The Dream of Doctor Bantam

by Jeanne Thornton

  Today isn’t real, said Patrice.

  Julie got Patrice into the bathroom, took Tabitha’s shirt off of her, got the soaked underwear off her legs. Breasts were absurd when you looked at them without desire. She started filling the bathtub, swirling the water with her hand to make it not too hot, not too cold. She led Patrice to it and got her in. Her hair whirled against the surface like a mermaid’s. She was breathing normally now. She tried a smile: a hesitant one, like a baby’s, learning how to make the motions.

  Stay with me, she said.

  I have to go, Julie said. I’ll be back this afternoon. At three.

  You hate me, whimpered Patrice.

  I don’t hate you, said Julie.

  You should, said Patrice.

  Julie stared down at her, at her absurd breasts against the water, at the dark, never-trimmed curls between her legs.

  I don’t hate you, she said again. What kind of music do you want? I’ll put on some music for you.

  I don’t want any music, said Patrice.

  You love music, said Julie.

  She got Tabitha’s portable CD player from the bedroom and set it on the toilet, making sure the cord was off the floor. She started it playing.

  Je ne veux pas déjeuner

  Je ne veux pas travailler

  Pink Martini, she said.

  Patrice didn’t answer. Julie watched the water swirl around her, watching all of the dirt gather in the water in sheets, as the fake French music played on.

  I have to go, she said. Do you want me to get you some stuff for your lip?

  Patrice didn’t answer.

  Look, said Julie. I’ll be back at three, okay? Clean yourself up. I’ll be back at three and we’ll get dinner, or something. We’ll figure out something fun.

  Don’t go, said Patrice.

  I’ll be back at three, said Julie.

  Patrice closed her eyes and let her face slip under the water.

  Je veux seulemen toublier

  Et puis je fume

  Julie waited for her to surface, then got up and closed the bathroom door behind her.

  She looked at the breakfast she’d made for a long minute before she scraped it into the trash.

  She reprogrammed all of Aunt Julia’s stations to the Indian music channel on AM. She listened for a while before turning it off. She passed under the highway to the streets with Spanish signs on them, the bars, the broken apartments, the clapboard churches with broken notice boards and bare trees clattering against their painted siding. The clinic was in the back lot of one church, next to a hardware store.

  She sat with her still-bleeding cheek and read through The Idiot and looked at Patrice’s drawing of her in her Funky Winkerbean notebook while the other three people in the waiting room shifted in their plastic seats. The waiting room was done up for Halloween, pumpkin lights around the ceiling and a cackling animatronic witch mechanically rotating by the front desk. It took two hours for them to call her name. They asked her questions and she answered them with lies, and they weighed her and wrote her weight down, and they took blood from her finger and asked her to piss in a cup. Then she went back to the waiting room to read for another hour until they called her back again.

  She refused anesthesia and she bit her lip as they dilated her, their metal rods freezing. She closed her eyes when they turned the machine on and let the sound scrape and hiss in her ears.

  It was already three, she said to herself for as long as she could think of anything.

  They asked her to rate the level of pain from 1 to 10. When it got down to 5 they brought her into a room with two of the women from the waiting room before and they gave her grape juice, her least favorite juice. Someone was bawling. Julie tried to ignore it, then covered her ears with the pillow, then just lay still and took another swallow of grape juice. She let it linger on her tongue so she could make sure that yes, everything was still great, she still hated this shit.

  She tried to imagine what Robbie looked like in front of her, made sure she got every detail of him right until finally he melted away and it was just her again, her and the aftertaste of grape juice in her throat. She liked that it was just her again. She’d grown attached.

  She lied and said that the pain was down to 2 so they’d let her go. She wondered why they didn’t ask her if someone was coming to pick her up. The car clock said 4:25. She had to hurry home.

  She sat back in the seat, eyes closing and pain rolling around her, and empty, totally empty, and at home Patrice was floating in the bath, waiting for her.

  She started the car and turned the Indian station back on and turned the wheel toward the eastern part of town, where she’d never been.

  It was starting get dark earlier and earlier, six o’clock, now, and she was still driving as shadows fell over the streets and then, moments later, the streetlights came up. And moments after that—staggered moments, each house making its debut like a soloist—there were the Christmas lights. It was insane; it was nowhere near the season. But there were no zombies, no skeletons, no pumpkins with slanted, wicked eyes burning on the porches: just Christmas shit on every fucking house. Flashes of dewdrop gold, red, lines of blue, riots of pink, steady green, halo-lit Santas and deer sculptured from silver light. Julie drove through it, street after street of it—driving got easier the more you did it; it was just a matter of doing it; anything was easy to do after you kept doing it for a while—floated like a cosmonaut alone in her steel and glass ship, and she tried to memorize the different constellations of color, and she knew as Indian voices blared pop nonsense into her ears that she’d never get it right. And she knew that when she got home she would tell Patrice, finally, that she was going to leave her.

