by Walter Kirn
I was bawling. “We didn’t stop it, either.”
“We got here in the middle. It’s not our fault. Look at him—like it or not, he looks much better now.”
Willy was right. The baby looked revived. So why did I feel dead?
The middle of things was a lousy place to be.
I saw them together again a few weeks later—Munch, his girlfriend, the baby, and Donna, too. She’d broken things off with me after the baby caper and taken up with a handsome college sophomore who was home for the summer from Marquette, where he supposedly edited the newspaper. I’d seen them at the movies a couple of times, smooching away at the foot of the screen while Donna’s father sat a few rows back, sucking a Coke and pretending not to watch them. I got the feeling the joke was on the college kid and that he was being spied on without knowing it. For all Donna’s talk about catching a rich man someday, I strongly suspected that she’d never leave home.
Munch, his girlfriend, and Donna looked thoroughly stoned as I pedaled past them on my ten-speed. They were standing around a fire pit in the Lions Park, cooking hot dogs on sticks. They jabbed them at each other and horsed around and their hot dogs flopped off the sticks into the fire, causing hissing flare-ups of burning fat. The baby lay on its back on a picnic table, wedged between a tape deck and a six-pack.
They saw me and I was trapped. I had to stop. I steered my bike across the grass and leaned it against the table and got off.
“In the mood for a tube steak?” Munch said.
“No thanks.”
“Finest ground-up entrails money can buy.”
Donna grinned like an idiot. She was one. The baby, asleep with its arms stretched over its head, looked markedly healthier than when I’d seen it last. Its eyes were moving under their flimsy lids and when I tickled its chin it jerked and kicked, showing normal reflexes for once. I liked to think that its night away from home had startled its parents into taking care of it. I noticed it had on blue socks against the chill.
“Don’t wake him up,” the girlfriend said. “He’s fried. Just got back from his infant play-group hour.”
“Good for you. Looking after him,” I said.
“Munch is like the perfect dad now,” Donna said. I could smell her beer breath from yards away. “He bought like a dozen books on modern parenting and made an appointment with a pediatrician.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Smoke a J?”
“Not now.”
I swung my leg over my bike seat and pushed off. Even the worst were trying to do their best today. Tomorrow or the next day they’d probably lapse, but the hope was that they’d recover and try a new thing. Nothing solved everything. Some things didn’t solve anything. You just had to treat every practice as the game.
hyper
1
Other people’s weaknesses and failures settled in their hearts, their minds, their consciences; mine, however, collected in my teeth. I didn’t know when the destruction started, the microscopic melting of enamel, or which of my bad habits was most to blame for it, but there was no doubt about when it crossed the line. It happened that fall at a mock United Nations when I drank from a cold carton of two percent while making a speech on behalf of Argentina. With the first chilly sip a bolt of pain forked up from my jaw behind my ears. Everything light in the room went dark and dark objects pulsed white.
“Are you okay?” said the girl beside me, who represented Spain.
“Headache. Bad headache.”
“Want a Midol?”
“Yes.”
The pain struck again at dinner with a hot food, a grilled breast of pheasant riddled with shotgun pellets. I ran to the sink and gulped water from the tap as a kind of black executioner’s hood fell over me. I woke on the floor with Audrey kneeling close and Mike standing over me, looking miffed. He’d just returned from a trip to Michigan, where Woody Wolff had been hospitalized for liver failure and placed on a long list for a new organ. Mike couldn’t believe they were making the great man wait and had already been on the phone to Woody’s congressman.
“Where does it hurt worst?” said Audrey.
“All through my head, but starting in my cheeks.”
She opened my mouth with her fingers. “I smell it now. Wow, do I smell it.” She fanned the air between us. “Completely abscessed. You must be miserable.”
“The kid couldn’t bother to floss, and now his teeth hurt. Excuse me if I save my tears,” Mike said.
