Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  A black Mustang swung around the bend blaring its horn, and Lani rocked to a stop beside Dirk. “Let’s ride,” she said, throwing open the passenger door.

  Dirk dove in as Chud pounced up to the Mustang. Lani put the car in reverse and squealed backward, jitterbugging around the curve. She braked hard and shot forward, rocketing toward Chud, swinging to hit him and missing by inches.

  Climbing into the mountains at seventy miles an hour, Dirk allowed himself a sob of relief. “I thought I was dead back there.”

  Lani turned toward him with a flame-quaking grimace.

  Dirk screamed and cowered against the door. Landscape tinseled by at eighty miles an hour, and the car streaked across a curve toward a rail guard. He grasped the wheel and pulled the car through the turn. Deft with terror, he snatched the keys from the ignition, and the engine stuttered and died.

  Lani, hands and face suddenly tentacled in ichorous light, steered the Mustang toward an oncoming truck. Dirk fought her for the wheel, and the truck swooshed by with a blare of its horns. The car bulldozed through thimbleberry bushes and smacked into a stand of ironwood trees, renting open the hood and geysering steam.

  Dirk braced himself for the crash and muscled out the door as soon as the car stopped. He collapsed in a sprawl among the shrubs and looked up at Lani clasping the wheel, watching him with a terrified stare. Blue sparklers scintillated along the dashboard and vanished. Dirk scrambled upright and backed off into the woods.

  The truck they had almost hit had stopped, and the driver ran toward them.

  Dirk waved feebly at Lani and hurried into the forest. As he hopped over fallen trees and crouched under flower-nettled branches, he felt for the arc. When he found it, he held it tightly, and the pluck of his heart quickened at the ice of its touch.

  ***

  Time has no shores, someone had graffitied on the ribbon-curved wall of the airport concourse. Hula dancers in shivering grass skirts approached with necklaces of color-splashed flowers in outstretched hands. Howard couldn’t take his eyes off the graffiti. Its message, so utterly appropriate to his predicament, rooted him in the throng of deplaning passengers. A lei ringed his neck, and he read the words aloud. The scrawl had the color and line of Utah’s red arches, implying the same timeswept bewilderment.

  “You’re dreaming, Howie.” Cora fluttered a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills across Howard’s slackmouthed face, and he woke sputtering. “Welcome to your first morning as a millionaire! How were your dreams?”

  Howard gazed about baffled at the suite in Las Vegas: Sunlight stood with archangel stature in the tall white draperies, and through rufflings from the air conditioner, he glimpsed the casinos’ electric icons looking robotically simple in the morning light.

  Cora held a bouquet of cash under his nose. “Is any perfume sweeter?”

  Money was spewed across the bed and scattered over the floor. What time is it? he had to ask—that’s how the dream went. “What time is it?” he asked, and harmonics of time chimed like a tuned piano.

  “It’s after eleven.”

  He would stand now and go to the window, where birds like black hands would wave from their plunge into the sky. He stood and went to the window, startling gray wrens into throwing their wild hearts to the wind.

  “Honey, are you all right?” Cora had never seen Howard so—strange. He almost always woke grouchy but never sullen. But then, she had never seen him with so much money. The big lottery win had set something desperate loose in him. The million he had won in the casinos last night was crazy excess, manic luck. But the second million he had come back with at dawn, that was frightening. And that was why she had woken him. He muttered in his sleep, and he only did that when he was scared. Something bad was up.

  Howard waited at the window. Cora had to ask a second time before he replied. The wait was necessary, a part of the dream’s blueprint.

  “Howie, what’s wrong?”

  “That money I brought in last night?” On cue, the urge splurged in him to look at her, and he did. With the windowlight on his face, she reacted, startled by his tired, sunset eyes. “I won all that money straight, Cora. But—shit. Cora, I won it off a mobster.”

  She clutched him. “A mobster? Howie, you’re joking, right? Where do you know mobsters?”

  “Some guy asked me to play. I smelled money all over him. So I played him and his buddies, and I won. I didn’t think they’d try and kill me for that. Geez! When they got nasty, I ran.”

