Thank You, Goodnight (6 page)

“I’m Tereza,” she said.

“Teddy,” I croaked.

She adjusted the ice pack. “I know who you are.”

Heavy footsteps suddenly began to hammer up a flight of stairs, and it dawned on me for the first time that I was in the photographer’s home. I righted myself and took in my surroundings. We were in a living room of sorts, rustically decorated, photographs of all sizes crowding the walls.

“I can’t believe you tried to beat up my father,” the girl said, amused. She nodded at the lower hemisphere of my face. “You lost a tooth, you know.”

“What?” I dispatched my tongue to explore my dental landscape and met an unfamiliar gap just right of center. “Jesus Christ.”

The thick bootsteps came to a stop and my enemy overtook the doorframe. He stood there with his arms folded, perfectly still and perfectly huge.

The girl rose. “I’ll go get some medicine.”

“That’s okay. I’m fine. Really.”

Ignoring me, she disappeared, leaving me alone with the Jolly Green Giant.

Heinz-Peter lumbered over to the couch and dropped himself into the chair vacated by his daughter, perilously close to me on the sofa.

I took in the monster. Yeah, he could kill me. Though it would’ve been a lot easier to finish me off while I was unconscious. Unless he planned on nursing me back to health and then killing me. It was really his call.

This, I realized, had been a monumental act of stupidity, a true breakdown of rational thought on my part. Why hadn’t I thought to bring the other
Faded Glory
losers along with me? We could have come as a mob of salty has-beens intent on taking back our dignity. That would’ve been the stronger tactical move.

Heinz-Peter’s moon face hung over me, grinning with an impenetrable blend of menace and pity. “You are comfortable?”

I nodded cautiously.

“Tereza get you medicines.” Then his face twisted, as if he’d suddenly recalled how it came to be that I, a virtual stranger from thousands of miles away, was lying on his sofa one tooth shy of a full set. “Why you hit me?”

Before I had the opportunity to point out the obvious, Tereza glided back into the room and presented me with an oblong white capsule and a glass of water. I inspected the pill. It didn’t look familiar, nor did it have any word printed on it, much less a reassuringly familiar one such as Tylenol, Advil, Aleve.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Medicines,” Heinz-Peter replied.

“Aspirin,” Tereza said.

It was significantly larger than any pill I’d ever seen, prescription or over-the-counter, and, in fact, resembled a small lightbulb. I considered asking to see the bottle.

“Is good,” Heinz-Peter encouraged. “Eat.”

The pain was nearly unbearable, an unacceptable alternative to
death, so I popped the thing into my mouth and chased it with a swig of water. It hardly mattered at that point that it was probably cyanide.

“I’m sorry I beat you up,” the photographer said. “It is big honor to have you in my house.”

“It really is,” Tereza echoed. “We’re big fans.” Then she pointed at my mouth and conferred with her father in their native tongue. Whatever information was passed, it clearly upset the man, for he issued some emphatic grunt of surprise—
Boonsk?!
—and looked at me with grave concern.

“Let me see mouth,” he urged.

Feeling foolish, I opened wide—there’s no unfoolish way to pre-sent your throat to total strangers—and after a brisk inspection, the man’s arms shot up over his head in a cartoonish show of frustration. Then he stormed out the front door in a fit of yapping and baying.

“He went to look for your tooth,” Tereza translated.

“Are you serious?” I noticed it was easier to sit up now, what with some alpine analgesic whipping through my bloodstream.

“Let him look,” she said, sitting down and crossing her legs.

“Stop him, would you?”

Even if the mad photographer poked around in the boot-stomped mulch and somehow came bursting back in with a dirty dislodged bicuspid between his fingers, I wasn’t likely to put the thing back in my mouth.

Tereza looked at me lying lamely on her sofa, and an apple of a smile absorbed every feature on her cherubic face. “I love your music. I really do.”

My eyebrows dropped into a skeptical furrow. “That’s nice.”

“I’m a huge fan. Seriously. I know everything you’ve done.”

“You’re funny,” I said, meaning
You’re insane
.

