De Selby Evolution

It was the first handshake that told me we were in De Selby territory. The dentist held out his wrist to me, as we do in bike repair shops. Only a bike repairman extends the wrist because his hand is covered in black grease, and Dr. Bellaiche’s were in green gloves.

The purpose of our little get-together was to extract a cracked eyetooth and replace it with an implant. I expected drilling, discomfort, time spent staring up at a bright light. I hadn’t anticipated such great strides forward on the path outlined for us by De Selby so many years ago.

I was aware I would leave with new substances filling new hollows in my body: metal, resin, fiberglass, even gutta-percha. But the fully realized De Selby moment came when the stalk for the implant was rooted, and the dentist screwed the crown on it: twist, twist, twist, and a last hard half-twist.

We mammals, unlike our friends the snails and shellfish, don’t have a lot of body parts with a spiral structure. Hard ones, at least (the labyrinth of the ear forming a semi-counterexample). This must have to do with the medium we spend most of our time in, the air, which is more easily parted than wet sand. The combatant creatures with twisted horns, like the gazelles and narwhals, are the other counterexample, and I don’t know whether the torsade is there for piercing effectively or for reinforcement.

So the tapping of a screw course into my upper jaw and the movement of a bolt-shaped object up it confirmed that I am conclusively on the way to a merger of man and bicycle. What sort of part could it be, the torsaded stem, if it had to serve as unit of human and cycle biomechanics simultaneously? I thought that as we have 32 teeth, and 32 spokes is a good number for a wheel (though less stout than a 36-spoke cross-laced), then today’s centaurification must have begun with a spoke, as good a place as any.

The repair was over. I rose to my feet, said thank you and staggered home. If you see me falling to the ground after abruptly jerking my head to the left or right, you’ll know that the transmutation is advancing.