About the Author Tim Millas lives in New York City. Exley's Machine is his second published short story and the first to appear online in Nuvein. He dedicates it to Susan and Judith, with love and thanks.

First they christened her the Answering Machine, because she was uncannily consistent on the phone; then – almost gratefully – the Filing Machine, since her perfection in this area allowed Rosa to concentrate on her specialties, oral hygiene and oral sex; then the Reading Machine, when she began to take textbooks from Ernst’s consulting room and, between doing everything else, methodically absorbed each one from cover to cover. Once Ernst even muttered that with her body she would make a perfect Sex Machine: but instantly Rosa said that he should be ashamed of himself, and had better apologize because Hadee could sue and count on Rosa as a witness.

Now, whatever she did, she was simply Machine. Her name was Hadee Cruz, and she was still Hadee to patients and her family, yet privately Machine was how she thought of herself. Not that she ever believed that she was literally mechanical, with a heart of gears and springs and a body of metal. No, Hadee knew that she was, unfortunately, organic and mortal. Still, the idea of being a Machine gave Hadee something, as essential as a code of behavior, a moral victory over everything she did and everyone around her.

Today, for example, she was doing insurance claims. It was Friday and Ernst always insisted that the claim form for every procedure done that week be sent out to the appropriate carriers before noon. He also expected her to “max up” the claims, in other words falsify them. So that many cleanings became emergency gum work, simple fillings gold inlays, shots of Novocain a general anesthetic, dead molars deeply impacted wisdom teeth. It was complicated because the patients of course paid Ernst their portion of the real procedure, which meant Hadee had to keep a separate set of secret books to track their billing, while the official bills and forms and records had to be scrupulously documented to withstand any scrutiny. To Ernst it was the means to his various ends, and he alternately crowed over how he was beating the system and despaired at his descent, deeper and less reversible with each passing Friday, into white-coat crime; to Hadee, the aspiring Machine, it was a challenge that made her mind and body vibrate like a speeding, soundless subway. Each claim had its click, when she felt exaggeration and plausibility coming together, like tracks connecting, as she hurtled forward. By now Ernst merely glanced and nodded before she sent everything out. Her claims were never questioned. Both Ernst and Rosa marveled at her skills – and Ernst paid her handsomely for them – but these rewards were as nothing next to her actions in action.

Ernst had another reason for getting all the claims out by twelve: every Friday, he and Rosa disappeared. What began as a “long lunch” evolved over the years to most of the afternoon – with one token appointment at 4:30 – and then finally all pretense of work was abandoned and neither of them bothered to return. Friday afternoons, particularly in July and August, were slow anyway, with everybody escaping New York early, and if Mrs. Ernst called Hadee simply told her that Dr. Ernst was with a patient. She would then call a particular phone number, and though Ernst would not answer the two rings would alert him to call his wife back after he had finished with whatever region of Rosa had been the object of his hapless excitement.

Hadee’s manner was so offhand that her explanation of Ernst’s inaccessibility, like her claims for his procedures, was never challenged. If you had asked Hadee how she felt about deceiving Mrs. Ernst, she would have shrugged, since she was indifferent to the woman. But in the moment of deception – when she said, “Oh, Betty, he’s with a patient right now” – her tongue pounded and her teeth hummed with that same, private thrill.

Even with half-day Fridays Ernst had a prosperous practice – mainly because he had been lucky enough to share it and then inherit it from his partner, mentor, and father in law, Dr. Wolfgang Ganz, now deceased. (Hadee had never met him but Rosa told her that Dr. Ganz was so revered by his patients that some used to travel here from Mannheim, the site of his original practice, for cleanings.) The patient list was blue-chip, the address was Madison Avenue, but the office, particularly the waiting room, had dank lighting, mismatched chairs, a couch with what looked like an appendectomy scar on its back cushion, a grey-green carpet worn to show the tread of patients to the coat rack and reception window, and streaky beige walls that hadn’t been painted since the evacuation of Saigon. According to Rosa, the office had always looked shabby, but in Dr. Ganz’s time this seemed to testify to his professional brilliance, while now it merely confirmed that Ernst was cheap, and a slob.

The waiting room was small, the treatment rooms smaller still, and always the fresh stink of Rosa’s perfume mingled with the stale stink of her perfume from yesterday, and last week, and last year. But Hadee’s space was ample, sealed off by clear grainy plastic from the patients, and also enclosed by silent walls on all sides. Her desk – really, her counter – was curved like a bay window, a generous and symmetrical curve, and to the right she positioned all work-related papers and tools, and the box of cheap plastic dreidels for Ernst’s pediatric patients. But the left curve of the counter belonged to Hadee and her reading. First the book of that day, one of Ernst’s massive textbooks, then Dorland’s, then the condensed Oxford English Dictionary. (She had told Ernst to buy this, and though he stared at her he did buy it without protesting or asking her why she wanted it.) Above the dictionaries was a cheap Mead notebook, which she would fill with terms and their definitions, or use to test her memory of dental procedures. Hadee kept the swivel mechanism of her chair well-oiled and could swing left and right and back just by pressing a fingertip to the counter.

Over the years she had so compartmentalized her concentration that she could swivel back and forth between claim forms, a chapter on tooth implants, a month’s appointment reminders, and recite any of it without mistake. Not that anyone asked her to; but Hadee would recite it within her own head. She was convinced that if her eyes were able to function independently, she could have read and worked at the same time, and accomplished twice as much.

