He has been thinking about all of this lately, thinking of it in the light of what his schizo brother has been saying about a sister, and sensing a creepy parallel — and just last night, he had a dream that really scared him, which both answered the question of Dorian’s strange behavior in recent months and explained the equally strange conviction from his own sixth and seventh years, as follows:
He was walking in a forest and encountered a man sitting under a tree clothed in a T-shirt and ripped blue jeans (feet bare). The man had long hair and a bandanna wrapped around his head. Also, the man was smoking an old-fashioned blunt. He didn’t look especially intellectual. But not only was he wicked smart, he was telepathic, because before Cliff had said a single word, the man said something along the lines of: Let ∞ be a set of universes, U’s, of distinct but parallel paths (A1 — Z100), each of which is a set of events, E’s, on ordered pairs <rc, fw> (<random chance, free will>), such that any variation in any E will have already resulted in the formation of a new U. With these presuppositions before us, we can now turn to your situation. My situation? The one you came here to discuss. Euforia? No, thanks. Consider the path you are on (B39 — R61): You have a brother. On other paths (such as K8 — E76), you don’t. One path is centraclass="underline" M50 — M50. If a significant event from that path is sensed on any other path, RS may begin to break down. RS? Reality-structure. Awareness of central path events may lead to new orderings of <rc, fw> that undermine RS. How? Your current situation is a textbook example. Your brother has become aware of an event that occurred on M50 — M50. He is taking actions influenced by that event. So, we really do have a sister. Did. She died. Correct. Your brother has become aware of that. His actions in B39 — R60 are being influenced by that awareness and are creating consequents. You mean consequences. No, I mean consequents. A consequent is the second term of a mathematical ratio. The first term is called an antecedent. When consequents in one universe have antecedents in a different one … What. What then. What happens then?
But the dream was about to break up.
The man was not talking anymore. In fact, he wasn’t a man anymore, although he still looked like one. He was a cicada. He opened his mouth and out it came, emotionless and unrequiring of breath: the scream of an insect.
In the light of day, Cliff has been unable to remember exactly what the man said. The ideas, so logical during sleep, now have a quality of total nonsense. What is staying with him very clearly is the scream at the end. Before that, there’d been a lot of weird mathematical jargon. Something about alternate dimensions and his little brother being not crazy. Well, you never said crazy in the first place; all you said was, there’s a need here for medication and the kid better start taking some before he does something more egregious than defacing a bathroom— (Phone ringing.) Speak of the devil. It’s four o’clock. First sign of him since he left for the party. Is it possible he’s still hanging with the mozlem?
“Lemme guess.”
“Cliff—”
“You’re getting a tattoo that says: 72 VIRGINS.”
“Something happened,” he says — and judging from the tone of his voice, not something good. Better lay off and be supportive.
“All right, calm the fuck down. What’d you do this time?”
“I didn’t.”
“Okay, okay.”
“First of all, there were three of them there.”
“Three of who where.”
“At the party. Kids from Crescent.”
“You mean Muslims.”
He doesn’t answer; and when Cliff tells him to turn on his video feed and there’s still no reply, the silence strikes him as eerie. In these days, the mind is poised always on a kind of ledge above fearful assumptions. You see a backpack on a bench or you hear a siren in the offing and your mind curls around an inner trigger. Perhaps he is unable to turn on the video. Because someone is forbidding it. Allowing a voice call, but no more. But, of all people to call, why me—Then suddenly there he is: Black eye and a fat lip, one cheek streaked with a line of blood, as if painted for war.
Cliff (trying not to laugh now): “So what’d you like crash your bike?”
“No.”
“Well what.”
He touches his lip and winces. Then says again that there were three. While they held him down, the other just whaled on him.
“You got in a fight,” Cliff says. “With Muslims.”
“They started it.”
“Jesus Christ, Dorian. Mom is going to execute your ass.”
“Is she home?”
“No,” he says. Then goes downstairs. Because someone is ringing the doorbell. He walks with the phone in his hand and his brother’s face on the screen; and when he gets to the door and peers through the fish-eye peephole (while Dorian is going on about how he never said anything to the kid, not a word the whole time, and the kid just went ape shit on him), whom should Cliff see standing there on the front step but the very same assailant. Son of suspected terrorists. The new kid on the block.
I could hear the doorbell through my phone and I could tell that Cliff was opening the door. What wasn’t clear were the first words spoken. Then my brother said: “Dorian, it’s for you.” And then, on my screen, I saw them. Mr. B was squinting, shading his eyes, leaning closer to the camera. “Dorian?” he said. Beside him: Karim. Wearing khakis and a polo shirt. “Dorian, we— I mean, listen, son. Well, here.” (Glancing at Karim.) “Karim has something—” Which was the last thing I heard. Because I had ended the call … Not in anger. Not because I refused to speak to him. At the time, I myself didn’t understand the reason. Now I know. That for the first time I was seeing myself in him. Marched to my house as I’d been dragged back to the mosque. We were to admit our wrongs, we children: from whom loved ones, futures, entire worlds had been stolen without apology. Somewhere deep inside, I was thinking: Why should either one of us be sorry.
8
That night, Karim Hassad does not sleep much. But around four in the morning, he has a dream of going back to the camp. Sent back because he attacked the boy next door. It unfolds realistically — like life, only in reverse. The old guy is driving him (not east to the Provinces, but west to the Territories); and instead of a dread of endless deprivation and sickness, Karim feels the promise — stronger with every passing moment (moments perceived by his dream-deceived mind as hours) — of the deep peace and amnesia of opium, which is itself a dream. And then the dream is over. Though dreams do not end so much as fade out of sight of the mind’s eye, as conversely they may fade back into sight when the other eyes, the ones made of veins and muscle and vitreous, are open. Which is what happens the next morning. Karim is awake in the bedroom given to him by the old guy out of the kindness of his heart. As he lies on the bed, staring at the ceiling¸ the lingering pain in his fingers makes him wonder how much pain the other boy is in, and the thought of the other boy acts like a rush of sunlight calling forth a shadow: the sudden memory of a dream of being taken back — a good dream, full of the simple feeling of going home.