The Dream of Doctor Bantam
Page 27
Here the unrepeatable balance of weights is ruined forever.
The world is light, nothing but light.
And whatever the clock says, I am here.
Here I am in art class with twenty other children, none of whom like me. Here there is something wrong with me that I can never know. We are in art class and I’ve spilled green paint across the tiles—tempera paint, made with eggs. It makes a lotus leaf on the floor, slow sticky trails of green that run into the shadows under the metal legs of desks. I don’t see the lotus leaf. I’m terrified and the twenty of them are separate creatures, caught up in different currents of time, unrepeatable yet unknowable. I get on my knees with a towel and I wipe the paint and the towel becomes green, the puddles disappear and turn into veins of green against the tiles and the black stockings of my uniform are tearing, my head is crashing into the metal legs of the chairs as I breathe fast and sharp and chase the paint under the dirty tables, and I am doing nothing to help and here it no longer looks like a lotus leaf; here it looks like what it is to them: a mess.
And here is where I begin to understand. Here is where I stay sitting under the table and look at the swirl of paint surrounding me and settle my backside into it and the twenty of them are laughing and I don’t care. Here is where I realize that no one can make me do anything ever again. I will sit in my lotus leaf and my uniform will be soaked through with green and I will be crying, so happy and crying, and here I am at the Institute for the first time I am bored and lonely and they seem friendly and Gregory is shining a light into my eyes and asking me to go deeper on green and I am here again, in this moment underneath the desk and in the course room of the Institute and I am so happy and crying again because here is the first moment where I realize that I don’t have to be bound to time. I don’t have to be ruined. I can begin to be perfect.
Here I sit in a circle with other people who are not bound to time. One of them is crying. The doctor for the hospital is asking him about his mother.
How does the thought of her make you feel, she asks him.
How does she make you feel, she asks.
I don’t smile but I would have smiled, here, where I wear a white blouse and a navy skirt and my friends and former students are making coffee and I am the youngest person ever to get as close as I’ve gotten to being Unbound, I am unique in a good way for the first time in my life, and we laugh together because we’re tired and we believe we are doing the right thing because here we don’t understand. We do this same thing in the Institute all the time and the Institute does this better. Words connect to words. Those words connect to moments, places. The connections do not repeat for different people. The connections are your identity and you work in the Institute to discover your identity because here you don’t understand that it’s not the kind of thing you can work toward. The Institute does not believe in what it says but if you believe what it says you can also get outside of time. The doctor may believe in what she says but she wants the man to do something that his connections will not let him do, that he is not doing.
The doctor is asking me about my mother. I don’t say anything or look at her.
Here my mother is home from a business trip. She is shouting something at me. Here I didn’t brush my teeth. I can’t understand her shouting; she has an accent and the letters of her words jumble in ways that are unrepeatable. I am walking to my room. She is there in my room and she is shouting. I am walking back to the living room. She is there and she is shouting. I am in the bathroom and I slam the door on her before she is here and I lock the door and she pounds on it and I sit on the carpet in the dark bathroom because I am afraid to turn on the lights. She is pounding and shouting and her words make no sense. There are no lights. I am on the rug crying. I have no destination because there are no destinations left from here. I pay attention to unrepeatable things in the dark instead. The scratchy spot in the fabric of the rug. The ghost edge of the soap bar in its dish, lit up by the backlight of the mirror and the stripe of gold at the crack beneath the door.
Julie between her legs is folded and delicate and she has a dent where no one else does. She is new, quiet, waiting.
I save the unrepeatable things I want to save. There is no time so there is no destination, no urgency, and no reason to be in places I don’t want to be. I go where the unrepeatable things I want to see live and I stay there and I do not walk here.
Julie is in the room with the square of light. Her hair is long and black now and in my apartment with me it is short and blond. She is wearing a plaid skirt and a black top and her breasts can be seen in it, one smaller than the other and under her arm there is a container of ashes. She is with a girl who is not me.
I have to go, she says. I’m sorry but I have to go. I’m sorry but I can’t stay here with you.
She taps her pocket and takes out a pack of nicotine gum; she unwraps a square of it and puts it in her mouth. She looks into my eyes and she chews it sadly, slowly. Something in her eyes is hard for me to understand. Her eyes seem full; she has not cried; she will not cry.
