Joshua Ferris: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

After Connie and I broke up, I played a little game with myself out on the streets of Manhattan. It was called Things Could Be Worse. Things could be worse, I said to myself, I could be that guy. Things could be worse, I said not a minute later, I could be that guy. Parading by everywhere were the disfigured, the destitute, the hideously ugly, the walking weeping, the self-scarred, the unappeasably pissed off. Things could be worse. Then a woman would pass by, one of thousands of New York women, coltishly long legged, impossibly high booted, always singly, or in pairs and trios, in possession of that beauty whose greatest cruelty was that it meant no harm, and as I died a little of want and agony, I said to myself, Things could be so much better.

Things Could Be Worse And Things Could Be So Much Better — that became the game, my running commentary on the streets of Manhattan, and I played it as well as the other slobs just trying to get by.

My life didn’t really begin until several months before the fateful Red Sox summer of 2011. Mrs. Convoy came to me one day in January of that year and said that something strange was going on in room 3. I looked in. I vaguely recognized the patient. He was scheduled to have a tooth removed. A botched filling (not one of mine) had invaded the nerve, he’d put off the root canal I’d long ago recommended, and at last he was in great motivating pain. But he was not moaning or crying. No, he was chanting, soft and low. He had placed his hands palms up, with thumbs and middle fingers touching, and was intoning something like, “Ah-rum… ah-rum…”

I sat down chairside. We shook hands, and I asked what he was doing. He had once studied to be a Tibetan monk, he told me, and though that period of his life had ended, when necessary he still applied his meditation techniques. In this case, he was preparing to have his tooth removed without the aid of anesthetic. He had worked under a guru who had mastered the art of eliminating pain.

“I have effected emptiness to the extreme,” he told me. “You just have to remember: though you lose the body, you do not die.”

His canine, in an advanced state of decay, was stained the color of weak tea but was still rooted to active nerves. No dentist in his right mind would pull a tooth without at least applying a local anesthetic. I told him that, and he finally agreed to the local. He resumed his meditative position, I juiced him with the needle, and then I went at his canine with a vigorous swaying grip. Two seconds into it he began to moan. I thought the moaning part and parcel of his effecting emptiness to the extreme, but it grew louder, filling the room, spilling out into the waiting area. I looked at Abby, my dental assistant, sitting across the patient from me, pink paper mask obscuring her features. She said nothing. I took the forceps out of my patient’s mouth and asked if everything was okay.

“Yes. Why?”

“You’re making noise.”

“Was I? I didn’t realize. I’m not actually here physically,” he said.

“You sound here physically.”

“I’ll try to be quieter,” he said. “Please continue.”

The moaning started up again almost immediately, rising to a modest howl. It was inchoate and bloody, like that of a newborn with stunted organs. I stopped. His red eyes were filmed with tears.

“You’re doing it again,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Moaning,” I said. “Howling. Are you sure the local’s working?”

“I’m thinking three or four weeks ahead of this pain,” he said. “I’m four to six weeks removed.”

“It shouldn’t be painful at all,” I said, “with the local.”

“And it’s not, not at all,” he said. “I’ll be completely silent.”

I resumed. He stopped me almost that very second.

“Can I have the full gas, please?”

I put him under and removed the tooth and replaced it with a temporary crown. When the gas wore off, Abby and I were in with another patient. Connie came into the room and informed me that the man was ready to leave but wanted to say goodbye first.

I should have fired Connie after she and I broke up. All she did for me was write the patient’s name on a card with the date and time of the next appointment. That was all she did, eight hours a day, longer on Thursdays. That and help Mrs. Convoy with the scheduling. And some billing, she also did some billing. But I had an outside service for billing. She never did enough billing that I no longer needed the outside service. And oh, right, the phone. Eight hours, sometimes more, of filling out little cards, inputting names into the schedule, doing not enough billing to save me from paying an outside service, and answering the phone. The rest of her time she spent glued to her me-machine.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Over there,” she said.

My patient stood as I entered the waiting room.

“I just wanted to say… thanks! Thanks for everything. This is the last time you’ll see me. I’m off to Israel!”

He was slurring just enough that I thought he might still be feeling the effects of the gas.

“Are you sure you don’t want a few more minutes to rest up?” I asked him.

“Oh, no, I’m not going just yet. I have to take the subway first. I just wanted to say how much I’ll miss you. I’ll miss everyone here. Everyone here is so nice. That lady’s nice. She’s super nice. And she’s super hot. I mean she’s really just, like, oh, fuck me. I would fuck that lady.”

He was pointing at Connie, who was looking on, as was the rest of the waiting room.

“Okay,” I said, “you need to recuperate a little longer. Come with me.”

“Can’t!” he cried, shrugging me off. “No time!”

“Then we’ll be seeing you.”

“No, you won’t!” he said. “I told you. I’m off to Israel!”

I started moving him toward the door. Connie handed me his jacket.

“But I’m not going to Israel because I’m Jewish. That’s probably what you think, isn’t it?”

“Let’s just get you in this other sleeve here…”

“But you’d be wrong!”

I opened the door. He got up close and whispered to me with a sour anesthetic breath.

“I’m an Ulm,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to Israel. I’m an Ulm, and so are you!”

I patted him on the back and then gave him a little prod.

“Congratulations. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you!” he said.

Gas makes people say funny things. I didn’t think another thing of it.

SIX MONTHS LATER, THE morning of Friday, the fifteenth of July 2011, began uneventfully. Cosmetic consultations and a gum graft and one hideously black tongue. “Nowhere Man” played softly four different times, or I was in four separate exam rooms while it played once. Later I caught myself humming it during a crown lengthening. Connie’s chignon slowly dried into the afternoon, filling the office with the scent of her hair. Mrs. Convoy suggested a new solution to the file overflow. Abby was silent.

You don’t have to do much to be a good dental assistant. Commit the instruments to memory and hand them off in anticipation of my needs. It’s not cardiovascular surgery. But it’s not all fun and games, either. Victims of car crashes and bar fights would come in with their mouths wrecked, and in addition to committing the instruments to memory and handing them off when I needed them, Abby had to be a steely professional when they first opened their mouths. You don’t want to be the victim of a car crash. Sure, I can get you eating and drinking again, but you’re never going back to the way it was. You’ve had your run of luck, and now it’s over. From this point forward, it’s all a compromise. From now until death it’s a matter of the best we can do.