Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Oh, I can’t explain it,” the alien fretted. “But I can show you. And in that way I will have enriched you.”

  “What do we have to do?” Howard asked apprehensively when the alien rose and approached them. He tried to edge away but couldn’t move any farther without going overboard. Fear frosted his insides.

  “Do? Why, nothing. Nothing at all. That’s the beauty of yes-out-of-mind. The glory of lusk. You don’t have to do anything at all. It does you.” It reached out its shining arms and grabbed their startled faces with icy, magnetic hands.

  A Xanadu feeling permeated them, and waves of wholeness and fulfillment radiated through their bodies like the lavings of a foetal dream. Howard, enraptured by the jeweled beauty of time, faceted instants clustering to planes of minutes, plates of hours, spires and minarets of crystal aeons, stood transfixed by the loveliness of its symmetries.

  Humming with empty hearing and pleasure, Dirk vibrated with the alien’s knowing. To be was indeed to gather from within: The very structure of the universe articulated itself violently through him. In a body-blinding flash of awareness, he peered into the pith of himself: The ruffled fabric of molecules that tailored his body unraveled into a teeming haze of star-point nuclei and blurry electrons. The inside of himself looked like outer space: Blackness held everything. His mind stretched across that blackness, twinkling with galaxies of atoms and seeing, close up, firsthand, that the pinpoints of hazy energy, the tiny electrons, were all the same. Not similar, like pennies or photocopied pages, but indistinguishably the same. All protons, too. All neutrons. All neutrinos. At its core, the entire universe consisted of identical units, wholly devoid of individuality. The sameness of all the parts almost maddened him. And he understood then the glory of life with its frenzied hungers and rendings, its baffling diversities and genetic distractions. Life is nature’s need to be unique. It all came clear. Life was creation’s need to let go of the sameness of atoms and molecules and be free as the fields of force that began all matter. To be free is to be lost. A laugh ballooned in him. What was all this maniacal life, this abandon, but him? The same force that exploded into the universe thundered in his heart, radiating his hair and his thoughts, working at his life as busy as the stars.

  The song began for him then—the diamond grindstone of heaven’s chiming music, bright as rock-and-roll, expansive and coherent as a Bach fugue. And for a second’s orgasmic epoch, the energy of the song filled his life. In the next instant, the energy had cooled to personal thoughts and the comprehension that he had always been free. He had only been a slave to himself, a prisoner to his own illusions about history and time. The alien had opened a window in his blood, and he had crawled through. For the moment, gripped by Insideout’s panoramic vista of his being, Dirk became the freedom of life. Terror sainted his awareness: He was but a mote of life in a swirling vacancy of motes. And though this gored him with loneliness, he did not rage against it as he had always before. Everyone, he realized, was an orphan. Everyone was a child of light locked in the night of spacetime. The crown of creation was as empty in the middle as zero. And what had been his torment became his truth, his joy beyond telling.

  His body, too slim to hold it all, knowing spilled through him and into the sea’s tidings. Dolphin snouts poked from the water and sprayed amazement as pulses of human feelings beaconed over the sea.

  Howard twitched alert. His trance cracked when he saw Dirk blinking toward blackout, swaying over the side. Time wrinkled into desiccated colors around him. Howard grabbed his shoulders. “Hey! Are you all right, kid?”

  Howard’s startled grip brought Dirk around. He clasped Howard’s arm. “I’m okay,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  A smile widened Dirk’s face. He was more than himself. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  Howard lowered him into one of the seats and turned to face the alien.

  Insideout, back at the stern of the boat, sat down. “Wild, no?”

  “Beautiful,” Howard agreed. “And spooky. This whole world is a flower of balanced energies. A dream.”

  “That’s the beautiful part,” the alien said and looked away, staring with its blank eyes toward the green altar of O’ahu. “The spooky part is that another orc bloom is building up.”

  Howard’s heart flinched. “You mean the people around us are going to turn into monsters?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’m terribly ashamed. And sorry. Oh, I am sorry. It’s my brain, you see. It can’t hold back the pain anymore. The hyperfield that sustains me is on the rack of your expanding universe. And I’m being stretched to the limits of my life.”

