The Dream of Doctor Bantam Read Online Free Page A

whole time. She sat with her sister, played Hole and Garbage on the psychedelic-painted stereo, and she cut out the newspaper comics and pasted them into her composition book. It was a habit she had, something that relaxed her. You could paste the panels in order, keep the plots the same, or you could mix things up, make members of the Patterson family flame out in terrifying traffic accidents involving Crankshaft’s bus, send bears from Mark Trail’s refuge into Montoli’s Pizza. She cut and cut and let the word balloons bubble up through her head as Tabitha shifted and sometimes moaned.
    She called into Einstein’s Arcade, pretending to be Tabitha, and she told them that she had a fever and that she couldn’t work that night.
    Yeah, I’ll bet you have a fever, cackled the manager.
    Julie gripped the phone receiver with both hands and held it until she felt like she could speak without shouting.
    Thanks, she finally said, see you soon.
    She put the receiver down and she started the Hole album over again.
    Linda and Michael talked her into going out to dinner that night. She’ll be fine, they told her; she just needs to sleep it off. The flu, it must have been.
    You can go wherever you like, Michael said. Sky’s the limit.
    I want to go to IHOP, she said. The one you can smoke at.
    Michael looked at her.
    I’m fine with it, Linda said.
    She picked at her lingonberry pancakes; she hated these things, actually.
    If you tell them to sing to me, she said, I’ll grow up to be stunted and hateful.
    Too late, coughed Linda.
    We’d never do that, said Michael. True to their word, they didn’t.
    They got home to find Tabitha gone.
    She’d called her boyfriend, one of them; he’d known her in high school. He’d always loved to watch her smoking by the parking lots before one day she wasn’t there anymore. He’d met her again at the arcade just after moving on campus; he thought she was still so beautiful, even if her eyes always looked tired, from staring at all those video screens, he guessed. He picked her up in his graduation SUV and took her to his dorm room. His roommate was there; he was one of those creeps who wanted to learn to play the guitar now that he was in college; he kept playing parts of the solo from “Little Wing” over and over and over while they smoked on the bed with towels stuffed under the door and dropped broad hints. Tabitha kept insisting and insisting. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, how she was talking. She was talking like she didn’t make sense, like things weren’t connecting. He should never have agreed with her to leave the dorm. He’d just felt so good—the legendary Tabitha Thatch, his at last.
    They left the dorm, though, and they drove into Hyde Park, into a cul-de-sac where there were no streetlights. They put back the front seats of his graduation SUV.
    She said something weird while they were, you know—just one of the weird things she said, actually. She said it was her sister’s birthday today, and that he should, you know, do her harder in honor of this. We’re all getting older, she said, older and smaller every single day.
    They finished; he was resting. They had the air conditioner on full. It was already the end of May; it was already sweltering.
    That was—the best sex of my entire life, he said to her.
    And here’s how she said it: I know the secret.
    It made no sense. She said she knew how to run so fast that she could escape history altogether. She could go back into the past, could find the place where it had all started to go wrong—the moment that had rippled outward in waves of causality, that had struck their father, that had floored their mother, that had kicked up Tabitha and Julie from the sea like some Joan Baez lyric: twin Venuses on the half-shell. Tabitha would fix all of that. She would twist time, save everything, make the world clean again without her.
    I finally know how to get outside of time, she said.
    She got out of the