Toothache

Sitting at his desk, in his cubicle, in someone else's building, Barnaby pondered the unique misery of a toothache. Known as Bee to his friends, he first considered the variety of comparative benefits. He wasn't suffering the all-encompassing wrongness of serious breakage, or the bold, miserable eminence of a ruptured something or other. There was no fiery crackling in his intestines, no spasmodic explosions in his lower body. Just an ache in a tooth, in his mouth, in his cubicle.

And yet, the closest he'd come to work in the last half hour was ritually opening and minimizing the excel spreadsheet which, on a brighter day, he would have been analyzing religiously for patterns and discrepancies in numbers and investments. Bee enjoyed, however begrudgingly, the compliments Mr. Jenkins (though Bee liked to call him Larry in his head) would pay him for his work and his focus. But not today. The pain had started the night before, just as he was going to bed. The precise cause was unknown – it wasn't the spiky, sharp directness of a cavity, or the agonizing displacement of one tooth pressing against another. But still, defying explanation, it ached.

He slept poorly that night, finding himself quietly staring into his ceiling. It had no pattern, and maintained a bland grayness that, Bee thought, was, at some point, an active choice on the part of a contractor, or a landlord, or someone. Ridiculous, Bee thought, that anyone would decide, without being pressed, to relegate a tenant to such boring and unfortunate paleness. Bee did not consider that he had chosen to live there.

Sleeplessly, staring up, Bee found himself slipping between pointless considerations of his previous day and Ruth, the girl in his office he joked with, and his pain, and his boss, and his spreadsheet, and his desk, and the knowledge that he did not know why he was hurting. His thoughts flitted from concept to memory to short, and embarrassing moments (A response of "I'm good, you?" after hearing only "Hey," for example), the pain in his mouth tinging all of them with a vague sense of foreboding and regret.

When he did sleep, it was halting. His dreams felt dark, though he knew he was dreaming. He sensed himself pushing against a wall, at one point, heaving his body against the mass of imagined concrete, willing it to uproot.

He had taught himself, when he was younger, to feel what it was like to be in a dream. He'd read a book about it in the library once. Now, when he felt as he did pressing against the wall, he would look at his hands, and notice the misshapen partiality of them, and recognize that something was wrong and that this was not real. Still, though he saw his hands, noticed the contours of improperly shaped, and missing fingers, and knew them to be clear indication that nothing around him was genuine, he continued to press, without really thinking, against the wall he was given.

When he woke up, the ache remained, so he blinked, and stood, and slinked to the bathroom to pee. He decided not to miss work, since an ache, though distracting, was not quite the open-sored debilitation of a significant laceration, or the sprained, chronic suffering of a concussive headache. "I'll be fine" Bee said to himself, thinking to the last year, when his sick days, unused, had dried up.

Full, and miniature, and full again. His mouse moved instinctively as he considered his mouth and its lingering frustration. The venture (his boss liked to call them ventures) he was working on was for an investment his firm was considering. "His firm." Bee wondered when the office and job and workplace he had applied to after business school had become his own, when he, after being adopted by it, had adopted it in return. Certainly not in the first months when, despite smiling politely and chatting as often as felt reasonable, he sensed himself an outsider in a room designated specifically for those who fit in. He would attend staff luncheons and wonder if everyone else felt as strangely alone as he did, standing there, finger food on a paper plate, his suit so recent a happenstance that he imagined a college aged Bee thinking it an immense and fortuitous luxury. His tie, of course, didn't match.

Bee thought, then, to Ruth, and remembered the luncheon where they'd met. He noticed her, an unnamed, young, and executive looking woman, contemplating the miniature, but not quite miniature enough sandwich held platelessly in her hand. The caterers, at these events, had managed a perfectly inopportune mix of small, but not quite bite-sized proportion, mixed with unnecessarily slippery and unwieldy ingredients. They were simultaneously too large to take all at once without seeming chipmunk-esque, and too messy to struggle through multiple bites. It's as if, Bee thought, they were designed to embarrass the uninitiated.

Bee wondered what considerations this woman, clearly not quite anyone's boss, though likely angling to be, was making. "I don't have a plate, and dropping pickles on the floor is unbecoming of a future CEO. But I'll look like I'm storing nuts for the winter if I just go for it" she debated, in his mind. And then, decisively, her mouth opened fully and engulfed it, ballooning her cheeks. Her eyes widened in surprise as the inelegance of her choice became clear. Bee watched, perplexed, as she chewed viciously, and heroically swallowed what she could. In a bout of instinctual self-consciousness, he watched her look around to see if anyone had noticed. Having not thought to look away, she and Bee made eye contact. For a moment, her face contorted in surprised embarrassment, before her eyes quickly narrowed, her chin rising just slightly, her head turning just enough to say "I know you saw it, motherfucker, now don't say a goddamn word."

Bee smiled, hard, and laughed and turned his chin down and raised his eyebrows, as if to say "And what the fuck, exactly, am I not saying a word about?"

Bee walked over, then, and raised his eyebrows to repeat the implied question. "Don't say a word" she said, literally now, the hint of a smile tinting her off-red-stained lips. Her eyes narrowed again, in mock suspicion, even as her smile deepened. Bee's eyes followed suit, and, in a matter of seconds, they found themselves giggling, having never spoken before, and knowing nothing at all about the person standing before them.

It was the sound of his own innocuous click that brought him back to his cubicle from the tangle of his memory. He had misplaced his cursor, and had resized the spreadsheet into a floating shroud over his desktop. He had forgotten about his tooth, as well, and once again recognized the aggravating emanation of what he, without having any actual idea, was calling his incisor. Still, he smiled, at the memory of a room of suits and smiles and rapport being built, being quietly punctuated by an ambitious and well-qualified future executive shoving a small packet of bread, roast beef, pickles and vinaigrette into her mouth, and praying no one noticed. Noticing, Bee thought, had thus far been the highlight of his short career.