“Yeah, well I happen to know that Lincoln didn’t write it on the back of an envelope, in fact. People think he did because someone made a joke about Lincoln writing the Gettysburg Address on an envelope. Get it? Other people, obviously your ancestors, were so stupid they didn’t know it was a joke—they were too busy screwing around with their syncopes and their zeugmas—and they thought he really did write it on an envelope. You’re fired.”
Dewey Knott then moved his head up and to his left, grasped his jaw with both hands, closed his eyes, and howled like a wolf. Every network news program opened with this for days. The president’s arrogant little snots began referring to the presumed Republican nominee as Wolf Man Knott. Teenagers loved what he did, but they didn’t vote. Among likely voters, Dewey Knott was preferred in the instapoll by fourteen percent, as opposed to seventy-two percent who preferred the president, and fourteen percent who “didn’t know.” These people also “didn’t know” when asked which was bigger, the sun or the moon, what country they lived in, or whether they were animal, vegetable, or mineral. All this, however, would be immaterial to the nominee, who wanted only to get his tooth fixed.
As he charged offstage, Dot ran for the microphone and, as unruffled as a bomb-squad robot, began to walk through the audience, reading a speech that Mushrom had been writing as things spun out of control. It was a thousand words long, and she was able to memorise it on the instant. After all, she had been the first female dean of the Harvard Business School, at age twenty-three. The problem was that Mushrom had had a bit to drink himself: “My husband knows that America is great, and he loves freedom, and he knows that we face the future. Like a small child from another planet sent to the world to fight for justice and the American way, he knows that his special powers. . . .”
Waiting in the wings, perturbed in his own inimitable fashion—that is, somehow, very deeply but only slightly—was Dewey Knott’s chief of staff, John “What the hell am I doing in this business?” Finney. Ancestrally wealthy, naturally brilliant, and actually principled, he was Dewey’s chief of staff primarily because he wanted the Senate to run smoothly, reflect its ancient traditions, and survive. In the unlikely event that Dewey Knott were to become president, Finney was willing to go with him as his White House chief of staff, because he knew that Dewey needed him. He would have much preferred to have been secretary of state, and he knew that Dewey would appear to promise this to him while promising nothing, just as he knew that were Dewey to become president, he, Finney, would stay as chief of staff during the whole Knott administration, for God and country.
“John!” Dewey said when they were alone in the greenroom. “I drank two Coke cans of whisky.”
“I know. Mrs Knott is out there saving you.”
“Call her Dot, John.”
“I will, Senator.” He would never call her Dot, but always Mrs Knott. Dewey Knott commanded him to call Dot Knott Dot every time Finney called her Mrs Knott, but Finney was formal in his ways.
“You’ll call her Mrs Knott, not Dot, I know you. Call her Dot, not Mrs Knott. I had to drink them. There’s a fire in my jaw.”
“Abscess?”
“My God!”
“We’ll get you to a dentist right away. We’ll go now. The speech will be explained by its context.”
“No one can know,” Dewey squeaked, sweating in agony.
“Why not, Senator?”
“They’ll think that if I’m president and I get a toothache, I’ll get us into a nuclear war. This is more than a toothache, and when I’m president I’ll know I’m president, but I’m not president now, so if I needed a bottle of Scotch to deal with this, it’s okay.”
“Can you hold on until we get back to Washington? We’ll have your dentist waiting and ready to go.”
“No,” Dewey said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I can’t.”
“We don’t know anyone here we can trust.”
“I do. In Siliphant. My dentist when I was a kid. When my brother shot himself through the leg with a twenty-two, he was the one, even though he was a dentist, who treated it, and didn’t tell my parents. He’s discreet.”
“We’ll call him.”
“He doesn’t like that.”
“What?”
“Telephone calls. Very old-fashioned. Uses a foot-drill. Let’s just go. He lives in his office and he’s always there. Hasn’t left Siliphant since the twenties.”
“What if he’s dead?” Finney asked.
