Freddy and Fredericka

by Mark Helprin

  “Look on the upper right, between one and B-two. You see that? I thought it was a wire, but he hasn’t any braces. It’s a spike, lodged in the gum.”

  “Let me see,” said Fredericka. “Oh my goodness it’s a nail, it’s right next to the tooth, and from the angle I would guess that it’s jammed into the periosteum. If it’s long enough, it may have pierced the jawbone. How could he have stood it?”

  “He’s a politician. That’s what he does to other people. Clamp.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Clamp.”

  “Look,” Fredericka said, “you’re a dentist, but I’m a dontist. A dentist, when addressing a dontist, is more gracious.”

  “I’m sorry. May I have the clamp, please, Madame Dontist?”

  She gave it to him with a bit of a smoulder. He pulled out a spritzer, washed the area, and daubed at it with disinfectant. Then, with the clamp, he gripped the end of the spike and began the extraction. With the application of a little force, he pulled it out. Freddy cleaned the wound, squirted disinfectant in the hole, and put a wad of gauze in Dewey’s mouth. “Bite,” he said, and Dewey bit like a guard dog. As Fredericka cut the N2O and fed Dewey pure oxygen, they looked at the spike. It was metallic grey, as thick as paperclip wire, as sharp as a hypodermic needle, and an inch long.

  “We’ve had some luck, Fredericka, but can you convince him otherwise?”

  “Of course I can.”

  They threw away the spike and leaned back against their wooden drawers of instruments, proud of their work upon their first patient. Their relief was temporary, however, for just as they thought they were in the clear, Dewey ripped off the mask, grunted, and went through some sort of spasm that suggested death.

  “What’s that?” asked Fredericka.

  “How am I supposed to know?”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Obviously not, he’s breathing.”

  “This isn’t England, you know,” Fredericka told him as they approached (to use one of Self’s insults) Sleeping Dewey.

  “What does that mean?”

  “This is America.”

  “Do you think that Americans breathe after they’re dead?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” Fredericka said.

  “Fredericka, don’t suddenly go anti-American just because we’re in a stressful situation.”

  “It’s not anti-American,” she protested, “it’s a compliment.”

  “You said it with a certain contempt.”

  “I did not. Freddy, he’s not getting up, is he?”

  “No.”

  “Is he in a coma?”

  “How could anyone tell?”

  “Maybe we gave him brain damage, Freddy.”

  “You don’t give someone brain damage, just as you don’t catch it. You cause brain damage. You inflict brain damage.”

  “I do?”

  “One does.”

  “Maybe we inflicted brain damage upon Dewey Knott. Did we?”

  “How are we supposed to know?”

  “Examine his brain.”

  “You mean take it out?”

  “Of course not. We don’t know how to do that yet.”

  “Dentists don’t take out people’s brains, Fredericka. Not to worry, he’s just sleeping.” Dewey had been hurled into oblivion by alcohol and nitrous oxide acting upon his exhaustion and anxiety.

  “If he’s just sleeping, wake him up.”

  Freddy shook Dewey, shook him again, kicked him, and commanded him to awake. He didn’t.

  “Freddy, you’d better look at his brain.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Through the ears.”

  Freddy was dumbfounded. Fredericka had become brilliant, but in some areas she lagged. “You can’t see someone’s brain through the ears, Fredericka,” he said patronisingly, and then gave a little royal laugh.

  “Oh really? In fact, if you shine a bright light across the columnar reticulum lying outside the cells of Claudius, a space is visible between the outer rods or corti and the adjacent hair-cells. This is called the Space of Nuel, and in conditions of neuromuscular stress or jaw inversion, the septum of reticulation just beyond the Space of Nuel can become translucent or even transparent, affording a direct view of the brain.”

  “That’s remarkable,” Freddy said.

  “Use the penlight. It has fresh batteries.”

  “Fresh cells, or, as I have explained, a fresh battery. What’s jaw inversion?”

  “It’s when the jaw is inside out. It doesn’t matter. Examine him.”

