The Dream of Doctor Bantam (22 page)

So here’s the question, here’s the fucking question, dear readers: which is the real person, in the end? And who—in the end—is going to have the courage to stand up to them?

She read the last lines over and over, sitting on the porch with the donuts congealing beside her. He hadn’t quoted her, exactly. It was pretty decent of him. If she ever saw him again, she might even thank him.

6

Patrice kept her pretty busy that next week. It was almost the only time she’d had to do property management work more strenuous than mowing the lawn or making soup. She had to figure out how to change the lock on the door downstairs—the gum had been a stopgap measure to keep Ira from coming in, classic Institute Macgyverism. She had to clear out the place, throw away all of Ira’s things, the game boards, the empties, the paperback books. She bought cardboard boxes from the hardware store instead and filled them up with the stuff, kept it all behind the porch and out of sight where Patrice tended not to go, Sharpied Ira’s name onto them. He never came by to pick them up. No one at the Retrograde seemed to know where he had gone—somewhere out West, toward El Paso, some people said, somewhere near Dallas, said others. He had seemed upbeat about it, like it was an opportunity for him. The gawky barista chewed on her bangs and said that she was spitting in the coffee of everyone who came over from the Institute, that she couldn’t believe they had done what they had done. Julie leaned over the counter and kissed her pimply cheek, then, when her back was turned, put up the flyer she and Patrice had put together:
APARTMENT FOR RENT, DECENT LANDLORDS, SMOKERS AND PETS OKAY IF USED RESPONSIBLY, PLEASE CALL ASAP
.

She used to take baths at Patrice’s when she was lonely, long baths full of long drags on cigarettes and long Russian novel characters with long faces. Now she sat on the edge of the tub, turned the water on, ran her hand under it until it got warm, then felt something shift inside of her, some what’s-the-point reflex; she turned the tap off and watched the warm water spiral away down the drain. Dr. Bantam sneered down at her and she couldn’t take her clothes off in here anymore. She wanted to turn the picture toward the wall, wanted to paint lipstick over its mouth, wanted to scratch slogans into its forehead. Patrice wouldn’t like it if she defaced the portrait. She stared at the walls—Patrice would like her to stare at the walls—until she had to go downstairs.

She went for long walks and she smoked while she walked. She didn’t realize she was doing this until one day when she forgot to take two cigarettes to cover the distance from Patrice’s to the Retrograde; she finished her first smoke, groped for her second and didn’t find it, and no longer knew where she was. The streets looked familiar; she just couldn’t remember what direction she was supposed to go in. She sat on the grass by one of the sorority houses on Rio Grande, in the shadow of a peach tree, and she tried to figure out where to go, tried to remember how to breathe.

Can I bum a smoke? she asked a likely-looking kid, from the patch-and-hemp look of him someone who lived in one of the co-ops a few blocks down.

You shouldn’t smoke, he said as he rolled her a cigarette from a half-empty pouch of Bali Shag. Are you a student here or something?

Here, she said. Oh, the University? No. I mean, maybe I will be. I don’t know.

It’s good not to know, he smiled down at her, nodding as he handed her the spit-sealed cigarette. She took it from him, looking up at him through her tiger-framed glasses, and she suddenly thought: I do not want to take this cigarette from this person. I hate this person. I despise this person for his weakness.

Thanks, she said, and she accepted a light and sucked the smoke down.

She was getting pretty good at dealing with people she despised, maybe.

She went to the Retrograde and she bought a latte and a croissant, for energy. She sat in the back and she took a free copy of the
Daily Texan
. She cut out panels from the terrible student comics and rearranged them in her notebook. Sloganeering fratboys gave zany rebuttals to anthropomorphic dogs. Anime freshmen laughed at crudely rendered A&M students. The word puzzle interrupted scenes of dorm pastoral, roommate conflicts, things wholly remote from her experience, things that should have been blueprints for her experience. She jumbled them all up, moved things around automatically. She checked for the flyer she’d left by the bathrooms. Someone had written over it.

JUST SAY NO TO CULT LANDLORDS

She found herself cursing under her breath at whoever the vandal was before she realized what she was doing.

