“I paint what I see hiding.” – Emilia Essig, One Possible Future

Dak has a new empty place.

Unpacking the box marked Bathroom, I can’t help looking at my tooth—the half on the counter next to my toothbrush, razor, and car keys. The chunk of molar has lain there a couple of days and I miss it. Miss having it in my mouth. The place where it’d been now feels craggy and empty and foreign, and the new topography is unsettling. I force myself to put a few more items from the box into my new medicine cabinet hidden behind the vanity mirror. These things I take or use or apply daily are part of my routine, and any routine feels important right now. But they are just things, I remind myself, not really part of me.

The part of me on the counter looks ugly. Not the bright white enamel a tooth ought to be, but dishwater white, coffee-stained. I’ll need to brush more. Will they all begin to break apart? Is something weakening my hard bits? Will my bones come next? I’ve never broken a bone. Not one. This, despite the childhood of climbing trees and buildings, hopping fences and even trains. Reckless, my father might have said. Curious, my mother might say.

I imagine the other parts I’ve lost as the tip of my tongue traces this new gap over and over. I know as time goes by, I’ll get used to it, but right now, I feel Dak’s crater and look at Dak’s tooth and I feel broken. It makes me want to put the thing in my pocket, so I won’t lose this too, on top of it all. I don’t. It isn’t that I feel unbreakable. Those days are long gone. But to be brought down—dentally—by a popcorn kernel is a stark reminder of my disintegrating reality. Its fragility. Things weren’t always so fragile.

#

Some things go unmentioned (decades back).

The new movie, Brazil, was absurd but artful, with a sort of surreal romance, so it made for a perfect first date. First official date. I knew Siggy pretty well. Really well, in some ways. In art classes together all through high school, we were always on the same wavelength, it seemed. She was a natural-pretty, very smart, and quiet. Quiet, that is, next to my boister—usually clownish attempts at sarcasm and counter-culture commentary. My edgier teachers had appreciated this in me, I imagined. In one parent-teacher conference, my mother was consoled, “Yes, Dak’s a pain in our butts, but—he’ll make a really great adult.”

Siggy seemed adult already. And now, a year out of high school, I’d finally found the nerve to ask her to do something that would mean something. Now we’d be more than classmates, comrades, fellow artists.

“Alrighty then. Pretty wild ride,” I said when we hit the sidewalk in front of the theater. We both squinted hard at the assault of daylight after the dark in there. A couple walking ahead of us was muttering about similarities to 1984’s Big Brother and I couldn’t help but shake my head. “Oh God no. So different,” I said, quietly. “I mean, this is a satire or whatever, and Orwell is scary as shit. Menacing, you know. Way more calculating or plotting or—”

“Machiavellian,” Siggy offered.

“Yeah. Yeah, exactly. 1984’s Big Brother is super Machiavellian. But the Ministry of Information in Brazil is just sort of bumbling through with big iron boots. Sure, it’s futuristic and dystopian and all that, but it’s just layers and layers of this kind of Frankensteined techno-bureaucracy built up and bolted together. The whole machinery of it is—”

“Kind of Rube Goldberg,” she said, “I totally agree,” with a sort of puff. Not a full giggle or laugh, but playful. And she smiled her quiet smile.

She was so smart. So exactly right. So out of my league. “Yes. Totally,” I added lamely.

We were quiet for another two blocks and I felt the importance of this, or at least the novelty of it. Giving each other space to process what we’d just seen, neither of us felt the need to fill the silence. My dates with other girls—other women—almost always slipped into conversational mutual masturbation: I ask you something (because I’m interested in you), and you tell me something poignant or amusing (but not too revealing, to make me feel like I asked a good question), then I say how cool or funny or amazing that is (to make you feel good about sharing) and I say how it reminds me of a story of mine (going only skin deep), and on it would go—never getting anywhere near a climax (at least conversationally). But it was different with Siggy. Or it might be if I could just keep being myself, whatever that was. Chancy, I thought.