Arc of the Dream

by A. A. Attanasio

  “Lusk,” he spoke to himself, and began again down the stony steps. “It’s just Donnie. You can handle him. Let the arc worry about the orc.”

  The orc screamed, a piercing meteor-whistle, and the rocks under Dirk’s feet crumbled like cheese and sent him tumbling down the steep scarp. Rocks punched him, gravel clawed, and horror whirled as the earth beat him closer to the demon. His arms and legs flailed and kicked vainly, and in a bruising avalanche of stones and dust he fell all the way to the hatched rock where the orc squatted.

  Spidery arms seized Dirk and hoisted him toward the munching mantis head with Donnie’s pitiful facemarks painted on it. Dirk howled. He wedged his legs into the cracked boulder and desperately braced himself. The green head, translucent to its hinging mouthjoints, ticking veins, and membranous skull, dipped, and its slavering jaws fanged his chest. Pain collided with his effort to hold back. He buckled, carried upright in the ravenous embrace of the orc.

  Dirk’s murder-scream shocked him to alertness, and the agony of his snapped ribs and gnawed lungs distilled him to a drop of sentience, dark with pain. Reflected in that exquisite drop shone the underbelly of the sky, hard blue and spongy with clouds. The excruciating stab of the mouth at his chest slashed through his muscles and triggered spasms that curdled him inward and then vomit-wrenched him straight. Blackness battered him, and he would have succumbed if his attention weren’t anchored in the dewdrop reflection at his pith.

  Clouds surged across the glacier film of the sky, and the radium point of the sun led him away from his death. He went willingly, with stolen release from the agony of his chewed body. Was this an endorphin dream opiating him with pain-products from his gnawed body? Weirdly, he recognized the alien’s reasoning—and the cruelty jolted stronger. Lusk. The word calmed him. He ignored the alien’s presence and let the scene he saw reflected in the bauble of his life absorb him.

  He rose upright groggily, staring down at his boots in the tawny sand. He swung his head around and faced Donnie beside the cracked boulder. He looked alert and furious. In his hand gleamed Chud’s butterfly blade, white with sun like a sliver of ivory.

  Dirk slapped his hip for the blade and felt the torn fabric where his pocket had ripped during his fall.

  “I’ve got the knife now, Dirk.” Donnie strode forward, caneless and springy. “And it’s you that’s going to be hurt this time.”

  “Donnie!” Dirk blurted and staggered back. “Look at yourself, man. You’re moving without a cane.”

  Donnie looked down at himself and hobbled with surprise.

  Dirk lurched forward, but his grogginess slowed him. Amazement slipped off Donnie’s face, and he swerved into a half step and slashed with the blade. Dirk leaped back and almost collapsed with weakness.

  Ferocity squeezed Donnie’s stare. “I’ve wanted this for years.” He pranced forward, taking full advantage of Dirk’s faint. By the time Dirk responded, Donnie’s knife arm swiped up to gut him.

  Dirk grabbed Donnie’s arm but wasn’t strong enough to stop it. The point of the blade pierced him above his stomach and glided off a rib. Donnie’s other hand punched out and socked Dirk squarely in the mouth, knocking him down.

  Donnie pounced on him, and Dirk caught the blade as it gashed for his throat. For a moment, he was able to hold him, his weakness just matching Donnie’s strength. “Donnie!” Dirk yelled at him. “What’re you doin’?”

  “I’m killing you,” his clenched face said. “You’re never going to hurt me again.”

  Dirk’s grip slipped, and the knifepoint needled his larynx. His arm trembled—words trembling in him, too: “Donnie, look at you! You’re crazy. This – isn’t you, man. It’s – some demon. How can you – walk without – your cane?” But those words came out huffed and garbled as animal grunts. In the end, all he could cry was, “Donnie, don’t kill me!”

  The piety of terror in Dirk’s voice reached Donnie. Here was the satisfaction that Donnie Lopes had always wanted from Dirk, and the sound of this hoodlum’s abject submission softened his savage will. The press of his knife slackened, and Dirk yanked the blade away and dashed it into the rocks. Donnie slumped forward, and his surprised face met Dirk’s upthrusting fist. His head snapped back, and his startled eyes flapped white.

