Author Bio 

LEE ROZELLE

MANDIBULAR FIXATION

      
On the digital x-ray screen, my daughter’s skull was a bad traffic jam, a pileup in some crowded city where cars of ivory tailgated, rear-ended, pushed against one another, backed into each other, and edged in sideways from all directions, all trying to exit through narrow intersections of bone. Jagged, gapped lines of baby teeth crept forward as rows of large, serrated permanents squeezed through the gums from behind. Incisors emerged in crooked columns from the bottom of her eyeholes, down from the nasal septum, up from the chin and jaw, all coming and going nowhere. Her skull a jack-o-lantern carved by the devil himself.
       “Is this unusual, Peter?” I asked.
       “Not for around here,” chuckled the gaunt orthodontist.
       “Will there be pain?”
       Turning from the screen, Peter Szell grinned. Pointing at areas where the teeth seemed most knotted, he explained that this case was rare because not one row of permanent teeth was squeezing to get out, but two.
       Before I go further, I must admit that I’m a wimp when it comes to the oral cavity. The oral cavity of humans, that is. Slurping, drooling, licking, smacking ... they make me nauseated. A bit of mayonnaise on an old man’s lip or a drooling baby and I get vertigo. It takes every bit of strength to pucker on the rare and always public occasions that I am forced to kiss my wife. So as I stared up at the screen at my daughter’s twisted teeth, I could feel my knees buckle, the air in my lungs got coppery and a brownish haze floated in front of my eyes. I was passing out.
       “Are you prepared to lead?” Peter uttered as if asking himself a question.
       “What?” I stamped my loafered feet to shake off the dizziness.
       “I said are you up to your responsibility? As head of the household?”
       “Of course, Peter. Yes.”
       Peter explained that Ally would need braces to pull her front teeth aside so that the clusters from the back might push through. In years to come, Ally would need a second and perhaps third set of braces, a retainer, and a series of headgears consisting of wire and screws and rubber bands. The entire lower jaw would be stressed for years, as he would drag my daughter’s teeth bracket-by-bracket along the jawline. Gums and roots would rip open and bleed, teeth would be excised by the fistful. Her oral cavity, a web of raw nerves, would be torn many times before her smile would match those of her private school friends. He said it just had to be done.
       “Guatemala?”
       In a half-whispering monotone, Peter said something about Guatemala. He was an elder in our church, and running makeshift dental clinics on Latin American mission trips was his thing.
       “You should come with us again,” he said as he licked his dry lips. “It’s been a long time.”
       “I’d just be in the way,” I uttered, short of breath.
       “Think about it, deacon.”
       With a series of well-practiced gestures, he maneuvered me from the examination room into the hall. I glanced for a moment at his hallway lined with photographs of our church members on missionary trips. I knew that I was in a few of those photographs. I didn’t look.

At home, my wife’s face stiffened when I told her about Ally’s visit to the orthodontist. Thumbing through the mail, Rachel dropped breast cancer donation requests and credit card offers into the trash one by one.
       “Peter asked me to go back to Guatemala,” I said.
       “Oh?”
       “Of course, I can’t go.”
       “Oh.” Her face darkened.
       “Don’t be so disappointed.”
       “Guess you know,” she glared, “about Leila.”
       “Leila?”
       “Leila. Leila your ex.”
       “No.”
       “No?” She arched an eyebrow.
       “No.” I stared down at envelopes and uneaten egg yolk in the trash.
       “Last night she died.”
       “What are you…?”
       “She drowned.”
       “God, what happened?” I staggered backward to a chair.
       “Bridge was wet. They say she just flipped her car off the Tallapoochee Bridge.”
       “Oh, my God. Leila.”
       “They say the car went down instantly, and you know how deep it is.”
       “Leila…”
       “But here’s the thing. When they pulled her car out of the creek, only some of her body was found.”
       “Some?”
       “Just the skin and hair. Most of her, you know, her epidermis was right there in the seatbelt, still wearing her clothes, but her skeleton and organs were not there. I’ve been a doctor for ten years and I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
       “Can we pray?”
       I took a knee.

