The Dream of Doctor Bantam (27 page)
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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