The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “Those were the other calls I made this morning. I gave it all away. Gave it to charity.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She didn’t let go of Roy’s arm. If anything, she held it tighter. It wasn’t what she had expected to hear.

  “Not quite all. I put five million in an account for you and Elsa. Left the same amount for myself—what I thought I was owed. Probably need it for medical expenses—I’ve cut all ties with Dr. Danesti.” He looked away, as if feeling guilty. “I can cancel all that if you want. I’d understand. I also gave some money to a friend of mine, for his kid, Rodrigo, but that’s it.”

  “You gave all the rest away? Two billion dollars?”

  “Do you want more? I could get some back, maybe, if you—”

  “No. I don’t want any of it.”

  Roy looked into the forest, his eyes focused on a spot a million miles beyond.

  He said, “Just think about it. I’m sure Jake would have wanted you and Elsa to have it.”

  One heartbeat, then two.

  “I better go,” Roy said.

  He leaned forward to get up.

  “We have a spare bedroom,” Hope said. “Why don’t you stay today? Go to the hospital tomorrow? If the doctors think it’s okay?”

  Elsa had opened the porch door and looked at her mother, who nodded. The little girl walked over, and Hope pulled her into her lap.

  “I’m not right in the head,” Roy said. “I told you.”

  “Then we’ll help you get right.”

  Snowflakes drifted over the forest. Roy’s body sagged. He sat back down.

  Hope said, “We’ll find a way.”

  She pulled him toward her, and he let his massive body collapse onto hers. It wasn’t only men who could promise never to let go, no matter what. She held him and Elsa tight in her arms.

  She whispered, “Come rest that weary head.”

  EPILOGUE

  “Mrs. Achari, come and sit,” said the lawyer, the little man in the oversize suit.

  “Little-Man-Big-Suit” was what Mrs. Achari had started calling him in the slum while she distributed leaflets. The name had stuck, and she laughed about it, but this morning she was summoned into the city by two police officers. They’d been very insistent. Could she be arrested for making up nicknames? More likely, she might be arrested for disturbing the peace.

  Or was it the incident with that man?

  The crazy one she had met under the Great Adyar Banyan tree. Ramya had insisted that she meet him. Her name was Adhira Achari, that was true, and years ago she had been a surrogate for a Western couple, when she was still almost a child herself.

  The experience had ripped her soul.

  She had always wondered what happened to the boy, and when this clearly delusional American came along, her heart had leaped. But she couldn’t be sure that it was her in the photo. She couldn’t see very clearly, even with her glasses. Ramya had insisted that it was her. He said that she could ease the man’s pain, that he was in great emotional and spiritual suffering—and the man had frightened her. He’d been babbling like a lunatic. In the end, she had told him whatever he wanted to hear, and after that, he just disappeared.

  Was that why the police had come for her? What had she done?

  Little-Man-Big-Suit gave his trademark dishonest smile. His head wagged back and forth. “Please. Please. You must sit down.”

  The honking cars and cries of the street vendors echoed through the open windows. The man’s bodyguard was still here, but now there were two more men. Different men. Huge men, directing evil grins at her. Even sitting down, the men towered over Mrs. Achari. She sensed their menacing presence behind her.

  “You can’t force me to do anything,” she blurted out straightaway.

  The lawyer extended one shaking hand. “Can you please verify this list of residents?”

  “I will do nothing.”

  “You misunderstand me.” He glanced nervously at one of the burly men behind her. Mrs. Achari looked back as well, over her shoulder. The men were both Caucasian. They smiled back, revealing straight white teeth.

  “These men …” The lawyer stopped to clear his throat. “These two men are here to ensure a fair and proper distribution of a … a gift.” He held up a piece of paper, leaned over his desk, and handed it to her. “You are to refer to these men—”

  “As Angel’s Guardians, ma’am,” said one of the men. “We will be here with you through the transition. This is a two-year operation to serve and protect.”

  Mrs. Achari was completely lost. “Serve? Protect?”

  “Your village,” said the man. He stood up. He looked as tall as a tree. “My name is Dog, and this is Alpha.”

  “You’re not here to throw us out?”

  Dog laughed and shook his head. “You own that land now. Over two thousand acres—the whole stretch of land between the navy docks, all the way to the water. Look at that piece of paper in your hand.”

  Mrs. Achari did as he said. “There are too many numbers.”

  “That’s how much money was just deposited into a charity in your name. It’s to be distributed among everyone in your village.”

  She looked again at the piece of paper and held it out at arm’s length. She still couldn’t see it properly. “This is in rupees?”

  “Dollars, ma’am. Almost two billion dollars.”

  “Is this some joke?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Achari’s hand shook as she tried to count all the digits in the number on the paper. “I am very sorry, but English is my third language. Do you mean you are my guardian angels?”

  “We’d prefer ‘Angel’s Guardians.’” Dog gave her the sweetest grin she had ever seen on a man so huge. “Or just your Angels.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Reader,

  I hope you enjoyed this journey with me. In the next section is a discussion of The Dreaming Tree in real life, some background material, and parts of my process in creating it.

  Also …

  The adventure continues for Detective Delta Devlin in my next book, Meet Your Maker, in which Devlin begins to work for Interpol and investigates the mysterious murder of an American art dealer.

  THE DREAMING TREE IN REAL LIFE

  First off, thanks so much for reading. I really appreciate your support and your interest in my work. Feel free to email me if you want to chat about anything in the book. My contact info is at the end of this section and also on my website.