That night I was nauseated, my eardrums buzzing, the wife’s ugly casserole like wormy knots in my stomach. In the dream my wife ran into the office screaming that our daughter had been taken by kidnappers—Mexicans! Illegal Aliens! she howled—but I was on the treadmill running hard with the incline set at 10. I had thirty seconds left on the blinking machine and needed to finish my workout. She hit and kicked at me during my cool down, slapping and screaming, striking my sweaty body with what looked like that repugnant casserole running from her upturned nose. Her face ballooned in maternal terror as she screamed for me to go “save our daughter.” I felt the urge to raise my hand, to slap her disappointed face, but instead I apologized, reassured her, took charge, fulfilling my abhorrent responsibilities as head of the household.
       Then I was all alone. It was pitch black and I found myself stumbling in tight yoga pants through an abandoned building that had this reek of burnt oil and rotten onions. The stark odor of human grease, unwashed clothes, and thick black flies spiraled upward in a confusion of staircases as I ran in the direction of Ally’s screams. Black garbage bags of slippery half-eaten food blocked me as I gaped into each rotten door up and down the poorly-lighted hallways, shuffling around like some lost rector from one doorway to another as roaches skittered in black masses along the ceiling. Ally cried for me from upstairs, under the floor, and around the far corner.
       Turning, backtracking, I found her alone in a dirty room sitting on a narrow bed, and when I reached out to touch her, I saw that something was wrong. My daughter’s eyes were smiling but her mouth was pulled wide, so ugly, a jumble of teeth jutting every which away from her mouth like yellowed dominoes and nails, lips crusted and cracked, tiny metal wires tied in thick knots from mouth to hands and eyes, a tongue of chewed rubber straps. I pulled at the wires that coiled from her teeth and put errant elastics and brackets into my own mouth. Bugs poured like black paint down the walls.
       “Daddy, you did thith,” she said.

Tomorrow, I woke with startled eyes. Tomorrow I’ll call the elders.

Falling back into twitchy sleep, dreaming about a street corner south of the border, my cupped hands were full of little packs of chiclet gum the wetback babies used to sell to keep from going hungry. Wormy chickens hung half de-feathered in the park, the metallic smell of hog blood and grilled organ meat wafting through the streets. Stark raw-boned men squatted in front of a concrete wall, plastic garbage turning end-over-end alongside a broken sidewalk.
       Peter Szell, our dentist, was yelling at me from the other side of the zocalo as Pastor Chuck stood on top of a car pointing at what looked like alien ships on the horizon. Pastor Chuck was wearing a wooden Aztec mask, and Peter’s arms were quivering and shaking, his legs still, his hair aluminum. The dead girl, Leila, rode a bicycle right between us, bouncing rings of red hair, a face filled with flowers and dense braces. Wearing a yellow sun dress, she passed by the mob of Mexican men clustered outside a store choked with trinkets. In no time they were in my face trying to tell me something, sell me something, pointing at the sky, shouting, fists pumping, and opened palms waving crooked Mayan calendars. Stumbling backward, tripping, righting myself, I could see desert hills in the distance and hear the buzz of their foreign voices. In the distance, street dogs stood on the hood of my Tesla and howled. The spaceships were coming closer.
       Staggering into the alley, I saw ceremonial masks line the dust-caked shop windows and in them, eyes. I knelt under a grid of wrestling posters pasted to the whitewashed wall. I knew these men, the men making muscles in shiny masks. Lucha libre! Espectacular! Santo, Dr. Wagner, Rayo de Jalisco. The wrestlers glued to the wall recognized me, beckoned me down into the alley, down into the dark with my pastor and dentist who walked beside me.