  “Give the money back.”

  “No way.” He pushed her gently aside and glowered. “I won that money fair and square, Cora. They were trying to cheat me last night. But I got lucky.”

  “I’m beginning to wonder—was it luck, Howie?”

  That question wasn’t part of the dream, and Howard felt the timelines shifting. A quag of uncertainty shadowed the patchwork transparencies on the periphery of his sight, and he felt a doomful chill. He forced his attention to the ivory-edged light of his wife’s face. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, you expect me to believe you beat a bunch of mobsters who had set you up from the start?”

  “It was a fluke. That’s all. I would’ve let the hundred grand go—but I won. I doubled it three times! That was once-in-a-lifetime luck, Cora. So I ran with the money. I stole their car.” He smiled gloomily. “I guess they’ll be coming after me now.”

  “You guess!” Cora shrieked. “Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”

  That question rang true in the empty space of his precognition. “What? And ruin your night in Vegas?” He offered this meekly, without meeting her stare.

  “My night in Vegas.” She snorted. “What about the morning after?” She stalked to the phone.

  “Who’re you calling?” he asked, already knowing, reverberating with the timelines that he saw motion-streaking past him as his wife dialed. He shut his eyes, and rays connected into a uranium blossom, a radiance of time-to-come intersecting here-and-now in the smell of desert pollen and the glycerin sounds of traffic on the boulevard below.

  “The police,” Cora answered shrilly. “We’re going to explain it all to them, and if we’ve broken some laws or something we can straighten that out right now.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Cora, the house was licensed,” Howard said angrily, waving at her to put the phone down. She pursed her lips and gave him a stern look, but she did. “The whole thing was legal,” he added more gently. “Except they tried to cheat me.”

  “How do you know it was legal? It was somewhere outside the city, you said.”

  “The guy who set it up said it was all right.”

  “Oh, right. A mobster’s word of honor. What was his name?”

  “Tony Robello.”

  “I’m calling the cops.”

  “Cora.”

  “I can’t believe it—Tony Robello. You played cards with a guy whose name was Tony Robello.”

  “What’s wrong with that? It’s a perfectly normal name.”

  “Sure, sure, until he sets you up for a rigged card game in a private casino. Then it becomes one of Death’s nicknames. Tony “Bones” Robello. Or maybe Tony “Necktie” Robello—like those Colombian killers we’re always reading about in Newsweek who cut open their victims throats and pull their tongues through like neckties!”

  “Cora, honey, we’re not calling the cops.” He came up behind her and took the phone from her hand. “Were going to make love. Then we’re going to pack up our money, go to the airport, and fly to Hawai’i.” He embraced her in a bear hug, and she pushed away.

  “You expect me to feel horny with Tony Robello lurking outside our door?”

  “I thought you’d find that tintillating.”

  “Titillating”

  “I like it.” He put his hands on her breasts and guided her to the bed. The glaze of silk under his fingertips, the corolla-sheen in Cora’s brown curls, and her floral scent garaged his anxiety. They occupied the radium-petaled core of time, the
timelessly symmetrical center of now. He had crossed this plateau of lovemaking before in his dream. And he knew Tony Robello was nowhere nearby. As long as he fulfilled his dream here on this bed, where the paper money made a glistening sound under their weight, they would be safe. Cora’s worried face relaxed to a smile under his rapturous stare, and he knew then they would find their way to the future and an airport wall that reminded, Time has no shores.

  ***

  Howard and Cora’s ride to the airport and their hop-flight to L.A. passed uneventfully, as Howard knew they would. The timelines gridded the dark of his shut eyes with the calmness of terrazzo tile. But Howard didn’t relax until after they had made their connection in L.A. and their Honolulu-destined jumbo jet bounded into the sky. By then, the massive quantities of alcohol he had drunk in the last twelve hours finally overcame him, and he slept.

  “Do you want to know why you can see the future, Howie?” a blond street kid with sweat-nested hair and razor-sharp eyes asked. Howie recognized him as Dirk, the tough from his first oneiric glimpse of Hawai’i. Dressed in black pajama bottoms and a sleeveless black shirt sweat-stuck to his muscular physique, he exuded a scent of oleander and damp earth, and his smile was dark with pushed-back teeth. “Because there is no future. Time is just the release of what’s already there.”

