Dreambender

by Kidd, Ronald;

  I sat on the bench next to her. We were quiet for a while. When I’d been to cemeteries before, they had seemed clean and formal. I had never realized how lovely they could be.

  “Two years ago,” she said, “the strangest thing happened—strange and awful. One night I heard my brother screaming and moaning like he was having a terrible dream. I went in to check on him and found him sweating and writhing in bed. I tried to hold him down, to help him or to comfort him. Finally, after a long time, he went back to sleep. I stayed with him, sitting by his bed. I guess I fell asleep. When I woke up, the bed was empty.

  “We searched the house and the neighborhood. We told the catchers. We talked to his friends. We put up signs. Nothing.

  “We searched for weeks and finally gave up. We discovered a few other cases like it, where people had had bad dreams, then disappeared. Maybe they’d run away. Maybe they had been hurt and couldn’t get help. Maybe there had been foul play. None of them ever came back.”

  I wondered how hard it would be to lose a brother, especially a twin.

  “The funny thing,” said Eleesha, “was that all the people who disappeared were about my brother’s age. He was twelve.”

  “Why would that be? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either,” she said.

  Eleesha stroked the bench tenderly and gazed off into the distance. “For the longest time I didn’t believe he was gone. We’d had that special connection, and I didn’t want to let go. Deep down, I knew that if he were still alive, he would have contacted me. But there was nothing. Not a trace.

  “I wanted a place where I could go to remember him, and I thought of my grandmother’s grave. This bench was close by. I come here to talk to him. Every few days I bring fresh flowers. I miss him.”

  Eleesha picked up a daisy and sniffed it. Her words explained the sadness I had noticed in her face. They also explained her eagerness to have me join the group. Eleesha had friends, but somehow, deep down inside, she was lonely.

  There were footsteps behind us and the light from another lantern. We looked up and saw a catcher.

  “What are you girls doing here?” he asked.

  He was an older man with a stern gaze. I’d seen him on patrol near the computing center.

  “Visiting my grandmother’s grave,” said Eleesha.

  “It’s late,” said the catcher. “You should be at home, sleeping.”

  I said, “We were just talking. We’re not causing any trouble.”

  “This isn’t the place to talk,” he said. “Or the time.”

  He studied me. “I know you. Your father’s a keeper. Did you tell him you’re here?”

  “Not exactly.”

  He reached down, took my arm, and pulled me to my feet. “All right, get up, both of you. Let’s go.”

  “Where?” asked Eleesha.

  “Home,” said the catcher. “I’ll let you go this time. But don’t let me catch you out at night again.”

  Eleesha hung back. I guess she wanted to say good-bye—to me or maybe to her brother.

  “Go!” the catcher told her.

  She caught my eye, then reluctantly moved off. When she was gone, the catcher walked me to the gate. Outside, he let go of my arm.

  “Are you going to tell my father?” I asked.

  He surprised me by smiling. “When I was your age, I used to sneak out at night. It seemed exciting. I explored the city. Maybe even a few cemeteries.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I grew up,” he said. “Now, go home. Go to bed.”

  “Thank you.”

  I turned to leave.

  “Oh, and one other thing,” he added. “Stay away from that girl.”

  “Eleesha?”

  “I’ve seen her by the computing center. She and her friends don’t follow the rules.”

  “She seems nice.”

  “She’s trouble,” he said.

  6

  Jeremy

  Colors were everywhere. The girl reached out and swirled them like finger paints. They formed mountains and tunnels, bridges and roads. She swirled them again. They were dogs and cats. There was a horse. She climbed onto its back and rode into the night.

  “This dream is nice,” I said.

  “I agree,” said Dorothy. “Pass or stay?”

  “Pass.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “That was hard. I wanted to stay.”

  “I know,” she said.

  The man was in a rickety old house. Bats hung from the ceiling. Bugs skittered across the floor.

  I said, “This is disgusting.”

  “Focus, Jeremy,” said Dorothy.

  There were halls, endless halls. With every turn the man found himself in another hall that stretched into the distance and out of sight.

  “He’s troubled,” I said, “but the feeling is vague. Maybe there’s a problem, or maybe he’s just worried.”

  “Pass or stay?” asked Dorothy.

  “There’s not enough to go on,” I said. “Pass.”

  “Good,” said Dorothy.

  The little boy was behind bars. He gripped the bars and shook them. They held firm. He tried to squeeze between them and get out. It was no use.

  “He’s in jail,” I said. “Maybe I should help.”

  “Watch closely,” said Dorothy.

  The boy jumped up and down. The ground was soft. But it wasn’t the ground. It was a blanket.

  I said, “Hey, that’s not a jail. It’s a crib.”

  Dorothy chuckled. “Good. You let the dream play out. You didn’t jump to conclusions.”

  “Pass,” I said.

  A woman sat in a kitchen, drinking coffee. There was a fluttering sound, and a blackbird landed in the open window. The bird let out an awful shriek, and anger rose up inside her. She lunged toward the window and splashed her coffee on the bird. It kept shrieking. She looked around, saw a knife, and grabbed it.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “This one, right?”

