The Dream of Doctor Bantam

by Jeanne Thornton

  On your first interaction with the object, did she seem interesting to you in sexual terms?

  What? Well—yeah, she had good legs, and she was wearing pretty short shorts. She was kind of nice looking. She kind of had it, you know. Going on.

  Expand on the ways in which the object’s identity incorporating with yours and with the Institute’s seemed like a miracle.

  I mean—you know Patrice. Patrice is fantastic.

  Quantify fantastic.

  She mastered the relaxation drill in an hour. She was helping out her classmates within a week. She was on staff in what, a month? I’ve been her dismantler since she started and she’s a degree closer to zero. I mean, she works at this stuff. We all do, but she can work harder, I guess. She believes it more deeply. She’s one in a million.

  Describe how the object’s identity incorporating into yours and the Institute’s seemed like not a miracle.

  The way she dumped me is pretty much not a miracle.

  Do you agree that an identity cannot have two opposed qualities at once? In other words, it cannot be x and not x. She is a miracle or she isn’t. One of the qualities must be a lie.

  I know that. I can’t—perceive it, here.

  Expand on the way in which the object of inquiry dumped you.

  It’s—it’s complicated. It just came out of the blue. She just dumped me.

  Go to a prior point in time and expand on the process by which the dumping occurred.

  I guess it was always sort of there—there was weirdness even from the very beginning, before she even came on staff.

  Go deeper on weirdness.

  It was like Dr. Bantam said, you know—INTAKE is the most critical part of incorporating an identity with the Institute’s. You just take the good results from relaxation sessions, concentration sessions, all of that, and you tie it to the Institute structure by using good vibes as glue. Patrice is even better at it than I am now but back then I wasn’t too bad, even.

  So I beam all the good vibes toward her that you’re supposed to, you know. I told her she was doing good, that I’d never seen anyone progress so fast, that she was beautiful, special, all that. It was the usual stuff, but it was true mostly for her. That was unusual for me. And I didn’t know what to do about it.

  Like, I invited her out to dinner at one of our unoccupied real estate properties, that one over on Rio Grande, the two-story. A couple of staff from INTAKE and counseling came—Andrew, who got relocated to the New York branch, he came with his guitar, and Kayla, who’s in LA now, she cooked this amazing vegetable lasagna in this kind of half-finished oven, and we all sat on the drop cloths that they’d put down to protect the carpet while the painting was going on, and we drank, uh, water, and it was really nice. They were all beaming good vibes at Patrice, too—it’s weird, because she was a guest then, but that’s the house she’s going to be working at in six months—just kind of funny. But she was really engaged, telling them all kinds of stuff about her college classes and how she used to not have so many friends in high school or anything and how her mom was hard on her, and Kayla and Andrew and I kept telling her that she was really great for having survived that hell, that the fact that she didn’t have any friends and read a lot of fantasy novels and stuff meant that she had a truly uncompromising soul, that people like her were, in the end, really the only kind of people capable of having true friends or doing great things at all. And you could just see the confidence kind of flow into her. Like—she had her shoes off, right, and she had her knees bunched up to her chest, and she kept staring at this one little loop of drop cloth that she kept folding and unfolding between her toes, just like playing with it nervously, and then you could see her straighten up, and her legs spread out and she sat up and she was looking at us, and she was so happy, she was glowing whiter than the primer on the walls. And the lasagna was also really awesome—on the outside it was kind of crunchy, and on the inside it was all hot and soupy and mixed-up, and thick, and you know, perfect.

  But we all had to work in the morning so we called it a night. Kayla and Andrew were sleeping there on the drop cloths so they could get up early and paint, so I said I’d walk Patrice back to her dorm. We went down the stairs and across the porch and off into the neighborhood—it was nice, there was no one else out there. It was just us and a bunch of double-parked cars and fireflies. And the whole time we were walking she kept talking about how great the dinner had been.

  Clarify what the object said.

  She said that this was all amazing. She said it was just amazing. She never knew life could be like this. She never knew anything could be like this.

  I told her that it really was a different world. I said, you know—we really don’t believe in tomorrow. We literally don’t believe in it.

  That’s so amazing, she said.

  We believe in making sure now is as good as it can be, I went on. We believe that we have the power to make now all it can be. It’s a very different way of looking at the world than most people have.

  It makes perfect sense to me, she said. It’s like I’ve felt these things all my life, and only now it’s like someone is saying them back to me. Like when I read the Amaryllis series by Gudrun St. Silverwolf, you know, the fantasy series—about the girl who lives in the castle made of pearls, and she reads the books in the library all day because she knows that there’s magic in one of them, and if she just reads them all she’ll find the one and she’ll learn to be a sorceress, and all the people in the town come knocking on her door to try to get her to come out and play and distract her, but no thanks, she says to them, I don’t need you; I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing, and she just keeps on reading.

  That little girl was you, I said.

  It’s so strange, she said. It’s so wonderful. It feels like everything is moving so very fast around me.