“John,” Dewey said, as if he were talking to an idiot, “how could that be?”
Instead of going to the airport, Senator Knott’s motorcade turned onto the interstate and sped toward Siliphant, press in hot pursuit, Dewey Knott kicking the front seatback of the limousine like someone doing bicycle exercises on a floor mat. The press were afraid and strangely silent, because they had never been in the void into which they were now headed, but only flown over it. Omaha was bad enough, but beyond Omaha, in the black of night, was nothing.
FREDDY AND FREDERICKA stood at the open second-floor window of their frame house and office in Siliphant, breathing-in a strong current of air that, courtesy of the lightning on the plains and the snows of the Rockies, was clean and relatively cool. They watched the stars blaze and the flickering of distant lights in another town on the plain, which seemed as remote and mysterious as a fully lit ship silently ploughing the dark across a long stretch of sea. They could hear not only the wind but the faint rumble of lorries on the interstate five miles away, patiently grinding toward the Atlantic or the Pacific. The air moved in waves and immense billows, carrying the scents of distant grassfires, cattle, and the innumerable tons of sage that blanketed tens of thousands of square miles and perfumed the night.
No one in the world knew where they were. Thus lost, they had the effortless freedom of ghosts, and felt as if they could float on the wind and blow through solid obstacles without touching them. Had there been trees on the plain, oak or ash, and had Freddy and Fredericka been taken on the wind, like dandelion seeds, they suspected that they might have passed through the tangle of branches and the heavy trunks as smoothly as the dead. But they were alive, they felt as bright as light, and they were framed by gauze curtains ebbing and flowing on the incoming wind.
Freddy stood behind Fredericka, his left arm curved around her back, his right grasping her waist. She had turned her head sharply to the right, and they were kissing. Her skin was sweet and fresh from a day in the sun and because it was always like that anyway, and he could see the lights of the distant town vaguely shining in her sky-clear eyes. In kissing her now, perhaps because they had made themselves insane with dentistry, he was especially aware of her teeth, which were like the perfect snow cliffs of Greenland. Now they had numbers that he knew, and now he knew the anatomy of the lips and tongue, but these things, this knowledge, came and left in the trance he was in, perfumed by sage, as he stroked her cheeks and hair. Sometimes it seemed as if they were moving, slowly revolving like astronauts separated from their ships, and sometimes it was as if they lay together, and sometimes it was as if they were just a foot or two over the floor, having kissed their way free of gravity. “No one ever told me this about Nebraska,” Fredericka whispered. As light as the curtains and lost even to time, they might have gone on all night, kissing lavishly by the open window, except that, after a while, they realised that someone was calling to them. They stirred and almost acknowledged a person on the pavement, but sank back into their lovely delirium. Then, as in a double take, they snapped out and looked down.
“Don’t you hear me?” Finney asked. “Can you hear? I’ve been trying to attract your attention.”
The doorbell was ringing, someone was pounding on the door, and the street was full of limousines and police cars. Rotating red and blue lights made the neighbourhood look like London in the Blitz, though it was so quiet that, despite the idling engines, crickets and tree frogs still filled the air with their beautiful madness.
Freddy and F
redericka looked at Finney, a compact, foreshortened, impressive figure in a suit. A suit in Siliphant? Limousines? Motorcycles? Range-Rover-like vehicles with the heft (instantly recognisable to Freddy and Fredericka) of armour plate? It could mean only one thing.
“They’ve found us,” Freddy said. “How in God’s name did they find us? It’s over.”
Fredericka was straightening her hair, hoping that she would not be photographed for an hour or so, for the blood had run so heavily into her skin that she was covered in scarlet, and her eyes had that opium look that comes from complete loss of self and the world in lovemaking. At least she and Freddy were still dressed.
“Are you the dentist?” Finney asked, sceptically. Though he couldn’t see Fredericka very well in the dark, still, he couldn’t take his eyes from her.
“Maybe they haven’t found us,” Freddy said sotto voce to Fredericka.