The one touch of elegance in the office was the built-in bookcases of Ernst’s consulting room, another legacy, along with many of the books, from Dr. Ganz. (Some textbooks were in German, which Ernst once told Hadee he could read; Rosa sneered later that he may have conned old Ganz and Mrs. Ganz, but she knew he was really a Polack. How she knew this she never explained.) Every morning Hadee arrived an hour before anyone else, made coffee, turned on the lights, set up her work station, and then went to Ernst’s bookcase to slide the textbook she was currently reading from its place in the wall. She returned the book to the same place at day’s end. Ernst hadn’t touched his own books in years, and their accumulated soot blackened her fingers and streaked her nose. At first Rosa had to point this out to her – even shoving her ever-present hand mirror to Hadee’s face – but now she duly washed her face and hands at half-hour intervals. She had read, as of last week, six complete textbooks and five-eighths of another. She had read books on oral anatomy and hygiene, tooth and gum reconstruction, oral surgery, and even orthodontics. But today’s book was different: Grey’s Anatomy, open to Eyes.

Normally she read each book very carefully, no more than five pages per day, and always in sequence, from the copyright page through Z in the index. She never jumped from book to book, never started something new until she absorbed every word of the one in front of her. But such was her resistance to not being able to read and work simultaneously – so wrong did it seem, so functionally absurd – that she couldn’t accept it. In the fundamentals of how eyes worked there must be something, a clue, an overlooked mechanism, that could make her own more efficient.

“Knock knock. Anybody here?” It was Alberto the mailman, bearing mail. He smiled down at her, looking, as always, into both her eyes.

“Good morning.” She spoke and smiled pleasantly. She always did these things well.

“Chica, you were in a zone.” Alberto held a thick wad of envelopes and a cardboard box all in his left hand, proudly, as if it were an especially heavy barbell. “You didn’t even hear me come in.”

“I know,” she admitted. This acknowledgment made him show his teeth: she noted that he didn’t floss and his gums were receding. Dentures within five years.

“What’s so interesting?”

“Insurance claims.”

“And reading,” he said, jerking his chin toward Grey’s Anatomy.

“And reading,” she agreed. Alberto never flirted, exactly. He never stared at her chest or said anything sexual, although you would have expected it, with his abundant eyebrows, manly belly and bulging ring of keys. His vanity was simply to command her attention. Hadee had found that speaking factually, answering his questions, satisfied him and shortened the encounter. Actually she found this worked with just about everyone.

“What you reading about today?”

“Eyes.”

“Eyes? You gonna be an eye doctor, now?”

“Oh, no,” she laughed. “I’m just trying to figure out a better way to see.”

She’s a little plain, Alberto thought, but man, her skin was like milk chocolate, so smooth, and when she laughed it crinkled around her mouth and under her black eyes. But whether she laughed or stuck her tongue out, in her face as clear as a sign was the message, DO NOT ENTER. “Well, Dr. Ernst has a priority mail today.”

“Thanks. I’ll let him know.” Alberto passed the mail through the square opening in her plastic wall, wished her good weekend, and left. She sorted everything quickly, and buzzed Ernst. “Doctor, the package you were expecting is here.”

Ernst said nothing but a moment later he was standing behind her. She could smell him. He smelled like Rosa, but this was complicated by today’s cologne, a deep woods smell that straddled but, like all his colognes, could not obliterate Rosa’s perennial peach blossom. He took the priority envelope, tore it open, flipped through the forms – it was some kind of mortgage refinancing – and sighed. Then his hairy knuckles tapped her stack of claims. “Finished?”

“Just about. I’m on the next-to-last one. You can check these while I finish.”

“Machine, I have a patient – ” But he didn’t leave. He flipped through the stack like it was a deck of cards; she handed him the last two, which he set down with another sigh. He hadn’t read a thing because he knew she did it perfectly: he sighed with a melancholy nostalgia, remembering how in dental school he spent most of his time on the couch, smoking pot and giggling at whatever was on TV, and he was happy; now he had the balls and chains of wife, family, business, two mistresses (besides Rosa, there was Carol), a sex addiction, and so much debt he had to lie and cheat to feed it. “OK,” he said, “these look good. Send ‘em out.”

He turned to go, but then turned back, wafting leaves and peaches past her cheek. “Oh, and Machine? Once Mr. Weber is done, we’re taking off. You can leave at four-thirty if you like.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll go ahead and cancel your two o’clock, then?”

“Uh…yes,” Ernst said, pursing his lips and pressing his hirsute hands together as if this was a tough decision. Despite his and Rosa’s preordained departure every Friday, Ernst always had her schedule one appointment smack in the middle of the afternoon. He never explained why he did this, although the easy reason was to create a paper trail of phantom patients so his wife couldn’t point to a blank appointment book in a future divorce proceeding. Or was part of him bored with adultery, disgusted with Rosa and his own compulsion, and perhaps hoping that some Friday, this Friday, he would show will power? “Mrs. Feinstein?” he said. “Yes. Cancel it. Give her a good spot early next week,” and though he moved his bulky head up and down for emphasis, his incongruously small eyes caught hers fearfully as if waiting for a laugh, the scorn his hypocrisy deserved. But she felt no more disgust for him than a car does for a driver who jerks his foot on and off the brake. “OK,” she said, “I’ll call her.”

