Dreams Come to Life

by Adrienne Kress

  “Uh, not really anyone. Just, when I was caught taking stuff from the closet and I was told we couldn’t afford to waste supplies and … well … you know …”

  “Ms. Lambert? Yeah, well, she’s a good worker, but she’s a woman, Buddy,” Mister Drew said, looking front and cracking his neck to one side.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means they don’t always understand business.”

  I wasn’t sure I believed that. Ma was pretty great with money and she worked hard. And Dot seemed to know everything going on at the studio. Sometimes even more than Mister Drew himself seemed to know.

  “Look, here’s the truth, kid,” continued Mister Drew. He was staring at himself in the mirror now, and it was almost like he was talking to his reflection. “There are always going to be people who are trying to bring you down. Maybe it’s sabotage—that’s easy because you can see it, right there in front of your eyes. Maybe it’s whispers and gossip. The worst is betrayal, Henry, that’s the worst. When you think someone understands the plan, when you think someone is part of the team. When you take someone in and share with them all your visions for the future. That’s like sharing a part of your soul, kid.”

  “Vision is important,” I replied, remembering the time on the catwalk in the theater. But I couldn’t ignore the strangeness of being called “Henry.” People slipped up all the time—heck, even I mixed up the names of my friends in the neighborhood, and I’d known them since I was born. But that name … the same named carved into my desk. It creeped me out a little.

  Mister Drew turned to me. It was as deep a look as anything. Looking through my eyes, not even into them. “Exactly, you get it, you do.” He stepped off the little platform he’d been on and came over to me. “Buddy, you’re coming to this party.”

  “I am?”

  “I’m inviting you. You need to see what we’re doing. You need to be a part of it.”

  I wanted to be, and I was excited to be. I didn’t know if I needed to be, but I was all for it. “Know what else you need?” asked Mister Drew.

  I shook my head. I had a list of needs in my life: money, security, food. But I didn’t think that’s what Mister Drew was talking about.

  Mister Drew grinned at me. “You need a tux.”

  * * *

  I’d never been fit for a suit before. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Ma always let out my hems and had a magical way to extend the life of all my clothes, making me stand there like a dummy in a shop window. But I hadn’t had a tux before, and I most definitely hadn’t gotten one from a swank shop on the Upper East Side. The tux wasn’t made from scratch, like Mister Drew’s was. It was one that had been returned to the tailor for some reason, one that he was reselling. So he let out the hem of the trousers, which always happened with me, and brought in the waist a bit, and did it so quickly Mister Drew and I barely had to wait before I was handed a fancy black bag with a hanger popping out of the top.

  I was used to carrying these kinds of bags for other people. But this one was mine.

  And that made all the difference.

  “What do you think, kid?” asked Mister Drew as we climbed back into his car.

  “I think it’s amazing, thank you, sir.” I was still in shock from the whole thing.

  “It’s nothing,” said Mister Drew with a wave of his hand. “So, kid, where do you live?”

  I didn’t know what to say at that moment. Not that I didn’t know the answer, it was just …

  “Hey, Buddy,” he said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “I know what it’s like. You don’t have to be ashamed.”

  I looked at him. It was hard not to be. It wasn’t just growing up in my neighborhood or being poor. That was bad enough. It was living in a tenement apartment that I shared with my ma and grandpa. Where all the apartments on my floor and the one below shared one small bathroom. Where the water was shut off for random reasons sometimes and the lights buzzed too loudly.

  How could I be proud of that?

  “Lower East Side,” I said.

  “Great!” He leaned forward to speak with the driver and I leaned back, wanting to disappear into my seat.

  Soon we were off, and Mister Drew was talking about how New York was the greatest city in the world, and that Los Angeles had nothing on what we were doing here with animation, and the actors were so much better, and how he loved seasons and hated palm trees. And I couldn’t agree or disagree because I’d never left the city, and anyway my stomach was in knots the closer we got to my neighborhood.

  Which we eventually did get to. I hated the ugliness of it. How tall the buildings were. How they looked like they might fall over onto one another. The laundry hanging from windows, the food stalls along the narrow street. And the people. So many people shouting at one another. Even if they weren’t angry. Just the noise and the heat and that smell. That smell I told you about. Of piss. And vomit. And sweat.

  “Which street’s yours, Buddy?” asked Mister Drew.

  “Are you sure?” I said. I really wasn’t excited about showing him that.

  “Don’t you want to show these people what real success looks like? Don’t you want them to see what hard work gets them? They should be in awe of you, Buddy,” said Mister Drew as we drove past Singer’s Butcher Shop.

  As far as I knew, everyone in my neighborhood worked hard. As far as I knew, they worked themselves to the bone. That’s why we were a neighborhood of hunched backs and tanned skin and thin angular faces. That’s why it never got quiet here. Folks were hustling even at two in the morning. But I did get his point. The point was I had managed to get out, and that was something to envy. I sure as heck envied those who had escaped before me. There was a difference between good hard work and bad hard work.

  At least … that’s what I felt then. In that moment. In that fancy car with my new tux I felt—well, I’m ashamed of it now, but in that moment I felt … superior.

