The Other Side of the Lamp

It started on Sunday, at three in the morning, with the glass of water. Ever since I stuck Doña Chela's note on my fridge I drink water even when I'm not thirsty, and at the hospital I get it from the big jug in the break room, which in November comes out ice cold. I took a long gulp and something shot through a bottom molar on the left side, like a bare wire. I stood very still, glass halfway down, waiting for it to pass. It passed. It came back with the next gulp.

Pao saw my face and said, "Go to the dentist." I said I would. She said it again on Monday. I said I would again. It's exactly what sixty-year-old men tell me when I say they should get their blood pressure checked, and I know that, and I said it anyway.

The appointment I didn't make

On Monday afternoon I made the mistake of complaining in the "Ortega Girls" group chat. One message, that's all: "a tooth hurts with cold stuff, ugh." Six minutes later Andrea sent me a screenshot of her conversation with her own dentist, Dr. Sotelo, where she had already booked me for Tuesday at five thirty. Underneath she wrote: "Don't thank me, just go." Lucía sent a tooth emoji. I didn't know there was a tooth emoji.

The office is on a second floor, above a pharmacy on Avenida Universidad. You go up a narrow staircase with an iron handrail painted white that leaves your hand smelling like coins. In the waiting room there's an aquarium with a single huge orange fish that doesn't move, and a boy of about seven who was crying without tears, professionally, while his dad looked at his phone.

The receptionist handed me a clipboard. Under "occupation" I wrote "nurse." She read it, smiled and said, "Oh good, so you won't be scared." I smiled back. It was the last thing I did with any confidence that afternoon.

The chair

Knowing how something works is one thing. Lying underneath it is another. Dr. Sotelo is young, wears a face mask printed with little molars, and talks very slowly, the way I talk to patients who come in frightened. I noticed it the moment she tipped the chair back and the lamp came on in my face: she was talking the way I talk. She was treating me the way I treat people. And it worked a little, which annoyed me.

I couldn't stop looking at the tray. I counted the instruments. I read the lidocaine label backwards in the reflection on the cabinet glass. When she gave me the shot I asked how many milliliters, and she answered without stopping: "As many as it takes, Audrey." That's a good answer. I'm going to steal it.

I had both hands clamped on the armrests. She touched one of them without saying anything, and I let go. Then I realized I'd grabbed it again.

The drill, again

It was a tiny crack in an old molar, the kind you fill. The cause, she said, was me. I clench. I have the wear of someone who sleeps with a locked jaw, and while she got the handpiece ready she asked if I sleep well. I laughed with my mouth open and the saliva ejector inside it, which is a laugh I don't recommend to anyone.

Then came the noise. High and thin, going in through the bone to a place behind my eyes. I knew that place: it's where Don Rogelio's drill reaches me at one in the afternoon. I closed my eyes and started counting. Four, pause, four. The doctor doesn't work to that rhythm, hers is shorter and more careful, but I counted in fours anyway, because it was all I had on me.

She took impressions with a pink paste that tastes of mint and plaster, to make me an acrylic night guard I'm supposed to wear to sleep. It'll be ready next Tuesday. She charged me for the filling and waived the consultation "since you're Andrea's sister-in-law," which I'm not, but I didn't correct her.

Lips together, teeth apart

I left with half my face asleep. At the light on Universidad I caught myself in the rearview mirror and my bottom lip was drooping a little, like a woman about to say something and thinking better of it. At home I drank a glass of tap water, room temperature, and half of it ran down my chin because that half of my mouth hadn't gotten the news.

Before letting me go, the doctor gave me one single instruction, on a card with her logo: "Lips together, teeth apart." Practice it during the day, awake, she said, so the body learns it on its own. I thought it was silly. It's the kind of thing I write on discharge papers knowing nobody will read it.

This morning I got home from the hospital at a quarter past eight, showered, put in my earplugs and closed the curtain. Lying there with my eyes shut, in that moment when you can still hear the gas truck outside but no longer care, I realized my jaw was clenched. Really clenched, like a fist. I don't know since when. Maybe since nursing school, like the bun.

I let it go. Lips together, teeth apart. Ten seconds later it was clenched again. I let it go again. That's how I fell asleep, at some point, without knowing which side was winning.