The Dreamcatcher, Chapter Four: “Denouement”

(Author’s Note: This is the fourth chapter of “The Dreamcatcher,” a serial story in this space. All previous chapters are available on my website: musingjamie.net)

Given all Tatu DeSouza’s stunning success, you might suspect that there would be a worm hiding somewhere in his Dreamcatcher apple. If so, you’ll be disappointed. Just as in John Cheever’s delightful short story about the Churchman family who seemed too perfect to be true, people, as they do, expected Tatu and his Daydreamer gizmo would someday fly too close to the sun and then, like Icarus, tumble into the sea and drown. But in their expectations of some ultimate comeuppance, Tatu’s doubters were disappointed. There would be no schadenfreude strings attached to Tatu and his Dreamcatcher.

In fact, just the opposite. The Dreamcatcher empire thrived. Tatu treated his employees and customers well. He established a foundation to combat and reverse climate change. He endowed a chair in robotics at Clark. He gave a substantial gift to Haddon, the school where his classmates once called him “Clam,” to establish a scholarship fund for low-income students interested in STEM. In exchange, the school offered to name a building in his honor, but Tatu demurred. He preferred to fly his good work under the radar.

Tatu’s father, Solomon, worked at the NSA for more than thirty years, and rose to the rank of Assistant Director for National Cyber Security. His mother, Hyacinth, rose through her ranks at the DOE as well, becoming Principal Deputy Assistant for Special Education before retiring as a GS-15. Their combined pensions provided them with a comfortable retirement, and Tatu’s success and generosity added a thick extra layer of padding, as well as an abundance of parental pride and peace of mind. Solomon and Hyacinth toyed with the idea of returning to Goa, but they never did. Instead, they purchased a small weekend home on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay where they liked to walk along the beach in the evening, looking for megalodon teeth.

Dreamcatchers became ubiquitous; like opinions, everybody had one. Sure; upon occasion, someone’s dream might turn into a nightmare, but the engineers at Dreamcatchers, Inc. found a way to mitigate, even expunge, those forays into our darker natures, and to turn them into benign visions that taught more positive lessons. Even Dreamcatcher’s few critics had to admit that the Tatu’s invention had changed the world. Violent crime became almost non-existent even in the most crime-infested cities in America, mass casualty shootings all but disappeared, and even the Middle East was eerily calm. It seemed Tatu’s little dream device had tamed and defanged all the wild beasts that had once roamed the jungles of the human subconscious once and for all.

To no one’s surprise, Tatu won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Two years later, Time Magazine named him its “Person of the Decade.” In an accompanying interview, Tatu recalled the story that his parents, both now deceased, once told him, the one about the coconuts on the palm trees that line the beaches in Goa, the ones that invariably fell on a DeSouza. “I know that I have been a remarkably lucky man,” Tatu mused. “I still am. One or two coconuts have fallen quite close to my noggin, but not one has ever scored a direct hit. So, is the universe abundant? It certainly has been for me; most—no, all—of my dreams have come true, and I hope the same is true for you. But I’m well aware that there are still bad dreams, and bad things can, and do, happen to good people all the time. And that, my friends, is the terrible and irreconcilable mystery of life, its beauty and its chaos.”

I’ll be right back…

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.

His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.