  Take a deep breath, I told her. Relax.

  I wish I had known about this before, she said. I wish I hadn’t wasted—so much time.

  And here she stopped again, one of those instant, frozen stops she does—she just stopped in place, on the street at two in the morning, and she was staring straight ahead of her. Fireflies were like dusting over her pencil-bun of hair; one landing on her arm—it was weird. I stopped and watched her, and if you want to know the truth I started to get a little bit freaked out—she was literally just staring at nothing. She would have stared all night, maybe, if I hadn’t come over and touched her on the shoulder.

  Listen, I said. You can’t worry about the past, okay? There is no past. There’s only your identity, right now—and whatever parts of your identity you want to keep, the parts you want to cultivate. It doesn’t matter that you only found the Institute now. There’s only now. Do you see?

  She didn’t get it, so I gave her the parable Dr. Bantam gives—you know, the one about how your identity is like a garden. The past is a bunch of weeds, and the future is this tree, and when you look at it in a timebound way, it looks like everything’s growing out of the same plot of land—so to water the tree, you have to water the weeds too, since the tree is growing from the weeds. And you start to feel sad that the weeds are there. But Dr. Bantam says that if you get to zero degrees of being timebound—if you become Unbound—you see finally, you really perceive, that the tree is growing out of the soil in one part of the garden, and the weeds are way over here in another part, and that all of it is growing at the same time, in different places within the same time, because there’s only one moment in time. So you can water the tree and let the weeds just dry up and crumble away. And then you’ve got a garden with nothing but trees and flowers. I mean you know the story—and that’s what I told her. I just really like that story.

  What did the object of inquiry say about the story?

  She said: God, I wish my past would just dry up and crumble away.

  And then?

  She asked me something strange. She asked me: why did you pick me for all of this? What was it that you saw i
n me?

  How did you answer her?

  Well, I mean—I had to think about it. I mean one way of perceiving it is like I said—we were low on stats, I was stressed out and I needed people to route onto courses, so I asked everyone—and she was the one to respond. So she kind of chose herself, you know? But I mean, I didn’t tell her that. Obviously I didn’t tell that to her. And in a way it’s not even true. There was something extra about her—there had to have been. I wasn’t just some kind of monster, playing the odds. I couldn’t have been.

  How did you answer her?

  I told her she had a kind of intensity that I found very appealing.

  How did she respond?

  She believed it, which was good. She said thank you.

  Was it your perception that she believed it?

  I mean—I think she decided to believe it. But that’s good, right? That’s how it’s supposed to be. Reality is what you want it to be. You water the plants in your own garden that most need watering.

  Did you have sexual intercourse with the object for the first time that evening, or later?

  I don’t remember.

  Did you have sexual intercourse with the object for the first time that evening, or later?

  I don’t want to tell you.

  Did you have—

  Jesus! That evening. Which is fine. It was a moment.

  Describe the sexual encounter.

  No!

  Describe—

  Fine. Fine. It was in her dorm room. She lived in one of those huge buildings, like anthills—people used to say that her dorm had once been a prison, that it had its own zip code, that kind of stuff. And she and her roommate really were packed in there. They didn’t even really have beds, just these kind of couch things that slid out of the walls so you could sleep on them, then you could slide them back into the wall when you were done and sit on them. I never met her roommate. She must have been some kind of dog person—there were all kinds of pictures of her, alone in a park or something with different huge dogs. Patrice’s side of the room was really different—there was like, nothing, except these little postcard photos of Paris she had pinned to a corkboard, three of them, kind of sad, right next to a class schedule. There were a few textbooks, too, but no fantasy novels or anything—she said she’d thrown all of that stuff away; she was too embarrassed to bring it to college with her. And she had some Christmas lights, the colored kind, strung around this microscopic desk she had stuffed in the corner. That was literally it—not even any clothes or plates or vases with dried flowers or, you know, girl stuff. I never went to college, so I don’t know what you’re supposed to have in a dorm, but it seems like you were supposed to have a little more than that—I mean, did she just eat in restaurants all the time or something? It’s like it never even occurred to her that this is where she lived. I guess it was kind of cool, you know? It’s like she didn’t need anything to remind her of who she was—I guess.

  Was there anything else?

  There was her notebook. Has she ever shown you her notebook?

  Assume she hasn’t. Describe the notebook.

  It was a little thing, kind of a vinyl-looking cover, quadrille paper. I didn’t look through it then, but she showed it to me later, once she was on staff, one time when we were over there while her roommate was away. It had these drawings and stories in it—little drawings of people and stories written in her tiny handwriting, like little bits of black plastic shrapnel scattered over the page.

  Her drawings were really good—they still are, I think, even though I don’t know if she does anything in her little book these days. She told me once how she got started with it. She’d be riding the bus around the city, back and forth to school or to the mall with her mom to get some shirts and things, and she’d see some man—or some woman, even—who’d be looking at her, or smile at her, or something. And she’d duck her eyes, she couldn’t bring herself to look back at them. But she’d remember what they looked like, and once she got home and she’d finished her chores and her homework and things, when she finally got to be alone, she’d draw them, just right out of her head, just like that. And God—she’d make up these stories about what she and these people on the bus would do together.