They didn’t talk about Ira at all while they were working together to scour all signs of Ira’s presence from the downstairs apartment. She didn’t sleep at Patrice’s the whole time. She saw Patrice often enough: helped paint over the stains in Ira’s old bedroom, helped her call the classified ad bureau at the
Austin-American Statesman
to list the apartment as being for rent, helped her burn the bundles of
Bluecollar Reviews
—the hate literature, said Patrice—that they’d found in Ira’s living room, mostly fresh from Kinko’s, collated but still unstapled. She watched the letters on the page—
inside sources close to the cult
—crumple into themselves and disappear. She made the meals and kept the bathtub clean. She never slept over. She looked at her fingers and she knew that she’d strangle Patrice in her sleep.

Wrapped in Tabitha’s sheets, she had a dream: Patrice running down the street, naked, trying to escape from time. The Geo Prism barreling down at her. Julie standing at the curb, just at the point where the impact would occur. I have to jump in front of the car, she thought in her dream. I have to jump in front of the car for her. She always woke up before she found out if she jumped or not.

Tell me a moment, said Patrice, and she adjusted the dial on the Machine.

Hard white light slamming into the backs of Julie’s eyes. It was frightening how no thought was required, how after some sessions on the Machine you could slip right in to the place where you couldn’t hear the tick of the clock.

I’m sitting on the couch, said Julie. I’m cutting up Funky Winkerbean. You’re in the bedroom. You’re studying.

Define your identities, said Patrice.

I don’t know what that means, said Julie.

Who is
you
?

Patrice. Patrice is in the bedroom studying.

Go deeper on Patrice.

The dial twisted; the blue place where the light burned hardest burned brighter again; pressed in. The motor was moving inside the Machine; she could hear the light it spit out.

Go deeper on Patrice.

Patrice is lazy. Patrice is sexy.

Go deeper on Patrice.

The dial twisted; she could taste the light.

Go deeper on Patrice.

Her breasts smell like lemons.

Go deeper.

She sprawls. She drools in her sleep.

Go deeper.

I’m afraid for her.

The light was gone. She was gone. The motors were singing and the voices were adding to the chorus. She would go just a little bit longer, say just a little bit more.

Go deeper on afraid, said the voice.

Afraid?

Go deeper on afraid.

I’m afraid for Patrice.

Go deeper on afraid.

I’m afraid she’s being hurt and she doesn’t know it.

Go deeper.

I’m afraid she’s been hurt, very badly hurt.

Go deeper.

I’m afraid she’s been hurt so badly that she doesn’t know she’s hurt.

Go deeper.

I’m afraid. That’s all; I’m afraid.

Floating in the music and the light.

Go deeper on hurt.

Pain.

Go deeper.

Pain like you can’t stand it.

Go deeper.

Pain so bad you, you run away.

Go deeper on away.

She was hurtling in space, bent in on herself, falling forward.

Go deeper on away.

Away.

Go
deeper
.

Somewhere. Away somewhere!

Go deeper on somewhere.

Away anywhere.

Go deeper on where.

There was no where.

Go deeper on where.

The light.

Go deeper on where.

Tabitha. Where Tabitha went.

Go deeper on Tabitha.

She’s going where Tabitha went, she’s—

The light was burning the corner of her eyes and she could feel the chair under her again; the voice was only Patrice’s voice; Patrice was manipulating the dial. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and let Patrice ask questions that got no answers until the light was gone, leaving only a fat blue-violet eclipse in front of her eyes.

She’d said crazy things; things she hadn’t even known she’d thought.

What’d you learn? asked Patrice.

Through the haze clearing in front of her she could see Patrice’s face: her mouth loose, lazy with a kind of terrified anger.

I don’t remember, said Julie. I’m sorry, I don’t remember.

She lay down on the bed, facing the wall, until Patrice came to join her.

