Evan Hannon
He’s at a lunch date, and ready to perform. He and the girl sit together in the booth of a restaurant next to a tinted glass window, the claret beads of the curtain dangling beside him. He makes a point of leaning back in a casual way and meeting her eyes, shifting his focus from left eye to right. This is a subtle sign to tell her he’s listening, that he’s invested in her. The girl is tall, brunette, and wears the sort of tight dress that accents her body nicely, chest and slim stomach. She has a tattoo of a heartbeat across her forearm, but he knows better than to ask about that. Too personal, too pushy. He’s wearing blue khakis and a gray oxford shirt and tie. Both are shabby, but he has his white lab coat (was running late on a filling, forgot to take it off, he tells her), and it hides the frayed condition and faded color of his clothes. At the coat’s breast pocket is a name tag: Mark Matthews DDS. The coat also hides his body. He is wasting. The muscles of his neck and face are losing their precision and strength, and he has trouble lifting things above his head. Muscular dystrophy. His body is small, and without the coat, he would look like a naked flower, all stem, no petals.
“I went into dentistry because I wanted to help people. A lot of doctors say that, I know, but it’s true.”
“Do dentists help people?” A joke. She smiles as she says it. He smiles too.
“Of course we do. Imagine if all your teeth fell out. Have you ever had that dream? Everyone does. Of course, that’s not really about teeth. It’s about fear of achievement. People fear success. They don’t want to be their best selves.”
“You should have been a psychiatrist.” Teasing again. She isn’t uninterested.
“I actually thought about it.” He picks up his coffee, hovering one hand below to catch any falling drops before they mar his coat. “Some of my professors encouraged me in that direction, said I had an aptitude for it. But I knew what I wanted.” He makes a show of looking at the faux-Panerai, silver on the wrist. “I’ve got to get back to the office soon. Got a busy afternoon ahead of me.” He ends this thought with a winning smile. He practices smiles in the mirror. He’ll hold them for minutes at a time, testing and forcing his face to hold the expression without quivering, no wobbling lips or shaking cheeks. A knowing smile, a loving smile, a kind smile, an insincere smile. He could unload a magazine of smiles across this whole coffee shop, gun down every unsuspecting person with practiced charm.
He stands up, extends his hand to the girl. She has a faint blush. “It was nice to meet you,” he says. He asks if she’d like to get dinner the following night. That’s when he’ll fuck her.
“I had fun,” she says.
“Of course you did,” he says. Joking smile. “I’ll text you soon.”
His car is two blocks away from the coffee shop, in the Galleria’s parking garage. He walks back, using the reflection of the windows he passes to make sure she isn’t following. In the parking garage, he passes a family: father, mother, daughter. He gives them a disarming smile and says, “Good afternoon,” loud enough that his words echo off the cement. The little girl is holding her mother’s hand; little pigtails held in place by baby-pink hair ties. She stares at him as they pass. He gives her a second smile, a we-both-have-a-secret smile.
None of the girls will ever see his car, 2002 Mazda Protege, paint chipped and sun bleached. Coat hangers dangle from the grab handles and he slips off the lab coat, smooths it with a hand and hangs it up. A glance to either side, and he strips in the parking lot, off comes the Oxford, the tie, the blue khakis, replaced with a baggy gray T-shirt and torn jeans. The jeans are size thirty but still dwarf his small waist and he wraps a belt four notches deep to keep them from sliding down his hips.
An unattended car in Texas summer is an oven. Slumped in his seat, windows down, even on the highway where the traffic is a roar, he stares out at the mass without seeing any of it. Four phones glow beside the dashboard, cords twisting and tangling, each phone connected to an adapter to charge, each phone connected to a different account, a different job – rideshare, food delivery, courier. As he drives, he looks at himself in the rear-view, practicing his we-should-get-out-of-here-now smile.
A different jacket hides his body today, a black leather trucker jacket. He participates in a “Male Empowerment and Leadership” panel, sitting on a hard plastic chair at a long table of other men; corporate executive, TikTok influencer, tenured academic, even a pastor. Each has a name plate on the table. His nameplate reads “Mark Mathews – Marine and Life Coach.” When he is a dentist, Matthews has two Ts, when he is a veteran there is only one. Mathews is broader than Matthews, courtesy of the plastic shoulder pads beneath his shirt and which give him the frame of a stronger man. They are a new addition; before he wore a weight vest stylized to resemble a flak jacket. But the vest drew too much attention. Men kept asking for his weight limit, what intervals he followed while wearing it, and there was a perpetual risk that someone might realize the vest was stuffed with only cotton.