  They stood on a sward of blue-eyed grass overlooking a spice-colored beach and a green sea. “Are you the alien that lets me see the future?” Howard asked.

  “There is no future.” Dirk took Howard’s arm and turned him to face the ocean so that the wind kissed him. “The past and future are always here. All times, all minds, all screams and songs are here. But where is here?” Dirk bent close to his ear and said, “Right inside the atoms that make up your brain, Howie. That’s where reality lurks. Not as atoms but in atoms. Right inside the protons that make up those nuclei is all the time there ever was, is, or will be.”

  “You’re crazy,” Howard decreed. “I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.” He tried to rouse himself from this dream. But the dream went on, calm as a stone.

  Dirk showed his shadowy smile. “Think about this,” he said. “Protons are the bricks of the atomic nucleus. They’re supposed to be ‘made’ out of quarks. Cute name. A proton is made of three cute quarks—but one cute quark, Howie, weighs five times more than a proton. How can that be? How can you build a brick doghouse so it weighs less than the bricks?”

  Howard strained to disrupt the flow of his absurd nightmare. But nothing happened.

  “What’s holding you in this dream?” The punk made a fist. “Binding energy, Howard. Everything that sticks together is fisted with binding energy. The Earth and the Moon. The Sun and the stars. Whole galactic streams. But the energy that stars, planets, and we need to stay together is really small. If you’d been paying attention to your physics teacher in high school, you’d know that gravity is the weakest force.”

  “Give me a break—I took auto mechanics in high school. Can’t you talk straight with me?”

  “Forget about sense,” Dirk fleered. “If nonsense explains nothing, it’s already explained a lot. Listen. Three heavy quarks add up to one featherweight proton, because fourteen-fifteenths of their mass is consumed as binding energy!” The kid laughed with zeal. “You should be breathless, baby. And the punch line is yet to come. You see, the smaller you get, the more energy there is. And there’s no end to the smallness! No end at all. Protons, atoms, and you exist because you have very little energy. You’re cool enough to stick together. At the level of the quark symmetries, reality freezes into atoms. Any smaller and there is no matter, only exotic super-short-lived forms of pramatter and photons. Smaller yet and spacetime breaks apart. The energy is so enormous that it wraps spacetime around itself like a black hole. Nothing gets out. Everything moves inward into vaster and vaster energy ranges endlessly intensifying toward the point horizon of infinity.”

  “Shut up, already,” Howard said in a tearing whisper, but couldn’t remove his gaze from the kid.

  “It gets crazier when you realize that all of creation, billions of cubic light-years of spacetime, is made up out of these furious fire-points blazing smaller than spacetime. You see, the universe is just the cold exhalation of a hotter reality—a truer, timeless reality you can’t even begin to guess about, except to know, without any doubt, that it is here. You are intimately connected with it. You are made from it.”

  The kid leaned nearer and poked a rigid finger into Howard’s chest. “With that much power, that close—anything is possible, Howie. Anything at all.”

  Howard looked beyond the tomcat slant of the lad’s head to a dune of jipijapa leaves resonating in the sea breeze. The motion broke into neon-edged fractals, and Howard reeled awake.

  People crowded the aisles, pulling luggage out of the overhead bins and filing past him toward the open hatch and a smiling stewardess. A narcotic scent of tropic blossoms wafted from the bright opening.

  “You’re awake,” Cora said cheerily. “You were sleeping so soundly, I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  Howard groggily rubbed feeling back into his face. Having had no alcohol during the five hours of the flight, he streamed with timeline perceptions. Cathedral swoops of spectroscopic radiance overlay retinal sight. Worse, vaults of distance dilated from inside him, expanding beyond his body, and swooning him with the mixed sensation of both flying and falling.

