arc/dream
Fourteen Hills
THE NIGHT AIR OVER THE GULF: dry, distinct. Stars like rice cast across a floor. A scattering of footfalls on deck: sailors hurrying to their places. Silence. A sliver of moon. A cough. A nervous laugh. A voice, “Yeah. No.”
The missile springs from its launcher, slitting the sky like scissors held open and run along wrapping paper. A hiss that’s audible even above the boiling, throaty roar. Flame-colored light flickers on the faces of sailors, throwing their features this way and that, as if these faces were changing into different faces—face upon face, over and over. The light fades as the missile climbs and begins its long arc toward the city, which lies sleeping a hundred miles inland across the desert. The roaring fades, too: a low, rumbling echo, way up against the sky. The faces go out.
• • •
A single stray dog trots down the street, a silhouette cruising along the circles of light cast by the lamps. The ticking of its claws on the pavement sparks up through a window and into the dream of the woman sleeping there.
• • •
It’s a hollow dream. That’s how she might describe it on waking, if she felt the need to put it into words. But words are not her medium. She’s a sculptor. She’ll try instead to outline the dream with her hands. In the air at first—for weeks, even years perhaps. She’ll concentrate, then try not to. She’ll close and open a fist. She’ll find her hand moving in a familiar curve as she reaches for a coffee cup, notice her fingers holding an invisible something as she sits lost in thought staring at nothing. She’ll sculpt the hollowness of this dream from a substance she’s not yet discovered, a material she’ll find only while trying to shape it.
The ticking of the dog’s claws rings off the inside of the dream, echoes, scatters. Is it a metallic sound? Or the sound of sand dropped from a bridge, sizzling through the surface of water? She turns her head on the pillow, eyes shifting beneath their lids. She’s exploring the shape of this dream, moving through it as if it were a house, and she reaches to touch the spot on the wall where the ticking began its ricochet.
• • •
The missile has leveled off into the horizontal trajectory set for it by the laws of physics and those who have fired it. The tail wobbles slightly, and the stream of heat behind ripples the night sky, churns up the stars. There are letters on the missile’s side, a phrase chalked in a youthful hand. The mark of a personality is present in those letters traveling through the night, three miles above the land, a humor and talent in the whip of each stroke. “C.O.D. —” it says, each white, chalky letter luminous in the moonlight. “Collect On Delivery.” In the desert below, a man has stepped from his tent to urinate. He looks up at the majestic dome of the sky, at the stars, and angles his stream higher. “My God," he thinks. “My God, it feels nice.”
• • •
The sleeping woman wanders down what seems like a hallway. Something prescribes her movement, but when she reaches to the side in search of the walls, there are none. She wavers, then moves back to the path. Something carries her along.
“Am I inside a donut?" she wonders, then laughs: “How can I be thinking in a dream? And what a thing to think. A donut? Well, a donut then. I’m strolling inside a donut, and I am profound in this donut. Will I be dunked and gobbled by God? Are we all nothing more than the jelly?”
Her hands are moving up and down, her fingers fluttering. She watches; she’s right there between her dancing hands. They’re putting on a show. She feels her biceps stretching and contracting, the hum of moving muscle. The rippling of her fingers is ticklish; they’re tickling themselves from the inside out. “What are my hands doing?” she thinks. “Ah, I know,” and her head is moving up and down, her mind jiggling and giddy. "The Jelly Dance.” Her hands climb higher, her elbows like rubber. “Also known as The Paramecium.”
The woman laughs in her sleep, the sound spiraling out the window and into the street, where the circles of light sit centered beneath their lamps.
• • •
The rivets on the missile cast tiny shadows, the moonlight picking them out as they stream by. The missile weighs nearly a ton. It’s been hurled above the ocean, over the land, like a giant stone. The president of a large country has thrown it because the president of a small country tried to blow up the former president of the large country, or so the current president thinks. He’s just hung up the phone, there on the other side of the planet, where it’s daytime. He looks out the presidential window at a tree. Goes blank for a moment as the branches stir. Shakes himself, nods decisively, turns back to his paperwork. He signs his name, wonders if his signature looks authoritative enough.
A newspaper lies beside him, the front page: a photo of two old women in babushkas, with grave expressions on their faces. A boy stands between them, disoriented, desperate. The president turns and signs his name across the top of the page. Sucks in his lip. Signs it again. Slight alterations, flourishes. An underline. Then, no—no underline. He fills the white space, then signs on top of the stories and finally, covers the photo. He notices a byline. “Ah, Ms. Coburn. Hello, Ms. Coburn. A tough cookie, that one.” He circles her name, “Wonder what her signature looks like.” He turns back to his paperwork and applies a bit more pressure, adds some speed, when he signs the next sheet.