  I directed Mister Drew to the front door of our building. It was tough to get there with the folks who had started gathering, and his driver had to make his way slowly. Heads poked out of the windows above, and I noticed Timmy Sharp come running out of his father’s shop to peer into the car. I gave him a wave and he stood upright, calling out, “Buddy Lewek’s in that car!” Well, that only drew the crowd closer, and I could see the expression on Mister Drew’s face was now no longer quite so happy. It looked concerned. Maybe he was worried we might hit someone with the car.

  Nah, that’s not it. That’s what I told myself then.

  But this is my story, and I don’t have to make up lies anymore. Not after what I know now.

  It wasn’t worry.

  It was disgust.

  We pulled to a stop. “Well, you better get out, Buddy. Your fans are waiting,” he said. He was smiling, but he seemed impatient now. And I was confused because, after all, this had been his idea.

  I nodded and grabbed the suit bag and slipped out of the car. Almost the moment my feet hit the pavement, Mister Drew was driving off. I didn’t blame him for wanting to get away from all this. It made me even more ashamed.

  “Hey, Buddy, can I order three of those?” asked Timmy, pointing after Mister Drew’s car.

  I smiled but didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t great with joking around.

  “Who was that, Bud?” asked Molly O’Neill.

  “My boss,” I replied, trying to push my way through folks to get to my door.

  “You work at that fancy studio, right?” asked Timmy.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’ll remember us when, won’t you?” called out Mr. Goldman from across the street. “Hey, Buddy, you’ll remember us when!”

  I waved at him and smiled. I passed through the door. “Billy’s having a party on Saturday, you should come,” said Molly.

  “Maybe,” I said, but that wasn’t happening. I wasn’t going to go to one of Billy’s shindigs where folks got sauced and fights always broke out.

  I closed the door th
en. I guess you could say I closed it in their faces, but they weren’t backing away and I was feeling overwhelmed. I’d always wanted to impress the neighborhood, but I hadn’t realized just how many feelings it’d make me feel.

  Mostly all I could think about was Mister Drew’s face and how quickly he drove off. It gave me a headache.

  I made it up to an empty apartment, and I was grateful for that. I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, explaining “how my day was.” I didn’t feel like practicing drawing either. I just wanted to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I carefully hung the tuxedo in the wardrobe next to Grandpa’s two faded suits.

  I walked over to the bed and stared at it. I looked over at the dresser. At the pages of drawings on top. I crawled over my bed and grabbed a fistful before turning over and lying flat on my back, staring at the water stain overhead. As a kid I’d pretended it was a river and created little towns in my imagination that lived along it. Designed houses and even chose one for me, Ma, and Pa. Someday we were going to live somewhere where there was room for everyone. Room to breathe.

  I picked up one of my drawings. One of a chubby angel from some ceiling somewhere in Europe. It had started as circles but now it looked pretty much like the picture. I’d never thought I’d ever be drawing chubby angels. I never thought it was necessary. But I was understanding better now. The simple lines that made up Bendy were still based on human figures. On classic angles. I was able to draw him walking and it looked like actual walking.

  I noticed one of my angel wings was half off the page then. That didn’t make sense to me. Why wouldn’t I have drawn the wing entirely? That was part of the exercise.

  I sat up. It reminded me of Grandpa’s cowboy from that afternoon. The way it had been slipping off the page.

  I looked at the next page in my hand, and the next. Was I going loony? Did they all seem just a little different? Were all the pictures slipping?

  Or was it just my mind? Was it just my mind that was slipping …

  I tossed the pages onto the floor beside me and held my forearm over my eyes. Everything felt hot. My arm, my head, my brain.

  I just needed everything to cool down.

  Everyone to cool down.

  Of course that wasn’t going to happen.

  From the frying pan into the fire, they say.

  Right into the flames.

  Time passes. Folks say that when things are going well time goes faster; when things are bad it goes slower. I can see that. But sometimes I think time makes its own decisions about things.

  I can’t tell you how much time has passed here. In the dripping dark. I can’t tell you what time has done, if it all just happened yesterday or if it all happened years ago. Or, I dunno, if it hasn’t happened yet.

  I want to tell about Sammy. About when he disappeared. I want to get to that part of the story. But the thing is, we only notice someone is gone when time has passed. It’s like the clock is ticking all normal, then it skips a beat. And we look up. And we didn’t actually hear anything happen. But something inside us noticed it. Something made us sit up. And wonder.

  It wasn’t quite like that with Sammy. Not exactly. It wasn’t a small missing beat. Though for a musical director that would have made some sense. In a funny way. But this wasn’t funny.

  It started two weeks after I got my tuxedo. After Mister Drew had invited me to the party. I was on my way down to my least favorite part of the studio, the Music Department, when I ran into that strange violinist I’d met on my first day. I’d never learned her name. The musicians weren’t around much and, anyway, she gave me the willies. She always looked haunted.

  Her hair was still a sheet of black, and she wore that long black skirt and sweater, even though, yeah, maybe the weather was a degree cooler now that it was September, but it really wasn’t that much better. She didn’t stop. I wasn’t even sure she noticed me. She sidestepped me and kept on going, and that was it.