She let Patrice put her hands on her side, to soothe her or some bullshit; she let Patrice roll her onto her back. She squeezed her eyes shut and wrinkled her lips into a solid clot of muscle. Patrice went around it, found the soft parts on her face, kissed them instead. Somehow her clothes got taken off. Somehow she was very wet. Somehow she had the first orgasm she’d had in weeks, her thighs clamped like pliers around Patrice’s fluid knuckles inside her.

We don’t have to talk about what you realized, said Patrice when they were smoking in the darkness. You’re not a student. You can leave your inner identities ambiguous.

Julie watched the smoke curl over her and disappear.

Light my cigarette again, she said. Patrice did: an orange flash in a blue windowless room. Julie busied herself with taking the smoke in, hissing it out, inhaling the fog around her. Smoke, hiss, inhale, back to smoke again, almost an exercise program.

How are you, she said to Patrice. I feel like we haven’t talked since the whole thing with Ira.

Please don’t mention that name, Patrice said.

Julie lay on her back with the cigarette hanging over her. Be mature, she kept telling herself. Be mature. Don’t walk away. Be reasonable for this person who says crazy things to you in the dark.

I’ve been very tired, Patrice said finally. I’ve been sooo tired, Julie. You know that I’m being promoted, right? I reach Unbound in a month. There’s so much to do, and this stuff, on top of it.

You’re becoming Unbound, said Julie. Congratulations. I guess that means you don’t have any problems anymore.

Thank you so much for helping me, Patrice said. Thank you so much for helping with all these things around here, during all of this. There are so many sad and stressful things I would have had to think about without you being so helpful to me.

The smoke curled around her outline in the shadows at the far end of the room.

I don’t deserve you, she said at last, and Julie closed her eyes and turned away.

I’m tired, too, she said.

I’m glad we’re seeing more of you, said Michael. It’s been, what? A week or two now? I feel privileged.

I dunno, she said, taking a bite of chicken. Michael had cooked it, dried it out; she was just glad it wasn’t more of her pasta nonsense. I missed you guys, or something.

I feel honored, said Michael. You’ve got a lot on your mind to waste any energy missing us.

She closed her eyes as she bit into the parched meat.

I do, she said. I have a lot on my mind. How’s Mom?

Mom’s surviving, said Michael. How are you? Are you still with Patricia? he asked.

Patrice, she said. Yes.

She attacked her chicken, poured tightly designed mazes of barbecue sauce over its skin. Michael looked down at the leftover bones of his chicken, meat still cuddled in the spaces between tendon and joint, untouchable.

Love is all that matters, he said.

She smoked and she watched him and from somewhere down the hall she listened to the static of Linda’s TV.

She called Robbie later.

Where have you been? he asked. Hang on, I can’t talk to you right now. I have a pre-cal test in the morning.

Will you read some of the questions to me? she asked.

I really have to go, he said, and hung up.

She could go anywhere in the world, she told herself. She tried to imagine the countries she could go to: all the valleys were made of bronze skin, brown-eyed lakes, forests of red-gold trees with pairs of really good legs hanging from every branch like cherries. And in her dream the Geo Prism came barreling down.

7

There was a wedding at the Institute; Patrice got Julie to cater it. She bought Nathan’s hot dogs, chopped them into fingers, rolled them in phyllo dough, baked them all, burned them all. She layered onion dip on spinach leaves, then changed her mind and just mixed the dip and the leaves together with an egg beater; she bought crackers and arranged them in a fan pattern on a plate. She bought plastic cups and made Kool-Aid; she bought a plain white cake from the store and a tube of icing and added a bunch of broken clocks around the perimeter. She found a taxicab service in the Yellow Pages and hired it to bring her and the food in a jostled tower to the wedding location, which turned out to just be the Institute. The student on duty at the door watched her as she carried plates from the cab, meter still running; he didn’t hold the door; he did try to bum a smoke from her as the cab driver pulled away.

