Dreams Come to Life Read online

  “Yes, Mister Drew.” With that she turned and left the office, her shoes clicking away until it was eerily silent.

  Mister Drew didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking at me in that way he’d been looking at me. “Buddy, right?” he said finally.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was still for another moment.

  Then.

  “Okay, let’s see it.”

  “See what?”

  “You wanted to draw, so let’s see it. Let’s see the finished result.”

  I didn’t have a finished result. All I had was my grandfather’s drawing in my back pocket.

  I reached back and pulled it out, placing it in Mister Drew’s already outstretched hand. He unfolded it and looked at it. He looked up at me. “Close the door, Buddy.”

  I closed the door.

  “Sit.”

  I sat.

  “There are things I’m supposed to say and do as a boss. But the thing is, kid, I never planned on being the boss of anyone. I was just a man with a dream. I was just a man who knew what he wanted, and took one step and then another, and soon I was dancing, you get me?”

  Not really.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’m supposed to tell you stealing is wrong, and believe me, I don’t like it when people steal from me. But is this stealing?” He held up the drawing.

  “I …”

  “Stealing is you taking something from me. Someone who claims something is his when it’s mine. I don’t have much tolerance for anyone who takes something from me. I don’t think any man does. But when you’re doing something for the greater good? When you’re creating and making things, and taking that extra step on the dance floor … that’s not stealing. You know what we call that?” He watched me expectantly. But again, I had no idea what to tell him.

  “I don’t, sir.”

  “We call that ambition.” Mister Drew finally smiled then, and leaned back in his chair. I wasn’t sure how or why, but I understood then at the least I wasn’t in trouble. I understood that, for some reason, I was actually being praised.

  Mister Drew looked at the drawing again. “This is good, Buddy, real good. I knew you had the skill, but I didn’t know you had the ambition. You were impatient. I get that. I’ve been impatient my whole life. You knew what you wanted, and you took it. I get that too. For the greater good.”

  “For the greater good,” I repeated. This story he was making up about me was part lie. I wasn’t that skilled. I couldn’t draw like that. I felt guilty for a moment until I realized that the stuff Mister Drew was impressed with was actually in the lie too. He just didn’t know it. Showing him the picture my grandfather had done had helped save my job. It had been for the greater good.

  “I like you, Buddy. I’m sorry I haven’t been around much, I’ve been working on a project. It’s been … tricky. Not everything works on the first try, you know?”

  That I definitely did know. “Yes, sir.”

  “Been a lot of late nights, and meetings, and investing in technology I’ll admit I don’t entirely understand. You gotta believe me that when I first saw a movie I thought it was magic. That’s how I am with new inventions. It’s all magic to me.” He sighed. Then, as if he’d made up his mind about something, stood. “So don’t take my absence to mean I don’t like you, Buddy.”

  “I don’t, sir.” I didn’t mention how he’d totally seemed to forget who I was a moment earlier. Probably because I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to believe him.

  “Good. Come with me. I have something to show you.”

  I stood and followed him out the door. I thought we were heading for the elevator, but he turned down the hall past Miss Rodriguez’s desk. I followed him to a small storage closet that he unlocked with a grin, and he pulled the chain for the dim dusty lightbulb in the ceiling. There were a couple novelty cans of bacon soup on a shelf to the side and a cutout of Alice Angel. Against the back wall was a pile of boxes stacked to the top, and that was what Mister Drew started to move aside.

  “Help me out there, would you, Buddy?” he said, passing a box to me. It was large, but light. Almost like it was empty. I placed it to the side and took the next, and the next, and that’s when I noticed a hole behind them. As we cleared the last box, Mister Drew turned to me with a finger to his lips and then motioned for me to follow him. He disappeared through the hole into the dark beyond.

  I admit, I approached it carefully and with a bit of concern. I should just have trusted him, I guess, but it was such a strange thing to be doing. To just casually move some boxes in a closet and then walk through a giant hole in the wall. And getting closer I could hear strange sounds from the other side. They were hollow and echoey. Voices?

  But I couldn’t just stand there doing nothing. I thought about Dot. I thought about all the stuff I’d done already. I could do this. Besides, when your boss tells you to do something …

  I stepped through the hole and out onto a small, wrought iron landing, kind of like a fire escape. I stared down between my feet. The floor was far below in the dark. I could see the shadows of gently swinging ropes below me.

  Ahead was a catwalk and brightness in the distance. Mister Drew gave me a look and I followed him along it, holding on to the railings on either side and not looking down. I didn’t really have a height thing, but maybe I had a bit of a height thing. The voices I’d heard got louder now, and I realized they were coming up to us from below, but I still kept staring straight ahead at Mister Drew’s back and at what was around us. There were a lot of ropes now, and cables here too. A dark curtain ran along next to us.

  We stopped.

  “They close next weekend,” he said quietly, and looked down. So I finally looked down again too. And that’s when I got it.

