I have a friend who says he looks forward to going to the dentist because it’s a challenge—he likes to find out if all his careful flossing has worked. Okay—there’s a bit of the Boy Scout in that, but I question his motivation. I know two people who don’t use lidocaine. One has an allergy. Another—well, she believes that life is suffering, and that we should feel it, that we shouldn’t flinch, that resistance is futile. I agree, up to a point; but when the shot is there and a few billion people would be grateful for it, not resisting may be the irrational choice. And I think she has some twisted idea of what it means to be strong; she wants others to watch her feel it and be impressed by her power to handle the pain, which is at least a little insane, I think. But so am I, on the other side of things. Like most counselors, I need my own advice; in the dentist’s chair, I am like a flinching boxer past his prime, dancing around the ring with the young contender. I try to face it squarely, but what I face is how to make it through the fear at all.
I want the dentists to reassure me, tell me that my cowardice is understandable, or at least not that uncommon. But I know I am way out on one end of this continuum. I know the pain can be treated, but the existential terror of pain known from the past becomes a new pain today. I am curious about almost everything in the world, but I am not curious about dentistry, about the battlefield of my mouth. Curiosity requires the willingness to engage, to know. I actually conquered a fear of flying; I talked myself out of it by learning and rational discussion and a few judicious doses of Xanax and Inderal. I can’t do that in the dentist’s chair; I can’t begin to engage. This is the plain fact: I’m not as afraid of being afraid, or of being ashamed of being afraid, as I am afraid of the dentist.
A long time ago, I worked in an outpatient surgical clinic. We sometimes used nitrous on our patients. At the end of a long day, one of the doctors, another nurse, and I were sitting around the back room. We were all feeling the stress of too many patients, too many hours. The doctor reached out and grabbed the mask on the nitrous cylinder, spun the knob, and took a couple of whiffs. He smiled and handed it to me. Straight from his hand to mine, like a prescription; I took the mask and a few quick breaths and felt a little light-headed and then guilty. My drug reference lists “euphoria” as an “adverse effect” of narcotics because feeling good is not the intended purpose of narcotics. When I took that single whiff of nitrous oxide, I felt as if I were cheating in some big way—cheating because I didn’t “need” it, because I wasn’t sick, because it felt good. Because it was fun. I never cease to wonder at the vast injury we have done ourselves this way—that we fear feeling pleasure means not paying for our sins.
THERE HAS BEEN the one root canal. I dreaded root canals the way other people dread public speaking or cancer. I go for a consultation first. Just to talk. The endodontist has a large binder of helpful full-color drawings telling me exactly what he is going to do down in my tooth root with his gutta-percha and drill and strange tools. He looks at my X-rays and says, pointing, “I think you’ll need a root canal on this other tooth, as well.” He pauses. “We’ve got time, we can do it right now.”
The tears start rolling down my face. The whole world has shrunk to the size of a root canal, or the root of my tooth is the size of the world, I can no longer tell. I look at him and see that he is embarrassed. A little annoyed with me, with my babyish tears.
Even now, I’m surprised at the lack of sympathy. I am periodically reminded by my patients that what is normal to me (the sounds, the smells) is a strange and frightening world to them. I’m not the typical dental patient, and I have to remind them of that. This is very far from normal to me. I don’t like the looks of the tools; I quite hate the sounds coming from the next cubicle, and I’m not in what would be called the proper frame of mind for learning. I had asked the receptionist about sedation as soon as I arrived—real sedation, a drug called Versed that causes amnesia. It’s used for painful procedures like colonoscopies and bronchoscopies, and I’ve seen time and again how easily patients get through difficult hours this way.
“It costs $500,” she tells me; and so that’s that. It’s lidocaine and nitrous, or nothing.
When I finally arrive for the procedure, a few weeks later, I find out that one of the assistants is the woman who was my best friend for a while in high school, when we prowled the streets of our small town in a plague of dissatisfaction and restless urges. She makes cheerful small talk while I take the chair, the stress vibrating through me. She gets me started on the mask, chatting about my siblings and the weather and her apartment and her boyfriend and her car and who cares and I don’t care and I watch the cloud passing across the window and after a while stop answering and after a while she leaves, and I think to myself that no one’s feelings will be hurt because we can blame it on the nitrous. On nitrous, all is forgiven.
