Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Look, kid,” the detective said around his cigar, then referred to an index card in his stubby fingered hand, “Donald—we don’t think you stole the items we found in your locker. We just want your testimony, then you can go. Come over here.”

  The glow of Donnie’s rage dimmed, and he followed the detective to his desk and sat down. They chatted for ten minutes, and Donnie told the detective about Dirk’s pattern of having him hold stolen goods in his locker in exchange for not being roughed up. “The guy’s a miscreant,” Donnie volunteered. “He’s a sadist. He likes hurting people. That’s why I figure the gangs were after him. They were the ones who slaughtered our house mascots, Hunza and Peppercorn, and left their carcasses on Dirk’s bunk. When I saw that, I thought he’d done it. That’s his style—utterly brutal and mindless. But it scared him. I saw him scared, and I should have known then that he was in trouble. He started acting nice to me. I couldn’t figure it until I saw him get abducted by two gang members.”

  “These the men?” The detective flashed two small mugshots of Chud and Ipo from the file in his lap.

  “Right. They carried him away in broad daylight in front of half the Home. You want the license number on the car? It was a beat-up Nash Rambler.”

  “We found the car.” The detective slapped the file closed. “Okay, Donald. Thanks for your help. You can go now.”

  “The least you can do is tell me what’s going on,” Donnie said, rising with the detective.

  “We don’t know much more than you do right now.” The detective led Donnie to the mesh door. “We found the car that was used in the kidnapping, but the gang members are still at large. They’re affiliated with island mobsters, so we have some leads to follow.”

  “What about Dirk? What’re you going to do with him?”

  “We picked Dirk up at the airport, but he won’t talk to us. Except to say that he did steal the stereo and watches we found in your locker. He admits that he extorted you into holding the goods.”

  That surprised Donnie, but he was glad that Dirk had finally been nailed and that Donnie had had something to do with it. “You’re putting him away, right?”

  “Juvenile court will decide that. Right now, we want to get to the bottom of his gangland affiliations. If you find out anything more, let me know.”

  The detective turned and walked back toward his desk. Donnie shook his head with dissatisfaction at the laxness of justice and opened the mesh door. From the corner of his eye, he spotted Dirk’s duffel bag, and an inexplicable impulse opened in him. He had touched the arc once—and it remembered him. But Insideout wasn’t calling to Donnie. The call came from the alien’s nightmare.

  Donnie looked to see that the detective’s back was to him, and then he reached into the duffel bag, rummaged among the tangling of clothes, and found the hard metal disc that Dirk had shown him at the Home. He swiftly put the arc in his pocket and left.

  On the bus ride back to the Home, Donnie examined the arc. It was dull and torpid to his touch, and holding it up to the sunlight and seeing a vague glint of rainbow, he suddenly remembered finding this object on the Big Island. He figured that the fall Dirk had tripped him into had jarred his short-term memory. Now, he recalled the scintillate energy that he had felt around it on the lava field and wondered if it had picked up some kind of piezoelectric charge from the friction of the volcano’s tectonic plates. He put the slug of metal back in his pocket, satisfied that at least he had redressed one of Dirk’s crimes against him. The arc hummed a note beyond the range of his hearing, and Donnie’s anger bit deeper.

  How could a creature like Dirk Heiser have been tolerated for so long? Didn’t everyone see what a monster he was? Or maybe it was just that anyone else with a busy schedule and two good legs had no time or desire to filthy themselves with Dirk’s ugliness. They could walk away from him, but Donnie had to take it. He thudded his cane against the floor of the bus so fiercely that the other passengers looked at him. He felt glad the cops had finally nabbed Dirk. And if they let him back in the Home, Donnie was determined not to eat grief from him anymore. Somehow he would find a way to be certain that Dirk would never hurt him again.

  Donnie limped down the steps of the bus when it arrived at the Home and snapped at the driver, “Stop it!” when she started the hydraulic lift that lowered the step to the curb. He hobbled as quickly as he could across the lawn, skirting the playground where kids were playing soccer, and headed toward the pond.