  Donnie collapsed, and the air whomped with brilliance, blinding Dirk. When sight squeezed back into his eyes, he gaped at globules of turquoise plasma wriggling over the sand and rocks, splattering into frenzied amoebas of energy, and finally drizzling into glints of stardust speckling the gully for a few moments before evaporating.

  Dirk sat up, shivering hands on his chest. He was intact. The world had become luminously commonplace. Donnie’s crumpled form lay undistorted on the grund, and the only pain in Dirk’s body throbbed as a constellation of bruises from his tumble into the gully. His weakness had also passed, and he stood up with buoyant relief.

  A wild shriek swooped from overhead, and Dirk crouched around to see Howard splashing dust in a jubilant gorilla dance. The lusk had really worked. The arc had collapsed the orc.

  Dirk found the arc in the fissure of the boulder where the orc had sat. It came away hot as ice, and when he held it up, a halo of colors wreathed it. The alien was still in touch with him, distant and weak, yet still present.

  Howard whooped again, and Reena cheered beside him. Their laughter rippled in Dirk’s mind. Thoughts from the feckless alien fit themselves to his awareness, and he understood what had happened. He put the arc in his pocket and scaled the shattered face of the gully.

  “Don’t put yourself in my mind,” Dirk said to Reena, “or anybody else’s. Listen to your telepathy idly. And Howard, ignore the timelines much as you can.”

  “That’ll be easy,” Howard smiled. He looked about for Cora. “I feel almost normal.” The gauze of design, which had veiled his vision since before his kidnapping, faded. Trickles of light came and went. “But why worry about it? The orc is gone. I can feel it.”

  “The demon is gone,” Reena agreed. “But so is Insideout. I hear only our own thoughts.” She had faced into Ipo’s corpse the way she had faced into the gangsters at the warehouse, with her own darkness—the void of catatonia and the surging fear of her madness. That’s the past, she gladly reminded herself, and tears pooled just behind her eyes.

  “Insideout and its demon are weakened.” Dirk hurried past the red-flowered bushes. “C’mon, let’s find Jiang. He’s got to hear this, too. If we can stay close to our perceptions and not use the alien’s power too much, the arc will remain an object. We can drive to the airport, get on a plane, and bring it back. No miracles. No orcs.”

  Ipo’s cadaver lay facedown in the dirt where it had dropped when the orc canceled. The limbs were awry and the head tucked under so that it looked more like a heap of dirty clothes than a body. The sight of it sent a draft through Reena, and she remembered the caulked blood and shattered muscles of the zombie. She took Dirk’s hand as they climbed up the spill of lava rocks and heard the white notes of a silent music. That was Insideout, far away, on the other side of its journey, singing the song of its return, singing it backward from the future. And she heard it because she was going there, too. The antiphonal whisper of her own song lifted through her from the stag-antlered center of her brain. Her body rejoiced in the wholeness that would soon be hers, without the angelic power of sifting thoughts from other minds—and without the abysmal numbness of her malformed brain. This prospect of normalcy felt stranger and more enchanting to her than the magical and terrifying presence of the alien, and she squeezed Dirk’s hand to renew her bond with the moment.

  Dirk thought she was still unnerved by the orc and searching for something soothing to say when Cora’s voice hailed them from nearby. “Howie! It’s me, Cora!” She struggled through a brake of thorny, fern-leafed kiawe a pebble’s throw away.

  The giant, red-haired woman accompanying her held up a wallet and the sunflash of a badge. “FBI!” she shouted. “Stay where you are!”


  Dirk pushed Howard. “Skip.”

  Howard waved to Cora. “I’m all right,” he yelled, “I’ll explain everything later. Don’t worry about me, Cora.” He ducked under a lean of spindly boughed thorn trees, following Dirk and Reena. Cora called after him, and the agent shouted more commands. But he ignored them. Explanations knotted as he tried to imagine what he could possibly tell her. Her cries grew frantic by the time they reached Jiang.

