No Cure for the Pain

by Paul W. La Bella

Joe reeled in agony. The side of his head throbbed like a hammer-stricken thumb, bruised and red and pulsing. The infected tooth needed to be taken out. The pain rose and fell in sharp bursts; it reached the top of his head at its peak, and the bottom of his soul at its valley.

“We’ll have to wait until next week for the procedure,” Dr. Barry told him.

Joe was sitting in an elongated chair, his long legs dangling over the side like an oversized child’s. It hurt to have his mouth open; the reddened flesh of his infected gums were stretched almost to the point of rupture. Joe managed a garbled question from his hung-open mouth.

“I’m going to prescribe some antibiotics for the infection. You can close your mouth.” Joe sat up in the chair and rested his feet on the slippery faux leather.

“And what about the pain?” Joe said.

“I’ll get you something for that too, fifteen milligrams of morphine should do the trick,” Dr. Barry said. He jotted a note onto his prescription pad and handed Joe the slip of paper.

“Thanks a lot,” he said. Joe stood, shook Dr. Barry’s hand and left the office.

* * *

The sun outside was hot, and Joe had to shield his eyes from it at first. He looked at the prescription in his hand and jogged across the parking lot to the road. He was able to get himself a last-minute appointment with Dr. Barry before the drugstore closed for the eclipse, but he was worried it might be too late to catch the druggist.

He raced along the sidewalk, his prescription waving in the wind that washed around him in cooling jets. He reached the long row of brick buildings and, finally, the door of Main Druggist’s. It was locked. A sign taped to the glass door read: Closed for the eclipse. Will re-open tomorrow. The whole town seemed to have closed up early to watch the once in a life time spectacle unfold.

Joe scanned Main Street. It looked like a ghost town; all the shops were shut, and everyone was huddled in Donner Park waiting for the eclipse. It had been all anybody could talk about for a month straight. People would walk into Joe’s butcher shop discussing which brand of protective goggles the other planned on wearing. One woman, waiting for a six-pound rump roast, told Joe that she even ordered a specialty pair out of a catalog.

“They promised they’d be here before the eclipse, oh, and they have this wonderful little floral design,” she told Joe, although all he could hear was the pulsing of his dying tooth. She showed him a picture from the magazine, and he smiled politely as fireworks exploded in his mouth. That had taken place a week ago.

He decided to walk back to his shop; maybe he had a stray bottle of whiskey lying around somewhere in the basement office. As he walked through the deserted streets, his tooth pulsed with each step in rhythm, and he cupped his hand to his chin. The infection has spread into the bone, he thought, it must have. Why else would my lower jaw ache when the infected tooth is on top?

He reached the small concrete ramp that ran into the front door of his butcher shop, unlocked the door and stepped in. He thought about opening up again until five o’clock, but then he looked out at the empty street and locked the door. His stomach grumbled, and he thought about cooking something up in the kitchen. His tooth sent a jolt of electricity though his head, and he decided instead to look for the whiskey.

He sat in his office chair and rummaged through the desk drawers, found the brown bottle and gulped it twice. Hot, acidic liquid filled his mouth, stung his rotting tooth and infected gums and burned in his throat. After the third gulp, the pain began to ease, and the anxiety along with it.

Joe sat with his legs stretched onto his desk and looked around the small office in the basement of his butcher shop. The walls and floor and ceiling were all solid concrete, at least a foot thick. Joe could attest to this fact: not more than a year ago, he’d had the brilliant idea to install a toilet next to the storage room across the hall from the office. He got so far as to order all the parts he needed from the hardware store, but had to trash the whole plan when he couldn’t get the piping through the thick ceiling.

That morning’s paper sat in a bi-fold on the edge of his desk. He lifted it and searched for the sports section. By all rights the Dodgers were on their way to winning the ’49 pennant, and that was just fine by Joe. His father had taken him to ballgames at Ebbets Field when he was young, but Joe hadn’t been back since his father died in ’36.

His mother moved him and his sister out of Brooklyn the next year. She couldn’t stand to look around at all the familiar people and places. She saw her husband’s bones in every shop window and every street corner, and she longed for a day when she wouldn’t hurt like that anymore.

He ruffled the pages of the paper, choosing short articles to skim, praying to God to distract himself for even a minute from the pain in his mouth. He pictured his tooth, black and decaying, a gaping hole in the center, and from that hole dangled a thin white nerve that sang fresh sheets of pain if it were disturbed. His mental image was not far from the truth.

He kept his jaws open but his lips shut. He was afraid to eat, afraid to sleep and accidentally clench his teeth together and send ringing pain, cold and sweet, up his jaw. So he drank the whiskey warm, not daring to introduce ice into it, and he thought about the extraction of dying teeth, of immeasurable pain, of reaching a new plane of existence brought about only by enduring such pain.

These thoughts danced in his head like poisonous vipers, thrashing and gnawing at his nerves until he finally fell asleep. His feet were perched on the desk, the paper on his chest, and the empty brown bottle clenched in his hands like a baby’s teddy bear. Joe slept while the bomb exploded above the town of Chester, New York.

* * *

He awoke, and his head throbbed from the whiskey. It was so bad he forgot about his toothache. He stood and let his upper teeth meet his lower, and the white line of pain vibrated through his head. He fell back into the chair, and an angry scream echoed in the concrete room as he cupped his aching chin. He reached for the brown bottle and found it empty on the floor by the trash bin, and decided to make his way back upstairs. He might have some frozen broth in the walk-in, maybe some chopped chicken and rice from leftover Chinese would make a decently tasting and, more importantly, easily chewed meal.