“Excuse me,” Finney shouted in exasperation, “are you the dentist?”
“I regret that the previous dentist is dead,” said Freddy in the same tone that he would have used in giving a Latin oration in the Sheldonian Theatre. Perhaps this was due to his elevated vantage point. “I’m Dr Moffat, the inheritor of his practice. As is my wife, though she is a dontist; that is, an endodontist. Have you ever wondered why there are dentists and dontists, such as endodontists, orthodontists, and periodontists?” Freddy was in his pedagogical mode.
“No, in fact I haven’t,” Finney said, which brought to Freddy’s scarlet face a slightly arrogant smile, until Finney went on, “because I know that one is derived from the Latin and the other from the Greek.”
“Which, I take it, you have studied,” Freddy said, assuming that this was not so.
“For a number of years, yes.”
“I did, too.”
“Good for you. I hope you’ve studied dentistry.”
“I have,” said Freddy. It was true.
“And that you can see a patient. I know it’s late, but it’s an emergency. It’s Dewey Knott, and that’s always an emergency.”
BEAUTIFUL WOMEN tend to tie things up in knots. Other women are often jealous of them or admire them to the point of female servitude, and men can become in their presence as ungainly as a giraffe in a neck brace. Fredericka was so spectacular-looking in her dental smock that no one, including Freddy, could take his eyes off her. Finney was greatly moved. Dewey, who had been well trained by Dot not to look too hard at what both he and Dot called “dames,” couldn’t take his eyes off her either, although he tried. “How’d you get so red?” he asked.
“Sunshine,” Fredericka answered, like a princess, ringingly.
“We don’t allow relatives in the room when we see patients,” Freddy told Finney, whose royal name he did not know.
“I’m not his relative, I’m his chief of staff.”
“Or chiefs of staff,” Freddy added.
“This is the presumptive Republican nominee,” Finney said. “The Secret Service wanted to have an agent present, but I convinced them to let me stay instead.” He thought he could impress Freddy (little did he know) into abandoning standard practice.
“Sorry,” Freddy said. “If we are to treat the patient, presumptive nominee or not. . . .”
“I am,” said Dewey. “I’m Knott.”
“Are you, or are you not?” Freddy asked.
“I’m Knott.”
“So you aren’t.”
“I am.”
“Look here,” Freddy told him, more severely than Dewey was accustomed to, “I don’t care if you are or you are not.”
“I am Knott.”
“Fine. Whatever you are, if you want us to treat you, no relatives or chiefs of staff in the room.”
Dewey Knott looked at Finney and said, “Finney, get the hell out of here.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Freddy, almost dropping the round mirror, with a hole in it, that he was about to strap onto his head. “To fix your tooth, I must be here.”
This last construction struck Dewey and Finney as most odd. “We know that,” said Dewey, “but he has to go, right?”
“Who?”
“Finney.”
“Yes?” Freddy answered, thinking he had been addressed.
“Why is it a question?” Finney asked.
“Why is what a question?” Freddy replied.
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Finney, just get out,” Dewey commanded.
“Ah, I see,” Freddy said. “He’s Finney.” He looked at Finney inquiringly, though Finney knew not of what he was inquiring. A distant relative, perhaps an eighteenth cousin, Finney resembled Freddy somewhat in elegance. Finney then left, thinking he was in a dream and not at all confident in Freddy’s perspicaciousness.
“Did you know Doc Ottabay?” Dewey asked when Finney was gone.
“No, he died long before we took over his practice. For years the dental needs of Siliphant have gone unfulfilled.”
“Well, fill mine for Chrissake,” Dewey commanded, pointing at his affliction.
“Just relax,” said Freddy. “We’re going to give you a little nitroglycerine to loosen you up.”
“Nitroglycerine?” Dewey asked.
“It’s not called that,” Fredericka said to Freddy, placing the mask over Dewey’s mouth. Dewey was rather disturbed.
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t know,” Fredericka answered, “but it does begin with an N. Nitrogen? No. Nitrate?”