“I’m not joking.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“You shouldn’t even know who I am.” I struggled to my feet and staggered toward the front door to call Heinz-Peter off the case. It now looked as if I had an outside shot at getting out of there alive and saw no reason to squander the miracle.

“I listen to all kinds of music,” she went on.

“You should listen to
many
kinds of music. No need to listen to
all
kinds.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, clearly amused.

“I mean, sometimes old music is just old music.”

“Is there something wrong with listening to old music?”

“It depends,” I said, readjusting to the sensation of walking. “If it’s Led Zeppelin or Nick Drake, then no. If it’s Missing Persons or the Osmonds, then quite possibly yes.”

“I listen to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and U2 and Black Sabbath. I also listen to Tremble.”

“You should probably go easy on the Black Sabbath. As for Tremble, your time would be better spent with Boy George solo albums.” I paused in my tracks to massage a boulder of pain out of my temples. “Look, you’re young now, but trust me, that won’t always be the case. Don’t piss away your listening years on music that’s just not good. My point is—do you know what the word
myopic
means?”

Tereza stared at me with scientific wonder. “You’re not what I expected.”

“Well, we’re all having new experiences today.”

She gave me a once-over that was just probing enough to be insulting. “You’re shorter, more pale.”

As I hobbled through the house, I took note of the photographs covering every wall. I was struck by their mastery, the thought and skill rendered in each composition—experiments in angle, distance, and color saturation. “Your old man has some talent,” I mused. “Although obviously I wish he’d never been born.”

Upon reaching the foyer, I peered through the screen and observed my tormentor crouched apelike as he scoured the grass for my
lost tooth. It was a noisy exercise, with snorts and grumbles of disgust. I pushed the door open. “Uh, friend?”

“I will find,” he called without looking up. His thick fingers brushed through the grass. “I knock out, I put back.”

“I don’t think it works that way.”

The man suddenly bounded to his feet, pointed at my mouth, and, as if it had just occurred to him, declared, “You need dentist.”

I spun toward Tereza. “There’s a dentist around here?”

The offense she took at my surprise was a few paces from playful. “Where do you think you are?”

“Lost,” I replied. “Hopelessly lost.”

*       *       *

Heinz-Peter drove at the speed of a camera shutter on the burst setting, flinging us along slender streets and charmingly precarious bridges. I bounced around the passenger seat, ice held to my lip, suffering steep penance for picking the wrong fight. My driver grinned and patted my knee like I was his date. “Mr. Teddy Tremble in my car,” he boasted, showing precious little interest in the road. “This is big thrill for me.”

I pointed at the windshield. “Focus.”

He steered at a nauseating clip over a hill that dropped into a small town center with narrow cobblestone streets, shops that had no doubt thrived for centuries. An old gray woman with a cane crept up the walkway of a stone house. Children in school uniforms strolled alongside the road with boisterous chatter. All these people looked busy and happy. We’d probably ride over some of them.

“You don’t like picture in museum?” Heinz-Peter asked, resuming our conversation.

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. But hey, my drummer loved it, so don’t feel too bad.”

“Why you don’t like it?”

“Well, let’s see. It makes me look like a dipshit—that’s certainly a big part of it. And you hung it up alongside pictures of other dip
shits and you called the exhibit
Let’s Laugh at the Losers
or something. Those are probably the main reasons I didn’t love it. Would you like to hear others?”

I watched him parse through my critique. “I don’t trying to make fun of you. I think you are victim of fame. This is what exhibit is all about.” He waved his arm expressively as he said this.

“Well, art usually goes right over my head,” I said.

“You are one time very famous,” he explained. “But then it go away and you are not happy. Yes?”

No. “You don’t know the first thing about me. You met me one time in a stupid restaurant in Amsterdam. And in that restaurant, did we talk about that? Not that it would’ve been any of your fucking business, but did you say, ‘Hey, Teddy, now that you’re no longer a famous musician, does your life suck?’ No. Instead, you pretended to be my friend, you snapped some pictures of me, and a few years later, you stabbed me in the fucking back. I even bought you a goddamn drink.”

He turned his body in my direction as if we were in couple’s therapy. “No, no. My exhibit is showing fame is very painful for famous peoples. If you are happy or sad for real life, this not matter.”

