Authors: William Lashner
I awoke from a dream I can no longer remember, in a musty, damp darkness that was spinning around like a carnival ride. There was some sort of chair, it was tilted back weirdly, and I was in it. I tried to move my arms, my legs, my neck, but everything was frozen. I tried to open my mouth and failed, which was pretty much a first. The darkness was spinning, spinning about me. I fought to stay awake, but nothing in the world seemed as sweet as closing my eyes and drifting back into my dream, a dream as pliable and sweet as saltwater taffy, stretching and pulling until it wrapped me completely in its pale, sticky arms.
I dreamed that I awoke and a bright light was shining on my face. My mouth was propped open with a piece of rubber jammed between my teeth. A dentist, in mask and cap, his face blanked out by the light shining behind him, had his hands in my mouth. They say you can’t feel pain in your dreams, but that is a lie, because this dream hurt like hell.
I heard voices. I must still have been dreaming, because the voices became part of a fabulous panoply of shapes and colors. I was in a magical world where flowers blossomed and sprites flitted and shiny white teeth with straw boaters danced on their roots, swinging toothbrushes like vaudeville canes while singing bright songs of oral hygiene. Two women strode onto the scene, beautiful, beautiful women, all in white. One spoke with a Scottish burr, one spoke with a German accent, so sexy for all its harshness, and both of these beautiful women were speaking about me. What I felt for these two women in white was as real as anything I had ever felt before in my life. What I felt was love, sweet and painful and true as the dancing teeth before me.
There was someone knocking at the door. Knocking and knocking. Answer it, I tried to call out, but it emerged as a muffled grunt, because again I couldn’t open my mouth. Knocking. Knocking. And then I realized the knocking wasn’t on a door, it was on my skull. I opened my eyes, and there was Dr. Bob, lightly knock knock knocking on my forehead.
“Hello, Victor. Are you ready to come out and play?”
I started to the surface of my consciousness, and for a moment everything was clear: the light, the darkness behind it, the damp of a basement, the chair in which I was somehow bound. And of course Dr. Bob, smiling paternalistically as he watched while I slowly started to drift back down to the lower depths.
Dr. Bob knuckled my head once more.
“It’s so good to see you finally awake,” he said. “How are you feeling? Quite rested, I should think.”
I grunted something and ran my tongue across my teeth. The gap was still there, but my two temporary crowns were now gone, and in their places were the nubby posts, sticking up forlornly from the base of each tooth. I felt somehow denuded.
“A dentist walks into a bar,” said Dr. Bob. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. He walks into a bar and meets this girl. When he tells her he’s a dentist, she’s suddenly all over him. ‘What’s so great about dentists?’ he asks. And she says, ‘They’re the only men who tell me, “Spit, don’t swallow.” ’ Ha ha ha.”
I tried to struggle out of the chair but failed. My head was somehow stuck in a position that made it impossible to see my arms or legs, but I could feel some give in the binding, so it wasn’t my muscles that didn’t work, which was a relief. Whatever the bastards had injected into my neck hadn’t paralyzed me.
“Wait, there’s more,” said Dr. Bob. “So the dentist, he takes this girl home, and after they’re done, she says, ‘You must be a very good dentist.’ ‘How do you know?’ he says. And she says”—he paused for effect—“ ‘Because I didn’t feel a thing.’ Ha ha ha.”
I struggled once again against the binding, groaned loudly.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Dentist jokes are the lamest things in the world. Maybe because there really is nothing funny about poor oral hygiene. How about this one? A dentist says to a sexy woman patient, ‘Will you have sex with me for a million dollars?’ She says, ‘Sure.’ He says, ‘How about for a buck thirty-nine?’ She says, ‘Certainly not. What do you take me for?’ And the dentist says, ‘We already established what you are, madam. Now we’re just negotiating the price.’ Ha ha ha.”
He pulled back a bit, put his fist to his chin in thought, considered me like he was a grade-school teacher determining what to do with a recalcitrant pupil.
“You’re still not laughing, Victor. Maybe it’s because you’re gagged. Or is it because it hits a little too close to home? Hmm? Is that it? But isn’t it better to be up-front about these things, especially when all my subtle hints and warnings have had no effect?”