  We were standing above a stage. I stared down through the lighting rig to the stage below. Far beneath us, maybe fifty feet down, I could see two actors walking around on a set that looked like a fancy living room. It was neat because where we were standing we could see the top of the back wall of the set, so you could see both sides: the front part covered with fancy wallpaper with a large window cut out of it, and the back part plain plywood with wooden supports propping it up. The actors were under very bright lights that contrasted sharply with the darkness on the other side. In the shadows were two stagehands sitting on apple boxes, dressed in black and not doing much.

  “I like watching them like this,” said Mister Drew.

  “Yeah, it’s neat,” I replied in the same quiet voice.

  “Oh, it’s more than neat, Buddy,” he replied.

  “It is?”

  Mister Drew leaned on the catwalk railing, still staring down through the twisted maze of cables and ropes. “They have parts to play. They do it the same way every show. Every pattern they make on the stage is repeated.” The audience laughed just then, a muffled wave against the short curtain in front of us. “Did you hear that?”

  Of course I did. “Yeah.”

  “The audience laughs every time at that same part. They are under the spell. They don’t know that they’re going to laugh exactly at that point in the play, but they will. It’s their fate.” It was Mister Drew’s turn to laugh.

  It was interesting to listen to what he had to say. It was true. And a different way of thinking. A twisting kind of way that I wasn’t really used to.

  “Who’s in control?” he asked me, turning then for the first time to look at me. I looked back at him. He was in shadow and his expression hard to read. I wasn’t sure if the question was supposed to be answered, but I tried my best.

  “The actors?” I asked.

  Mister Drew shook his head and looked down again. “Not the actors, Buddy. They need to be told where to go. Remember?”

  I remembered. “Okay, um. I guess then the person who tells them?”

  “The director,” said Mister Drew.

  “Yeah, the director.”

  We watched the actors a
bit more. One of them fell over an ottoman without spilling his drink, and then suddenly a trapdoor opened under him and he vanished under the stage. The audience laughed and applauded.

  “Joy. Fun. Pleasure. All of it is coordinated and carefully planned. Everyone knows this and everyone works together. It works because they trust the vision.”

  I nodded.

  “You know what that is?” he asked me.

  “What, ‘vision’?” I replied.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure.”

  “What is it?”

  I looked at him and he was staring at me hard. “Oh, uh, it’s having a dream, I guess. Wanting something and seeing it like it’s real. Like when people talk about visions they’ve had, sometimes religious or sometimes they’re sick and see things, and …” I stopped because I could tell I was rambling. I knew no one liked my rambling.

  “Go on.”

  “But, uh, the way you’re talking about it is like seeing something in your imagination and wanting to make it happen.”

  Mister Drew smiled then and snapped his fingers at me. “Exactly. Making your dream a reality.”

  “Dreams come to life,” I said automatically. I’d seen it on the Bendy poster enough times.

  “They do, Buddy. They do.” He looked down at the stage again, so I did too. “But they don’t happen without work. And ambition. You gotta fight for your dreams. Fight hard.”

  Now I couldn’t tell if Mister Drew was talking to himself or not. But then he stopped talking entirely, so I didn’t have to worry about which it was. At first his silence made me uncomfortable, but I got used to it and began to enjoy the fact I got to watch more of the play. I didn’t know what was going on, or who the actors were pretending to be, or even why the audience laughed. But there was something really fascinating in watching from this angle. It also made me have that empty sort of feeling, that one where I realized that I’d missed out on something I didn’t know I’d missed out on.

  I’d never seen a play. I’d always thought the lights on Broadway and Times Square were enough. Kind of like a painting, I guess. But inside the buildings there was also magic. I’d never thought much about it. Until now.

  Suddenly my whole body lurched forward, my hands losing their grip on the bar and my feet slipping from under me. I thought that I was going to fall to the stage. Crack my skull on one of the lights, land on the ground, my legs twisted under me. It was such a vivid thought that, for a moment, I thought it had happened. I screamed out, from fear and the pain that I wasn’t actually feeling, and then the world came back into focus and I realized I was still on the catwalk. Mister Drew was laughing, really hard. I noticed then his hand gripping the back of my shirt. Holding on to me.

  I looked down. The actors were looking up at me. Or at least into the darkness. The magic had stopped. Everything had ended. For that moment.

  “Sorry, Buddy, terrible prank. I shouldn’t have done it. But you see now what I mean?” asked Mister Drew, offering me his other hand and pulling me upright.

  “What?” I asked. I was out of breath even though I hadn’t gone anywhere. I was still trying to understand the nature of the prank.

  “When everyone is working together it all goes smoothly. When one person doesn’t, everything stops.”

  “Did you push me?” I asked.

  “Nah. I yanked you around a little bit, all in fun, Buddy. Like an initiation. You know.”

  I didn’t, but I felt better that it’d been a joke and he hadn’t put me in danger, even though it felt like he had. It was kind of funny actually, now that I’d calmed down. I imagined I must have looked pretty silly thinking I was about to fall to my death and screaming like that. When I was safe.

  So silly.

  “I bought this theater,” he said.

  “You what?”

  “This. All this is mine.” He gestured with his arm at the dark space.

  “That’s impressive,” was all I could think of saying.

