Word: mouthings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...patient opened his mouth, he thought of taking off his glasses to avoid looking at the steel glint in the dentist's eyes. But before he could, the rapid-fire, machine-gun-bullet orgasms of pain were exploding in his jaw. Jab! Jab! Jab! The patient jammed his eyes shut. His whole body was tight, as time after time he felt the needle piercing deep into his gums, driving its payload of novocaine into his bloodstream. "Just relax," he heard the nurse saying. The injections were done. He slumped back into the chair...
...worst is over," the patient said confidently to himself, feeling the deadening novocaine take control of the right side of his mouth. He had a few minutes to think, and looked past the dreary green window curtains out at the drab, decaying, worn brick roofs of Cambridge buildings. "Soon I will be back out there," the patient thought to himself, "where there are real battles to fight, instead of the false battles in this etherized hell." With that though, he forgave his fear, and thought of women, and of whiskey...
...worst was not over. The dentist returned, and the patient, having taken off his glasses, could only see him dimly. "How does your mouth feel now?" the dentist asked matter-of-factly. Then without waiting for the patient's reply, he took a long dull instrument from his cabinet and, with it, gently pocked the patient's reply, he took a long dull instrument from his cabinet and, with it, gently pocked the patient's upper tooth. Feeling nothing, the patient relaxed and then, in an instant, realized the dentist was pushing harder and harder at the tooth...
...more," the patient wanted to shout. "There is only one more wisdom tooth left in my mouth, and it will be gone in a minute, and I'll be free." But even as he thought these thoughts, the patient felt the dentist begin to push at the last tooth. Harder and harder the dentist pushed, as he had pushed before. Only this time something was wrong. The tooth did not crack. "Jesus!" the patient screamed in his mind. "Jesus, make it crack. For the love of God and Norman Mailer and all the greasy hamburgers eaten in all the dirty...
...they happen because they accept everything that happens. They even come to beg for defeat when it becomes clear that influencing cause and effect, indeed determining the course of their own lives, is for them impossible. Mother Night opens with the voice of Vonnegut coming at us through the mouth of a Nazi war criminal sitting in an Israeli prison awaiting trial. At the end of the book he does himself in when he suddenly finds he has the evidence to acquit himself...