I’m going away, she says. We’re finally going away from here, together.
The other girl is pretty, gawky and young and dark, black hair cut in one wet lock that hangs over her face like a dog ear, peeping red lips. She looks bored and looks jealous, although there is nothing to be jealous of. She has Julie, here. I have Julie too, and I always will.
And Julie doesn’t need to be sorry and Julie doesn’t need to be sad. Things never repeat. One girl killing herself isn’t the same as another girl trying to. It only seems the same to people who are timebound. They think they have to avoid repetition if they don’t like the things that repeat. They have to avoid repetition in order to get to something new, something unrepeatable, somewhere that they want to go. It’s a confusing way to live.
Nothing repeats. The bored dark girl isn’t me and she won’t ever be. The ashes under her arm are just ashes. They are nothing inevitable.
Julie is still here. Here in my bed. Here in my notebook. Here in my kitchen. Here in my bathtub with my cigarettes in her mouth.
Time is like a book. Most people read it straight through from the first page to the last one. What does that give you? A sad story.
But there’s no reason to read a book like that. Page 160 is still there when you’re reading page 321. The words on the tower of blocks are still the same. Just turn back and see. All the moments exist at once, flat on sheets of time. All the unrepeatable things remain for you to go to whenever you want. People read the way they feel they should and they get to the end and they’re sad. I read life so that it makes me happy. I flutter the pages in front of me and feel the wind on my still face, unrepeatable every time.
A book is a container for unrepeatable things.
There are pages I don’t like to read. Here I read them by mistake and I scream because I can’t stop looking and the nurse comes and here there’s a needle in my arm and a mask on my face and here I sleep and here I’m happy again. I tear out the pages I don’t like. I tear them out and the book gets thinner and I can’t read it the way I’m supposed to but I don’t want to. I want to be happy too much. I want to live Dr. Bantam’s dream.
And I know the pages I like to read. They remain, marked and dog-eared. I turn to them when I want to. I don’t have to move or leave my bed or go somewhere, like Julie has to go somewhere, like Julie has to go away with the girl she I suppose loves here, now, the girl that is no longer me. Julie knows how to survive in this world. I don’t. Get through today, but there is no today. Or put another way, there are only todays, flattened and pressed and frozen. There are only pages in a book.
In my book, Julie and I can be together.
Julie and I roll on the carpet and the Christmas lights shine around us in the dark apartment. Soup bubbles on the stove and the alphabet pasta inside combines into words and dissolves again. A dog barks on the street out of rhythm and Ira Wasserman drinks Lone Star and plays board games on
the floor below. The light shines in the glass frames of the Paris photos, red green pink blue. Her cunt is wet and my finger is warm and one of her socks is still on her feet hiding her stub toes, her mangled nails. Her hair is wet and short and shining in yellow light. Her body is a hole around my hand. Her heart is a hole into which I’ve crawled. The pages turn back again because time isn’t real. We are together because we need to be. We are together and together we will survive.
New York–Austin, 2007–2012
Thanks to Daniella Gitlin, Kathleen Jacques, Lilana Wofsey-Dohnert, Crystal Yakacki, Anika Gjerdrum, Tim Miles, Joseph Sachs, K. Harlock, Sarah Bridgins, Veronica Liu, and anyone I’ve forgotten (sorry, sorry) for reading earlier drafts of this book and for providing advice and encouragement during the multi-year slog of bringing it out. Thanks beyond thanks to Miracle Jones, Kevin Carter, and Bill Cheng for basically listening to me read this entire thing aloud, multiple times, as I was writing it, and for providing wise counsel. Thanks to Anton Solomonik for inspiration. Advanced thanks to Jennifer Hanks, whose appreciation of the book is perhaps least in doubt. Thanks to my mom for fostering a sense of independence that has probably stood me in good stead, and thanks to my dad for unquestioned belief.
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Table of Contents
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Tabitha
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Julie, Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Intermission
INSTITUTE OF TEMPORAL ILLUSIONS INTERAL SERVICES MEMO
Julie, Part II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Patrice
Chapter 1
Acknowledgements
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