Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  Dirk grinned up at the highest contrails. “We survive these next twenty-four, Howard, we’ll talk.”

  Howard puttered slowly into the harbor, timid without the timelines to guide him. Dirk directed his approach and waved off skiffs and fishing boats that came too close. The sandy-haired owner of the boat waited at his berth among the wharves with a handful of friends and a cooler of ice-chilled champagne. “You guys are ten minutes early. You want a grand back?”

  “Keep the change.” Dirk beamed and boosted himself onto the wharf.

  Howard helped himself to a bottle of champagne and raised it in toast. “To Reena and Jiang. May they make it here safely—and quickly.”

  While he swigged, Dirk watched the grinning boatman to see if the orc was on him. Howard handed Dirk the bottle, and he looked away from the boatman and leveled his pale stare on Howard. “To staying alive.” He gulped and put the bottle back in the ice. He and Howard walked down the pier attentively, scrutinizing everyone as they went along.

  Howard knew that in his vision the orc had appeared in the parking lot—but timelines might have shifted since then. His insides gleamed, burnished with fear. Everywhere he looked, he saw everyday people absorbed in their acts and dreams: Crews setting sail and docking, open-faced tourists promenading the wharves, laughing friends, quiet lovers. The winged monstrosity from his vision couldn’t possibly exist in a world as sun-rich and unremarkable as this. But it had to be real. His prescience had never been wrong.

  In the parking lot, crossing to the boulevard that led back to their hotel, Howard had his eyes on the sky, but Dirk as usual scanned the street scene. He heard the snick of a camera to his right and turned, expecting to see tourists. Three stout Japanese men with brushtop haircuts and crisp shirts and trousers stepped from the shade of the lot’s huge mangrove tree. Two dashed toward the harbor to cut off retreat; the other strode purposively to meet them. Dirk observed the man’s forearms, thick as trout and blotched with tattoos. Yakuza!—the Japanese mob. He grabbed Howard’s elbow in a panic. “We got trouble, pal.”

  Howard quit his sky surveillance and cast a troubled look about him. Beyond the mangrove tree, a black Mercedes with tinted windows idled. Standing by the open driver’s door, with an autoreflex camera in his hand and wearing aviator sunglasses and a smile as thin as his mustache, was Tony Robello. Howard’s prescience had been right after all—but the alien’s dwindling strength had distorted the future view of this moment: Tony and the Yakuza had appeared in his vision as the winged monster, and Howard had been duped by his literal expectation. Too late, he realized that this trap could have been avoided.

  “Make a run for it,” Dirk said, dropping his duffel bag. “I can handle myself. I’ll hold them off.” Dirk crouched into a defensive posture.

  Howard, terrified of the muscular, tattooed men closing in on them, wanted to flee, but he couldn’t. He’d already seen the orc snag him, and he’d just sworn his friendship to the kid. Only after Dirk shoved him did he dash for the street.

  The man approaching them quick-stepped to block him, and Dirk lunged forward to confront him. With a yell, Dirk leaped into the air and descended on the assailant with one leg tucked under and the other heel thrust forward.

  The Yakuza whirled and knocked Dirk to the ground. The kid tumbled and bounced to his feet, hands clawed to strike. He lashed out in two rapid viper-stabs. The Yakuza blocked both, punched once, and dropped Dirk flat on his back. Gushing tears, head clanging, he watched the Yakuza grab Howard and carry him to a waiting hatchback. They threw him in and drove off before Dirk could even sit up.

  Swiping the tears from his eyes, he looked about drunkenly. The Mercedes had gone, too. Howard’s baseball cap lay upside down on the asphalt. A group of chuckling fishermen, their strung catch of crevalles and yellowfin still bright with the sea’s chrism, walked off the pier and into the parking lot. No one else was in sight, except the rush of cars on the boulevard, where no one stopped for anything.

  ***

  Cora waited nervously on the balcony, tugging the sleeves of her pink caftan while watching the street for the first sign of her husband. He hadn’t been gone that long, but she was frightened for him because of the incident in Vegas. If he wasn’t back in the next half hour, she determined to call the police. Twenty minutes later, she spotted the young bodyguard Howard had hired. Her heart winced. He arrived at the lobby alone.

