The secret dream — dental hygienist for frightened children — and its dark key (n239)

pivotal · STANDING; surfaced 11 Nov YDAU

• When: STANDING interior facts (a hope and a history, neither a dated act); surfaced 11 Nov YDAU when Lenz relays the dream to Green, the endnote supplying what Green already knows and keeps.
• What: Charlotte's secret dream in sobriety — she had sworn Lenz to secrecy; Lenz, relieving himself against a dumpster, now tells Green, swearing him to secrecy in turn — is to someday get her G.E.D. and become a dental hygienist specializing in educating youngsters pathologically frightened of dental anesthesia, because her dream is to help youngsters; but she fears her Virus has placed the dream forever out of reach. The endnote hanging off that sentence closes the circuit the scene leaves open: Green, himself sworn to secrecy, does NOT tell Lenz what Charlotte had shared with him — that her adoptive father had been one-time Chair of the Northeast Regional Board of Dental Anesthesiologists and had been pretty liberal with the old N2O and thiopental sodium around the Treats' Revere MA household, for personal and extremely unsavory reasons. The dream's object — children terrified of dental anesthesia — is her own childhood; and in the same scene one man breaks her confidence while the other keeps the darker one.