Chapter Nineteen

Max thought he was accustomed to pain, since he practically traded in it as a dentist. He thought he knew suffering. But the terror and the hammering, shuddering, startling mix that hit him now drove him mad with its cruelty. Since yesterday—was it yesterday? How long had it been—Max was more than just sore. He more than ached from the head. It wasn’t a stabbing. It wasn’t a sting. It was a heat, a burning, echoing from his brain, like his hand—no, his head—was on a stove, and he couldn’t lift it off.

Max was nowhere. No time passed. Everything hurt.

Whatever Wade had clobbered him with, it knocked him free from everything he knew. He visualized himself reliving memories. He imagined himself strapped to his own dentist chair, surrounded by a blur of others, judging him for his crimes. The judges—voices he knew, faces he didn’t—wanted to condemn him.

It was never a dream. It was always real. Max could pinch himself in it and feel it, and he couldn’t reason his way out of it, the way you can puzzle your way free from sleep by asking yourself questions about the situation. Max asked all the questions, shown moments from his childhood, from his bad boyfriends, from the past two months. He wouldn’t wake up. He wondered if he was in death. He wondered if he was in hell. Hell had a dentist’s chair.

Hell was a flash of memories, all of them bad. And the judges showed them to him, the chair venturing like a roller coaster from nightmare to nightmare, Max could not move from them and could not blink.

Sometimes he could make himself budge, and he’d feel himself, eyes suddenly open, in a pool of blood on the floor of his office. Then, in a flash, it would be gone. He would try and grab for anything, knocking over papers, but then he’d be gone from the office floor, back in the dentist’s chair, watching porn with his Uncle Charlie when he was 10, the man’s hand upon his knee.

Max would flash to the sounds of a bone saw, a nurse telling him not to worry, and then he’d hear his own drill, the whizzing and the high-pitched squeal it made as a little boy winced and squirmed under the weight of it. Even through laughing gas, the little boys—baby squishy ones of about 5 or 6—would still wince and squirm, trying to stop more than pain. The boys would try to stop the idea of pain, the promise of pain. They didn’t want to learn what pain had to teach them. The painkillers made them sillyheads, too. They were all cute and pliable and funny-sounding.

“Is this real life?” the little patient would ask him, the drugs turning him from a man into a Muppet.

Max asked himself this now. Max asked his judges this.

“Is this real life?” Max screamed, and the judges towered over him. They told him no.

Max never touched the littlest ones. He would only entertain the ones who wanted to be entertained, the ones like Wade who were old enough to understand how good it felt to be touched before Max touched them. Like Christopher. Like Jacob. He’d been that age when he was taught it. And it hadn’t messed him up. He was preparing them for life. They’d walk away, at 16 or whatever, laid and experienced.

The state allowed it. If Wade had been a girl, he could consent. Georgia was a bit murkier about the gays, though. At one point, it didn’t want the guys fucking each other, no matter the age at all.

Max cared about Wade. He flashed, while in the dentist chair, to Wade crying about his dad, to Wade crying about his baby, to bitching about something. Wade was just a crybaby, perpetually in need, always crying. Sometimes it was nice to save such boys. Sometimes it was just a headache.

Other boys weren’t like Wade, the 18-year-olds he met on the Internet, the 20-year-old college kids. They were stronger. Those dalliances never lasted as long. Max was never their first time, just the first time they’d tried someone older. Max knew how to kiss them, knew how to touch them. Max liked to be a teacher, though. He liked his partners to learn things.

The conversations with the judges, the moments, would last for hours. They’d be boring or painful, inescapable. Max would struggle against the straps on the dentist’s chair, and the whirring of the drill would threaten him.

“We suffer through,” a judge whispered, sounding like Celeste. “You suffer. You suffer for what you’ve done.”

“What about you, Celeste?” Max screamed into the void. “What about what you did? You brought that boy to me.”

“He is just a boy,” the judge whispered.

“You know you know.”

The scenes continued to play, the moments where he asked Uncle Charlie to touch him, after he knew how it would feel. Max used to want to tell his secrets, but what could Uncle Charlie say in reply? Uncle Charlie could say Max did it and wanted to do it.

Max took responsibility for the things that happened to him. He encouraged Wade to do the same. When he kissed Wade, Wade kissed him back. There was a willingness. But there was more. Max liked control.

When Max saw the night in the hotel, he felt himself biting Wade’s ear, dragging his tongue along the boy’s chest. Wade had said it was better than sex with that girlfriend of his. Wade said everything was good. And Max tried to feel like he’d done something decent, romantic and spontaneous by taking the boy away with him.

Δ

In a flash, a jolt of pain brought Max’s eyes open, and he saw blood in front of his eyes.

And Wade. And Celeste. And they were standing there, staring at him, terrified of what they saw. Max screamed. And they seemed to hear him. They saw the blood just as he did.

They told him he was awake. They marveled at each other that Max was awake. He wasn’t in a dentist chair. He was in a hospital bed, and he jolted to try and break free from them. But it was still difficult to move.

This was hell, and they were his judges. And they had condemned him to suffer.

Wade’s mother rushed in, pricking Max with needles, yelling obscenities all around the room. And Max was numb, his head on a pillow, but he still felt like screaming. He was still in hell. He was not free.

In hell, everyone knew Max’s secrets, and no one shared the blame with him.

“Am I dead?” he asked Wade’s mother in a whisper.

“You were in an accident,” she replied. “You’re in the hospital.”

But the judges haunted him, standing over him. Wade’s mother was just another judge.

He saw them. He looked to Wade, terrified. Celeste convulsed. And then it all faded away, leaving only the pain and the thoughts.

Max pictured the six-year-old blonde boy who squirmed in his chair, putting a hand up to try and keep the drill away, but the drugs had already taken effect. It was too late, even with the boy’s hands up, to stop the pain. Max wielded pain as a way of improving lives. Pain creates better smiles.

Guilty as hell, Max thought, condemning himself. Unsure of what was real anymore, he knew only pain, he expected only pain.

Death could just be a continuation of pain, not a rest or a reprieve from it. It was a slideshow of nightmares that occasionally forced you to walk back through it, suffering in a new way. Still, Max wondered what he deserved.