Once he realized the voices weren’t coming through the vent but from under the door, what he heard changed: the two voices weren’t conspiring, they were being intimate.  He had already imagined the woman sitting at her desk, the man on it, but now their hands were about to touch, to result in sudden silence — when, all at once, a drill bored into his diseased molar.  He felt himself tense up into a body fist.  Why had the sound of a metal drill on enamel not yet been banned! — and he felt his mind turn back to imagining that the hands had somehow touched by now and maybe the desk had become for the man and woman their forest floor.  Their bodies were so deeply entwined into an almost ball that he could not tell whose feet were whose.  If asked, he couldn’t have identified the man separate from the woman.  They had merged and seemed unable to separate.  He had to do something.  How could they continue to love each other if the other was not separate? He had to warn them, and then all went blank…till he came to, with the dental assistant — the very woman he had imagined at the desk — wiping around his mouth and letting go his hand.  Years later, she reminded him that the first thing he did when the anesthesia wore off was ask her, How’d you do it?  He had no recall of that moment, but, upon hearing those words from her, the story just told leading up to those words came to him as if it might have been his own.