if he asked his tourists to tap on articulating paper with their teeth at any point during the tour, most would leave. Instead, he placed an ashtub full of water between the stove and refrigerator, with strips of articulating paper floating freely on the surface and emitting a pretty blue bouquet If a tourist ventured into the bathroom closet, he would find a special olfactory delight—a Baldor lathe running perpetually, with a generous mound of Fasteeth heaped into the aluminum splash and dust pan. He equipped the lathe with a number 9 acrylic bur and a peach stone for a more complete Fasteeth circulation than most tours would offer. After a few hours of the lathe running continuously, all the clothes in the closet were saturated with that unique polish and grind aroma.
In the bathroom Dr. Sandborn took special care, since he knew it was the most common room for household accidents. He placed a large plastic spray botde of Campho-Phenique next to the band-aids and cotton balls and tongue depressors on the aluminum stand. Above the Campho-Phenique, he taped a sign: “Hey Kids! (and grownups too) This special solution smells remarkably like Chloraseptic, but do not spray it down the back of your throat or you will have to vomit and be rushed to the hospital. Do put it on cuts and bruises with cotton balls, then bring the dirty cotton balls to me. Enjoy the tour, Dr. Sandborn.”
In the medicine cabinet, within handy reach of the sink, he planted a jar of orange sherbet-flavored Ultra-One for the kids, and unflavored Sensodyne toothpaste for the adults. On the bottle of Banicide on the bottom shelf, he wrote with a felt-tip: “For those who want to avoid spreading hepatitis, herpes, AIDS, and tuberculosis, gargle with this solution at least once every visit as soon as you enter the apartment.”
In the living and dining areas, he perfumed the environment with open jars of Polyjel impression material and mint flavored Prophy Paste. Few dentists realized that Polyjel, once opened and aged for a few days, retained the scent of various fine cheeses, or that mint flavored Prophy Paste seemed much more spearmint than peppermint when one really concentrated on the fragrance.
Dr. Sandborn strolled around the apartment absorbing all the new smells, swinging his arms like a schoolgirl. Then he stopped, covered his eyes, nose, and mouth, and concentrated on breathing through his ears.
One year earlier, Dr. Sandborn begged Dr. Riddle to reconsider his decision.
“Touch my mind again,” he pleaded. “Just hang around the office and do the books. I’ll pay you.”
“No Sandstorm,” Dr. Riddle said quietly. “I’ve taught you all I can. If I retire now, the Mrs. and me can enjoy the money while we’re still young enough.”
“But you were right. I still don’t understand pain. I don’t know how to deal with it. My patients will stop coming if you don’t stay.”
Dr. Riddle touched his friend’s shoulder. He spoke gently.
“There’s something I’ve never told you. Remember the year I took the sabbatical? I was ready to crack up. I spent three months just pacing around in a church.”
Dr. Riddle had paced the south aisle of the Wells Cathedral in Somerset every day, often with his eyes closed. When he thought that no one was around, he ran to the sculpture that he had read about with such fascination in the office. He reached up and stroked his fingertips over the capital of the stone column with his eyes shut, memorizing every feature. Years later, at night, he could conjure up the sculpture simply by closing his eyes: curved stone shoulders exploding out through torn concrete curls, framed by an elongated, linear face stretched taut and ragged at the left cheek by a finger, with a precise puncture in the open left eye where the pupil should have been.
“It looks like a gargoyle with a toothache,” a woman had said from behind him, startling Dr. Riddle back to his senses.
“I bought a picture postcard of it for two pence at the front desk,” she said, trying to put her hand into the sculpture’s mouth.
Dr. Riddle had turned to her violently, thrust out his chin, and yanked the side of his mouth as close to his left ear as possible, closing his right eye viciously and flaring his nostrils like a dragon, looking, for an instant, exactly like the sculpture.
“How cute,” the woman had said, snapping his picture. “My husband will love it.”
According to the free tour brochure folded in Dr. Riddle’s pocket, your pain would disappear if you touched Bishop William Bytton II’s epitaph, engraved in the floor of the cathedral, and thought of the sculpture at the same time.
“So what happened?” Dr. Sandborn said excitedly. “Did it work?”
“I was arrested for sleeping on top of the epitaph,” Dr. Riddle said. “Now goodbye.”
“But I don’t know how to act on my own.”
“There’s an old Chinese proverb,” Dr. Riddle said. “If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap.”
Dr. Sandborn entered the empty spare bedroom of his apartment instinctively, without flicking on the light. This was the room in which his tourists were not allowed. In the middle of the dark floor, he practiced spinning around with his eyes closed without moving his feet, rolling his eyeshells within the perimeters of his head until they were soft as marbles. He clamped his teeth over his tongue so that he could cleanly taste the inside of a green inkpen. With a wallpaper paste brush and without moving his arms, he coated his body with red Eucerin and Neutrogena in the dark. Lacing his fingertips behind his head, he peeled on, one finger at a time, a pair of ambidextrous unisize disposable latex examination gloves, and decided he would never take them off. Then he lowered his body, from the neck down, onto a freshly ironed Kay-Pees professional dental beach towel, with medium-soft trubyte equalizing wax floating down from the ceiling and covering his body in layers of white licorice.
He exhaled silently and pictured his face in the dark. He had chosen his particular face because it had the perfect proportions according to the Greek criteria: five times the width of one eye and symmetrical features when one drew a line down the middle of the nose.
He prayed to Saint Apollonia in the dark, reading aloud from an overdue library book Dr. Riddle had loaned him:
Apollonia, Apollonia,
Holy Saint in Heaven
See my pain in yourself
Free me from evil pain
For my ache may torture me to death.
Apollonia is the patron saint of dentists. The Romans pulled all her teeth one at a time because she refused to renounce her faith. They broke her teeth with iron points, extracted the roots with tongs, and crushed her jawbone into chalk.
In the middle of the dark floor in the spare bedroom, Dr. Sandborn lay with a rag that had been soaked in chloroform draped around his face. He waited patiently for the tourists to arrive, breathing peacefully through his mouth.
THE PERILS OF ASTHMA
1
A Finch Named Goldy
Bub Lilly was certain of four things when he was twelve: he had acute asthma, he hovered between eighty-two and eighty-five pounds, he did not want to play the trumpet ever again, and he longed to own a Zebra finch and name it Goldy and let it fly free in his bedroom. Like cleats on a slow, spongy, indoor track, these certainties flopped around the perimeter of Bub’s head, setting pace and direction for his life.
He spoke to his dad about it.
“Pop,” he said, practicing the speech alone in his room. “I remember when I was eleven and you said a man should speak up when he’s troubled or he would get crushed like a melon in his head for keeping it all inside or else it would all explode and that’s what I’m doing and I’m telling you I will never never never ever play the trumpet again, and you will sell it for me and buy me a finch named Goldy and then we’ll both be happy and men.”
“Why would you name a finch Goldy?” his father would have said.
So