THE POLICY

by Bentley Little

  Hunt stood. He was not a rabble-rouser, was not a firebrand like Edward, but he too was angry. It disgusted him that the union that was supposed to fight for them was so passive, so unwilling to stand up for its members. They were a bunch of scared little sheep, and he had no respect for them whatsoever.

  He addressed the association president. “I think the problem is that we don’t have outside negotiators. We have him”—he pointed to the lawyer—“but he’s only a consultant and you only use him to answer your legal questions. So we end up with employees sitting across the table from their bosses, and of course they’re not going to bargain hard, because they’re afraid of reprisals. Because they’re concerned about offending management, we’re left out to dry. Edward’s right. This association is not doing its job.”

  “Our job,” the president said, “is to do what’s best for all employees, not to cut our nose off to spite our face.”

  Edward frowned. “Enough with the amputation imagery, you gutless weenie—”

  There were peals of laughter throughout the crowd, and the president turned red.

  Chris Hewett, another tree trimmer, pointed an angry finger at the president. “You’re supposed to fight for all employees, not give up at the first sign of trouble.”

  “What do you suggest we do?” the president asked. “Go on strike?”

  Hewett nodded. “If necessary.”

  “I’m not going on strike and jeopardizing my job for tree trimmers,” a computer programmer said. “I can’t afford it. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”

  Hunt looked over at the man and was glad he had not transferred over to MIS. He might lose his job, but he felt proud to be aligned with Edward and Chris and the rest of the tree trimmers. These were good men, honest men, and he had no doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, most of them would be willing to put their jobs on the line in order to help out their fellow employees.

  “Your job’s not even needed!” Jack Hardy, Hewitt’s crew-mate, shouted out. “They’d save a lot more money if they contracted out you guys instead of us!”

  The room erupted in chaos, other maintenance services employees, fearful of a trend, siding with Hewitt and Hardy against the technocrats in MIS.

  Edward put a hand on his shoulder, motioned toward the exit. “It’s the Do Long Bridge. There’s no one in charge here.”

  “We’ll see what we can do!” the lawyer promised from the front of the room. “Everyone’s job is important!”

  “Come on,” Edward said disgustedly. “Let’s go find a bar and get drunk.”

  ELEVEN

  1

  Beth had just finished picking the last of her ripe tomatoes when the alarm clock sounded in the kitchen.

  She carried the tomatoes inside and shut off the alarm. She tended to lose herself in her garden, so to tether herself to the real world, she’d taken to setting the clock when she needed to be somewhere or do something at a specific time.

  Today she had to go to the dentist.

  While she knew that she should have been going all along, getting regular checkups and cleanings, she’d let it slide for so long that, eventually she’d been afraid to go, afraid she’d have cavities or need a root canal or be subjected to some sort of Marathon Man-ish procedure. But the pain in her gums had gotten so bad that if she chewed anything on the left side of her mouth it hurt like hell, and Hunt had finally convinced her to get it checked out.

  She had no regular dentist, so she’d called the customer service number listed on her insurance card and got the name and number of a participating dentist. That had been nearly three weeks ago. She’d tried to get an earlier appointment, had impressed upon the receptionist the extent and severity of her pain, had argued that this was an emergency and needed immediate attention, but the woman had doggedly insisted that the schedule was completely booked and she could not possibly fit Beth in until the end of the month at the earliest.

  Beth washed off her tomatoes, placed them on the counter to dry, then went to get dressed and brush her teeth. She’d been obsessively brushing her teeth ever since she’d made the appointment—three times a day at the minimum, sometimes up to six—as though a last-minute flurry of good dental hygiene would negate the years of inattention and reverse the problem affecting her mouth.

  She brushed, flossed, gargled with Listerine, then went into the bedroom and sorted through her purse to make sure she had her insurance card and enough money for the co-payment.

