Your train will arrive soon and you will leave with it
Your train will arrive soon and you will leave with it
Brad Weslake
This dentistry is mostly white. White concrete walls, white tiled floors, white-coated people. As I had entered, a young woman displayed an automatic smile containing two fine rows of pure white teeth. They looked two-dimensional, touched-up, ready for the magazine cover. They lent her skin a dead pale-grey hue, like it was irrelevant background detail. As she had flipped through her rolodex for my appointment, I had imagined her being raised on a space-station by a team of robots, relentless polishing, food pumped directly into stomach to bypass mouth. My name is Jake, I am 13 years old, I am keeping a mental inventory of things that are white. I am waiting for my dentist.
I have no idea where my mother is. She probably made the booking. She probably doesn’t know where I am.
My Japanese dentist emerges from the surgery calling my name. Did my dentist dream of becoming a dentist? Did he imagine as a child that the gift-wrapping under the family christmas tree concealed a collection of stainless steel dental tools? He is looking from my photo on his records, to me, and back to the photo. In the photo I have the vaguely scared look of a 13 year old boy being photographed, and I guess I am vaguely scared now as he gestures me to follow him.
I wonder if the interior design of a dental surgery has more to do with hypnosis than sterility. This is a place you remember, a place that feels separate from the world.
If I was old enough to make small talk with a dentist I would like to ask another question.
Do you dream at night that your white coat becomes a magic carpet, that your stainless steel tools are slung about your waist like holy weapons, that you circle the world in search of dental crises, that the poor and toothless of grin dream in turn of you?
As it happens my dentist, directing me to sit, asks about school. I answer point blank, ‘educational’, no irony, and puzzle over to which of the various alien structures in the room the verb ‘sit’ could apply, eventually deciding to sit on the floor. Now he laughs, his teeth also two-dimensional, and his laughter improbably restricted to his jaw only, no humour elsewhere in the body. I look at my dentist and imagine God the bored cartoonist, giving my dentist a two-frame jaw-hinge of a laugh before tossing him into the scene unfinished. God yawning, rubbing his eyes, wondering if he might not cut back on the number of characters to make his drama even remotely intelligible.
My teeth are fine, nothing to worry about. No’theeng my dentist says, still smiling. I yawn, testing the hinge of the jaw. In the eyes of my dentist, I am a set of teeth with a dull shadow of a body. I try it as I leave the dentistry, two sets vibrating in conversation as they hover above the couch, the pure white set I encountered on the way in forming an x-ray smile as I pass. The street outside is empty, no sign of a waiting parent, no sign of a set of teeth.
Later, the bus arrives under a twilight sky. In the eyes of my father, a bus is a wireframe rectangular prism, all points and polygons, ready for a three-dimensional computer animation. For a brief moment the buildings and street are sliding away and collapsing around me, but I realise that it is the bus which is sliding away, now. I try on my fathers eyes and see the wire prism moving across an empty screen. Shortly we pass a car wreck on the side of the road, a mosaic of slick purple smoke, grey sky, pools of deepening red blood. The elements of white here can be found in drifts of fine magnesium ash, smooth road-markings, the exposed bone of a leg extended from a car door. Was a family broken up on the road here? I look at the shattered glass on the road and imagine God exploding family photo frames and sprinkling the remains about the scene. I have never seen a photo containing myself, my mother, and my father. My mother announces over the automatic intercom that the bus will shortly arrive at a stop and will then require seven minutes to arrive at the stop following. There is a small collective nodding among the passengers. Her voice is reassuring and familiar to the public transport commuters of the city, the voice of years dedicated to child psychology. Hers is the voice that echoes in the dreams of sleeping businessman on trains, hers is the voice that delivers the news. You are about to miss the birth of your only child by four minutes, she whispers. Or, you are nine minutes too late for work, and you have been warned, this could be the last time.
My mother sees people as children, or inner children carrying scars and trauma, oversize bodies. I try on my mothers eyes at school and watch my little teachers pull the strings on their oversized bodies in front of restless classrooms of inner children in waiting. People from my school wait with me after class in case my mother arrives to pick me up, then pester her to announce the time, the temperature, anything. It is true, too, she really does speak in announcements, even to me.
