He answered the summons and found his error. Unlike him to have overlooked something so simple. He was slipping; it was the tooth.
That night the band had a gig in a downtown club. Here he wouldn’t slip. The music was safe, not in his head anywhere near the tooth, but in his blood, his marrow, the strong pads of his fingers. Luckily he wasn’t a horn player—that might be a problem.
“How’s it going?” Hal asked while they set up the amps.
“I just had root canal.”
“The pits. Oh, sorry, no pun intended. So, are you okay? Can you do this?”
“Sure I can do it.” Hadn’t there been chamber orchestras in Auschwitz? Composers, operas, concerts? The words were unspoken, barely thought, yet he winced with shame at so gross a comparison. He couldn’t wait to begin playing, to escape his own errant mind. And soon enough, all thought was extinguished. His mouth forgotten, he lived through his hands and ears. He was restored to himself, the self he had owned before he crunched on the olive pit. Lisa, gorgeous in black Lycra and streaming red hair, clapped and whistled from a front table. When it was over she climbed onstage to throw her arms around him. “You were great. I love to hear you play,” and she took his face in her hands to kiss him.
“Ow! Don’t.”
“Oh, I forgot. How was it?”
“There are worse things in the world. Only right now I can’t remember what they are.”
“You’re cute, Richie. You’re such a big baby.”
The next morning, as he drank hot coffee, Koslowski noticed a strange sensation. With each sip, his tooth, or what was left of it under the loose temporary crown, expanded like a living organism, a cell gone wild. Soon he would barely be able to close his jaw around the rapidly growing thing in his mouth. It was supposed to be dead, its nerve destroyed. He must be hallucinating. This was the stuff of his childhood nightmares, where innocent toys came to menacing life, assaulting and carrying off his parents while he stood by helpless.
Teeth did not grow after childhood. Koslowski knew that. But was it possible for a ground-down tooth to regenerate? He wished Lisa were home—she was the only one he could ask this absurd question. Why was she never around when he needed her most? Had she been at the party, the whole thing might not have happened. It wasn’t supposed to happen—not to him, anyway. Not with his teeth. She had a cold that night, true, but she was well enough to be sitting up studying when he got home. With Lisa there, he might not have found himself next to Cara, the human rights attorney. They might have eaten later. The portions of spaghetti would have been allotted differently, with some other guest getting the lethal olive. Not that he wished such misfortune on anyone. But someone else might have detected the pit, someone with a different heritage, someone not so liable to be distracted by tales of human rights abuses offered as party chitchat.
Over take-out Chinese food that night Lisa groaned about all the papers she had to write, the exams to study for. The term was more than half over, the work at its peak. Plus the extra projects she’d taken on—the Women’s Caucus that was investigating gender discrimination in academic hiring, the Harassment and Rape Advisory Center … And the application for the summer mission to Bosnia. If she didn’t get that, she’d have to hunt for a summer job and psych herself up for wearing suits and panty hose every day. Koslowski decided not to raise the question of whether teeth could grow.
Instead he called his mother. “How did the MRJ go?”
“They won’t have the results for a few days.”
“Oh. Well, how’d he take it? I mean being closed up in the tube.”
“You know him. He said it was nothing, it’s all relative.”
In bed, in the dark, he felt the tooth expanding. He tried various positions and found it best to lie on his back with his mouth open, even though he disliked breathing open-mouthed. But each time he woke and shifted around, it grew again. At this rate it would get so huge he’d be unable to move his tongue to call for help. He would choke, asphyxiated by his own tooth. Exhausted by panic, he plummeted into a mire of dream and recollection: soldiers in white smocks and high boots hurtled up the sands of Brighton Beach on rampaging horses, and he ran from the window to hide in the closet and gnaw at the doorframe. Peering out, he spied his mother as a child, the last living child in her family, being grasped roughly by the shoulders and forced to drink the milk from her mother’s breasts. At her age, seven, it was a humiliation, but she’d be beaten if she didn’t obey. She took the nipple in her mouth and gagged, but she sucked.
