12. Anzigity

 

The directions tell me to, “PLACE 1 UNDER TONGUE LET DISSOLVE BEFORE SWALLOWING.” Such bad writing. Why remove the your between under and tongue? The pill between let dissolve? Whose tongue? What should dissolve? To save eleven characters they’ve eliminated an exponential amount of clarity. But what do I care? The pills are small and blue and I’ve already taken three. A streetcar goes by Dr. Nashid’s office, rattling the windows, producing what seems to be a symphony of rumble, and I realize the benzodiazepine has already taken effect.

There is no sense of transcendence, no enlightened insight or rush of self-confidence, but even without any of these properties, I can tell you that benzodiazepine is the drug I’ve been looking for all of my life. The pills have not only removed my anxiety, they’ve washed away any residue, removed even trace amounts, made me so free of it that I could confidently hand over my passport and attempt to cross the border into the state of self-assuredness. This elimination of worry has made me realize how much worry I routinely carry, like the loudness of a construction site revealed at quitting time. Could the majority of the world really feel this good most of the time? Are there men and women walking around this full of security? Feeling this safe? I feel slightly resentful, thinking about everything I could accomplish without the invisible vultures of anxiety continually perched on my shoulders.

I’m still revelling in this potential, knowing that there are at least seventeen more pieces of magic in the translucent yellow white-capped container, when Dr. Nashid comes into the waiting room. She sits down beside me. She spends a few moments looking directly into my eyes.

“How are you feeling today?”

“Fantastic!”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’ve taken the medication?”

“Yes!”

“So you feel that you are ready?”

“Let’s do this!”

Dr. Nashid doesn’t laugh at my enthusiasm, just leads me down the overlit corridor into the small, windowless room. The instruments gleam on their silver tray. The capped needle makes a forty-five-degree angle across the manila folder that bears my name. Blissed on benzodiazepine, I feel no fear when I see these things. I know my fear is there, but it’s in a cage, sleeping in the corner of the room. As the pretty dental assistant ties the blue paper bib around my neck some behind-the-camera part of me, for reasons that are still unknown, prompts me to snap my fingers.

“So. You are ready. Then if you could lie down, please?”

I do. Dr. Nashid pushes my mouth a little wider open. She dabs my lower left gum with a Q-tip. The needle still prompts me to close my eyes. It hurts. I breathe deeply. I picture my heart beating slowly. Then I can’t feel the needle anymore. I open my eyes. A sequence of large steel instruments goes into my mouth. The drill sounds. And then, using a surprisingly consumer-grade pair of pliers, Dr. Nashid reaches into my mouth. It’s almost through sound that I feel the ends of the pliers grasp my tooth. She begins to pull. Dr. Nashid tugs harder. I can feel my wisdom tooth resist, then begin moving, pulled out of its socket and through my flesh. It isn’t painful. Not even metaphorically. My mind conjures no allegory for the trials of acquiring wisdom itself. I just sit there, eyes open, focusing on the feeling of the tooth, which is no longer part of me, moving through the flesh that still is. I close my eyes as well. I listen to the sound of water running. Sometime later, the pretty dental assistant taps my shoulder.

“Here you go,” she says, and hands me a clear plastic container, the kind that would come filled with ketchup alongside a takeout hamburger. Inside it is my wisdom tooth. I can see the tooth’s jagged edge, the rough patch my tongue loved so much. I sit in the chair, grinning, shaking the plastic container, examining the tooth’s unexpected size as it rattles around, some sort of rare specimen, a butterfly captured in a faraway climate and brought home to study. This is when the words of a woman I saw earlier that morning, in the hallway outside of courtroom 313, come back to me. She was a strange, frail creature in her early twenties wearing too much mascara. Her black roots had grown three centimetres into her platinum hair. Her fingernails were bitten. Her shoulders were hunched. All of these things combined to create the impression that her spirit animal was a raccoon, although she radiated not impish confidence but worry and anxiety. She spoke in a quiet, husky voice that I heard only because I was walking past her.

“When I’m scared, it’s hard for me to believe that anybody knows what to do more than I do,” she said.

I will never know the context in which these words were uttered. The man she spoke to could have been her lawyer or her social worker, but based on the way the two of them were conspiratorially huddled together on the hallway’s only bench, how their fingers reached out toward each other but did not touch, I’d say they were in the very preliminary stages of becoming more than friends. He caught me staring at them and then led the raccoon girl farther down the hallway, where they continued their now-animated discussion by the elevators.

Her phrase stayed with me as I took the pills and got into a taxi. And as Dr. Nashid finishes packing my mouth with gauze, I feel a desperate need to say them out loud, as if the phrase is an oath or a spell, something that must be spoken out loud for its power to fully take effect.

“When I’vm scared it’z ’ard fer me to bulieve anzone znows what to do butther thzn I do,” I whisper.

“What’s that?” Dr. Nashid asks. I hadn’t meant her to hear me. But now that she has, encouraged by the continuing effects of three hundred milligrams of benzodiazepine, I feel a desire to explain myself.

“Zan I hell you sumting?”

“Are you being frightened?”

“No. I vant to hell you hhy I’m zo frighzed by denizry, luve, zyah fuzure.”

“You’re having a good day if you can tell me that.”

“Whin I’m szared it’z ’ard fer me to bulieve anybody nows wuat to do butter than I do. Tis da root of my anzigity. Makes me gate convol—even if it’s somethin I now nothung aboat. Meh fear iz zo shrong zat I half to do somethig. I gate convol! The ting iz, sumtizes I shold gate control. Nd sumtizes I sholdnt. But I dnt mate zat dezizion based on facks but anzigity.”

“Of course.”

I shake the plastic container. The wisdom tooth rattles. Dr. Nashid and the pretty dental assistant are eager to attend to their next patient. I know that. I have no desire to stay in this windowless room. But still I seem unable to convince myself to go. I continue sitting, giggling slightly because the idea that dental surgery has just changed my life seems very strange to me.