There is another voice, directly behind me, engaged in conversation. I realise that it is conversing with itself, talking to no-one and everyone all at once. It is gradually rising and falling and subduing the ambient passenger noise. Finally it is the only voice on the silent bus, it is two voices and then three voices and when I turn around there he is, a young man with cool blue eyes staring into space. His hands are tracing the outline of a human figure, of two human figures, as if he is sculpting them out of the air. And he is giving his air sculptures voices. I imagine that this is how my father creates my mother, and how my mother creates my father, and see them in the spaces between the moving hands, two air people creating themselves from nothing, until my mother announces the end of seven minutes. I exit the bus to the nods of passengers.
It is dusk here, difficult to find white.
Both mother and father arrive now, in separate cars. How does this happen, why does this happen so often? I look at them both driving away and imagine God the reckless stage director throwing characters around, smashing them together, losing them altogether. I imagine God throwing my mother and my father into a house together and laughing, lifting the house up and shaking it around while his head flips open like one of his cartoon characters. As I walk home the sky fades and stars begin to flicker, traces of white scattered across the night. I count forty-three before I reach the house.
At the table I chew on a finger nail, bored. The inside of the house is lit with fluorescent white light, very pure. The only white left under the night. The questions come, again. What if you were so bored you started chewing on your fingernail and never stopped? How much of yourself can you eat trying to disappear? In an art class last year I had drawn a stick-figure man holding a stick-figure chainsaw, with the title, ‘How much of you can you remove before you are no longer you?’. I was sent to my mother, the note stating simply ‘Task was to draw family. Drew self holding chainsaw. Recommend counselling.’ I had no idea until then that the task was to draw my family. I could have framed my picture and hung it on the wall. I could have taken one of the other pictures from the classroom and hung it on the wall. At my counselling, my mother made announcements to my demons, I drew her a stick figure of a smiling face, three smiling faces, I was allowed to leave.
Now she announces on the house intercom that dinner will be served in three minutes, except this time it really is her, not just a digital sample. When I sit down at the table the world seems to revolve around outside the house like trains around a train station, as if the city radiates outward from here, radiates gradually outward on the waves of my mother’s voice. The television mounted above the table makes announcements, too, and people come and go. I do not recognise the people that come and go, and my feet twitch like I am missing something, somewhere, like I haven’t been listening to the announcements hard enough. The house is lit like a train station, too, designed for movement, designed for short periods of time with twitching feet, no shadows, don’t panic, your train will arrive soon and you will leave with it. My house is a terminus for activity, not an end in itself, not somewhere you can stay.
My father has emerged from elsewhere in the house and has sat down at the table. We wait approximately one minute before a small alarm sounds in another room and my mother enters, with food. We eat our meals silently, watching the television. Once, when I was younger, I had walked into a room in the house and found my father at the computer. On the screen was a wireframe simulation of the female figure, animated for sex. It was massively complicated, the work of thousands of hours. And realistic, realistic enough for me to recognise the model as my mother. My mother and father are sitting on opposite sides of the table, eating, and looking at the television. Towards the end of the meal her eyes glaze over with static and she describes her day like a newsreader. My father looks at her like he looks at the television, chewing, not blinking. After the food is gone my father is gone, too. He soon moves through the house from the outside inwards, switching lights off as he goes so that the circle of white light diminishes slowly to just this room.
Shortly my mother rises to switch the television off and it is as if she herself had stopped talking, had switched off. This is her signal for me to leave, to go to sleep. I fail to understand what this means for my mother and myself in the same way an ant fails to understand the pattern of the colony in an anthill simply by moving through the tunnels. I move through tunnels, too. She switches off the light and, as she leaves the room, switches off the signal to the television so I am left awash with static glow and silence. I am sitting with my arms resting neatly on the table. The television static is mostly white. The questions come, again.
I look at the television and imagine nothing.