He woke in a cold sweat, pulled Lisa close and made love hastily with no words and no kissing.
“That was not so nice, Richie,” she said mildly.
“Sorry,” he grunted.
By morning the tooth had shrunk to normal size. Blessed relief. So it was all an illusion, a brief episode of madness. But as he stood up and moved around, it began to grow again. Hot coffee, especially, made it grow, like watering a plant.
Dr. Rodriguez was puzzled. He gave Koslowski a curious glance and said the feeling would probably go away. Meanwhile, the results of the periodontal exam were dismaying. “You can’t build a bridge in sand. No reputable dentist would make you a bridge until you attend to your gums.” Koslowski left in disbelief, holding a card with the periodontist’s name.
“He can’t build a bridge in sand?” Lisa echoed. “Sand! I don’t mean to laugh, Richie, but it is funny. Look, don’t start with all that gum stuff. Just go to someone else.”
“You recommended him. You said he turned you on.”
“You’re losing it, you know? Like, I’m really sorry this is happening, but I’ve got to work now. Oh, what about your dad? How did the MRI go?”
“They don’t have the results yet. But they can’t be good,” he said glumly. “It’s probably a brain tumor.”
Night after night in the dark, his tooth grew, while he lay overwhelmed by the obscene mystery in his mouth, fearing for his sanity. But he said nothing; his friends in the band and at work frowned when he mentioned teeth, as if he were complaining of a hangnail. Everyone had had dental work—they rolled their eyes and cited their abscesses, their infected gums and impacted wisdom teeth—but no one took it seriously. No matter. Pain was subjective. For his part, he understood suffering now, not only physical suffering but the intangible anguish of the mad. Those periodic news items about ordinary men who went berserk and murdered their loved ones: a nice guy, the neighbors always said; he greeted us on the street, he liked to wash his car on Sundays …
He took Lisa’s advice and consulted another dentist, recommended by the human resources director at work. Muzak from the office speakers, a bad sign. Dr. Olafson was intrigued by his bite. “Click your teeth together,” he commanded, “and listen to the sound. Okay, now listen when I do it. Do you hear the difference? The two sides of your jaw don’t meet simultaneously the way mine do.” With his musician’s ear, Koslowski clearly heard the nanosecond of discrepancy. “So, what does that mean?”
“I’d have to grind down one side before I could make any bridge. Otherwise you’ll start getting headaches. Maybe you already do.” Indeed, a headache was coming on.
His worst fears were borne out. His father had a brain tumor. Koslowski rushed to Brighton Beach as soon as he heard the news.
“Don’t bury me yet,” said the elder Koslowski in his gruff way. “They make mistakes all the time. If they were sure, they’d have me on the table cutting my head open. Why can’t they just give me something for the headaches?”
Koslowski looked mutely at his mother. He must defer to her, but he hoped she wouldn’t insist on the truth. Why labor to convince a man he was dying if he chose to think otherwise? Especially as the doctors found him too far gone for any remedy.
“Take the pills you have,” she said evenly, “and I’ll call tomorrow and ask them for something stronger.”
“They make me groggy, and when I wake up the headache is still there. If I’m too groggy I can’t drive to
work.”
“You can’t drive, period. They said it’s dangerous.”
“I’ll decide that. They’re only doctors. They’re not the law.”
“So,” Koslowski asked when his father went to lie down, “what do they expect will happen?”
“He’ll deteriorate, they said. They can’t tell how soon. They said to take one day at a time.” She made a wry face. “Deteriorate.”
He agreed it was an ugly word. Unbearable, in fact. And yet his father seemed as forthright and irascible as ever. Maybe he was right. Doctors had been known to make mistakes. Tests could be misinterpreted. “We’ll manage, Mom. We’ll get through this all right.”
She smiled wanly. Koslowski knew now that what he used to call her martyred look was merely patient desolation. She had lost one husband already, ages ago back in Leningrad. Killed on the job when a scaffolding collapsed. She’d felt crushed herself, she used to say. So crushed under a cloud of gloom that she had to get away. Even if the cloud followed her, at least it would be in a new sky. And somehow she had managed to persuade a distant relative in New York to sponsor her passage. Once she was there, rumor had it, the new world would not send her back. But where could she go now?