  Cora met Dirk at the elevator. “Where’s Howard?”

  “Relax, lady. Howard’s taking in some deep sea fishing.” He hoped he wasn’t being literal: He figured the whip-thin guy in aviator glasses with the Mercedes was Tony Robello. The brawn had definitely been Yakuza. Dirk’s hoped that they had taken him to get his money, not his life. If he was right, they would be coming here next. Howard had registered the suite in a fictitious name, but Dirk didn’t figure Howard—or anyone—would be very tight-lipped with the Yakuza.

  “Why didn’t he call?” Cora complained. “I taught him everything he knows about fly-casting. He’d want to take me along, I know it. Something’s wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” Dirk walked to the suite and went in, but Cora hung back. “Lady, I’m not gonna hurt you. I’m here to help you. Leave the door open if you’re afraid of me.”

  “If you want to help me, then you tell me the truth about my husband.”

  “He’s out at sea, fishing. We figured that was the safest place for him right now. He’s concerned that we might have been trailed to this hotel, and he sent me back to move you to another place.”

  “I’m not going anyplace without him,” she said from the doorway, and a blue-silver sheet of flame flapped once over her face and was gone.

  Dirk blinked, wanting to believe he hadn’t seen that lick of orc fire. “Your life is in danger here. I’m trying to help you.”

  “Are you?” She paused, gauging him for truthfulness. “Where’s your ID? I want to call your agency.”

  “I don’t work for an agency.”

  “Ha!” A rasp of ultraviolet sparks came and went behind her.

  Dirk knew he had seen that, and his blood whipped faster in his veins. “Howard needs somebody he can trust.” The words inspired a cringe of dismalness. He had already failed Howard. He had to do something now to help him, and the only thing he could think of was to get Cora out of danger and give Howard a chance to bargain. “I’m not just some bodyguard like he said. I’m a friend.”

  Cora heard the depth in his words, and she stepped into the suite. “How does Howard know you?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “It would help me trust you.”

  Dirk nodded and reached into himself. “He knew my dad in Nam. They were military buddies.”

  “Howard was never in Nam.”

  “They met in the Philippines, in Subic Bay. He was my dad’s best friend before he was killed.” A swell of emotion budged to his face, remembering the sadness of his father’s ghost.

  “Howard never told me.”

  The memory of his father charged him with hurt, and he felt filthy for lying. “What more can I say, lady? Either you get your stuff and I’ll find you another place, or you stay here and meet whatever comes down the pike. I’m not gonna fight you.”

  Cora gathered her clothes and Howard’s in their suitcases and had Dirk tote the luggage to the front room for the bellhop to pick up. She carried the silvery, metal alloy suitcase that Howard had bought in Vegas to transport the twenty thousand hundred dollar bills. In the lobby, she accepted the return of the cash deposit, settled her account, and tipped the manager a handful of the big bills for his promise that the hotel would continue to take messages for her and her husband and relay them when she called.

  They left through the delivery entrance and had the bellhop load their luggage on a pedicab that Dirk waved down. He had the driver pedal them along the back streets to an equally opulent hotel.

  “What happens now?” Cora asked after the luggage arrived and they were a
lone in an oceanview apartment. Orc energies marbled the air around her, and she began to notice them. Her eyes twitched to catch the shimmers of light at the edge of her sight.

  “Have some food. Rest. Wait.” Dirk backed toward the door.

  “And you?”

  “I’ll go meet Howard. I don’t want you to worry about anything. We’ll be back soon. Now that he knows you’re safe, we may just lay low at sea tonight. We’ll be in touch by tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” She surged with protest but then held herself back. Dirk looked anxious. “Okay,” she conceded. “But tell Howard to stay bundled up out there. Maybe I should give you some of his clothes. It must get chilly at night.” She went to the suitcases trailing a comet trail of diaphanous blue energies.

  Dirk stopped her with a shout: “Hey, no! Clothing’s no problem. I thought of that already.” He opened the door and backed out. “Don’t worry. Okay? Keep hanging out and hanging on.”

  The door closed, and he was gone. Cora waited two heartbeats, then went to the phone and called the police.

  ***

  The day tilted. Night rose in the east. A planet burned in the teal-blue sky over the Pacific. And the vastness of the galaxy began to spill through the transparency of the night. Dirk sat among the boulders of Sandy Beach, his duffel bag a pillow against a slant of rock.

