Maybe it was all a dream, that bit about Al bleeding to death and the teeth Dan pulled out of Izzy's mouth and that little girl Didi who tripped me and turned out to be Dan's daughter and the Tenement Museum and that kid's PlayStation that I broke and that guy Jim who said Zelda was Didi's mother and Joe and Bill who were waiting for me with their guns and their grins and that bite from behind. I had been dreaming, that's all, one of those stupid dreams where you need to do something or go somewhere, and it's always something silly and simple like zipping up your fly or taking out the garbage, but you are simply unable to do it, to get there, and then suddenly you're somewhere else, trying to perform some other simple but unfeasible task, rowing, rowing, rowing your boat, rowing nowhere, till you wake up and you don't know where you are or what is real or what is not. Reality, you think, who the hell knows what that is? It's always the same, at least for me, when I wake up, but this time I felt something strange, in my head, as if it were lit from the inside, so bright, and then I felt, or rather my tongue felt as it was poking through my teeth, that my front tooth, my left front tooth, was broken, was missing half its edge, and suddenly I remembered the fall, how I fell flat on my mouth on the sidewalk and one of my front teeth split in half and a bit went missing; and so, this meant that everything had really happened, only now I wasn't sure if this was real, if what I was thinking and feeling and remembering now was not a dream, for if I was dreaming now, what happened then must also have been unreal. Am I Louis dreaming he is a butterfly, I thought, or am I a butterfly dreaming he is Louis? Maybe I wasn't even Louis or a butterfly or anything at all. What does a man ever know for real about his life, about his dreams (what were these dreams? had I been drugged again? what was this bright spinning fuzziness inside?), about the nature of his being, of his being here or being there or being anywhere? Only that he shouldn't attempt to grasp the reality of things, as Lao Tzu said, with any instrument other than his five senses; that he shouldn't pretend to know the essential truth of anything around or within him without first opening his eyes. Now, therefore, I opened my eyes, and it was so damn bright I was as good as blind.
Damn that dazzle. Even with my eyes shut tight, it penetrated the deepest nooks of my brain, washed my whole skull with white light, a sterile painful hospital white light, and for a minute there I was positive that, forget about rowing and dreaming, this was death, I had died, I'd been killed, I was dead, this was death, death! Relax, I thought, nobody's dead, not you anyway, for to think that you're dead, to think anything at all, is to be alive. For a few minutes I thought of that, of how good it felt just to be alive and thinking, even if my thoughts revolved around the unreasonable possibility that I was dead and floating in some light-flooded hell, till little by little, as I got used to the brightness, I began to entertain the possibility of opening my eyes again and finding out where the hell I was. Unbearable--I shut my eyes again, and I waited a few more minutes till I felt I had gotten used to this brightness, this time for real, then opened them again. Light, light, light, again I shut my eyes tight, waited, opened them again, and at last I was able to see.
Like a mole peeping out of its burrow, I sniffed and fidgeted and turned this way and that and had no idea where on earth I was. Evidently I had been drugged, again, but at least I was alive. So where the hell was I, and why were the lights on so bright? There were two shiny metal tables, stainless steel I think, at the other end of this room, and next to one of them a row of shelves, also stainless steel, and on these shelves and on the tables there was an odd jumble of things that made me think I was in some madman's laboratory. There were flasks on one table, filled with different kinds of liquids, green, blue, purple, orange, transparent, and next to these flasks were pliers and files and drills and funnels and other tools, and on the other table there were dental instruments, probes and props and mirrors and drills and syringes, and on the shelves there were nothing but jars and more jars. Holy shit, I just realized, my sight had been totally restored and I knew where I was! I was in Zelda's workshop, in the restoration workshop of the Tenement Museum, Joe, Bill, grinning at me with their guns and that shadowy figure that bit me, a trap. Now I took a better look at the jars, those that were on a shelf beside me, and saw that they were full of teeth, all of them, sets of dentures, smiling to one another in their glass prisons. God, will they stop with the teeth already? On every jar there was a label, either green or white, and on it was written a date in red ink, and the dates were mostly from the last week or so. Not all though: some jars were older, with yellower teeth and labels dating to the nineteen-forties. Every jar of teeth, old and new, had a blue top, and the initials DP at the bottom of its label.
And then, as I was trying to make sense of all this, my phone rang. Ring-ring, it went, ring-ring (a stupid tone that simulates an old phone ring and that I've been meaning to get rid of for some time), but I was unable to answer it. That's when I realized the fix I was in. Here I was, sitting on a wooden stool, my hands tied to one another and to the legs of the stool, my legs also tied to one another and to the legs of the stool. This was unpleasant enough, and to add insult to this injury, I also had to pee. How had this happened anyway? I had fainted, yes, and oh, right, I was beginning to remember bits of things, Joe slapping me to wake me up, an interrogation, more slapping, a syringe, a shot in the arm, Joe and Bill turning purple, green, purple, green, and the other person still in the dark, saying nothing, doing nothing, but it was pretty obvious, now that I was thinking of it, that she was the boss. She had kissed me, on the nape, then bit me, so naturally I assumed it was a she, but who knows? Perhaps it was a he, though that would have been a very effeminate he. Like David Bowie during his glam phase, he was pretty effeminate then and sang like a little girl, though when he spoke he was a baritone or even a bass. Anyway, I believe I handled the interrogation pretty well. Not that I had anything of great value to divulge, only that Dan had Hitler's teeth that he had taken from Izzy who was dead, but I'm pretty sure I kept my mouth shut about that, though maybe I told them everything, as I'm beginning to think that the drug they gave me was some kind of truth serum. Either that or I just spilled the beans out of the kindness of my heart. To tell you the truth, I was getting fed up with the whole teeth business and it didn't bother me if they got hold of that Dan bastard who, it was now evident, had involved my sister in this whole business.
