The Collector
By Marie Avis
Breaking news: New forensic evidence has emerged in the yesterday’s murder of Jeffrey Lewis in West Philadelphia’s Clark Park. An anonymous claims a tooth was found in the vicinity of Mr. Lewis’s body. Anyone with information about the incident is encouraged to contact the PPD.
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Bianca Zahn’s propensity for collecting was probably due to a combination of genetics, circumstances, and nominative determinism. Her father, Lukas, was an engineer who had come to the University of Pennsylvania from a small town outside of Munich as a foreign exchange student during his junior third year of university, with plans to return home after one semester. Due to his anticipated short stay and baggage space limitations, he only brought one of his twelve beer steins. These plans to return to Germany were abandoned soon after he met Carla, Bianca’s mother. Carla was studying philosophy and fine arts, and they first crossed paths at the library. Lukas picked up Carla’s student ID card, which has fallen out of her back pocket while she was talking to a sorority sister. It was love at first sight. As far as Lukas knew, his brother in Munich still had the rest of his steins.
Ten years after that fateful morning, when Carla’s grandmother died from esophageal cancer, Carla inherited her collection of Venetian Carnivale masks. They had been lovingly wrapped in silk scarves and carefully placed in a trunk when her grandparents left Italy to join her great uncle in South Philadelphia in the 1940s. Carla immediately unpacked them and hung them on the living room wall of her family’s Queen Village row house. Bianca was only three at the time but she was more fascinated than horrified by the bird-like faces. Lukas referred to them as “the plague doctors,” but he loved Carla enough to tolerate their beaky gazes.
Like many young children, Bianca loved picking things up off the ground. She reached for feathers, dropped earrings, and even the occasional chicken bone. No single category of item struck her fancy until she lost her first tooth biting into an apple slice during snack time in Mrs. Harrington’s kindergarten class. She spit the jagged piece of apple out onto her desk and pried her tooth from the grainy white flesh. It was a perfect little piece of bone—a moment ago part of her mouth, and now a beautiful glistening pearl in her hand. Her best friend Stella screamed, and her classmates crowded around her desk to look at it. No one else had lost a tooth yet.
“You have to save it,” Stella said. “If you put it under your pillow tonight, the tooth fairy will come and take it and give you money. Then you can buy candy.” Stella spoke with the worldly confidence only a 5-year-old with an older sister could possess. As much as Bianca liked candy, there was no chance she was parting with this magnificent tooth.
When Lukas came to pick her up, she ran out the door of her school into his arms, as usual. “I lost a tooth today!” she exclaimed, sticking her pink tongue through the gap where her right incisor used to be. “Stella said I have to leave it under my pillow for the fairy to come buy it from me, but I don’t want to. It’s my tooth and I want to keep it!”
“Well, I have good news for you then,” Lukas replied. “There’s a German tooth fairy named Zahnfee, and she will leave you enough money for a pack of Skittles, and leave your tooth behind.”
“Zahn-fee?” Bianca said quizzically. “Like our name?”
Lukas laughed, “Yes, my dear, your last name means ‘tooth’ in German!”
“Cool!” Bianca crouched to look at a rock in one of the streetside tree planters, making sure the envelope with her tooth didn’t slip out of her skirt pocket.
“Guess who lost her first tooth!” Lukas boasted as he flung open the front door. Carla, walking around in a wrap dress and stockinged feet, glared at him. She pointed to her phone and mouthed “client” and Lukas and Bianca snickered conspiratorially and went to the kitchen for a snack.
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For many years, all of her baby teeth sat in the deepest compartment of her Little Mermaid jewelry box, largely forgotten, until she had the opportunity to acquire one that hadn’t grown in her own body. It was October of her junior year of high school and the leaves on the trees had just started to change colors. She was at a punk show on South Street with some friends from school, and they had worked their way up to the front of the crowd, a few rows back from the stage. A mosh pit broke out in the space next to them. Just as the screaming chorus was mounting a crescendo, one of the most enthusiastic moshers caught an accidental bracelet spike to the left canine, and all of a sudden there was blood pouring from his mouth, blending with the sweat soaking his threadbare black t-shirt. He didn’t seem like he was in any pain, he just continued dancing and grinning and splattering blood around the crowd.
His tiny tooth, slightly yellowed from 15 years of smoking, lay on the grimy floor. Bianca was drawn to it as if there was a halo surrounding it. “Take it,” a force within her urged. In one fluid motion, she crouched, darted her arm out between the stomping feet, and had the stranger’s jagged tooth in the pocket of her skintight black jeans before anyone noticed her. As she stood up again, one of her friends grabbed her shoulder, then held her hands and started leaping in place. In the contemplative space created by a room of strangers pulsing and screaming to the same beat, Bianca considered what she had just done and why. She had hit a blunt that was passed to her while they were waiting on line to get into the venue, but she actually didn’t even feel high anymore. In fact, the “take it” was the most uncomplicated, clear desire she could ever remember having. It was illogical. The closest thing she could liken it to was a memoir she had read about someone with OCD—the feeling of “I MUST do this thing or something bad will happen”—but she had never felt compelled to do anything else.
When she snuck into her bedroom that night, reeking of stale cigarettes and strangers’ sweat, she carefully placed the tooth in a mini plastic bag she hadn’t bothered to throw away after taking the Xanax it contained. She placed the bag in the back of her sock drawer. It seemed important to keep this stranger’s tooth separate from her baby teeth. Noting that it was still ten minutes before her curfew and congratulating herself on being such a responsible daughter, she peeled off her disgusting clothes, left them in a pile on her bedroom floor, and accidently woke her parents by taking a long and steaming shower.
The following spring, her biology class took a field trip to the Mutter Museum, but she was slightly disappointed to discover their collection only contained loose beaver teeth (which, unsurprisingly, have evolved to look nothing like human teeth) and full mandibles. She did enjoy the display of foreign bodies removed from urethras through, thinking about how weird some people were. The tooth stayed in her drawer, waiting to be joined by other acquisitions.
