Читать книгу No One You Know - Jason Schwartzman - Страница 14

I’m at the dentist, deeply reclined. She comments that my beard is new, thinking I’m my brother, until I tell her I’m not. I learn a little about her, that she likes her vacations in the three and four-day variety, so you can have more of them.

“Not waiting for your two weeks like some dog,” she says.

The dentist starts telling me about how she is still relatively new to the city – how the building jumpers are very inconsiderate when they don’t wait for people to pass. She seems to think that the jumping is as New York as taxis or rats, and she worries they’re going to land on her. Once she saw the aftermath in person, the police taking their time, the body still there, someone’s head splattered across the sidewalk.

I’m overdue for an X-ray, so she is jockeying the machine into position, pivoting its arm. It can be contorted to support whatever position she needs, but the problem is that it won’t stay still. It is moving too much on the right side. “A screw loose,” she explains. Until someone fixed it, she asked patients to use their actual arm to hold the mechanical one steady above their heads while the photos are taken. She assumed the machine had the same skittishness on the left side, so she asked her patients to hold it on that side too. One of them was an engineer and he told her he didn’t think that just because the mechanical arm is skittish on the right side, it will be skittish on the left. Gravity, physics, she still doesn’t know exactly what, but he was right. When it held, when the mechanical arm did not quiver on the left side, “it was a blow,” she tells me.

“I didn’t feel well all of a sudden.”

Now she wonders what other assumptions she has made.

She pulls down her surgical mask so we are face to face. In such a clinical setting, it registers almost as a kind of nudity, and my recent isolation makes the unexpected intimacy especially potent. It has such an effect on me that I consider asking her out.

How do you ask out your dentist?

She is still thinking out loud, telling me about this one moment – the screw-shaped hole in her brain.

“What other tiny errors do I make when I judge people?” she asks. “When I think about myself.”

I start becoming concerned about her reliability as my dentist. She seems to spend a lot of time thinking about dead people. I like my dentists to be bland and stable. Empathetic but not too eccentric. Fixing teeth must take concentration. Consistency.

So many screws.