Pages 723–724
Ennet House, the night of 14 November: Joelle van Dyne asleep in the 5-Woman room, veil tucked between pillow and jaw, Charlotte Treat asleep across the room — and beside her, Kate Gompert's bunk empty, which you, unlike Joelle, can explain (pp. 714–716). A page of waking worry about what freebase cocaine does to teeth slides into a dream in which Don Gately — unhurt, humming, bibbed in impossible white — is her dentist. That's the whole scene: one worry, one dream, no events. It's short and dense; read it slowly.
Terms, in order of appearance
- fantods (p. 723) — real old Americanism: the horrors, the severe creeps; a house favorite of this book's vocabulary.
- smoker's polish (p. 723) — ordinary abrasive toothpaste for tobacco stains; Joelle's new enamel-revitalizer purchase is "a whole level of power and expense above" it.
- selvage (p. 723) — the woven edge of fabric that doesn't fray; her veil's hem, tucked secure even in sleep.
- lampblack (p. 724) — soot-black pigment; the smudges under the dream-mirror's pop-eyes.
After you read: three things
1. The first sentence names sobriety's tax. "After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety" (p. 723). The body's bill arrives only once you're clean enough to open it: Chandler Foss's corroded stumps at supper, the toothless 'base casualties whose mouths scare her worse than anything said at meetings, the expensive toothpaste carried like a talisman. The scene is a one-page anatomy of that mechanism.
2. What the dream restores, and how. The man she left feverish and tubed in the Trauma Wing at p. 707 appears unhurt, "abstractly kind," making no chitchat, probably not knowing her name: "He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor's message" (p. 724). For a woman who lives behind a veil, being ministered to attentively without being looked at is the precise shape of comfort — the dream understands her better than most of the waking scenes do.
3. The mirror on his forehead undercuts it twice. In the steel disk she sees first her own face, "convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring" — exactly what the veil exists to keep unseen — and then, as her lips are drawn back, rows on reserve rows of canines "tinged at the tips with an odd kind of red... teeth that have been up to things she hasn't known about," receding down a pitch-black pipe until they blot out the dentist's good face, while he "assures her that these can be saved" (p. 724). Salvation and horror through the same instrument. If it rhymes for you with Hal's crumbling-teeth nightmare back at p. 449, that's the book's filing system at work.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.