Harry Turtledove (Editor) - The Enchanter Completed

A tiny, sharp-nosed pliers of shiny iron in his hand, Vankirk bent towards me-and I, I willingly opened my mouth. "Well, well," quoth he, commencing his work, "here is a thing most extraordinary."

"What is it?" I enquired-indistinctly, I fear me, on account of the interference with my ejaculation arising from his hand and instrument.

First removing the wire, as he had told me he would, he answered, "Why, how very well you have recovered from your ordeal, Mr. Legrand, and how perfectly the tooth I have transplanted into your jawbone has taken hold there. If I-if any man-could do such work with every patient, I would serve kings, and live as kings do; for kings are no less immune to the toothache than any other mortals."

"You did better with me than I had dreamt possible, Mr. Vankirk, and should I again stand in need of the services of a tooth-drawer-which, given the way of all flesh, and of my sorry flesh in especial, strikes me as being altogether too probable-you may rest assured I shall hasten hither to your establishment as quickly as ever I may; for, rendered insensible by the miracle of chloroform, I shall at last be able-or rather, happily unable-to cry out, imitating the famous and goodly Paul long ago in his first letter to the Corinthians, 'O pincers, where is thy sting? O torment, where is thy victory? and knowing myself to have triumphed over the agonies that have tortured mankind for ever and ever."

Still holding the pliers, Vankirk cocked his head to one side, examining me with a keenness most disconcerting. After a moment, he shook his head, a quizzical expression playing across his countenance. "Extraordinary indeed," he murmured.

"Why say you that, sir, when I-?"

I had scarcely begun the question ere the tooth-drawer raised a hand, quelling my utterance before it could be well born. "Extraordinary in that you are, to all appearances, a changed man," he said.

"Why, so I am-I am a man free from pain, for which I shall remain ever in your debt, figuratively if not financially," I said.

"Our financial arrangements are satisfactory in the highest degree," Vankirk said. "By every account reaching my ear, you are and have always been a man of the nicest scrupulosity in respect to money, and in this you seem to have altered not by the smallest jot or tittle; not even by the proverbial iota, smaller than either. But your present style-how shall I say it? — differs somewhat from that which I observed in you a fortnight previously. And, as the illustrious Buffon (not to be confused with any of our present illustrious buffoons) so justly remarked, Le style c'est l'homme m-me . I trust you would agree?"

"How could any man disagree with such a sage observation?" I returned. "As an apologia, however, I must remind you that my faculties at the time of our last encounter were more than a little deranged by the pain of which you so skillfully relieved me."

"It could be," he replied, studying me with even greater keenness than before. "Yes, it could be. Yet the transformation seems too striking for that to be the sole fount wherefrom it arises."

"I know none other, unless"-and I laughed; yes, laughed! fool that I was-"you would include in your calculations the tooth of which you made me a gift in exchange for my own dear, departed bicuspid. Tell me, if you would-what is the tooth's true origin? Some source closer than a sanguinary field from the late war with Mexico? Am I correct in guessing you obtained it from some local-harvester, I believe the term is?"

"Well-since from some source or another-"

"My eldest son, whose particular friend is a doctor."

"I see. Since you have learned the term from your son, then, I shall not deny the brute fact of the matter. Yes, you have a Baltimore tooth, not one from the Mexican War. But I insist, Mr. Legrand, that it is a tooth as sound as I declared it to be when first I showed it to you, the truth of which is demonstrated by the rapidity and thoroughness with which it has incorporated itself into the matrix of your dentition. That last you cannot possibly deny."

"Nor would I attempt to do so," I replied, rising from the chair in which I had, on this occasion, neither suffered the tortures inflicted upon those condemned to the nether regions by the just judgement of the Almighty nor experienced the miracle of complete insensibility granted through the agency of the dentist's chloroform, but merely undergone some tiny and transitory discomfort whilst Vankirk removed the wire tethering the transplanted tooth to its natural neighbor. "Truly, I have a better opinion of you after your frank and manly admission of the facts of the matter than I would have had as the result of some vain and pompous effort at dissembling."

Vankirk scraped a match against the sole of his shoe to light a cigarillo; the sulfurous stink springing from the combustion of the match head warred briefly with the tobacco's sweeter smoke before failing, just as the Opponent of all that is good, he who dwells in brimstone, shall surely fail at the end of days. Pausing after his first inhalation, he said, "Your style has indeed undergone an alteration; and what this portends, and whether it be for good or ill, I know not-and, I believe, only the sequential unfolding of the leaves of the Book of Time shall hold the answer."

"I am but a man; a featherless biped, as the divine Plato put it; though not, I should hope, Voltaire the cynic's plucked chicken; and, as a man, I can only agree that the future is unknowable until it shall have become first present and then past; while, as a man named William Legrand-commonly called Bill-I can only assert that no change perceptible to me other than the relief of my distress through your art has eventuated in the time that is now the recent past, this time being as impalpable as the future but, unlike it, perceptible through memory, whatever sort of spiritual or physical phenomenon memory may one day prove to be."

"God bless my soul," the tooth-drawer declared, and then, upon due reflection, "yes, and yours as well."

"Yes," I said, "and mine as well."

On leaving his place of business, I truly believed all would be well, or as well as it might be for one with my notorious dental difficulties. The only cloud appearing upon the horizon of my imagination was the fear-no, not really the fear; say rather, the concern-that the tooth transplanted to my maxilla, whencever it first came, would weaken and abandon its adopted home. This showed no sign of eventuating. Indeed, as day followed day that tooth became attached ever more firmly to my jaw. Would that my own had been so tenacious of adhesion to the jawbone from which they sprang.

For some considerable while, then, all seemed well. No-again I misstate the plain truth, which is that for some considerable while all was well. Not every thing was perfect; we speak of a man's life, after all, not an angel's. But all went as I would have hoped, or near enough. The most that occurred of an unusual-certainly not uncanny, not yet-nature was that one or two or perhaps even several individuals imitated Vankirk the tooth-drawer in remarking upon what they perceived as an alteration to my accustomed forms of speech.

"What ever can you mean?" I enquired of one of these, a newspaper man by the name of Thomas Bob. "I note no variation from my utterances of days gone by."

"Whether it be perceptible to yourself or not, your prolixity, I must tell you, has increased to a remarkable degree," Thomas Bob replied. "Were that not so, would I remark upon it?" He laughed immoderately; such were the jests of which he was enamored.

"My prolixity, say you? Why, am I not the same simple, straightforward fellow I always was, a man to call a spade a spade, and not, with Tacitus, an implement for digging trenches-you will, I pray, forgive my failing to append the original Latin, which unfortunately I cannot at the moment-"