Michael Martone - Seeing Eye

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “This is on the taxpayers’ nickel.” I wanted everyone to hear me. The men in the room, I could see, were trying hard not to look like they were listening.

I was anesthetized once. This was a few years ago. All four of my wisdom teeth were impacted. Before they put me under, I had to read a form and sign it. It said I understood all the things that could go wrong. The procedure was usually performed on patients much younger. Nerves could get cut. Dry sockets. Shattered jawbones. I don’t like blood or guts, so I signed it quickly to stop thinking about the possibilities. I signed, sitting in the chair while the oral surgeon held up the syringe, squirting out drops of the drug from the gleaming needle.

“We are going to put you into twilight sleep,” the doctor told me. “Not really sleep. Not deep enough to dream. You’ll just be very relaxed,” he said, slapping at my arm to find a vein. “If we weren’t going to work in your mouth, you’d tell us all your secrets. You’d just let go.”

I was out like a light. It felt like sleeping in a seat on an airplane. I remember thinking I wish I knew what my secrets were, what I really thought. But the drug that made me tell the truth also put me into twilight sleep so that I never really knew what I said. I know I was talking, telling them everything. I kept rocking along through the dark night. Then, the doctor and the nurses were looking at me strangely. Had they heard me say something, the muttering I had been making becoming clear when they swabbed up the blood or turned away to pick up another instrument? Did they stop and listen?

Tell me what I said, I said to them. But it came out nonsense. I could just begin to feel my face again, feel it swelling up. My lips and tongue had vanished.

“Who stole my tongue?” I said.

“Is someone coming to drive you home?” they asked as they walked me into another room.

“Ma mamph,” I said. I could hear again. I was vaguely aware of other bodies on cots scattered around the room. The doctor and the nurse eased me onto my own cot. They stuck a sheet of instructions in my hands and slid a small envelope into my shirt pocket.

“Those are your teeth,” they said. I had wanted to do something with the molars, polish them up and have them made into jewelry or shellac them for a paperweight. But when I opened the envelope later all that spilled out were splinters of bone, crumbs of teeth. They had to be chiseled out the doctor told me when I called. “They didn’t want to budge,” he said.

I looked at the pile of fragments on my desk. Here and there I could see a smooth contour of a tooth, the tip of a root, the sliced off crown like a flat-bottomed cloud. I pushed the parts around on the desk. Most were ragged, caked with clotted blood and bits of browning tissue. The pulpy nerves crumpled to dust. I poked the pieces into four piles, the bits making a scratching sound as they slid across the stationery they were on. I had drawn stairs on the paper, and I climbed them up and down, up and down.

Maybe it was the painkiller I was still taking. I sat there staring at the piles of dust thinking: These are all my secrets reduced to ashes.

“It’s the drugs,” Marilyn said when I told her how sad my wisdom teeth had made me. I tried to explain that the operation had pried something out of me. I couldn’t begin to explain it. “It’s the drugs talking,” she said.

The kitchen timer the Secret Service set bings on the end table, and they all stand up from the couches. They toss the People magazines in a heap on the coffee table. I turn back to the window and see the naval officer sprinting for the helicopter revving up on the lawn. He’ll fly directly to Bethesda. The official White House photographer snaps a few pictures of me at the desk. A Secret Service agent rushes my doodles to the shredder in the closet. “You want me to dial the phone,” I ask, “sign a few papers? What?”

“Just act natural,” the photographer says as aides usher Marilyn into the room. I stand up, push the chair from the desk. We kiss in front of the bureau, the elephants sniffing up at us. I hear the snap, snap of the camera, sense the white flash on my eyelids.

I am sentimental, I think. I feel lots of things. I just don’t let anyone know. No one will know how it felt to be the President of the United States for a few hours. Janine, on her way to work, cannot begin to imagine the depth of my feelings. Everyone else, the whole country waking up and getting ready for the new day, they can’t begin to imagine what I feel I feel.

The photographer wants another picture of us kissing. Marilyn leans into me again, her eyes closed, her head cocked to the right. I could kiss her on the cheek or on her mouth. Kissing is all different now. After the extraction of my teeth I found that feeling would never return to my lips, the nerve endings crushed or severed by the operation. I don’t like to think about that, nerves and tissues. I decide to kiss her mouth, and I do. It is a sensation I’ve grown to like. The numbness.

“What is your real name?” I ask the woman who is Barbie. She is shivering next to me as we stand in the open doorway at the end of the assembly line. The satin sash she wears matches the ribbon we are supposed to cut. The sky is gray, and the pigeons, scared up by the band music, are spiraling back down to the holes in the eaves and windows of the unused part of the factory where they roost. She tells me her name as she takes my arm. Her hard hat floats on top of her thick hair.

“You could be Ken,” she whispers to me. “Let’s pretend.”

The CEO and owner of this plant is speaking to a crowd of workers and reporters who spill out to the big parking lot. I’ve thought of that. I could be Ken. I have that block-shaped head. The hairline and the line of the jaw are Ken’s. I smile at her, imagining the way we look. I am holding the giant pair of scissors with my other hand. Barbie and Ken and a pair of scissors scaled to make us look doll-sized. Our smiles are frozen on our faces. You have to practice this. Yes, I could be Ken. He’s a good-looking guy. I take it as a compliment.

The Corvettes spaced along the line are pink. This factory now makes all kinds of electric cars for kids. The cars have two forward speeds and one in reverse controlled by pedals and gearshifts. The detailing of the paint and upholstery matches the vehicle it is modeled on. But I am told it is the novelty of the keys that come with the car, starting it up and shutting it off, that sells the product. Children in elementary school love them. They carry their jingling key rings to class for show-and-tell.

“It is like a real car,” the CEO told me earlier. The Corvettes are just one line called Barbie’s Corvette. It’s a licensing agreement with Mattel. “And it comes in any color you want,” the CEO said, “as long as it is pink.”

I thought it was a bad idea driving one of the Corvettes around the parking lot. The CEO and the PR people had hoped I would take one for a spin. I thought of Dukakis in the tank. I pictured myself wedged in the tiny cockpit, my knees up by my ears, my hands on the steering wheel between my feet. The Secret Service were to act as pylons. Stiff as posts, staring from behind their dark glasses at everything except me. I would scoot around their legs in the car, turning a complete circle around one agent, then slalom back through their dispersed pattern on the parking lot, a test track. I would try to cut the corners as close as possible, trench coats slapping my face.

Instead of driving one of the cars, I admired them during a photo opportunity. One turned slowly on a tabletop turntable, the television lights playing over its pink gloss finish. Barbie stroked the fenders with the fingers of her long hand. This was my first look at the car. The ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the assembly line came later. We were to take a tour of the plant and the factory showroom, where salesmen walked among the highly polished demonstration models handing out brochures. When we got there, we picked our way through the cars at our feet, the miniature Mercedes and tiny Jeeps. We stopped to marvel at a replica of a ’57 T-bird coupe.