The Errant Tree

Greatfields Park

Dylan's bags were often heavy, and the ones she dragged back to her apartment that day were no exception. She dropped them at the foot of the closet that contained her art materials (hinges, struts, textiles, propellers, motors, motherboards, wires, paints, glues—bits of anything and everything), dropped her clothes on the great pile of garments in one corner that should have occupied the closet, and then dropped herself onto her bed. It wasn't long before she was up again, pacing the apartment with a tall glass of whiskey in hand, sipping and listening to the crowds outside. This was her ritual: to wander aurally among them, a sound-shadow eavesdropping upon their jokes and pithy observations, their supercilious debates and outright rows, at once resenting them for their fickleness and pitying them for their ennui.

But aren't you just like them? the voice would come. Why are you peering at them like some Quasimodo, when you could be out among your comrades, no longer alone, struggling as one against the tides of misery?

Because they're all asshats, Dylan would reply, and finish her whiskey and go to bed.

It had not always been so. Once, there had been synergy between Dylan and the people of Great London. She had joined them in the city's nightclubs, its overstuffed pubs, its riverside esplanades, its restaurants, its gyms, its theaters, and its underbelly. She had ventured with friends into the heart of the Green Zone, gawking at its splendor and jealously mocking its inhabitants with their ostentatious displays of wealth: private gardens, personal assistants, and vanity mounts (a popular trend, equine animals engineered for city travel). But then, like slowly rotting fruit, every pastime and every acquaintance had grown less and less appealing, until she could only bring herself to visit the maker space where she constructed her gruesome paraphernalia, and barely to indulge in a solitary, celebratory drink on a pub stool after the completion of a new project. It was not that she hated all people personally; Dylan wasn't fool enough to think every person in the city unlikeable. Rather, she loathed them as a group; she hated what they needed, what they loved, and what they ate. She hated those among them who succeeded, and those among them that failed. She resented the technocrats who ran the city as much as the talking heads who railed against them. There was nothing anybody could do, likeable or not, to extricate themselves from that malignant mass that humanity had become in Dylan's mind, and so she hid her mind away, and it had been that way for at least a decade, and so, on the plus side, she was alone, but on the minus side, she was lonely.

That night, she was also drunk, and angry, and dreaming.

She dreamed of wolves (perhaps unsurprisingly). They surrounded her, thousands of them, the ring of them at first so far away that they were all but a dotted line on the horizon, specks of grey and brown that she only knew were wolves because of the dreaming. Dylan had full run of a vast field newly plowed, and she leaped and played among the hay bales, their long shadows stretching in the early morning sun, and she was a child again. But as the day wore on, the great lupine ring tightened around her, the wolves approaching slowly, snarling, pressing together and merging with each other to become even larger and somehow more human. And Dylan grew older and slower, and the day waned, and finally a few enormous beasts had closed in so close that Dylan had nowhere to go except to climb a tall tree at the center of the field. She looked down, and there was now only one enormous werewolf climbing the tree beneath her, its eyes red with the foreknowledge of death. And Dylan reached the very top of the tree, her stomach lurching with fear, limbs tingling, and above her, there was only the night sky, and she leapt into it, falling upward faster and faster, until she could not breathe for the thinness of the frigid air, and she awoke with a blanket twisted around her.

Earthly dreams are not like ours, Oskar; there is no augury, no divine intervention; there is only the self, speaking to the self. But we have much to teach ourselves, do we not?