Dreambender

by Kidd, Ronald;

  Music. Leif blanched when he heard the word, but Callie seemed to glow. She was different in this place. She had a warmth, a brightness. It was hard to describe, but it lit up the room.

  “Are you a computer?” the woman asked her.

  Callie didn’t hesitate. “I’m a singer.”

  The woman smiled. “Of course you are. You have a gift. Everyone does.”

  “What are you calling a gift?” asked Leif. “What does it even mean?”

  “It’s what you were born to do,” she told him. “Sometimes it takes a while to find it. You watch. You listen. You dig deep to discover it. Then comes the big question: How will you use it? For good? Evil? Safety? Hope?”

  I studied her face. She was telling my story, whether she knew it or not.

  “What about me?” I asked. “What’s my gift?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  I thought for a moment, then smiled. “Asking.”

  Leif shifted uncomfortably. I thought of another question.

  “What about Leif?” I said. “What’s his gift?”

  The woman turned toward him, one eyebrow raised. “Do you know what it is?” she asked him.

  Leif thought for a moment, then looked around at the wood and the light and the space.

  He said, “This is my gift—the Music Place. I’ll give it to the fixers.”

  I said, “That’s not what I meant.”

  “It’s all that matters,” he said. “Come on. We’re leaving. I’m taking you back.”

  Suddenly, off to one side, the stage door swung open. Sal stepped through, along with Deb, Zack, the tall girl, the one-legged boy, and the girl with the skinny dog.

  Relief flooded through me, and I turned to Leif. “Looks like you’re outnumbered.”

  “Maybe not,” said Leif.

  Behind Sal and his friends, the fixers emerged. Dorothy was with them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s over.”

  Later I learned what had happened. When Leif followed us to the Music Place, he’d contacted the fixers, and one of them had hurried to the Meadow to get Dorothy. I guess I should have been flattered that she had come to arrest me personally.

  We spent the night under guard at the Music Place. I wanted to be with Callie, but they put us in separate rooms. Desperate, I spent the night trying to figure out how to escape.

  The next morning, Leif came to get us. He released Callie first, then brought her to my room. I shoved him and tried to run. Leif grabbed me effortlessly and, using some trick the fixers had taught him, twisted an arm behind my back.

  “Go!” I yelled to Callie.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “Yes, you can! He can’t hold both of us.”

  She said, “It’s no use, Jeremy. We have to go back.”

  Her face seemed different. The light was gone. Something about it was dull and lifeless.

  Then I knew. Dorothy had been busy in the dreamscape. I imagined her reaching out and tying off a strand, the way she had taught us.

  “No!” I moaned.

  “It’s fine,” Callie said. “I’m a computer.”

  Her hope was gone, snipped off like a lock of hair. And my hope, what shreds of it were left, withered and died. Sensing my reaction, Leif released my arm. I didn’t move. There was nowhere to go.

  “Why?” I asked him. “Are you really scared of a song?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t you ever get tired of questions?”

  “What are you going to do, Leif? Tie off our dreams? Brick them over? Then what? How far does it go? What if a dream slips by? What if it spreads?”

  He smirked. “Like a disease?”

  “Like joy. You can’t contain it forever. Somewhere deep inside, it’s growing. You can’t stop it.”

  “Watch me,” he said.

  Callie touched my arm. Her hand was cold. “Thank you for trying. It’s better this way.”

  “What about the Music Place?” I asked her. She gazed at me vacantly.

  The fixers came. Dorothy was with them. She took Callie away, back to the City.

  Leif turned to me. “Let’s go.”

  “What about the woman who lives here?” I asked. “What about Sal and the others?”

  “Don’t you worry about them,” he said.

  Leif and the fixers led me off. After all the running and dreaming and hoping, I was going back to the Meadow. The Council waited.

  24

  Callie

  My mother was sitting by the window, watching. As Dorothy and I approached the house, she came flying through the front door and threw her arms around me.

  “You came back! I knew you would!”

  “Hi, Mom,” I said. It felt warm inside her arms.

  My father was right behind her. He hugged us both, his cheek wet against mine.

  Dorothy introduced herself and said, “She was in Between.”

  My father stared at me, amazed. “Between? Weren’t you scared?”

  “I think so,” I said. “It’s a little hazy. There was a boy named Jeremy. He talked about dreams.”

  “He was confused,” said Dorothy. “He won’t bother you anymore.”

  I remembered the excitement on Jeremy’s face and wondered what had caused it.

  My father turned to Dorothy. “Thank you for bringing her back.”

  Dorothy smiled. “You have a special girl. Take care of her.”

  That was the end of my big adventure. I went back to my life at home and at the computing center. It was safe and comfortable. Every once in a while, when I was thinking about numbers, an image flashed by with strange faces and bright colors, but then it was gone.

  The bright colors reminded me of Eleesha and her friends. I saw them a few days later, when I was on break at the computing center. Eleesha came running up, concerned.

  “Well?” she said. “What happened?”

  I shrugged. “I decided to come back.”