He showed me the tiny tape recorder I had hidden in my jacket pocket. He switched it on for a moment. Out came Whit’s voice, slightly muffled but still clear enough.
“She was supposed to be dead asleep, it was supposed to be so easy. But the woman awoke and was so frightened at the intrusion that she came at him with a gun. And he reacted badly. There was a struggle, there was a shot, and the bullet—”
Dr. Bob snapped off the tape player.
“So, Victor, tell the dentist your price. What? You want to say something but you can’t? Maybe it’s the duct tape over your mouth. How about we do this?”
He reached for my mouth, quickly pulled something off with a searing
rrrrrrrrippp
.
“Aaaargh,” was the best I could manage.
“Much better,” said Dr. Bob. “I do love a good negotiation. So, Victor, let’s—how do you people say it?
Hondel
? You first. What will it cost to buy the tape and stop you from bringing me into this mess?”
“Where am I?”
“Mr. Robinson’s basement. He has this wonderful vintage barber’s chair, which is where you’re sitting now. I can pump you up or down, just like in the office.”
“I can’t move.”
“Isn’t duct tape wonderful? I used two whole rolls to tape you to the chair. That’s enough to affix a Buick to the wall.”
I struggled some more, felt the tape give a bit again, but failed to gain anything close to freedom. “What did you put in me?”
“Oh, nothing serious. Something I use for my more squeamish patients. FDA-approved, very mild. Nurse MacDhubshith might have been a mite overly enthusiastic in the dosage”—he shook his head in disappointment—“but still nothing to worry about. So, we were talking about price.”
“A trip to California, like you gave Mrs. Dent?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“I like it here,” I said. “No price. I’m for sale, always, but not to you.”
“Oh, come on, man, don’t be obtuse. Who can give you more than I? Do you want Carol Kingsly back? Have you been pining for her smile? Or maybe you’d like a position on Mr. Takahashi’s legal staff? Quite a lucrative position, I might add. No more nickel-and-dime cases for you, Victor. Think of it, zipping around the world on the corporate jet, staying at the best hotels, growing fat on expense-account meals. You could use a few pounds, I daresay, especially after this little ordeal. Are you hungry?”
“I want to throw up.”
“I suppose, then, food right now wouldn’t be the best inducement. I know what you’d like. One of my patients is the wife of the hiring partner at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. Quite the white-shoe firm, Victor. They have an opening for a trial lawyer in their criminal-defense department. You’d be perfect. Think of it. A little staid, maybe, but a very prestigious outfit, and your clients would be all the best people.”
“I have a client.”
“Of course you do. But he’s a witless scumbag who abused his family, cheated on his wife, abandoned his child, dived deep into debauchery, and now is playing games with your partner’s emotional life. What do you owe a creature like that?”
“The best I have. Let me out.”
“Oh, I can’t do that. Consider all my endeavors, all those souls I’m in the process of helping.”
“There are a lot of people in prison you can help, too.”
“I’m not a criminal.”
“Then what are you?”
“I’m someone who won’t sit back and let people’s lives fall apart without doing what I can. I am an optimistic man of action. A fighter of dental disease and the malaise of life. Looking for a love connection? I’ll make it. Your boyfriend stalking you? I’ll keep him away. Is a young girl missing? I’ll find her.” He paused for a moment, looked at the tape player in his hand. “Is your father abusing you? I’ll make sure he doesn’t have the opportunity anymore.”
“You’re referring to François Dubé. That was why you sent Seamus in to deliver the tape.”
“He was so eager. It was such an easy mission. Put the tape in the VCR, set the timer to start when Leesa woke up. And there it would be, proof of his debauchery and her avenue to win custody playing right there on her television screen.”
“But she ended up dead.”
“An accident of blind happenstance. It was nobody’s fault. Things happen.”
“The death might have been an accident, but not the frame-up.”
“He would have gotten custody. He would have had complete dominion over his daughter. What happened in the apartment was a tragic accident, yes. But I couldn’t allow that man to get his clutches on that poor girl. You, more than anyone, know the harm that a parent can inflict on a child.”
“You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“Why don’t you join the army and save the world?”
“I do the same work, I just do it my own way.”
