The Blur and the Pain
July 4, 2018
It was dark when he regained consciousness. The pain came only after—but still earlier than any other perception or memory. Every single part of his body—the ones he was able
to feel—ached in different measures. The pain was so scattered that he wasn’t sure what hurt the most. Not even the worst hangover of his life could compare to whatever his body was experiencing now.
He opened his eyes. His sight seemed a little better this time. Confused lines started to come back in place on the edges of the objects in front of him.
Will the world eventually stop spinning? he wondered, as he closed his eyes again and groaned. A ragged exhale came out of his lungs. He forced himself to give it another try, so he
glimpsed through the room he was in. Shadows and objects were taking shape, dancing out of focus right in front of him in a kaleidoscopic party. His mouth was dry and filled with a metallic taste. Coins, he thought. My mouth tastes like a bunch of quarters. His head was a throbbing bass drum. He could feel his heartbeat in the nape of his neck, fast and deep. His panting echoed from the inside; he could feel it in his ears. The groans were loud in his head. It was like listening to the world from a stethoscope.
He tried to move but he couldn’t. He tried to raise his right hand, but he couldn’t—nor could he raise his left hand or move his legs. Eventually, he realized that he was lying in a dental chair. His arms were secured to the armrests with duct tape; his legs were taped together and to the chair’s extension. It felt like being on a recliner—just a less comfortable one, surrounded by odd tools. Between his body and the chair was a thin layer that he guessed was cellophane; when he tried to rock his body on the chair, it stuck to his sweaty back. He was shirtless and barefoot. The only thing he wore was a pair of jeans.
What the hell?
The task of raising his head required all his effort and determination. He took a deep breath and swayed his neck more violently than he had meant to. Like all mistakes, it was too late when he judged it to be so. The world blurred more, and the room started spinning in front of him at worrying speed. He closed his eyes again. When even the darkness of his eyelids started spinning, he stuck his head out and threw up on
his lap. Judging from the consistency of the hot and acidic fluid spread on his legs, he hadn’t ingested anything solid in a while. With no reason, he started laughing, finally confirming the thought that crept in the back of his mind. Yes, he was high as shit. He laughed harder, in an extraneous stirring that he couldn’t control. He couldn’t tell whether he had been in the chair for two minutes, two hours, or two days. The only thing he had a perception of was the spinning. The hysterical laughter coming out from his mouth didn’t sound like anything belonging to him. Then the memories started to come back forcefully. He had rejected them all at first. There was too much going on already. But they could not be pushed away forever. He could snooze them, but they would come back relentlessly. And indeed, they came now like a wind, wiping all doubts away. In the storm of his thoughts, he remembered all at once. Something triggered the chain reaction. It felt like turning the master switch on in a warehouse filled with darkness. He could almost hear the buzzing sound of neon lights turning on in sequence, revealing bits of information. With every row of lights switching on, he felt a wave of discomfort and desperation growing. He observed it rising inside with raging dread. He laughed again, hard and against his will. It was just as uncontrollable as the spinning. He was on a nightmarish merry- go-round where everything was amplified. He forced himself to escape from the dreadful pictures that were accumulating in
the darkness and opened his eyes.
He knew exactly where he was. He had been here before,
and not very long ago. The room he was in was large and had a low ceiling. It was divided into two sections, with two different floors. One was covered in square, green tiles. The other was dark, uniform material that looked like slate. An unfinished wooden staircase loomed on the other side of the room. The narrow, rectangular windows near the top of the walls confirmed his latest memories. He was in a basement. The light passing through the windows was still strong and spotlighted his surroundings. The place was a marvel of cleanliness and, aside from the vomit, smelled of bleach and disinfectant. Beneath the windows, a row of steel cabinets and drawers rested against the wall. On the counter were objects, shapes he couldn’t quite put in focus yet.
He turned his head, and this time he was able to control the impulse to retch better than he had before. He slowly opened his eyes again and gently turned his head to the left, discovering a dark corner of the room. There were no windows on that side, and the sunbeams filtering from the others could not reach that far. There was a coat rack standing on the floor in the farthest corner. The shadows on the wall made it look like a tall and skinny creature, stretching its long arms in an impossible attempt to reach the light.
His mind went back to the main problem. He had already lay on that chair, just not tied up, not as a prisoner. And that was the moment when he finally realized he was a prisoner indeed.
How fucking ironic, he considered, sitting on the same
chair where he had once believed the pain would finally cease. He focused on the chair with its four branches, one at the top and one at the bottom of each side; every branch had several extensions. The bottom arm on his left carried a blood-stained oval sink, the kind where people rinse and spit. It wasn’t made of white plastic, like the one at the dentist’s office he had been to in the past; this one looked like steel, suggesting that it belonged to a dentist from another time. As the pain became clearer and more localized, he checked his gums with the tip of his tongue. The ferrous taste became stronger, mixed with an unpleasant sweetness, as if something was rotting in his mouth. His tongue found a hole in his upper left arch and felt something was wrong, not in place.