  This was a favorite haunt of his, only two miles from the Home. He knew the beach’s dunes and rocky coves well, and he had come here because if this was to be the night of the orc, he wanted to meet it on his own terrain. Other nights when he had crawled down the Home’s wall of dented bricks, he had sat here trying to calm the craziness in him with the surf’s noise. All that seemed childish now. What had he despaired? That his father was dead? Endless fathers were dead. The sea could be his father. The waves of this beach had taught him everything he knew about balance, daring, surrender, and release. Bodysurfing had been more thrilling than a ballgame with the old man. And the girls he had met here had given him more affection than any mother could have. He wasn’t starved for love. So what was his gripe? He couldn’t remember now.

  He listened for the alien. All he heard was the surf’s commotion. Far down the beach, a night fisherman’s lantern came on, green as an eye. Since leaving Cora, Dirk had seen wafer faces of glare around other people, but he had kept moving and nothing had concentrated.

  The black voice of an animal cried from the sea rocks, and Dirk blew forward onto his heels. He strained his eyes to stare over the boulders, which had become masses of darkness. He sensed nothing unusual. The sex of night and day continued in the west, shining on the windcut clouds and the island’s bluffs.

  The melisma of a cat in heat sounded again, and Dirk sat back. His heart stared hellward, anticipating the orc. He knew with the certainty of the alien’s mastery that it was coming for him, but he kept his mind innocent. He had to. The night disclosed a harvest of fantasies. He would not succumb as easily as he had to that Yakuza thug who had decked him this afternoon.

  His hand went to the bone bruise where his jaw had absorbed the Yakuza’s blow, and he stopped himself in midreach. He traced the ancestry of his motion back through a lineage of half-conscious associations to the achy absence his parents had left him. He gently but firmly placed his hand in his lap and drained his mind of distracting thoughts. He breathed the sea’s omens and watched the constellations kindle. He wasn’t his father’s son for nothing.

  Arc of the Dream

  Jiang rose and fell in the steady surge of the ocean. His face floated on the surface in a tangle of wispy white hair and whiskers like the blown waste of a tubeworm. He drifted in a trance of exhaustion, windburnt eyes flickering to the rhythm of his tread in the water, waiting for dawn to release him to death.

  Moony blue light sheened the swells. The apertures of his body loosened with relief, ready to give up, yet he exerted himself, swaying gently as a hydrozoan, turning to face the shadow of the rising sun. Slowly, he rotated toward the light, and the sea flashed brighter. Gleams of blue fire went off like fireworks as the light struck the rocking waves. Shock twitched the silver tufts that were his eyebrows, and his eyes opened wider. In crooked light, like a sheet of frozen lightning, his children balanced on the sea hills, rising and falling.

  Jiang clapped his eyes shut and opened them again. His children remained there, watching him with slow faces, weary with grief. Their ghostly arms reached toward him. His wife undulated there, too, the spicy murmur of her voice calling the children’s’ names. The names pealed across the ocean like the wanderings of a bell.

  Exhaustion and sadness pulled him down, and he relented to the cold gravity of the sea. Water sloshed over him, and as his sinuses cramped with the bite of salt water his sight ignited into fiery streamers. The sea banged away from him in a geyser of spray, and he flew with outstretched arms and legs like a human star into the night.

  The demon had seized him again! At the moment of his surrender, Jiang suddenly launched through the sky once more. Dare he believe this was true? He clenched his hands to his body in the rising rush of his flight. He felt solid. His exhaustion and bone-soggy coldness had sloughed away, and the superhuman stamina that had carried him to the sea infused him.

  He relaxed into the buoyant embrace of the demon and looked about for the grisly creature that had fallen with him into the ocean. Sparks flurried behind in the draft of his soaring flight, and he did see gnashing, oiled faces in the blinks of fire. But he moved too fast for the sparks to gather into larger shapes, and he was grateful for that.

  The scalloped hem of the solar wind rippled in the east, and Jiang briefly glimpsed the sun sitting like a lizard on the Earth’s curve before he dropped back into the night. A frail star appeared in the blackness of the Pacific. As Jiang swooped closer, the pinch of light blossomed into a web of lights – a ship. Closer, the white hull shone in the glare from the deck-lights, and he could see the ship’s name in some foreign language.

