Since he was a Little in the Sanctuary, the dream had come to him. A dream of a long-gone world and a voice that sang inside him. It was, in its way, a dream like any other, made of sound and light and sensation. A dream of a fat woman in her kitchen, breathing smoke. The woman shoving food into her wide, wobbling cave of a mouth, talking into her telephone, a curious object with a place to talk into and another to listen. Somehow he knew what this thing was, that it was a telephone, and in this manner Sanjay had come to understand that this wasn’t just a dream he was having. It was a vision. A vision of the Time Before. And the voice inside him singing its mysterious name: I am Babcock.

I am Babcock. We are Babcock.

Babcock. Babcock. Babcock.

He’d thought of Babcock, back then, as a kind of imaginary friend—no different, really, than a game of pretend, though the game did not end. Babcock was always with him, in the Big Room and the courtyard and taking his meals and climbing into his cot at night. The events of the dream had felt no different to him than the other dreams he had, the usual sorts of things, silly and childish, like taking a bath or playing on the tires or watching a squirrel eating nuts. Sometimes he dreamed those things and sometimes he dreamed about a fat woman in the Time Before, and there was no rhyme or reason to it.

He remembered a day, long ago, sitting in circle in the Big Room when Teacher had said, Let’s talk about what it means to be a friend. The children had just had lunch; he was full of the warm, sleepy feeling of having eaten a meal. The other Littles were laughing and fooling around though he was not, he wasn’t like that, he did as he was told, and then Teacher clapped her hands to silence them and because he was so good, the only one, she turned to him, her kind face wearing the expression of someone about to bestow a present, the wonderful present of her attention, and said, Tell us, Little Sanjay, who are your friends?

“Babcock,” he replied.