  Peering into Dewey’s left ear, Freddy looked like a sailor trying hard to form an image in the eyepiece of a jiggling telescope.

  “What do you see? What do you see?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s unjustifiably snobbish.”

  “I mean I don’t see any . . . wait a moment. Ah, yes. Yes. I see . . . I see something. It’s rose-coloured, and it’s shaped like an inkwell.”

  “Is that his brain?”

  “I would hope not, but it is in the centre of his head. What else could it be?”

  “Does it look all right?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Are there any cracks in it, or wounds or anything? Does it look damaged?”

  “No, except that somehow I think it knows that I’m looking at it.”

  “At least we didn’t break it.”

  Freddy drew back and switched off the penlight. “He’s sleeping, that’s all. Let’s have faith that he’ll awake.”

  They were in the midst of washing their hands when they heard someone pounding on the door and rattling the doorknob. It was the other Finney, who yelled, “What’s going on in there? Let me in.”

  “We can’t,” Freddy said, speaking as if to the door.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s in recovery.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Yes, he’s fine,” Fredericka said. “He had an extremely dangerous abscess in his peristootium, which made for complications of the nerve bundle in the Bocage of Venus.”

  “In the what?” Finney asked.

  “The Bocage of Venus,” Fredericka said, addressing the door.

  “Yes,” said Freddy, “the Bocage.”

  “The Bocage?” Finney asked from beyond the door.

  She then continued. “We did a most complicated nerve splicing in the peristootium. He can’t move or be disturbed until the Islets of Langerhans congeal and fuse with the Dendritical Horns of Laertes.”

  “He’s got to go on Nightline in twenty minutes,” Finney said. “After the Omaha speech, the only thing that’ll save him is a strong performance tonight.”

  “Sorry,” said Fredericka.

  “What’s the topic?” Freddy asked. Fredericka kicked him and waved her hands around in an erasure motion.

  “Defence and foreign relations,” Finney said, “about which he knows almost nothing. We were hoping we might catch his charisma in one of its rare appearances, but I guess it’s over.”

  “Will they take answers relayed from his hospital bed?” Freddy asked.

  “What hospital bed?”

  “Here, in the office of his dentists, where he is recovering from a life-threatening abscess.”

  “Why can’t he just take the phone?” Finney asked.

  “He can only garble,” Freddy said.

  “We know that,” Finney declared. “Why can’t he just take the phone?”

  “I am referring to the fact that he’s got all kinds of tubes and fishing equipment hanging from his mouth.”

  “Fishing equipment?”

  “That’s what dentists call it as a joke,” Fredericka said to the door. “His mouth is in traction and he looks like a sea bass.”

  “Can you understand him?” Finney asked.

  “Only from long experience,” they both said simultaneously.

  “Me, too,” said Finney. He weighed the choices. “Why not? He’s g
oing to crash and burn one way or another. He’s had no briefing, he really hates these subjects, he’s drunk, and he’s in pain. What’s your number in there?”

  Freddy told him.

  “Well,” Finney said to no one in particular, “maybe people should see that he doesn’t know anything about this stuff. The pity is that Self knows even less and cares not at all. Let’s do it. Why not?”

  ALTHOUGH THE HOST of Nightline (a man, not a vast army) was framed against a backdrop of the most exquisite federal blue, he was so elfin in manner and appearance that most people who saw him imagined that he was sitting upon a giant spotted mushroom. Freddy had once spoken to him in an early morning hookup to Balmoral. After the interview, Freddy had still had time to eat breakfast, walk to his favourite trout-fishing eddy, and begin to cast before sunrise.

  Freddy was quite used to the oddly calm and desultory period of waiting before going on the air, as technical people came and went on and off the line and things slowly got rolling. During this time, Fredericka expressed her disapproval, for anything to do with the press might inadvertently throw them back into the pre-dental life.