  “That’s it? What about the boy? You ran away with him.”

  “Jeremy? He’s gone. He went home.”

  “He talked about a mountain and a path,” said Eleesha. “What was all that?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t remember.”

  She studied my face. “You’re different. Like when you stayed away from the Midway. Like we are when we forget our painting and have to remind each other.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “What about singing?” she asked. “What about music?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about it. You know that.”

  Eleesha shook her head. “Something isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way.”

  “How should it be?” I asked.

  She struggled to speak. “There’s something inside you. I want to reach in and pull it out, but I don’t know how.”

  “Numbers,” I said. “That’s what’s inside of me.”

  A few days later, as I walked home from work, a woman fell in beside me. She wore a dress that was more like an old sack, but she wasn’t dirty. Her skin was soft and smooth. It seemed to shine. There was a bag slung over her shoulder. She was like no one I’d ever seen, and yet there was something familiar about her.

  She said, “Hello, Callie.”

  “Have we met?” I asked.

  “Yes. At the Music Place.”

  I didn’t know the place she was talking about, but I knew Jeremy, the boy who had gone with me to Between. For some reason I couldn’t recall his face. I did remember his hand and the way it had felt when he touched me.

  “Do you know Jeremy?” I asked.

  “I do,” she told me. “I’d like to see him again.”

  “He talked about dreams. I remember that.”

  Once again I tried to picture his face
, and part of it came into view. It was his eyes. They were warm and kind.

  “He’s a different sort of boy,” said the woman.

  Another part came into view—his nose. I giggled. “Noses are funny.”

  “Jeremy asks questions,” said the woman.

  I saw his lips. I had touched them. I had kissed them. I must have blushed, because the woman smiled.

  “He’s your friend,” she said. “He’s a dreambender.”

  I stopped walking. I stood perfectly still, and the world spun around me. The woman watched.

  I said, “Dreambender—I know that word. It’s important, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “I want to know.”

  She took my hand. “I’d rather show you.”

  This time I didn’t stop at home. The woman led me to the edge of the City. When no one was looking, we entered Between. My father had said it was frightening, and maybe it was, but it was also familiar.

  I remembered another face, this one smudged with dirt.

  “Sal,” I said. “He had friends. Will we see them?”

  “Not this time,” said the woman. “We have to hurry.”

  “Why?”

  “Jeremy’s in trouble.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “The Meadow.”

  “On the other side of Between.” The phrase popped out of my mouth, as if we were playing a game of fill-in-the-blanks. How did I know that? How many blanks were there?

  The woman plunged ahead. I followed, stepping over roots, pushing aside branches.

  We walked all that day and the next. I thought of my parents and how worried they must have been. I thought of my job and imagined the black marks that would be put in my book. These things should have bothered me, but they didn’t. I was going to help Jeremy, the boy with the warm eyes and the face I had trouble recalling.

  Who was the woman? She knew me, but I didn’t know her. She had upset my world, but she made me feel calm and peaceful.

  We slept beneath the trees. There was something so simple about it—walk all day, eat roots and berries when we got hungry, sleep at sunset, rise at dawn. We barely talked. We didn’t need to. Once or twice I heard sounds behind us and thought we were being followed, but it must have been my imagination.

  When I woke up on the third day, the woman was kneeling by a river at the edge of the woods, studying her reflection. She splashed water on her face, then took a brush from her bag and combed her hair. She turned to me.

  “This is the day, Callie.”

  “Are we going to the Meadow?”

  “We’re there,” she said.

  25

  Jeremy

  I tried to feel joy. I really did.

  I had asked Leif how he and the dreambenders could contain it, but now, back in the Meadow, it was fading fast. How can there be joy when you’re locked in a room and the walls are closing in around you? Joy had faded with Callie’s dull stare and Leif’s stern glance. The two most important people in my world had changed, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Callie’s dream had been erased. Dreambenders had tied it off, and all that was left was rattling around inside my head. That’s the way we did things in the Meadow, the place where, until a few days ago, I had lived my life. Then I’d gone to the City. It was noisy and confusing, but it was full of life—real life, flesh-and-blood life, the kind you could touch. I had touched Callie, and she had touched me. Together we had found another place, different from the dreamscape and the City and Between.

  The Music Place.

  Naming it, hearing the words, I felt a kind of excitement, or the memory of it, the way you remember fire but can’t feel the heat.

  There was a click, and the door opened. Arthur entered.

  “It’s time, Jeremy.”

  I’d been in the room for several days, waiting for the trial. Arthur had brought me food, and I’d tried to talk with him, but he’d just shaken his head sadly. He didn’t seem as strong as before, and I guessed that he had been blamed for some of the things I’d done. That made three lives I’d wrecked, if you counted mine, which, it was becoming clear, no one else did.