Where the hell was she anyway, and why wasn't she here to help her brother who was tied to a stupid stool and had to go to the bathroom? Or, wait a minute... was it possible that she was that shadowy figure who had kissed and bit me? Unlikely: I would have sensed it, and would have known instantly. Like that time I went to visit her at Brandeis: she left the key to her room under the doormat, with a note saying I should wait inside till she returned from her yoga lesson, so I went in and waited, and poked around, when suddenly I sensed that there was someone in the room, so I opened the wardrobe and there she was, my silly sister, who was expelled a month later for doing heroin.
Damn this rope, my hands were turning blue and bloodless, and on top of that I had to void my bladder. Now then, I had to do something, or else pee in my pants and let my hands wilt. On one of the stainless steel tables I spotted a file, or even better, the edge of its legs was ragged enough to slit these ropes. That, however, was all the way on the other side of the room and I was tied to this stool, but then I remembered seeing something like this on TV when I was a kid, a rerun of I Spy, where Kelly Robinson was tied up with rope to a similar stool and he saw a similar ragged table leg, and what he did was to hop the stool as if it were a horse to the other end of the room and break loose by rubbing the rope against the table leg. Every dog has his day--that was Kelly Robinson's favorite saying. Very well, this was my day to be Kelly Robinson. Energized by this brilliant idea, and the possibility of freeing myself and my bladder, I grabbed onto the seat of my stool and with the aid of my feet--fortunately the stool was a low one--I began to hop toward the table with the ragged-edged legs. Now, a skinny man might have effortlessly trotted to the other end of the room, but for a bulky person like myself--I weigh two hundred pounds--riding a stool, even a low one, is no simple task. Don't keel over, I kept telling myself. Relax and don't lose your poise, just make your little jerks, jerk up, jerk forward. Easy does it, short measured hops, nothing showy, nothing big and sudden or you'll tumble to the ground like Saddam Hussein's statue. And then, as I was making good and steady progress, already halfway there, one of the legs of my stool slipped into a rut in the floor and I fell over, stool and all, and banged my head. My head was throbbing with pain when I woke up, and it felt like I was bleeding out of my ears, but the stool was broken and one of my hands, my left hand, was free.
Oh man, the rush of blood to that deprived extremity, it felt so good, like that first breath after being underwater for too long. For a while I wasn't able to do anything other than enjoy this pleasant bloody feeling in my left hand, but then my right hand began to demand attention, and as soon as I regained the use of my left hand I went to work at untying my right one. Slowly, sensation returned to my right hand, and so I turned to my legs, still tightly bound to the broken stool, but this task was far from easy, as the rope they had used on my legs was stronger than the one they had tied my hands with. Painful too was the urge to pee, and just as painful the need to remain dry and proper.
It was then, as I was trying, and largely failing, to set my legs free, that I saw the box of beer steins. Near one of the tables there was a pile of boxes, and one of these was open and displaying, very neatly, for show, some fifteen beer steins similar to the one Zelda was holding when we met: the 1936 Olympiad. None of these was as ornate as that one, but they all had the famous five rings and a swastika prominently displayed. I returned to the task at hand, pulling and twisting and biting away. Nothing doing, it was too damn tight. Goddamnit, I was wasting my time. What I should do was worm my way to the tool table, grab a file or a knife and slash this damn rope. I set out to do just that, writhing like a snake and puffing like a dog. The problem, so I realized as soon as I arrived at the foot of the tool table, was that no matter how hard I tried, I wasn't able to stand up and get to the tools. However, I had an idea: to turn that table over, or to shake it till all the tools fell off. Okay, so I tried to lift the table, but it was too heavy, so I resolved to shake it instead. Under the table I slid, so that the tools wouldn't fall on me, and I began to shake that damn table with all my might, and sure enough, it worked. Tools were falling to the ground like rain, first a drill, then a funnel, then flasks, smashing to bits and releasing their weird liquids, then pliers and tweezers and an anvil and a hammer and, finally, a file, and so I slid out from under the table and gingerly made my way to that file--there was a lot of glass on the floor, from the broken flasks--and I grabbed it and began to file away. Yet this file, it turned out, was rather dull, and was doing very little to the rope, so I grabbed one of the shards of broken glass and used that instead. Oh yes, that shard of broken glass was eating away at the rope and I was almost free, almost free, but then I heard footsteps, loud footsteps, and I stopped what I was doing, afraid that Joe and Bill had returned and would see me, but if so, I thought, I should really get to work on this bind, so I filed away furiously with my shard of glass, so furiously that I was hurting myself, drawing blood, but then I heard my name and I knew who was making those footsteps, my silly sister. Unbearable, this urge to pee and the blood flowing down my ankles, and the sight of Zelda at the door, looking at me, panting, puzzled, happy, free at last.