  Jiang’s heart skittered. He sailed through the air directly over the ship. He made out every small detail—the lightning rods on the steam stack, the parabolas of tiered decks, and two men in white uniforms standing together on the main deck, the red spark of a cigarette rising and falling between them. The men were not Chinese.

  Whirling in a slow and invisible vortex, Jiang twirled gently down to the ship, hovered momentarily over a swimming pool lit with eerie gelatinous light, and collapsed onto the deck with a loud oomph. The crewmen, two cooks hot from preparing breakfast rolls and sharing a cool break on the aft deck, jumped around when they heard Jiang land behind them, and the one who was smoking dropped his cigarette. “Who the hell are you?”

  “He’s not crew.”

  “No kidding.”

  They bent over him and helped him to his feet. “He’s soaked. Must have been in the pool.”

  “That’s sea water. Can’t you smell it?”

  “Sea water? We’re going fifteen knots. Can you talk, old man?”

  “He looks Chinese. Feels strong as a horse.”

  Jiang allowed himself to be carried, but his muscles twanged, tiger-packed with restless strength.

  “You did real good, old man.” They bolstered him on either side and guided him toward a companionway. He swung his smile between them. They smelled flagrantly rich, scented with cooking oil and flour. “Don’t know how you did it, but you made it. We arrive in Honolulu after breakfast.”

  ***

  The wide morning stretched through the tall windows of Orly airport. Reena sat anxiously in the security office, staring through tinted sheet glass at the traffic of people and luggage. The guard who had picked her up conferred with his superior, a portly woman with page-cut hair. The chief glowered at Reena while nodding to the guard.

  Reena ignored them and watched the churning crowd with longing for the mystic freedom she saw there. Insideout lingered close to her, but it was drowsy and had withdrawn her telepathy. Without the mental noises from the throng in h
er head, she too had become just a wanderer. The idea thrilled her. In all her life, this was the farthest she had traveled. Beyond the arched windows, in the tempest noise of the airfield, jets took off into a dawn like milk, and the places they scattered to she would never see.

  Wake up! she cried to the godful presence within her. If you fall asleep, I’ll go crazy. They’ll lock me up again! For an hour, while security reported her to authorities, she had been crying silently to herself like this, sitting here, watching the sky gray and the clouds brighten to curry tones. This time, her cry for the alien was reflex, and she hopped in her seat when blue acetylene jumped from the tips of her body and her head cawed with psychic noise.

  The glowering chief shouted with alarm to see Reena’s hair lifting out briskly and shining like bright optic fibers from her spark-faceted face. And the guard toppled over a chair in his rush to back away from the fiery woman. The air in the room looked polished, and it suddenly filled with a menthol fragrance of glaciers and conifer crags.

  Reena stood, and the tremulous electricity spilled in curds to the floor where it skidded wildly. Troll screeches rasped like fingernails on a garbage can lid, and the electric blobs became pugnacious prehistoric fish faces snapping rabidly. The fiery, jaw-raving congealments gnashed briefly and disappeared.

  Reena put her attention deep into the stares of the two security guards and said, “Forget you saw this. Forget me. Go about your normal routines happily and with kindness.” She brushed the static wrinkles from her gray slacks and walked out into the crowd.

  “Where were you?” she asked aloud. In the cloud of noise both inside her telepathy and in the mill of passengers, she was too confused to hear herself think.

  “It’s almost too late for me.” In her scalded hearing, Insideout dwindled to a whisper. “My brain is shutting down. I’ve been away too long from my source of power. Come quickly.”

  Reena selected a Concord flight to New York. Once snug in her seat, she used an airline magazine map to plan the rest of her itinerary from New York to Los Angeles, and then Hawai’i. The whole journey would take fifteen hours. To be certain that her travels continued uninterrupted, before she got on the Concord she stopped a woman her age and asked for her passport. She accepted Reena’s mental command to be happy and kind by cheerfully turning over her passport and walking spritely to an airport cafe. With her new passport, Reena booked passage for all her flights and got her tickets. She would arrive in Honolulu at 7:45 in the morning, island time.