A Sort Story…
The Dreamcatcher
Chapter One
“Coconuts”
Tatu DeSouza’s marvelous story begins in India, in Goa, to be precise, a place where, when a coconut falls (or so it is said), it is sure to hit a DeSouza on the head. (DeSouzas are everywhere in Goa; they are the Smiths or the Jones of Goa.) However, in this case, the DeSouza that got hit on the head was Solomon DeSouza, Tatu’s father-to-be. And it was not a coconut that hit him that day. Rather, it was the sight of another DeSouza, Hyacinth DeSouza (no relation), a diminutive girl ten years younger than Solomon who was walking along the beach collecting sea shells.
How is it possible, you might ask, that someone from India, a Goan at that, would be named Solomon, or, for that matter, Hyacinth? Shouldn’t he or she be named Dinesh or Aisha, Rohan or Veda, Muhammad or Maryam even? Not necessarily in Goa. You see, the Portuguese arrived in Goa in the 16th Century, and it was Portuguese missionaries who implanted Catholicism on its white sandy shores, and so, to this day, the coconuts that fall from the palm trees are not only likely to hit a DeSouza, but also a practicing Catholic. Such is life.
But back to Solomon and Hyacinth. Within just a few weeks of Solomon’s first glimpse of Hyacinth, a marital contract had been negotiated, a dowery had been proposed and accepted, and the local priest had been engaged to perform his priestly duty. He did so with such aplomb that, despite the not-insignificant difference in their ages, the new husband and wife did what new husbands and wives do, and within a year, Tatu was born.
His name at birth, of course, was not Tatu. That came later when Tatu, né Caleb, was a two-year old living in Urbana, Illinois and just beginning to speak his first words of English. On one of his first attempts to say “thank you,” the words sounded more like “tatu” which made both Hyacinth and Solomon laugh out loud. Seeing his parents laugh, Caleb repeated “Tatu,” and from that moment on, his parents called him Tatu. It was a spontaneous and happy christening.
But wait: how did Solomon, Hyacinth, and baby Tatu come to be in Urbana, Illinois? Whatever happened to Goa? Simple. Both Solomon and Hyacinth had aspirations that went well beyond palm trees and coconuts. Solomon was a gifted mathematician and Hyacinth had dreams of becoming a teacher, in fact, a special education teacher. And so, Solomon and Hyacinth applied to several universities in the United States, and when the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana accepted Solomon into its doctoral program with funding, husband and wife obtained student visas and, with little Tatu, set sail for America.
Upon arrival, Solomon threw himself into his studies of logarithms and algorithms while Hyacinth tended to the baby. That arrangement worked for a few months until Hyacinth became restive, at which point, she found a nearby Montessori school for Tatu. Once Tatu was enrolled, Hyacinth applied to the University as an undergraduate. (You might think Solomon would have objected to this new arrangement, but to his credit, he did not. In fact, he supported his wife’s ambitions if only because in his mind, another university degree would only serve to shinny his little family higher and quicker up the flagpole of the American dream.)
For the next three years, all three DeSouzas applied themselves to their education. Solomon wrote his dissertation on the intersection of mathematics and national security. Hyacinth submitted an honors thesis entitled “Brave in the Attempt; The Impact of the Special Olympics Movement on Special Education” which earned her a Magna Cum Laude degree. And Tatu? He went about becoming a typical American boy.
Goa was quickly receding in the DeSouza’s collective rearview mirror.
Chapter Two:
“Haddon”
By the time the newly-minted Dr. Solomon DeSouza accepted a position in cyber security with the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, and his wife, Mrs. Hyacinth DeSouza, reported to her new job at the Department of Education in downtown Washington, DC, the family had moved to a small rambler in Silver Spring, Maryland, an appropriately diverse enclave accessible to both parental postings.
