I might not be the person to represent the story that my father was not his parents’ only son, but was, in fact, one of two males to pass through the mortal doorway of his mother’s hips. I say “might not” because I do not have the facts to tell you that with confidence. What I believe to be true, a story I heard from my father when I was very young, is that a lifeless gristle baby squirted out of his mother somewhere between her virginity and her death and every witness to that stillbirth is dead.
Years later, I called my father on a weekday and told him that Ashley, my wife at the time, had lost the baby. Our micro-human, whose heart she and I both watched thrum on a screen, was an alive baby once, moving and shaking throughout her uterine ballroom. Weeks later, that same screen cursed us with images we could not unsee, our homunculus now a jelly sack containing jelly bones and a jelly heart, an alive baby no longer. My father was apologetic. He took the news in stride, offering condolences. I don’t know if he thought about his lost sibling then. Or ever again.
I’d call to ask him. But he also has passed, me having fashioned his grave with a pair of posthole diggers, taking the time to open the box of his scorched remains, seeing his bone fragments nestled into the grey ash like prizes in a claw machine. I was hoping to see a tooth, but he’d had them all pulled.
I have this ache on my furthest molar, top-left side, and I’m beginning to lean the direction my father did, to have problem teeth pulled instead of repaired. A dentist worked on the tooth in Anchorage a decade ago while I was navigating my divorce. I was texting my new lover while the man worked in my mouth. This woman was having a panic attack. She was prone to these, or at least prone to making them up, and I was trying to put out that fire when I got a phone call from work about a chemical spill and to get back as soon as possible. That’s when the dentist said he had to drill down into the pulp to get at the rot in my tooth and then chuckled to himself, repeating how bad the decay was.
I put my phone in my lap and let the dentist work; I thought of my father and how after all of his teeth were pulled, which were in such bad condition that most shattered when gripped by the dentist’s pliers, leaving roots that remained embedded and jagged, him not wanting to pay for the surgery to remove the remaining material so he was advised by the dentist that any fragments remaining in his gums would eventually travel to the surface like errant splinters, so there my dad is at the dinner table a few months later and he reaches in his mouth, removes his loose-fitting first set of dentures, a prosthetic he asked for with teeth in “old man yellow” and was denied the request, so there at the dinner table he pulls out the lower dentures with the embedded paper-white falsies and sets them in his plate before reaching into his mouth with his left hand, the one with four and a half fingers, because he suffered an incident in his thirties whilst welding on an oil derrick in Southern Colorado and when he removed his glove, post-incident, his ring finger had been twisted around a few times causing the bones inside to explode through the skin creating something akin to a fleshy Christmas tree, but at the dinner table that finger was just a nub that wiggled fruitlessly while he struggled to reach the back of his mouth with his thumb and index finger where, fortune would have it, a treasure jutted from his gum which he extracted and placed on the table before putting his bottoms back in and continuing with dinner as if nothing had happened.
It didn’t bleed, which was what I focused on as a child. There was an off-white shard shedding its drool onto the surface of our Formica table with no blood to be seen. This was strange to me as within the years leading up to this I had accidentally knocked out my sister’s tooth trying to get a stolen item back, her face swinging into the post on the back of one of the dining room chairs from a minor scuffle, causing one of her upper front teeth to fail its cantilever, thereby pushing the exposed portion of the tooth inward, causing the root to pop straight out of her gum, ripping a seam as it went, her, grabbing her mouth with both hands and screaming, but very little sound emerging because she was muffling it, me, running around the table where I discovered her pristine tooth on the carpet, whiter than my father’s dinnertime prize, so I snatched it up and raced into the kitchen where I poured a glass of our own goat milk to plop the tooth into.
Oh was there blood. It splattered the sink when she removed her hands to expose the damage. The tooth was successfully stitched back in, complete with braces to hold it until the upper jaw took it up once more, but years later that tooth died while my sister was asleep during her deployment to Kyrgyzstan, her, waking to half her face swollen and tender, and the offending bone had to be removed by a field nurse with some local anesthetic and deployment grade utensils.