“It matters to me. Hey, you know what? Maybe I’ll write a song about some miserable oaf who lives in the mountains and takes pictures of people having dinner and pretends to understand them. And maybe I’ll call that song ‘Song about Heinz-Peter Zoot’ and I’ll post it on YouTube and play it in Times Square. What do you think?”

Heinz-Peter looked troubled. “What is this—miserable loaf ?”

I leaned back and held the cold compress to my lip. Tires crunched gruesomely over either a thick branch or a crossing guard. A woman in a billowy dress hung clothes on a line outside a small red cottage while a young boy straddled a bicycle. They were going to have meat pie for dinner.

“I am very sorry, Teddy.” The sentence was delivered cleanly—no
accent, appropriate use of a linking verb. No doubt he could apologize proficiently in most of the world’s languages. “I am big fan. I don’t try making fun at you.”

“Oh no?
Faded Glory
?
It Feels like a Lie and It Looks like a Mess
?”

He threw me a look of confusion.

“That was the name of your exhibit, remember? The name of the photograph.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Marius, my assistant, he make names. I don’t too good English.”

“You don’t say.” I should’ve guessed that there was a coconspirator, someone with the necessary tools to slander and be cute about it.

“My pictures say only that you are human being like other peoples.” Heinz-Peter continued to plead his case.

“Well, other peoples aren’t hanging in the Tate, staining themselves with nachos.”

Without any warning or the slightest decrease in speed, the car lurched off the road into a small, unpaved parking lot. “Here is dentist!” he announced.

At the far end of the lot sat an old stone hut. The front door was a thick slab of oak, reminiscent of that pub in Dublin. I noticed a chimney and thought it a curious feature for a dentist’s office.

“Are we meeting him at a bar?”

Heinz-Peter got out and headed toward the door of the hut.

I had no choice but to shadow the big lug across the gravel parking lot, a hand on my battered jaw. “Faded glory,” I muttered. “Faded fucking glory.”

Inside, a prune of a man who seemed to be a casual if less than enthusiastic acquaintance of Heinz-Peter’s led me back to a dim room with a reclining dental chair. A cigarette dangling from his lip, he peered into my mouth, then shook his head in discouragement. “I don’t know,” he mumbled in a thick accent. He frowned at a tray of sharp metal instruments. “I don’t know.”

He then proceeded to hack and claw at whatever remnants of
tooth were still wedged in my gum. He pulled and tugged, at one point practically kneeing my chest for leverage. After ten agonizing minutes, he dejectedly tossed his tool—Early Man’s version of an X-ACTO knife—back into the pan and extinguished his cigarette right next to it. “I don’t know,” he grumbled again. “I don’t know.”

I asked this ray of fucking sunshine for some novocaine. Startlingly, the word was not within his lexicon. “Novocaine?” I repeated with growing alarm. I, of course, had no clue how to say “numbing agent” in any dialect but my own. How do you pantomime “local anesthesia”? I said ouch and ow and winced with great cinema until he got it and, looking annoyed, shuffled away to see if he had some lying around.

He returned a few minutes later and unceremoniously injected a gallon of colorless serum into the inside of my cheek, which hurt just as much as Heinz-Peter’s uppercut. Within seconds I felt seriously stoned and indifferent to the clear fact of my imminent death. I felt myself slipping away, but my last thought before blacking out for the second time that hour was remarkably sensible: Are you supposed to lose consciousness during a routine dental visit?

Through a gathering fog, I watched as the dentist miserably poked an unlit cigarette between his lips and struck a match.

*       *       *

Here’s where I note that Sara had strongly counseled against my coming here.

I called her from the London hotel, told her the whole story, how all these years I never knew that my legacy actually involved a little piece of cilantro staining my smile. She seemed to consider the tale a sort of dark comedy—until I mentioned how I’d decided to modify my travel itinerary.

“That’s a very bad idea,” she’d said. “It’s dangerous, Teddy. You don’t see that?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Look, I know you think you’re a bit of a tough guy, but having a temper doesn’t make you a badass.”

I hooted. Sara never used words like
badass
—she’d gone to Dartmouth—and she could only hope to sell it by attaching it to a cute little sneer.