I was taken to see Perry Lyman in the morning. His office had changed since my retainer days. As his dental technician prepared a tray of instruments I surveyed the new posters on the walls. The messages of peace and love had given way to patriotic scenes: the Stars and Stripes being planted on the moon, a row of crosses in Arlington National Cemetery, the Blue Angels flying team streaking past Mount Rushmore.
“He’ll be another minute,” the technician said. “Sit back and unwind. I’ll start you on the gas.”
“He gives patients gas now?” The technician was new. “He used to use hypnosis.”
“Out of vogue. Dentistry’s a living, changing science.”
I held the mask snug. The gas was cool and sweet. The technician told me to inhale normally but the moment she left the room I sucked and gulped. I slipped back deeper and deeper into my mind until I seemed to be sighting down a telescope with a foggy lens. When Perry Lyman walked into the room—a man I’d teased and tortured and provoked, and who had every right to hate me for it—I felt a wave of compassion and forgiveness. “Good morning. I’m glad you could see me on such short notice.”
“It wasn’t short notice,” Perry Lyman said. “Two years without a checkup or a cleaning usually tells me the patient will be back.”
He picked up my chart from his desk, which was cleaner and tidier than before. He was wearing a silver flag pin on his lab coat and seemed to have put on muscle in his shoulders.
“I owe you an apology,” I said. “My stunt at the bike race.”
“Depressing time for both of us. You’d lost your security blanket, I’d lost my marbles. Credit the Guard for turning me around. From pothead pacifist to citizen soldier.” He tilted the chair back. “Feeling any lighter?”
“Starting to. You joined the National Guard?”
“I suffered from an organic disorder, Justin. First I dealt with it medically, through drugs. Next, I realized I needed a shot of discipline.”
Perry Lyman turned a dial on the nitrous tank, then switched on the spotlight angled at my face. “Let’s see what’s doing inside the old black hole.”
The nitrous oxide acted on me like truth serum. As Perry Lyman scraped and picked, I chattered away about things I rarely spoke of: my plan to become a TV issues-analyst and stir the nation with controversial insights. My notion, inspired by a recent dream, that the original Bigfoot was a hoaxer who’d found that roaming the woods in pelts and skins was the life he’d wanted all along. I even let slip my shameful wish that Woody Wolff would never get a liver.
As I rambled, a lot was happening in my mouth. I coughed out blood clots the texture of cottage cheese and watched the water whirl them down the spit sink. I swallowed gritty bits of tooth enamel.
“We have a job ahead of us,” Perry Lyman said, cutting the gas off and raising the dental chair. “First, your gums: they’re receding and infected. The abscessed molar needs a crown and root canal and your bottom wisdom teeth are terminal.”
The gas wore off as he spoke and left me wondering if I’d made a mistake in coming back here. Perry Lyman had already taken my thumb—what would he take next?
“That’s just the dental dimension,” he said. “Your heavy bleeding during the exam suggests malnourishment.”
“I had a bad meat experience last fall.”
“School?”
“They hate me. Impulsive and disruptive. Doesn’t work up to potential. Self-absorbed.”
“Homelife?”
“You want the whole checklist?”
“A to Z. I like to see my patients in the round.”
I ticked off the facts in the tone of a reporter. “Joel gained fifteen pounds this summer, lost ten at a tennis camp, then gained back twenty. My grandparents came for another visit last month but Mike accused Grandma of faking an asthma attack, so they left after only being there two hours. Then Mike got his crossbow and shot up the garage. He’s having business troubles. He’s building a health club but no one’s signing up and there’s a petition going around town to prevent him from selling guns, his biggest moneymaker.”
“Your mother?”
“The same.”
“What’s the same?”
“I wish I knew.”
Perry Lyman let a silence go by, then slipped a mechanical pencil from his lab coat, clicked up the lead, and faced his calendar, which was illustrated with paintings of aircraft carriers. He drew X’s through a number of squares, rubbed his chin, erased a couple, then added a few more.
