Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

An hour before landing, a stewardess came by with a basket of Snickers bars. I took one. It was cold and solid, and when I took my first bite I felt a painless crunch and the presence of something foreign in my mouth. I spat into my napkin. In my hand, protruding from brown gunk, was a tooth — an incisor, or three-quarters of one, dull and filthy.

Dazed, I called over an attendant.

“I found a tooth in my chocolate bar,” I said.

She looked at my napkin with open fascination. “Wow…” Then she said carefully, “Are you sure it’s not yours?”

My tongue lodged itself in an unfamiliar space.

“Shit,” I said.

The tooth was graying in my pocket when I arrived back at the hotel. My first impression, on entering the lobby, was that the Chelsea had been invaded by theatergoers and lady golfers from the Midwest. It turned out that these sporty-looking men and women in Bermuda shorts and baseball caps were from the FBI and were here to arrest the drug dealer from the tenth floor. All of this was explained to me by the angel. I had barely seen him all summer, but here he was in his favorite chair. It was not a reassuring sight. His wings were tipped with dirt and his toenails had grown long and yellow. Something about his person — his feathers, or perhaps his feet — reeked. Sitting in the neighboring armchair was a small, dark-haired woman in her sixties. With her careful coiffure and chic gold bracelet and Gucci handbag, I took her to be one of those unfortunates who check into the Hotel Chelsea in the mistaken belief that it is a normal establishment with normal amenities. “This is my mother,” the angel said, flopping a wrist in her direction. I shook Mrs. Taspinar’s hand. “How do you do,” I said with as much conventionality as I could muster, as if an ostentatious show of comme il faut might minimize her son’s aberrancy and the dark, inordinately troubling gap in my smile and the collapse of law and order betokened by the detectives surrounding us and, this particular slope being a slippery one, the hellishness of the world.

She smiled up at me and made a remark in Turkish to her son.

“My mother is here to take me home,” the angel said. He was worrying the hem of his wedding dress as he watched the federal agents. “She thinks I should return to Istanbul and find a wife there. Maybe become a doctor. Or work in computers.”

The angel’s mother gave an excruciated laugh. “Have you been to Istanbul?” she asked me in a feminine, slightly lilting voice.

“No,” I said. “I hear it’s a wonderful city.” I felt terribly sorry for her.

“It is,” she said. “It is quite beautiful. Like San Francisco, with many hills and bridges.”

A moment followed in which the angel and his mother and I made a dumbstruck triangle.

“Well, I must go,” I said, picking up my travel bag. “It was very nice meeting you.”

At that moment there was a commotion by the front desk. A bunch of feds were spilling out of an elevator, and in their midst, head lowered and wrists bound by a plastic loop, was the ginger-bearded man who so loved horses.

“Hang in there, Tommy,” somebody called out to him. There was a Laurel and Hardy moment as men took turns squeezing through the glass doors, and then the ginger-bearded man was gone. He left no dog behind him. Evidently the date hadn’t worked out.

The next day, a Thursday, I asked the guys at the front desk about the in-house dentist. “He’s good,” I was told.

By lunchtime, a fake new tooth, as discolored as its neighbors, had materialized over the chip in my lower gum. The dentist, masked and gloved, hovered in and out of his little floodlight for the best part of an hour. It was unexpectedly reassuring to receive his deepest consideration. He nattered about his salmon-fishing vacations in Ireland, which by coincidence had been precisely the pastime of my Dutch former dentist and led me to wonder if there was a connection between angling and tinkering with teeth. Certainly he seemed as happy as a fisher, this New York practitioner, and why not? One of the great consolations of work must be its abbreviation of the world’s area, and it follows that it must be especially consoling to have one’s field of vision reduced to the space of a mouth. At any rate, I was very envious.

And I didn’t want to go to work. Perhaps operating under an oral inspiration, I decided instead to fix my bathtub’s drain, which for weeks had been almost fully blocked. I walked to a hardware store and bought a state-of-the-art plunger and attacked the drain like a maniac: instead of shriveling in minute increments, the bathwater now escaped in a tiny silver twister. This failed to satisfy me. I called in one of the hotel handymen. After somberly assessing the problem, he returned with a snake, that is, a length of wire he slithered into the depths of the hole in order to extract whatever might be down there. At that moment, the bathroom fell dark.

We went out into the hallway, where the fuses were located, and it became apparent that all the lighting in the hotel had failed. It turned out that the whole of the city — indeed most of northeast America, from Toronto to Buffalo to Cleveland to Detroit — had mislaid its power. We did not learn this until some while later; our immediate sense was that more disastrous violence had been perpetrated on the city. I joined the people collected in the hallways, which were lighted only by the distant brown skylight above the staircase, and somebody speculated authoritatively that the Indian Point power station had been hit and shut down. I thought about packing a bag at once and trying to escape the island on foot, or by boat, or running over to the Thirtieth Street heliport and paying whatever it took to clamber into a chopper, Saigon style. Instead, I found myself at a tenth-floor window surveying the panicked, immobilized traffic on West Twenty-third Street with the apartment’s tenant, a pretty, conventional-looking woman in her thirties named Jennifer. Presently Jennifer said, “There’s only one thing to do in a situation like this, and that’s drown our sorrows.” She brought out a bottle of coldish white wine and for an hour we watched the confusion on the street. “I’m leaving this city,” she declared at one point. “This is it. This is the final straw.” Then the good news reached us that in fact no disaster had occurred, and Jennifer said, “There’s only one thing to do in a situation like this, and that’s celebrate.” She produced another bottle of wine.

Stillness came over New York. Seventh Avenue was crowded with people trudging quietly homeward, and in the heat many of the pilgrims removed their jackets and even their shirts, so that a spectacle of mass near-nakedness presented itself to us. Jennifer spent a lot of time trying to contact her boyfriend. The phone systems were overloaded and she couldn’t get through. She was worried for him because, she intimated, there was something clueless about this man, whom she’d met, she said, at the auction house where she worked: he came in one day and gave her instructions to sell a diamond ring returned to him by his ex-fiancée. “I got him fifteen thousand bucks,” Jennifer said brazenly. Meanwhile her heart had been quite taken by this forlorn client. She learned that he’d accepted an offer from business school at Case Western over an offer from Harvard because his then fiancée — the woman for whom he’d bought the ring — had told him that Case Western was where she was herself bound; but then she accepted an offer from another school, leaving him high and dry in Ohio. “He didn’t take the hint,” Jennifer said. “But I guess hints don’t really cut it, do they?” It was only after he’d started at Case Western, Jennifer related, that he discovered that his fiancée was seeing another man. This was why she worried for him, Jennifer said, because he was someone capable of getting the wrong end of the stick.