One night (or perhaps every night) in late-March, I drove home comatose, feeling the membranes and goop creeping ever forward, encasing the brain in thicker insulation, leaving nothing beyond a slight numbness.
Afterwards, out in the open air of dusk, I saw the intersection bounded by fading lines, carefully separating madness, potential looming mid-air. Weary, enraged motorists eyed eachother cautiously out their passenger-side windows. Swearing behind tinted layers of shatter-proof glass, feeling all protected, showing me what the insides of their mouths looked like. Gesturing unkind symbols of a limited vocabulary.
I walked toward the parking lot, behind me, the intersection and its irresistable pull. I saw myself charge toward the center of the street, lying down against warm bitmen. And it would be there that I heard the silence, some strange stillness broken only by a slight drifting of sky overhead.
In the car doing eighty-five down High Street Road, a two laned crawl toward Ashburton and all the wonders of that dead suburb, I became vaguely aware that this was all implausible.
In an alternate time-line, I feared that my tooth would fall-out. I did not need a professional to tell me this. It would fall out because I had not been able to bite down on it for more than 2 weeks and every so often, when I reached back with my tongue to feel for cavities, I would always find stale blood seeping out from the swollen gums. Oh Christ.
Eventually, the dentist asked how long I'd been in pain and I duly gave him the figure, to which his reply was "oh fuck, why didn't you come sooner?" Or some such sentence, perhaps without the expletive. I said it was because I hated his entire fucking profession and would sooner drink a 750ml bottle of whiskey in three continuous large gulps to dull the pain than have anyone of his ilk shove uncaring, latexed fingers into an orifice of mine. This was followed by some of the most painful dental work I had ever had.
The flesh on the right side of my face, the decent looking side, swelled and subsided and swelled again. For days it did this, a sort of heaving balloon trick, protesting the slow dillution of novacaine in the system. Panadol wasn't good enough, and Herrin, it turned out wasn't being cut with a pure enough portion of paracetamol. In desperation and a regular bout of nausea, I remembered some nerve-pinch trick that stopped toothache and dug my nails into the webbing flesh between my thumb and fore-finger, until the whole thing was covered with a pattern of deeply embossed half-moons, shaded to varying degrees of red and purple. This technique worked well-enough, at least until the pain settled in my hand and thus returned, full-force to my face.
That night outside the laundromat, intersection of High and Blackburn. I returned to the traffic box, its subtle little chroegraphed routine of Go, Stop, Maybe. Only if you feel like it dares and double-dares. Overhead, the blue neon sign of the adult video store flickered, buzzed its familiar electric buzz. I knew this was all... a sign. The speeding cars denied it, but I was far too clever. Walking steadily past the curb, I stepped into a no-man's land of 4-wheeled metal machinery, onto the center of the square where I promptly collapsed with a thud, passed out from the pain.