19F – Airport

Somewhere in this building there’s a pipe that sucks out all the atmosphere. It’s the opposite of warm. The stale air that seeps out of the air conditioning. The strange green hue to the lighting. The chairs that are never quite comfortable, no matter how you contort your body. The carpet that makes strange, swirling patterns if you stare at it too hard.

I feel sick.

Let’s be honest, nobody really likes to fly. When somebody asks, oh, did you have a good flight, they don’t think for a minute that you might have actually enjoyed yourself. It’s more a question of whether you made it through relatively unscathed. The best you can hope for is accidentally falling asleep, only to wake up on the other side, the throbbing in your neck a welcome trade-off.

Not that sleep is an option for me.

I catch myself watching the early flights go out, and I find the little finger on my left hand is quivering. Slightly. The sight of the large metal birds makes something heave in my chest, but I can’t stop looking at them. Each one hurls itself into the sky, and I can help but wonder how they stay in the air. Ok, obviously I know how it all works, but I also see everything that’s trying to bring them crashing to the ground. Gravity. Drag. Headwinds. Powerful forces. To anyone else, the planes look smooth, graceful, elegant. Perfect miracles of engineering. But I see a struggle. A desperate scramble to be airborne. Engines whining in protest, straining.

You can’t hear how desperate they are.

I watch them lurch upwards and all I can see is details – a small wobble of a wingtip here, a tilt there. No cause for alarm. Nothing that would get written up. But to my eyes, each one is an omen. A sign of impending disaster.

Don’t give me the road safety comparison. I know all about the statistics. I have, as they say, done my homework.

Before I know it, I’m walking down the corridor. Past the faint tang of burnt coffee that’s just everywhere. Through the strange, familiar tunnel of beige and grey. I feel the outside air, the fresh air, begin to wrap itself around me.

And then I’m at the door. This metal hatch that’s supposed to keep us from being sucked out into the sky. I start seeing stress fractures everywhere.

This never used to happen.

Before I know it, I’m in my seat. I look out the window, watch another plane taxiing down the runway, and a small pool of bile forms in the back of my throat. All the way through the pre-flight, I can hear my own heartbeat, feel the blood swirl through my head. Something feels too tight.

I look next to me, and Dave’s sitting there, waiting for word back from the tower, like I am. His face is calm, serene, utterly professional. How do I look? I don’t know. Nobody has said anything.

I grit my teeth and slowly suck in air. My lungs are screaming for more and more but I hold it. I have to hold it. My breath hisses like I’m sucking up steam.

I flick a switch and speak into the microphone, expecting my voice to catch, tremble. But the high-pitched chatter in my head comes out low, controlled, even. It’s not me. It must be someone else.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we apologise for the delay, just some traffic ahead of us. We should be underway shortly.”

I’m promising them something. The words don’t say it but I am. They believe me. Right now, someone is sitting back there, breathing out the bad air, comforted, relaxed, embracing the nothingness. Letting go of their fear.

I want to go back there. I want to give them some of mine.

18F – The Night Dentist

The old rough leather belts held his arms to the chair. They felt out of place in the room now – worn, cracking at the edges. Everything else was clean lines and stainless steel. He flexed his arms beneath the bindings and looked up.

“You’ve upgraded.”

The dentist was picking over a series of metal implements. They seemed smaller than he remembered.

“Been a while since you were here. How long since your last clean?”

“A year.”

“No, I mean your last real one. Like this. When did I see you last?”

He tried to count.

“Would have to be at least eleven years. Maybe twelve.”

The dentist rattled around the metal tools, pulled one out, held it up in front of him. Like he used to, when he was just a kid. To stop him from being scared.

“This other dentist, did he try for an x-ray?”

“Tried. Managed to talk him out of it before it got awkward.”

He nodded, and slowly approached the chair.

“You’d better be careful about things like that.”

A gloved hand grabbed the edge of his lip and twisted it outwards, not too gently. He saw the eyes, more sunken, huge behind the glasses, peering in at his teeth. He wasn’t just older, something else about him was different, his voice a little colder, harder.

“You been behaving yourself then?”

He caught the inference, ignored it.

“Been working on farms, mostly. Middle of nowhere.”

“Uh hunh… Oh. What’s this then?”

The spectacled eyes leaned in closer, squinting. He selected a small metal rod from his tools and gently tapped one of the raised incisors.
His jaw exploded with pain. Everything went vague, and he felt his muscles and nerves instantly tense. When the haze cleared, he looked up. The dentist was at the far end of the room, watching him cautiously.

“Quite a racket you’re making there. Thought that might be a bit tender.”

He felt a tiny burst of anger. He shut his eyes and forced it down. A few deep breaths and he was himself again. He looked up.

“What’s going on?”

“Hard to say. It looks like one of your… what do we call them? One of your other incisors has been damaged. What have you been eating?”

He didn’t reply.

“My guess would be an abscess, probably at the base. When the teeth retract it gets pushed deep, right under the jaw. Might explain the headaches you were telling me about – your body just can’t localise the pain.”

The dentist began picking through his equipment, holding up one implement after the other while he spoke.

“Normally we’d be looking at a root canal, but you have to understand, your whole physiology is a complete mystery to me. I don’t even know what will happen once the tooth retracts. And we’ve only got a few hours until that happens.”

“So… what can you do?”

“I can try to pull it out.”

He sat there for a minute, tried to think.

“What happens if we leave it?”

“I can only assume that the headaches will get worse. The infection could spread – it could become life threatening. You’ll need antibiotics. At the very least I’d say there’s a good chance you’d end up in hospital.”

No hospitals. No blood tests. No x-rays.

He could wait. But waiting would mean another month. Another month for another moon.

“So it has to come out then.”

The dentist looked over, needle in hand, and laughed nervously.

“I suppose I don’t have to point out that I’ve never done this before? Not on someone like you, anyway.”

Then the old man leaned in and injected something into his gum line. A sharp stab of pain gradually receded into a faint, fuzzy sensation. His face went numb.

“That’s a little more than the usual dose. You’ll be needing it, too.”

He watched the gloved hands carefully select a short, metal spike. The dentist began to tap the inside of his mouth, tentatively at first, but then with increasing force. He could feel nothing, no but his head shook, jostled with the effort. He watched the old man’s face, tight with concentration, but excited, too. Not the kind of operation he’d get to do every day.

His jaw began to throb, softly at first, then growing stronger, beating out a deep, solid rhythm. He could taste blood, and when the dentist backed away he could see it as well, on the metal and a small spray on the dentist’s smock.

The dentist leaned in with what looked like a pair of sturdy metal forceps, and clamped on to the tooth, gently wiggling it backwards and forwards. And then, bracing himself against the edge of the chair, he tensed his muscles and yanked backwards.

The dull throbbing became an uncontrollable rush of pain. Every muscle strained against the bindings that held him to the chair, until the metal arms bent and the bindings themselves gave way and snapped. A foul tasting liquid rushed into his mouth and he spat violently on the floor. In the same moment he was up, the hair on his arms and his back standing upright, his whole body awash with blood and adrenaline. He roared.

When he came to it was the early hours of the morning. His bare skin shuddered against the cold metal doors of the cabinet. His chest was sticky with blood, and there was a faint metallic taste in his mouth. He forced himself to look over at what he’d done, even though it twisted him up inside, even though it made it difficult to breathe. He wanted to remember.

He walked over to the body and gently pulled the tooth from the forceps. His tooth. Two inches long, a sharp, evil looking thing with a strangely curved root, bloodied and soft. He slipped it into his pocket and stepped quietly out of the surgery.