Free The Strangers' Gallery by Paul Bowdring Page A

top-notch dentist. I called his home but, as expected, only reached an answering machine that informed me his office would be open at eight-thirty in the morning. I offered to take Anton to the hospital, as he seemed to be in some pain, though it was unlikely that there would be a dentist in the emergency department.
    â€œMaybe they could give you some painkillers,” I suggested.
    â€œNo no no,” he said, shaking his head and waving his hands like windshield wipers across his grimacing face.
    He might have been averse to going to the hospital, but he wasn’t to taking painkillers. He said he had some codeine in his knapsack, which was lying on the floor. He took two tablets, then lay down on the stripped bed in the fetal position and tried to go to sleep. Lying there in just his underpants, he looked so bare, helpless, and miserable that I picked a blanket up off the floor and covered him up.

    At exactly eight-thirty I called Freshwater Dentistry. The name of Dr. Wins’s dental practice, which of course merely referred to the location of the office on Freshwater Road, had always suggested to me some radically new aquatic dental technique. Mrs. Halfyard, the receptionist, never one for stalling half measures, agreed to take Anton in right away. We arrived at the office even before the dentist, but Mrs. Halfyard said that Dr. Giovannetti was just on his way in.
    She had checked
my
records when I called in and now informed me that I hadn’t had a checkup in over four years. This I found hard to believe, but she looked unblinkingly at me over the top of her glasses—a blatant imitation of Dr. Giovannetti, I thought—when I leaned in over the counter to glance at my chart.
    Hadn’t I received my annual reminders? she asked. I said I couldn’t recall. There was a cancellation that very afternoon, she said. One of Dr. Giovannetti’s patients had died. That was why he was a bit behind, she explained; he was visiting the bereaved family on his way in. She said I could come back at two o’clock, and though I was a bit hesitant about replacing a dead man, especially with Frank Morrow for a neighbour, I agreed.
    Dr. Wins shared his office space with two junior colleagues, and the waiting room was already filling up with victims of “compromised dentition,” as a poster on the wall referred to our common dental ills.
    â€œI guess I’ll see you after work,” I said to Anton.
    â€œOkay…I’m okay,” he replied, half-heartedly.
    I left him sucking on his knuckles and reading
Oral Health.
In an old issue of this magazine, here in this same office, I had once been most surprised to learn that dentists had the highest rate of mental breakdown and suicide among all professional groups. To think that these most stolid of professionals, these maintainers of our molars, bicuspids, canines, and incisors, these trusted mechanics of our working mouths, more trusted perhaps than the most invasive of surgeons, for they work while we are awake (and, of course, some of them
are
surgeons)—to think that they were cracking up and killing themselves much faster than the rest of us had come as a shock. I thought about it again on my way to work.
    In the article, a detailed sociological and psychological analysis had been presented to account for these alarming statistics, but it all seemed beside the point. My theory was this: the mouth is not only the most used and most important but also the most intimate, the most sacred orifice of the human body. Air and sustenance enter, the voice comes out; it is where the soul, it is said, leaves the body after death. And then there is lovemaking: the mouth bestows and receives the most intimate of kisses, performs the most intimate of acts. No wonder a person would feel constant stress working inside such a hallowed place. But alas, chipped, yellowed, abscessed, decaying, plaque-covered teeth may also be in there, and work inside it he