  He nodded and took a step toward me. “It’s still a secret, so don’t tell anyone. I gotta figure some stuff out, but everything’s changing, Buddy. Everything.” He placed a hand on my shoulder and looked at me intensely.

  “That’s a good thing,” I said, but I kind of meant it as a question.

  Mister Drew smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes, Buddy. It’s a very good thing.”

  I couldn’t believe at first I hadn’t been fired. Ms. Lambert couldn’t quite believe it either, when I came back downstairs and sat back at my table.

  “Well, I don’t get it,” she said, standing over me. “Guess he likes you, huh?”

  I nodded.

  She nodded too. “Okay, well, I get how it is. And you might have Mister Drew’s trust, but it’s going to take some time to earn mine,” she said, clapping her hands together.

  I nodded again.

  “Right,” she said. “Check in with Story and see if they have the new script.”

  I was up on my feet in a flash, ready to show that Mister Drew’s faith in me wasn’t misplaced. Ready to show Ms. Lambert that I wasn’t someone she should be worried about. “Got it,” I said. I immediately made for the elevator.

  “Buddy!” she called out after me.

  “Yeah?”

  “You keep working on Cowboy Bendy,” she said. “It better be worth all this.” Her expression was as severe as ever, and yet finally I was getting my first art assignment. I was terrified at making it good since I couldn’t even really make it in the first place, but I was so excited not to be fired and to get to draw that I couldn’t help but grin wide.

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  The rest of the day was spent doing gofer duties, which I really didn’t mind because I couldn’t actually work on Cowboy Bendy. I was thrilled that I was finally going to get the chance to draw, to do more than just run around like this, but at the same time I couldn’t do what my grandfather did, and wouldn’t people notice the difference in ability if I started drawing my own stuff?

  “So, you’re in a bit of a pickle,” said Dot after I’d explained it all. She took a sip of root beer and leaned back in her seat. I hadn’t wanted to admit any of it to her, but she’d heard about my almost-firing and had demanded we go to the pub together again so she could pass me her Cowboy Bendy script and hear the whole story. Which I told her. I couldn’t seem to keep stuff from her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I need to practice, but I don’t think I can get good overnight.”

  The door behind us swung open, and I glanced up to see Jacob, Richie, and a couple guys from Accounting come into the bar. I hunched my shoulders a bit. I didn’t really want to be seen by them. I didn’t know why. Maybe I was a little intimidated. They disappeared into the crowd by the bar and I looked up at Dot.

  “So I’ve been looking into this Tom fellow,” she said.

  “Oh!” I’d forgotten I’d asked her about that.

  “Yeah, so it’s very interesting. He works for a company called Gent. Seems pretty high up in the company. It looks like he’s working directly with Mister Drew on some kind of machine.”

  “With Mister Drew?”

  “I don’t know what it is, couldn’t figure out where it is even. But I’m going to keep looking for it.”

  “What kind of machine?”

  Dot shrugged and sipped her drink. “Maybe a more efficient way of filming cartoons?”

  I nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Look at you two so cozy!” Jacob was suddenly sitting next to me, slamming his beer down so the foam slipped over the edge and splashed onto the table.

  Dot rolled her eyes. “In this heat, I wouldn’t want to be getting cozy with anyone. No offense, Buddy.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” replied Jacob, taking off his hat and mopping the sweat on his brow with a paisley handkerchief. “So, Buddy,” he asked, “how’re you liking working at the studio?”

  “It’s been interesting,” I replied.

  “Well, I’ll say it: I’m glad you w
eren’t fired. And I’m glad you drew that picture. Because sometimes it’s hard to get noticed. Trust me, I know. People will underestimate you at every turn, mac.” He looked at Dot. “Right?”

  “Absolutely.” She nodded.

  “If anyone knows what it’s like to be ignored it’s the woman, and the black man. Trust us on this one.” He raised his glass to Dot and she clinked hers with his. It was as playful as I ever saw her get. But it wasn’t actually playful in a way.

  “You have a girl, Buddy?” Jacob asked after taking a swig.

  “Nah,” I replied.

  “Really? A good-looking kid like you?”

  “I’m not too focused on that stuff right now,” I said. The fact was I wasn’t focused on that stuff at all. Sure, there’d been a few girls in the neighborhood I’d been sweet on, but I didn’t have the time to ask them on a date—didn’t have the money to either. And now with this new job and everything … Besides, it felt really uncomfortable talking about this with work people. With any people.

  “You can focus on more than one thing at once, you know,” said Jacob.

  “I know, I just … need to get some stuff in order.” And I live at home with my ma. And my grandfather shares my bed. And I need to become a pro artist overnight.

  “How’s your dating life, then?” he asked, turning to Dot.

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at her drink.

  “You look sad there, Ruby Slippers. Did I say something wrong?”

  She laughed a little at that and looked at him. “Don’t call me that. And no, it’s just I don’t date. I’m not ready.”

  “Ready?” I said.

  Dot sighed hard. “You two. Boys. Pushing, always asking questions. Don’t like to answer them, but you love asking them.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. At this point the whole conversation had got away from me. I didn’t really know what I was doing or supposed to say.