“Unfettered by the law, by any oversight, by a system of checks and balances.”
“I can be trusted.”
“And you decided François’s fate based on what? The bitter ravings of a separated wife spewed out while you drilled her teeth?”
“The family dentist always knows.”
“You might be wrong.”
“Believe me when I tell you this, Victor: I’m not.”
“You’re still the little boy in the closet, aren’t you? Held back by his siblings as he helplessly watches his father beat his mother.”
“I was that boy. Powerless and afraid. I’m not him anymore.”
“But the results are the same, aren’t they? You stayed in the closet, and your mother ended up bloodied and dead on the floor. You tried to help, and Leesa Dubé ended up bloodied and dead on the floor. It’s the law of unintended consequences: No matter our good intentions, the unintended consequences of our acts will predominate.”
“So what are we to do, Victor? Nothing?”
“Maybe just our jobs. You fix teeth, I’ll represent clients, and in the end we’ll see how it all shakes out.”
“A world where everyone disclaims responsibility because caring is not in the job description.”
“A world where everyone minds his own damn business.”
“But you don’t want that anymore, do you? Really?”
I pressed my tongue into the gap in my mouth, thought of Daniel Rose’s scarred arm. I said, “Let’s ask Leesa Dubé what she thinks.”
“Yours is not a world in which I choose to live.”
“Maybe you should adjust your medication.”
“So what are we to do with you, Victor?”
“Give me a ride home and a parting gift of the home version of your game?”
“I hardly think so,” said Dr. Bob, before turning out the light and rising from his seat. As he walked off, his shoes sounded harshly on the basement floor.
I don’t know how long I lay there, taped to the chair in the darkness. It seemed like hours, longer. But once I ended up at the Ice Capades and that seemed like weeks, so my conception of time is quite elastic. I screamed for a bit, but that just ripped up my throat without doing any good. I struggled again to get free of the duct tape, and I did manage to free my head, but when I looked down, my whole body was covered with silver. There was no getting out of that. Still, I tried. I even imagined myself the Incredible Hulk as I fought to break free, but if I turned green, it was from nausea alone, and I stayed just as trapped.
I fought to calm myself. At first I tried meditating, wiping my mind of all thoughts, and I was pretty successful, clearing my brain of all thoughts save one. But the one that stuck was that I was at the mercy of a certifiably insane dentist whose stock and trade was blood and pain. Or was it pain and blood? One or the other. Neither of much comfort, and together a terribly ineffective mantra. So much for meditating.
Then I tried to figure out why I hadn’t just gone along with the bastard. I was in trouble, I should have agreed with whatever he said and then run like hell.
But then what? To betray him would have given him an excuse to destroy me. Which was a strange thing to think, because why would he need an excuse? What excuse had he needed to drug me into a stupor and drag me to the basement and bind me with duct tape and pry off my crowns?
But there was something in the thought, wasn’t there? And when I finally realized what it was, it calmed me considerably. I remembered the way he looked at Tilda after he noticed the gash on my cheek, as if he hadn’t been the one to send her. I remembered the way he criticized her for being more Thor, the Norse god of thunder, and less Loki, the trickster god of mischief. And I remembered the way he shook his head when he mentioned that Nurse MacDhubshith had been a bit too enthusiastic in the amount of drug she administered. It was as if there were lines he wouldn’t allow himself to cross. And I knew why, too.
Nothing is more delusional than the benign beatings of the human heart.
I must have fallen asleep again in the chair, because I dreamed the footsteps before I actually heard them. I tried to keep my eyes closed as I fell out of sleep. I wanted as long as possible to gather the loose beads of my consciousness. So with my eyes closed, I listened. One pair, three pairs—no, four pairs of footsteps. The whole shooting match had come to say good-bye.
“Wake up, bucko,” said Tilda as the lids over my eyes turned red with light. “The time has come to take care of you for good,
ja
.”
The chair jerked upward, my eyes jerked open. Dr. Bob and his hygienist stood before me. Behind them stood the strange pair of Whitney Robinson III and the pale Nurse MacDhubshith.
“Any new thoughts?” said Dr. Bob. “Have you reconsidered my offers? One call and you’d be atop the hiring list at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase.”