In Pursuit of Rest

Gina sat in the waiting room, finger tips on her lips, biting tediously at her jagged nails. She pulled on her sweatshirt wrapping it tightly around her shoulder blades. Slouching, her shoulder blades poked away from her back like tiny wings tucked under her skin. She sipped mildly from a lukewarm cup of coffee. The foolishness of drinking coffee before a dentist appointment wandered idly through her thoughts and left without a trace.

She blinked, her eyelids dragging across her eyeballs like a feather through syrup. Her vision slightly blurred as she tried to focus on the fish tank in front of her. From the folds of her freckled skin, her eyes, not unlike the protruding globes of a fish, stared at her own reflection in the glass. Her reflection was teetering, rocking on the plush chair, swaying in the cool darkness of the tank. Another syrupy blink and she could feel the slick seaweed on her arms, the silence born from leagues of water pressure bearing down on her ear drums. A friendly clam opened its gaping shell, its moist flesh pulsing in time with the tank currents. Come, it beckoned, sleep here. Yes, Gina thought, so far from her air-conditioned apartment, from her diffusers and melatonin, from her blue light filters and warm cups of milk, here, finally she could sleep.

“Gina, you can come on back. We’re gonna be on the left side.”

Gina blinked quickly and stood on unsteady legs. She furiously swept her tongue around her teeth, searching for any nail fragments she’d left in her mouth. Satisfied she dropped heavily into a dental chair, leaning her messy bun against the head rest. The walls were white, a shiny white like a disco ball that’s only one large tooth. Dentistry equipment poked into her peripheral view.

Something in the bottom of Gina’s stomach settled, resting gently on the pleather seat of the dental chair. Like setting down a heavy bag after walking up flights of stairs, she felt her spine seep into the gentle curve of the seat back, the sweat on her shirt fading as if warmed by a summer’s day.

“I’m going to lean you back.”

The dentist reclined the chair and whirled in the world around Gina's head, orienting tools, checking the water and overhead lamp. An apron slipped around Gina’s neck, the texture always reminded her of picnic napkins. A suction mouthguard was angled into her mouth, holding her jaw wide open. The constant drum of air excavating her lips tempered the sounds of the office in an opaque film. Two pricks pinched her cheek and she waited calmly for the numbing to take effect. Her arms rested easily at her side, her shoulders draped on the chair like thick fabric.

The dentist got to work. Intermixed with the drumming suction, the gentle scraping of tools against Gina’s teeth and the rumble of the drill, played a melody like a lullaby amplified off her ivories.

Gina’s eyelids blinked a syrupy sweet blackness. She felt a current pulling her down, down, down. Rumbles of a train on the tracks somewhere in the distance, a soft scraping like a knife dragged across a plastic cutting board. Moments measured in heartbeats pulsing slowly against the cotton apron on her chest. A clam shell opened in time with those beats. Slow your heart, it beckoned, like this, open, close. The wings tucked delicately into her back, ruffled and settled back under her skin. She didn’t need to reply, she was already carried away.

“Hey”. A hand on Gina’s shoulder, “all done”.

Gina blinked awake as the suction was maneuvered away from her lips. She rinsed her mouth with a cup of water, her numb cheeks forced her to stoop over the sink to spit. Even the drool dripping down her chin couldn’t dishearten her well rested smile.

That evening in her room with her blackout curtains drawn and her weighted blanket binding her to the mattress like a damsel to railroad tracks, Gina closed her eyes thinking of the cool rest from the dentist appointment. That’s the kind of sleep she needed, a pulsing clamshell underwater deep deep kind of sleep. It did not come.

In a stupor she followed May around the antique mall looking at relics of some other households idolation. Stacks of plastic purses, baking dishes, piles of doilies, a case with technicolor jewelry.

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know, whatever speaks to me.”

Gina languished in May’s wake, dragging her feet between pictures of framed birds and piles of haphazard books. The only thing speaking to her were the soft cushions of nearby chairs. Usually populated by disassociating husbands, the chairs were bleak modern fixtures amidst vignettes of years gone by. The floors were painted wood but she could make out the grain between the gray chipped boards. It was soothing looking down, it gave her eyes a rest, letting her pupils droop in parallel with the bags under her eyes. The edges of her peripheral vision overlapped with pockets of her own flesh, tinting her sight in dark hues.

Fatigue wasn’t a drag on her limbs but an awareness of them. She could feel her knee joint pulling on her shin every time she lifted a foot, could sense the muscles on her neck pulling on her jaw as she looked to the ground. She had an awareness of existing that nagged on her brain like a missed chore.

Since her dentist appointment she had yearned for sleep, hoping for the restful oblivion she experienced in the chair. Each night she squeezed her eyes tight, picturing the fish tank in the waiting room and each morning she watched the sun rise with bloodshot eyes and heavy limbs, another night passed with rest evading her.