Another sigh from Ernst, as if he couldn’t decide whether he was relieved or disappointed: and the uncertainty left him standing there, despite his waiting patient. Machine began putting the claim forms into their envelopes; this turned her back to her counter and released him from eye contact. But still he stared at her, self-loathing already morphing into lust. “So you finally got sick of teeth?”

“I never get sick of teeth,” she said, factually. “But I had a question. Doctor, can anybody see two things at once?” She realized this wasn’t clear. “Seeing one thing with one eye, and a different thing with another eye, not just objects but information, and seeing them at the same time, and absorbing them, mentally, like.”

“Almost like having two screens?” he said, behind her. She nodded. She heard, or rather felt, his body rustle as he shifted from one foot to the other, which he always did, even when doing a procedure, as if unable to commit his bulk (six foot four and 300 pounds, up from 230 when she first met him) to a single position. “Uh…no. I don’t think so. Two eyes definitely see more than one eye alone, but they still form one big screen, one image.”

“What about animals? Can animals do it?”

“Huh, I don’t know, maybe. Fish. Maybe a whale. Those eyes are pretty wide apart.” He laughed and then sucked it back nervously. “Why?”

“Well, then I could read more about teeth. Read two books at once.”

“Oh. Yeh.” There was a knot in his voice. He stood there, shifting and rustling, as if forever. He never questioned her appropriation of his textbooks or asked her if she had any interest in further education. He never questioned her oddness, her remoteness, her lack of boyfriends or girlfriends or social connections of any kind, a 30-year-old Hispanic who refused to speak Spanish living with a mother who spoke virtually nothing else. He thought he was hiring her body, and instead he got this…this machine, this engine, that made his practice and cheating and philandering all go. She was the biggest piece of dumb luck he had stumbled across in his life. He wasn’t going to fuck it up by trying to fuck her. But that brown body, slim-hipped, narrow-shouldered, with such unexpected breasts and buttocks; a foot shorter than him, even smaller than Rosa, and yet more powerful than either of them; knowing he would never sample it or understand it, he just wanted to cry. “Machine, what you’re really talking about is having two brains – ”

“Dr. Ernst, Mr. Weber’s mouth is getting tired.” Ernst instantly spun around like one of his wobbly dreidels and went back to work. Rosa, arms akimbo, made a clicking noise with her tongue. “Poor man’s been holding it wide open for 20 minutes. I know how that feels.” She plopped herself right next to Hadee, on her counter, partially on the stack of envelopes that would be mailed to the insurance carriers, and simulated a wink by scrunching one side of her face without actually closing an eye.

Hadee slid her chair over a few inches and called Mrs. Feinstein. “I’m sorry, but Dr. Ernst had a personal emergency. No, nobody’s hurt, but he had to leave. Tuesday at nine? Very good. Thanks for your understanding.” Rosa as usual was chuckling before she finished talking; swinging her legs up like a little girl on a swing, she repeated the words “personal emergency.” This cancellation ritual appealed to her. She always contrived to be around when Hadee made the call, and then always found something sniggering to say. Hadee as usual did not react, sliding back to her prior position even though it put her close again to Rosa. Rosa arched her back and raised her left buttock enough to push the envelopes out from under it – her right thigh touching Hadee’s elbow – then pushed away from the counter and immediately brushed herself off and began inspecting her short skirt and high boots for any traces of dirt or lint. The years had thickened Rosa’s thighs too much for a skirt that brief, but otherwise she looked as calculatedly girlish at 33 as she had at 25. Her voice was higher-pitched than Hadee’s, but always composed. Clothes, makeup, skin, hair, fingernails – everything was immaculate, and seemingly imperturbable. Not long after Ernst hired her, Hadee opened the door to a treatment room and found him on tiptoe pressed against the counter, pushing into Rosa, who was perched with legs apart and her head against the cabinet behind her. Ernst pulled away and walked to the window, so mortified he could neither speak nor show his face. Rosa stayed on the counter, simply crossed her legs and said, “Yes, what is it?” When Hadee said the two o’clock was there, Rosa waited a beat, a faint smile in the edges of her eyes, and nodded: “We’ll be right there.”

Ernst was so shaken up that he never had sex with Rosa in the office again, sneaking her instead to the apartment he kept nearby. For a long time he couldn’t look at Hadee. Rosa, on the other hand, seemed to find reasons to talk to her and look into her face. Hadee’s non-reaction seemed to please her, and Hadee knew that Rosa would have been fine with her walking in on them any time. “Two brains?” she said.

“Oh,” said Hadee. “I was just asking Dr. Ernst about something.”

“Ass-king him, you mean, not ax-ing him.” Rosa always pointed out the low-class artifacts in Hadee’s speech, not so much to put her down as to confirm that she could say or do anything to Hadee. Now she picked up Hadee’s left hand, inspected it, and said with a grin, “Machine, you really should get them manicured. They’re so beautiful already, so just imagine.” She said this in Spanish. When they met, Rosa announced that she was Cuban – perhaps to remind Hadee that she was only Puerto Rican – and she also liked to speak Spanish to her, usually in front of Ernst because it stoked his lust and made him paranoid. It didn’t bother her that Hadee never answered, or even betrayed that she understood. “If you’re ever going to be a dentist, take it from me, you have to have beautiful hands,” she continued in English. “You have to have hands people want you to put in their mouth. Even he gets those paws manicured. I keep telling him to wax the knuckles, but he won’t listen.”

“I’m not going to be a dentist.”