  “That’s horrible,” Howard conceded, “but what’s this about an orc bloom?”

  “My painsick brain is becoming demented, Howard.” Insideout hid its face in a perfect mime of distress. “My craziness makes orcs.”

  “Dirk, are you hearing this?” Howard called, anxiously.

  “Yeah.” He buzzed pleasurably from the experiences of yes-out-of-mind, and he listened with his face turned up to the sky and his eyes filled with clouds.

  “I can’t stay with you any longer,” Insideout said, standing up. “These shapes are terribly unstable.”

  “How do you do that?” Howard asked.

  “Electrostatic charge. The ocean is teeming with ions.”

  “Come back,” Dirk called feebly.

  “Trust yourselves,” the alien said. Dolphins scythed through the air behind it. “I will…”

  The watershape splashed into spray, the dolphins dove out of sight, and Howard’s timelines clapped back into place. A roar shook sea spray from the stern, and the boat shot forward, flinging Howard to the taffrail.

  Dirk quickly choked off the engine. Howard crawled into the seat beside him and lay back stunned. After a moment of breathless silence, he asked: “What’re we going to do?”

  “We can’t do anything until the others get here,” Dirk said in a dreamy voice, eyes half shut. “Let’s go back to the hotel and lay low. Wait.”

  “With my wife turning into an orc in front of my eyes? No way, kid. Think of something better.”

  “I can’t think after that, man.” Dirk sat up and frowned to feel the euphoria of lusk diluted by the need to act. “Okay, now we have to fit Cora into this mess.”

  “Look, Dirk, she’s my wife. I’ve always taken care of her, and I always will. If we’re emitting some monster-making radiation, then I’m staying away from her until this whole thing is over.”

  “Hey, don’t get bent. We’ll give her a call when we get back to shore. Right now, we got to figure a way to stay away from the orc for about another eighteen hours. By then, Jiang and Reena will be here.”

  “Sure, but where can we go until then?”

  “That’s for you to figure out, Merlin. You’re the guy who can see the future.”

  Howard tried to quell his anxiety and analyze the timelines intersecting within him. But he was too nervous, and the swaying of the boat and the liquid sparkles of sunlight on the swells distracted him. “Take out the alien.”

  “The arc?” Dirk asked, reaching into his pocket.

  “Right. It’ll help me see into time. Maybe I can find us a safe way through time to the others.”

  Dirk took the cold shape out.

  Howard flinched when he saw it. The arc appeared as a piece of daybreak in his eyes, the blind tip of lightning, puncturing sight and leaving black blisters on his vision that glowed like embers under his closed lids. He turned his gaze aside, into the blunt glare of the sea, till the sting in his eyes relented; then, he looked again through tightly squinted lashes. The light was alive. The light declared life. In the dazzling triumph, Howard felt its power reaching into the prickly points of his body, his cells, endlessly shattered and made, inventing him moment by moment. The light of the arc saturated him with its radiance. The ways of choice rayed through him like air-tracks in an icecube.

  “Get us outta here alive, Howie.” Dirk’s hot-hearted prese
nce pressed closer, fragrant as pine resin. “Find us a way to hide from the orc.”

  Voices of silence intercut the noises of the sea. Howard surged free of his body and into the wavelight of the alien. Immediately, he was with an old dragon-whiskered Chinese man, Jiang, as he was at that moment: Running with demonic speed over rail ties past a cedar lake brown with the tannin of fallen leaves. Time buckled, and Howard soared with Jiang into his fate a few hours ahead. The railroad tracks sang a silver scream, trees snapped by, then sagging shacks, soured industrial lots, huddled buildings, and the frantic avenues and architecture of Shanghai. The flashforward sped through Jiang’s departure from Shanghai harbor as a stowaway to his discovery and plunge overboard and his mad flight across the night sea shadowed by an orc of luminous corpse gas. Jiang meteored into the ocean, and the timerush calmed to its ordinary flow.

  Jiang’s pumping legs held him up like an offering to the spectral night. He was strong, but his strength was vanishing into his effort. His old heart repeated its prodigal wish to keep treading water, to stay afloat. His body complied and cried with weariness.

