First came a big-eyed beauty poking around inside my mouth. Because of the mask and the close proximity, those eyes—which were merely somewhat large to begin with—became as vast as two lakes in which a person could drown, lakes brimming with incredible concentration, concentrating on poking around inside my mouth as I strained it open like a sick cat. Agony, agony, agony.
Sometimes, perhaps because the silence had stretched on too long, the big-eyed one would narrate her own steps to fill the void, explaining what she was doing. But she didn't explain when making the mold—I still don't know what they call it in their jargon. It went like this: she held out a skull-like dental tray packed with blue putty, and like the Earth pressing a cat's paw into clay to stamp a plum blossom, she shoved an entire row of my teeth into that blue muck. She seized the right moment to smooth the shape, pressing firmly wherever it looked loose. When it was done, I stared at those two lumps of blue putty for a long time. The teeth were imprinted in them with perfect fidelity. There was something extremely childish and comical about it, yet the big-eyed one and all her colleagues were completely unfazed—which I found very, very strange.
Blue putty. After all that was done, I was handed off to a male dentist. First came the X-rays, which required me to bare my teeth for a stretch of time that, in absolute terms, wasn't particularly long, but relative to the act of teeth-baring, was about as long as that scene where Xu Yajun plays a Shanghai mob boss baring his teeth—and when he does it, it looks tremendously cool. But baring your teeth under the direction of a dental nurse feels more like playing house. After the nurse finished posing me, she called me over with instructions: since the clinic's internet might be spotty, she told me to photograph the X-ray with my phone.
Teeth-baring. Teacher Xu Yajun. The extraction lasted a full hour. Afterward, I placed the extracted tooth on the floor, prostrated myself before it, and took a photograph titled "Down on the Floor Looking for My Teeth." Then I drove home with an ice pack pressed to my face.
Down on the floor looking for my teeth. Back home, I read the doctor's clinical notes—concise and vivid, like a short story: A new generation of Yu Hua.