  He didn’t know where he was going just yet. He burned with anger—furious at the whole world. This happened to him sometimes, only this time his fury was untamable. He jerked forward at a pace that hurt his leg, and the more it hurt, the harder he pushed himself until the pain and his motion became one. “Hurt goddamn you! Hurt me! Go ahead!”

  Tears of defiance greased his sight, and he lurched to the edge of the pond. He stopped with the toes of his shoes touching the lace of green and brown algal scum. The pain in his bad leg burned like a hot wire. He wanted to throw himself into the mud, to thrash out his rage in the sticky waste of life. He edged forward, clenched with hysteria, when he spotted the graves.

  Donnie stabbed his cane into the mud and pivoted to face the site where Dirk had buried Hunza and Peppercorn. The Earth there was torn open and sunken, and the blood-smirched linen they had been wrapped in was dragged half out of the hole. Bent over a withheld gasp, Donnie swung his body closer and followed a double set of pug marks pacing away from the open graves. At first, he assumed some animal had dug up the corpses and dragged them off. But then, crouching nearer to the mud, he observed that there were no other tracks. The gasp in him widened toward a scream. The animals had dug themselves out!

  The horror of his deduction battered his heart, and he would have turned and fled. But he couldn’t move. He followed with his gaze the trail of paw prints that wandered into the grass toward the hole in the chainlink fence that the strong-legged boys used to get out into the wild fields under the volcano. The urge rose in him to follow. But he resisted, and the thigh of his bad leg twitched with involuntary strength. He jerked forward one step and screamed a tiny, hopeless cry.

  Cold smoldered against his thigh, and his hand clutched at the icy burn. The metal disc he had taken from Dirk’s duffel bag seared his whole leg with freezing fire. He yanked the disc from his pocket, and his hand pulled out a piece of the sun.

  Nerve-aching brightness dazzled in his palm. His wrist, arm, shoulder, and then entire body flashed into blue refulgence. Maniac strength fitted itself to his body, and he managed one last whimper of shock before the deep mightiness of the arc’s power flapped the rags of his body sharply against his skeleton. He jerked like a tangled puppet, and his mind melted away.

  A bellow like a mad bull’s sounded from across the pond, and the kids playing soccer two hundred yards away stopped their game. They beheld Donnie Lopes at the far end of the pond, walking without his cane. The few with the keenest eyes saw a shimmering hung over him like a glass bell. He budged through a sheared hole in the chainlink fence and disappeared into the sere brush of the bison-humped hills under the empty bowl of the volcano.

  ***

  Dirk. His name glittered in him, and he sat up on his cot and looked toward the gray bars of his cell door. Sunlight sheeting through the skylight of the jail corridor hexed his sight, and all he saw was a figure with long hair and supple posture. He stood up, and his heart swerved.

  “Reena,” he said in a gust of surprise. He could barely believe that he faced her. She was more beautiful than she had seemed to him in his tranceful encounters with her, and he palm-wiped his eyes to be certain that she actually stood before him.

  He stepped up to the bars and took all of her in with his surprised stare. He hadn’t expected to see her dressed in gray crushed denim and silk. Her ash-blond hair spilled pale fire over her lavender blouse, and the languor of her green gaze and the lynx-span of her face held him wordlessly before her.

  She put an arm throu
gh the bars and touched the pollen down on his chin. He looked something like her vision of the alien but less pretty, more harsh. His gray eyes looked like the insides of ice. Loneliness teetered in his stare, but more strongly she perceived a varletry to the thrust of his jaw and the surly curl of his mouth. He looked arrant.

  “What’re you doin’ here?” he asked, and immediately felt stupid.

  The telepathy of meaning echoed simultaneously with the breath of his voice, and she understood him as though fluent in English. “Jiang is outside,” she answered in French, but she could see from the comprehension in his expression that he understood. “After you there is only one more of us to free.”

  “Yeah—Howard. And we better get a move on, too, because the guys holding him are not notorious for their patience. I’m sure his wife has called the cops by now. Can you get me outta here?”

  She turned to call the guard, and Dirk rubbed his chin where she had touched him. Her fingers had felt like points of wind, cool and electric.