“Why not? Already you probably know as much as he does. I could get him to let you do a cleaning. I’m sure you’d be a perfect Cleaning Machine, and I guarantee the lazy bear would let you start doing procedures. And then we wouldn’t even have to show up.”

“I don’t want to be a dentist.”

“Hey, I don’t want to be a hygienist. Or anybody’s puta, either. But you’ve got to be something. And you, Machine, are not a receptionist. Don’t ask me what you are, but that you are not.” Rose put her hand on Hadee’s shoulder, let it rest there, and then, getting nothing back, went away satisfied.


The office is silent other than the sound of her breathing, the snap of turning pages, the sewing-machine steadiness of her chair’s wheels as she slides slightly back and forth. Then all stops. She has finished the chapter. Now it’s barely one o’clock and she has four uninterrupted hours and she determines that she will go back and reread the whole thing. She read carefully – copious notes and drawings of eyeballs confirm it – but still she is sure she has missed something.

Normally, for Hadee, intention and action are one and the same. Yet now she does not reread the entire chapter, but finds herself flipping pages, skimming words and sentences, and then getting stuck on the sequence of drawings that show how the eye works: how in the normal eye light travels and reaches a focus point precisely on the retina, resulting in clear images, while falling short in the near-sighted eye, or overshooting the retina in the far-sighted eye, resulting in blurs. As her own eyes dart from drawing to drawing, she feels a dry grinding in her chest, like mistimed gears going nowhere.

She goes to one of the sinks to wash off her hands. She sits, or rather sags, back down in the chair, and this sends the chair backward, and instead of correcting it she lets it keep drifting, away from the counter. One wheel slides past the edge of her plastic mat, encounters her rug, twists and causes the chair to stop. The silence is different over here, thicker somehow, resting in her sinuses and stomach. She thinks of Ernst and Rosa. She thinks they must be in the apartment now. (A small apartment two blocks away on Madison which Rosa, who lives in Astoria, wants to make her residence; but Ernst won’t let her, pretending that Mrs. Ernst uses it as a Pied a Terre when she shops and socializes in Manhattan. In reality he uses it for trysts with Carol, and doesn’t want Rosa that close anyway, wheedling him to spend nights with her.) She thinks, no, imagines Rosa undressing, carefully hanging her clothes in the bedroom closet, while Ernst heaps his things on the nearest chair...

Hadee jerks the chair back onto the plastic and rolls back to the counter. Now she stares at the page, and instead of words she sees black shapes, the grainy yet almost translucent texture of the paper itself. An idea rises and swirls in her head, twists like cigarette smoke out of her eyes, takes shape before her and blots out the page: the idea that this sense of limitation is not due to her inability to see and read double, but somehow is increasingly inherent in the very act of reading.

She has been reading textbooks for the past six years. It has accounted for more than half of her waking function. She distinctly remembers the beginning, a day in which she had dispatched filing, scheduling, mail sorting, phone calls, and every other conceivable task with unprecedented speed. She walked into Ernst’s consulting room to ask him for something to do, but he was on the phone, and while waiting she turned toward his bookcase, and noted that one of his textbooks was jutting out from the rest. Moving her hand forward to shove it in, she pulled it out instead. Brought it back to her desk, opened it, and reengaged.

There have been other beginnings; always unplanned, yet sharp and inevitable in her memory. The day with Inez and Iris (she seven, they nine and 10), the three of them in the living room, pretending to be their mother and her friends having coffee and talking about men and marriage. Actually Inez and Iris were pretending, and both hectored Hadee to play her part, or at least say something, and Hadee noticed a huge ball of dust under the TV stand. She tried grasping it in her fist, then came back with a wet paper towel, then saw more dust and lugged the vacuum cleaner, which was almost as tall as she, out of the hall closet, and then she vacuumed the whole room and the rest of the apartment. Halfway through she had to remove the bursting paper dust bag and put in a fresh one. So began four years of housework – dusting, polishing, washing, folding, ironing, watering plants and turning mattresses and changing light bulbs, her mother had to keep teaching her new things and then would watch in uneasy amazement as Hadee did it all, silently. Then the day she smelled something burning and rescued gravy that her mother – talking on the phone – had forgotten about. So began six years of selecting, buying, preparing, cooking, serving, recycling, and disposing of food; she cooked every meal for the entire family, and her father, staring at her behind as she washed the dishes, joked that he would divorce lazy Maria and marry Hadee. “You’ll take care of me,” he said, and then laughed at himself for how much he meant it.

Hadee stayed at home and took care of all of them, and as her sisters and brother moved out she stayed and cared for her mother and father, and then when Leon died abruptly of pancreatic cancer – still she stayed and worked and left Maria with nothing to do. Then there was the moment when she finished everything so quickly that she had the time to read every page of the paper, even the want ads, and she saw the ad for a receptionist, and she interviewed the next day with Ernst and Rosa. Rosa, seeing her body, told Ernst not to hire her since she had no experience, and Ernst, seeing the same body, hired her on the spot. Pointing at her high grades in all classes in high school, Maria couldn’t understand why Hadee would not aim to become something, at least a teacher, maybe a lawyer – a stockbroker; think of the money, she said. Hadee did not think of the money. (Although she maintained her checkbook and paid her own bills as efficiently as she did Ernst’s.) She could not conceive a day without action, and yet never connected that action with ambition. Such things were just more of the hysteria of the creatures around her, like crying to God or blubbering over love or wanting someone’s house and car or anticipating your whole waking day the moment of pressing into someone else’s flesh…

“Or maybe you just want to get married. To a nice doctor,” Maria said, wishfully, but not with any real hope. “But then a hospital would be better…”

Hadee makes herself stand, but her eyes are still stalled on the page. The phone rings and she answers with “Dr. Ernst’s office,” already offhand in anticipation of Mrs. Ernst at the other end.


