As she sprawled on the floor with a shriek and a groan, I grabbed the handle of the cleaver and levered it back and forth until it released from the wall and freed my jacket

I tossed the cleaver to the floor, lunged for the door, when something grabbed hold of me. I tried to shake her off, I tried to push her away, the nurse was so thin it should have been nothing to get her off my back. But it wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t the nurse.

“Be a good boy now, bucko,” said Tilda’s heavy German accent, “and take your medicine, ja.”

Next thing I knew, there was a pinching in my neck and something cold slipped through my collarbone, racing down and across my chest, into my very heart.

I flailed out with my arm and caught Tilda with my elbow in the same spot I had slammed her before. The force of it freed me for a moment. I took a step toward the door, then a stagger. The room shifted on its axis. The floor slid noisily beneath my foot as I lost my balance. I looked down. My foot had slipped on a flat piece of metal. I bent over, grabbed the metal blade by the handle, tried to stand up straight. The room shifted again.

I reached for the doorknob and missed, smacking my head on the wood. I recovered, reached again, felt the cool brass in my overheated hand. I turned the knob, pulled the door toward me, staggered back.

“Hello, Victor,” said Dr. Bob, standing now in the entranceway. “So nice to see you again. Put that down. We have no need for violence.”

The cleaver fell from my hand and slammed point first into the wooden floor. I staggered back, lurched forward, fell to my knees.

“I’m so glad to be able to catch you,” said Dr. Bob, stepping forward and grabbing hold of my arm to keep me upright as my head lolled to the side. “What do you say to one more session in the chair, Victor, for old times’ sake?”

76

I awoke from a dream I can no longer remember, in a musty, damp darkness that was spinning around like a carnival ride. There was some sort of chair, it was tilted back weirdly, and I was in it. I tried to move my arms, my legs, my neck, but everything was frozen. I tried to open my mouth and failed, which was pretty much a first. The darkness was spinning, spinning about me. I fought to stay awake, but nothing in the world seemed as sweet as closing my eyes and drifting back into my dream, a dream as pliable and sweet as saltwater taffy, stretching and pulling until it wrapped me completely in its pale, sticky arms.

I dreamed that I awoke and a bright light was shining on my face. My mouth was propped open with a piece of rubber jammed between my teeth. A dentist, in mask and cap, his face blanked out by the light shining behind him, had his hands in my mouth. They say you can’t feel pain in your dreams, but that is a lie, because this dream hurt like hell.

I heard voices. I must still have been dreaming, because the voices became part of a fabulous panoply of shapes and colors. I was in a magical world where flowers blossomed and sprites flitted and shiny white teeth with straw boaters danced on their roots, swinging toothbrushes like vaudeville canes while singing bright songs of oral hygiene. Two women strode onto the scene, beautiful, beautiful women, all in white. One spoke with a Scottish burr, one spoke with a German accent, so sexy for all its harshness, and both of these beautiful women were speaking about me. What I felt for these two women in white was as real as anything I had ever felt before in my life. What I felt was love, sweet and painful and true as the dancing teeth before me.

There was someone knocking at the door. Knocking and knocking. Answer it, I tried to call out, but it emerged as a muffled grunt, because again I couldn’t open my mouth. Knocking. Knocking. And then I realized the knocking wasn’t on a door, it was on my skull. I opened my eyes, and there was Dr. Bob, lightly knock knock knocking on my forehead.

“Hello, Victor. Are you ready to come out and play?”

I started to the surface of my consciousness, and for a moment everything was clear: the light, the darkness behind it, the damp of a basement, the chair in which I was somehow bound. And of course Dr. Bob, smiling paternalistically as he watched while I slowly started to drift back down to the lower depths.

Dr. Bob knuckled my head once more.

“It’s so good to see you finally awake,” he said. “How are you feeling? Quite rested, I should think.”

I grunted something and ran my tongue across my teeth. The gap was still there, but my two temporary crowns were now gone, and in their places were the nubby posts, sticking up forlornly from the base of each tooth. I felt somehow denuded.

“A dentist walks into a bar,” said Dr. Bob. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. He walks into a bar and meets this girl. When he tells her he’s a dentist, she’s suddenly all over him. ‘What’s so great about dentists?’ he asks. And she says, ‘They’re the only men who tell me, “Spit, don’t swallow.” ’ Ha ha ha.”

I tried to struggle out of the chair but failed. My head was somehow stuck in a position that made it impossible to see my arms or legs, but I could feel some give in the binding, so it wasn’t my muscles that didn’t work, which was a relief. Whatever the bastards had injected into my neck hadn’t paralyzed me.

“Wait, there’s more,” said Dr. Bob. “So the dentist, he takes this girl home, and after they’re done, she says, ‘You must be a very good dentist.’ ‘How do you know?’ he says. And she says” – he paused for effect – “ ‘Because I didn’t feel a thing.’ Ha ha ha.”

I struggled once again against the binding, groaned loudly.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Dentist jokes are the lamest things in the world. Maybe because there really is nothing funny about poor oral hygiene. How about this one? A dentist says to a sexy woman patient, ‘Will you have sex with me for a million dollars?’ She says, ‘Sure.’ He says, ‘How about for a buck thirty-nine?’ She says, ‘Certainly not. What do you take me for?’ And the dentist says, ‘We already established what you are, madam. Now we’re just negotiating the price.’ Ha ha ha.”

He pulled back a bit, put his fist to his chin in thought, considered me like he was a grade-school teacher determining what to do with a recalcitrant pupil.

“You’re still not laughing, Victor. Maybe it’s because you’re gagged. Or is it because it hits a little too close to home? Hmm? Is that it? But isn’t it better to be up-front about these things, especially when all my subtle hints and warnings have had no effect?”

He showed me the tiny tape recorder I had hidden in my jacket pocket. He switched it on for a moment. Out came Whit’s voice, slightly muffled but still clear enough. “She was supposed to be dead asleep, it was supposed to be so easy. But the woman awoke and was so frightened at the intrusion that she came at him with a gun. And he reacted badly. There was a struggle, there was a shot, and the bullet-” Dr. Bob snapped off the tape player.

“So, Victor, tell the dentist your price. What? You want to say something but you can’t? Maybe it’s the duct tape over your mouth. How about we do this?”

He reached for my mouth, quickly pulled something off with a searing rrrrrrrrippp.

“Aaaargh,” was the best I could manage.

“Much better,” said Dr. Bob. “I do love a good negotiation. So, Victor, let’s – how do you people say it? Hondel? You first. What will it cost to buy the tape and stop you from bringing me into this mess?”

“Where am I?”

“Mr. Robinson’s basement. He has this wonderful vintage barber’s chair, which is where you’re sitting now. I can pump you up or down, just like in the office.”