Little Tatu had just turned eleven and was preparing to enter fifth grade. His parents decided to enroll him at Haddon, a well-respected, all-boys school in the adjacent suburb of Bethesda. Coming from the relative freedom and independence of the Montessori method, the transition to the academic discipline and social mores of Haddon was not easy for Tatu. Moreover, Haddon boys were interested in sports almost to a fault, while Tatu was anything but athletic. In the fall, he tried soccer, but his large, black-rimmed glasses came home broken—twice. In winter, he attempted to dribble a basketball but couldn’t manage more than a bounce or two before losing control to gravity. In spring, Tatu’s parents bought him a tennis racket in hopes he might make new friends on the court. But the ball never seemed to find the strings of Tatu’s racket, and by the end of the first week of spring sports, Tatu was a spectator, not a participant, sitting and studying on the sidelines.
That was when the teasing began in earnest. As his parents ascended their respective professional ladders, Tatu descended his social staircase. One of the more popular boys in his class decided Tatu was a stupid name, and that his classmate’s real name was Ragu, as in the spaghetti sauce. From that moment on, his classmates rechristened him ‘Ragu,’ which soon morphed into ‘Clam,’ which was the acronym for Ragu’s advertising jingle, “Cook Like A Mother.” Tatu at home, Clam at school.
A lesser spirit might have withered on Haddon’s thorny social vine, but all the taunts and teasing never seemed to penetrate Tatu’s sense of self. During recess or after school, he retreated to the library and, using his Montessori skills, began to reach for the stars in what was becoming to be known in academic circles as STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. To relax, he played Sudoku. By the end of fifth grade, he was doing algebra. In the summer between fifth and sixth grade, he conquered geometry. By the time he graduated from Middle School, Tatu was versant in multivariable calculus. The mathematical world and its STEM shoreline was his proverbial oyster.
This might seem like a pathway to scholarly success, but a single lane is hardly a highway. Tatu had very little interest in his other required subjects: his foreign language class (Spanish) bored him; American History made him somnambulant; and his Upper School English classes tortured him with their aphorisms and ambiguities. Haddon prided itself on developing men of character who could think and write as well as wrestle and play lacrosse, but Tatu adamantly stayed in his own STEM lane. That he was a social orphan never seemed to bother him, nor did he bring any apparent social malaise home from school.
As a result, Solomon and Hyacinth were oblivious to Tatu’s situation. Absorbed in their own jobs and used to Tatu’s closed bedroom door, they focused all their attention on their careers up until the day when Tatu, midway through his junior year in Haddon’s Upper School, came home and announced that his college counselor wanted to schedule a family meeting to discuss Tatu’s college aspirations. Solomon and Hyacinth immediately saw an opportunity to ascend another rung on the ladder of the American dream and threw themselves into high gear. They did their research and then, with Tatu in tow, they went off to meet with Haddon’s college counselor, a seasoned veteran of the college admissions wars. Solomon and Hyacinth expressed their desire—more, their expectation—that Tatu attend an Ivy league institution. The counselor listened patiently, then diplomatically pointed out that while Tatu did indeed excel in STEM-related subjects such as math, computer science, and robotics, his overall GPA put him somewhere in the fifth decile of his class, well below the standard of what any Ivy League institution would deem acceptable for admission. Moreover, the counselor said, Tatu did not have any meaningful extracurricular activities, nor was his college essay—his Personal Statement, the counselor called it—likely to impress an admissions officer. “Aim a bit lower,” he suggested.
As a result, for reasons neither Solomon nor Hyacinth could quite fathom, the counselor strongly recommended adding a few what he called “foundation schools” to the list of schools to which Tatu should apply. That neither Solomon nor Hyacinth had never heard of any of these schools made for a rather ticklish meeting, but in the end, they agreed that in addition to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Cornell, Tatu would also submit applications to Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana (“Our alma mater!” Solomon proudly told the counselor), the University of Michigan, and someplace called Clark, a well-regarded private research institution located in Worcester, Massachusetts, which, the counselor assured them, had world-class STEM programs. Tatu remained silent throughout the meeting.
Now you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that midway through the following year, Tatu was rejected at Harvard, Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Cornell. He was also denied at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the University of Michigan. Perhaps because both his parents had once attended the University of Illinois, Tatu made it to the Wait List there, but that was as far as he got. Thankfully, he was accepted at Clark. Haddon’s college counselor breathed a sign of relief. Hyacinth and Solomon were disappointed, but a generous scholarship from Clark helped to soften the blow.
Chapter Three
“Dreamcatcher, Inc.”