  “Yes,” said Dorothy.

  I pulled the strand and tied it. The knife folded in on itself and disappeared. Instead of a knife, the woman picked up a loaf of bread and tore off a piece. She offered it to the bird. The bird plucked it from her hand, then flew off across the sky.

  I said, “She wanted to kill it.”

  “Now she doesn’t,” said Dorothy.

  “Is she dangerous?” I asked.

  “In real life? Probably not. We all have violent impulses. But now there’s one less. We change the world an impulse at a time.”

  “It’s flat,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The world we’re making—it’s flat and dull. Less interesting.”

  “Maybe so,” said Dorothy, “but it’s better than the alternative.”

  They were called little dreams, the kind that flicker in the dark, shine briefly, and disappear. Most of our dreams are little dreams, and those were the ones Dorothy had been helping us with, the way she was helping me that night.

  The five of us were spread across a corner of the dreaming field, alone together, each exploring a different part of the dreamscape. Leif sat up straight as usual, an intense expression on his face. Gracie fidgeted, trying to get comfortable. Hannah smiled. Phillip lay back on the grass, gazing into space.

  During our weeks of training, we had learned that the dreamscape shifts constantly and, like the sky, is different every night. Some nights they are clear and sparkling. Some are foggy. Sometimes the wind kicks up, scattering debris. Sometimes clouds move in and dreams darken.

  Lightning flashes, thunder rolls. Across the dreamscape, in a thousand ways on a thousand nights, people suffer, tremble, cheer, throw back their heads and laugh.

  Each dream is different. Some are simple,
and some are complex. It’s part of what keeps us coming back. The differences call for judgment, and ultimately that’s what dreambending is about.

  What goes? What stays? What gets tied off and removed? Trim, adjust, move on. Mistakes are made—they always are—but if we do our jobs, the big picture will be fine. The world will turn to the better, slowly, gradually, imperfectly. One degree at a time.

  That’s what Dorothy told us. I told Dorothy it didn’t seem right. Just because we had the power didn’t mean we should use it. But I had to admit that I liked it.

  Dorothy moved from person to person, checking our work, suggesting, encouraging.

  These days I barely saw her gray hair or bun. What I saw were her eyes. They seemed to take in everything, not just outside but inside too.

  As we had explored the dreamscape over the past few weeks, I had learned why training didn’t begin until we were thirteen. Dreams could be brutal. They could be violent and grim.

  There was love and there was sex, and the two weren’t always the same. We had glimpsed these things as children, but our minds had flinched and turned aside, the way you might shield your eyes from a bright light. Now, as dreambenders, we couldn’t look away. It was our job to observe and decide.

  Some couldn’t do it. Dorothy told us stories about people who were overwhelmed by the dreamscape. Some became addicted and couldn’t bring themselves to leave. Others got lost and weren’t able to find their way out. A few tried to do damage. They hid out among the impulses, creating fear and revulsion. Eventually, of course, all of them were caught by the watchers, the group that observed and managed the dreamscape, and they were given other jobs. They stayed in the Meadow, part of a small group who didn’t bend dreams but were still able to help and be a part of the community.

  All except one.

  That’s what people said anyway. They told stories about a dreambender who had wandered off into the dreamscape and over the hills. One day he was in the dreaming field, and the next he was gone.

  No one, not even the watchers, could discover where he went or why. But he was out there, they said, roaming the dreamscape, haunting dreams. They called him Boogey. Personally I doubted the story, but some people believed it. Hannah did. So did Phillip. For some reason Boogey scared Leif to death. More than once I had found Leif cowering in his bed, shaking uncontrollably, convinced that Boogey was after him.

  “You’re doing fine,” Dorothy told me. “Good work with the blackbird.”

  She started to move off toward the others. Watching her, I thought about what I’d seen and heard in the dreamscape.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  She turned back to me, smiling. “What a surprise.”

  “We bend dreams about violence and machines and pollution. I get that. But what about music?”

  Dorothy blinked. “What about it?”

  “Those other dreams are dangerous. Music isn’t, but we bend it anyway. Why?”

  I’d wanted to ask that question for a long time, but no one wanted to hear it. Music was something we weren’t supposed to talk about. My friends and I did, of course, but we always whispered. The word seemed mysterious, loaded, ready to explode. But the thing itself, the melody that had come floating to me in the night, was beautiful.

  Dorothy’s smile faded, and she gazed into the distance. “I wondered when you’d get around to that. Lots of us wonder about music. Few have the courage to ask. I was one of them.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “They fidgeted and didn’t say a thing. So I asked around. Finally, I spoke to a caregiver at the children’s house and saw a flicker of something in his eyes. He pulled me aside and checked to make sure no one was listening.”

  “And?”

  Dorothy looked around, the way the caregiver must have done that day. She turned back to me. “I wouldn’t tell most people, but I think you should know. The caregiver I spoke to that day had heard stories about the time when the ship landed and the City was rebuilt. He said the founders were determined to prevent another Warming.”

  “So they banned machines,” I said. “Everybody knows that.”

  “They believed machines had caused the Warming, but there was something else. They thought the people had become distracted, focused on themselves instead of the world, on feelings instead of facts.”