  The guard shuffled down the corridor and opened Dirk’s cell.

  “Now that’s a way with words,” Dirk tried to kibitz.

  “We have so little time.” Her idle eyes looked wearier, and he recalled the alien’s urgency and the truth that when it left, so would its powers. They would revert to their old selves. That was the freedom Dirk had craved since Mitch’s ghost first appeared—but for Reena, of course, it meant madness. She smiled, hearing his thought. “Insideout is taking me with it when it goes.”

  “You’re kiddin’?” he said, though the harmonics of comprehension already chimed in him: The arc had the capacity to translate a human body to a wave function and shrink it with itself smaller than the fabric of spacetime, small enough to fall out of the continuum and into the infinite array of possible realities. The mentations went on, defining the energy equivalencies that would be siphoned from the vacuum field into the upper atmosphere to preserve the conservation symmetries and allow Reena’s exit from this universe—but he wasn’t listening. Until now, she had just been an image in his mind of another babe, and his feelings for her had been slack. But here, in the immediate presence of her, with her fruit-sweet scent reaching into him and her features shining in the incandescence of now, muscular emotions wrangled. He tried to suppress his swelling infatuation, frightfully aware that she knew his feelings. But that was hopeless. To his relief, as they walked out of the cell block, she gave no indication that she had tapped into him.

  In fact, Dirk’s thoughts chivvied round and round Reena’s heart. She had never felt love for a man before, and she wasn’t sure that what she felt for Dirk was love. She didn’t even know this boy. Yet, his heart relented transparently to her, and in it she met a sort of grandeur in the athletic jubilance of his rascality, a brightness to his dark spirit, like a vampire’s unearthly beauty. He wasn’t sly or crooked. His crimes were all daring, almost selfless with danger, like when he had run drugs for his mother or when he disrupted the conformity of the Home with his chicanery. She liked that in him, because she would have liked that in herself if she had been whole.

  Walking past police officers, clerks, and detectives, Dirk experienced a ribald arrogance, a dreamlike silliness that almost provoked him to leap onto a desk and dance. Then, at the periphery of sight, he noticed ultraviolet gems dangling in the air, and when he swung his direct gaze toward them, they snapped into caustic sparks and vanished. Understanding nettled him: The orc mounted power from their unbalanced impulses. But the power wasn’t fully manifesting here. It drained away from them and pooled eleswhere, steepening toward an ultimately seismic encounter.

  “I’ve seen the gargoyles,” Reena spoke to him. “Jiang has, too. They are the alien’s demons.”

  “What’re we gonna do about them?”

  She stopped at the wire-mesh door that led out to the public corridors. “I thought you would know.”

  Dirk grabbed his duffel bag from the detectives desk where it lay and held it up. “The arc knows. It’ll come to me.”

  Outside, Jiang sat in the driver’s seat of a squad car, hands on the wheel, pretending to drive. Dressed in the clothes that he had been given on board the liner—blue denim pants with belled cuffs, a wide-neck red and white striped pullover shirt, and his black slippers, he looked like an old salt just released from drying out in the drunks’ tank.

  Since collapsing onto the deck of the liner last night, he had been reluctant to use his special strength. He knew he was strong again, because he felt engorged with vigor, but he was afraid to use the power. The demon he had seen on his mad night sea flight was still around. Glimpsed in windshield reflections, it showed as an insect-masked dragon, come and gone in an eyeblink. He hoped that if he remained still enough in his heart, it would go away. Even so, how could he hope for stillness when he spun with astonishment? Golden Mountain alone was cause for excited exploration. Perhaps if he were still an old man he would be content to sit in the midst of this miraculous whirlwind and meditate (ch’ing mo), but moving so magnetically, feeling so weightless and fresh, he had no hope of containing his energies.

  And so, Jiang touched the world around him. He sat in the driver’s seat and grasped the steering wheel, absorbing the tactile luxury of this stupendous machine. Furtively, he reached out with his strength and pinged the mirror-paned side of a skyscraper, feeling the resilience of the tempered glass and the opulence of the bronzed sash. The air, tainted with traffic fumes, a perfume of technology, awed his senses. He glanced about for the mad glints and enamels of the dragon. In the rearview mirror, flame-shaped adder eyes watched him, and he hopped from the car.

