I was sitting in the cafeteria eating meat loaf when something peculiar happened inside my jaw. My cheek started swelling up. By the time I got back to the ward I had a Ping-Pong ball on the side of my face.
“Wisdom tooth,” said Valerie.
We went over to see the dentist.
His office was in the Administration Building, where long ago I’d sat quietly waiting to be locked up. The dentist was tall, sullen, and dirty, with speckles of blood on his lab coat and a pubic mustache. When he put his fingers in my mouth they tasted of ear wax.
“Abscess,” he said. “I’ll take it right out.”
“No,” I said.
“No what?” He was shuffling through his tool tray.
“I won’t.” I looked at Valerie. “I won’t let you.”
Valerie looked out the window. “Could control it with some antibiotics for the moment,” she said.
“Could,” he said. He looked at me. I bared the rest of my teeth at him. “Okay,” he said.
On our way back Valerie said, “That was sensible of you.”
It had been a long time since I’d heard myself called anything as complimentary as sensible. “That guy looked like a pimple,” I said.
“Have to get the infection under control first,” Valerie muttered to herself as she unlocked the double doors to our ward.
The first day of penicillin the Ping-Pong ball turned into a marble. By the second day the marble had turned into a pea, but there was a rash on my face. Also I was too hot.
“No postponing it now,” said Valerie. “And don’t take penicillin again, ever.”
“I won’t go,” I said.
“I’m taking you to my dentist in Boston tomorrow,” she said.
Everybody was excited. “Boston!” Polly wiggled her striped hands. “What are you going to wear?” “You could go to a matinee,” said Georgina, “and eat popcorn.” “You could score something for me,” said Lisa. “Down near Jordan Marsh there’s this guy with a blue baseball cap—” “You could jump out at a red light and split,” said Cynthia. “His name is Astro,” Lisa continued. She was more realistic than Cynthia; she knew I wouldn’t split. “He sells black beauties cheap.”
“I look like a chipmunk,” I said. “I can’t do anything.”
In the cab I was too nervous to look at Boston.
“Lean back and count to ten,” said the dentist. Before I got to four I was sitting up with a hole in my mouth.
“Where did it go?” I asked him
He held up my tooth, huge, bloody, spiked, and wrinkled.
But I’d been asking about the time. I was ahead of myself. He’d dropped me into the future, and I didn’t know what had happened to the time in between. “How long did that take?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he said. “In and out.”
That didn’t help. “Like five seconds? Like two minutes?”
He moved away from the chair. “Valerie,” he called.
“I need to know,” I said.
“No hot liquids for twenty-four hours,” he said.
“How long?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
Valerie came in, all business. “Up you get, let’s go.”
“I need to know how long that took,” I said, “and he won’t tell me.”
She gave me one of her withering looks. “Not long, I can tell you that.”
“It’s my time!” I yelled. “It’s my time and I need to know how much it was.”
The dentist rolled his eyes. “I’ll let you handle this,” he said, and left the room.
“Come on,” said Valerie. “Don’t make trouble for me.”
“Okay.” I got out of the dentist’s chair. “I’m not making trouble for you, anyhow.”
In the cab Valerie said, “I’ve got something for you.”
It was my tooth, cleaned up a bit but huge and foreign.
“I snitched it for you,” she said.
“Thanks, Valerie, that was nice of you.” But the tooth wasn’t what I really wanted. “I want to know how much time that was,” I said. “See, Valerie, I’ve lost some time, and I need to know how much. I need to know.”
Then I started crying. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it.