William Lashner - Falls The Shadow

“I don’t understand the relevance to my sore tooth.”

“Dr. Pfeffer takes a holistic approach to the practice of dentistry. You don’t just treat a tooth, he likes to say, you treat a person.”

“How about if the person only wants to treat the damn tooth?”

She sighed cheerily. “That’s fine, Mr. Carl. Only answer the questions you are comfortable with, so long as you put down all your insurance information.”

“I don’t have dental insurance.”

“Then we take Visa and MasterCard.”

“Of course you do.”

“Just give us your card number and the expiration date. But remember, Mr. Carl, as Dr. Pfeffer constantly reminds his patients, every tooth is connected to a nerve, and every nerve is ultimately connected to every other nerve in a series of switches we don’t yet fully understand.” Her bright, cheery smile was suddenly not so cheery. “You wouldn’t want to cure the tooth only to find something else stops working.”

I smiled politely back until it hurt, sat down, read again question sixteen.

Are you currently in a fulfilling sexual relationship? How does one answer such a question? Do I talk about my past affairs, my hopes for the future? Do I discuss the dates I had been on in the last couple of months, the prospects I was prospecting for as we spoke. And what does fulfilling mean, anyway? Can a sexual relationship be equated to a brisket, where after your third portion you push away from the table and say, No more, thank you, I’m fulfilled ? By and large, my fulfilling relationships had not been sexual and my sexual relationships had not been fulfilling and that seemed to me exactly the way the world worked. So I thought about it some more, all the twists and turns, the ambiguities inherent in the question, when a door opened.

A woman holding a file strode out, her smile blinding in its whiteness, its width, its perfection. She was tall, thin, her ginger hair straight and silky, her eyes blue. She was dressed like a high-fashion model on a runway and was every bit as lovely.

I watched as she handed the file to the receptionist.

“How did it go, Ms. Kingsly?”

“Fine, Deirdre, wonderful.” She rubbed her tongue, pink and glistening, across her upper teeth. “He has such gentle hands.”

She glanced my way. I tried to smile. She turned back to the receptionist as if my chair had been empty.

“The doctor wants to see me in four months. A Wednesday would be best. In the afternoon.”

They chatted a bit more as the receptionist went through the book and staked out an appointment. Ms. Kingsly leaned forward to reach for a pen. Her supple body formed a dancer’s line with her arched back, her raised leg, her pointed toe. When she stood straight again, her nose wrinkled and her pretty teeth bit down on her lower lip as she wrote out her address on an appointment-reminder postcard.

I looked down once more at question sixteen. “No,” I wrote.

“Victor Carl,” came a voice, strong and Germanic. It was a voice that brooked no possibility of dissent, the voice of a leader of men. I rose instinctively, stood at attention, looked around for the voice’s source. She was standing tall in the doorway, dressed in white, holding a file to her chest. Her shoulders, her breasts, her hands were all strangely outsized. She looked like she could wring me out like a damp rag and that, quite possibly, I’d like it.

“Y-yes,” I said.

“We are ready for you, ja ,” she said without a breath of emotion flitting across her stony face. “I am Tilda, Dr. Pfeffer’s dental hygienist. We are very pleased that you have come to us. This way, and bring your questionnaire.”

I glanced nervously at Deirdre and Ms. Kingsly. They both looked back, widening their eyes encouragingly. Gentle hands.

“Sure,” I said. “Yes.”

Tilda, the hygienist, stepped aside as I walked past her into the hallway. Her scent was woody and strong. The brightness from the waiting room dimmed. The Muzak hushed when she closed the door behind us both.

“You will be in examination room B, ja ,” she said.

Well, I thought, that sounds cheery. Examination room B. Transpose the letters and it spells Maximum Pain. Doesn’t it?

She led me to a clean, brightly lit room down the hall. Arrayed around a large orange examination chair were drills and lights, X-ray guns, sinks, flat trays full of barbarous instruments. She ordered me into the chair, and I complied, lying back as she jacked it up and down and up again. My vertebrae bounced against the orange leatherette.

“Comfortable?”

“Put on some Jimmy Buffett, give me a margarita, and I could be at the beach.”

“ Ja , well,” she said, clearly not amused. “This is not the Costa del Sol. Wait here. The doctor will be with you shortly.”

“That’s exactly what I was afraid of.”

A few minutes later, he swept into the room, the doctor. I could tell he was the doctor because he wore a doctor’s mask over his mouth and a doctor’s scrub cap over his hair and the lettering on his white linen doctor’s jacket read DR. PFEFFER.

“What have we here?” He picked up my file, scanned quickly through the new-patient questionnaire. “Victor Carl, yes. And you are having some sort of problem?”

“My tooth.”

“That’s good,” he said. “If it was your foot, I’d have to say you’re in the wrong place.” He laughed. “Tell me about this tooth.”

“It hurts.”

“A lot?”

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“Was there any precipitating event?”

“I’m not sure, but a short while ago I got socked on the side of my jaw with the barrel of a gun.”

“A gun? Oh, my. Was it an accident?”

“No, he meant it, all right.”

“How interesting. Someday you’ll have to tell me the story. Every detail. I’ll be fascinated. But I suppose now I should take a look.”

He went to the sink, scrubbed his hands, took two rubber gloves out of a box on the counter. “Where is this tooth of yours?”

“Lower side, Dr. Pfeffer, on the right.”

“Oh, we’re not so formal here,” he said as he fitted the gloves onto his hands. “Why don’t I call you Victor?” He tightened a glove with the snap of rubber. “And you can call me Bob.”

“I am very concerned,” said Judge Armstrong from high on his bench, shaking his big round head with great concernedness, his voice falsetto high. “Very, very concerned.”

I leaned over to Beth at the counsel table in Judge Armstrong’s courtroom and said, without moving my swollen jaw, “I think he’s concerned.”

“What?” she said.

“Forget it,” I said.

“What?”

This is what happens when a tooth is pulled out in pieces and half of your jaw swells to the size of a grapefruit: No one can understand a word you say.

My visit to the dentist ended with Bob pulling my tooth, a grisly event that I still shudder to recall, which was why it was Beth who had put on the evidence at François Dubé’s hearing for a new trial and why Beth had made the argument. On one side of her sat François, in his prison jumpsuit, looking ever suave in maroon. I sat on the other, offering encouragement and trying not to spit blood onto the courtroom floor.

“The Supreme Court has said repeatedly that impeachment information can be crucially important to a fair trial,” said the judge. “In light of the circumstantial nature of the evidence in Mr. Dubé’s trial, the testimony of Seamus Dent, putting the defendant at the scene of the crime, was particularly significant. If the information about his drug use had been available to the defense, his credibility could have been shattered.”

“But, Your Honor,” said A.D.A. Mia Dalton, standing for the District Attorney’s Office, “in light of the fingerprint evidence, in light of the motive evidence, in light of the photograph of the defendant grasped in the victim’s hand, the proof in this case remains-”