Adam was always unsure of himself. It was a condition he developed as a child from the constant teasing of three older brothers, and the father that imbued upon his children a sense of entitlement to belittle dreams. Adam’s father was a man broken by the strains of hard work for menial pay – by the fact that the world, according to him, had no compassion for dreams. Adam’s father, pragmatic, encouraged his sons to learn the lesson early. Unfortunately for Adam, being the youngest, the lesson was taught hard and mercilessly at a very young age. Every time he dared to speak about a want or an idea, he was quickly shot down by his father and brothers. Adam always wanted to be something grand – a man among men on the cover of magazines and newspapers across the globe. He wanted to be important. He had never figured out how he would become the important man he desperately dreamed to be, but he knew, even with the taunting and derision of his family, that it had to happen. As a child, he also developed a sense of secrecy, keeping his grand dreams to himself, but he still dreamed.
Adam had to learn to hide his dreams because, for him, it was not the world that lacked compassion for dreamers; it was only men. Adam’s mother, no longer on this earth, would tell him stories as a small boy about those who did the impossible – those who dared to dream greater than what anyone dreamed before them, and succeeded in those dreams. Adam sometimes cursed his mother for infecting him with hope, only to take it away when she was diagnosed with a malignant and aggressive cancer. He watched his hope wane away as did his mother. All that was left behind was the cold and bleak lessons of his father. “Be practical, mijo. The world does not care about what you want. It always takes away what you hold precious. Nothing should be precious.” An errant tear crawled down his father’s cheek as Adam watched the last little light in his father’s eyes die when they buried Adam’s mother. Adam was ten years old.
For fifteen years, Adam practiced squirreling away his dreams. He never spoke about them to anyone. He used to write them down in a journal, but he was taught at age thirteen that even writing down dreams was too dangerous. Ernesto, his oldest brother, found the journal which Adam thought he was so careful to hide in a crevice behind his nightstand. Ernesto was just shy of eighteen and enlisting in the army. He was the most unforgiving of the sons, and took perverse pleasure in crushing the spirits of those least able to defend themselves. Ernesto was, by all definitions, a sadist. He was tall and stocky, and loved the idea of a good brawl. His interest in joining the army had very little to do with serving his country, and everything to do with learning new ways to inflict pain on anyone. Ernesto’s favorite past time was to practice his torture methods on Adam. Adam was always an easy target – slight, sensitive, and quiet. Ernesto’s alpha personality willed the two middle brothers, twins, Alejandro and Cain. The twins knew that if they went with Ernesto’s musings, they would be spared his cruelty.
It was a bleak January morning when Ernesto discovered Adam’s journal. It was a simple title – Sueños – scrawled across the front of a beaten up composition journal with a crease down the center of the book from the times when Adam would secret it with him to a place where he could be free to imagine the things that would make him a big man; a better man than the ones he knew. Ernesto happened to be in a particularly devious mood that day, and entered Adam’s room only to torment him. He knew Adam was hiding something somewhere that could be used as ammunition to destroy his youngest brother. Adam was at a friend’s house which gave Ernesto free reign to stalk about the 15-foot by 15-foot room. He checked under the bed, scoured the drawers of Adam’s dresser, and anywhere else he could think of as a hiding place. He was hoping for something simple – a love letter, a silly toy, underwear with skid marks. He searched through everything and found nothing. In his frustration, he slammed his fist into the wall, knocking over the lamp on Adam’s nightstand. When he went to pick up the lamp, he found what he was looking for, only better than anything he could have imagined.
When Adam returned home that day, he found Ernesto leaning comfortably in their father’s Lay-Z boy, a grim smirk creeping across Ernesto’s face. Ernesto cleared his throat and began to read aloud as Alejandro and Cain sat expectantly on the couch facing Adam. “When I am a man, I will own my very own Laundromat. It will be the fanciest of Laundromats with plush seats for all of the customers.” The twins began to snicker. “It will be so fancy that people will come from miles around to use my laundromat. It will have a play area for the kids so they’re not running around on the laundry carts, and it will have marble folding stations, and it will always have someone sweeping and cleaning. On Friday and Saturday nights, we’ll turn it into a club called Clean Linen, and all of the coolest guys and hottest girls will party there.” The twins’ snickers had turned into riotous laughter. Ernesto stared straight into Adam’s eyes, and Adam was frozen where he stood. He had not even taken off his coat, trapped in his eldest brother’s sights. The ripping of paper echoed through the room like the world, itself, had been ripped from the heavens. Ernesto crumpled the page of dream #32, and threw it into the fireplace. Adam felt faint, hot, but could not move from where he stood. Ernesto repeated the process over and over again with every dream that Adam wrote in Sueños. Ernesto would testify of the dream to a cacophony of laughter — Adam as a business man, a criminal mastermind, a superhero, a savior, an inventor — then he would rip the dream from the page, and toss it into the fire. And poor Adam, all he could do was bear witness as each of his dreams were engulfed in flames. Ernesto savored every moment as he watched all of the joy deflate from his littlest brother’s eyes and the light fade. When all of the entries in Sueños were destroyed, Ernesto stood up, raised his hand to silence Alejandro and Cain, and approached Adam. Ernesto stopped only a pace away, and bent his face close to Adam’s. “Let this be a lesson, little brother, I will always take what you hold dear. You can never hide it from me.” His grin grew broad as he saw the tears begin to well in Adam’s eyes. Ernesto turned and walked to the fireplace, and tossed the emptied shell of Sueños into the fire. All three brothers laughed together, and Adam never moved.