  Let’s find a hotel room, Cora would say presently. You’ll be more comfortable there. Waiting for her words, Howard thought of her creamy belly and auburn-highlighted hair, and his dizziness abated. Root thoughts served as wekk as drink, he had learned from their sexcapades in Vegas. Food sometimes worked, too: He thought of an inch-thick steak in a puddle of mushroom gravy and a potato flayed like an exotic butterfly. Soon the timelines strummed into the soft vibrations of ordinary sight, and he opened his eyes to see his wife in her aqua pantsuit standing beside him and taking down their travel bag.

  “Let’s find a hotel room,” she said. And the plagiary of the future becoming the present soothed Howard. “You’ll be more comfortable there.”

  He felt confident enough now to consider telling Cora what was happening to him. But like every other time when that urge rose in him, it provoked a fright like a child’s scream. Naves and clerestories of rainbow tracery netted his vision, and he suddenly whirled through a nautilus spiral of electric fire. At the hub, a basilisk of invisible force clawed for Howard, its dragonish human shape erupting blackly in the brilliance of the whole world falling into it and smashing to light.

  Howard quickly suppressed the desire to tell his wife about his future-seeing power, and normalcy gelled into place. He huffed like a man who had just learned he could breathe unaided. Okay, he thought, apprehensive about not having heard this thought in his dreaming. Let’s see this thing through. Whatever that means. Hell, at least it’s happening in Hawai’i—and I’ve got bucks to burn.

  Sleep had revivified him, and he delighted himself by unfolding effortlessly from his seat and walking lightfooted with the crowd, holding Cora’s hand behind him. Through the window of the boarding ramp, he spotted palm trees and dim pavement. Ukulele music braced the air, and at the end of the fluorescently lit corridor, Polynesian dancers in brown tapa wraps swayed. An exhilaration of deja vu stretched through him, and he looked eagerly for the graffiti from his dream.

  There it was—an exact replica of its foreknown shape, promising that – beyond the world of stitched-together hours, beyond the endless pursuit of night and day – there was no tomorrow and no never—there was only whatever is.

  TIME HAS NO SHORES.

  ***

  Dirk Heiser had arrived an hour earlier and had zipped the words onto the concourse wall outside the passenger gate with a spraypaint can that he had found in a trash receptacle. At first, he had been reluctant—not about defacing public property (he’d often spraymarked bus stop benches, highway overpasses, and elevators with his street-na
me TENDER BENDER, and the pithy insights that came to him during his classroom meditations, like GOD HAS SUICIDAL TENDENCIES or MAMA IS MAW or NUDE IN THE GARB AGE). dirk was a willing street artist, but he had been reluctant about giving up his free will.

  After totaling two cars in the mountains and fleeing orc-possessed Chud and Lani, Dirk had huddled in the root cave of a banyan tree until Insideout’s Poe-voice told him that the orc energies had subsided. Reluctantly, he returned to the highway and hitchhiked to the airport as the alien directed. During the two rides that got him there, he stared at the drivers, looking for orc-fire in their eyes and in the patina of their faces, annoying one of them enough for him to say: “Eh! Wat? Owe you money?” When he got out at the arrivals pavilion, Dirk was springy with relief.

  “Get the spray can out of there,” Poe muttered as Dirk strolled past a metal trash basket in the airport terminal.

  Dirk did as he was told and followed the alien’s mental commands through the airport to Howard’s gate. Understanding folded in him like mental origami, thoughts and sensations bending together into a coherent shape that perfectly fit the contours of his mind, so that he understood, without knowing how, that a man was coming who would help him get the arc back to where it belonged.

  The flight monitor informed him that arrival time was an hour away, and Dirk sat down on the floor with his back against the wall even though he faced a reception area of empty plastic seats. Dirk hated those seats. It was impossible to slouch in them without feeling uncomfortable.

  The spray can he held tingled with effervescent energy, but he resisted the desire to use it on the wall behind him even though the concourse ranged empty. “Why do I have to do every little thing you say?” he complained. “I mean, I can understand cutting out on Lani and hitching here to meet this guy I’ve seen in my dreams—but do I really have to spraypaint this wall? What if I don’t want to?”

  “You have no choice,” Poe replied with lugubrious insistence. “It has already happened on the timeline that leads me back home.”