The President's Teeth

CW: Human trafficking

Agent J — case handler of the dead, the dirty, and the gone — noticed as he began reviewing photos of the women in the newest folder atop his desk that, well, his teeth started making noises, broadcasting voices and whirring sounds.

“That’s odd,” J thought, opening and closing his mouth.

For the first time in years, before him was a case where maybe nobody died, disappeared. And it all felt wrong.

He was good at his job. His stomach never churned at images of decaying corpses found up in the hills or along river banks, rotting hands topped with death-defying shiny, lime-green acrylic nails. His heartbeat remained ever so steady as he thumbed through case histories involving sun-dried teddy bears found in the desert a half-mile away from the crime scene. He could hand one of the relatives a Kleenex while breaking bad news, but never tear up himself.

A consummate professional. Everything under his control.

But today, a week shy of his forty-third birthday, right when he’d felt like he’d finally had it all — the job, the brownstone, the smart wife, the cute kid, the smush-nosed dog, the pickleball and pints on weekends with friends, even — he was presented with this.

First, a case that was alive, clean, and pink.

Second, loud teeth.

J found this to be disturbing.

Inside the manila covers and clamped to reinforced metal fasteners, the file contained dozens of photos and still images of a room covered in wall-to-wall pink carpet. One corner of the dark web’s infamous center stage. A doorless, windowless cube, occupied in each image by a body in lingerie, the face obscured in some mask: a ski mask, a luchador one, or a plastic mold of some smiling, dead president. She’d be vacuuming. Just vacuuming. Anything a paying customer desired could be poured or rubbed into the shag, and subsequently they’d have the distinct pleasure of watching someone beautiful vacuum it all up, turning crunchy peas or sprinkles or a bowl of soup sucked and slurped up into tidy, triangular lines.

A satisfying, clean kink. No more, no less.

Something the original beautiful cleaner — now digital pimp, or Madame, if you will — found a market for. Apparently, she brought beautiful women, sometimes men, from abroad to put on the masks and bras and press the power buttons; all under the guise of attending an imaginary graduate school for entrepreneurs on student visas.

Lies. All lies.

Seeing the pink room splayed open inside his workspace was making J’s teeth tune into some strange frequencies, his dentin and enamel and little bits of metal fillings flooding his mind with this unnatural, inescapable noise.

They’d been trained about vicarious traumas, sleep disturbances, social reclusion, the likes. To check in with themselves.

Nobody had said anything about talking teeth, though.

“So odd,” J thought, pushing against his mandible as if trying to unclog his ears.

Picking up the file with his other hand.

Walking it towards his supervisor’s office.

He knocked on Director M’s open door jamb. “So…” holding up the folder, “They’re all still alive, right?”

“Sure seem to be. Alive and trafficked in this wildly lucrative visa fraud ring, yup,” Director M said, not inviting J to sit in the chairs across from her. The ones where occasionally outsiders sat and massaged disintegrating Kleenexes while J disclosed redacted bits of mysteries he’d solved. Or was solving.

“So they don’t want to…it’s just that…” J’s mouth full of metals and words that wouldn’t come out. “Sorry, why am I the one getting this case?”

“They’re immigrants. That’s your beat. You can handle it, can’t you?” She isn’t looking at him, nor waiting for his reply.

Well, technically, no. But there had been a pattern in cases he’d solved, he supposed. J wanted to say more, to explain — in some appropriate manner — that it seemed perhaps he couldn’t handle it. Or didn’t want to. But his teeth were getting louder, preventing him from thinking — much less speaking — clearly; nearly compelling him to contort his mouth in a manner M would find most certainly unprofessional. He simply nodded and turned around, back into the hall. He hauled himself and the file to his Kleenex-less, window-boxed office, throwing the thick manila down on his desk, away from him. Wishing he had tongs to handle it, goggles to wear when peeking inside. Despite him having already been contaminated, swallowed up.

Felt like he needed to wash his hands.

His mouth.

And these sounds.

He wondered if chewing on AirPods might act as noise-cancelling pills, imagining replacing pen caps with ear-stuffers he could chew on while reading and taking notes.

***

Come COB, Agent J made his way home, leaving the file in his office, of course, closed flatly atop his desk. But it left with him nonetheless. Actually, it did more than that, the virus having spread everywhere by then. A little vacuum filter of a grenade he couldn’t put the pin back in, exploding tiny truths and gray fuzz everywhere.

You know what the case and all those images inside did to him?

Baader-Meinhof’ed.

Outside on the sidewalk, he saw pink vacuum lines. In his newsfeed inside the flat glowing world he cups with his hands on the train, he scrolled past unnaturally white veneers and cheeto schmears needing to be sucked up through gears and hoses. He swore he can hear his teeth picking up crackled recordings of presidential and other famous speeches aired long ago on old radios.

and newcomers… can rise as fast, as far as their skills will…

Dinner was impossible. Trying to chew any food, cringing from the tines of his fork as if being electrocuted, and sitting with a napkin in his lap as if everything was normal should his wife pay him any attention. Which she didn’t. They both focused on their daughter, her plate, the hungry dog underfoot, pouncing on flung sporkfuls of quinoa and sweet potato, ignoring the cut-up bits of casaba.