  What’s the opposite of a dreambender? Is it a dreamsmasher? A dreamcrusher? When Leif brought me back to the meadow, he had marched me past the dreaming field, and everyone had stared—strangers, friends, Phillip, Anna, Gracie. Gracie had hurt the most. She had joined me in pushing the boundaries, but she had known when to stop. Some of us never learn that lesson. Leif had walked me to a boat and taken me to the island, where I’d been locked in a room until the trial. Now the trial was here.

  Arthur led me down a hallway toward the Council chamber. I told him, “I’m sorry, Arthur.”

  “We’re all sorry,” he said.

  We entered the Council chamber, where once again I faced a long desk with three chairs behind it. Seated in them, as before, were Dorothy, Louisa, and Ching-Li, wearing their dark robes. Leif stood nearby. He gave me a curt nod. He and I had been best friends. I wondered where we had gone wrong.

  Louisa said, “Please take your place.”

  I sat in the chair facing the desk. Leif and Arthur stood on either side of me.

  Dorothy pounded a gavel and fixed her gaze on me. “Jeremy, you showed such promise. You were brilliant and intuitive, a natural dreambender who could have been so much more. You asked questions. You pushed us to reconsider things, and that was good. But you pushed too far. You challenged the Plan. You violated the teachings of Carlton Raines, and we can’t allow that.”

  Clearing her throat, Louisa read the charges. “You disobeyed the watchers. You went to the City. You met a dreamer. You told her about the Meadow. You described dreambenders.”

  As she read each charge, the others flinched as if they’d been struck. When she finished, Ching-Li looked up at me.

  “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked.

  Feelings pressed in on me. Hope swirled, then sputtered. I felt as if I weighed a thousand pounds.

  Finally I said, “I told Arthur I was sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. But I don’t regret what I did. The dreambenders are trying to do the right thing, but it’s wrong. The City people should decide for themselves. They need to make mistakes.”

  Behind me, Leif snorted. “And destroy the world?”

  “Or make it better than you could imagine,” I said. “One little dream in a forgotten corner of the dreamscape might be the answer to everything. Don’t bend it. Let it go. See where it leads.”

  Dorothy gazed at me. I saw her hesitate.

  Then she said, “Jeremy Finn, we find you guilty. You are banned from the dreamscape forever.”

  She pounded the gavel, and the Council rose. Arthur took my arm. I stood up, barely knowing where I was or what had happened.

  As we turned to leave, I heard music.

  It was faint at first, then filled the room. It was all around us. There was a melody with straight, pure tones and lovely curved lines. The notes were stacked on top of each other like stones.

  “Wait,” said Dorothy.

  26

  Jeremy

  There was the strangest expression on Dorothy’s face—happiness, regret, longing, all at once. She followed the music out of the Council chamber and into the main room, and the rest of us followed along behind.

  In the room, the watchers had been working on the Plan, but they had stopped. They stared just as Dorothy and Arthur and the Council all stared.

  Next to the fireplace, playing the golden stick, stood the woman. Callie was beside her.

  When Callie saw me, she ran across the room and threw her arms around me. Leif smirked. The others, listening to the music, didn’t seem to notice.

  “You came,” I whispered.

  Callie
nodded. I saw a spark in her eyes and suddenly knew that no one—not Leif or I or any other dreambender—could put it out for long.

  The melody wound around us and between us. Dorothy ventured up to the woman and gazed at her. When the music stopped, the woman lowered the golden stick. Leif moved to intercept her, but Dorothy waved him away.

  “I always wanted to meet you,” Dorothy told her.

  “Really?” asked the woman.

  “It was years ago. You dreamed about playing the flute. I was assigned to bend your dreams, and I did. But first I listened. You always played that melody.”

  “It’s mine,” said the woman. “I made it up then played it over and over again until it sank deep into my bones. All of us have melodies—at least, that’s what I believe. Sometimes I make up melodies for others, to express their gifts.”

  Callie’s eyes lit up, as if she had just remembered something. “I have a melody. I sing it in my dreams.”

  Ching-Li, standing behind Dorothy, had been getting more and more upset. “Music, musicians—we don’t talk of these things.”

  Dorothy told him, “Just this once, I want to know more.” She turned back to the woman. “I kept your dream. I still listen to it, even today.”

  Louisa, standing beside Ching-Li, gasped and turned away.

  “We all have gifts,” said the woman. “Mine is music.” She gazed at Dorothy. “What’s your gift?”

  “She’s head of the Council,” snapped Leif.

  “What else?” asked the woman.

  Dorothy was quiet for a few moments. She looked down at her hands, as if noticing them for the first time.

  “I used to draw buildings. I imagined them, then drew them with a pencil. I wanted to be an architect. I used to dream about building things in the City. I dreamed about the computing center.”

  The woman snorted. “The computing center is a box to put people in. They’ve been in boxes ever since. You’re in a box.”

  Dorothy said, “The boxes work.”

  “Do they?” asked the woman. “They fit together neatly, but life isn’t neat. It’s messy.”

  Next to me, Callie spoke up. “Jeremy and I saw a different kind of building. It wasn’t a box. It had strange shapes and shiny surfaces. Inside, it was made of wood.”