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, turning his head to her as when she had turned her head sharply to him in the kissing that seemed so far distant now even if it had been only an hour before. His hand covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “They can’t see us, they don’t even know there are two of us, we’re totally out of context, and I’m going to put this cotton wool over the mouthpiece.” He then taped a rabbit-tail-sized piece of absorbent cotton across the lower end of the phone. His eyes focussed on a world somewhere else as he listened first to the commercials and then to the introduction.

  “Good evening. As you may have heard or seen, Dewey Knott was stricken today by a life-threatening abscess that felled him during what was to have been a defining speech he delivered—in the event, somewhat problematically—in Omaha. He was supposed to have been with us tonight, but instead Nightline has an exclusive hookup to his hospital bed in Siliphant, Nebraska, his hometown, where his life was saved in an emergency operation by his longtime friend, the noted oral surgeon, Dr Moffat.

  “Hello? Is this Dr Moffat?”

  “Moffat here,” said Freddy.

  “Dr Moffat, is Senator Knott in your care this evening?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Can he speak? May we speak with him?”

  “He can speak through me,” Freddy said. “Otherwise he would be unintelligible.”

  “I should just speak to you as if I were speaking to him, is that right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Let’s try that then. How are you, Senator? Are you sensible?”

  “I’m fine,” Freddy said.

  “We’ve just spoken with Dr Moffat, but we’ll ask you. Are you in any danger?”

  “I’m not exactly lying here unconscious, am I?” Freddy said on behalf of Dewey. “I’m in no danger whatsoever, though I was.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes. Dr Moffat tells me that I had a potentially fatal abscess, which he has now cured, although I will be incapacitated for a while, because, to avoid nerve damage, my mouth has been put in traction.”

  “Senator? Your mouth is in traction?”

  “Yes. I’m going to take the brilliant Dr Moffat back to the Senate with me. There are mouths there and in the House of Commons that cry out for traction.”

  The interviewer thought this was funny, not because it was, but because it was intended to be, and that’s the way Washington is. But something about ‘Dewey’s’ statement lingered. “The House of Commons, Senator?”

  “Full of the lowest vulgarians,” ‘Dewey’ said. “And I hope Dr Moffat doesn’t stop there. The mouths that most deserve traction are those of the press.”

  “The print media.”

  “You wish.”

  The host looked somewhat disturbed. People would process their grandmothers for tomato fertiliser just to be on his programme for five minutes. No one had ever criticised him on air, or even implied a criticism. “Senator. . . .”

  Freddy interrupted. “You know,” he said, “they take film and pictures of you when you’re swimming off a yacht or hunting ducks in Spain, and then they put a fake story up and everyone looks at you as if you’re insane.”

  “Really.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Is that what happened to you earlier this evening during your Omaha speech? Was that the fault of the press?”

  “That was my fault,” said Freddy. “I really mucked it up. I did. After the sudden onset of the abscess, to anaesthetise myself I drank a bottle of Scotch. When I gave the speech I was as drunk as an Irishman.”

  “An Irishman?” the host repeated, almost in shock. No American politician would so gratuitously and offensively say such a thing, especially about so large a dissolving voting bloc. “Senator, what do you think Irish Americans will have to say about that last comment?”

  “I don’t think they’ll say anything. I think they’re too busy running guns, raising money for the IRA, and blowing up people in boats, that’s what I think.”

  “But, Senator, you yourself are of Irish extraction.”

  “I am?”

  “On both your mother’s and father’s sides.”

  “Knott is an Irish name?”

  “Senator, for many years now, you’ve been the grand marshal of the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York.”

  “I did that to take advantage of those poor drunken bastards who will vote for me because I march at their head. That’s called the politics of ethnicity, I believe, and it’s repellent. What’s good for one man is good for another. Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is founded on the principle of equality of fundamental rights attaching not to a group or a class but to the individual. You cannot have justice if rank and privilege are accorded by class. I have always believed that, despite the accident of my birth.”

  Although he did not quite comprehend the accidental quality of Dewey Knott’s birth, the interviewer said, “Senator, I’ve never heard you talk this way, in this . . . style.”