  He had watched the star-pattern of the Lion plunge into the sea. Over two hours had passed since his demon power had abandoned him. He relaxed his legs and dropped his head back, wanting to float, but the black depths drew him down. He moved his arms before him in a sweep, kicked his legs, and rose to the surface again. He would not die here, the joke of some demon. Too much suffering had been endured, too many others of his own seed had gone ahead of him into the void for him to abandon himself so helplessly to an absurd death. The ocean would kill him, but he would choose the moment. He would swim until dawn and drown with the sun in his eyes.

  Howard fell away from this scene, bounced through intricacies of fire and emptiness, and emerged in the marmoreal expanse of an airport at night. Neon signs in French shone up from the depths of the marble floor, and Howard swung his attention, trying to orient himself.

  He hovered before the plastic colors from a fluorescently lit airlines kiosk. Reena was beside him—a tall, blond woman with green eyes in a fox-wide face. Behind her opened a timeshaft, a tunnel of outer space glinting with opal light. In the jeweled light, events replayed themselves as Howard studied them. The timeshaft behind Reena showed her journey from the asylum to the airport at Avignon and the flight from there to Orly international airport. Minutes before, a white-sweatered, green-smocked Reena in hospital slippers had entered a clothiers in the floodlit glass and marble mall and selected a new outfit. She picked out lacy underwear, gray denim slacks, amber-soled canvastop shoes, blue socks, a lavender shirt, and a lightweight buff jacket with abalone buttons.

  A security guard watched her step out of the dressing room fully garbed in her new clothes, smile at the cashier, walk out, and discard her old garments in a trash bin. The guard followed her to an airlines counter where she acquired tickets for a series of connecting flights to Honolulu, which she paid for with nothing more than a smile.

  When Reena walked past other security guards and into the gate for an overseas flight without a passport, he intercepted her. This was where Howard’s sentience had manifested, and he watched intrigued from his invisible stance beside the electric kiosk.

  “Madam, may I see your passport?”

  Reena faced the guard with a childlike smile and thought: Let me pass. Forget you’ve seen me.

  “Your passport, please,” the guard insisted.

  Fear spurred her, and she thought more forcefully: Leave me alone. Forget that you’ve ever seen me.

  “I noticed that you walked in here without displaying your passport,” said the guard. “I want to see that now, please.”

  “Of course,” Reena replied and began searching through the pockets of her jacket. Fear trilled louder. She had lost her power. The alien had fallen asleep. She sensed that. It was still there—her mind was clear, so it was still compensating for her malformed brain—but she could no longer push her thoughts into peoples’ minds. She trembled with the thought that if Insideout went any further away, she would collapse into her sickness. She hid her shiver as a shrug and faced the guard with a jinxed smile. “I lost it.”

  Howard lifted away as he watched the guard leading Reena off. Blinding effulgence engulfed him, and to a chorus of raving screams he watched the ocean sheeting below and Honolulu’s white modernity loom ahead. Beside him, Dirk wept, and Howard offered his hand.

  Then, he was back on the harbor, walking across a parking lot and away from the boats with Dirk. A shadow alighted on them, and they turned up their faces to see a pterodactyl-winged, millipede-segmented gargoyle swooping overhead. Spiderlegs stab-flashed outward, pincered him by his clothes, and hoisted him away from Dirk. He screamed, and darkness snapped hugely.

  He abruptly found himself back in the boat with Dirk. Reef fish flashed out of the water, clouds swelled in slow motion, and sunlight forked his eyes.

  “What’d you see?” Dirk wanted to know. He had put the arc into the pocket of his jeans, and it burned uncomfortably.

  Howard tried his breath and at first couldn’t speak. “Jiang and Reena are in trouble,” he gasped.

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Jiang’s drowning. Reena’s been picked up by an airport security guard. I think we’ve lost them.” Howard pressed his eyes with his fingertips.

  “What about us?”

  “The orc’s onshore. I saw it.”

  Dirk banged his fist off the fiberglass hull. “We can’t go back.”

  Howard looked up, face smoky with tears.

  “We’ll stay out here,” Dirk said. “We’ll wait for the others.”