The root canal didn’t hurt more than a filling or a crown. Pain—the physical pain is covered. The numbness required was deep and extensive, spreading through my eyeballs, far up into my nostrils and scalp, into the canals of my ears, and it lingered for many hours. The procedure was long, so long, on and on. And I am cursed with imagination, and wish I’d never seen the binder with its color pictures. It filled my dreams.
TIME TO HAVE another permanent crown cemented on, a gold one on a back tooth. This is a procedure many people do without lidocaine. In the days before an appointment, I might go through a rainbow of experience: stress and anger, an undirected vague resentment, self-pity, more impotent anger. As it approaches, anxiety begins to crowd out everything else, anxiety felt in the palms and stomach. The morning of the appointment, the secretary calls and warns me there is something wrong with the nitrous setup and it won’t be available today. My tooth is hurting, I’m sick of it all, I want to be done. This one tooth has probably been worked on eight times or more in my life. I hang up and a small, bleak terror envelops me, and I’m crying, lying on my bed in the dark. I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t. And I don’t; I make another appointment.
When I get there a few days later, I try to explain to Dr. B. It has been so long since I’ve had dental work without nitrous. “I kind of fell apart,” I say. “I really am a strong person,” I say. “I’m not scared of many things. Really, I’m pretty good in most places. Really.”
I imagine my pioneer ancestors facing the pliers with only a bottle of whiskey. I imagine the sidewalk dentists in India. None of that helps; gratitude is a crappy antidote for terror.
I look up and back at Dr. B, where she sits behind me, and say, “You’re my mommy now.” She smiles, but doesn’t laugh. We’re all five years old inside. I’ve told patients this a thousand times, and I tell myself the same: we are all children, we are all vulnerable, we are all helpless in each other’s hands.
She hands me the mask. The pink walls turn orange, the light expands, a tingling, cottony sensation surrounds me. I turn up the music, and David Byrne is crooning to me: “Hold tight / We’re in for nasty weather.” Pinching. Pushing and pulling, clamping and scraping. Empty skylight. No cloud.
I realize that I am alone. There is no one near me. Perhaps they have forgotten me. Perhaps they went to lunch, or home for the weekend. I feel a rush of self-pity. I’m just going to sit here, all alone, I think. My pity slowly drifts across the skylight with everything else, finally, like everything else, fading away.
Antioch Review, Spring 2008
I’m still going to the same dentist’s office. They know me there. I am sure there are special code words all over my chart. Everyone smiles patiently and takes their time and pats me on the shoulder.
The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies
THE GREAT ENTOMOLOGIST JEAN-HENRI FABRE COVERED his desk with the carcasses of birds and snakes, opened the window, and waited.
He didn’t have to wait long.
FROM THE TIME I was quite young, I loved cold-blooded creatures. I had to be taught not to pick things up in the woods: to me it was all good, all worth examination, f
rom beetles to mushrooms to toads. I was stealthy, and in the thistle-ridden fields near my house, I caught many blue-belly lizards to keep as pets. My father built a cage for them, a wonderful wood-and-screen contraption that smelled of pine and grass and reptile. I kept garter snakes and frogs and chameleons too. Once, someone gave me a baby alligator. I had several praying mantises, and built them elaborate branch houses in the cage, and fed them crickets. I don’t know where this came from, my appetite for the alien; it feels like an old question, long and mysterious.
My study of living things, part inquiry and part the urge to possess, became inevitably a study of predation and decay. I had to feed my pets, and most preferred live food. Mantises always died, their seasons short. The chameleons died, too delicate for my care. The alligator died. I tried to embalm it, with limited success—just good enough for an excellent presentation at show-and-tell. When one of my turtles died, my brother and I buried it in my mother’s rose bed to see if we could get an empty turtle shell, which would be quite a good thing to have. When we dug it up a few weeks later, there was almost nothing left—an outcome I had not anticipated, and one that left me with a strange, disturbed feeling. The earth was more fierce than I had guessed.