The young man stood at the corner of 72nd Street and Madison Avenue, waiting for the light to change. Behind him was the Ralph Lauren store, consuming and excreting scores of preppie-wannabes, with their last-minute purchases for this weekend in the Hamptons. Two bottle-blondes coming out stopped to look at him, because he was wearing spotless Lauren white slacks and a rich brown braided Lauren belt and a light yellow cotton mock-turtleneck Lauren pullover to go with his Brooks blazer and tasseled Kenneth Cole loafers. He could have been posing for a Lauren ad or as a living monument to the preppie way of being, but he was no wannabe, not with his fair Anglo-Saxon face, his chiseled chin, his curly black hair, his speckled blue eyes, or his lean, six-foot frame. The girls just stood there, at the edge of his vision, giggling half at him, half in awe of him.

But when the light changed the young man, who was actually 34, named Xavier Exley but called Ex by himself and everyone else (except Marianna), crossed the street without even a glance at the girls. He was late and in another three hours every road out of Manhattan would become a parking lot. And now it was starting to drizzle. Ex could already see the effect this would have on his slacks, but while he walked steadily, he saw no point in running. He originally planned to take the day off and reach Allie’s parents’ estate by noon, so that he would have hours to make himself crisp for their First-of-August party, and their, or rather his and Allie’s, big announcement. But Forrester needed him today, and the hour he needed him for became three hours plus, which meant he had to change at the office before he left since he couldn’t chance arriving with the party already in progress and he not dressed for it. It also meant Allie driving up on her own – she could have waited but refused, furious that he had let that blood-sucking Jew Forrester (meanwhile her dad was half-Jewish, and her middle name was Rachel) lure him in on his Summer Friday. Ex smiled as the rain fell harder, even tipped his cleft chin up to receive it. The day, and no doubt the weekend to come, was already such a fiasco that when he cracked his tooth – on a chunk of salmon, for God’s sake – it seemed right to him.

When he had days like this growing up his mother, Marianna, would smile at Ex and say, “Make it work. Just make it work for what you want.” If he made a face she would add, “Look at me. No money, no skills and your father gone, and look where I live and look what I wear. Look at my friends. And look at the son I have!” When he got older he cut the torture short by saying, “Yeah, look at you. A pathetic social climber who never got past the second rung!” He would jeer at her for saying she lived on Park Avenue when really she lived on 87th, for claiming to be Anglican when she was pure potato-famine Catholic, for calling herself Marianna when she was just plain Mary. But damned if she hadn’t made him an expert in Making It Work. He was already making today work. Got a dentist’s name from Forrester because of course his own dentist was already in East Hampton at his estate. Let the rain muss him up, if he couldn’t arrive crisp he would glory in his dishevelment, weave an epic tale of his pratfalls, like Shackleton fucking up his whole expedition and parlaying it into heroism.

He was startled by a voice, almost a screech but making words, and he realized it came from the guy approaching him on the pavement: wearing a cream Armani suit but obviously insane, eyes focused nowhere but shouting as if at someone right in front of him, rapping orders about having a fresh suit ready with staccato self-importance. His left arm jutted out oddly, like he’d had a stroke. As he passed Ex saw a black plug in his ear, a wire running down to the arm: oh. Just an asshole. Cell phone and earpiece. Not remotely aware that he looked like a freak. Trying to prevent tumors in that brain – Ex started shaking – didn’t he know the whole thing was a tumor and the world would be a better place if he was dead – and now he was giggling as uninhibitedly as the guy had been shouting. And there was his own new earpiece, which he planned to try on the drive out. Yeah. Right. Mr. and Mrs. Church, you’re losing a daughter but growing a tumor…He was so depressed suddenly that he stepped in a puddle by the curb to cross the street to La Ronde, which had a bar. He looked down: by some miracle his pants cuff was untouched. He snorted, and kept going to 68th and Madison, and there it was, 790, a square white brick building. Through the drizzle it looked pretty grim, and the lobby was worse, with a 50’s dripping piss abstract on one wall, and a smelly guard behind a sign-in desk with napkins stuffed under one leg to make it level. The elevator clanked. Still, it was Madison Avenue, and Forrester had told him that these guys, Ganz and Ernst, had some choice patients, like a former Vice-President and a famous alcoholic cabaret singer.

No matter, Ex thought, as he approached room 510, this could be Doc Holliday and the Little Shop of Horrors – he’d just feed it to his Fiasco Epic. All he had to do was get this tooth filed down or covered up; his man, Rienzo, would be back Tuesday.

After the crunch – more terrible for how it sounded than felt – and the pleasure of spitting out a weird chunk of tooth and metal, Ex felt no pain. He said, “I think I cracked a tooth,” and then it was as if a midget hand with jagged fingernails had raked across the inside of his right cheek. It stopped instantly, and when he spoke again there was no pain at all. Then he sipped some water and the shock of it made his nuts retract. He went to the bathroom mirror and the Xavier Exley he got back looked fine, the cheek neither swollen nor sunken, his jaunty JFK Jr. hair and smile intact. He tasted blood but didn’t see any. Ex knew life was 90 percent misery but he also knew, and pretty much accepted, the vast conspiracy of externals, the agreement to drink and drug and fuck around and fall apart and yet always, in one another’s presence, look fine. He looked fine. He was fine.

