The Legend of the Toothworm
In my dreams, I am visited semi-regularly by a man named Yorick. He has many faces, but I always know it is him. He comes when I am feeling uneasy, when I have lost my grip on the flesh of life like an edentate house cat fed only on sweetened cream.
He likes to take out different tools - depending on the theme of my dream - and slowly extract everything, from my molars to my incisors. I always awake before I am entirely toothless, which is why he always comes back for more. Sometimes he whips out a 17th century French tooth-key, and I’m back in France. Images from Marseille and Paris flicker behind him as I avoid his infernal gaze. I see a collage of Chartier, where Lily and I went for steak dinners at least three times a week when we lived in the Marais. At the time I was heartbroken, and the pain had found it’s way to my left ovary, which caused a low-level affliction throughout that Winter. One night, after one steak too many, I felt a dizzying and pulsating agony throughout my body and had decided drunkenly that I had been struck down with Mad Cow Disease. Lily scared me further by suggesting that the cause of this spell was an ovarian Dermoid Cyst, the most womanly of growths, which have teeth, nails and hair.
As Yorick pokes around the back left corner of my mouth, Dermoid cysts float around the circumference of his skull like some disgusting fleshy flower crown. Yorick! Look at all those disembodied teeth behind you! Practice on those instead!
Sometimes he presents his Goat’s Foot Elevator, the most diabolical of tools, and attempts to lever some canines out of my squealing jaws. I wish to myself, can’t it be called something more affable like a Dog’s Paw Gadget. That would make me feel much better about this whole situation. This dream takes me back to Mexico City, where my Wisdom Tooth had got infected and suddenly my dentist is a Labrador wearing a sarong. There were lots of stray dogs in Mexico, and my boyfriend at the time also resembled a dog. He often said he knew that this was his first time as a human because his hands sometimes forgot how to hold things and he’d look down and for a second see paws. On Valentines day we sat on the beach in Zipolite under the moon, steaming from Mezcal and Victoria beers and a stray dog came to sit with us. For a moment I couldn’t tell which was my boyfriend and which was the dog. It was all Amores Perros.
Yorick! Look at all those bounding beach dogs with their baring snarls, why can’t you take their teeth and save those anti-vaxx crusties from rabies! They deserve a second chance!
Post-operation, I am down on all fours, blindly sniffing out the cracked teeth he’s discarded. He does decide to keep some of them as souvenirs. After all, he is a dark magician and I am his drowsy target girl. He probably takes my gnashers back to a horrid kind of storage unit, filled with sawn-in-half women and impaled breasts. I imagine that he drops them into a jar of boiled gallnuts and vinegar whilst cackling. Although, by now I know him well, his arrival is always met with a trembling fear and confusion. Why must he take my teeth? My parents spent a fortune straightening them up and removing all memory of my crooked-teethed ancestors!
O! Mandible Vagabond, you tooth-pulling dental quack! You jingle through villages with anklets made of molars and your song croons through the ages of my dreams like some ancient siren.
“Hear ye, hear ye! Blessed folk in this here town square, afflicted by that abominable worm, I have brought with me the smoke of henbane and a midnight frog to coax and cauterise your decaying tusks. I have found, in the next village along, the Legend of the Worm, written on cuneiform tablets. I know, dear villagers, it seems like I am speaking an evil kind of nonsense, but I have traversed this cosmos thrice over and seen the Babylonians drawing out spirits from rotting teeth, I have seen the Egyptians with their amulets and crushed mice, and I have watched over alchemists whisk together sulfur and myrrh. I am within and without all of these dentists - in me is the tooth in its growth and decay, in me is the cycle of life, death and rebirth, in me is the Vampire, in me is St. Apollonia, in me is the currency for our Primal Trade - baby teeth. I am the Legend of the Worm incarnate, the Holy Tooth-puller, the Dental Mendicant!
Come to me with your ills, those crumbling, eroding calcified things that grow from your jaw and make you weep through the night with a pain worse than death. Come with your pennies and I will forge from that pain a relief like no other!”
Yorick is an ageless trickster, he is an agent of Satan in the most mischievous and infuriating way. Wherever I am in my dreams, he appears like some shapeshifting daemon and rallies all of my reflections. Me, and them, who are me, watch paralysed whilst he proslytizes on whatever town square of my mind we land on. When I lay my head to rest, clean-mouthed and all rinsed out, the last thing I want is to feel the punishment for a crime I have not committed play out in my dreams. So, like a Vampire-hunter hanging up some garlic, I swill my mouth with cloves, turmeric and coconut oil in the hopes of scaring Yorick away. But he always returns in his ivory linen suit, seams embroidered with melted down gold crowns and his leathery skin tattooed with Ottoman dental diagrams, a beautiful clown hellbent on knocking out my teeth. So, this is the Legend of the Toothworm: we are not told that when we are children, and make our first deal with the Tooth Fairy, that she is really Yorick in disguise. We can’t just pick and choose which teeth we’d like to fall out and exchange for money, and as we get older the Tooth Fairy will visit us in both sleep and waking life to ensure we pay our dues.