Dylan’s Dream
This was Dylan’s dream:
He stood, as a much older man now, at the head of a long conference table in room with windows on three sides. The table was the cut from the core of a single great tree of carefully considered origin and sat a baseball team comfortably.
It was polished to within a semantic inch of being a mirror. It reflected everything — every color, bird, cloud, even the interior lights of the other tall tall buildings — and there were not many, as this was one of the tallest. Dream Dylan (who was not Dylan, really) was a portly man wearing a top hat and with a strong mustache, in many ways a parody of the robber-baron capitalist but with the advantage of sunny temperament and a human soul. His employees — and there were very many of them — would have described him as jovial, kind, even effusive.
Standing now at the head of the table, grinning the grin he always grinned, he exuded the very specific easy confidence that comes only from being one of the richest men in the world. Quietly regarding the upturned faces gathered around that great table, his own executive right-angled Camelot, he reflected on the reach of the empire he had built over his lifetime.
He owned (or to be regulatory in precision, “owned an overwhelmingly controlling stake in”) a factory in every country in the world. He owned department stores and restaurant chains and software companies, and he owned everything that connected any of them to each other, and he owned half of everything that came out of the ground and a quarter of the things that came out of the sea, and he owned the ideas concocted by tens of thousands of geniuses at organizations tasked with thinking of every problem man had ever had and would ever have and quite a few they would never have. He was the central gear of the world economic apparatus, the corpus callosum of the planet’s financial psyche; simultaneously the introduction, climax, and denouement of the narrative that was the history of making, keeping, and multiplying money.
But it had all come from one thing. One singular interest, a bit of ingenuity and a lot of drive, some lucky breaks and some unlucky breaks that then turned lucky and vice versa. But his planetary-scale castle was built on what is widely accepted as exactly what one should not found castles on.
When he was a child, the magnate would walk endlessly on the dunes for what seemed like the whole summer, first alongside his (solidly lower middle class) mother and then, later, by himself or with his younger brother. But mostly by himself. And for a man who predicted the future with such ease, he never looked at the horizon. His head was bent, looking at the sand. He felt it between his toes and under his dried out summer soles. He noted how the particles shifted and fell away under each new square millimeter of weight and how they stuck in the lines he didn’t knew he had. He felt the grains with greater and greater precision as he walked, and began to classify to himself the types of sand he crunched upon all those long summers while the other kids played or made out and his neck turned a purple red and began a shedding peel that wouldn’t stop until October.
He looked at the sand closer than anyone had looked at sand before. He listened to it with the ear of a confidante and close friend. He even smelled it, and it was different from the salty ocean smell and more beautiful still and he could stand at the edge of the water and cancel out the salt in the scent and smell purely the sand.
There was the pebbly, coarse sand which brushed off easily but made terrible sand castles. There was then a smaller, still roughshod breed which squelched satisfyingly. And so on it went, gradating downwards, all the way to a sand so fine it was almost essence of sand. He thought endlessly about the shapes that made up the sand, never perfect circles he knew, but a random particulate jigsaw puzzle that somehow meshed and settled perfectly. It became his obsession — more than that. He studied biology to understand all the organic slough that eventually turned into sand. He studied geology and the ocean to understand where the sand came from and how it got there and why the crescent beaches and sinuous dunes were shaped the way they were. He studied physics to understand how and why each grain settled exactly where it did among its billions of anonymous cousins.
And through all these studies he came to understand the world in ways no one ever had. He created low-impact geothermal barriers that protected shorelines, powered entire coastlines and doubled as sea life sanctuaries. He created industry changing algorithms for sorting and packing that revolutionized logistics and materials science. And he himself created one of the purest, most uniform substances in the world, a proprietary substance that had applications in every industry from biochemical (as a perfectly neutral growing environment) to military (as, of course, a weapon) to astrophysics (for polishing the highest resolution of mirrors and conference tables) to fashion (for, well, adornment).
He had created one of the finest materials in the world, and he employed that double meaning often to very cheesy but endearing effect.
He searched the world for more and more sands and clays and loess and dust while building one of the largest empires the planet had ever seen, wielding power financial and political consummate with an international superpower. He found the world’s siltiest silt deep in a valley in Utah; he financed decades long installation art projects just because he could; he had a species of frog named after him; he funded soup kitchens that fed entire boroughs; he bought and returned priceless antiquities to their native lands; he had made the world a better place.
And he built the castle of his life on sand. The same sand from those childhood dunes he clutched in his hand in a glass vial that was always around his neck. And today, he would step away from his work. He unclasped the necklace and poured the vial slowly out onto the table. He spread it out thin. It looked resplendent, almost mystical on the smooth wood. It turned to stars and then into a constellation. It looked just like Scorpio. Then it disappeared.
Dylan awoke covered in a fine dust that coated every square nanometer of his being. He would find it in his hair and his ears and his pockets for months.
