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By Root 520 0

body of the family with as little disruption as possible. It isn’t unusual—the note from the school nurse reporting a case of chicken pox, the patient confiding, just before he opens his jaws, that he is feeling a little woozy, and then he leans back and out it comes, the miasma of contagion. Once each winter, if we are lucky, twice if we are not, the great family reunion that is the flu, or strep throat. The family patients have their characteristic styles of illness, and Lizzie is truly the worst, since she can’t stand discomfort but fights the medicine. Dana is hardly any better and seems to get a certain amount of relief from simply cursing, which doesn’t give the rest of us any relief at all. And me? Dana says that I am the one who haunts the house with a martyred air. I ask for a glass of orange juice, she says, and then, before she has a chance to get it, I turn up beside the refrigerator, wounded to the quick by her failure of care, and pour it myself. Yes, yes, yes. I wasn’t eager, given our circumstances, to take on this flu.

The patients, now transformed into vectors, came without cease. I leaned over them. I picked up one instrument at a time and set each down. I wanted to be careful and not angry. I wanted, in fact, not to be myself, but I didn’t want to be Slater, either. None of the patients really replaced him in the chair, though, and when Dana passed the door, or spoke in the outer office, his ears pricked with that sleazy curiosity of his. “That your wife?” he kept saying. My private revenge against him was that I knew that his front teeth were going to disintegrate, and that his embouchure wouldn’t be his for long, no matter what. Slater was an insensitive fellow, though, and didn’t care what I knew. He also wanted to sit sullenly in the office and eat steak subs with cheese and drink coffee every day for lunch. Dana wasn’t the only staff member pretty fed up with him. Laura didn’t like his manner at all, and Delilah just stayed away. Only Dave didn’t seem to notice.

Anyway, during those lunch hours, Slater and Dr. Dave were locked in argument. It was not that they couldn’t agree what to do. Neither of them knew what to do. Their concerns were more abstract. Dr. Dave wanted to find reasons for his feelings. It would have relieved him to know, for instance, that steak, cheese, and coffee were biochemical poisons that were deepening his anxiety. Slater had never seen anything, heard anything, or felt anything. Slater had no receptors, only transmitters. He wanted to shout and drive and drink and blow his trumpet. He was marvelously contemptuous of every thread Dr. Dave wanted to look at. What good had it done him, all these years, Slater declared, to pick up one tool at a time? Income, Dr. Dave said, look at my income, look at what people think of me. People, said Slater, think nothing of you. You are just a dentist, another white coat, another small thing. Every day you sit at your stool fashioning things in people’s mouths, and then they close their mouths and stand up, and more than anything they want to forget you, and your work never sees the light of day.

But you, Dr. Dave said, you know nothing, you stumble through your life without a first notion, pressing yourself and your breath and your music into the world. What good has it done you, Slater, to consume without thought and express without consideration? No good, said Slater. No good. But I know that it does me no good, and you don’t even know that.

And then I sit with my head against the wall, waiting for the next patient, and I can hardly move or breathe, and when the tears begin rolling down my cheeks, I just turn my head toward the window, I don’t even wonder why they have come or how I might dismiss them. I hear Dana’s step pause beside the door, the step of her $120 Italian high heels, for she is very particular about elegant shoes. I can imagine the flash of her curious blue eyes, but she says nothing, and when Delilah speaks from the other office, she turns and goes out, and both Slater and Dr. Dave feel gaspingly sorry for themselves.