  He stood atop a natural cairn of rocks that had fallen from the tattered rim of the crater. He had gone there after the orc imploded and the dead animals plopped to the ground. His strength, impaired from his strenuous standoff, he felt momentarily soggy with fatigue. But the relief of the orc’s collapse had carried him to the top of the rockpile to see the others. Kiawe shrubs blocked his view, and he had thought of levitating over them when his strength returned—until he spotted Cora and Charlotte. He watched as they laboriously meandered the labyrinth of thorn trees, rocks, and cactus. With his telekinesis he probed the texture of the terrain around them and found what he wanted in a ledge high up on the rim.

  “Jiang,” Dirk waved as he rounded a rise finned with prickly pear cactus. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded and pointed toward Cora and Charlotte, who closed in across a field of swordgrass.

  “Yeah, we gotta move.”

  Jiang smiled. “Don’t worry.” He hooked his mounting strength into the crater rim wall and tugged free a herd of black rocks. The boulders somersaulted down the scarp, trailing a caterpillar of furry red dust.

  “No!” Reena bawled in a voice that rang from inside his bones.

  Jiang frowned, bewildered. What was wrong? Did they think he intended to crush the two women? He had delicate control of the stampeding stones, and in a sway of outflung power that lifted him two inches off the ground and tilted him backward like a water skier, he brought the wall of rocks hurtling across the path of their pursuers.

  Howard ran to the top of the cairn and peered into the roiling dust until he found Cora and Charlotte backing away from the avalanche. He leveled a harsh stare at Jiang, but his ire faltered when he saw that the old man had slumped to the ground, breathless.

  Dirk rushed to his side and scanned the crater for orc signs.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Reena said.

  “It’s there now,” Dirk replied in a hush of certainty.

  “Maybe it’s not strong enough to reach us yet,” Howard hoped. He gently took Jiang’s throat in his hand and felt the feathery pulse. He looked to Dirk and shook his head.

  Jiang looked like he was solving a riddle. He concentrated on where his strength had gone. Deeper. He was surprised. When he had been toe to toe with the orc, facing into the rabid muzzles of the dead beasts, he had thought life moved outward. All his life, he had believed this. The dragon roamed outside. And while he had waited for the others to battle the dragon, he had been content—and strong enough—to hold it and contemplate it. In its four mad eyes he had seen the perfect light. In its rage to kill him, he had experienced the wrath of neverendingness. All experience was holy. His father had been right all along. Poet or farmer, angel or demon, rock or human—each was a midget Earth, each was whole.

  “Jiang?”

  The time to let go had not yet come. The withholdance continued outside of him in the literal world. He had to undo it himself. The actions required were already enciphered in him. He had only to open his eyes.

  Reena laid her hands on his face and insearched for his life. It rose toward her out of a pencil-sketched vagueness. As it drew closer, serenity pervaded her, and all lightness fled her body. She became a stone leaving its zeroes behind on the surface of the sliding light. She would have plummeted out of her own body right then, except Jiang’s willingness to surface to life buoyed her, and they both bobbed awake.

  “Are you okay?” Dirk’s hands clasped the sides of her face, and the concern in his voice was rift with fear.

  When she came to, her mind-touch felt the release of his fear followed by joy. Jiang sat up between them. “I’m okay,” he mumbled. “Stand aside.”

  Jiang soared to his feet, dust spiraling about his ankles.

  “Don’t do that,” Dirk warned.

  Reena used her telepathy to inform Jiang about the need to restrain their powers so that the orc would not feed off them, and he grimaced with concern.

  Dirk felt her silent energy like a whiff of glacial air. “Cut it out, Reena.” Dirk looked back toward the gully and traced glints of light that could have been dandelion fluff lofting in a breeze or— “Let’s get outta here.”

  Howard led the run back to the car. The timelines had brightened. The optimal path back to the car swerved ahead in neon white, a softglow that unmazed the desert forest. At the gravel road, Howard stood on the log and stared back through the gunsmoke tint of shrubs to where Cora and Charlotte picked their way up the slope. He waved.

  Dirk went into the green car with the dented roof and ripped the wires out of the radio he found in the glove compartment. He hoped that the agent hadn’t called them in yet, but as he got out, two cars came barreling down the rutted road toward them. The cars spewed gravel, swung sideways to a stop before them, and unsprung men with drawn guns. “Federal agents!” they announced. “Put your hands on your heads!”

  Reena looked to Dirk, and when he nodded she raised her hands and said, “Get back in your cars and forget you’ve seen us.”