  “Of late, Wickham,” Freddy began in his reflective tone, even though the host’s name was not Wickham, “I have been rereading the documents of the Founding: The Federalist Papers, histories of the Constitutional Convention, the letters of Jefferson and Adams, and, most importantly, the Declaration and the Constitution themselves. I have for the first time seen the deep and luminescent connexion between these and the philosophy and culture of our mother country, how the greatness of the English oak—solid and strong but fixed and constrained in a tight and settled island—was allowed to flower luxuriantly and in miraculous ease in the great spaces of America. We are like two halves of a broken coin. The English: staid, cutting, seasoned, and reserved. The Americans: youthful in energy, intoxicated with principle, full of spontaneity and song, and irredeemably vulgar. How badly we need one another, perhaps.”

  “Excuse me,” the host interrupted, for Freddy was enamoured of the unity of the English-speaking peoples and would have gone on indefinitely. “Is this Dr Moffat?”

  “Yes, Moffat here.”

  “Dr Moffat, you seem to be relaying Senator Knott’s answers without pause. How do you do that?”

  “I watch his lips move, and mine follow a quarter of a second later. After interpreting for thousands of patients whose mouths I have set in traction but who must continue to run their businesses and communicate with their families, I have perfected instant recapitulation.”

  “Remarkable. Let me ask the senator, then, a few questions about military and foreign affairs. I’m amazed, as I’m sure all Americans will be, too, at Senator Knott’s . . . what can I say? His leap into quality? His depth of statesmanship? His seriousness. His transformation. I sense in just these few words we’ve heard the presence of a greatness and wisdom long absent from the American political scene. Of course, I could be very wrong, but I think something has happened here, and I think my co
lleagues in the press will be most eager to look into this as well. But I do have some important questions that—I apologise—are strictly policy-oriented. Senator, I know you’ve been ill, and may not have had the opportunity to be briefed, but, may I?”

  Freddy had a near-photographic memory, read all the government dispatches supplied to his mother, devoured every fact in literally a score of foreign affairs and military journals, and was—despite a military rank that suggested only tactical responsibilities—a genius of grand strategy. He had no qualms about the questions to come. “Senator Knott says,” he told the man on the toadstool, “I have no qualms about the type of questioning you propose. I keep up on these things and, out of charity and modesty, only let it appear that I depend upon my aides. Now that I’m going to be president—and I will be president, because I am determined to win the election and I shall see it through—it’s time to dispense with my previous reticence and state to the American people that your next president is not a substanceless, back-slapping, sub-intelligent, moronic twit incapable of anything other than vulgar political machination. I live and breathe the relations between states and the finely balanced interdependency of diplomatic and military power. I know the history, the current operational details, and the broad structure of principle and metaphysic upon which strategic and diplomatic calculation rest, and I will happily submit to your questioning, at any level of detail.”

  “Senator, I can’t tell you how amazed I am at this—how shall I say it? I can only repeat—transformation. I don’t mean to be insulting, but are you the man they used to call ‘the emperor of density’? I think it’s safe to say that this is a new Dewey Knott.”

  “Thank you, Wickham. That’s very kind of you.”

  “We have assembled a panel of experts here, and they’re ready to question you. Are you ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready,” said Freddy.

  The panel that had been assembled to question Dewey consisted of three of the most arrogant, offensive, and aggressive think-tank monstrosities in Washington. They had learned to hybridize the blood-red internecine warfare of the federal bureaucracies with the baseless pomposity of academia. The result was a beast as sure of himself as a professor who comes to believe that, because his students dare not dispute him either persistently or importantly, he is always right; and as fierce and predatory as the bureaucrat who knows that ten percent of his job is doing his job and ninety percent is neutering, incapacitating, discrediting, demoralising, and enslaving every single living person out to the greatest possible range. The three of them were there that evening for bayonet practice upon the dangling carcass of Dewey Knott, hoping that one of the president’s smug, empty-headed snots would note their service to the president’s campaign for re-election and reward them suitably in times to come.