Adam was finally able to move after staring into the fire for what seemed like an eternity. He had seen all of his dreams rise and fall in the flames. He removed his jacket, and sat on the floor in front of the fireplace until the fire was nothing more than ash and the gray afternoon had turned into night. Ernesto, Alejandro, and Cain would enter the living room throughout the evening to taunt him about his entries. “Oh, I’m Adam, and I drive a Ferrari in Madrid fighting bulls!” “No! I’m Adam, an astronaut discovering a second moon!” They jeered him without mercy, but Adam just sat in front of the fire in silence. He didn’t hear what they said. He could only hear his father’s words spoken a little over a year before – the world always takes away what you hold precious. Adam thought to himself, “It’s not the world that takes it away; it’s men.” He stayed before the fireplace long after the embers faded, and he decided in the darkness to hide his dreams the only place he knew Ernesto could not find them, where no one could take them from him. He thought of his mother and her kindness, and he wondered if she, too, was only a dream. Her warmth fading from him like the heat of the few remaining embers before the fire died completely.
Adam, now a young man of twenty-five, was secretive and awkward. He had difficulty looking men in the eyes. He was in a constant cowering position. He had difficulty speaking to people because all that filled his mind were his dreams. He kept obsessively meticulous care of his thoughts, holding on to every random idea, almost to the point of delirium. He had difficulty speaking because all he ever wanted to do was talk about what he wanted to do – build an eco-friendly manly hotrod; be the catalyst to peace in the middle east; fight the power; fix the economic crisis in Europe. Adam had a million and one ideas, but he was too afraid to tell anyone because he knew the consequences of them being discovered. Instead of chasing these dreams, he chose a cubicle with moderate pay where he did nothing but regurgitate the same information to countless, faceless people. “No, sir, that option is not available to you under the plan.” “Yes, ma’am, payment will be issued promptly.” “I understand your frustration with the process, but …” He didn’t mind the work at first because it was relatively simple, mindless. He had a script, and it kept him busy and fed. When the call volume died down, however, he couldn’t help but allow his mind to wander through his ideas – inventing a new smartphone app that let you buy your dinner by tweet; creating the plot to the next great American novel stylized like a reality tv show and facebook had an illegitimate child; inventing a tonic that gave every man the beard he always wanted. He found himself now restless and unable to keep his composure in front of his laptop station. He had to get out of there. There were offers for people to leave, and he always accepted. He did so because, if he did not, he thought he would combust.
Every day, at around 1:30 he would skulk out of the building, get into his car, and then race off to his home. There he would draw out all of his new ideas, map them and experiment. He would create detailed graphs of how he would become the big man he always dreamed. Before the sun set each day, there were pages thrown all over the one-bedroom home he rented – a quiet unassuming guest house in the middle of suburbia. He would let himself go mad with the overflow of everything he could possibly want and how he would go about getting it. Today, he chose to work on how to create the day-time Laundromat and weekend Club Linen. He wrote out every possibility, designed a business plan, and printed possible sites for the location. He spent hours creating a plan for success. At 9:00 pm, he finished it all, then he lit his fireplace. As the fire began to roar, he took a moment to go over everything he had created, admiring the possibilities, and then he threw every piece of paper into the fire and watched it burn until there was nothing but ashes. He did this night after night – a new flight of fancy, an old idea that needed reworking; everything that could have been. He would make everything tangible, and then he would throw it into the fire. As the last of the embers would burn out, he would think to himself, “Only men have no compassion for dreams, and they cannot take what I do not keep.”
