There’s a point system at my orthodontist’s. The way it works is, you come in and get poked at or whatever, and then they hand you a slip of paper with all these boxes. The boxes are things like “Great Oral Hygiene” or “Appointment Between 9 and 3”. Each of them is worth 5 points, and if you fulfill one of them, you get a check in that box to indicate that you deserve that particular number of points. There’s one that says “Community Service” that’s worth 30 but I never actually get checks for that because I never tell them. It doesn’t really seem right. Imagine you die one day and you’re standing before the gates of heaven or whatever, and God comments on your wonderful service to the poor, to which you reply, “Oh that. Yeah I was hoping I’d get enough points for a 50 dollar visa gift card. Speaking of which, they never did give it to me, the bastards.”

So in a way, this check system is slowly destroying our society, one minty fresh set of braces at a time. You get your slip of paper at the end of the appointment and feel kind of bad that you don’t have the Great Oral Hygiene your dog knows you should have. But you have 5 checks! That’s one more than last time! And you hand that slip of paper in with the satisfaction that these hard-earned checks are building themselves into something great. It’s a long, tired road, at the end of which lies great riches in the form of 10 dollar Barnes and Noble gift cards or, if you’re really, really lucky, a pair of headphones. I don’t actually believe anyone has ever cashed in his check. Everybody’s a miser there, in dentistry or whatever you want to call it. You think you’ve got enough for a 50 dollar iTunes gift card, and you’re faced with a dilemma; do you spend it, or wait till you’ve got enough for 100? You only get braces once. I guess maybe in fifty years old men and women will be hobbling into the reception room, demanding with their last gasps the trinkets they spent their childhoods working towards. It’s terribly silly really, but I’ve always thought that when the world falls to pieces the only thing that remains will be the check system. I ought to know, because the world ended yesterday.
It was kind of unexpected. Hellfire rained on the world for five days straight. We all had a terrible time of it, and there wasn’t much of anything left by the time it had spent itself. The hellfire, that is. Anyhow, on the sixth day I went outside and found that everything was black and charred and all, and started walking because there wasn’t much else to do. I found a couple of people, but none of them interested me particularly. I kept at it for a while, and eventually I came to Chevy Chase. I didn’t recognize it as Chevy Chase when I first arrived, of course. The creepy clay policeman was gone. I realized it in the end, though, because half of the old people’s home was still there, so to test out my theory I went to 5550. I figured it wasn’t safe to use the elevators, because they always tell you to use the stairs in case of fire. I’ve always been terrified of elevators anyhow. Once at camp I got stuck on one with a bunch of my friends and we rang the button and nobody came. Everybody else thought it was absolutely hilarious, and one girl said “I remember I saw a movie where a bunch of people get stuck on an elevator like this, and one of them’s the devil…and they start getting killed off one by one.” The timing was terrible, and I threw a bit of a fit. We got out eventually. It turned out it was one of those old-timey elevators—the kind that has two doors—and the outside one wasn’t closed properly. So we managed to drag apart the second doors in the end, since we hadn’t actually left the floor we were on.
Anyway, I kept climbing up the stairs because the office is in room 320. I noted with a certain apprehension that half the building appeared to be missing; little pieces of brick and mortar plunged gleefully into the smoldering abyss below at regular intervals. It was all very unnerving. The stairs at one point looked like they were about to give up on life in general and join their brethren in the apocalyptic destruction. They didn’t though, so I kept going. I eventually made it to the third floor. It looked different, so I thought maybe room 320 had been destroyed by the meteors. I had a bit of a scare because that would have bulldozed my whole theory. It was still there though. There was bite taken out of the hallway between myself and room 320, so I had to get creative. It’s amazing the things you can think of in moments of emergency. I was pretty thirsty by the time I’d finished, but the water fountain wasn’t there anymore, and you needed one of those keys with the lego dangly accessories to be able to unlock the bathrooms. The door to the office was missing, along with some of the floral patterns. The copies of People magazine had miraculously survived the world’s end. It’s because the dentists encased them in little plastic booklets for when patients would read them in the waiting room.
I wasn’t really interested in the magazines. I was more interested in the receptionist’s desk. And sure enough, the desk was still there. Light fixtures had burnt out and electrical wires tangled in ways that did not look at all safe, and the large windows in front of the dentist chairs were empty, the chairs themselves all black and burned with little bits of stuffing hanging out. But the desk was as it had always been—the Plexi panel was unmarked and the wood un-singed. The monthly contest wasn’t there anymore; the month before, when I’d gotten my rubber bands replaced, the challenge was to guess the weight of a pumpkin crouched next to a wicker basket filled with estimations. They did this because it was almost Halloween. It sort of depended on the season—in the winter it was usually snow related, like how much floss did it take to make this snowflake, and the winner would get a pair of beats by Dr. Dre. Once I won I contest in which I had to match sets of teeth with the animals they belonged to. When they next saw me and told me excitedly that I had won a pair of beats and asked what color I would like them in, I thought they were talking about the vegetable, so I ended up with purple ones. The wicker basket was gone, the pumpkin half eaten. Other than that, though, the receptionist’s desk remained pretty much as I remembered it. Two of them were gone. The receptionists, I mean. The only one left was the black-haired one. She sat typing at a computer. The edge of it burst into flames, so I kind of sat there for a few moments, watching it. She didn’t look up because she was too busy typing. The fire extinguished itself after a bit, so I went over and leaned on the desk.
“I’ve got a lot of points,” I said. “I had five checks last time. Could I cash them in?”
She didn’t reply, just sort of kept staring at her computer. I looked over to see what was so interesting but it was just a bunch of cracks.
“Do I have enough for a Barnes and Noble Gift card?” I asked. She still didn’t reply, only this time she reached under her desk and rummaged a bit. There wasn’t anything there, I guess, because she came back up looking sympathetic. “Could you make an appointment for next week? We’ll have your card for you then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure. What time?”
“We don’t do appointments after five or on weekends.”
“Ok, sure. Could I come by Monday?”
“Of course. What time?”
“Can we do 10:30?”
“We sure can.” She typed a few things into her computer, then turned back to me. “It’s all set. 10:30 Monday.”
“Alright, cool. Thanks.”
“Any time.”
I forgot to come back Monday. I came later because I’d gotten lost since then. By the time I found the building again, there was no receptionist. There was, however, a bright green 30 dollar Barnes and Noble gift card, waiting at the desk.