She patted his hand as if he were a boy. “Dying,” she said, “everyone gets through. I only hope he doesn’t suffer too much.”
She must have looked this way when she first arrived, barely speaking English, and the only work she could find was cleaning office buildings. Koslowski could imagine his father, who worked in one of those offices, being drawn to her sallow face, her thin, tense body bent over the mop and pail. He had expected to brood alone forever, but must have sensed that with her he needn’t give up his nourishing bitterness. He felt at home with her misery; he wanted to live with whatever had carved the hollows in her cheeks.
By chance, the periodontist’s office was right next door to Dr. Callahan’s, the root canal man. Was it truly chance, or was he in the toils of a dental cabal? Dr. Dahlberg, barely older than Koslowski himself, had officious little wire-rimmed glasses and an ashy, pursed face, like Mengele. But he was short and stout, which was not the way Koslowski remembered Mengele. Or rather, the way his father remembered him. In a high, nasal voice, he pronounced Koslowski’s periodontal situation grave indeed. Lots of “pockets” in which food could be trapped, rotting the teeth. He would have to undertake a series of deep gum cleanings, one “quadrant” of the mouth each week, with Novocain to get at the remoter places. Then he would decide if surgery were required. He also recommended, in passing, that Koslowski have all his wisdom teeth removed.
He listened in a daze, his eyes fixed on a poster with bouncy red letters, some of them shaped like teeth: “Be True to Your Teeth or Your Teeth Will Be False to You.” Could these be his excellent teeth the creep was describing? He, with his superior dental legacy, his stellar record? His very identity was being denied. But he must hold fast to reason, and to his goal: the bridge. If his gums were sand, it followed that they must be shored up. Beyond reason, some obscure impulse drove him on. He was embarked on a process, a kind of quest, that must take its course, stage through wretched stage.
After the second week of periodontal cleaning, the human resources director called him in for a conference.
“We know you’re the best in the business, Richie, but you’re getting careless. Is something the matter?”
“No, nothing,” he mumbled. “I’ll get it together.”
“You do that. Things are getting backed up. We can’t afford that, you know.”
Nor could Koslowski afford to have his job at risk. The dental bills took his breath away, but the human resources director had taken special pains to intercede on his behalf with the dental plan.
On the third visit, when Dr. Dahlberg exultantly held up a tiny brown shred dug from the upper reaches of his gums—“See? See what I found in there?”—Koslowski knew the man was mad. But he couldn’t turn back. He was trapped in the process, a maze with no exit in sight. The dentist’s white brick building itself resembled a sinister mound of teeth, and its very slow elevator and pristine halls, their sleek doors bearing plaques for polysyllabic medical services, grew more eerie with each visit. Even the familiar sights of Central Park—the traffic, the horses in bondage, the kiosks, the children tottering on the jungle gyms in the first bright days of spring—seemed full of peril. He saw it all through the prism of his battered jaw, the walks back downtown drenched in Novocain.
Throughout, his father’s condition was unchanged. “What about the driving?”
“The car’s in the shop,” his mother said. “The transmission. It may take a while to get the parts. Maybe never.”
She was nothing if not resourceful. This was the woman who had gotten herself to Brighton Beach a decade before the wave of emigrants. “How’d you manage that?”
“I fiddled with a few wires under the hood. It was easy. I have a car service taking him to work. Who knows how long he’ll be going. Anyway, he likes it. No hassle.”
That night in the piano bar, he abandoned the old favorites and indulged himself with Ellington and Thelonius Monk. No one paid much attention either way, and it eased his mind. The owner, a dapper old man with a fondness for Koslowski, liked it too. “Nice, Richie. Very nice. Gives a touch of class. Not every night, but once in a while it’s fine.”
After the final week, Dr. Dahlberg said that surgery was needed in several areas.
“Only where the bridge goes,” growled Koslowski through clenched teeth.