While he was still a student at Haddon, Tatu felt something brewing inside his brain, something akin to herbal tea, but he was never quite able to put his finger on what that something was. However, within a month of arriving at Clark University, Tatu had not only discovered what that something was, but he also began to discern how to realize it, how to make, as it were, his personal dream come true.
And therein lay a great irony, for what had been lurking in Tatu’s mind for several years now was a Dreamcatcher. We all know the feeling: asleep, we enter a world where anything is possible, where random events and people emerge out of our subconscious past to sweep us up into some grand scheme or some devastating pitfall. But upon waking, it all fades away, leaving, if we’re lucky, only an ephemeral footprint which unsettles us throughout the following day. If only there were a way to capture our dreams so we could watch them again and again until were we were able to decipher their true meaning, their deeper message. In a word: a Dreamcatcher!
And so Tatu set out to invent just such a gizmo. And guess what! Within six months, he had a prototype: a nightcap that looked something like a ski hat with ear flaps that covered the temporal lobe of his brain. Made of a soft, plush material and infused with filaments and electrodes that could capture images produced by synapses deep within his brain, as well as the additional images produced by the rapid eye movements of deep sleep, Tatu’s first Dreamcatcher was able to capture and record his dreams as they occurred. Moreover, it was able to download those dreams to an App on Tatu’s bedside smartphone so that in the morning, he could push the play button and watch his dreams in all their glorious and disjointed detail. Then, in a move of marketing genius, Tatu decided a simple smartphone app would be free with the purchase of a Dreamcatcher headset ($999), but for an additional subscription fee, the Dreamcatcher app could be upgraded so that any sleeper’s dream could be forwarded to any therapist anywhere in the world for instant analysis. Therapists would have to pay a modest subscription fee to Dreamcatcher, Inc., but the return on that investment would be make it more than worthwhile for the followers of Herr Freud.
All Tatu needed was some start-up capital. With the help of Clark’s Alumni Affairs Office, Tatu reached out to a few potential investors who were not only intrigued by the idea, but were also willing to invest the necessary funds for a reasonable return or a small stake in Tatu’s company, “Dreamcatcher, Inc.” With his seed money in hand, Tatu was off to the races. By the middle of his sophomore year at Clark, he had dropped out of school and was negotiating for production facilities in Taiwan, South Korea, Vancouver, and, in a nod to his distant Portuguese ancestors, an off-shore distribution center in the Azores that would service both the lucrative European and African markets.
Word of Dreamcatcher, Inc. quickly reached Hollywood, and Tatu was asked if he would like to pitch his idea to a group of potential investors with very deep pockets on Shark Tank. He agreed. A few months later, he made his pitch, describing his product, his manufacturing costs, his business and marketing plans, and his projected earnings. He even revealed his new company’s logo: a stylized image of a spider web. The chum was officially in the water, and the sharks acted as sharks do—they went into a frenzy. One shark offered Tatu three billion dollars for 51% of Dreamcatcher, Inc., at which point Tatu laughed and walked off the set.
A few weeks later, 60 Minutes aired a segment on Tatu’s Dreamcatcher. It included a lengthy interview with Tatu who, although admittedly a tad quirky, came across as a charming entrepreneur with an admirable social conscience. Soon thereafter, Dreamcatcher, Inc. went public and its stock soared like fireworks on the Fourth of July. Within a few years, little Tatu DeSouza, the boy whose classmates once called Clam, was as rich as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos put together. People all over he world were buying the Dreamcatcher; Tatu’s production facilities found it hard to keep up with demand. Moreover, Tatu’s tech people were almost overwhelmed: not only did everybody want the hardware that would record their nighttime ramblings, but they also wanted the upgraded software package that would enable them to share their dreams with anyone, anywhere, who might be interested.
Within a few months, the world seemed to become a kinder, gentler place, all thanks to Tatu’s plush little sleep hat, the sophisticated software that accompanied it, and the variety and vividness of the dreams they revealed. Within a few years, the human subconscious was rendered conscious, and the lingering shadows of our common psychoses gave way to dappled sunlight.