  She left the SUV at Robbie’s house; she dented it against the mailbox on the way in. She got her bike out of the back, sat down on it, closed her eyes and nearly threw up. She got off the bike and sat down on the gravel driveway, made herself breathe, fought back the hot saliva gathering at the back of her throat. She was bleeding; she was sure of it; no she wasn’t she couldn’t be. She left her bike in the driveway and got back in the SUV. She bit her lip and turned the Indian station all the way up to keep from blacking out.

  Michael’s car still wasn’t there; Linda’s wasn’t either. All the lights were off.

  Sorry, sorry, sorry, she said, stumbling into the house. The ceiling fan was quiet; the TV was off. I’m sorry, she called to the back of the house.

  She flipped the light switch and nothing happened. She flipped it again. She frowned.

  There was water moving in the bathroom. She felt the saliva at the back of her throat; she tried to run; she felt the stabbing pain in her gut again. She worked her way along the wall. There was water in the carpet, squishing like a dead swamp under her boots.

  In the dark bathroom the reflections of the ripples on the surface of the bathtub stood out in the mirror. She could see the other thing in the water, heavy and still, somehow, pink.

  Tabitha, she said.

  She went into the dark hallway and stood halfway between the bathroom and the bedroom. She leaned against the wall; she felt it in her gut, like razors twisting around. She shouldn’t have lied to the doctors; doctors knew everything. But she didn’t sit down. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to get up, and there were things—her eyes rolled in the darkness; she gasped—there were still things she had to do.

  She had to unplug the CD player. She had to fish it out, waiting a minute first to make sure the electricity had dissipated—is that how it worked? They didn’t ask that shit on the GED exam; why didn’t they—and when she had it in her hands she threw it onto the tile, let it break.

  The thing’s mouth was still above water, its nose too. She slid her hand back beneath the surface. Her skin was still warm. Her stomach was still moving. She was breathing.

  She pulled the thing out of the water—it took her some tries; god damn this fat bitch—and she ran her hands over its breasts, its shoulders, its bre
athing face locked in a smile. She kissed it, tried to give it air, thought about dialing for help; there wasn’t going to be any phone; even if there was a phone, there wasn’t going to be any help.

  It wasn’t worth getting upset. It’d happened before, one of time’s hiccups, doubling back on itself. She looked at the remains of the CD player on the floor—water sluicing over the laser-etched surface of Pink Martini—and she told herself it was fine. She wasn’t bleeding; the pain was going away. She would make it through; she’d survive. She had what it took to survive.

  She let go of the warm, wet, immobile shoulders; she let Patrice slide back into the bathtub, her head still dreaming above the waterline. She left her hand in the water, like a boat, drifting in the shadow of some great dark island, and she waited in the dark for Michael and Linda to get home. And still—still—she couldn’t cry.

  I used to say the word timebound a lot. I meant it two ways. Bound like you are tying something to something else. And bound like you are going somewhere—homeward, often, or to anywhere.

  It’s these uses that I’m afraid of and that I’ve decided to reject.

  A sailboat in a concrete pond in a park is bound somewhere, but mostly by accident. At first a sailboat is just black with varnish and white sails and red stitches. It is turning in the sun. I am turning it; my hands turn its little wheel; the radio turns its little rudder. I hold the wheel one way and I hold it another and it turns in place on the pond with the other boats. Its sail is a snowshovel but it shovels and scatters sunlight instead of snow. The sailboat makes a hole in the water and the water makes a hole in the concrete pond and the platform where the other children and I stand makes a hole in the soil beneath us. My hand is the radio wave and the boat and the scattered sunlight. We’re all frozen, dancing together.

  Are you finished yet? my mother asks. We’ve got to go to the store and buy your books.

  I’m still playing, I say.

  Go hit that other boat with your boat, she says.

  I don’t want to, I say.

  She stands and she smokes Camel Lights. Here I smoke Camel Lights in secret in the alley behind our house and the calendar is different many times over. But here by the pond I don’t.

  You’re not doing anything, my mother says.

  I’m playing, I say.

  Here I’m playing with blocks that have letters on them. They have colors too (here the floor is a color; here the floor is green) and here I make the rainbow—red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet—and on the rainbow it says DJULTE, almost a girl’s name.

  Here Julie is lying on the pillow with her elbows over her short blond hair and her armpit hair is blond at the tips, black where the hairs come out of her body. She is smiling and I like it when she smiles. She is gone and the pillow has her smell and I imagine that the hole her head makes in the pillow is the same hole my head fits into, here when I try to breathe in her smell and remember her and she is not in this place—I try to remember her because here I’m still timebound; here I still believe in memory—and I know that it isn’t the same hole her head makes and my head fits into because I know nothing’s the same, nothing repeats.

  I stare at the tower of blocks, the rainbow, the almost-name of someone that here I don’t know but here I do. I want to knock down the block tower and make another tower, to find another name. But then it won’t be the same; the moment will change (here I still believe in moments, even if I don’t have words for them). The tower stands in the living room and in front of it sits a little girl who is me, afraid because some magic in the world gave her an almost-name, an unrepeatable thing, and my mother knocks it down and says I need to put away my own toys. Here I am too old for toys and she throws them away. Here they sit somewhere beneath bags of garbage and there is still paint on them and they spell something new and unrepeatable, something I don’t know.