  Sexual stories?

  Sometimes, yeah, but she didn’t show me those, and I don’t think she did more than one or two. Mostly it was just stuff where like—they’d go to the movies or the library together, or they’d talk about the books Patrice had been reading—in the stories, the people on the bus had also read those weird fantasy books, these like weird drunken frat kids or lawyer women in pinstriped suits had for some reason read Gudrun St. Silverwolf books—and they had these animated arguments about the themes of the stories, and Patrice usually came out on top of the arguments, but not always, which was kind of strange—like sometimes she’d let these totally imaginary people beat her. It was crazy, this totally classic dislocated locus of identity, just like Dr. Bantam describes in Who Are You And Who Are You Today? She had like hundreds of these little drawings and stories.

  Go back to the actual sexual encounter.

  I mean it was good. It felt kind of dangerous—we were in a dorm and all—it felt like what Dr. Bantam talks about, like our identities, our purposes, were one, like you’re always supposed to feel, you know?

  It was good, except for physically, I guess. Physically it was kind of terrible. We were on this horrible bed that slid into the wall, and the more you moved around the more it slid in by accident until it was basically shoving us onto the floor. And she wasn’t—fully aroused, if you know what I mean. But you know, we finished up and everything.

  What did the object say to you after you had finished?

  She asked if I thought her, you know, her hair—you know—was ugly, or coarse, or something. I told her it wasn’t.

  What else did the object say to you?

  She asked about protection, like if I had used any. Which seemed weird to me—I mean she must have known that I hadn’t. I said that we could use some in the future if she wanted.

  She looked at the ceiling; her hands were kind of resting behind her head. I was sitting on the floor beside the couch-bed; she rolled to the side and there was a kind of ripping sound when her skin came loose of the vinyl. She said that she didn’t mind if we used protection or not.

  Actually I kind of want to have a baby, she said. I’d want to have a lot of them.

  What did you say to the object?

  What was I supposed to say? It was such a weird thing. Why would someone who liked being alone to the extent that she obviously did want to have a baby? It didn’t fit.

  Why do you believe that she wanted to be alone?

  She said she did, didn’t she? Why would you live like she did if you didn’t enjoy being alone?

  Did you ask the object to explain what she had said?

  Why would I? It’s pretty straightforward. She wanted a baby. It must have been biological or something.

  Again: what did you say to the object?

  I said that I guessed she should do whatever she wanted in life. She seemed happy about that. She sat up from the couch and gathered up my hair in kind of a knot—I had longer hair then, remember—and she kind of pulled my head into her arms and kissed the top of it. Which was nice and all.

  Is that all you noticed?

  No—I mean I was kind of weirded out by it, honestly, but I really liked her too. And when I walked home from the dorms—she got me out by the back stairs, didn’t kiss me good night or anything, but who really minds that, you know—I could still kind of smell her on me, some weird sweat that had soaked into my slacks. It’s like—this is kind of silly—but have you ever reached into a birdbath? When you see your reflection in it, and your reflection is in this upside-down world, and so you reach in to try to touch the world on the other side of the water? It felt like that—like my hand was still coated with some mud or something from the bottom of the birdbath, soaking into my skin.

/>   And this was not the only occasion on which you had intercourse.

  Oh no. We had plenty of intercourse, believe me. A little bit less once we were both on staff and one or the other of us would be tired all of the time. But there was always some occasion where I could, you know, talk her out of studying for a test for an evening—because it’s meaningless, right?—or we could borrow a car from Andrew or one of the other guys on staff and go out for a drive, and you know what that leads to.

  Did the object ever exhibit more arousal during intercourse than she had previously?

  What does that even matter? I mean she must have. She never said no or anything.

  Describe the point at which the object said no.

  Oh God. So it’s months later. She’d dropped most of her classes altogether—she had one microeconomics course left, but we could tell she was going to drop it, too. And we were all pretty happy about that, of course, because she was such an asset to the branch, and it was what she really wanted to do then. It was good for her to drop courses like that. You can read about all that academic stress and stuff in her record—all the things with her mom, and the counselors at her high school, and, you know, the attempt she’d made—all of that. So it was good for her to have less of that stress to deal with and for her to be working for something really positive for a change.

  Describe the point at which the object said no.

  Don’t make me, okay? She said no. We broke up.

  Describe the point at which the object said no.

  We were over at the apartment; Andrew and Kayla were still finishing it up and everything. I think they had to fix up the sinks or something but all the paint was on the walls and the carpet was in. We came over with a bunch of beers and some takeout Chinese food to, you know, celebrate her dropping out of school completely. And I thought it was kind of a given that we were going to, you know—have intercourse. But she just sat there, even when I crawled across the floor to kiss her and start, you know, taking off her clothes. She just sat there, like some shadow burned into the bare white walls.