  “It’s all around us,” Reena said to him, and he was relieved to see her beside him again. On the ride with her from the docks, he had observed how his special vitality had coursed more intently when they touched. The boy with her was Dirk, the wise youth from his dreams. But the boy looked tougher in person, more earthbound.

  “The dragon is watching us,” he said to her, and Dirk, too, understood him. “It has followed me here to you.”

  “It’s called an orc,” Dirk said authoritatively, and Jiang knew what he said, because Reena was among them. “It’s the alien’s craziness. And it’s gonna get worse.”

  “Forget the gargoyle,” Reena said. “There’s nothing we can do about it, right?”

  “The more we do, the stronger it gets,” Dirk confirmed, reaching into his bag for the arc. He felt the round, brass button on a pair of rodeo pants and thought that was it. He didn’t want to take it out until they were away from the police station, and he threw the bag into the front of the squad car. “And when the orc zombies a body, it’s unstoppable.”

  “There’s one more of us,” Reena said. In her mind, Howard’s thoughts blossomed into petals of radiance, the bloom of time unclenching from the present.

  “Howard was taken by some very dangerous men,” Dirk said. “The men who have him want a lot of money. And I have no idea where he is.”

  “Ah, money,” Jiang nodded knowingly. “In China now, they say to get rich is glorious.”

  “I can find Howard,” Reena said, ignoring Jiang. “Together we can free him.” She gestured for them to get into the squad car. “Dirk, you drive.”

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Dirk slapped his hand against the top of the car. “We can’t take on the Yakuza. They’ve got guns. Why not use the cops to bust them?”

  Reena gave him an askew look. “Can’t you hear Insideout?” She could. Whenever she faced Dirk or even called his image to mind, she heard the alien’s thoughts. They were there inside Dirk, faint but distinct, brooding and sulfurous with hope of escape. But he focused externally. The closest he came to the alien’s interior was wanting to understand ghosts and how his father’s consciousness persisted beyond death. Reena, thinking of her own survival, tuned precisely to Insideout’s need, and she heard the alien through Dirk.

  She put a fingertip on the velvet space between Dirk’s eyes, and he envisaged
Poe again in the ferrous shadows of his mind’s eye. “Don’t, don’t,” the miniscule voice whispered. “The police are no part of the timeline that leads me back to the hyperfield. You have to get Howard out on your own. Please, trust me, even though it seems I’ve made a mess of everything else. Go, as quickly as you can.”

  Dirk shivered. The thunderish expanse between him and the alien seemed too far to breech alone, and he trembled with the thought of falling into that depth. He blinked and forced alertness into his head. The lot of parked squad cars was burdened with sunlight. “Okay, then.” He ducked behind the wheel. The touch of the ignition key displaced his unearthliness with a crude joy. He’d never stolen a cop car before. “Let’s roll.”

  Reena and Jiang got into the back seat, and Dirk drove out of the lot. The old man sank into his seat and watched the modern landscape drift by. While Reena fed Dirk directions, Jiang lay his hands on his thighs and felt something similar to the root’s pulse in the grip of granite. His life melted stone. Like a slow-growing cliff tree that cracks boulders, his frail being had been wedged into the marvelous. The impossible shattered around him into the everyday miracles of life on Golden Mountain. Try to speak to yourself, he mentally pricked himself. But what was there to say? The sinewy energy in him hovered far from words. He smiled at the back of Dirk’s head, noticing the dimple of a boil scar and the novelty of sun-streaked hair. “You explained much to me in my dreams, young Dirk. You showed me the demon as a circle of metal. It needs our help, you said. Which is why we are together. But how can it need us when its own power is so much greater than ours?”

  “That’s the craziness of this whole thing. We’re as far from understanding it as yeast are from us. It’s all so weird.” He tossed a grin over his shoulder. “I guess it needs us the way we sometimes need antibiotics. Without us, the alien’s wasted—and so are we and everybody else on this island.”