I woke again. My wife was curled up facing the wall dead to the fucking world as always. Darkness squeezed and luxury blankets constrained my sweat-soaked body. Someone was standing in the hallway. Maybe. When I got up and walked in the dark toward Ally’s room, I thought I heard crying.
       “Baby?” I said through the door and knocked. “You OK?”
       “Daddy?”
       I opened the door. From the blade of yellow hall light, I could see Ally sitting up in the bed in her robe, her arms clutching her knees, her face red and swollen.
       “Sweetie,” I leaned down to look. “What’s the matter?”
       “My mouth,” she said and rubbed her cheeks. “It hurth.”
       “Let me see, honey.”
       Ally opened her mouth and my throat tightened. The room went brown. Teeth like thorns and devil horns stuck through my daughter’s gums in tight rings around her baby teeth. Pastor Chuck had said about the devil, how the devil can root himself inside. I offered a reassuring grin. I said things a dad should say. I gave her Vicodin.

Brown clouds from the paper plant crowded Lake Guin on the day my daughter got her braces. From the side kitchen window, I watched a skinny Hispanic man with a drained face, clearly the runt of the landscaping litter, as he clipped the long privets that ran on each side of my rock driveway. Sporting earbuds and wearing a sleeveless shirt, the man stooped over the clippers, his mind elsewhere. He was making the hedges all crooked. Putting a bathrobe over my pajamas, I walked out the door down the hill to where the young man clipped. I took a knee and cocked my head toward the hedge. The boy’s neck tightened and he looked over his shoulder at another man at the edge of the road working a weed eater. The men exchanged blank stares.
       “Morning,” I said sporting a stiff, wealthy grin.
       The boy pulled out his earbuds and lifted his chin.
       “Can I see those clippers for a second?”
       Glancing over his shoulder again, he handed them to me and stepped back. With care, I clipped across the hedge, forward and back, forward and back. After about a minute, the section I had worked on was right, and I moved my hand over the perfectly leveled space.
       “That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. A couple of unsightly sprigs bulged up just out of my reach, so I leaned down and clipped a bit more. “That’s what I’m…” My knees were wet with dew, my face sweating. I wanted to show him.
       Snip, snip, snip.
       Snip, snip, snip. I showed him.
       Snip, snip, snip. I showed him.

“Dad?”
       Ally stood at the door, her voice abrasive. I had been out in the yard for over an hour. She looked different, with an older girl’s slouch, and somehow more developed. She was grinning down at me, grinning at me with those profane teeth. It felt as if she wanted to embarrass me, parade her corrupted mouth in front of the hired help and the whole gated community. Above me, the boy with the earbuds cringed at her hideous maw and turned from me with an uncomfortable clearing of his throat. Beaming at no one with my best church face, sharp clippers in my hand, I stood and glared at the front door. Ally disappeared back into the house.
      ***

The surgical suite was an open bay with low, angled ceilings and stark lights. Five dentist’s chairs jutted from the room’s center in the shape of a star, five outstretched children with heads together like Siamese quintuplets, all of them with lip and cheek retractors in their opened mouths that pulled the bottoms of their faces down into distorted gawps. All those little teeth and eyes in the starkness, and my Ally one of those stretch-faced children. After seeing what they were doing to one fat-faced boy with a pair of forceps, I decided to hide in the bathroom.
       Sitting on the tile floor, I dug into my jacket pocket and pulled out my Santo wrestling mask. Given to me by the elders as a gift, my vestment they called it, my mask was silver and smooth to the touch. When I put it on, I could feel God’s power and forget those little mouths laid bare, pink gums and stretched lips open to Peter’s stainless-steel tools laid out in a line. Spotlights turned the children’s faces a ghoulish yellow while scurrying young dental assistants with flawless smiles and rubber tubes sucked drool from gaping mouths attaching brackets and twisting strands of wire. The children’s small bodies lay flat, their eyes darting around like those of confused spider monkeys. Peter flitted from patient-to-patient pulling on arch wires, testing brackets, and leaning into his pincers. Looking into the bathroom mirror with my mask on, I took off my shirt and made a few flabby muscle poses, and then removed the mask and stuffed it into my pants. When I walked back to the bay, I saw that Ally’s expectant eyes were trained on me.