  “Feelings?”

  She sighed. “Art. Dance. Especially music. They said because of music, people fiddled while Rome burned.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s an old expression. No one knows where it came from. It means being distracted during a crisis. When the Warming came, the leaders tried to shut down the concert halls, but the musicians wouldn’t let them. In the daytime, the musicians helped fight off the crisis like everybody else, but at night they gave concerts. They kept making music, claiming it was important. Even though times were difficult, music gave life meaning. It gave people hope.

  “The founders disagreed. Years later, when the City was settled, they didn’t just ban machines. They banned music—not through laws but by spreading the word that music is evil, something you don’t talk about and don’t do.”

  I said, “Do you really believe that?”

  Dorothy gazed at me. “Part of me does. The world works better when people focus on their jobs.”

  I snorted. “That world is boring. Music is beautiful.”

  When Dorothy answered, I got the sense she was arguing with herself as much as with me. “Maybe music is beautiful. But we can’t have everything we want, Jeremy. As a dreambender, you should know that. We make trade-offs every day. We snip things out. We prune the weeds so plants can grow.”

  “Music isn’t a weed,” I said. “It’s a plant, maybe an important one.”

  “Some people would disagree with you—Carlton Raines, for one.”

  “Carlton Raines was scared,” I said. “So were the founders. They knew you can’t control music. You can’t fence it in. It’s pure feeling. Is that so bad?”

  “Maybe it is if your job is to manage the world. It’s a delicate balance. Music is dangerous. So we forbid it to protect all of us.”

  She squeezed my shoulder, then moved off toward Gracie. I went back to the dreamscape, where I erased an impulse to steal, a craving for chocolate, and a fascination with violence.

  Of course, all I really changed were the dreams, not the people, but the dreams were where they lived. Their wishes, hopes, and fondest desires were there, and I was with them. I rounded the edges and softened the colors. I flattened the world. Meanwhile, in my own mind, the original dreams lived on, with the colors bright, the feelings raw, the melodies strange and lovely.

  7

  Jeremy

  They came in boats.

  Running through the Meadow was a river, and in the river was an island. On special nights, boats cast off from the island at sunset, moving across the orange water like dragonflies. The color stretched over the river and up the sky in a continuous band. Blue and purple waves rippled, spreading in patterns through the world, the way dreams do.

  They were the watchers. When we saw them set out across the river, we stopped and stared.

  “Why are there twenty-four of them?” I asked Dorothy. “Why not twenty-three or twenty-five?”

  Leif snickered. “Do the math. Eight boats, three to a boat. It’s all the room they have.”

  It was a joke, but it was also typical of Leif—using math to find the answers.

  “They tried different numbers,” Dorothy said. “Twenty-four worked best. Enough to manage the dreamscape but not too many.”

  “How can anyone manage the dreamscape?” asked Gracie. “It’s so complicated.”

  “That’s why little dreams are handled by the dreambenders,” said Dorothy. “It leaves the watchers to manage big dreams.”

  “All m
y dreams are big,” said Hannah.

  “Your mouth is big,” said Phillip.

  Dorothy looked out over the river. The watchers were halfway across, rowing with slow, steady strokes.

  “You’ve all seen big dreams,” she said. “You’ve bumped up against them. They’re the ones we stay away from.”

  “The nutcases,” said Hannah.

  Dorothy’s eyes flashed.

  “Sorry,” Hannah mumbled.

  Leif said, “Above all, respect for the dreamer.”

  It was from The Book of Raines. Had he memorized the whole thing?

  “Big dreams are recurring dreams,” said Dorothy. “They don’t flicker and die out like little dreams. They come back again and again, carving a channel in the mind. The channel gets deeper each time. These are the dreams that can change lives. Some involve mental illness, as Hannah suggested. Some are obsessions. Some show intense longing.”

  “What if the longing is for something good?” I asked.

  “Sometimes it is,” said Dorothy. “Sometimes it isn’t.”

  “Who decides?”

  Dorothy studied me. “The watchers decide. It’s part of the job.”

  “And what if they’re wrong?” I asked.

  “They’re usually right.”

  The boats reached land, and the watchers got out. They wore robes to distinguish them from the other dreambenders. The robes were white and billowed in the breeze. The watchers fanned out across the dreaming field. Every so often, one of them would stop next to a dreambender, and the two of them would talk in low voices.

  “What are they doing?” asked Gracie.

  “Giving assignments,” said Dorothy.

  “For the Plan,” said Leif.

  The Plan. I’d heard that term my whole life, but whenever I had asked about it, my caregivers would tell me, “You’ll see. Wait until training.” They had said it so often that the Plan had started to seem like a fantasy, like Boogey or the Tooth Fairy.

  “Leif is right,” said Dorothy. “The Plan is real. You’ve wondered what the watchers do on that island? They work on the Plan. The original Plan, called the Document, was drawn up by Carlton Raines and the founders. It was made up of long-term goals. Over the years, the watchers have adjusted those long-term goals to fit new developments, but the underlying purpose is always the same: to keep the people safe.”