Each guest details the ways in which they, as a man, have been made to feel small, reduced to some germ of manhood rather than the real thing. A few are angry, a few reflective, but none of them bring anything real. He can see it in the faces of the audience; they look as if they’d only stepped into the lecture to get out of the sun. All men, men of all persuasions and colors, old and young. He gazes across them and then to the back of the hall, where one man stands against the door. This man wears the same style of lab coat as Mark Matthews, but the stranger is taller and his clothes look well kept, his shoes black and shiny. His face is in shadow.
When he finally gets the microphone, he stands up, surveys the crowd and gives them a cold smile, an I-have-a-plan-to-kill-everyone-in-this-room-if-I-have-to smile.
“My name’s Mark Mathews, and I served two tours of service in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
The audience shifts a little, wakes up. They want real heroism. He gives it to them. He tells them how his platoon came under fire, snipers positioned in the hills, how his Sergeant took a shot to the leg and was incapacitated. He tells them how he applied pressure to his Sergeant’s wound, how the blood soaked through the uniform, how his Sergeant gripped him by the collar and ordered him to take command, to do what needed to be done to save the lives of their fellow marines. He draws the audience close. They’re hungry and he feeds them, and because he feeds them, none of them think about his emaciated body hiding beneath the jacket.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “leadership is about more than giving orders and taking commands. It’s about life and death. Maybe that seems like an exaggeration,” he gives them a how-little-you-know smile, “but I’ve seen it firsthand. If you want to reach your potential, to become the best version of yourself, you’ve got to find it inside of yourself and do it. There’s always been a lot of talk about how progress is gradual. But I don’t buy that. There are leaders and there are followers, and if you’re a leader, you’ve got to step up and seize it. It’s as simple as that.”
After the talk finishes, some of the audience approaches the table to ask questions, to thank the speakers for their time. He’s pleased by the number who approach his end of the table. It makes the effort of smiling so much easier to bear. He hawks his classes. In the shrubland outside of Dallas, his expertise and experience can be distilled into a three-day test of endurance and will.
“The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible, to trust yourself more than anything else in the world. To do that, you need to become comfortable with pain,” he says.
He directs those interested to a PayPal account, down payment of 239 bucks. “It fills up quickly, so I’d register now if you’re really interested.” He gives them a most-of-you-won’t-cut-it smile. It’s the sort of smile that you can’t help but want to conquer. From out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees the stranger in the lab coat, but when he turns his head, there’s no one there.
That night he has a dream about his teeth falling out. He’s sitting in class and the teacher has called him to answer a question, a question that will decide whether he passes and gets his High School degree this time. He wants to answer, he tries to answer but his teeth just keep falling out, tumbling across his desk and rolling across the floor and out of the classroom, giggling all the while. He wants to chase them, but he’s afraid of where they’re going. He wakes up in a sweat.
“Was dental school difficult?”
He orders her more cocktails without asking if she wants them, and she drinks them without refusing. The room is loud, conversations slopping around the walls and they have to half-yell to hear one another. She’s wearing a blouse now, and he sees that she has more tattoos; a heart with a dagger through it below her throat, the virgin Mary, surrounded by flowers on her shoulder. He doesn’t like women with that many tattoos, but he’s already here and not about to let good work go to waste. She leans in when she speaks to him, the front of her shirt drooping so her cleavage is clearly visible and she doesn’t mind it.
“It was a lot of time,” he says. “But difficulty is relative. You decide your limits.” Her face is already red, and it flushes a deeper shade of crimson. “Do you think you’re the best version of yourself?” he asks her.
“I don’t know, she says.
“I do,” he says.
In bed, she’s languid and desperate to please. He stays beneath her, keeps his shirt on, doesn’t let her see his sunken chest. In the morning, he’s gone.
Another girl, another coffee shop. She is short, dark featured. Her septum piercing keeps catching his eye; she hadn’t had it in her pictures.
“That dream, about losing teeth? It’s about fear of achievement. People fear success. They don’t want to be their best selves.” He doesn’t like the way this girl acts. She doesn’t pay attention to him when he speaks. Her eyes keep wandering, ceiling, floor, past his shoulder. “Some people will never become their best selves,” he says. “They can’t do it.”
“How do baby teeth feel about rejection?” she asks.
He straightens himself, white lab coat pulling in. “What?”
“They fall out when the adult teeth are coming in, right? They probably see their replacements. Down through the ceiling, up through the floor. They know when they’re about to get kicked out. They’re just starter teeth.”