The missile’s hissing slides into a whistle, which crystallizes the silence of the stars. The desert below, with its slopes, its rises and falls, looks as if it’s breathing.
• • •
The sleeping woman’s laugh has disintegrated and mixed itself up with the sounds of the night: the drip of a spigot at the end of an alley, a whooshing that somehow makes its way up out of the coin-sized hole in a sewer cover, the swish of a passing car (headlights skim the ceiling and glint in the woman’s dream).
The dream-shape grows dark; then it’s filled with a dull, stagnant light. The woman’s stomach clutches. She’s in her mother’s room again, the way it was during those final long months of cancer: the smell of flowers and disinfectant. She sees the doctor’s boy—all of nineteen?—rolling her dead mother’s body over as if it were a corpse. Slipping the canvas beneath, tucking it. Letting the body fall, re-adjusting the canvas, shoving her mother this way a little, rolling her that, just getting her arm in: it pops free and falls, her hand bouncing. The woman doesn’t let herself turn away; she watches him heft up the body: The shape of it is inside her: this sack full of her mother. She wants to scratch at the boy’s eyes.
The dream fades and pulses. It frays. Stitches itself back up. Frays again. Here, it is amorphous, rough but soft like a sponge; there, it is polygonal, hard, and smooth. She rounds a bend and the whole thing drops into her hand. She turns it over and reaches for it with her other hand. It springs up around her. She is seven years old, standing in the middle of a vast shallow lake. A weekend trip she can never place—a visit with a friend of her father’s? Her mother’s?
Set free with the other children to explore the neighborhood—so unlike the city where her family lives—she finds herself in this lake at dusk, crossing to the other side. The shouts of her new friends have wandered off; she’s forsaken their game of tag for the feel of mud between her toes. She reaches into the water to squeeze the mud through her fingers. But she can’t make the bottom: Her fingertips, no matter how she strains, are as far from the mud as the edge of her T-shirt’s sleeve is from the water. She can’t reach the bottom without getting her sleeve wet. It makes no difference that her shorts are soaked; she won’t let herself dip the sleeve, even the tiniest bit.
She hangs suspended, then, there in the lake, biting her lip, staring at the edge of her white sleeve and the strip of her dark, sandy skin—just as wide as the distance between her fingertips and the mud. It’s mathematical: if she adds to one side, she must add to the other; if she pulls away, increases the width of the strip of her skin, the distance between mud and fingertips widens accordingly. It’s like her mother’s little scale for weighing spices, the weights with the tiny handles, the needle quivering. She stares at her sleeve, her eyes traveling down: the band of skin; the film of water, dipping slightly where it circles her arm; the colors of dusk on the surface of the lake, glowing red, orange, and golden. And then the feel, underwater, of her fingers fully stretched.
It all fuses together: this feeling of stretching; the invisible distance to the bottom; and the image of sleeve, skin, and upside-down sky. She can see the straining of her fingers in these stripes of white sleeve and darker skin, and she can feel the stripes of color in her straining. And the thrill of that merging echoes through her still as she sits on the shore, scratching a bug bite, breathing in the smell of reed, dust, and darkness.
• • •
The missile continues its flight, and now the lights of small villages dot the desert below. A clump of palms stands out, a change in the texture of night. There are other such changes, too: a winding road, a broken-down truck.
The missile is not thinking. The missile is all motion. Its skin does not rise up in the wind. Goose bumps do not appear. It doesn’t yawn or blink. Still, perhaps it does carry thoughts with it; perhaps it carries feelings. But what sort of feelings would it carry? Who is the missile’s sculptor, and what dream have they wrapped in this cylinder? And the sailor who chalked those words on its side, what is he doing now? He’s stepped to the ship’s rail, and he’s lighting a cigarette. He looks out across the gulf. He’d like to see trout jumping. He flips the lighted match overboard, and though he knows the flame is already gone and the water too far below, he hears the match short out nonetheless, hitting the water, and he remembers when he was a boy. There was a trick you could do, with two paper clips, a needle, and a glass of water. You lowered the needle, using the clips as little hooks, and you made the needle float—you cradled it on the surface tension.
He looks up: I’d hate to be the poor sonuvabitch that’s underneath that motherfucker when it comes down.
• • •
In the woman’s apartment, the hands on the clock spasm slightly, then continue on. The floor creaks though no one has stepped on it. A picture eases down the wall a millimeter or so, as the wire from which it hangs chooses this moment, after years of being taut, to relax its weave. No one will notice, but the room feels more comfortable.