“You look sick,” Peter gleamed after the procedure.
       “It’s messed up,” I said. “What you do.”
       “These children ... they’re my flock,” his eyes glittered, “as are you.”
       I walked into the hallway and scanned the framed photos for a glimpse of myself and the woman who had just drowned. Jowly, sunburned, and dressed in extra-large sweaty T-shirts, the missionaries in the pictures looked out of place in all that sunshine. There was Pastor Chuck, a face of grooved wood and cobalt eyes that sucked out the sky. There was Peter Szell, detached and bony with something rotten in his head. And there, between them, was Leila. My Leila. My dead, beautiful Leila. The girl I should have let rescue me when I had the chance. Memories of the elders in a circle wearing tight masks flowed into my mind like lustral water.
       “I can’t concentrate,” I said to Peter, “even in church. I keep thinking about her…” “When’s the last time you’ve had your teeth checked?” Peter asked as he leaned in, his face a sharp, yellow incisor.
       “Get away,” I whimpered as I covered my mouth and nose like a terrified child.
       Turning in the hallway, I righted one of the well-polished wooden frames. It took me a while, but I found the photo I sought around a dark corner on the top row. Leila and I stood together at the edge of a crowd of haggard mission workers under a squat old mango tree. Most of the sweaty faces in the picture looked sunburned and grim, ready to get back to air-conditioned Bama, but Leila and I were smiling. Leila was always giggling and making off-the-wall comments that nobody got. She played the guitar beautifully and had the greenest eyes… People at church said she was “outspoken,” which meant she’d best keep her metal mouth shut. Our slender bodies and braces matched. She adored me and wrote me sprawling letters.
       But when it came down to it, Leila just wasn’t right. Pastor Chuck explained that Leila was the type of girl you could play stink finger with at camp, not present to father across the bay with his state senator friends and seedy TV preachers. That she was not a good match for mother with her cut glass and shredded Pilates trainers and her tight-knit prayer circles. Leila just wouldn’t have made the cut, he explained. Especially not after what happened to her.
       You don’t just go and get engaged to a girl who’s been kidnapped and raped by Guatemalans. You don’t tell the fathers, senators, TV preachers, mothers, and Pilates trainers that men in dirty wrestling masks had kept her for hours and made her do degrading things, removing her wisdom teeth with a set of dirty pliers, manipulating her body with rudimentary 3D printers. No, I could never have had a child with someone like that.

That night Rachel was on call. Just after dinner, she had to perform a facelift. As Ally took her bath, I turned on the porch lights and stared at the row of privets that dropped into the darkness down the hillside. The space in the privet that I had done, the part that I had clipped myself, perfectly, to show the landscapers, now looked to me as jagged as my kid’s mouth. I walked around the house staring out at the tainted water of Lake Guin below us with images of Leila clouding my mind.
       “Daddy, will you read to me?” Ally stuck her shining choppers out of the patio door in her pajamas.
       “No.” I rubbed my temples.

As I squirmed in tortured sleep, I heard a pleading scream. It sounded like Leila. I felt the presence of the elders, the secret world of the deacons, of the Gospel, and of our apostolic mission. I covered my ears with a pillow but heard another scream. Now awake again, I realized that it was Ally. I sat up in the empty bed, petrified to go to her, and as I listened through the wall, down the corridor, I heard not crying but giggling. I clamped my eyes shut, put the pillow over my face, and wormed in gutters of sleep until the girlish laughter stopped. Finally, when the house was silent, I put on my robe and tiptoed to Ally’s bedroom. Opening the door just a sliver, I saw that Ally was sitting up in bed, alone.
       “Ally?” I said. “I thought I heard someone.”
       “You’re supposed to knock.”
       I closed the door and tapped with my knuckles.
       “What do you want?” her high voice fouled the air.
       “I thought something was wrong,” I said through the door.
       “My teeth are growing everywhere, Daddy.”
       “Do you want me to look?”
       “No,” she shuddered. “Get out.”
       I went down the hall and into the laundry room, got the hedge clippers, and slid on my Santo wrestling mask. Pastor Chuck says to live a Godly life, fathers must accept their responsibility as leaders. Fathers must make hard calls. Fathers must stand firm. Holding the clippers behind my back in the Santo mask, I went to her door and tapped again. When she didn’t answer, I opened the door just a crack. Lying flat as a board under the covers, she appeared to be asleep. I tiptoed closer and could see that her eyes were clamped and quivering, her mouth pinched tight. She was faking sleep. Lying to her father. I shook her, but she remained as stiff as a corpse.