  “Forget it.” Howard wiped the fright-sweat from around his eyes with the heel of a hand. “That thing I saw had wings. It’ll fly out here.”

  “So we’re just gonna go back there and get taken out?” Dirk stood up. The buoyant rhythm of the boat made him keep his stance loose, and the frustration he endured had nowhere to go but into his heart. And there an answer waited. “We’ll go back. But we won’t hide. The orc can’t hurt us except through others. We’ll keep moving. Whatever plasma shapes it takes just look scary, right? They can’t hurt us.”

  “Kid, the thing I saw carried me away.”

  “Maybe what you saw is wrong.”

  “It’s never wrong.”

  Dirk reached into his pocket and took out the refrigerated arc. Vapor wisps curled off it. “Maybe you can look again. Find another future.”

  The arc looked like a shiny compressor slug. Howard reached out and took it. His hand jumped to feel how cold it was. He held it up close to his face, but no timelines crystallized out of thin air. He shot a stare at Dirk. “I think it stopped working. I don’t see anything.”

  Dirk took the arc back. It had gotten warmer. “I think it peaked.” He searched his heart for the answer he had just known: The orc can’t hurt us except through other people, he repeated to himself. So? So what? The comprehension and ecstasy that had flourished in him moments before vanished. “Fuck it!”

  “You feel normal, too, don’t you?” Howard asked. “I think we’re all on our own now.”

  “It punked out,” Dirk concurred glumly. The arc was as warm as any ordinary wafer of metal.

  Howard started the engine. Dirk put the arc back in his pocket and sat down. The ride into the harbor slid along without incident. “So you took a class trip and picked up a spaceship. That’s how this madness started?”

  Dirk nodded and watched afternoon sunlight glinting off the diadem of Honolulu.

  “Your parents know anything about this?” Howard asked.

  “I live in a Home,” Dirk answered in a flat tone. “My dad died in Nam. Mom left.”

  “Oh.” Howard tried to engage his stare, but the kid wouldn’t look at him. “What about the Home, then? Anybody there know about our troubles?”

  “Some guys I owe money kidnapped me in front of about twenty other kids. I think the Home knows I’m in some kinda
trouble. I don’t know if they’ve called the cops or what.”

  “The guys who took you were orc-infested. Is that right?”

  “Right.” Dirk felt dreamlessly bland. What had he called it in his spell with Mr. Leonard? Anomie. Anomie dripped in him. Without the influx of power from the alien, his life seemed futureless. Even if he survived the orc and got the alien where it was going, what then? Back to stealing stereos and running dope?

  They sped on in silence for a while, and Howard remembered his vision of this moment. The ocean sheeted with speed beneath them, and the engine’s roar opened like a screaming choir. He looked over and saw Dirk gazing listlessly at the scarves of high clouds. In the dream, he had been weeping. Maybe he was weeping. Howard spoke up: “Kid?”

  “Hm.”

  “Until today, we were strangers. When I first saw you in my dreams, I thought you were a punk. But back there, I saw our destiny. Everything perfectly balanced, tuned like an engine. It was so beautiful I just know we can get through this thing—if we stick together. I know that’s true, kid.”

  “Yeah,” Dirk responded without looking at him. I’m with you.”

  “Okay, then we’re buddies. I figure what you and I saw happen back there makes us friends for life. No one else will ever believe us. It’s just you and me. Right?” Howard offered his hand.

  Dirk saw the hand out of the corner of his eye and watched it hang there a moment before taking it in a quick shake.

  “We’re friends now,” Howard said, slapping Dirk on the shoulder. “So don’t call me Howie anymore.”

  “Sure. And don’t call me kid.” Dirk hung his head into the slipstream of rushing air.

  “Since our lives depend on one another,” Howard went on, “so do our fortunes. I’m not greedy. If we get out of this thing alive, I’m giving you one of those millions the alien won for me. That won’t make up for not having parents, but you got Cora and me for that—if you can stand us.”

  Dirk faced about with a slack jaw. “You’re goofin’ me.”

  “I’m not goofing you. And I hope to God you’re not goofing me. I have a feeling we’re going to need each other over the next twenty-four hours.”