The Dream of Doctor Bantam by Jeanne Thornton Page B

Tabitha’s old bike, where it looked like it belonged. She pulled it free, threw it down on the grass, and went upstairs to bed holding her arms tight around herself. She slept until Linda got home and the tobacco smoke had worked its way down the hall.
    Patrice called her that evening at ten as she was eating frozen pancakes fresh from the microwave.
    I just got back from work, she said. I slept so terribly. Can you come over right away and fix some dinner?
    It’s ten o’clock at night, said Julie.
    The time isn’t important, said Patrice. I’m so hungry, Julie. I’m so completely hungry and you need to be here.
    Julie went to hang up the phone, but saw the yellow pages resting on the little footstool below the receiver first. She sat at the table with the phone cradled under her ear and paged through it.
    Here, she said. Pizza Classics. They have a deal, nine dollars for a large pepperoni pizza.
    I don’t eat meat, whimpered Patrice.
    They have a deal, twelve dollars for a large vegetable pizza, said Julie. Here’s the number.
    She read the number out. She waited, her pancakes turning to mush.
    Did you write it down? she asked.
    So I just call this number and they bring me the pizza, Patrice said, slowly.
    It took ten minutes of explaining before Julie was sure that she understood the process and could get through it on her own: the call, the directions, the meeting at the door, the question of whether the pizza is handed over or left in a neutral location, the question of the tip.
    Okay, said Patrice at last. I think I understand the principles.
    Awesome, said Julie. Congratulations. I have to go.
    Will you come back tomorrow at eight? asked Patrice.
    Will you beg me? asked Julie, just before she hung up the phone.
    She sat in the kitchen and finished her pancakes, stirring the icy batter at the bottom of the bowl with her spoon. Then she went to the phone and dialed Patrice’s number.
    Hello? asked Patrice. Is there a problem? Is the pizza still coming?
    Yes, I’ll come back tomorrow at eight, Julie said, and hung up.
    All the next day she couldn’t relax; eight o’clock hung over her. She rode the mystery bike to the bookstore, to the Retrograde for endless glasses of free water, to the creek that ran by Lamar where the college kids played Frisbee golf on their days off. She took her copy of The Dream and Reality of Time Travel along and she sat on the limestone and mud banks of the creek, and she watched college kids and she calculated the time until she became one of them—three months of summer, twelve months of bulk hours—and she wondered just what the difference could be, what would happen to her in that time to make her think that Frisbee golf seemed like a good idea.
    It is a long-held dream of human beings, homo sapiens , said the copy of The Dream and Reality of Time Travel that Tabitha had once intended to give her as a birthday joke, to escape from time. You may not call this dream by such an accurate name, of course. Perhaps you want something simpler for yourself. You want a good, fulfilling job. Success in school. Your own home; your own car. A loving relationship. The pursuit of an escape from time goes by many complicated names and many complicated masks.
    But all the masks cover a single leering face! It is the ugliest face in the world and the most terrifying. If we saw it for what it truly is, we think we would scream in terror. So instead we substitute our masks for the truth. We deny that there is even a face to escape from.
    The face that stares at us is time.
    I see the face for what it is. You see it, too, if you are honest with yourself.
    And if you can see time for what it is—if you stare into the face—the face of time ceases to be terrifying. You will lose the urge to scream. Instead, you will laugh at the fact that you were terrified for so long.
    What is time?
    Time is an illusion, the illusion that life proceeds as a series of events that “happen” to a series of