“Sit very still now,” he ordered during the surgery. “I’m going to scrape off a bit of bone.”
“Wait just a minute. What do you mean, scraping off my bone?”
The periodontist smirked. “Do you want me to put up a mirror so you can criticize the whole procedure?”
Fuck you, Koslowski longed to say. But the lunatic’s hands were in his mouth.
He left with two strips of gray putty, makeshift Band-Aids, on his gums, and a printed sheet of post-operative instructions for daily rinsing and compresses. In his Novocain haze, he felt at one with the dour horses, shuffling through the park in their abject servitude. He’d lost weight; his pants needed pressing; he needed a haircut. He probably looked as wretched as his father when he first arrived at the age of nineteen, scrawny and enraged after months in the camp. If he held out a Styrofoam cup, he thought, people might just drop coins in.
In bed, when Lisa read him a newspaper article about the rape victims in Bosnia, he said, “I feel raped too.”
“What are you talking about? You’re doing this by choice.”
“It doesn’t feel that way. Those hands in my mouth. It feels like something I’ve been sentenced to, I don’t know why. First it was just an accident. Then it became my destiny.
“Richie, don’t you know the difference between oral surgery and being raped by a troop of soldiers?”
“I guess not.”
“You’re sick, you know? You should get help.” She barricaded herself behind the paper.
He didn’t need help. He was someone who gave help. Not only in the dormitory fire. The subway accident three years ago: he was working as a computer doctor for a large chain and roamed the city on house calls. Just over the Brooklyn Bridge, the speeding train heaved and veered, then crashed maniacally to a halt that tossed the passengers out of their seats. The lights went out. People shrieked. Koslowski, on the floor but unhurt, felt around for the howling baby who’d been opposite him and managed, in the dark, to set the stroller upright and get him back in it. He urged people to try to find seats and stop yelling. When a conductor with a flashlight appeared and began to restore order, Koslowski helped the baby’s grandmother to her feet. He soothed a whimpering boy, then carried an injured old man along the tracks to the next station, a quarter of a mile away, where emergency medical workers awaited them. His mother saved the small item in the paper that cited his deeds. All that could be seen of him in the photo was a leg and an arm
: he was helping to raise a woman onto a stretcher.
When the putty was removed a week later, Koslowski was aghast at the new configuration in his mouth. It was no longer the mouth he had lived with so intimately for thirty-two years, but an alien mouth with cavernous spaces between the teeth, big enough for a grain of rice. Against his specific directions, the periodontist had left a gaping space between two front teeth, marring his distinctive smile. The man had deformed him, mutilated this most private part of his body—irreparably, he was told when he demanded a reversal. He protested vehemently. Food would lodge in the spaces. He would have discomfort forever. His body, his material being, his very essence had been violated. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”
The dentist stared as if he were a nut case. Everything he had done was necessary and therapeutic, he said; he did it all the time. It was imperative to raise the gum line. If Koslowski didn’t like the space in front, he could have the tooth capped.
“Go to hell.” As he walked through the park he devised excruciating tortures for Dr. Dahlberg, involving the soft, generative parts of his body, which he imagined as small and ineffectual. Mengele, he thought, where are you now that I need you?
Rage was energizing. He strode quickly past the captive horses, his strength resurgent. He would live with the mutilated mouth the way people lived with disabilities. He knew plenty of disabled people. A boy at school had been a thalidomide baby with flippers instead of arms; he went on to become a biogeneticist. The bass player in the band had lost an eye in the Gulf War and wore a black patch; he was jaunty and uncomplaining. Right this minute a young woman in a motorized wheelchair was speeding nimbly through traffic on Central Park South. She was luscious, with dark skin and amber corn rows. Koslowski stared until she was out of sight.
Be a man, he told himself, even as he felt the tooth growing in its maddening way. He called in sick and got a haircut. He bought two pairs of pants. He paused at a store window full of tennis rackets, basketballs, sneakers, hard shiny Rollerblades. The customers going in and out were breezy and muscular. He too had had that resolute air, not so long ago. Straightening up, he went in.
Referred Pain: Stories Page 6