“I’m blocking out a month for the whole process. But I need your commitment you’ll press on to the end; otherwise I’m wasting both our time.”
“What whole process?” I said. “To fix my teeth?”
Perry Lyman retracted the pencil lead. “If I threw the whole thing in your lap at once, you’d panic. You’d think I was overreacting. But I’m not. I’m going to do what I should have done the first time.”
I looked into his eyes for clarification.
“Treat the disease,” he told me, “not the symptoms.”
Mike dropped me off for stage one, the root canal, on his way to the airport. He was headed back to Ann Arbor to visit Wolff and help sell his house to cover medical bills. I braced myself for the usual lecture about the cost of my sloppy oral hygiene but instead Mike apologized for his recent tantrums, explaining that his old coach’s collapse had shaken his faith in human goodness.
“How is he?” I said.
“Still waiting. Something stinks. Plane crashes every evening on the news but a man who won four Rose Bowls can’t get a liver.”
Mike pulled into the clinic’s parking lot. “About Perry Lyman—he’s been to hell and back. Listen to him. Show him some respect.”
“What happened?”
“He lost his father to Lou Gehrig’s. Then his wife left. Killer alimony. He went to a clinic in California somewhere and came back squared away. A solid citizen. He’s behind that new tax-cut petition that’s going around.”
Thanks to novocaine and extra gas, the root canal was loud but painless. The drilling and digging prevented me from speaking, but Perry Lyman kept me busy listening.
“I’ll spare you the sob story introduction—you’ve probably already heard it through the grapevine—but a couple of years ago I hit a wall. Sensitive there?”
“A little.”
“Bottom line: I reexamined everything. Values. Attitudes. Relationships. Most crucially, I went on medication. Result: I’ve become the man I always wanted to be. I fly and maintain my own small helicopter. I tutor illiterates. I go to church. The stoned neurotic on the water bed is dead and gone.”
I held up my hand to keep my mask from slipping. I wanted all the gas that I could get.
“Which brings me to a question, Justin.”
I waited.
“Have you ever suspected you’re different from other teenagers? Not as patient. Can’t finish what you start? Terrified of being left alone but angry when you feel crowded?”
He’d nailed me. “All of it.”
“It isn’t your fault,” Perry Lyman said. “It’s mine. I saw the syndrome when you came two years ago. And what did I do? I let you go on suffering. Classic hyperactive teen, textbook attention deficit disorder, and Dr. Counterculture here tried the subconscious suggestion.”
“It worked. I stopped.”
“You switched,” said Perry Lyman. He changed his drill bit. “I want to start you on Ritalin.”
“You’re a dentist, though.”
He stepped on a pedal and revved the drill. “I like to think of myself as more than that.”
The pill was the driest thing I’d ever swallowed and seemed to absorb all the moisture in my throat during its scratchy, slow descent. I drank from the glass of juice Audrey gave me and thought about Garrett Blount from fifth grade, who’d also been diagnosed as hyperactive. Garrett had pierced his own ears with a pencil, Krazy-glued his hands to walls and blackboards, and regularly wet himself in class. I still remembered the puddles under his desk, so hot they gave off visible wisps of steam.
“They’re wrong,” I said to Audrey. “I’m normal. I’m fine.”
She answered me with a story. When I was six years old, she said, I’d trimmed our living room carpet with pinking shears because I’d thought it was growing.
I didn’t remember this.
“Or think of when you were ten. The milk phase. You had to pour milk on everything you ate.”
I dropped my head. There was no denying the milk phase.
I was walking to school when I felt the Ritalin hit. The air seemed to thicken and mold itself against me. The sky expanded and revealed its curved shape as my peripheral vision spread and sharpened until I could almost see over my shoulders. Moments later, I noticed my stride had changed. My footsteps felt involuntary, guided, as if governed by magnets buried in the ground. To walk I just had to let myself be pulled.