But to my sister, whom I watched sneeze a bone shard from her sinus cavity onto a table in a Chipotle in Frankfurt, Germany, this sort of thing happened.
My youngest son’s first tooth bled as well. I captured it in a photograph that was taken inside a hotel room somewhere in Colorado, after the divorce, when I was travelling from whatever parts of the world I was in to watch the Discovery Channel late into the night with my boys, as was our hotel room practice in those early divorce days, and on this occasion he was afraid the tooth wasn’t ready, but everyone, including him, could see the adult tooth beneath it, giving it a boost, so he reached in and cranked on it but the amount of gum tissue connecting it was far more than any of us had bargained for, so after an unforgettable ripping sound, and some crying in which he says, “I’m not crying,” the white nugget was removed and held aloft for the photo, a band of red exiting his smiling mouth and down his chin, a large drop forming and threatening the stain resistance of the Super 8’s carpet.
When I was a child, I wrestled teeth from my head with such ferocity that the gummy material on them could not be removed without utensils, so there my teeth sat, under a cup on the counter, replete with my ragged flesh, waiting for my parents to fake the Tooth
Fairy and leave me a minor bundle of cash overnight, which was the reason for tearing them out in the first place. I needed money for comic books.
Later, when completing my first income taxes working for the United States Military, I was asked if I wanted to put Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) Technician inside the “Occupation” bubble. I was told I could put anything I wanted because it was only for data purposes, so I chose “Superhero”. That was 2001 and I have been filing taxes with my occupation as Superhero ever since.
The military showed me that I was not a superhero, though. On a long run of missions, about 36 hours in, on the last drive of the night which was set to take us back to Forward Operating Base (FOB) McHenry in Iraq, our rear right tire exploded, having had a slow leak all day as we tried desperately to keep it full while driving hundreds of miles, from one Improvised Explosive Device (IED) to the next, blowing them in place, creating widowmaker potholes alongside the road, also stopping at another FOB for a post blast investigation on an IED that detonated while two insurgents were removing it from the trunk of their red sedan to bury it roadside, an attempt to murder us before we could murder them, but instead it vaporized them, I’m sure a surprising event, searing their fat onto the outside of the red sedan, some of their hair visible at the edges of the crust, the large, amorphous human stain looking and smelling like burned bacon grease, so we finished that analysis and drove off base without refilling the tire, as they did not have the equipment to do so, us, hoping for the best but ending with the worst, on the side of the road, pitch black, in a hostile zone, hurrying to change the tire, me, being scared and sleep deprived, making the mistake of putting my face in the way of the highlift jack handle when jacking down the rig, the force of the handle snapping up into the air, hitting me so hard that the pipe split the skin on my cheek and the end of the handle hit me in the side of my nose, fracturing my left orbital and collapsing my outer nose bone and septum, shoving them inward, subsequently exposing parts of my bone, which had been swaddled in skin my whole life, to the Iraqi night air, but this was all unknown to me because I was flying overhead, backward and upside, above my team chief’s head, my legs flailing so wildly that I tore the crotch of my pants by stretching them over my left testicle, causing a royal purple bruise to form on it within 24 hours, then landing on the dirt to the welcome of blood pouring out of my face and into the dust below. I was given an intestinal bandage for my troubles. I removed this when no one was looking and stuck my pinky in my nostril and pushed my face back into place. Kind of.
The only superhero I met while deployed was an Iraqi man named Muhammad. He was our translator on cache missions, negotiating our way into bunkers hidden beneath chicken coops and into the secret areas of the dump where munitions were buried. He was afraid of insurgent retaliation for working with the Americans. But his wife, who would make us samoon almost every morning, him, delivering it in thin, brown plastic bags, still warm, the steam wet against our hands, his wife convinced him to keep working with us because she saw him as an example to their daughters of how to fight for a country you want to live in.