The woman hugs herself in her sleep. She’s holding her son again, as if tuberculosis had never taken him away. She’s exhausted, bewildered, and it’s making her float. She tries to concentrate and think it through beforehand, so she won’t make a mistake, but then she just has to do it. She takes her nipple between her finger and thumb and massages it up out of the areola. A drop of colostrum appears. She’d feel like a flower if she didn’t feel like the film on top of a cup of pudding. She raises her child and smears the drop on his tiny, budlike lips. He lies there like he’s just been spread on a cracker. “C’mon, baby, it’s yummy, and I’m very tired. It’s yummy." She’s pronounced the word too forcefully, but she’s too tired to correct herself. She raises and smears again. His lower lip moves; she tenses. He opens his mouth, and she pops him to her breast, but she knows immediately that he hasn’t taken hold. She lowers him and lets her head roll back. His lips fidget; he opens his mouth. Whap—she moves without thinking, and she knows this time he’s caught on; his face has disappeared into her breast, and she’s almost afraid he can’t breathe. But his powerful mouth, far too insistent for such an angelic, diaphanous creature, makes it plain that he’s alive. He can suck, the little monster.
She holds him there, her arms a cradle, a bowl, a basket, her arms. She stares down at his ear; a tiny spiral. The pain of the sucking is not pleasant, her breast as sore as it is, but it’s not unpleasant either. He’s buried in her left breast, a hand’s width from her heart. “He could suck it right out of me,” she thinks, and she closes her eyes and swallows. He does.
• • •
The missile begins to drop into its curve, a sureness and grace in its falling. It draws the earth up toward it, the gravitational pull of two bodies acting on each other.
The city spills into the desert like a ruin. Here and there a light winks on or off. Someone is up late studying; another is up early writing. In a fortified bunker some miles away, this small country’s president slumbers peacefully. He drifted off at midnight, pleased by a successful test: a Phantom jet, purchased years ago from the large country, draped a long dusty line of anthrax over a desert valley. The line clouded like pollen, pink, then vanished. Soldiers in space suits retrieved the monkeys from their cages, and the monkeys are being carefully watched.
• • •
A feral cat slips through a fence. The woman shifts her position again. The dream, like all dreams, is in fact many dreams. It braids and unbraids, tangles her in the bedclothes: She laughs with her father while at the same time feeling strange because she knows her father is dead and has been for years; she tosses stones into a pond and can almost get her mouth around the sound—she wants to put one on her tongue to make it happen. Always she’s aware of the space around her, how her simple presence changes it, and how it, too, delineates her. Chairs are different when she’s in the room, and she’s different looking at them. And if she sits in one: How fine—the way it works her body like clay. She moves her arm, and the space the air has created for it, for every small line on the back of her hand, travels along, not a moment too soon or too late, and knows exactly when to stop.
Yes. She has it. The shape of the dream is in her hands. Inside her. She rolls over, and her arm describes an arc across the sheet. The ripples in the fabric shift and align. The light from the lamps adjusts the shadows in total agreement. Her arm moves again, and the shadows scatter. She’ll awake in the morning, and the sculpture will begin its growing toward birth. She has it, and she must let it go.
A child—in the small country, perhaps, or the large country, or in another country altogether—will acquire his father’s signature and join his schoolmates on a field trip to the museum. A shape will meet him there. He’ll feel something he’s not felt before, or rather, he’ll feel something he’s felt before but somehow he’ll feel it for the first time. He’ll smile, swallow, move toward it. The guard thinks to speak but says nothing. The child steps into the shape. While his schoolmates move on to the next gallery, he knocks on the sculpture, and the metal rings in his hand. Is it metal? Or earth? He wonders and runs his fingertips along a gauzy patch. The guard steps into the next room. The boy scratches the sculpture with his fingernail, opens his palm and presses it flat against the shape. But he must catch up with his classmates. On the way out of the gallery, he looks back. He feels the shape filling him, then hears himself breathing. He runs.
Soon he will begin to realize that he’ll make a shape of his own one day, very much like this one, but very different. The two shapes—hers and his—will form a third; they’re already forming it as his shape comes into being—as he smooths a lump of clay, twists a piece of Wire—for her shape is inside of his, and his, as people look at it and then back to the woman’s, makes its way into hers. And other shapes, too, will appear, the products of other people—similar, different; a continuity: one length of wire in a grand armature, one line of thread in a vast weave that becomes ever stronger, more beautiful with each successive generation.
• • •
The night has just begun to give way. The sky is grainy. It hums. Very nearly perpendicular to the ground now, its long arc coming to an end, the missile heads toward the street, down toward the apartment, the lamps and their circles of light, the sleeping woman, and the dream, none of which will exist when the sun finally clears the horizon. +