He gives her a you’re-an-idiot-but-I’m-too-polite-to-say-it smile. “I never thought about it like that,” he says. He reaches down, switches on the ringtone of the phone in his pocket. It will, no doubt, receive a notification to deliver someone’s groceries or meal, and he’ll excuse himself.
“Hello doctor,” says a voice.
He turns. A man is standing there, tall with brown hair parted down the middle. He’s dressed in cargo pants and a black turtleneck and a black leather trucker jacket. Mark Mathew’s jacket. The man smiles and his teeth are sharp and hard and white, almost canine. “Great to see you again,” the stranger says. He sticks out a hand and they shake. His hand is crushed like putty in the stranger’s grip.
“A pleasure,” he says and flashes a do-I-know-you smile. The Stranger smiles, too. The Stranger’s smile is a you-should-know-me smile. He knows it’s that kind of smile because he’s practiced that version, too; cheeks puffed out a little, lips parted. The Stranger knows the code of smiles.
“I’m sorry,” says the Stranger, and extends a hand to the girl. “My name’s Mark Mathews. No relation to Dr. Matthews here. Just one T.”
His stomach drops. The stranger is still smiling, teeth like steel.
The girl takes the stranger’s hand and smiles herself. It takes no code to understand that smile: this-afternoon-was-a-waste-until-you-showed-up.
His phone finally rings. He stands up, excuses himself and in his haste, he knocks over his coffee and it splashes across the coat. A dental emergency, immediate attention required. As he pushes out of the door, he sees in the reflection of the glass the stranger has taken the seat beside the girl. Somehow, in the glass, the stranger’s eyes find his own. The stranger is smiling but he doesn’t know what kind of smile it is.
He can’t get the coffee stain out of his lab coat. He watches it spin inside the machine with bleach and detergent, the only TV in the laundromat playing Pakistani news. This is the third time he’s washed the lab coat, but the stain only seems to grow darker. He holds up the wet coat. A woman sitting at the machine next to his points at the stain.
“You need to use vinegar and baking soda for that,” she says.
Reviews are coming in for his desert retreat. Except he never held the retreat. The men are supposed to pay their deposit and when they drive out to the given location, they find nothing and the PayPal email is deactivated, their money lost. But there are five-star reviews, shining testimonials. “Mark Mathews helped find the real me.” There are even pictures. The Stranger stands in the desert, dressed in fatigues shaking hands with men. His smile? I-can-fix-them.
He lays low for the next month, sticks to the gig economy grind. On the highway, he feels like a faceless piece of machinery. More driving, strength waning, body growing weaker. Halfway through June, he takes a food delivery job and then gets a rideshare job to the same location. Two birds, one trip. But it turns out, his passenger is the girl with the heartbeat tattoo. He keeps his face down as she gets into his car, trying to hide. She’s on the phone and gets into his car without noticing him.
“We had some difficulty at first, he was so closed off,” she says. “But he’s really opened up. It’s hard dating a dentist, you wouldn’t think it, but the rates of alcoholism are super high.”
The destination for the girl and for the food is a dentist’s office in Irving. As he pulls up, he reads the writing on the office window: Mark Matthews DDS. The girl gets out, giving him a quick “thanks,” as she leaves. He sits there, his heart pounding so hard it might shatter through his weak ribcage.
Pushing his way through the main door, he enters the office with a smile; I’m-not-scared-of-you. The bags of food are heavy and his arms quiver. A single receptionist sits behind a plastic screen at the front desk, dressed in pink nurse scrubs. The girl with the heartbeat tattoo is gone. The Stranger’s face stares out from a poster on the wall, strong arms crossed, flashing his hard, white teeth. He is smiling. I-am-in-control-here.
“Could you put those up here?” asks the receptionist. The Stranger is here. He can feel it. The Stranger waits for confrontation, sitting in his office chair, smiling. The smile weighs him down. He’s too weak to lift the bags to the counter, and he sets them on the floor and leaves without answering the receptionist. As he leaves the office, he gasps as if he’d held his breath the entire time.
In his dreams, his teeth roll away, giggling, and he sits there, mute and unable to respond. He knows where his teeth are going but he can’t follow. He’s too scared, and he sits at the desk, body degrading, toothless and weak. From the hallway, he hears laughter. The teacher gets up, goes to look and see who’s laughing. When she returns, she will inform him he’s being moved to a different classroom, a different school. The outline of the man who will take his desk can be seen through the wall, strong, successful and worthy. He knows this is what will happen when the teacher returns, but he sits there, waiting, unable to do anything about it.
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Evan Hannon was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska, and now lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife and twin children. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, EPOCH, Bat City Review, X-R-A-Y, and HAD.