September 26, Mistaken identities

dog read

It is Monday morning and I'm in one of my favorite seats 7D. I get the whole window and none of that forty year old Via train curtain which some travelers still draw to avoid bathing in the fresh, encouraging morning sun. Cows in the fields are not yet on their feet, still huddled in the order of family or friendship preferences which make them sleep in twos and threes under the stars. The train I take is never full, since it gets to Toronto way after businesses have had their business breakfast. I travel business class simply because, with the rare exception, I get two whole seats for myself. When you look at it that way, it is preferable to economy class by far.

The few times I got company, it was that of important men who liked to talk. Do not get me wrong, I like talking to strangers, I find out a lot of things I would not be entrusted with by closer friends except after years of sharing and being put to the test. But the two hours of listening can be overwhelming, and the last confession disclosed a life filled with events worthy of sharing, according to him. It took me days to be released of that febrile pouring of the soul.

My last two visits to Toronto have been a combination of dentistry and osteopathy. Teeth and posture. The visit to the dentist had left me with pain for a few days in a row, so I finally decided to take a close look in the mirror and see what was going on. A simple investigative reflex. To my astonishment I noticed a small, grayish round filling right in the middle of the one implant I possess, a molar. I had thought that the filling was supposed to correct the last molar of the lower row, but no, that one looked pristine. This one, immediately anterior though, was supposed to be a false tooth through and through. Even falser, if that can be said, than a crown. Do they fix false teeth nowadays? As if they were real? Has our condition of partial cyborgs come so far as to have us treat the artificial parts in our bodies just like we treat the organic ones? These questions troubled me for two weeks; I shared them with visiting friends, who came to think one simple thought. I must have a very incompetent dentist.

Yet I knew this not to be the case. The woman dentist who takes care of us at the moment was an engineer, among other things; I do regard her very highly and, in spite of her young age, I trust her. The only explanation remained for me that artificial parts are prone to decay, in other words, that they behave not unlike the organic ones.

Before my next appointment I happened upon another perplexing story, this time of a friend, who has been in analysis for many years and still is. Upon returning from her summer holiday, at the very outset of the first visit, she remarked that the armchair, in which she had been sitting for most of the previous year, once she migrated from the couch to the seated position, had been changed. She sat in it, found it less comfortable than the one before it, and wondered aloud, in the direction of her analyst, one of the most respected, well known figures on the North American psychoanalytic scene: how come he had decided to change the old chair with this one? She kept to herself the thought that this, new armchair, being in fact just as old and rather ragged looking as the old one, lacked in comfort by comparison. The replacement seemed therefore hardly justified.

The good analyst replied,  casually at first, that he had done no such thing as changing chairs. That this was the chair that had always been there, from the beginning. Surprised and slightly confused by the denial, my friend insisted. How could he tell her that this was the same chair, tell it to her, who had sat in the old thing for the better part of the year, week in week out, three to four times a week, as he would have it? She, who, as he knew quite well, took some pride in her faculty of observation, she who looked closely at things, noticing carefully their placement and various qualities, she who had a memory of some repute, put to test and reaffirmed through years of training in her field, which, in fact, requires a flawless ability to remember and reproduce, just as much as the flawless capacity to tell things apart? The true from the false, with a very small margin for error?

Indeed, having recognized all these assertions to be true, the analyst decided to enquire further into the matter. Could she tell him more about the "old" chair? What did it look like? How was it different from the "new"? And how did it compare with the numerous chairs rushing now through the open doors of memory, invading the office, overflowing with sentiment musty of distant past? To which question my friend gave him an extensive, detailed answer, going from the size and color, to the rocking qualities, shape of the arms, feel to the touch, all of which made the two chairs if not vastly, at least definitely different. The analyst had to leave his own well protected seat, behind the desk, and come in the open, near the analysand seated on the chair under question, in order to point out the various details which made of this, here chair, a mature, well used, well weathered object, well scratched and therefore hardly deserving, indeed, of the trouble of having to replace another old, well used chair. Point at which my friend started, as expected, to wonder about her own mental process, and the spell under which she felt she had maybe fallen, in this unexplainable and yet so real syndrome of "the other chair".

Even if, to me, the decisive proof that she was not mistaken, that something had changed, lied in the affirmation that, while the old chair would have allowed her to curl up, to comfortably nest by bringing her legs underneath, had she chosen to do so, which she of course never did, but could have, if she ever wanted, the new chair was too tight to allow for that would-be comfort.

In the dentist's chair I was wondering how I would bring about the topic of my molar's mistaken identity. At first my lovely dentist did not quite get my point. I opened my mouth and showed her: see? That smallish, well-distinguishable grey patch? No no no no. What are you saying? It is the last molar we worked on the last time. But you didn’t. Look.

Of course, she did not need to look. And at that very moment, while talking to her, I remembered the words of the other dentist, the arcane torturer who, almost ten years ago, had put the implant in. The grey patch in case of emergency. If there's a need to get in there. In case something goes wrong. A way in.

The pictures of the procedure of two weeks ago were brought up on the computer screen and there it was: the last molar, half way through the process, gaping sorrowfully, and at the end. The filling so shiny, softly white and pristine. Almost invisible. You must forgive me, I said, I have a bit of a neurosis these days. My dog Rocky has two equally broken, probably equally painful upper molars, the largest and more useful of his teeth. They also show cavities, and as we have found out, they have to be extracted. And I do not quite trust the vigor or the competency of the man who will have to carry out that momentous task, a new vet of whom I know close to nothing.

It is not the first time I identify with my dogs' misfortune. Of course. Does it matter, whether those broken teeth are theirs, or mine?