  The agents complied. As Reena drove past the two cars of mannequin-faced agents, she rolled down her window and added, “Have the happiest day of your lives. And share your joy with others.”

  “For the benefit of all beings,” Jiang added, raising a hand in benediction. A few moments later, while he chuckled, a sickening lassitude bled through him, and he exclaimed in a Chinese dialect.

  Dirk and Howard looked back with anxiety. Reena studied the whorls of her fingerpads, a spindle of saliva drooled from her lip. Jiang opened his hands in a feeble shrug, muscles leathern again.

  In the rearview mirror, Dirk looked for the agents. He couldn’t tell whether they had noticed the Mercedes driving away from them, and he restrained the urge to floor the accelerator. He also searched for the orc. No sign of it showed out there. Deprived of the alien’s imagination, Dirk reverted to his angry old self. “Where are you, fucker?” he asked into the mirror as the FBI curled out of sight, and he cursed both Insideout and the demon. At the paved road, he breathed easier and let himself believe that they had gotten away clean—while under the heel of his right boot, a grub of a snow-blue energy, packed and glimmering, hoarded strength.

  Dirk drove to a nearby high school, and in the parking lot they ditched the maroon Mercedes. He hot-wired a tan station wagon, and they pulled out onto the highway, westbound toward the airport. Moments later, Howard tapped Dirk’s shoulder and jerked his head to the rear. “Its Cora.”

  Dirk craned his neck and eyed the green Toyota at an intersection with Cora half out the window, pointing at them. The Toyota shot into the traffic, causing several cars to swerve and jam their brakes. “Shit.” Dirk accelerated. “How’d they find us?”

  “Maybe the orc is helping them,” Howard volunteered.

  “Now I’m glad I cut their radio.” He pulled up to the tail of the truck ahead of them. “If we can lose them, we might make it. Hold on.” He swung onto the embankment, gunned past the truck, and cut in front of it a few yards from where the shoulder of the road ended at a concrete abutment.

  “Christ, Dirk!” Howard shrilled. “You’re as dangerous as the orc!”

  Dirk’s risky driving put distance between them and the Toyota. And twenty miles later, when they glided up the off-ramp toward the airport, the green car was long out of sight. They banked a curve and came into view of the conning tower, light aircraft hangars, and in the distance the jumbo jets. Dirk drove directly across the grass field and onto the concrete apron before the nearest hangar.

  “How’re we gonna handle this?
” Dirk asked.

  “Lusk, little buddy.’’ Howard got out of the car. “We hitch a ride on my laurels.” He strode into the hangar. Mechanics were busy overhauling an executive-class jet. Howard stooped under a dismantled wing and presented himself to the pit boss in front of the wire mesh windows of his office. He was a narrow man, like Howard, but short and gray-haired. Howard smiled when he looked through the window at a newspaper on the man’s desk, open full page to the sports section.

  Howard guessed that the pit boss would have a plane of his own to charter or sell, and when the wiry man announced that he had a Piper Seneca at the far end of the field that he’d let go for thirty-nine thousand, Howard introduced himself as the kidnapped Illinois lottery winner. They walked into the boss’s office and ruffled through the paper. Howard’s photo, from Cora’s wallet, as well as his story, up to the kidnapping at the boat harbor, had made the front page.

  “I need your help getting away. I’m being chased. I don’t have any money on me at all. But if you’ll give me that Seneca, I’ll give you a hundred grand from my first lottery check.”

  The pit boss’s lean face impassively assessed Howard. “You make it one twenty-five, put that in writing, and the plane’s yours.”

  By the time Howard had filled in the agreement of sale, the green Toyota appeared on the off-ramp from the highway, and Dirk began shouting. Howard ran for the station wagon. Dirk had the engine running, and as soon as Howard leaped in, they peeled away.

  Howard directed him down one of the criss-crossing airstrips, past a line of small planes, to the blue and white twin prop he had just purchased. The Toyota had cut across the grass of the airfield and rushed down a runway parallel to them when they reached the plane.

  Dirk threw open his door and helped Reena get out. “Get Jiang. Let’s go.”

  Howard carefully guided the old man’s legs free of the door and lifted him upright.