And what of Tatu’s parents, Solomon and Hyacinth? They did what all parents do: they basked in their son’s glory, for they had never doubted, not even for a second, that all his dreams (and theirs) would come true.
Chapter Four
“The Beauty and The Chaos”
Now, given all Tatu DeSouza’s stunning success, you might suspect that there was a worm hiding somewhere in his Dreamcatcher apple. If so, you’ll be disappointed. Just as in John Cheever’s delightful 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, the 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 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 had 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. 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. They toyed with the idea of returning to Goa, but 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 would turn into a nightmare, but the engineers at Dreamcatchers, Inc. found a way to mitigate, even expunge, those forays into some poor soul’s darker nature, and to turn that nightmare into a benign vision that taught a more positive lesson. Even Dreamcatcher’s few critics had to admit that 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.”
Chapter Five
“Galgibaga Beach”
The last two-and-a-half decades of Tatu’s DeSouza’s life were spent in quiet contemplation at his hacienda in Tesuque Pueblo, a secluded and shady enclave just north of Santa Fe. He had never married and had no natural heirs so at age 65, he simply walked away. He liquidated his holdings in Dreamcatcher, Inc., gave away all the money to schools, universities, and museums, and allowed a new generation of entrepreneurs to run the company. Despite the fact that almost all of Tatu’s cherished patents on his Dreamcatcher device had expired, and that the very idea of such a gizmo (Tatu’s favorite description of his own device) had become commonplace, Dreamcatchers, Inc. still dominated the market. Tatu became a mythical and mysterious figure, a 21st Century version of Howard Hughes or Greta Garbo. That was just fine with him.
Still, the public and the world’s media were consumed with Tatu’s legacy. Young entrepreneurs would trek to the gates of Tatu’s hacienda in New Mexico hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero. Renowned authors and journalists pleaded for the chance to write his life’s story. Ken Burns wanted to make a documentary. Women all over the world wrote him love letters. Tatu politely declined all such requests; he was content to live simply on a diet of tofu, vegetables and spring water, tending his gardens, taking long walks, and reading tomes devoted to the lives of Catholic saints.
Then there came a day when Tatu simply disappeared. Gone; vanished like a dream at dawn. No one, not even his majordomo, knew why he disappeared or where he had gone. There was no evidence of foul play so, after several months of public and private investigations that led to one dead-end after another, Tatu simply passed on into the rarified air of legend. No one doubted that his invention—his Dreamcatcher gizmo—had changed the world in a way not unlike the voyages of Christopher Columbus, or the inventions of Nikola Tesla, or the plays of William Shakespeare, or the the statues of Michelangelo. But Tatu himself? Was he alive or dead? If the former, what was he doing? If the latter, where was the body? Tatu had always loved a good mystery; now, he was one.
Or was he? A year after Tatu disappeared, a young Goan police constable was walking along Galgibaga Beach at dawn, making sure no one was disturbing the nesting places of the Olive Ridley sea turtles that loved the soft white sand of one of the world’s most beautiful and pristine beaches. The sun was rising. Small waves gently lapped the shoreline, rippling the crystal blue water of the Arabian Sea; a gentle breeze rustled the fronds of the tall coconut palms that fringed the half-moon bay. Everything was as it should be: perfect.
At the far end of the beach, the constable cane upon an old man asleep on the beach under one of the palm trees. This was neither unusual nor prohibited, for Goa was a forgiving place, and the man, neatly dressed in a white linen dhoti, was certainly not causing any trouble or disturbing the sea turtle nests. In fact, he seemed to be smiling. But as the constable came closer to say a respectful “Good morning, sir” to the sleeper, she noticed a pair of broken black spectacles and a trickle of dried blood that had seeped into the sand. Nearby was a coconut. It didn’t take the constable long to figure out what had happened. She called for an ambulance, but the damage had already been done. Oddly, the deceased bore no papers of identification.
Back at the substation, the constable filed a succinct report: an unidentified elderly man, no known name or address, had been found on Galgibaga Beach, the apparent victim of a falling coconut. The only clue to his identity was a small tattoo on the back of his right hand: a spider’s web. It looked vaguely familiar to the constable; it reminded her of the logo on her dreamcatcher.
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown, Maryland. 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.