Her path wandered away from May and dragged along the floor until she spied the reflection of her own feet in a glass case. In the dust speckled case she peered up to find an antique dental chair in the center of a display. An idea, like her conspiratorial smile, brightened her face. Or maybe that was the Edison lightbulbs shining a little too close to her cheeks.

May resurfaced to find Gina elbows deep in a plastic tub of old tools. In a neat pile next to Gina were several objects, a small square mirror, tiny pliers, a pencil sized metal stick with a hook on the end like a question mark.

“Be careful not to get cut by that stuff”, May warned. “Rusted tools can give you blood poisoning.”

Gina grinned. Yes she thought, poison me with those sweet sweet dreams.

In the next few days Gina transformed her bedroom with reckless abandon. She bought a shade of white paint similar to teeth reflecting off a flashlight (with May at the hardware store, “does this color kind of look like a disco mouth to you?” “... what?”). Flecks of paint mottled her floor from the enthusiastic paint job she’d done on her walls and ceiling. She moved a dresser to the back wall and her bed to the center of the room. She vigorously wiped an old silver serving plate and neatly organized the antique tools on its face, placing the whole thing on her bedside table. After each improvement to her apartment she would lay down in bed at night, imagining the rumbling of the drill, thinking of darting fish amidst a bed of cool rhythmic seaweed, but sleep would not come.

She found an adjustable overhead lamp and spray painted it white. She scoured the internet for a dental chair that could fully recline. The one she found had a curious baseball sized hole in the seat but she didn’t think too deeply about that. She replaced her bed with the chair and laid a paper napkin on her chest whenever she went to sleep. Still, through the night her mind, like a lingering fog, was vacuous yet omnipresent. In the mornings her fatigued limbs functioned like they were attached to pulleys and strings, belatedly responding to her incessant tugging. Each morning she stared at herself in the mirror, gently fingering her puffy cheeks, her hollow undereyes. She drank carafes of coffee and throughout the day walked rings around her block to exhaust herself, but still sleep would greet her like an uninterested lover, cold and aloof.

What could be missing, she thought, the fishtank? The plush waiting room chairs? The time of day? She turned her living room into a waiting room, replacing the furniture with chairs from thrift shops. On her television she live streamed a fishtank from Youtube. She couldn’t understand the language that trickled into the video feed but found herself murmuring ”spya moite bebeta” to her toothbrush before bed.

One evening she was perched on her bathroom counter, trying to angle a syringe into her mouth, maybe numbing her cheeks was the key. It was a struggle to orient herself so that her gums and the tip of the needle were both visible in the vanity mirror. Her arm burned from holding it aloft. With a sigh she relaxed, setting the syringe on the counter. Chuckling she thought to herself, maybe this is a little crazy.

In the mirror her exhausted frame stared back at her. Shorts exposed her squished kneecaps to the granite countertop and her legs were quickly losing feeling. Her hair was coiled into a bun like a snail’s shell atop her head, strands intermittently drifted away giving her an auburn halo. Drifting like the fish gliding across the mirror’s surface, flexing its tiny tail fin to change direction.

She leaned closer to the mirror, inspecting the wayward fish and the dark void of deep deep water she now saw reflected there. Little particles floated by on invisible currents, the shadows of swaying seaweed intermittently colored the mirror a deep gray. Gina looked left and right, thinking she’d see edges of the tank but the tiles of her white bathroom remained firmly in place.

Gina glanced back at the mirror, even her reflection had vanished, replaced by a swaying underwater view. Her nose almost touched the glass pane, her ears could almost hear the distorted waves, her face could almost feel the cool water. In a flash a giant fish appeared before her, mouth open, ready to swallow her whole. She shrieked and pushed away from the mirror, her numb folded legs no help as she toppled sideways off the counter, diving headlong towards her toilet bowl. Her arms flailed around her chest as her face came crashing down on the toilet seat, her hip dropped heavily to the linoleum floor.

She lay on the floor for a few moments, curling around her midsection, letting pain tickle her. She could taste blood on her tongue and the jagged edge of a broken tooth threatened to cut her curled lips. Her hip was numb, and jolts of pain bloomed from the side of her face with each exhale. Oh no, she thought, oh no oh no. Keeping her legs as still as possible she reached one hand forward, then the other, dragging herself along the bathroom floor. Crossing into her bedroom she reached for her phone, on its charger not far from the reclined chair.

“Hello,” she whispered into the phone, “it’s a emergency.”

“Are you ready?”

Gina hobbled up from her waiting room chair, her bent form reflected in the depths of the fishtank. Her vision was blurry, her hip ached, and she blinked with a slowness nearing concussion. A pillow had accompanied her on the subway journey to the dentist office and she clutched it with the fervor of a toddler. She bared her broken tooth as a grin stretched to her earlobes.

“Yeth.”