Lady Joker, Volume 1, Kaoru Takamura [best affordable ebook reader TXT] 📗

Hatano knew the answer. In the next moment, he automatically picked up the X-ray photo and held it up to the halogen lamp above his head, but this was all a pose, just a diversion from his momentary confusion. Before the procedure, he had meticulously examined where and at what millimeter he would drill a hole, measured the rubber stoppers on the cutting instruments, and confirmed the position of the canals.

“Owww . . .” The grimacing female patient let out a cloying complaint.

“Hang on a little longer.” Hatano responded in a brisk tone that was neither harsh nor kind, and prompted the patient to open her mouth again. Hatano would be forty-seven, but just as his body, sculpted into shape by more than twenty years of tennis, had not changed over the years, his manner toward patients remained exactly the same as the day he opened his dental practice. The impression he gave could be described as a gentle coldness and, peering from above the mask that covered half his face, his eyes hardly even paused on the patient’s face as his gaze darted back and forth between the patient’s chart and oral cavity. And the face that looked out from his mask showed no trace of a man who had recently lost his only son.

Hatano looked closely into the patient’s mouth. In the chamber of the molar from which he needed to remove the pulp, he had prepared a proper access with his dental drill. With twenty years of experience in dentistry, he had confidence in his drilling skills, and in fact, the problem was not with the size or shape of the opening. Perhaps the opening had offset the angle necessary for his reamer to find the proper glide path through the root canal, or he had made a simple mistake when calculating the working length. As he thought about this, his eyes fell on the instrument tray by his hand, and the No. 30 file he had just been using. The rubber stopper, which he thought he had placed firmly at a right angle when he first adjusted the working length, was now slanted diagonally.

In that instant—before he could even register his own shock at the sight—Hatano averted his eyes. He thought someone else might have seen him, but the female assistant working across from him was looking away, still holding the suction in the patient’s mouth. His other assistant, taking a break from sterilizing instruments, was busy grooming her nails. Hatano threw the file with the crooked rubber stopper into the sharps container and picked up a new one.

All he had to do was pass through the opening in the canal again. If he overfilled the canal, or pushed sealer beyond the apex, she might be in pain for a while, but as long as it did not cause any inflammation, there was nothing to do but leave it alone. If he had perforated the canal wall, he would have to repair this before he restored the tooth. Pondering what had happened with the self-reproach that always bubbled up inside him at a time like this, Hatano resumed filing and refocused his attention on the sensation at his fingertips.

An infant was crying in the waiting room. The man coughed again. The phone rang.

Once he had finally passed the No. 30 file through the opening, he stepped up to the next sized file, No. 40, and had just begun enlarging the root canal when the receptionist popped her head in from the other side of the partition. She looked as she often did when she was unhappy about something. “Telephone.”

“Who is it?”

“Someone named Nishimura.”

“Ask for the number, please.”

“He said he’ll wait.”

“Never mind. Just ask for his number.”

The receptionist retreated. Hatano exchanged the file for the reamer and began removing the pulp. Each time he pulled out the reamer, he wiped the dark red tissue that clung to the blade onto a piece of gauze.

Even now, despite the precise, mechanical movement of his fingers, Hatano noticed that he was a bit distracted by the immovable fog that had filled the space just behind his brow since the death of his son. The fog had formed into an indeterminate mass, so that he could no longer distinguish his despair from his doubts, and he felt as though only a tiny tremor could make it explode. And who is this Nishimura, anyway?

He finished cleaning and sterilizing the root canals, irrigating them with sodium hypochlorite. He called to his assistant to prepare the sealer, and inserted the gutta-percha into the canal before the temporary filling. Then he asked his assistant for the sealer but it did not arrive immediately. I told you to prepare it, he thought. Hatano put out his hand and waited three seconds. He took the ZOE cement that appeared on a glass slab, filled the pulp chamber with it, pushed it down, and, with the same hand, turned off the halogen lamp.

“We’ll see how it goes for a while. It’s just a temporary filling, so be careful when you chew. If you feel pain, give us a call.” As he spoke these words to the patient, Hatano was already washing his hands at the sink. The only thing on his mind was the two minutes he had lost because he had to redo the root canal preparation. He wiped his hands, and even while he was filling out the patient’s chart, he locked eyes with the receptionist who had popped in her head again through the partition.

“Doctor, telephone.”

“Switch it over.”

In the mere twenty seconds it took him to finish what he was writing on the patient’s chart and stand up, his next patient was already seated in the examination chair. With a quick glance at the fully occupied waiting room on the other side of the partition, Hatano retreated to his small break room and closed the door.

“Dr. Hatano?” A man’s voice addressed him through the receiver. “My name is Nishimura.”

“Nishimura who?”

“I’m with the BLL.”

What caught Hatano’s