The Dream of Doctor Bantam (15 page)

Always stay with me, said Patrice into the smoke. Always be here.

I always will, said Julie, without thinking.

It was June, and in August she’d go back for her senior year of high school. It was June and she wanted to save someone’s soul; it was June and she talked with beautiful girls about the meaning of time and the meaning of life; it was June and she ran her fingers through red-gold hair in an apartment far, far from home. It was June, and for all her life she had lived on a dock, pacing back and forth looking for ships, and now one was passing her by, and she shot her harpoon gun over the sea wall and the breakers, into the prow, on an impossible tightrope she’d walked until she was here in front of the prow, the woman cutting the waves, her wood faded to yellow and her eyes sad-carved, dripping with salt, and it was June, and Julie clung to the woman on the prow, happy stowaway, for as long as her arms could hold out, and dreamed as cold water crashed into her again and again and she dreamed she could catch rainbows in the spray if she looked.

And in August, the ship would shake her loose; summer would be over and her real life would start again. She would let go and fall into the sea. Or she would hang on and let the ship carry her—where? Wherever they would go, together.

Patrice was asleep, hot breath on the soft skin above her breast; she held tighter, and as much as she didn’t believe it, as much as she hated it, she offered up this prayer: let Patrice be right about time. Let the dream of Doctor Bantam be real; let August never come.

INSTITUTE OF TEMPORAL ILLUSIONS

INTERNAL SERVICES MEMO

“The one moral commandment, the one true virtue in any honest identity, can be expressed in one word:
simplify!
”

— Alistair Bantam, Founder

From: Identity Counseling Administration, ITI Branch #0242 (AU-TEX), 1st Floor Coordinator

To: Identity Evaluations, ITI Branch #0242 (AU-TEX), 2nd Floor Coordinator

cc: National ITI Archives, Quality Control Identity Processing Office, Bantam Office of Ephemeral Archiving

Re: Report and Evaluation of Identity Counseling Session REFERENCE 10/28/02, Dual Identity, Patrice Marechal Degree 0–9 and Gregory Roche Degree 0–10

PURPOSE: To make honest the shared identity of Roche 0–10 and Marechal 0–9, both Branch #0242 AU-TEX staff for REFERENCE 3 and REFERNECE 5 respectively and improve relative security in identities of both parties and also redress diminishment of productivity caused by lack of honesty in shared identity of both parties. To make things better.

MATERIALS:

Machine, Bantam Memory Elucidator Mk VIII

Machine, Bantam Memory Elucidator Mk VIII (second copy)

Paper (ream, 1x)

#2H Pencils (12x)

Identities (2x)

PROCEDURES:

(1) The order of administration of Machine counseling is determined by a coin flip. Roche’s case is attended to with greater priority than Marechal’s, resulting from her choosing TAILS, erroneously.

(2) Both identities are taken into a room and the Machine is administered. Counselors zero out Machine feedback then run association drills to remind the fundamental identity to be forthcoming about questions on sensitive topics relating to interpersonal relationships without slamming, distorting, or blinking out sensitive data.

(3) Identical questions are administered to both identities and the results recorded using an equal quantity of pencils, paper, etc. according to the judgment of the administrator.

(4) The results of the interview are attached below.

RESULTS:

Attached is the full transcript of the interviews with Roche and with Marechal, pursuant to Founder’s Directive of 04/02/81 on Information Retention.

INTERVIEW 10/28/02:011: ROCHE

Describe the object of inquiry when she first became known to you.

I saw her first—or our identities became known to one another first I guess, more precisely—when I was working pre-INTAKE on Guadalupe street. The branch was doing below-optimal, lots of bounces and flakes and headshakers on our roster, and only two people routed into dismantling/counseling over the weeks prior, so as you can imagine my boss was kind of riding me and I was pretty stressed out. So I was working hard. I was pitching hardballs, raving up enthusiasm, basically running any process I could run to route people into counseling and grow the chapter and keep myself, you know, on course to zero.

You haven’t answered. Describe the object of inquiry when she first became known to you.

She was—it was a positive interaction. I mean I thought she was cute and all—and serious-minded and not too timebound or anything, also. Maybe other identities wouldn’t have the same perception of her as cute. She was dressed like everyone else was, you know, burnt orange hoodie and white shorts and white sneakers, and her red hair looked kind of wet as she rushed from class to dorm and back. She had a pencil stuck into it or something—it looked kind of bizarre.

Go deeper on the object of inquiry.

She didn’t have that pale skin that most redheads had. She was like half Greek or something—she looked kind of bronzed, stained. You could tell that underneath the bulky sweater fabric she had nice curves—small, kind of aerodynamic, but still nice. Her face was kind of long and her eyes kind of bulged out. She looked a little crazy, honestly. She looked like there was some furious little orchestra playing inside her head and she had to be 100 percent focused on conducting it, and anytime you said anything to her it was like she had to rewrite the whole score on the fly around what you said, conducting all the while. So I guess we clicked or something. We both seemed kind of stressed—I mean, serious too.

Describe your initial interactions with the object.

I asked her if she was having a good day, pursuant to the usual rave-up process. She stopped and she looked at me—and I don’t mean she just slowed down; it was like she froze in place and stared. She said, I don’t know if I’m having a good day.

So I asked her if there was any stress in her life that might be causing her not to have a good day. She thought about it.

I guess my classes, she said. I guess I’m having a hard time with my economics classes.

Can you help yourself? I asked.

I’m sorry? she said. She had that kind of weird way of talking—you know how she talks, kind of monotone. She had that even then.

It’s what we say, I said. People always ask you if they can help you, in like stores and things. But what they mean is: can I help you buy something from me? So we like to ask: can you help yourself? It’s a little more honest, and people can only really help themselves in the end. Don’t you agree?

She stared at me—her lips fell open. She still had braces, then—it seemed weird to me, someone having braces at nineteen, which is how old she was, then. Who gets braces at nineteen?

I’m not sure if I can help myself, she said.

That’s ridiculous, I smiled. Every person in the world can help himself, or herself. You just have to want to learn how.

I gave her the questioning-eyes process, but I didn’t even need to—at that point it was, you know, like fish in a barrel. I followed the Bantam program for pre-INTAKE and didn’t even have to branch down the flowchart very far. She agreed to come in for a free relaxation course in three minutes I think. Score one stat point for the week and the heat was a little bit off of me. At the time it seemed like a miracle.

At the time?

Oh God—I mean, let me be precise—it seems like a miracle here, where we were then on the map of time; here, where we are now, talking to you, it seems less like a miracle. I guess this is the source of the problems I’ve been having with this whole breakup?

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.