He turned his head to the other side, glancing at another branch of the chair. It was a mirror, and somehow, he was certain it had been left there so he could use it. It was there for him to see. He shivered as a wave of terror crested inside his chest. The mirror was pointed way too far to the left to reflect anything that was of use to him. He used all his strength to create a gap between his palms and the chair, but the effort was futile. Either the duct tape was way stronger than he would have expected, or he was much weaker than usual. His arms didn’t move an inch. As a sense of impotence pervaded, he let himself weep. The sound echoed in the room as the sunbeams, flooding from the windows, became weaker on the walls. He screamed in a desperate outburst, swaying in vain. His mind traveled all the way back to when he was nine, reading about
Harry Houdini. He wished he had learned something from all those illusion books.
He sensed something underneath the pointer finger of his right hand. A rounded and knurled surface brushed the numb fingertip. He tried to push it, but his finger slipped—and he saw one of the chair’s arms wobbling. He realized it was a knob. He played with it, rolling it back and forth, and realized with some disappointment that the knob could not move the arm with the mirror. The only arm of the chair that it did activate was one bearing a tiny metallic tool with the shape of a hook. The mechanism squeaked loudly in the deep silence of the room, where the only noise he’d heard so far had been his own panting.
Oh, come on, for fuck’s sake, he thought as his hopes began to abandon him. He extended all his fingers, looking for something else. His fists hadn’t been clenched when he was tied to the chair, but open on the armrests, with the tape wrapping the wrists and palms, so that the thumbs could move freely.
She wants me to be able to see myself in the mirror, he realized—and another sudden wave of fear assaulted him.
He moved both his thumbs in circles, trying to cover as much area as he could.
He found a switch on the right side. It seemed to have three positions: forward, center, and backward. He moved it back and forth, but nothing happened. It took him a bit to understand the switch was a selector, to move different tools with the knob he had found before. He shifted it all the way backward and
then tried the knob. Finally, the mirror began to move toward him.
As the contours of his features became visible in the reflection in the mirror, he knew right away that the troubles he had put himself in were far worse than he could have ever imagined. His face was a triumph of swellings and clotted blood nuances on the ghastly background of his skin. His right eye socket was a dark purple circle—as if he had been punched, hard. The swollen jaws made him look like a grotesque caricature of himself. He forced himself to smile in front of the mirror. When he did so, he closed his eyes instinctively. He wanted to scream, but no sounds came out of his mouth.
With a violent spasm, he vomited again on his lap. He took a deep breath before giving another glance at the mirror, afraid of what was expecting him beyond the clamped lips. On the lower arch, the two central incisors were bandaged with tiny cotton capsules, each of which showed a clotted red area on the top.
And slowly, almost like the brain had been waiting for him to see before pulling the trigger, the pain was back. Not entirely back—but he could feel it pulsating to the same beat as the headache throbbing in his temples. He opened his mouth and looked back in the mirror, then gently patted the cotton capsules with his tongue, searching for the hard edges of his teeth with no success. His teeth were gone—and not the ones that were supposed to go. When he tried to apply more pressure, an electric impulse of pure pain blasted through his
gums, reaching back into his head, straight to the brain.
He screamed.
Oh fuck...fuck...fuck.
He gasped, avidly searching for oxygen in the still and hot
air of the room. The pain ramped up. He writhed uselessly on the chair once more. The duct tape did not cede a tenth of an inch. He felt stupid and angry. He wasn’t sure if he had been given anesthesia or other drugs, but the effects had started to fade away. The pain went up a level, a hammering sting that he knew, eventually, would have driven him crazy. He forced himself not to touch the spot again. He closed his eyes, hoping to push the pain away.
In the darkness of his mind, he met his dad. He imagined him spending his day in the garage, fixing old cars, heating his frozen TV meal, and killing a six-pack. He thought about his mother too—at least, the few memories of her that were still strong and colorful in his mind. He thought of his wife, and all the reasons why he’d decided to escape from her seemed somehow weaker now. He thought of the hitchhiker, and the old man. He thought of Greg, who was probably bombarding his phone with calls and messages.
Johnny Hawk had wanted to escape from everything and everyone—from the world; from himself. He had made himself purposely oblivious of everyone who had tried to reach him in the past weeks. Now, he yearned desperately for anyone who could take him out of the hole he had dug for himself.
His phone. He glanced down at his half-numb legs, looking
for the bulge in his front pocket. There was no trace of it, of course.
On the tray to his left, something gleamed, breaking his train of thought. The tray looked old and stained. He moved his left thumb, looking for the selector on the armrest. After a couple of attempts, the tray came alive, moving jerkily toward him. The closer it got, the clearer the horrific sight became. A sobbing moan choked in his throat, and at that point not only did he know he was going to die but that he was going to do so in a lot of pain. He shivered deep down inside his bones as the sun set, casting darkness preambles across the basement. The air felt heavier to breathe. Everything looks worse than it is in the dark, his dad’s words came strong in his mind, but the sun waits just behind the gloom.
On the tray, a composition of objects had been organized with obsessive care, in a dreadfully symmetric scheme. A puzzle that didn’t leave much room for interpretation. The reality of the message was second only to the power of it. He looked at the shadows getting longer on the walls, then glanced back at the tray.
Two five-dollar bills had been placed at the top corners of the tray. Just below the lower edge of each bill were the two incisors he was missing in his mouth. They had been placed on pieces of cotton, cut with tidy edges. Both the teeth had stained the cotton with small red dots of blood. The note went straight to the point. In a sharp-cornered handwriting, which he had seen before, the note read:
The Tooth Fairy takes
But she gives in return.
An honest trade with no guessing. A trophy you must earn...