  The dentist’s office was not located in a medical center or suite of offices but rather in a converted adobe house. What had once been a residential street had been widened into a commercial boulevard, and many of the former homes had become businesses. There was an interior decorator, a tax accountant, even a cafe. The outside of the dentist’s office still retained the look of a family residence, but the interior had been completely remodeled and did not bear even the slightest resemblance to a home. There was a surprisingly large waiting room dominated by a huge aquarium populated with primary-colored saltwater fish, and behind an open sliding glass window a receptionist spoke on the phone to what sounded like a very insistent patient demanding an appointment at an unavailable time. There was no one else in the waiting room, but from behind the closed door next to the receptionist’s window, Beth heard the unmistakable high-pitched whine of a drill cutting through tooth.

  She signed in at the window, then headed over to one of the yellow vinyl couches against the wall. On the table next to her was a stack of Maxim, Details, and FHM magazines. Not the usual dentist’s office fare, but she picked one up and glanced through an article on fetish websites.

  “Mrs. Jackson?”

  She still wasn’t used to having Hunt’s last name, and though she heard the receptionist’s voice, she didn’t immediately realize that she was being called.

  “Mrs. Jackson?” the receptionist said again, a little louder.

  Beth quickly put down the magazine and stood up, embarrassed. A dental assistant was holding open the door and had in her hand a file folder. “Right this way,” she said, smiling.

  Beth followed the young woman past the receptionist’s desk, down a short corridor to a small exam room, where she awkwardly contorted herself into the dental chair and then allowed a wax-paper bib to be clipped around her neck with a metal chain. The assistant—Dora, according to her name tag—swung a metal tray holding several wicked-looking instruments into place above Beth’s chest. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she said before stepping out of the room.

  Beth waited, remembering all too clearly why she’d been avoiding dentists for the past decade. Her mouth was already filling with too much saliva, and she imagined what it was going to feel like when the dentist began working on her teeth and the saliva puddled up in the back of her throat, threatening to choke her as she waited for some suction.

  God, she hated dentists.

  There was a jaunty knock on the wood of the open door, and Dr. Blackburn breezed in, smelling of Old Spice and Listerine. He could easily have been a television game-show host from the 1960s. He had the plastic, perfect-smile, every-hair-in-place look of a Bob Eubanks or a Wink Martindale. When he came closer, though, and sat down on the round stool next to her, she saw there was a cowlick on the left side of his parted hair that refused to remain down. It was not an Alfalfa, but it was obvious and completely out of place. There was something disturbing about that, and as he talked to her, asked her questions about her dental history, she could not help focusing on that one wild section of hair. It bothered her. It seemed so at odds with the rest of the dentist’s appearance, so out of character, that it seemed wrong, and though she didn’t know why, it made her feel uneasy.

  Another assistant came into the exam room—not Dora—and there was something not right about her, either. She was wearing the prim white uniform of a dental hygienist, but her eyes had far too much mascara, her lips were too red, and there was an incongruously sharp-nosed, white-trash cast to
her features. She looked like a character in a porno movie, the nasty nurse who would take her clothes off for a patient and then get drilled on top of a rising dentist’s chair.

  Dr. Blackburn spoke quietly to his assistant for a second, then flipped on the swivel-armed light above the chair and turned back to Beth. “Open wide,” he said. She did so, and he poked and prodded the teeth on her upper left side with a metal pick until he found a spot that made her flinch.

  “Does that hurt?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she grunted.

  He adjusted the light, exchanged his pick for another equally sharp tool and then propped her mouth open with a rubber wedge. The suction hose was turned on, hung over her lip, and he began to systematically examine the rest of her mouth. Once more he muttered something unintelligible to his assistant, then he started wiggling each of her teeth with his fingers. On several, it felt as though he slid a band or clamp over them. He used the sharp pointy tool to painfully trace her gum line.

  Something was wrong.

  “What are you doing?” she tried to say, but her mouth was still propped open, the suction hose was vacuuming out her saliva, and it came out more like, “Uh ah oo oo eh?”