He might have decided to wait till Tuesday, but when Forrester, who had followed him to the bathroom, asked how he was, his “I’m OK” shoved an ice pick from under his jaw through the top of his head.

Ex tried the door; it was open. The girl at the other end said he would be taken promptly at one fifteen. It would have been in keeping with today’s script to find a full waiting room and five patients backed up. But the place was empty. (And a dump.) All the lights were on yet it felt abandoned. Nobody was sitting at the reception desk. Ex stood there for a minute, staring like an idiot at the empty chair, then tried to poke his head through the opening to look around, and it was like he had laid his cheek on hot coals. He said “Hello?” not loud enough for anybody to hear, and yet at that moment the door to his left opened. “Mr. Exley?” “Yeah – Dr. Ernst?” “Yes. You can come this way.”

“Oh…great,” he said, not moving. “So you can take me right now?”

“Yes, you can come right in,” Dr. Ernst said, and gestured for him to go through the door ahead of her.

Ex stepped through, then turned back, almost bumping into her. “I really appreciate the short notice – you being able to take me, I mean. This is a lifesaver.”

Dr. Ernst smiled pleasantly. “Let’s put you in here and take a look.”

She walked ahead of him into a tiny room that made the chair and all the dental torture tools look twice their normal size. Following her, Ex noticed that she was small – not stunted, just compact – and that her white coat hung down to her ankles. Hadn’t Forrester said “These guys”? Also he would have expected somebody named Ernst to look German, or at least Caucasian, not Black-Hispanic like this woman was. Not that he had anything against women dentists, and her skin was an incredibly even-toned caramel color, something Allie would kill for. And Ms. Dr. Ernst installed him in the chair so easily, and pulled over the tool tray and that big overhead light like every dentist he had ever opened his mouth for. “Now how did this happen?”

“Damned if I know.” She kept smiling but didn’t laugh, and he added quickly, “I was just chewing. On a piece of smoked salmon, nothing hard. I’m a senior bond trader at Forrester Wellstone and Max Forrester always caters in the best when he makes us work through lunch. So this was a good piece of salmon. It shouldn’t have caused this.” Ex wondered if she would appreciate the difference between good and bad salmon. Then he told himself to stop being racist – or maybe idiotic was more appropriate, since the racism of his earlier thought was rather obscure. His cheek twitched, and suddenly that big light made him feel exposed. Dr. Ernst just watched him, still smiling, her dark eyes and caramel face impassive yet patient, not rushing or judging him. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was the toast. But the next thing I know, I’m crunching on my own tooth.”

“Do you have the piece that broke off?”

“Oh. No.” Forrester had told him to save it, but holding that ugly hunk of tooth and dull metal in his hand, thinking that this came from him, was him, part of the foundation of his smile, was so upsetting that he flushed it down the toilet. Was this a dental faux pass? Again Ex felt embarrassed, and then caught himself thinking of Marianna, herself an unofficial maid and changer of bedpans for rich old bitches, saying haughtily, “She’s getting paid, isn’t she? Let her fix it.”

He said, “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d be reattaching it,” laughing, mocking himself but also tweaking her, a tricky balance that always had Allie, and even the sternest women, eating out of his hand.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dr. Ernst said. “We’ll fix it. OK, open up,” and with that, not dismissively but decisively, her eyes flicked off him and looked into his mouth, as if everything that was Xavier Exley was subordinate, even superfluous, to his teeth. Using the little round mirror with the long handle, she examined the spot. She put some tools on the tray. She took one of them, a sharp-pointed probe, and prodded the tooth here and there, until she found the bad spot, but her touch was just enough to hint at that blinding pain without making him suffer through it. She stepped back and nodded. “That really hurts, doesn’t it.” Not unkindly, in no way apologetic, as if it was part of her competence to know where it hurt and to know that she had the power to really make it hurt. This made him feel…safe, somehow. “That nerve – ” his voice was a croak; he cleared his throat. “That nerve must be connected to every other nerve in my body.”

“Not every nerve. But a damaged tooth definitely sends signals to the central nervous system, so you’ll be hurtin’ in other places.” She met his eyes briefly again, and he felt as happy as a petted dog. She glanced away, as if looking for his chart and then remembering he was a new patient. “We could take an x-ray, but the damage is pretty clear. What’s left of the tooth can be saved, but it will have to be reshaped and a gold inlay put over it.”

“Gold?” Given the uses of his smile, she might have told him that he would have a permanent gap in his front teeth, like Alfred E. Neumann.

“Gold is the best material for this kind of damage.”

“Will it show, when I…open my mouth? I mean – I don’t want to look like I’m from Trinidad or something.” Then he realized she might be from Trinidad. “I, I just don’t want it to stand out – ”

Dr. Ernst touched his arm, strictly a professional reassurance, but at the mild pressure of her fingers – longer than he would have expected, not painted but almost white, especially the moons, against her skin – Ex still felt a personal response, a surge of liking for her.

“It won’t stand out. It’s way back in your mouth, and even when you smile nobody will see it. If you really wanted it we could use a bonding material that looks like tooth enamel. But that won’t last very long. Gold has been shown clinically to be the most durable.”