  There is a lot to unpack in this book.

  If you’ve read any of my other work, you’ll know how much I love to mix reality with fiction until the line between them gets gray and blurry. Much of this book is based on real-world events and technologies—from the impending event (planned for this year) of the first human head transplant operation, to tetrachromats (real people who do indeed see a hundred million more colors than the rest of us), artificial wombs, the freezing of whole organs for transplant, and even the Gilgo Beach Killer (whom I renamed the Fire Island Killer in this book)—which is an active and ongoing investigation and still one of the biggest unsolved serial-killer cases in America, even though someone was recently convicted in two of the killings.

  The saddest truth, however, is the brutal and highly lucrative international trade in human organs for transplant, which we will discuss a bit later in more detail.

  To kick off the discussion, The Dreaming Tree is an homage, of course, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I purposely finished it around the two-hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein’s original release, as a celebration, but also to coincide with the eve of the very first human head transplant about to be performed in the real world.

  In the world of Mary Shelley, the book was pure fantasy, a way to reflect on the realities of the world of that time. But now this topic takes
on a whole new dimension as humanity contemplates crossing this threshold.

  “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come?”

  These words are from the creation of Dr. Frankenstein in the throes of its existential dilemma, and I wanted to touch on some of these same ideas in The Dreaming Tree. There are strong thematic elements related to Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Satan as the fallen angel, so for fun I included a strong secondary character named Angel, who is sacrificed defending our fallen hero and, ultimately, is the one who brings redemption. I invite you to tell me what you think of the parallels.

  On the topic of human head transplants, if you search the web, you’ll see that Dr. Sergio Canavero announced recently that he will be attempting the first human head transplant. The very audacity of Canavero’s project shocks us, but the technical hurdles to performing such an operation have already been overcome. Technically, it should be feasible, but morally and ethically? This is another question entirely. However, history shows us that once something becomes possible, it isn’t long before someone crosses the threshold, come what may.

  When in vitro fertilizations and heart transplants were first proposed, the ethics and morality were vigorously debated, with many at the time saying that such daring experiments were against God. But now such procedures have become commonplace.

  And during the writing of this book, the world was stunned when a Chinese scientist announced the birth of the first gene-edited babies—even if technically feasible, this was an ethical boundary most had considered taboo. It is banned in most countries around the world, and yet, in an instant, that boundary was crossed. Genetically edited humans have become a real thing.

  Only time will tell whether the same becomes true for head/body transplants, something else that is now technically feasible.

  How does consciousness form? This is still an open question. Another open question concerns how big a part the rest of our nervous system, outside the brain, plays in our identity. The ancient brain around the gut isn’t something I made up—this is a real thing. If you research the early evolution of chordates—in basic terms, the phylum of organisms with a spinal cord—the original nervous system and “brain” before this evolutionary step was centered in the gut. It is the most ancient of our sensing and “thinking” systems.

  This is a topic I would love to discuss more with readers, so feel free to message or email me to start a thread online on my Facebook page.

  I did take some liberties in The Dreaming Tree—for instance, I doubt that human “head transplants”—technically better termed whole-body transplants—will be allowed in the United States anytime in the near future. Too many bioethics questions are still unresolved. Whole-body transplants may well not happen for many years, despite predictions to the contrary.

  For now this is the domain of fiction, and one of the reasons I decided to undertake this book now was to explore the idea with readers and continue the conversation about this and many other topics touched on in The Dreaming Tree.

  Sadly, one of the things that made the biggest impression on me while researching this book is the brutal and highly lucrative trade in transplant organs, which is largely controlled by international criminal networks. Even more shocking are the reports, in recent years, of prisoners in China being executed and their body parts harvested for transplant.

  Right now on the dark web, you can buy a pair of human eyeballs for fifteen hundred dollars, a skull with teeth for twelve hundred, and so on. The most surprising thing was learning that it is possible—though illegal, of course—to get a human kidney delivered into a private clinic in the Western world for something like three hundred thousand dollars, or a pair of lungs for about a million.

  The question, of course, is where these human body parts come from. And unsurprisingly, the source is often the desperately poor who can be preyed on.

  Roy’s visit to northern Chennai’s “Kidneyville” was designed as the other end to his arc that reaches from the opulent homes and dinner tables of the Hamptons to the poorest of slums, where teenagers sell their own living organs for a handful of dollars. “Kidneyville” isn’t really one place. There are slums with similar names dotted all over the globe, in almost any place with large populations living in grinding poverty.

  Almost unbelievably, during the process of writing and discussing this book, I came upon the story from a friend of mine who was abducted in Central America, with the express intent of murdering him to sell his organs. He managed to negotiate his way out of it by promising a large reward, but I found this story, so close to home, shocking, to say the least.

  I invite you to investigate for yourself on the web. It’s easy to be horrified, but at the same time, people in desperate straits make desperate decisions—and for good or for ill, these choices are largely shaped by how much money one has—and, obviously, one’s own moral compass.

  Finally, while the trade in human organs is growing, so are the technologies for artificially growing organs using 3-D printing and scaffolding. So perhaps, the future isn’t quite so dark. Perhaps, technology can save us all in the end.

  I’m interested to know your thoughts. If you’d like to get on my mailing list for new releases, or just want to talk, please email me at Matthew@MatthewMather.com.

  Best regards,

  Matthew Mather

  January 1, 2018

  The 200th anniversary, to the day, of the publication of Frankenstein.