After dinner, during his daughter’s bath, he even smelled the color pink inside all their subway tile. Her George Washington-esque wigs made of white sudsy bubbles, her artificial-dye-free, 3-in-1 soap packaged inside an artificially-dyed neon pink tube with a pump. Cherry-scented and cherry-colored everything, everywhere.

“Have you learned about George Washington yet?” he asked his four-year-old, hairdressing her bubble-foam wig before rinsing it all away. Really does look like a founding father if you get enough pumped-up soap in there. She didn’t understand his question, though. Just kept squeezing rubbery wet animals, fountains of their spit shooting up and out of their insides.

“Tuhtle skwwiiiirt yew,” she giggled, continuing to fill and empty the little toys’ bellies and mouths. Her smile was still full of temporary baby teeth that looked like white arils, her adult ones just waiting in her gums’ chambers. She and her baby teeth cackled, pruny fingers now torturing the brown cow. “Moooo skwwiiiirt yew too.”

Even their insides smelled like stone fruit.

***

The next morning, as he was filling his thermos before heading out, he heard the front door open, startling him. J had forgotten what day it was, the time. And that they would be here.

The cleaners.

Wednesday.

In came the three aproned-wrapped women, calling into his home, offering tired smiles and forced yet pleasant greetings while gripping microfiber cloths, a cobweb duster, and their own jackets, keys, sounds. Hauling themselves and a vacuum up his stoop, closing the door behind them.

Of course.

Baader. Fucking. Meinhof.

J thought of two things when he heard the closed door latch, while he waited for his coffee to finish brewing.

First, he thought of JFK.

Second, of these three women wiping down his appliances covered in a week’s worth of one family’s grime, of Windexing smears caused by his daughter’s mouth. Doing all of that wiping and Windexing, for him, without their clothes on.

He imagined himself standing on the living room rug, throwing panko at the floor for them to vacuum in front of him.

Him throwing, them vacuuming.

Vacuum in hand, them just waiting for him to throw more, their faces and bodies exposed; maskless. Seeing him right back. No window or door for any of them to escape through.

Throwing, vacuuming.

He could hear the inside of his dental fillings starting to beep loudly, as if responding to his inner ECG machine. The heart-rate lines weren’t on a little black medical screen or even in the vacuumed-raked pink floor; they were inside his mouth, telling his truth. Ashamed by his thoughts and worried they’d hear the beeping too, he tried to hyper-focus on Kennedy instead as he gathered his wallet, keys from the catchall bowl in the entry. More than usual, he averted his eyes in his final goodbyes toward these under-the-table employees of his, fumbling to unlatch the door again.

***

He’d been thinking of presidents’ teeth last night, before falling asleep.

Read how, while in the Navy and shipwrecked after a torpedo attack, Kennedy swam for hours across an ocean, hauling by his teeth another wounded crew-member; the man’s lifejacket turned into a clamped bite-guard. The two — and the rest of the crew he led, heroically — made it to a deserted island. Kennedy’s impressive bite lugged two bodies through the currents towards survival. At least one near-death experience was averted and logged for the history books.

Now those. Those are some teeth doing mighty, medal-winning work. Irish-made real teeth, they were; but nothing’s more American than a Kennedy, than a war-hero.

***

Once outside and several doors down from his stoop, J paid the cleaners’ boss more promptly than usual, using his thumb to send about twenty percent over that week.

Like penance.

As he approached the train station’s vestibule, on the street, he saw a yellow and black school bus wheel by him. The bus’s presence calmed his teeth, which got louder again as it rolled away. Perplexed, J decided to follow the bus. Rather than proceeding down the station’s conveyor belts to multitask — another morning answering emails in a snowboard stance aboard public transit, breathing in stale air and strangers’ body heat — he headed back to school. Chasing quietness.

The school bus moved slowly through the congested streets, but braked and opened its door — some library book grade school magic spilled out of — outside the nearby P.S. The very one his daughter will most likely attend, not unlike the one he attended as a boy, only tens of blocks away. He remembers the classrooms, all the little alphabet banners fringing the walls, the sound of someone creaking open their desk, clunking an apple core into a waste basket, or sharpening their pencils in the back. Kids always leaving the ground up, swirly shavings on the floor for someone else to clean. Also shoving their gum wads under desks, flinging their bitten-off nail moons down the aisles.

Vividly, he can remember when they all learned about George Washington: this crazy kid who chopped down his dad’s cherry tree, had the balls to tell the truth about it, and then went on to rule the world in gaudy wigs and leggings with a mouth full of wooden teeth. Declining more terms because he was that great of a guy.

Vibrating pocket, not teeth.

“You overpaid the cleaners?!” His wife texted him. J remained behind the school bus, frozen in place by its flashing red lights, his memories of this long-lost schoolboy allegory.