His family was beheaded in front of him while he was held down to watch, likely seeking comfort from his own beheading which occurred shortly after his family’s.
While in EOD school, we were forced to watch videos we also could not unsee. When I think of Muhammad and his family, I see the video of the Chechen soldier having his head sawed off with a large, combat knife. I remember the film was black and white, but that might have just been bleakness. The Chechen was lying face down with his head turned to the left. The camera was zoomed to his bust, the other men around only appearing as a boot holding his head down and the hand holding the knife. The man doing the slaying, his hand came into frame with the knife, which he inserted blade-out, just in front of the spine, and then cut his way from the inside of the neck to the outside. It was difficult work. The Chechen’s eyes never blinked. They were white all the way around. And his mouth was open, exposing his own troubled teeth. The only sound was the sawing of his trachea and his gulping for air as the wind had been disconnected from his vocal cords almost immediately.
What is there to say about that? What’s to be said about any of this, really? We come from somewhere, with intricate blueprints which tell our cells to become muscle, skin, heart, ovaries, testicles, fingernail, or bone, among other things. Those cells grow more cells and soon we divide and conquer the womb. We grow into these strange beasts that make babies, some of which survive, and we make samoon and highlift jacks and the vehicles to use them on. We make truncated braces, whose job is to hold in one lone tooth in place with the hope that its cells will talk to the other cells and remember each other. We paint and we dance and we giggle and put fingers inside each other. We cry. We get in fistfights and we lose our appendages to unexpected circumstances. We dream our teeth grow agitated, loosen, and then strike off from their posts, filling our mouths up such that we cannot spit them out. Sometimes we wake up thinking about the significance of this, so many dreams about teeth. So many teeth. So much hair and skin and bone and meat, temporary housing for electrical impulses we believe to be us, this life happening so quickly that it’s always almost over, when that energy will transfer back to where it came from. Or maybe somewhere entirely new.
The strangeness of all of this, coming and going, and an organic bone architecture inside our meat which, sometimes, comes through our skin to feel sunshine, likely for the first time, only to have our tender casing pulled back over, like a blanket, and sewing it back in place, never quite the same as it was before. It all seems so painful. So fragile.
But, sometimes, a woman that we date, long before she met us, was having a drink with a friend at a bar in Europe, and was spun around by a drunken man who smashed a drink, glass and all, into her face, for no discernable reason, leaving, among other wounds, a tooth that would never heal right, eventually needing the care of two physicians in one day, so on that day, which is years later when we are dating, we drive her to the first physician who removes the tooth and carves a notch in her upper jaw, the bone having decayed over the years, while we wait in the lobby; then she is wheeled out, groggy, and looks at us and smiles, her bright green eyes a shock against her coal black hair and a gap of the same color in her front teeth that the dead tooth used to occupy, and she says, “I’m officially a pirate now,” which is, of all the things that she could have said considering the circumstances, the one that seizes our hearts, so we get her into the car and take her to the next doctor, who uses a special blender to mix cadaver bone cells with some of her own and then embeds that slurry into her face, sewing the gap back up, hoping those cells will all wake up and see they still have a place in this world, creating a new, dense bedding for a post that will be fastened more than a year down the line, but it’s not the one doctor or the other doctor that matter, or the post, which was a success, or the lost tooth, really; rather, it’s that in the quiet of the car on the way from one place to another, while she was compromised from drugs, slouching in her seat, wearing a horizontally striped black and white dress, she put her slender hand on ours and murmured, “I love you, thank you for doing this.”
Nicholas Dighiera has been published in The Sun, River Teeth, Creative Nonfiction, Short Reads, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, Under the Gum Tree, Complete Sentence, North Dakota Quarterly, Mid American Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Fugue, The Forge, and other publications. Two of his essays were notable selections in Best American Essays.