dentist

The receptionist desk is muted greys and with black edgings, behind it two computers screens, keyboards and phones. The phone rings as you approach and stand before the desk and say to the receptionist on the right. “Hello I am… “ “We’re expecting you take a seat in the waiting area…” Two or three sofas (how can you never remember how many sofas there are in the waiting room?) a low table, carpets. Again all in greys and… there are other colours and patterns but you cannot remember them. You sit down on the sofa by the surgery door and before you can take your book out of your pocket, the dental nurse appears in the doorway, and invites you in. Andy the dentist greets you and suffused in the existential dread of having a strange masked man manipulating your mouth and looking inside your body and stress begins to surface. He rolls the chair back and you are watching images of the fjords of Norway, the water is rolling in from the sea, bright sunshine, a cruise ship docked on the jetty, people frozen, moving glacially slowly [cut] an italian hilltop town and open wide, relax your mouth a little, a needle injects anaesthesia into the gum beneath the roots of the tooth. The pain makes your entire body freeze and then again on the other side of the gum. Andy test the tooth for pain. Adjusts the chair. The images from the front of a train accelerating out of a station, running parallel to the road on the left and the river on the right… Birch trees and tracks passing. It’s midsummer on the images. He swings the char upright, you cannot see the screen anymore. He takes unidentified tools and with invisible gesture extracts the tooth. Checks the wound. Puts a roll of gauss into your mouth and tells you to hold it firmly, after a minute or two he changes the gauss. Andy explains what you can and cannot do today, over the weekend rinse your mouth with hot salt water… relieved its over you drive along the residential main road, the long way home, and alone accelerate up the hill. The roll of gauss … But, it will be asked, what about ‘ the word as such’? ‘ As such’ is precisely the point. The word must of necessity refer to the real, otherwise it is not’ a word as such ‘. I put the media player on, Myra Melford trio is playing. Driving up the hill, along the incline I don’t brake allowing the memory of the dentist to let me drift over the rise and down the other side, gravity accelerating us down the slope.