“OK, doctor,” Ex said. “You’re the boss. Gold it is. Let’s do it.”

“Oh, we won’t be doing the inlay today.”

“Oh.” Like he was disappointed; God, you are a freak, he thought. “Why?”

“It’s a long procedure. You said you had to be somewhere by six. Also, it really is a decision that you should make with your regular dentist.”

“Oh.”

“No, today – to get you through the weekend – we’ll just put in a temporary. It will protect the remaining tooth, and will keep it from lacerating your gums and cheek, as well as minimizing the pain. It’s not as strong as the actual inlay, though, so you should avoid very hard things and try to chew on the other side.” She pointed, unnecessarily, to his other cheek, but he smiled at the pure line of her arm emerging from that oversized sleeve.

“Well – can I ask you one other question?”

“Sure.”

“Will it survive a girlfriend on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a pair of elitist future in-laws, a bunch of hungry, thirsty sharks, a million drinks, and more phony speeches than you’ll hear at an award show? Because after this I’m meeting my girlfriend, actually my fiancée, at her filthy rich parents’ estate in East Hampton, and we’re going to announce our engagement publicly at their annual First-of-August party, which won’t attract the elite elite but does get some lower rung Fortune 500 and a smattering of Hollywood. Will it survive that?”

He deliberately put enough smirk in the words to keep them from being unbearably pretentious, yet not so much that they became a pure joke: he knew from experience the smirk made what he said more impressive; to many, intimidating. But oh, how his mouth hurt, and as it pulsed through him the pain of his shattered tooth began to seem the cry of his fractured soul. His whole life was this oscillation between ambition and the smirking at it, desire for things and disgust at everything, the want for a perfect place in the world, the constant impulse to blow it, and himself, to bits. But he never did, did he. He despised Marianna (thank God, she was “not well enough” to make the trip today) and yet still saw everything through her goddamn brain. Allie had the same problem; when she told him her parents wanted the engagement to be announced at this party, she alternated between excoriating them and, when he tried to do the same, telling him Grow up. Wasn’t this their strongest bond, really, didn’t her own anguish make him love her, or, at least, hate himself less? Didn’t they –

His eyes widened as he remembered Dr. Ernst, listening to this. He was suddenly terrified at what she was really hearing or seeing. When he stopped talking, however, all she said was, “It will definitely survive that.” Then, she unbuttoned the front of her white coat. “Hope you don’t mind – we all have to wear this, but it really just gets in my way – ” and she pushed the coat behind her like a cape, sat in the stool beside his chair, and rolled up her sleeves. She was wearing jeans and a plain black shirt. She could not have been taller than five three, and so had to elevate the seat of the stool to bring her face back above his. And he was smitten.

Why? Doctors as a class never impressed him. First of all they worked for a living, and Marianna had instilled in him that your ultimate aspiration was not to have to work, to be so rich you only did things that amused you. Second, even the most brilliant micro-surgeon seemed to Ex hardly better than a mortician, sewer worker or garbage collector: people who worked in the foul mess humanity made. Now, dentists were necessary, but sticking your hands in somebody’s mouth was, well, like probing an asshole. He generally made it through a procedure with lots of Novocain and pretending he was drunk. But now he was alert, as Dr. Ernst tipped his chair back and brought the interrogation light directly over his face; now he was tingling, as she pinned the bib on him and gave him the injection that felt like she was pinching one of his nipples; now Ex, who for all his girlfriends before Allie, could take or leave sex himself – the Big Nothing, like Warhol said, performance masquerading as irresistible impulse – now as Dr. Ernst began to scrape and drill away the rough edges of his tooth, Ex was hard and barely able to resist the impulse to pull her onto the chair.

But it was more than that. Ex was smitten. For the next 20 minutes Ex was in love. The shocking part was not that he no longer loved Allie, because he still did (as he always had, in a way). But, God, in a few hours he would be announcing their marriage, the marriage of all he wanted, socially and professionally. As Marianna loved to nag him, he had taken too long to get married, but even she couldn’t deny that this marriage was it: in one stroke he would silence her, say a preemptive fuck you to anyone who would fire him, assure himself a permanent place at the rich man’s table. Did he really want it? Did he have a choice? Wacko mother, JFK looks, a name like Xavier Exley, did he expect to be a Peace Corps worker and hang out in Somalia? He was a born stereotype, for God’s sake; and though he was smart enough to be self-conscious about it there was nothing burning inside him to make him fight it.

Yet now, as Dr. Ernst fitted a mold over his tooth, Ex was fitting himself into his Jaguar; driving not to East Hampton but to 790 Madison Avenue; jumping out to open the door for Ernst (she had no other name); and then roaring downtown to Chelsea, where he just knew she lived, unmarried, alone. On the way he set up his mobile and called Allie, and when she answered told her, Sorry, he wasn’t coming after all, it was over, sorry, and, just as her rage and hysteria became an electronic screech, he hung up and threw phone and earpiece out the window. He loved Ernst’s apartment, sparely furnished in the manner of an innately elegant person not interested in such things; he wanted to just sit and look at her, but she took him to the bedroom, undressed him, and tucked him under the covers of her bed. As she removed her own clothes, setting them indifferently yet neatly on a bureau, he told himself, This isn’t happening, with a joyous horror, because it already, irreversibly had.

