David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Let’s go. Here’s the bus. The crowd’s mostly getting on. Let’s get out of this shadow.”

“Did you get all that?”

“Dentist, Scoutmaster, merit badge, rescue, woman with dimension problems. Check. But I’d really rather be talking, Rick.”

“Listen, Lenore, shall we get on the bus? Just on a lark? What do you say?”

“Are you kidding? Do you know what the crowds’ll be like in the interior? It’s Saturday, you might have forgotten. Let’s just stay along the good old lake, here.”

“Why this fixation on the proximity of the lake?”

“….”

“At any rate, we are informed that the now still unconscious psychologist had in therapy sessions professed to see the achingly lovely woman’s psychological troubles as stemming from the con-, tinual sexual advances and erotic situations that necessarily confront the woman as she goes about her life in the collective societal environment of Indianapolis, where she lives, so that the problem is conceived of as, a, due to the constant erotic battering at the woman’s sexual identity from without by other members of Indianapolis’s society, which societal unit the psychologist clearly loathes, but and b, due to the woman’s own failure to develop a sufficiently strong sense of self and interior worth to allow her to be discriminating about which of the constant stream of advances to respond to and allow to have any bearing whatsoever on said interior self and sense of worth.”

“My nose is going to get sunburned. I can feel the sunburn starting.”

“I suppose you want me to ask about the gymnastics. I read a rather cutting review in the D ealer. ”

“Look, if you want to talk, like as in have a conversation, good, because we really need to. Let’s just hunker right down here in the sand and—”

“No, no, wait. Not yet. We’re still dangling.”

“Beg pardon?”

“To return, the context gives us to understand that the psychologist is actually at best warped and at worst simply evil, and that though he had lured the achingly lovely but troubled woman out deep into the coniferous interior Indiana wastes ostensibly to rap, one on one, about her sense of self and the strength thereof, ostensibly away from all the disturbing exterior erotic assaults the woman suffers in collective society, actually the psychologist really just wanted to seduce the poor woman, which seduction is immediately attempted, in a positively oafish way, the minute the two have hiked out of earshot of civilization, and but which seduction, however oafish, the poor insecure ambiguously dimensional woman is in no shape to resist, and thus the better part of two days were spent by the psychologist and the woman rutting like crazed weasels on the bed of soft pine needles that covers the coniferous wastes, and actually it was in the throes of one such rutting-session that the psychologist’s magnetic clipboard came into contact with and potentially disastrously damaged the woman’s compass, which was the hikers’ only means of orientation.”

“….”

“The disaster being only potential, of course, because of the timely intervention, after a tense, pine-pitch-eating week or so, of the theoretical dentist and his troop of Scouts, which intervention and rescue prompts a gush of narrative and explanation and context from the woman, who clearly flips for the dentist at first sight, even though he has a slight hair-loss problem, but anyway the gushing and flipping, not to mention the initial aching loveliness, prompts a reciprocal rush of emotion in the dentist, who is a widower; and so in a dubious but not entirely inappropriate passage we are informed that a certain nascent love-plant sends up a fragile and vulnerable green shoot or two through the desolate coniferous soil between the woman and the dentist, while, all about them and the love-shoot, Scouts mill, and accomplish difficult merit-badge-related tasks, and chart elaborate retum-courses that involve steering by the lights of esoteric nebulae, and propose to drag the very worse-for-wear psychologist back to civilization on a gumey sled of branches and pitch and woven pine needles.”

“Rick, is this supposed to be a sign?”

“Just wait for the climax.”

“No, Rick, here. See? Footprints, but around every print four holes, like from an old person’s walker sinking in the sand. Is this supposed to be somebody walking, with a walker?”

“I think not. I think this person here was simply steering a course through a field of sun umbrellas. This place is after all positively littered with sun umbrellas. These holes don’t work for me as walker tracks. Besides, we’re duneless, here, you might have noticed.”

“I guess you’re right….”

“Anyway, to make something long attractively shorter, the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman get married. They fall madly, uncontrollably in love, and decide to unite forever, and the woman tells the dentist about her whole neurosis-set, and the dentist is incredibly compassionate, and says he doesn’t care, and he goes and has a long talk with the eventually physically recovered psychologist, and forgives him for taking advantage of a completely helpless patient, and purely out of compassion and goodness asks him to be the best man at the impending wedding, the wedding is impending, and the psychologist is understandably relieved at the dentist’s discretion, but he’s also still wildly infatuated with the achingly lovely woman, and so even during the wedding — which is attended by, among others, the dentist’s brother, the woman’s whole huge Indianapolis clan, and by everyone who’s anyone in the field of theoretical dentistry — the psychologist is covertly smirking and chuckling and checking out the woman’s body under her wedding dress.”

“I’m tired.”

“Which checking out is at this point futile, though, because although the woman still has the pathological need for sexual attention and activity in order to stave off violent neurotic upheavals, said need is let’s just say being more than adequately fulfilled by the theoretical dentist, in whom the lovely woman has reawakened a surge of passion and an urge for intimacy the dentist has not felt since his youth, when he was fresh out of the Scouts. And here a long section is devoted to graphic descriptions of the implications of all these reawakened surges and fulfilled needs, some of the most vivid of which involve certain dental apparati being put to uses which — although emotionally innocent, and so of course ultimately OK — are far in excess of the average dentist’s wildest fantasies. If you get my drift.”

“Maybe the drift should be sped up. I really want to talk to you.”

“I sense that, Lenore, believe me. Let’s do it within the context provided.”

“So at least get on with it, then.”

“And so the theoretical dentist and the achingly lovely woman are married, and truly staggering levels of intimacy are being attained, and neither partner rejects anything the other wants to do as undesirable or sick, and the woman is unbelievably happy, because she is wildly in love with this admittedly older but still very impressive theoretical dentist, and because her pathological needs are being satisfied within an emotionally and socially acceptable framework. And the theoretical dentist is unbelievably happy, too, because of his fierce and complete love for the achingly lovely woman, and because satisfying her prodigious needs is not exactly torture for him, either. So things are simply wonderful.”

“….”

“Until, that is, the theoretical dentist is the victim of a hideous auto accident, in which he was not at fault, and is catastrophically injured, being as a result of the accident now deaf, dumb, blind, and nearly completely paralyzed and insensate, again through absolutely no fault of his own.”