Just like that.
It is not there. It is there. It is not there.
That full.
That empty.
You do not have another thought until a drop of melting ice cream drips on the back of your hand.
You raise it and lick.
Andi walks over to a trash can on the wooden sidewalk, tosses away her cone, walks back to the car, collapses in, and waits for you, staring straight ahead, rubbing her jaw.
You continue working down the flow chart.
The door brandishes open.
Andi scoots out.
She walks with deliberation over to the pay phone across the street in front of an abandoned antique store, searches through the phonebook with the stained powder-blue plastic cover hanging from a segmented aluminum cord, digs in the pockets of her jeans for change.
You join her and massage her upper back while she jabs in the number.
This is an emergency, she announces into the mouthpiece.
She listens.
Yes, she says after a while.
She listens.
Excruciating. I’d describe it as excruciating pain. When I was eight I once stapled my thumb to my desk in school by mistake. This pain exists within the same general sensory terrain.
She listens.
Lower right molar.
She listens.
Yes… Yes… No.
She listens.
Absolutely not.
She listens.
No.
She listens.
I’d say more like a white-hot poker. Yes. A white-hot poker. That’s correct.
Ninety minutes, and you are flipping through glossy magazines, trying not to pay attention to the toddler who stumbles among chairs in the waiting room, attempting to make eye contact with you.
Only you.
Among all these waiting people.
Only you.
As if it has perfectly reversed second sight.
Three-feet tall, it looks like someone has applied a coat of Vaseline over its face and hands, they are so shiny with mucus and semi-solids.
Its gender remains vague, its eyes washed-out blue.
Its mother is oblivious, naturally.
She is speaking with the oblivious receptionist.
The oblivious receptionist is explaining to the oblivious mother that in her experience the most frightening thing about giving birth is the fear of runny mascara.
I’m like totally vulnerable, okay? she says as she files her fuchsia fingernails. My legs are up in those saddle thingies, and I’m screaming for somebody to get me an epidermal because I’m about to die, and then my face starts totally dissolving.
The mother wears tortoise-shell glasses that are four times too large for her face.
They remind you of a snorkeler’s mask.
Her neck-length blah-colored hair is so filamentous you can detect large patches of scalp through it.
The waiting room smelling like chemicals whose functions you do not understand.
The toddler bobbing its head just outside your peripheral vision, wide expectant smile on its sloppy face.
You cannot believe what a bad sense of other human beings it possesses.
Sending it psychic messages to retreat, you read an ad for a blow-up dummy designed to look like a lumberjack which frightened single women can prop next to them in the passenger seats of their cars for a feeling of security.
Within ninety-six hours of birth, babies can distinguish their mother tongue from a foreign language, sucking more vigorously when they hear it spoken, and Andi has been gone nearly forty minutes.
And yet the thing is? the receptionist is saying. The thing is, with proper planning and sufficient attention to product peranimas it doesn’t have to be an utter disaster.
Among all these waiting people.
Only you.
As if this child saw the world precisely backwards.
White is black. North is south. You are nurturing.
Its eyes, you note, are nothing like Gen’s.
You read an ad for a one-time-use respirator designed to expedite escape in the event your house is engulfed in flames.
For a tool to remove blackheads from your nose by suctioning.
A drill whines to life down the corridor.
The toddler squats, hands on knees, rocking side to side, knowing you can see it, believing you think it is as cute as kids get, suspecting in less than twenty seconds you will look up and return with greetings from your solar system.
Getting everything categorically wrong, in other words.
You cannot believe what congenitally poor readers some people are.
A bearded man who cannot keep his hands still and every so often huffs through his mouth like a horse sits next to a Native American woman who is so large she actually occupies a chair and a half sits next to an elderly man with mulberry veins exploded across his cheeks sits next to a fifteen-year-old goose-necked girl humiliated by her braces and head gear.
The door to the outside opens.
Everyone in the waiting room looks like the winning serve might be delivered right now.
A baby raised for one year amid the sounds of English loses the ability to hear the sound of a Swedish vowel and a man with dandruff ashing his shoulders and too old to be wearing jeans but wearing jeans anyway tiptoes in, moves delicately as if he has hemorrhoids, lowers himself into a chair, crosses his legs, cups his right knee in laced fingers.
Crosses his legs the other way.
Puts both feet flat on the floor.
Puts his hands in his lap like two uncooked chicken breasts.
Covertly slides down until he is sitting on his backbone.
Everyone notices but pretends not to notice.
Everyone except the receptionist and the mother.
They are talking about creating waterproof-yet-gentle-to-the-skin foundations.
Everyone except the receptionist, the mother, and the toddler.
The drill down the corridor sounds like high-frequency terror.
On another page in another magazine you come across a computer-generated photo of a happy family on vacation at the Hanford National Theme Park, now slated to open next spring.
They are posing for a Kodak moment in full baggy radiation gear amid scree fields and sandstone months before any family will in fact pose for a Kodak moment there.
The toddler squats lower, rocking and bobbing.
Its nostrils are crusted with greenish-yellow childsnot that reminds you of the insect burrowing into the sand on the Caracas beach.
When you were growing up, the key to dental health was regular brushing.
When you went to college, it was regular brushing and occasional flossing and an annual trip to the dentist whose hands smelled like onions.
These days it is regular brushing, regular flossing, regular water-picking, regular scraping with a sulcabrush, regular prodding with a rubber-tipped instrument whose name you have never learned, regular mouthwashing with a rinse that contains chlorhexidine digluconate, and the regular insertion of a syringe tip up under your gums to squirt various antibacterial agents into developing pockets.
That you can remember the smell of your dentist’s hands, and not the more important details from your past, is shocking to you.
What is the purpose of memory, if this is an example of it?
When your father was dying in his hospital bed, you remember the doctors pumped in what seemed like pints of morphine.
They assured you and your mother repeatedly that he felt no pain.
They were wrong.
If things continue along their present course, it is possible there will not be time to accomplish anything else in a day.
Everything will be devoted to the mouth.
This is not a good sign for Andi.