  But later in the day I heard Dave of all people talking about how the musicians had been locked out of the Music Room.

  “What’s the big deal?” Richie had asked, pushing up a wrinkled sleeve and scratching his bicep. “Get a master key.”

  “They did. Seems like something was barricading the door,” Dave replied. We all looked at him. The old man never spoke, never seemed to remember we were here. “All I know,” he added, and then, like a switch had shut off, he was back to work, flipping between his two pages, making sure the change in the drawings of Boris’s arm from cel to cel was just right.

  “There must be more to that story,” Jacob said to me.

  Something to do with ink, I imagined but didn’t say out loud. Because that was a bizarre thing for someone to say.

  Three days after that, when enough time had passed, but not so much that people really noticed it, Toby from Accounting mentioned that Sammy hadn’t come in for his paycheck. Again, us workers only knew anything about this because Mister Drew himself was storming around the building, angrily muttering about it. Interrogating folks he met as he went. I didn’t feel like the rage matched the situation, but then I figured maybe he had something more on his mind than just a missing music director.

  “It’s the machine,” said Dot as we were eating lunch.

  “What about it?” I asked. She always just said things out of the blue like that.

  “Something’s not working right. I heard him yelling at Tom.”

  “He’s yelling at everyone,” I replied.

  “Yes. But trust me. We want answers? We need to find that machine,” she said.

  I couldn’t exactly tell her how I wasn’t interested in investigating any further. How the creature near the Infirmary didn’t make me curious anymore, just made me want to stay away. After going to the suit shop with Mister Drew, all I wanted was to draw and show Mister Drew what I could do. I just wanted to work.

  But then Sammy went missing.

  Officially.

  He’d been gone for over a week. But when the police showed up and started talking to folks, that’s when we realized it was more than just someone taking a day off.

  The questions were straightforward. “When was the last time you saw him?” and that’s when I remembered that the last time was the time he’d stormed into the Art Department looking for ink. That made me very uncomfortable.

  But then things took a turn.

  I remember coming to work and the police were outside and the studio was shut down. I remember being told by Richie that someone had broken in and messed the place up. That they were looking into a possible burglary. I remember Mister Drew rushing from his car and shouting in the detective’s face something about sabotage. How seeing him shout like that was worse than seeing Mr. Schwartz lose his temper. Than seeing even Sammy lose his temper. It was jarring and a little scary. Especially compared to how he usually seemed.

  I remember finding Dot in all the mess. Or maybe she found me.

  “Do you think it’s burglary, Buddy?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” I said, sounding more sure than I felt.

  “So you’ll come with me, tonight, when everyone’s left. To check it out,” she said. She didn’t even ask. If she’d asked I’d probably have said no. Then again, I still could have told her I didn’t want to. She had no power over me.

  The fact was, despite my concerns, I was still curious. But it was more than that. Seeing Mister Drew so upset, seeing him shake with rage, and locked out of his own studio. Well, it made me want to fix things. And if Dot and I could figure out what had happened, solve the mystery, he’d appreciate that. I had ambition after all.

  And Dot had a key.

  * * *

  The police barricades were still up that evening. There were no police though. No one around to guard the studio.

  “Do we really want to do this?” I asked. I couldn’t draw a more ominous-looking scene if I tried. Which at this point, well, I was beginning to figure my efforts at drawing weren’t all that impres
sive. Still. The dark looming exterior. The “Do Not Enter” sign. The fact even that the streetlamp overhead was dark. A burnt-out bulb or something.

  Dot didn’t really care about atmosphere, in the real world that is. “Ready?” she asked. She slipped easily under the tape crossing the front door and had the door unlocked before I even made it across the street running after her. She was little, but quick.

  Inside, the studio reminded me a lot of the first time I’d seen it. When there had been that blackout. It made me feel strangely better because it was familiar. But it didn’t make me feel all that safe or anything.

  Dot turned on a flashlight.

  Because she’d brought a flashlight.

  Because she always thought ahead like that.

  “I don’t think we should turn any lights on. We don’t want to draw attention to the building,” she said as she started walking. “And keep away from the windows, okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, which wasn’t quite the right thing to say, but I was feeling so uneasy now. I knew Dot was confident that Sammy was behind everything strange and creepy in the studio. And I wanted to trust her, like I did with most things.

  But I couldn’t forget the breathing on my face.

  The large handprint on my shirt.

  It didn’t make sense to me that any of it was … well … human …

  It also didn’t make sense to me that it wouldn’t be either.

  I didn’t want to scare her though. And I didn’t want to scare myself. But I was afraid of what hid in the dark corners.

  We stepped into the elevator. It was a strange experience. Feeling the motion, but seeing only Dot and part of the ceiling lit. It was hard to believe we were moving at all. Dot didn’t say anything, but looked as determined as ever holding the flashlight just below shoulder height. Her glasses created large shadows around her eyes, framing them so it looked like she was wearing a mask. She was a superhero.

  The elevator clanged to a stop and we stepped out into the dark hall. Here we go again, I thought. We walked that familiar hallway and Dot shone the light around to see more than just where we were going.