“OK,” she said, “now that I’ve taken the mold, the next step will be to shape the material for the temporary and attach it to your tooth.” She took a step back. He could see the glint of a dot of perspiration near the hairline of her forehead. Was this the first time she had said “I” and not the medical “We”? As in, “I love you too”? And was she really smiling now, not just with her mouth but her eyes, nose, and ears? “How do you feel so far? Any pain?”

“No. I feel fine. But, can I ask you yet another question?”

Of course he had no question, he was just trying to prolong the moment, but then he realized what he had to say next: Would you like to have a drink with me, after we’re done? And she said, “Sure. Ask me anything you like.” And then his mind was blank, and the question that was inevitable had vanished; or not vanished, but crushed against the unexpected consonant in the words he so longed for: “Ask me anything…” He realized that Ernst, Dr. Ernst, had said “Ax me,” yes she had actually made the word ask sound like ax, the way one of their gum-chewing, big-haired receptionists might say it. And she wasn’t even aware of it! She stood smiling at him, waiting.

Ex managed to say: “Will this take much longer?”

“No,” she answered immediately, “we’ll be done by two thirty. You’ll make your party” – and then she moved in and resumed work, telling him to open wider and mercifully making conversation impossible.

He lay there, numbly sensing her hands in his mouth, and feeling his face hot and twitching, and yet the back of his neck was damp with relief. He hated himself but knew that he was very, very lucky. Call him a snob, call him racist, call him a shallow, hollow man – he could not see himself going through life and facing the world with a woman who said “ax” when she meant “ask.” He just didn’t have the character for it.


She knew what to do, and she did it. Her reading flowed through her hands; within half an hour the temporary was molded and attached, and the patient could now function comfortably until it was time to receive the real inlay. She did everything perfectly. She was a new machine.

But once she solved the problem, she was confronted by another. Though her motions were smooth, in her chest and arms and head she felt so much knocking that she feared she would shake apart. She was sure her hair was burning. She had to breathe through her mouth. The patient, Exley, whose eyes remained open and unblinking throughout the procedure, seemed oblivious to all of this. In his lack of response Hadee felt rise in her something she could not describe, not in physical terms, not heat or vibration, the only word she knew for it was yearning, for the person in the chair below her.

She didn’t want to kiss him, or talk to him. She wanted to be his machine. As Cleaning Machine, Cooking Machine, Answering Machine, Filing Machine, Claim Form Machine, Hadee’s actions benefited others but didn’t involve them. As Reading Machine she never once thought or cared that the mouth being fixed might give thanks for it. But from Exley she wanted. She didn’t quite know what; but she knew she wasn’t getting it. He was friendly, even with his mouth stretched wide and stuffed with cotton and a suction tube, and his eyes stayed on her all the time. But none of this acknowledged what she was really doing, what she could do, how she could be his machine, how she could care for his teeth and his mouth and for every part of him, for as long as he and she both lived.

Of course Hadee didn’t expect this to happen. She would never see him again. Did this upset her? No, she thought firmly – but she wanted him to acknowledge –

She thought he was going to when he said he had another question. But his question was nothing. She waited – there had to be more – had he realized she wasn’t Ernst? Though her hands tensed instantly, ready to respond to the threat, she thought, No, that’s not it, he wouldn’t have stayed sitting there. She looked at him now, and for the first time it seemed wrong that his open eyes gave nothing back. And she knew then what the problem was: He didn’t see her. He was blind.

She thought back and now certain actions – staring at her empty chair, pointlessly hesitating when she told him to come in – made cold sense. The way he kept trying to be charming, the way he kept asking her questions, diverting her: he was trying to conceal it. He didn’t want anybody to know. He actually made his way through life pretending to see; maybe he enjoyed more advantages from this deception; and until now he had gotten away with it.

The fact that Hadee had engaged in her own deception of her own in no way mitigated her judgment of his. Hers revealed genuine ability. His disguised a handicap. His wife to be, her parents, his coworkers and friends – all assumed he could see them…The enormity of it made her uncertain, maybe she was wrong, maybe there was some other reason for his behavior. In the guise of giving his temporary a final check, she leaned closer, and in examining his eyes once more she finally made a breakthrough in her own sight.

Not the breakthrough she had wanted before – no dual vision – but something even more incredible: she could see past the surface of his eyeballs inside them. She moved like a beam of light past the cornea and aqueous body, through iris, pupil, lens, and vitreous, all the way to the retina, and even the optic nerve. And she saw exactly what was wrong. Instead of bending and refracting her to a focus point, recreating her image on the retinal screen, his eyes registered nothing. It wasn’t that he was nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic, no, in his eyes the proper functions occurred but no image was recognized. Each eye was useless, vestigial as an appendix.

He knew it, Hadee was sure, but denied it to deceive others, or perhaps himself. She felt something like sympathy, but immediately sympathy became impatience. He had to face it, admit it. That would never happen as long as those eyes remained in his head, dead but convincing.

Hadee picked up one of the probes and brought it toward him as if to scrape away some excess bonding or to test the grip of the temporary. She penetrated the right eye, straight through the sclera into the vitreous, and then dragged the probe across, causing the ball to burst with a mixture of blood and clear gelatinous fluid running down his cheek. Then there was no ball: at least his empty socket could only be an empty socket. Exley yelped wordlessly and in one reflex his body arched upward and his arms flailed. Her answering reflex was to reach up and bring down the point of the overhead light full force against his temple. He slumped and stopped struggling. Then she did the other eye.