Teeth

Painting, Smoking, Eating, Philip Guston, 1973, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of www.artchive.com.

"It’s just going to be pressure. It might scare you a little. Every time I do this, I get an eyebrow raise, right when it cracks.”

“What do I do after?”

“We’ll give you directions written down. People tend not to remember what I’m saying right now, because they’re nervous.”

“Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Can we just, like, do it now?”

“Yes, absolutely. Let me go wash my hands.”

I take out headphones and start listening to Bon Iver in one ear.

After a minute: “Ready?”

“Yeah.”

“First we’re going to get you nice and numbed up. We’ll give you plenty of stuff, and then we’ll still check afterward. I know that’s something lots of folks are afraid of, feeling the surgery.”

I hadn’t thought about it but yes, that sounds pretty fucking awful.

“Lie back.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Pinch coming.”

Close my eyes quickly. Nothing. I missed—

Ow. Fuck. Ow. That wasn’t a pinch. Does he think that he can make it feel better by calling it—

Oh god it feels like it’s going through the bottom of my mouth all the way out. Shiver with it, try not to say any—

Okay. Okay. Okay.<

— Tense shoulders and pant and groan once like it’s sex and

Okay.

“That was the worst pain you’ll have today. How do you feel?”

Just shrug.

“I’ll leave you alone for a while. When your lips are tingling, that’s when we’ll start.”

Nurse: “How was it?”

“Fine.” I don’t know what to say. Listening to Towers, it lasts for a few minutes. Then:

“How are your lips?”

They can’t move. Someone has to have realized I can’t answer this.

“Nice and tingly all the way across?”

It’s not tingling it’s more like a bunch of needles dancing and making shapes in relief but

Nod.

The doctor comes back.

“Let’s do it.”

It feels like he’s breaking down a building in my gums.

*

After, the woman in scrubs gives me a receipt for two holes in my mouth. The doctor comes out to shake my hand. I try to grunt thank you. He must get this a lot; he says you’re welcome. I walk out of the white room into the heat with an icepack and cotton swabs and weird dead lips. The x-ray image keeps coming back: a nerve line cutting down from my ear to my chin, too small and too thin and too bare for what it is, a wire.

*

Back in my room, sweating. I try to change my bandage for the first time and holy fuck. That’s a lot more blood than I thought could be in a mouth. It comes out in long thin goopy strings, not quite liquid and not quite solid but purely red. I almost ask my roommate for help but just do it, that’s a thing, thank you Nike, I just do it, biting down on clean cotton.

*

Night. I can feel my lips. Unfortunately I can also feel my mouth. My roommate brought me Vicodin an hour or two ago, but for some reason I didn’t take it.

It hurts. I think I thought someone would try to distract me, watch something with me, do whatever it is people do. They haven’t. They want to but they have lives too, their lives don’t just stop, this was a fundamental flaw in my reasoning, fuck, people still have stuff to do other than think about me. I am out of it.

The sheets and the floor and everything are stained with puddles of red. Bloody swabs dashed in a plastic bag. My room is a war zone. I still can’t talk much, even though I tried, I saw some friends, they brought me food I could barely swallow. I tried to entertain them but I couldn’t, I could only make some sounds and try to smile, I was an animal; they left to go watch something. My face isn’t my face. The sharp thing comes and goes. There’s TV but it isn’t what I want. I don’t even have books here: I left them in other places. No reading, no talking, no eating, no fucking, no touching, no watching.

I go over to the sheet of white paper on my wall. Take out a sharpie. I’m not a person tonight, just a mess of sensations.

The sound of something breaking.

Drilling through and shattering it.

Pressure. Torque. Grinding up pavement.

Holes in my mouth. Too much to swallow. Red iron taste. Clot in the back of my throat. Nothing in my face at all. It hurts, leaves, comes back, stays. Don’t touch me. Someone is making shapes in my mouth. It feels cold. I’m cold. Someone is making shapes in my mouth. I can’t talk, I’m an animal. I write and it doesn’t help.