My first class that morning was English. We were supposed to be reading Moby Dick. As Mrs. Rand chalked theme words on the blackboard—Whiteness, Sea vs. Land, Revenge & Pride—I opened my paperback copy for the first time.
“Who’d like to talk on Whiteness?” Mrs. Rand asked.
I opened my mouth and out flowed several ideas I wasn’t even conscious of having thought about. Whiteness stood for eternity, I said. It represented both innocence and extinction.
“I see you read the preface,” Mrs. Rand said.
This wasn’t true. I hadn’t read a line.
It happened again in biology. I pronounced “mitochondria” correctly, despite never having heard it spoken before.
After school, I swept into the house to share my news. I found Joel in front of the TV watching a tape of his serves at tennis camp. The counselors had told him he showed promise but that it was buried under all the weight.
“You’re out of breath,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve changed. I’m better. It works. It really works.”
“Why are your eyes like that?”
“Like what?”
“So huge.”
The conversation depressed me. I felt inside my pants and found the pill I was meant to have taken at noon. An hour later, feeling better, I settled onto the couch with Moby Dick. When Audrey called me to dinner I said, “One minute,” but I kept on reading until eleven o’clock. I woke up at five and took another pill and by the time Mike and Audrey came down to breakfast, I’d finished all but two chapters of Moby Dick. No skimming or skipping, either. Every word.
I didn’t take nitrous oxide for my crown fitting; I preferred the new clarity of Ritalin. Perry Lyman held up a mirror afterward and showed me the jewel that was bonded to my jaw. He’d urged me to get a porcelain crown out of consideration for Mike’s budget, but I’d chosen gold. The new me deserved the best.
“How’s the medication?” Perry Lyman said.
“Great. I read my first whole novel last week. Also, I mowed the lawn the other day and managed to make a perfect crisscross pattern.”
“Mood swings?”
“No swings. Just up and up. Straight up.”
“Any other breakthroughs besides the mowing job?”
“Only little ones,” I said. “It used to feel like a hassle to put on underwear, but now I wear it every day. Also, the Pledge of Allegiance. It gives me chills now. I never really listened to the words before.”
“Don’t pull my leg.”
“I’m not. I’m being honest.”
Perry Lyman slid open t
he drawer in his desk where he kept his giveaway toothbrushes and dental flosses. He took out a fat red book and looked a page up. “You’re describing a common side effect: euphoria.”
I’d heard this word but was fuzzy about its meaning.
“Let’s keep an eye on that,” Perry Lyman said. “You don’t want to get to feeling so high and mighty you do something stupid like try to leap tall buildings.”
A shadow of the old distrust fell over me. What could be wrong with feeling good?
My wariness lingered during my next visit. After filing and readjusting my crown, Perry Lyman gave me a psychological test. He assured me that there were no wrong answers, but I knew better. There were always wrong answers.
“Now and then, when things don’t go my way,” he said, reading from a clipboard, “I feel that life is blank. Fill in the blank.”
I couldn’t decide what kind of answer to give. One that made me sound confused and jumpy, confirming the original diagnosis, or one that made me sound calm and healthy? Cured. The stakes were high: if I didn’t respond correctly, I could lose my prescription.
I tried a nonsense answer first. Depending on how Perry Lyman reacted, I might get a clue as to how to play the other questions.
“A miracle,” I said.
Perry Lyman remained expressionless. “When I’m away from home, I miss my blank.”
I hesitated. “Family. I miss my family.” This was the cured approach.
“My teachers are blank?”
“Mature adults,” I said.
“You’re faking this. Don’t play games with me, Justin. This is serious.”
“I thought there were no wrong answers?”
“Don’t get cute.”
I switched my tactics after that and answered like a hyperactive person.
“When I see other people suffer, I feel …”
“Nervous?”
“My friends don’t know how blank I am.”
“Impatient.”
“Baby animals make me feel …”
“All jittery.”