He opened the door of the office and stepped into the narrow hall. The staircase leading back up was obliterated; it lay in shards of splintered wood and nails, chunks of broken concrete sat on the wreckage like icebergs in a jagged sea. He looked up and, instead of the ceiling, stared into a chemical-orange sky. A plane flew overhead like a carrion bird surveying the damage, looking for scraps to dine on. Joe’s heart raced, and with every frantic beat his tooth throbbed.

He climbed the mass of splinters and concrete and found that his shop was gone, as were all of the buildings on the street, and every street that he could see through the now desolate landscape, barren like a salt desert. The macadam splintered and webbed like shattered glass, melted in the atomic blast and re-solidified in the sunless orange air.

“It finally happened,” he said, “The bomb, they actually dropped the bomb.”

He was shouting in the middle of the scorched road, the buildings lying dead around him in heaps like dried animal bones. He circled, panning the landscape, hoping wildly to find something, someone, anything familiar, anyone who might be alive. The wind howled, the only colors were the orange sky and the blackened earth. He sat in the middle of the cracked street and, with his chin cupped in his hands, Joe wept. With every heaving, sobbing gasp, his tooth pulsed fresh sheets of icy-sweet pain through his head.

* * *

Joe lay in the street a long while. He thought about his life, his father, his mother and his sister. He thought of Alice and how he should have married her when he had the chance. He thought about the Dodgers, no chance of their winning another pennant, their grand stadiums reduced to piles of rubble.

He thought about war, how they all thought that after Hitler it’d all be done with, over, never hear mention of war again, not after what the world had just gone through. Then he thought about Truman, and Stalin, and Mao. He thought of that fellow Oppenheimer and Einstein and their bombs.

He thought of that woman, the one who was so excited about her mail order floral eclipse glasses. He wondered if all the people of Chester were looking up into the sky when the bomb fell, if the mail order floral eclipse glasses stood any chance of optical protection from a thermonuclear blast. He didn’t think so. Time passed, and it seemed that Joe had run out of tears to weep. He did, come to think of it, feel extremely thirsty, as if he had actually leaked all of his bodily fluid out through his eyes. He stood, still cupping his chin, and walked off down the broken street. He walked like a man in a dream: he was moving forward, but the world seemed to lag behind, spinning backwards like a broken treadmill with each step he took.

He eventually came upon a row of stout brick buildings, all connected to one another through a series of stone facades. The roof of each was caved in, but miraculously the buildings stood. They looked out of place now, standing like stalwart guardians in a graveyard. The wind blew, a steady, lifeless sound that spun debris in the dead town. It picked up, sending dust into the air that choked Joe and blurred his sight. He shielded his eyes from the dust, and then something flew into his face and clung there like a wet paper towel. He ripped it free, and the wind died down.

The paper read: Closed for the eclipse. Will re-open tomorrow. It was the sign from Main Druggists. He looked back up at the row of short brick buildings and realized that the one in the center was the drugstore. He raced across the road, hopping over chunks of stone and concrete and burnt oaks and finally reached the blown-out opening that was once the shop’s window. He looked in and found only debris, piles of wood and stone and jagged metal from the caved-in roof. It was dark inside, and the air smelled of burnt plastic. He reached into his pocket and found the prescription from Dr. Barry, scribbled on a small piece of paper in barely legible script: 15mg morphine, one tablet every four hours as needed.

Joe climbed in through the blown out window and felt around in the dark, chemical-smelling store. Each step was a tempt of fate. He fell once and landed on a relatively harmless pile of bricks. He waded through the rubble and made his way to what remained of the druggist’s counter. He leapt up, ignoring the jolting pain from his tooth, and crossed the threshold behind the counter. There were shattered brown bottles that littered the floor, mingling with unknown and viscous liquids, dust and dirt. He found a shelf that somehow managed to stay upright, its contents hardly disturbed at all.

Joe didn’t know if his name would be on any of these pill bottles, but he didn’t think it mattered anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. There was only the death of this world and his toothache. He rummaged through the containers, reading through impossible drug names, searching, hoping, praying that he’d happen upon one that read morphine.

He shrieked. The bottle in his hand read; Donna Katz, 1324 Maple St. Chester, NY 15458. 10mg morphine. Take one pill every four hours as needed for pain. Contains 20 tablets.

His heart leaped in his chest, he dropped the paper from Dr. Barry among the leftover debris and unscrewed the cap from Donna Katz’s prescription bottle. He dumped six pills in his hand and swallowed them dry. He puckered from the impossibly bitter taste of the pills, but this was a small price to pay for peace.

Joe left Main Druggist’s with the bottle of morphine and sat on the remains of the concrete sidewalk out front. He let his long legs stretch out as far as he could and sat looking up at the orange sky, and another plane flew over. He opened the bottle of morphine and dumped six more pills into his left hand and swallowed them all in one dry gulp.

“This is how it all ends,” he said to nobody. The morphine was making its way through him now, and he no longer felt any pain in his tooth. As he looked at the barren, burnt landscape, he felt a pain far worse than anything; a sorrowful pain in his soul. He laid his head back on the charred brick building and closed his eyes. Joe fell asleep, and another plane flew over the dead town.