David Wallace - Broom of the System

“Another one of these real happy stories, I see.”

“And now the theoretical dentist lies in the hospital bed that will be his home for the rest of his life, and the lovely woman is of course frantic with grief and love for her husband, and the dentist is lying there, in complete blackness, numb blackness, paralyzed, almost wholly insensate. But not, and now I repeat not, entirely incommunicado.”

“You can tell my socks are going to be all black and nasty from this rotten sand, Rick. This is that cheap kind of sand. Shit on fire.”

“Yes, not incommunicado, as I’m sure you see would be a very significant and precious thing for someone otherwise plunged completely into numb silent blackness. Not incommunicado because exactly one area of the dentist’s devastated body actually retains some feeling and power of movement, namely the central portion of his upper lip. And also because the dentist, having been as we know a consummate Scout, knew and knows Morse code, inside and out.”

“Morse code? Lips?”

“Communications to the dentist are effected simply by tapping the relevant message out in Morse code on the dentist’s upper lip. Messages from the dentist are possible provided that one is willing patiently to tap each letter of the Morse code alphabet onto the lip and wait for a signal from the dentist — a heart-tweakingly feeble and tiny movement of the upper lip — when the right letter has been reached. Needless to say, communications from the shattered dentist are incredibly slow and difficult to receive.”

“….”

“But see that communications to the dentist are comparatively easy. And now the Midwestern theoretical dentistry community, out of sheer respect for the broken and insensate dentist, and a desire to get his input, however understandably slight, on certain vexing high-level dental problems, seeks to engage someone in the Indianapolis area with a working knowledge of Morse code, to tap some of the current and pertinent developments in the dentist’s professional world onto his lip. Meanwhile the achingly lovely woman has undergone an intensive course in Morse code, so that she can communicate on a personal level with the broken dentist, and she visits him every day, relating items of interest, comforting the dentist in his numb black silence, tapping onto his upper lip how very much she loves him, et cetera, and also reading fiction to him, via Morse code, because the dentist has been a fanatical fiction reader, when sighted and whole. Specifically she begins tapping onto the theoretical dentist’s lip Frank Norris’s stunning novel McTeague, which the dentist had been reading just before his hideous mishap, and which she had picked up and seen on the very first page concerned the adventures of a dentist, and which indeed, you can tell from her husband’s lip movements, he enjoys having Morse-coded onto him. ”

“But and meanwhile the psychologist, having seen the news of the hideous auto accident, and having begun to scan the journals of theoretical dentistry for further news of the brilliant dentist’s physical and professional condition, sees in said journals the appeal for an Indianapolis Morse code tapper with some dental savvy, and he immediately comes forward to volunteer his services, although in reality we’re informed that his sole exposure to Morse code had been when he sent away for a Lone Ranger decoder ring as a boy, which ring turned out to be simply a Morse code key, which the boy was to use to decode disappointingly dull ads for Ralston that were transmitted in a supposedly mysterious code at the end of every episode of ‘The Lone Ranger,’ in Indianapolis.”

“Lone Ranger rings? Ralston?”

“He also passes himself off as having a keen amateur interest in the whole theoretical dentistry scene, et cetera. Of course the psychologist’s true motive is to insinuate himself back into the arms and lap of the achingly lovely, but also as he and we can anticipate given the situation and context increasingly troubled, woman. So the psychologist appears in the dentist’s hospital room with armloads of cutting-edge-theoretical-dentistry literature, and he and the woman reestablish an acquaintance, because the woman is almost always in the room tapping McTeague onto the dentist’s lip when the psychologist arrives.”

“Here’s the curve of the lake. We’re getting near the end of the trail.”

“And the psychologist begins ostensibly tapping important cutting-edge dental theory onto the dentist’s lip, while the woman stands there at the door, her eyes shining with gratitude at the psychologist. But in reality the psychologist is simply tapping random and meaningless taps onto the lip, he doesn’t give a damn what he’s tapping, and the paralyzed, deaf-dumb-and-blind dentist gets enormously confused, there in the numb black, and he begins trying to move his upper lip, to communicate his confusion to his wife, to ask what the problem is, what’s this gobbledygook being tapped onto his lip, but the psychologist is meanwhile engaging the woman in clever conversation, and mild flirtation, and the woman has been without the erotic attention and activity she involuntarily craves so desperately for an ominously long time, now, and so she’s distracted, and beginning to be tom, but at any rate she’s distracted, and since the relevant signal-movement of the theoretical dentist’s lip is such a truly pathetically tiny movement, she doesn’t ever see it, and so the wildly disoriented and frightened paralyzed dentist continues to have gibberish tapped onto his lip for hours each day, until one day the psychologist taps and repeats one particular Morse code message that he went to the trouble especially to learn, the message being to the effect that he was going to ball the paralyzed dentist’s achingly lovely wife until she bled, that he was going to take her away from the dentist and leave the dentist all alone in his numb lonely blackness, and that there was nothing the pathetic, paralyzed, helpless dentist could do about it; he was as inefficacious as he was inadequate.”

“Jesus, Rick, what is this?”

“I promise we’ll be able to relate to it. Let’s just bear with. On receipt of this Morse code message, the dentist in his hospital bed is flung into a state of such depression and despair that he stops moving his lip, however pathetically tinily, to signal his wife, even when she taps ‘I love you’ onto the lip. And the lovely wife perceives this sudden absence of lip movement as a sign of further physical deterioration in the dentist, and so she too is thrown into despair, which despair further aggravates her emotional condition vis à vis the sex-and-dimensionality neurosis, and she begins to offer less and less resistance to the malevolent blond psychologist’s frequent and oafish sexual advances, many of them made right there in the dentist’s hospital room, while the dentist lies right there, helpless and insensate.”

“Blond? A blond psychologist?”

“Affirmative.”

“Why is this story beginning to give me the creeps?”

“It means you’re beginning really to relate. You’re being intuitive about it.”

“What does being intuitive have to do with it?”

“Here’s the end of the trail. Shall we strike off into the interior? I sense that whatever it is we’re looking for is best looked for in the interior. In the heart of the Desert, Lenore. What do you say?”

“Let’s just go back the way we came. My nose hurts. This is clearly a waste of time. At least this way I get to look at the lake.”

“Christ, the lake, again. The lake is just a bunch of people fishing for black fish. Who cares about the lake?”

“Rick, why are you sweating like this? It’s hot, but it’s not that hot. Are you OK?”