  “We’re going to have to replace your teeth,” the dentist said.

  What?

  A bolt of panic shot through her. She tried to protest, tried to tell him that there was no way she’d agree to anything so extreme or radical, but again the words sounded like gibberish. The dentist seemed perfectly able to understand her, however, and he pressed her down with one restraining arm when she tried to sit up. “I’m sorry. Tooth decay is so far advanced and you have so many cavities and such enamel loss, not to mention your rotting roots, receding gums, and gingivitis, that I’m afraid such a drastic course of action is necessary. Besides, my hands are tied. It’s these new regulations and insurance company requirements. Even if such a procedure were feasible in your instance, I’m not allowed to cap; it’s considered cosmetic and your insurance won’t pay for that. I’m also required to treat distressed mouths aggressively. It’s part of their preventative maintenance program. If I find evidence of widespread tooth decay, I have to do everything I can to immediately resolve the problem.” The assistant—Rene, Beth could now see her name tag said—handed the dentist a steel hypodermic, and he maneuvered it into her mouth, the needle pressing painfully against the inside of her cheek. “Don’t worry. This won’t hurt a bit.”

  Preventative maintenance.

  The phrase leaped out at her. That’s what Hunt had insisted the homeowner’s insurance company do for the house when he wanted them to pay for replacing the whole roof, and as the relaxing drug spread through, her body, loosening her muscles, loosening her mind, the thought occurred to her that this was payback, the insurance companies were getting together in order to punish them for complaining and demanding their rights. Collusion. Wasn’t that illegal? Already her thought processes were breaking down, and her brain began leapfrogging from one paranoid scenario to another: the insurance companies were after them… and the AMA… and the credit card companies… and the car manufacturers… and the ADA… and the government…

  Before she went completely under, she could have sworn she heard the dentist singing a strange little ditty. “Pussy for breakfast, pussy for lunch, pussy for dinner and a midnight snack.”

  “I love the taste of balls in the morning,” the dental assistant said from somewhere far away.

  When she came to, she was in the waiting room, propped up in one of the couches. Her entire skull throbbed. She opened her eyes and stared dumbly for several minutes at the fish tank. Air bubbles from the filter, she noticed, percolated upward from between a set of upper and lower teeth that sat flat on the blue gravel, moving up and down as though laughing.

  All of a sudden the receptionist was next to her and helping her stand up. “Come on, Mrs. Jackson. It’s time to go now.”

  She was dopey and she knew she was dopey, and a part of her thought that it was unprofessional and possibly illegal for the dentist to be sending her out like this, but she didn’t have the will or the wherewithal to argue, and she allowed herself to be led out docilely. The receptionist did not even accompany her out to the car. She positioned Beth on the front porch of the office, then went back inside, closing the door behind her.

  Feeling unsteady, her head suffused with a dull pulsing pain, she walked down the porch steps and then around the side of the building to the tiny parking lot. Her mouth was dry, and she kept running her tongue over her lips and teeth, but the teeth felt strange. Too cold, for one thing. And they had a faint taste that was almost familiar.

  Concentrating hard, trying to focus on each menial task before her so that the drugs in her system didn’t entirely overwhelm her ability to function, she took the key ring out of her purse and carefully unlocked the driver’s side door. She got into the car, sat in the seat, pulled down the visor, and opened her mouth to look at herself in the mirror.

  All of her teeth were shining, sparkling silver.

  Beth was on the bed and crying when Hunt got home. She’d called him from the car, blurting out the entire story between sobs, and he asked her to stay where she was; he’d leave work early and meet her there. But she hadn’t wanted to wait by the dentist’s office—she’d been afraid to remain anywhere near it—and she told Hunt she was going home.

  Once again he had Edward and Jorge cover for him, and he sped from the west to the east side of Tucson as fast as the midday traffic would allow.

