‘You’re going to feel a pinch,’ he says, as said pinch blossoms into a hairy shank of pain. A needle in the mouth-roof carries all the subtlety of a grenade in a gas tank, and I try to tell him that it feels like he’s stabbed through my soul but he’s already wrist-deep in my mouth before I get the chance. I call him a sadist (‘adiss!’), and as is the case with my mangled speech, my playful smile is lost against the grotesquery of my unhinged jaw, like trying to show a fist with an open hand. Charm is inconsequential when the victim of a root-canal, I realize, and my eyes close to allow the swirl of pain-killers to anesthetize me fully.
I’m imagining tearing through a mammoth mound of Caramilk bars when the smell of burning face rouses me. I try to pinpoint the stench, flipping through a catalogue of aromas and finding the closest approximation to be that of smoke on fire, when he nearly pulls me from my chair; he’s apparently drilled so deep into my tooth that he’s using two hands to pry himself free. My eyes open inadvertently as he dislodges whatever it is that got stuck, and I watch him wipe his brow before I swim back out into the ocean of my mind.
I’m in the waiting room now, and the dentist has just unmasked himself so I don’t have to guess at what he’s saying after every third word; he’s hunched as though he’s come through a great ordeal, and he asks me how I feel. I mumble ‘nyumph’ a couple of times to shake free of the freezing and give him a wink.
‘If my teeth had an ass,’ I said, perhaps a little too loudly, ‘it feels like they’ve been fucked in it.’
Patients look up from their magazines. The receptionist’s head swivels toward me with shocking alacrity. The dentist’s face twists into something that at last resembles bemusment. The warm cascade of understanding washes over me, and my eyebrows arch excitedly.
‘That’s it!’ I bellow, my arms unconsciously opening as though I was welcoming home a friend. ‘Getting a root-canal is like being assfucked in the mouth!’
I don’t remember the first falling balloon, nor the first appreciative slap on the back; I have vague recollections of hastily-erected banners, of streamers filling the office with horizontal colour, of manic one-sided phone-conversations, of arguments over the precise wording and eventual placement of the plaque-to-be. Torn up pamphlets advising against gum disease produced a makeshift tickertape parade, and people everywhere started kissing passionately in celebration. I stumbled backwards in my astonishment, almost falling into an old woman I mistook for a small lump of rags. I bent down to apologize and found her weeping joyfully.
‘I didn’t think I'd live to see the day,’ she gasped, reaching up to touch my cheek. ‘You’ve come up with the perfect description of a root-canal, yes you have. Oh my stars.’
The tears ran down the cracks of her wrinkled face as she looked up at me, and I stood satisfied with my accomplishment, admiring the festivities I had inadvertently initiated, proud that I had contributed so mightily to the advancement of human evolution. I grabbed a passing adolescent by the arm and slapped a fiver into his hand.
‘Do me a favour,’ I said, grinning like the devil himself. ‘Go snag me a Caramilk bar.’
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