Dewey tried to say something, but it was muffled by the mask.
“Fredericka, how can we fix his tooth if the mask is over his mouth?”
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I guess it should be over the nose.” She moved it. “There, that’s better.”
“Don’t you know how to . . .” said Dewey, and then a strange look came over him. “Don’t you. . . .”
“The question is,” Freddy said, addressing Fredericka, “how much of this stuff to give him.”
“How are we supposed to know?” Fredericka asked. “We haven’t gotten to that yet.”
Dewey’s eyes flashed like the eyes of a wild horse when a thunderstorm is near.
“What does it say on the machine?”
Fredericka looked down. “There are a lot of numbers. What about eight? That might be good.”
“Higher,” said Freddy. “Once, I bet on eight at Monte Carlo and lost ten thousand pounds. What about fourteen, that was my regatta number.”
Dewey tried to rise from the chair, but by this time he had no body. Flying through the empyrean, with no sense of time, he dreamed ecstatically and with anxiety. He dreamed that he had lost the election. Then he dreamed that he and Dot were young again, and that no one had ever heard of them, and that they were in shorts, walking on a sand road that led to the ocean. They could hear the surf in the distance and feel it pounding every time a wave thudded down. It was a hot day, the United States had just defeated Japan, and when he got up in the mornings he wasn’t the slightest bit stiff. He was sunburned, he had all his hair, Dot was a beautiful young woman whose ambitions were of the heart, and no one had built much of anything on the coasts except some gun emplacements, so the beaches were windswept and empty, and the sea was primitive and wild. He could have stayed in that dream forever.
“He looks happy,” Fredericka said. “I wonder what he’s thinking.”
“Fredericka, we’re in a rather difficult situation.”
“Yes.”
“After all, we were going to practise on animals first.”
“That wouldn’t be fair,” Fredericka protested.
“Oh, let’s not have that argument again,” Freddy said.
“It wouldn’t. My shampoo isn’t tested on animals, so why should we practise on them?”
“Wouldn’t you prefer that your shampoo be tested on animals rather than on people, or on you? Besides, I would think that a gorilla might enjoy having his hair washed.”
“It
wouldn’t have worked, Freddy. How would we have gotten a cow into this chair?” she asked indignantly.
“It’s adjustable,” Freddy said.
“Anyway, this is not a cow or a high plains drifter or a charity patient, this is the Senate majority leader, whatever that is, and perhaps the next president of the United States. The Secret Service is outside, the press is outside, and we forgot to ask him where the pain was.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered anyway,” Freddy said. “We haven’t come to fillings, bondings, or root canal. If only he could have arrived a few days from now.”
“You said he’d never come here.”
“Yes, well, first we have to make sure we don’t put him to sleep permanently.”
“You mean kill him?”
“It would be a tragic embarrassment. If we don’t kill him, perhaps we can relieve his pain. Or, when he wakes up, if he wakes up, we can speak in gobbledygook and refer him to a babbiodontist.”
“What’s a babbiodontist?”
“I don’t know. Is he alive?”
“I think so.”
“Let’s examine him. We may not know what we’re doing, but he’s lucky to have two dentists all to himself.”
“But, Freddy, we aren’t dentists.”
“We are now,” Freddy said. “I read in the book that they’ll open their mouths even when they’re gassed. Open,” he commanded.
Dewey’s mouth popped open like the lid of a rubbish bin. This startled Fredericka, who jumped back and put her hand on the top of her chest just under her neck.
“Courage,” Freddy recommended, peering into Dewey’s mouth. “My God, it’s like a horse’s mouth. If we get a file, we can float some of the teeth. I’ve done that, and we won’t even have to put him in cross ties.”
“Do the examination, Freddy, as in the book.”
“Very well. Stetson’s duct, visible. Lips, normal. Mucosa, normal. Pronounced recession from—three through B-one, and, wait. Just a minute. What’s this?”
“What’s what?” Fredericka asked, peering into what had been called the widest thing in Nebraska other than the river Platte.