IJ study archive

Scene 146: joelle teeth dentist dream

Scene
146
Pages
723–724
When
14 Nov YDAU (2009), night (Joelle asleep in the 5-Woman room); tooth-worry begun 'a few days before the debacle in which Don Gately got hurt' (i.e., before 11 Nov)
Where
Ennet House, 5-Woman room (Joelle's bunk beside Kate Gompert's empty one); dream: a solitary dental officein: Enfield Marine Public Health Hospital complex › Ennet House Drug & Alcohol Recovery House
POV
Joelle van Dyne (3rd person limited, sliding into her dream)

Characters present

Characters referenced

Themes

Connects to (editorial cuts & payoffs, 13)

Summary

A short hinge scene on sober worry: "After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety." Freebase cocaine eats teeth, as Chandler Foss's corroded stumps demonstrated at supper, and Joelle now carries a traveller's brush and expensive anti-corrosive toothpaste in her purse. Asleep beside Kate Gompert's empty bunk, veil tucked between pillow and jaw, she dreams that Don Gately — unhurt, bibbed in dental white, humming, solo — is ministering to her teeth with abstract kindness and no chitchat. The dream's trustful calm is undercut twice through the mirror-disk on his forehead: first she sees her own face "convexly distorted and ravaged by years of cocaine and not caring," and then, as he draws her lips back, endless reserve rows of sharp canine teeth tinged red "as of old blood... the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat" — teeth "that have been up to things she hasn't known about" — receding down a pitch-black pipe, blotting out the dentist's good face even as he assures her "that these can be saved."

What to notice

The dream runs in present tense while the waking worry runs in past — the book's standing grammar for states that don't pass. Its comfort is the U.H.I.D. wish granted in full: face yielded up, held open, scrutinized by a man making "very little eye-contact" who "probably doesn't know her name" — exposure made bearable by pure clinical attention, intimacy with the knowing subtracted. And the nightmare's vanishing point puns on its own cause: the red-tipped rows recede "down a pitch-black pipe" — the object that corroded her teeth waiting at the bottom of the image of them — so that even her scream, spreading the mouth wider, can only display more of the thing she's screaming about.

Beats — page-by-page
  • p. 723: the thesis sentence on caring crashing back in as obsession; the tooth-dread genealogy — Foss's stumps at supper, the toothless 'base casualties whose mouths give Joelle "the fantods like nothing at meetings could"; the new over-the-counter enamel-revitalizer toothpaste "a whole level of power and expense above standard smoker's polish."
  • pp. 723-724: dream setup — Dr. Don, mid-South-accented, bibbed in impossible white, "his big hands deft," eyes "abstractly kind, concerned for her teeth"; no assistant, no chitchat, "He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor's message"; gloveless fingers that "taste warm and clean."
  • p. 724: the forehead mirror-disk "like a third eye" — her own convexly distorted, pop-eyed, lampblack-smudged face; then the rows of red-tipped canines, "more rows of canines behind them, in reserve"; her mouth spreading to scream shows only more teeth "leading back and away down a pitch-black pipe"; the image blots out Gately's face as he probes and "says he assures her that these can be saved."

Themes in this scene

  • Addiction and Recovery: sobriety's first gift is dread — the body's bill arriving once "not caring" lifts; the dream's last line ("these can be saved") is recovery's promise heard through terror.
  • Film and Optics: the dream is built of lenses — the convex mirror-disk doing to her face exactly what she's hidden behind the veil to avoid (and what 'base use did); a viewer watching herself being viewed, Madame Psychosis optics turned clinical.
  • The Body and Tennis: teeth as the body's archive — corrosion, enamel, the creaturely rows; the body keeping score of what the self stopped attending to.
  • Dreams: a whole-scene dream — Dr. Don Gately, unhurt and bibbed in impossible white, ministering with abstract kindness until the forehead mirror-disk shows first her ravaged face and then reserve rows of red-tipped carnivore canines receding "down a pitch-black pipe" (pp. 723-724); wish and warning in one apparatus, dreamt in present tense beside Kate Gompert's empty bunk.

Connections — backward & forward

Backward

  • Pairs precisely with Hal's dental nightmare (scene 093, p. 449: teeth crumbling to chalk) — the two veiled/hidden prodigies share a tooth-dread iconography; also Lenz's razored-out "receptacled heart" (the stash cavity in his Large-Print Principles of Psychology and The Gifford Lectures, scenes 105/142 — the receptacle he later refills in "his medical dictionary", scene 148) and Foss's corroded stumps put cocaine and teeth in one ledger.
  • "Teeth that have been up to things she hasn't known about": Gately's violent past (the burglary thread, scenes 016/145 — the A.F.R. tracing the DuPlessis loot toward him) lodged in the dream as carnivore teeth "in reserve" — the dream knows what Joelle doesn't yet.

Forward

  • Gately "unhurt" marks the dream as wish: he's been in St. Elizabeth's since the 11 Nov shooting (pp. 601-619, scene 120). The dream's iconography — Joelle yielding, face-up, watching him in a disk — anticipates and inverts her actual bedside visits to wounded Gately (pp. 824, scene 161ff), where she ministers to him.
  • Kate Gompert's empty bunk: Kate is at this hour concussed on Prospect St. (scene 141); the room-cleaning frame resumes in scenes 150/152.
  • The convex self-image rhymes with the U.H.I.D. veil doctrine (scenes 058/060) and with Molly Notkin's coming account of what's under/behind Joelle's veil (pp. 788-795).

Notable passages (4)
  • p. 723: "After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety." — the scene's thesis and a anchor passage for addiction-recovery.
  • p. 724: "He is there to help if possible, is his whole demeanor's message." — Gately distilled to a single dream-attribute; the AA ethic embodied.
  • p. 724: "the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat... teeth that have been up to things she hasn't known about" — love's first sight of the beloved's hidden history; essential extraction.
  • p. 724: closing clause — the teeth blotting out "the big dentist's good face as he probes with a hook and says he assures her that these can be saved." — salvation and horror in the same instrument.

What links here Timeline events here (8) · Connected from (3) · Passages quoted here (28) · Motifs (5)

Timeline events here

Connected from

Passages quoted here

Motifs