Moments after the drill starts its unholy aria, my nostrils filling with the hot electric odor of cauterized calcium, a shock of pain jolts open my tightly clenched eyes to reveal through the mist of tooth-particle motes a woman staring down at me. With a face like the backside of a spade and eyes that are two minnows swimming toward each other, she looks extremely familiar and utterly strange. Just as a flash of recognition passes through me, the pain resurges. She flickers and fades like the faulty transmission of an analog image, then comes back more vivid than ever. I scream.

The vibration in my head suddenly ceases and Dr. Dufera asks, “Are you alright, Miss Stephens?”

“No, I am not,” I confess in a shaky voice. “I need more anesthetic.”

“I’ve already given you the recommended limit of Lidocaine and cannot administer any more. I can, however, offer you nitrous oxide. It will cost extra, I’m afraid, and your insurance may not cover it.”

“Anything not to feel the pain!” I plead.

After I sign the paperwork, Dr. Dufera places a softly hissing nozzle over my nose. As I greedily inhale the gas, I think I hear him murmur to his assistant, “After all, the teeth have been a very effective instrument of torture since the beginning of humanity.”

I’m soon floating in the warm, velvety depths of a profound darkness. It’s extremely pleasant, euphoric almost, until a voice slashes through the swaddling numbness: “Wake up, princess.”

I open my eyes and there she is again, her broad chin resting on Dr. Dufera’s shoulder, even as he jiggers his cruel instruments around in my mouth, paying her no mind. The assistant, too, behaves as if there is no interloper in the room.

Though my mouth is filled with the dentist’s fingers, the drill, cotton balls, and the spit-suction thingie, I manage to grunt, “Who the hell are you?” I glance at Dr. Dufera to see if he thinks I’m talking to him, but he just keeps drilling and drilling, lips creased in concentration, goggles powdered with tooth dust.

“The better question is, who the hell are you?” she asks, a crazed smile appearing like a crack across her face to reveal dark gaps between her teeth, the survivors broken and jagged like the splintered pilings of a jetty that has mostly been washed out to sea. Her breath is rancid, breaching the plastic apparatus of the laughing gas with the bilious stench of decay.

Reaching around Dr. Dufera, she strokes my sweater, nails scraped and broken to the quick, fingers worked to crookedness, knuckles popped out and shiny. “Nice. What is it? It’s so soft.”

The unraveling cuff of her plain gray sweatshirt rides up to reveal a gaunt arm corded with hard muscle, the flesh stippled with tiny, suppurating bumps.

Knotting my hands together so she will not see the diamond ring, I mumble, “Cashmere.”

“Mmm,” she hums with pleasure until I shrug her off. But that doesn’t stop her envy, her wanting, which I feel coming off her like a cold blast of air. She boldly steps out from behind Dr. Dufera. Supine, I can only see her top half, shoulders wide and torso narrow, a swimmer’s build, also suitable for carrying a yoke dangling heavy baskets.

She snatches my glasses from my lap where I keep them for easy access should I need to look at x-rays or the close-up crime scene photos of my teeth. After admiring the handsome design and the glossy shine of the faux tortoise-shell frames, she places them on her face. They fit perfectly. Her gasp flutters the air. “Everything’s so clear.” She gazes about in rapt wonder, then fixates on the EXIT sign over the door. “If only I could read…”

Exploiting her moment of wistful vulnerability to assert control of the situation, I demand, “How did you get here?”

“How did you get here?” she demands right back with a vehemence that makes me cringe into the padding of the chair. Then, she cranes forward to see what Dr. Dufera is doing. “You still have all your teeth? Damn!”

I don’t tell her that actually, no, two of them are implants. Very expensive implants. She doesn’t need to know that.

Staring longingly into my mouth, she runs a cautious finger over the apocalyptic landscape of hers. I watch in horror as she works free a carious nub, etched with tarry plaque and carved with a rot corroded crater. Her tongue tenderly probes the fresh lacuna, lapping out the blood that is pooling there. In the grime-lined palm of her hand, the tooth disintegrates into talc which she blows at me with a vaudeville wink.

Turning her attention to my purse hanging from a hook on the wall, she begins to rummage through it. At least my purse is old, the leather cracked, the handles dingy with use. But she finds my wallet, which is stuffed with cash as I had just been to the ATM because my cleaning woman doesn’t take checks. She flips avidly through the array of credit, health insurance, and customer loyalty cards and carefully inspects my driver’s license.

Then she takes out my phone and, pinned as I am underneath Dr. Dufera’s drill, I’m powerless to stop her as she unlocks it with her fingerprint.

It occurs to me that I’m dying. Dr. Dufera is either drilling too deep or gassing me up with too much nitrous oxide, and I’m about to cross over to the other side. I wish that instead of her, I was seeing a movie reel of my life. Then, in those first few, brief frames, I would once again meet with my Korean mother who, as legend (in the form of my adoption file) has it, relinquished me when I was two weeks old.

Shaking her head as if in disbelief, she studies photos of my sons, fingertips white under her fractured nails as she manipulates the screen to magnify their faces, looking for herself in them. The anger builds in her as she scrolls through the photos on my phone with sharp, violent swipes, every picture an indictment: family celebrations, group portraits, beautiful vistas, major milestones, famous backdrops, food and drink, laughter, hugs, delight, love, happiness. Too many photos of my beloved mutt Nari, each one eliciting the same what-the-fuck grunt from her. Selfies taken in the glamor capitals of the world: New York, Paris, Tokyo, London.

Seoul.

She hurls the phone to the floor. If the screen cracks, I can’t hear over the high-pitched insistence of the drill. Face phosphorescent, mouth opened wide with all the pitiful remnants showing, she howls, the two sounds harmonizing in a harrowing duet.

I want to tell her that there is a lot of my life that isn’t captured in the photos, like the countless hours I have sat under the whine and bite of the dentist drill, when no amount of numbing agent is ever enough. I want to say it isn’t me she should hate but the system that separated a baby from her mother to make her adoptable, weaning her much too early from her mother’s breast for nine months of god-knows-what from a foster mother’s rubber nipple, ruining her teeth with an artificial sustenance that could never replace a mother’s milk.

The drill stops and Dr. Dufera and his assistant lean in close to inject composite into the freshly bored hollow in my tooth. Leaning back with a satisfied sigh, Dr. Dufera pops the nitrous oxide hood from my nose. The stink of singed bone lingers, tooth smut yet drifting through the air. My glasses are back in my lap. I put them on, the lenses smudged with palm prints, and look for her.

She’s gone like the corrupted part of my tooth that has just been excised. But, I know she isn’t really gone. Since the sundering, she has always been there, and always will be. I’ll see her again when I’m back in the dentist’s chair, what’s left of my teeth disappearing under the drill.


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