  He was stunned when he saw her mouth. She’d described it to him over the phone, and he’d believed her, but he hadn’t been able to imagine how freakish and horrible it looked, hadn’t been able to anticipate the way it changed the appearance of her entire face. Her nose now seemed off center, her cheeks chubby. She looked ugly, and if he did not know her as well as he did, he was not sure he’d be able to recognize her. To top it all off, her lips were swollen grotesquely, and she kept dabbing her mouth with an ice-filled washcloth to stem the bleeding.

  All of this must have shown on his face, because the second she caught his expression, she was sobbing anew. He rushed forward and sat down beside her, cradling her in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get this fixed. I don’t know what possessed that lunatic or how he thought he’d get away with something like this.”

  “I didn’t even consent.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I mean to the procedure at all. I wouldn’t let someone yank my teeth out without getting a second opinion. But I didn’t even have a chance to tell him. They were drugging me and putting me under, and when I woke up, I was like this.”

  “How’s the pain?” he asked gently.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “Unbearable. And the anesthetic hasn’t even worn off yet. Once it does…” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “They can’t get away with this.” Hunt felt like smashing his fist against the wall in frustration. He had never felt so powerless or so overwhelmed. This made no sense. Absolutely none at all. There was no reason for anyone to do something like this to Beth. She had no enemies, and no one could profit from knocking all her teeth out and replacing them with silver posts.

  Was the dentist insane?

  It seemed a distinct possibility.

  “We’re going back there,” Hunt said. He went to the closet and got out his camera and camcorder. “I’m recording the whole fucking thing, and we’ll see those bastards in court. I don’t care if they fix your teeth and then get on their knees and kiss our asses till their tongues are brown. This should not have happened in the first place and, goddamn it, they’re going to pay.”

  Beth managed a small swollen-lipped smile.

  “Let’s go.”

  The address and directions to the dentist’s were still in Beth’s car. The vinyl of the driver’s seat was spattered with drops of blood that had leaked from her mouth on the drive home, and Hunt wiped t
hem up with napkins from the glove compartment before taking off. “You shouldn’t have driven in your state,” he said as he backed out of the driveway. “You could’ve gotten in an accident.”

  Beth took the washcloth away from her mouth. “It would’ve been their fault,” she told him.

  “True enough. But you would’ve been the one hurt. Or killed.”

  “I wasn’t staying there. I couldn’t stay there.”

  He nodded, understanding.

  The dentist’s office was gone when they returned.

  That was impossible. It had only been a few hours, and there was no way that all of the furniture and equipment could have been moved out of the building in that short a time. But there were no shades on the windows, and they could see through the dusty glass that the rooms were empty, the walls bare, the floors uncarpeted. The house was just a house, a vacant structure waiting to be converted into some small business like the other dwellings on the block.

  They both got out of the car and walked up the concrete path to the front porch. “This was it, I swear it!” Beth insisted.

  “I believe you.”

  “But how could this happen? An hour ago, two hours at the most, there was a waiting room with rugs and couches, and a five-hundred-pound aquarium. There was a receptionist’s desk and several exam rooms filled with dentist’s chairs and sinks and lights and cabinets.”

  It couldn’t happen. They both knew that, and later Hunt supposed that that was the moment when he started to realize he was up against more than just an out-of-control corporation, that something far less concrete was at work here, something closer to supernatural than natural. But that thought wasn’t conscious, not yet, and in response to her question, he said, “I don’t know.”

  The house next door was an accountant’s office, and though it appeared to be closed and a sign on the door said “By Appointment Only,” Hunt rang the bell and knocked, hoping to find someone who could give him a little background on the dentist, tell him how long the dental office had been there or what had happened to it. But no one was at the accountant’s, and the travel agency on the opposite side was closed, too. Across the boulevard, a smoothie shop was open, but the employees inside knew nothing about the dentist’s office and hadn’t seen anything unusual at that location today.