A Destination Needs A Dreamer

Gatlin heard the violin every evening on the commute back from work. Wending between warm rushing bodies on the subway, eyes forward, bag clasped protectively at her side, she drank it in at the same time as she didn't slow. It was probably the best part of her day. The shivering strains crescendoed and collapsed, tugging at something in her core. She'd never seen the violinist, but whoever he was, he was clearly a master, clearly professionally trained. The music always seemed to be coming from somewhere further down the track, around a bend, just out of eyeshot. She'd come to think fancifully that it was something only she could hear. She’d come to think of it as her future, calling.

Gatlin didn't have much time for fanciful thoughts. Her life was regimented strictly by her own design. She got up early: 4:30 am, when the streets were dark, garbage blowing around in the basketball court across from the tenement building she called home. She had to be at work by seven and she left no margin by which she could be considered late.

Work was a prestigious publishing company in Manhattan; it had been a dream, a feat of pure doggedness and hard work to get it, and she didn't intend to give them any reason to let her go. She loved the job itself, but the people were something else, their differences not only in skin color or economic divide, but in this other flat, passionless quality that she imagined a driver might have in one of those sci-fi stories where the cars steered themselves and the person behind the wheel was symbolic, obsolete. They didn't consider themselves lucky to be here; they were just here as the next natural course of action in an unimaginative life- but that apathy could easily turn like a snake waking from hungry dreams and devour her own progress like it was nothing. So she forced herself always to work better, harder, faster than the other interns there. She made herself indisputably competent, and indispensable as one could be for someone hanging on the bottom rung.

Today her step was a little heavier. She'd applied to an artist’s scholarship to Cornell in Ithaca. It was a full-ride- the only way she would stand a chance of going. But she hadn't received a reply and the deadline she would have heard by was today. She loved her family but she wanted more than they seemed to- she wanted out of the circuitry of regular life, mind-numbing nine-to-fives and routine that felt like running in place, an upward-facing illusion that kept you sliding- always- two steps back.

Gatlin thought- no, she knew- that her portfolio was good, arresting even: paintings blurring indistinct or abstract forms, greyscale surrounding bursts of color. All her instructors had told her she had something special- but didn’t everyone? It was being heard over the noise, that was the trouble.

She walked along, meeting no one's eyes, already anticipating the rest of the night: a disappointing tv dinner in the living room before falling asleep on the couch, surrounded by her own artwork propped against the walls, the smell of her father's cigarettes and the wailing of her sister's newborn baby in the room she'd vacated for them, ushering her down into sleep.

Sleep. That was the other part of it. It wasn't just the lack of response that made Gatlin so dispirited. It was the lack of dreams.

She wasn't psychic- as her best friends had tried to convince her throughout high school. But her dreams sometimes had a glow to them, a sort of vision as if she was seeing a peek from behind a door into a past she'd never inhabited, or forward past the forking in the veins of fate, miles past some road she might take- or avoid. She had seen her great-grandmother this way, buried in the wall of her childhood home. The woman had gone missing and never come back according to official scripts, but Gatlin, following the relentless heeding of her dreams had found her desiccated body in the guest room with its stale smell of disuse and old-fashioned wallpaper. She’d only been eight.

That was the biggest thing that'd ever happened to her. But there were more, smaller things. She'd dreamed her friend's brother dying from a gunshot, blood leaking out on the street. Shed dreamed the view from the Eiffel Tower- to which she'd never been- a week before her aunt was proposed to there. And she'd dreamed being handed a goody bag that looked exactly the same as the one she'd received when she'd joined her current internship.

Mostly, the dreams were unwanted, stressful even. But occasionally, when she woke with hope like a fine residue of morning mist upon her soul instead of fear, she took comfort in them, assurance that she was headed in the right direction. And often she took inspiration for her paintings in dreams as well, fleshing out the small gap of vision that, upon waking, she always remembered so vividly it was like someone had graffitied it on the walls of her mind.

She knew she couldn't control the dreams, couldn't force them to come- but the lack of them made her think that in lieu of a lucky break or a tragedy, nothing was coming for her at all. And that absence somehow felt worse than anything. Early in the submission process, she'd thought how nice a dream of acceptance to Cornell would be, though the dreams didn't work that way, didn't capitulate to her desires. At least, she tried to think, her mind had been quiet of impending tragedy- but somehow even that wasn't a comfort.

.

She was standing at the back of the crowd waiting for the D train, when the music started up. This evening, the violin’s song was something rich and poignant, tugging at her tired heartstrings and making her eyes want to weep. Like always, she turned and looked about, and was shocked because for once, there he was: the mystery behind the melody. He was not what she expected.

He was tall, thin as a rail, his light brown hair, overlong, falling into his face. The instrument case lay open at his feet, a few crumpled bills scattered across the bottom of it. He was dressed in nice, brand-name clothing or some kind of uniform, hard to tell, but it was disheveled and dirty as though he hadn't bothered to change in days. The cuffed sleeves of his shirt were rolled up and she could see fresh, angry track marks up his arms. This last made her almost look away, until he looked up and right at her. And then the breath left her body.

His eyes. Wild, green and almost phosphorescent with restless light, like a feral animal, a thrill-seeker on a tight-rope. She'd seen those eyes before, she knew it.

Upon looking at her, the young man ceased his playing a moment. He looked of an age with her, and she couldn't help but notice he was handsome in a heroin-chic, dangerous way. His mouth quirked in a small, cocky smile and he winked at her. It was flirtation, pure and simple, and for a moment she deliberately pulled some of her braids over her shoulder, took a step closer to him, twitching the hem of her skirt- but at that moment she also heard the screeching, the explosion of hot air, and the sound of a door crawling open behind her, and she turned to see her car had arrived. Gatlin hurried to join the throng and she didn't look back. You didn't mix yourself up with someone like that. She knew his type- the kind to be handed everything in life and to throw it away. Probably a dropout music prodigy from that fancy Upper East End school she forgot the name of- yes, that was probably it, his clothes did look like private school fare. But even as the train pulled away, sending her on the long journey home, she couldn't stop thinking about it. There was something that bothered her.

Those eyes. Those eyes.

.

When she got home, her sister called for her but she ran to the living room, searching frantically through the paintings she'd propped up against the wall, all the way to the back, to the stuff from last summer. There it was. A boy, half made of smoke, the only distinguished parts of him being a coat of some sort, wild hair, an outstretched hand. But the eyes were the center of it all, the only part of the picture she'd colored in anything other than black and white. They stared out at her, luminous, vibrant, like they had on the subway, their color like envy, like poison, like...life.

"Who are you?" she whispered to the picture. A hand fell on her shoulder and she whirled around.

"Whoa, sorry," her sister said, looking taken aback, one eyebrow raised at the scene she must have walked in on, Gatlin's words spoken to no one. "This came for you. I think it's from Cornell."

She handed an envelope to Gatlin and turned to go, her child's cries beckoning her from the kitchen. Gatlin stood with the creamy-rich paper in her hands, feeling its heft, its weight, and said a prayer to no one, to anyone, a heavy awe running down her like warm rain. She'd thought it was too late.

Gatlin slid a finger under the flap and began to tear.