  They spell almost Julie also.

  Things do not repeat. The angles of grass blades in the park where my mother and I are walking. They come out of the soil one way and one way only and if you step on them you destroy something. A trail of snot from a sneeze accidentally sneezed on the tabletop in school forms a friendly face and when it is clean the face will be wiped out. Plastic toy rabbits that I keep in my toy chest in my bedroom, which is white and which has only one light bulb, have a kind plastic face when they are new. And here the plastic melts and flakes and picks away and they are not the same plastic rabbits anymore. They are strangers. They are the thing that you know, and here they aren’t.

  That’s one view. Things start unfamiliar, then they get familiar, then they get unfamiliar again. Everyone lives, then everyone dies, you guess. Bound for distance or bound for death.

  Or there’s the other view. Things are friends and strangers, both. Things are alive and dead, both. You get to choose.

  Christmas lights are unrepeatable things. They are rainbows (red orange green blue, but then pink instead of violet), but they don’t look good where people hang them straight, like rainbows. They look good where people sling them over bushes or hang them bunched like icicles or wrap them around trees like candy canes. Here red is next to red or red is next to green, which means Christmas, or blue and orange are together, which means something else. You can watch the lights and follow them and imagine where the original string goes, see the secret branches that you can’t normally see, and you can straighten the string out in your mind and see the perfect rainbow, or maybe one of the bulbs burned out and had to be replaced and so it goes red orange red, and that’s also significant.

  Christmas lights hang from my apartment ceiling (here it’s my apartment and here it’s my mother’s and here it’s the Institute’s). Julie is on the couch. She hunches over me in khaki shorts, her breasts small. One hangs lower than the other by a soft inch. The Christmas lights shine blue and green and pink on her shoulder and on the other side they shine yellow and light her up from behind like an angel. I want her to freeze in place like this forever with the lights painting her perfectly and I want to study how the lights shadow and shine and fill the holes of her collarbone, the hole her perfect body makes in space. I want this because I still believe in time and I believe that time moves fast, that time moves at all. And here she moves and her hand is on me, there, where she likes to put it, where it fits a different way every time, and my eyes are closed, and I am full of something strong, and behind my eyes I can feel the tiny electric fire of the lights, and I forget the order of them; I am bound somewhere.

  I have to pay attention to these things, these unrepeatable perfect things.

  There’s a light by the door of the room, here, that you can see where it’s dark. The green button calls nurses and the red button calls doctors. There’s a light in the parking lot across the way that goes on just after the other lights go out. That light is not here and only the other lights are, but that light is also here. There is a red light that blinks. It is on and my heart is on and it is off and my heart is off. There is a square of golden light with a human shadow in it. A woman is there with an empty bedpan in her hand. She is there with a full bedpan. The light and the woman are not there at all.

  She is conscious, they say. We don’t know what the problem is. Something isn’t communicating with something.

  Everything is connected and I understand that better than them so they can’t let themselves understand me.

  Here the nurse’s hand is on my foot. My muscles are tense and my muscles are slack. They want me to learn how to walk. I know how to walk. Every morning I walk from the apartment to the Institute and every evening I walk from the Institute to the apartment. And here I walk from Julie to the Institute and from the Institute to Julie. I walk between them. Both of them are here at once.

  Here I don’t walk because here I understand. To walk is to have a destination, something you want to get to. To walk is to be bound to time, to bind yourself to time.

  I don’t walk here. I am still and that lets me understand.


  Here my foot is on the edge of the bathtub in Julie’s house. I am small and unhappy and Julie is gone. Here she says she’ll be back at three. Here it’s not three and here I still believe in time so I cry. I cry because I don’t understand that Julie is here and because I think I don’t understand the illusions of time that the Institute talks about. I want to understand the illusions of time very much because I think they are the only things worth understanding.

  Here in the bathtub I don’t understand that the Institute is wrong, impure. The Institute says it doesn’t believe in time and if you work hard you can learn to not believe in time either, and you’ll be Unbound, you’ll be perfect. If you work hard, they say. Work hard, they say.

  To say if is to believe that it could be otherwise. To work hard is to have a destination. Dr. Bantam says that time is an illusion but here in my room I don’t think he really believes it. I believe it. I live by it.

  Here in the bathtub I don’t, and I know that I have no destination, and I know that I am small and alone, and I feel myself collapsing in on myself like a tower of blocks.

  The radio is on the edge of the tub, held up by an unrepeatable mix of weights and angles. It plays:

  Je ne veux pas travailler

  Here Julie tells me to clean up, she’ll be back at three. Here I’m in the tub listening to music, clean, collapsing.

  Here I don’t understand. I try to live in a way that I don’t understand how to live in. Here I wish that things could stop. I wish to lie here forever frozen in the hot bath and I wish to never have to get out and get dressed and I wish—because here I don’t understand, because here I can be hurt—here I wish never to see Julie again. I wish never to hear her say that thing, get through today. Here I can’t get through today; here I believe this: that no matter what, today will become tomorrow.

  Here my foot is by the radio at the edge of the tub, dancing on it. I wish for many things, and some of them I don’t even know.