Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [38]
After three hours on the Internet and most of a bottle of scotch, I came to the conclusion that the bubble was just some sort of benign cyst that needed to be lanced. Probably, I concluded, I had jabbed the roof of my mouth with my toothbrush and this somehow created the cyst.
So I removed my friend Suzanne’s wedding picture off my wall and held the thumbtack over the flame of my Bic to sterilize it. Then I went into the bathroom again and did my compactmirror trick. Very quickly, I stuck the thumbtack into the center of the bubble, bursting it.
The relief was instantaneous. A clear liquid was able to escape from the bubble. As I wrote once in an American Express newspaper ad: The pressure is off; the weekend is on.
I decided I would call Bob and see if he wanted to have a spontaneous Friday-night date. Bob is this very friendly and short forty-year-old who answered my personal ad on AOL. We’ve had four dates, sex on the third. And the night before last he invited me over to his apartment on the Upper West Side, where he cooked a rack of lamb. He’s an excellent cook. But as I was walking around his apartment looking at pictures, I came across a picture of an extremely handsome man in a bathing suit. I said, “Who is this?” and he said it was him, taken when he was thirty-two.
Immediately, I felt gypped and wanted to date the younger Bob, no matter how good his rack of lamb was.
But he was so funny and charming that I decided eleven years wasn’t really that significant an age difference. And the nine-inch height difference between us didn’t matter so much when we were lying down.
I phoned Bob and got his machine. This sort of made me feel a little suspicious, because I didn’t recall him telling me he had plans for tonight. Maybe he had gone out for milk? A movie with a female friend? Or maybe he was asleep.
Then I figured, Fuck it. I might as well go to sleep, too. So I undressed, climbed into bed, and turned out the light. In the dark, I poked my tongue around the roof of my mouth. The bubble was gone.
The next morning I woke up, and automatically my tongue went to find the bubble. By now it was such an automatic function, I knew it would take weeks to unwire my brain. Except my tongue did come across something. Not a bubble. The opposite: a hole.
Alarmed, I got out of bed and went into the bathroom to inspect my mouth. What I saw was a tiny hole, right in the center of the roof of my mouth. The hole was much larger than a hole created by a thumbtack. It was more like something you’d expect if I’d used a ball point pen.
Hmmmmmmm.
All weekend I obsessed on the hole. I looked at it hourly and gargled with warm saltwater and Listerine constantly, hoping to prevent infection.
On Monday I returned to work and was extremely busy. Thus, I was distracted from my hole until returning home at night to see it still there and gaping.
By the end of the week, the hole was still there.
It was still there by the end of the month. And, I thought, perhaps slightly larger. The edges of the hole did not appear pink and infected. Rather, they were the color of the rest of my mouth. So this meant that the hole was now a part of my body. Except that I was certain the hole was larger than it was originally. And who was to say it wouldn’t grow larger, still? Eventually, would I be able to tuck the entire tip of my tongue in there? Perhaps be able to store things in the hole? The possibility of dating a drug addict in Rikers occurred to me. I could stow his heroin bag inside my mouth and nobody would think to even look in the hole because a person isn’t supposed to have such a hole in the roof of his mouth.
The hole didn’t hurt. Couldn’t that be considered a good sign?
But no. I decided that there was no good sign to be had. A hole is a hole, and a person is only supposed to have so many. And this hole was dangerously close to becoming an orifice.
I decided it was time to see my dentist. This is not an action I undertake lightly, as I do not care for my dentist. She believes not in local anesthetic and laughing