In time I became specifically interested in human bodies, how they worked and how they got sick and what they looked like when they died. This did not pacify my mother, who worried aloud about my ghoulish preoccupations. I did enjoy the distress I could cause by something as simple as bringing an embalmed baby alligator to school in a jar. But I was also—and for a long time I could not have explained why it was of a piece with my impassioned studies—exquisitely sensitive to the world’s harsh rules. I regretted each cricket. An animal dead by the side of the road could bring me to tears, and I cried for each dead lizard, each mantis. A triad, each leg bearing weight: sensitivity, love, and logic. The weight on each leg shifts over time. Now, a penetrating awareness of the cruelty seemingly built into the world’s bones. Now, a colder logic, an awareness of the forces that balance systems at the cost of individuals. At times, in brief pure blinks of my mind’s eye, a love painful in its intensity, an unalloyed love. I love the tender, pale blossoms opening now on the cherry tree in my yard, the sudden pound of lush raindrops from the empty sky: each thing I see is a luminous form in a sparkling world. Such love is a kind of grace; enshrined in it, all is right with the world. It is a little touch of madness, this kind of love—raw and driving.
Some years ago, I began to study the small things in the forest that I didn’t understand, moving from the lovely and lethal amanita mushrooms to the stony, invincible lichens to the water skippers coasting lightly across the little creeks. I began to study insects especially and then flies in particular.
Flies are so present and innumerable that it is hard to see their presence clearly, hard to believe in their measure. There are around 120,000 species of flies, depending on who’s counting, and they have many names: bee flies, cactus flies, papaya flies, warble flies, brine flies, nimble flies, biting midges, green midges, gall midges, mountain midges, dixid midges, solitary midges, net-winged midges, phantom midges—so called because the larvae are transparent and seem to disappear in water. Studying flies, my head begins to spin with suborders and divisions, tribes and clades, and the wild implications of the Latin names: Psychodidae and Sarcophagidae and Calliphora vomitoria.
The order Diptera is old, as are most insects; it was well established by the Jurassic Era, 210 million years ago.1 (Unlike all other insects, flies do not have four wings. Diptera comes from the word di for two and ptera for wings.) Fly biology is a vast and changing field. New species and subspecies of flies are always being discovered. Familiar species are found in new locations; variants between species are analyzed in new or subtler ways, and so the taxonomic distinctions between flies are always being revised. But in the general term, flies are defined by their single set of wings, legless larvae, and mouthparts designed for biting, sucking, or lapping.
We are one kingdom with flies: Animali, and then we diverge. (You can remember the taxonomic series of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genera, species with an appropriate mnemonic: Keep Pots Clean; Our Food Gets Spoiled.) Flies are found in the phylum Arthropoda: exoskeletons, jointed legs, and segmented bodies, a group that includes crabs, centipedes, and spiders as well. The flies are in the subphylum Mandibulata, which means mandibles on the second segment past the mouth opening, and just imagine that. We are not in Kansas anymore. Class Insecta means a body is divided into head, abdomen, and thorax. The insects from here on out—beetles, fleas, ants, scorpions, walking sticks, and many other types—are entirely separate orders.
Inside these templates, there is stupefying variation. They are divided into families, genera, and species by the varied location of veins in the wings, their color, body size, type of mouthpart, the number of stages of larval development, the type and separation of eyes, antennal structure, the arrangement and number of bristles on the body, the length of the legs, and habitat—differences controversial and infinitesimally detailed.
We often know them as the most common and familiar things, as single things: individual flies rescued or swatted, struggling in webs, crawling dizzily across cold windowpanes on a milky October day. One finds flies in odd places, but so often they are not a surprise even in surprising locations—in the laundry basket or buzzing inside the medicine cabinet, or caught unawares in the wash water. Almost every fly you catch in your house will be a housefly, one of the family Muscidae, chubby and vigilant flies that can birth a dozen generations every summer. (Houseflies are found in virtually every place on earth save for Antarctica and a few isolated islets.)