The next morning, as our family sat down to a rushed breakfast, Ally wiggled the teeth that had not been captured by her braces, the pancakes and fruit on her plate left untouched. I tried not to watch. Cutting into an undercooked egg, I could hear Ally slurping her unwashed hands in her mouth. The smacking sounds made my stomach twist.
       “Please stop,” I said as I stared out at the lake.
       Ally rolled her eyes at me and continued to twist and pull her teeth making that revolting sound. Rachel sucked at her greens smoothie and checked the time as I fingered the clippers in my robe pocket. Taking a drink of cold coffee, I looked into my daughter’s enflamed face, at the tiny lines of blood on her fingers as she tugged at her deranged teeth and made sounds that reminded me of livestock.
       Jesus, the smacking.
       Jesus, all those teeth.
       As I felt chunks of egg coming up in my throat, she pulled a tooth from her bloody gum.
       “Get it away from the table,” I said, waving my arms. “Put it under a pillow.”
       She showed the bloodstained tooth to her mother as if it were a misshapen jewel, and then with Leila’s mischievous grin she turned and held it up to me.
       “Look at it, daddy.” Her snaggled face rancid. “Look.”
       “Get it out of my face!” I shoved her backward with both hands. I didn’t push her hard, just enough to get her away from me, but her head snapped back with a loud pop as she fell and hit the tile floor. More shocked than hurt, I’m sure, she crawled over to her mother screaming like she’d done when she was a filthy screaming baby. Clasping our daughter, Rachel looked at me not saying a word, but that crushing look, that vicious frown I had grown so used to, made crusty makeup craters around her scowling mouth.
       Pathetic, her face said. Unemployed, it said.
       “Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection!” I brayed and stood with outstretched arms. Ally and Rachel turned to look at each other for a moment with wide eyes, and then they both burst into laughter.

I woke early. No dreams, thank the Lord. Putting on my robe, I went downstairs into my dusty corner office and locked the door behind me. Fumbling around in my locked file cabinet, the one I’ve had since I was an Omega Lam, I found the thick white envelope I had hidden from myself for so long. But now I needed to look at it. I had to. I had been called to bear witness on this great getting up morning. Inside, there were dozens of pictures of Leila, so young, so beautiful, in dresses and bikinis, some half-naked, and me never more alive, our braces shining in the sun. Gently I slid out the stack of letters held together with rubber bands. Leila’s love notes held traces of feeling that I couldn’t fathom anymore. The water from my eyes stained the browning paper. It had taken a lot of moral strength to do what the elders had done to Leila. What we had been chosen to do.
       I’ll go burn these letters in the barbecue pit out back because the elders are soon to arrive. After the ordination, I will be a deacon, and I will see the temple’s inner chamber. I will learn the incantations and rituals of our order. Chokeslam. Cutter. Piledriver. DDT. I will master them all. I could still hear Ally and Rachel bumping around upstairs and hoped they were not in too much pain. After burning these letters, after prayer and hand washing, we too will put on our masks and go upstairs for fellowship, and after the liturgy, we will administer to the women. Pastor Chuck and the elders will take my women and conduct the procedure, the ordination, the operation. Call it what you want. Cast stones if you want. It is how it is done. How it has always  been done. It is prophecy.

                  Father accept this offering from your whole family and from the one you have chosen.