Past the reception room and the INTAKE desk, the Institute opened into a low-ceilinged dugout of a meeting hall, stained acoustic tiles forming a ceiling and a massive clock bisected by a lightning bolt hanging from the far wall behind two tall plastic green plants and a buffed wooden podium with a fake microphone stand. There were some ten rows of folding chairs, twenty chairs to a row with an aisle up the middle; when Julie tried to move one of them she found that they were all held together by metal bands that circled their legs. No one was sitting in the seats yet except two ushers who passed a hand-rolled cigarette back and forth, ashing on the floor. The groom lurked at the front and scowled at them. He wore a white shirt and navy slacks and he couldn’t have been more than nineteen. A silver watch was hanging from two of his fingers. Patrice stood by the folding table propped along the right of the room, three photographs—the bride, the groom, the two together—in a chrome-plated frame in front of a gigantic wedding cake with a wax figure of a bride and a groom, and the groom looked nothing like this groom, and there was an orange price sticker on the frame of the wedding photo and a paint spill on the surface of the long pressboard table.

You didn’t tell me there would already be cake, Julie said.

This is a wax cake, said Patrice. They reuse it. I’m very glad you’re here.

The ushers and the groom turned to look at them. Julie gave them a thumbs-up and began to take the cling wrap off of the dishes.

Does the groom give her that watch or something? Julie asked.

They each put on the watches, said Patrice. And they synchronize them.

That’s actually adorable, Julie said.

She finished unwrapping the dishes; she stacked the plastic cups in even rows of five; she put serving spoons into the bowls of dip. One of the students, freckled, came over, unfolded a napkin, and stacked six phyllo hot dog rolls on it, which he began to eat at the table.

You’re not going to wait until, you know, after the wedding? Julie asked. It’s traditional.

The student smirked at her.

I don’t believe in tradition, he said, and he put another hot dog in his mouth as he turned to walk away.

Patrice smiled at his back. She put her hand on Julie’s shoulder and she walked over to the group of students. They all greeted her warmly, offered her a cigarette.

The guests filed in. All of them were from the Institute, or at least came dressed in style in white and navy. The only exceptions were a tall man, a waxy mustache over his lip and wide light-smeared glasses, and an older woman in a striped baggy blouse and too-wide shorts, reading glasses on a plastic rhinestone chain around her neck. Based on where they were sitting in the front row and based on the hyperbolic jawline they shared with the groom, they must’ve been the parents. The mother nodded sadly into space, not looking at the podium. The father held her hand in solidarity. The groom clenched his teeth into a furious expression and refused to look at them, or at the bride when some kind of synthesized music, heavy on the brass, began to play; Patrice said goodbye to her co-workers and skipped back over to Julie, where she stubbed out her cigarette on her heel, grinned, and grabbed Julie’s fingers in hers. Julie looked at her: she looked at Julie, lowered her eyes, then turned to the front door. The wedding party was approaching.

The bride wore a white blouse and a navy skirt; there wasn’t even a ribbon on it or anything. She approached on the arm of a jowly man who carried a copy of Alistair Bantam’s book,
Practical Ceremonies for the Unbound and Getting There
(paperback, holofoil cover). The fat silver watch she’d slip onto the wrist of her beloved, now looking at her with a raised, appraising eyebrow, dangled from her press-on nails. The students in the folding chairs rose as they passed. The synthesized wedding music reached a crescendo of bleats and the bride took her place just opposite the groom. Neither smiled and they held each other’s eyes like they were in a prison yard, like unspeakable violence would fall on the first one to blink. Patrice’s hand tightened on Julie’s.

The jowly man leaned on the podium with a loud crack.

Can we help ourselves? he whispered to the room.

We can help ourselves, the room said back in one proud and droning voice.

Patrice said it too. Julie could just make it out, like the black shirt of a puppeteer moving against the black curtain.

The jowly man set the paperback on the podium.

Can you help yourselves? he asked the bride and groom.

We can help ourselves, said the bride, huskily.

We can help ourselves, said the groom, sounding like the first boy to die in the horror movie.

The jowly man nodded a deep and wobbling nod.

Fellow students, he said, and he coughed, and he kept coughing. A student in the front row ran to the podium with a bottle of water, jostling the bride. The jowly man emptied the bottle, shook his head again, and tossed the plastic at his feet.

