Easy Listening

[Side note: The Heide Award, given to the best creative piece campus-wide during a school year, went to a piece entitled "Cumming Shit" and written by a man named Elmo.  I can’t tell you how many things about that sentence that bother me, only because no one has that kind of time.]

My ears itch at the silence, and then the man above me begins to whistle tunelessly.  It might be Dixie, but he doesn’t strike me as the secessionist type.  The mouth mirror retracts my cheek as the sickle probe bounces over the enamel moguls of my teeth.  It catches, and the dentist tsks-tsks.  He looks like a robot, a Bradbury creation–you know, one of those 1960 notions of how an automaton would appear in 2009–because of the dual magnifying lenses hooked over his silver-rimmed glasses and the mask obscuring much of his face.  Thin, almost gossamer wisps of hair circle the crown of his head like a tonsured monk, and when he switches on the lamp on those loupes, I imagine a collier entering the coal mine.  What will the miner excavate today?

Could I get some suction, please? the dentist asks, turning towards his stainless steel tray arrayed with a dungeon’s worth of torture instruments.  The dental assistant runs a hissing white straw along the bottom of my gums, the membranes alongside occasionally sticking in the vacuum and interrupting the air flow.  Alright, we’re going to have to fill these, the dentist confidently opines as he turns back to me, a three inch needle in his left hand.  A canister of lidocaine sits in the syringe like a shell sits in a bolt-action’s breech.  You’re a lefty? I ask, my eyes glued to the needle.  It might as well have been potassium chloride.  What if it is potassium chloride?!  A labeling disaster at a pharmaceutical manufacturer, a pandemic of well-meaning twentysomethings dead in dentist’s chairs across the country?!

Nah, he says casually.  I sprained a finger on my right.  It makes holding the syringe uncomfortable for me.  I nearly laugh.  He cranes his neck until we’re face-to-face in uncomfortable proximity.  He returns his attention to his assistant before the needle even touches my gums. They chat amicably, and the slow, sharp, building ache of anesthetic entering my system distracts me from their conversation.  I just stare up at the iridescent plate hanging overhead and listen to the standard easy listening fare pumping softly through the office speakers.  "Closing Time" by Semisonic, which is actually about a baby being born, not a bar at night’s end.  I close my eyes and feel the lidocaine’s tingling skitter and scatter like a centipede’s legs tap dancing across my lip.  They’re wearing cold metal shoes, and when I concentrate on the rhythm of those pins-and-needles, I convince myself it’s something profound that time forgot.  Then again, though, I’m fucking full of myself.

He puts the anesthetic away.  Leaving the room for a moment, he leaves me alone with the assistant.  She is in her mid-forties, I guess, although she carries the years like gifts instead of burdens.  It should be awkward because I once dated her daughter, but it’s not.  She thinks I’m intelligent and eccentric, so she guilelessly prods me towards ridiculous and harmless assertions, like "stingrays being deadly flapjacks."  Which they are.  He comes back.  Are you numb yet, he questions, in your lip and tongue?  

I am not.  Perhaps half-numb.  So he sits down and pulls out another shell from his cache of ammunition and prepares to shoot me again.  You’re usually pretty hard to numb, he tells me, probably to remind me that this is my fault and not his inability as a dentist.  Although, really, he doesn’t need to remind me.  Last time I laid sacrificial lamb-prone on his chair he shot me four times, before I simply told him to get on with it and then endured the pain.  Not to mention the hours-later sensation resembling having my jaw broken by a prizefighter.  You can’t stick a needle into a nerve four times and not provoke it to anger.  All of a sudden, the caterwauling of Bono has filled the room.  As she hums along with the song, I notice how young the assistant is.  She’s pretty, like her daughter.

Halfway through reaching towards me with this next injection, he furrows his forehead.  A fellow dentist works down the street.  Why don’t you see if he can’t have more luck?  Besides the inconvenience to me, I can’t think of any reasons.  So I drive my truck a couple blocks to a different dentist, a different man who reminds me of a different serial killer.  His office feels absurdly sterile, like an HMO conjured the ideal and then doubled its price as a matter of protocol.  It’s cold and white and everything smells like isopropyl alcohol.  No words here, so the behavior matched the decor.  Just two shots in quick succession, a local anesthetic out of a daunting tool on several different teeth, and a brisk exit back towards a paying customer.  As I step onto the blacktop parking lot, I notice how the daylight has painted everything springtime.  I could run.  I could go home, and nurse my pincushion jaw.  But I can’t do that.

I drive my truck towards the remodeled house in which my dentist practices.  Honestly, it’s alarming that while paralegals, nurses, and dental hygienists work, lawyers, doctors, and dentists practice.  As if they lost my case, give me the wrong medication, or just straight fucking kill me, they don’t have to worry–it’s just practice!  I sit back down in his examination chair as he enters the room.  As I stare at the yawning gorilla on the ceiling demanding that I open wide, I’m suddenly happy my dentist has some cachets about this.  Are you numb now? he asks, sitting back down.  Not really.  He harumphs to hide a quick smile.  Well, that makes me feel a little better.  Which prompts me to wonder if I’m the urinal in a sudden pissing match between professionals.  What do you want to do?  he inquires, facing me earnestly.  I don’t have much more time for you today.  You can come back in a few weeks and try again, or I can start excavating your teeth now.

I sigh.  Just do it.  As he gets out the fast drill that shrieks bloodsoaked murder, the assistant searches for a song amongst the radio’s commercials.  She stops for an instant on an alt rock station, fooled by the current song’s innocuous intro.  Hurt, by Nine Inch Nails.  Combined with the squealing drill, I decide, This isn’t easy listening.