Somewhere along the line, J discovered they’d all been lying to him. Everyone. About truthful George, of all things. His mouth had been full of lead and gold, the teeth of elephants and other humans, enslaved humans; anything but the wood or ivory they’d have led little kids to believe before. Back in school. Such a great leader, a good fighter, but a terrible role model for dental hygiene. J supposes it was moments like that, among others, that made him think it was okay to lie some too, even if the moral of the story was supposed to be about honesty. Or brushing. Flossing. Laying off the sweets. Honestly, J didn’t really understand what the point of each story had been, all the presidential anecdotes. How great they’d seemed.

He texts her back.

“I spilled something this am. Asked them to take care of it properly, so you wouldn’t have to worry about it.”

“WHAT did you spill?”

He can see more dots of hers, incoming to bite.

Somewhere along another line, one of the times she caught him in a little white lie, she went quiet. For years, she’d persist in opening wide. Reminding him to take down the Christmas lights or out the fly-infested compost tin; in conveying her exasperation over how excruciating it was for her to always — every day — initiate dinner plans or coexist in his preferred air-conditioning settings. But. When it came to him outright lying to her, her teeth and tongue stopped moving as fast, and came to a stuttering halt.

Like sucking on a pit. Tying a stem. Holding it in.

He doesn’t wait for her ellipses to manifest this morning. He ignores his wife and her little dots, mosquito bites he knows won’t itch as badly if he doesn’t scratch them. Something else is doing greater torture than an irritating bug bite to him today, and he wants to hack away at it. So he slides her back into his pocket, and turns around to resume his routines, heading again towards the train and into work.

Better late and with a mouth full of whirring teeth than never.

He realizes this morning that in all these years, he’s never actually seen his wife vacuum.

***

His entire commute in, there is pink carpet unrolling out before him. Everywhere. Out the windows, along the tracks, down the walkways. When he finally steps into his office, his desk has become a pile of pantry crumbs, dryer lint, old hair. Logging onto his computer, his mouth turns on and off, making whirring sounds.

He thinks about all the kids he saw disembarking from the bus. He bets none of them would tell the truth if they cut down a cherry tree, or had a secret. He’d lie too.

He’ll lie today, to his boss. Sometimes, lying’s a good thing. Reading about the president’s teeth, he could understand why Cleveland tried to keep his dental work a secret, worrying some image of him — gummy-mouthed, toothless, staving off cancer — going public may’ve caused panic or a recession or the end of the world, even. Later, when Eisenhower didn’t fib and admitted he was getting emergency dental work done in the middle of the night, people insisted he actually met up with aliens. Recently landed extraterrestrials and POTUS on some UFO.

J shakes his wrists and readies himself to face Director M. He’ll need to touch the file again one final time.

I’d rather have my teeth and my dignity at this point, he thinks. But if I had to choose one…

He wants to say, “I cannot tell a lie,” like a good boy. To ask if he can please sink his teeth again into a case that is traumatic and gritty; gnaw on grotesque facts that sooth him, quiet his mouth.

J. Filled with real but rotted teeth; filled with metal and lies.

The truth was, he didn’t want to be seen. Let someone else handle cases of the living. Fetishes in the flesh, those beautiful bodies of aliens, immigrants, cleaners of others’ messes. Arrest them, try them, deport them. Or oogle, pay them.

J can only handle saving the cold, quiet bodies, solving too little, too late. Where the victims can’t be disappointed in him. Where the eyes don’t look back, the teeth don’t talk.

He knew now, and felt like a little boy, trying to hide an axe behind his back.

So the truth was also this. Agent J, he had seen these images and videos before. Many times, at his leisure, in private browsing windows. He’d sought out the pink carpet. He’d hovered his hands over the spacebar, watching beauty handle extension cords, push vacuums. He had liked watching them. A lot. For reasons he couldn’t quite explain or fully understand himself. They weren’t sexual or graphic per se, but sure, they were exploitive, fetishizing.

They were honest.

He’d sometimes wonder, like while on the train, walking his dog, or reading his daughter a bedtime story — what it would be like. To pay for a private cleaning.

Metals.

He would fantasize about them scattering, then sucking up metals. Little ground-up bits of iron, to be precise. Like the kind clinging to magnets at science museums.

He’d daydream about metal flecks glittering all over the rug before meeting their violent final destination, making clanking sounds while thrashing inside the canister’s tornado. He’d imagine the smell even: maybe a little hot, chemical burning slush.

But J never took that next step. He knew it was weird. Plus, he had it all, you know — this job, that mortgage, the family and lazy dog… (truthfully, he hated pickleball). J didn’t want to be that guy. The kind one embarrassing mistake follows to his grave.

Hell, people get killed for much less, and he should know.

Not everyone gets off scot-free after hacking at someone’s cherry tree, George.

And not all of us have the Irish-made fortitude of Kennedy. His teeth are his private reminder.

Maybe that’s the lesson for Agent J.

The consummate professional. A grown man with leftover chickenpox scars, buzzing cavities, and a clean house to come home to tonight.

And if he cannot tell a lie, the truth is also this. He feels sorry for those beautiful masked women being hunted in this Operation Hoover. Sad for all of them, because they’re not hurting anyone.

Just cleaning.

Like how he makes nice what happens to the dead, the dirty, the gone.

He knocks on M’s door, his teeth humming, preparing his lie.