Sometimes we know them as plagues: I’ve been battered by biting flies in forests, near mangrove, and in sand, flies the size of pinheads in clouds so thick I couldn’t walk twenty feet without getting a crop of angry red bites on every inch of exposed skin. These are the ones we call punkies or gnats or no-see-ums, the fly family known as Ceratopogonidae. There are more than four thousand species of them—tiny, almost invisible flies with stinging bites, inexplicable dots of pain.
The Encyclopædia Britannica says simply, “It is not possible to discuss all dipteran habitats.” Flies live in the air and the soil and under water and inside the stems and leaves of plants. They live high in the mountains, in sand and snow, tide pools and lakes, sulfur springs and salt lagoons. The brine fly lives in the thermal springs of Yellowstone at temperatures up to 43 degrees Celsius. There are flies in the volcanic hot springs of Iceland and New Zealand living at even higher temperatures. Certain flies handle extreme cold easily too, blessed with a kind of antifreeze and other strange gifts. The wingless snow fly lives underground in burrows and wanders across the white fields during the day—wee black spots walking briskly along in the afternoon. The Himalayan glacier midge prefers temperatures around the freezing point but has been seen active at minus 16 degrees Celsius. (When placed in a hand, it becomes agitated and then faints from heat.) One carnivorous fly lays its eggs in pools of seeping petroleum, where the larvae live until maturity. One wingless fly lives inside spiders. Certain flies can live in vinegar. There are flies munching contently on spoiled vegetables. When we eat them by accident, they just ride the peristaltic wave on through, exiting in our feces and moving along.
The single pair of wings that is crucial to the identity of flies may be very small or startlingly large or vestigial, may lie open or closed, look scaly, milky, beribboned with black veins, smoky or transparent. Instead of a second set of wings, flies have small bony structures called halteres. They are mobile gyroscopes for flight, beating in time but out of sync with the wings, twisting with every change of direction to keep the fly from tumbling. Most are astonishing flyers, able to move in three dimensions at speeds hard to measure. Some can hover motionless and fly backward or forward or sideways like helicopters. (Flower flies, which look alarmingly like wasps but are harmless, will hover in front of your face, ap
pearing to gaze directly into your eyes.) Midges beat their wings more than a thousand times per second; this is too fast for nerve impulses and instead involves a mysterious muscular trigger effect. A fruit fly can stay aloft for an entire afternoon, burning 10 percent of its body weight every hour. There are clumsy flies: the march fly travels laboriously only a few feet off the ground, and so is continuous fodder for car radiators; march flies are often seen banging into people and bushes, and even the walls of buildings. Soldier flies can fly, but don’t very often; they sit for long periods of time on leaves or flowers. Other species prefer to walk or run, sometimes on the surface of water; the louse fly, often wingless, walks sideways, like a crab.
John Clare wrote of flies that “they look like things of mind or fairies.” There are flies so small they can barely be seen by human eyes; others are as wide and long as a man’s hand. Their bodies may be lime green or shiny blue, glowing black, metallic or dull yellow, pearly white, leathery, variegated in browns, matted with dust. A few are flecked with iridescent gold and silver. They are squat or slender or wasp-waisted. Their legs may be very long and fine or stubby, delicate as a web or stout and strong. Fly genitalia, one text notes, are “extremely polymorphous.” Some flies have beards or even furry coats made of bristles; others seem hairless. The hover flies mimic bees and wasps, growing yellow-brown bristly hair like the fur of a bumblebee; they are sometimes striped like yellow jackets. The tangle-veined fly, which is parasitic on grasshoppers, has a loud, bee-like buzz. A fly’s antennae may be akin to knobs or threads or whips or feathers or pencilline brushes. Insects do not breathe exactly; they perform gas exchange in a different way from mammals, through tubes called spiracles. Their larvae breathe in many ways, through gills and snorkels, or by taking up the oxygen stored in plant roots and stems. Spiracles show up just about anywhere: beside the head, in the belly, in a maggot’s anus.
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