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The old ambulance is missing its brakes again and Lorenzo, semi-pro street racer but also our driver, laughs from the front of the vehicle as if to reassure us that, well, at least we still have the steering wheel and we should be damn thankful for that.
"In one piece, please," Omaira quips. I feel even less safe in the back of the ambulance with Omaira, a hygienist, who braces herself against the portable dental chair and gives tiny yelps for every pothole that makes contact with a tire.
We continue inching along, before Lorenzo is able to force the brakes back in their socket and pronounce the ambulance fine. He tests the brakes again on the empty road. It's a small miracle that we haven't driven off the mountain. I'm in my eighth of twelve months to complete the yearlong obligatory social service known as "rural," where students enrolled in medicine, dentistry, nursing, and bacteriology serve rural communities after graduating. Our sites are chosen by lottery and negotiated through bribes. We work Monday through Friday; on the weekends, we go home and drink, or stay in the barracks and drink. On difficult days, like the one where we lost the brakes or when we descended the unpaved dirt roads of Yumbo in first gear, with Omaira vomiting out of the window, Lorenzo and I take the edge off by thrusting mechanically against each other.
Dentistry had interested me since I saw my grandfather without teeth. We'd just moved to the city, into my uncle's house, and my grandfather was playing basketball in the empty lot behind school with much younger men. He was elbowed in such a way that four teeth fell, twinkling on the cement. My grandfather hadn't motioned for a break from the game, hadn't been scared of the blood he spat. Instead, he picked up his four teeth and put them in his pocket. A decade later, after he moved in with us but before the lung cancer took him, I would study my grandfather's dentures when he left them in the bathroom. I ran my forefinger over each beautiful, polished stone, stark against the blue bathroom sink.
Over the months, I've developed a uniform and a routine; my barrack rises...