Fellow students, he began again. Some thirty-seven years ago, in timebound terms, Dr. Alistair Bantam started this whole enterprise of ours. Today, in timebound terms, we keep it going. We do so because we’ve chosen to. It is our identity.

We are in sync, announced the wedding guests.

Yes, said the jowly man. But there are more identities in the world than you can shake a stick at.

He turned the page; this was actually some kind of formal text for the ceremony.

More identities than you can flush out of a beehive, said the jowly man. Well. Today, we’ve got a cute couple here who’re going to combine their identities all over again. What’s your name, honey?

The bride lowered her eyes and spoke up.

Mary, she said.

And you, fella? asked the jowly man. He accented it on the second syllable, like it was a foreign word.

Thomas, boomed the groom.

Tom and Mary, said the jowly man. Well. I guess you two have something to say to one another, don’t you?

They locked eyes again, not blinking. Mary’s lip curled, just like a wolf.

Tom, she said. There are no days in my life; there is only my life. But all the days of my life have been empty without you.

Mary, he said. There are no days in my life; there is only my life. But all the days of my life have been empty without you, too.

Then we have no choice, said Tom.

Then we have no choice, said Mary.

Patrice’s hand tightened around Julie’s fingers.

We’ve got to make one life out of this mess, said Tom, slipping the watch on his wrist.

We’ve got to make it happen, said Mary, slipping on her watch as well.

We’ve got to make it happen, mouthed Patrice. She’d been mouthing the words to the whole thing.

Julie let go of her hand.

I have to go do something, she whispered.

What? whispered Patrice, turning all the way to face her, but Julie was already walking away. On stage there was silence, except for the crackle of lit cigarettes and the tiny grind of the watch gears synchronizing in universal love.

Patrice would follow her. She went into the men’s bathroom. She was alone, and the place was as clean as the women’s, except for some stains in the grout of the floor tiles and the sharper smell of Lysol around everything. She could feel it in her nose, lemon-fresh and burning. She went into a stall, locked the door behind her. Then she leaned against the metal corner and leaned back her head. She took a cigarette out of the pack and held it in her hand, unlit, for some time.

Finally she lifted it to her lips, took out her lighter, caught the tip. As soon as she took her first breath she realized that she was going to throw up and there was no stopping it and she let the cigarette fall into the toilet.

She threw up into the toilet bowl, nothing but water, over and over. She stopped heaving, swallowed, threw up again.

It was useless to feel bad about the way one’s life was turning out. The only useful thing to think of was the specific set of steps one would take to get out of a bad situation. If she really focused on her vomit, really imagined its texture (mixed with tobacco confetti, staining it yellow), imagined its taste on its way up relative to its taste on the way down, she could make herself throw up again, she thought, this would help her get out of the bad situation. She couldn’t make herself throw up again. She felt bad about the way her life was turning out all of a sudden.

When she flushed and left the stall she found Gregory at the urinal. She hadn’t seen him since the day at the Retrograde. He winced when he saw her and cupped his hands more tightly around his penis, flushed.

Good God, he said. I guess you really are a dyke, huh?

She would have laughed if she didn’t feel so terrible. She walked to the sink and started the cold water running. She washed her hands, then brought a handful of the water to her mouth. She wasn’t going to leave because of him. She liked it in the men’s bathroom. Maybe she’d just start using it all the time.

Do you have a toothbrush on you? she asked.

I’m not in the habit of carrying one, he said. Do you have a purpose here?

He came up behind her in the mirror, loomed over her in the mirror. She spit out the water.

I’m trying to make my mouth not smell like vomit, she said. That’s my purpose here. The women’s bathroom was full or something.

Or something? he asked. Or what?

Or something, she said. It’d maybe be better if you left me alone.

He leaned in close over her shoulder.

Are you okay? he asked. Is Patrice okay?

She stared at Gregory: hazel around his pupils and pits in his skin, pink with blinking sweat under the fluorescent bathroom lights.

I’ve been having a pretty bad September so far, Greg, she said, and she slumped down to the tile floor in front of the sink, and he sat down on the tile floor with her and listened as she began to tell him everything.