The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Enamel clxxxvii-ccxxi

Later, however, the Father of Teeth emerged noisily from beneath the floorboards of the death-chamber, splintering the parson's nethers and scaring the grieving relatives into fits, while the wheezing grey thing on the bed boggled in terminal terror.

"Are you an emissary of the Creator, come to bear away my spirit?" it asked.
"Not in the least," said the Father of Teeth.
"Then," wheezed the grey thing on the bed, "have you come to offer me unholy bargains, in order to prolong my life and corrupt my soul with worldly pleasures?"
"Far from it," said the Father of Teeth.
"But the shadows are gathering," wheezed the grey thing on the bed. "Where is the tunnel? I was informed that there would be a luminous tunnel, with all my most eminent forebears waiting to pay their respects." The Father of Teeth leaned over comfortingly and displayed a grinful of cavities in their abysmal profundity, but the grey thing on the bed did not seem greatly solaced.

The grieving relatives were mostly quiet by now, the majority having been carried off by heart attacks and cerebral accidents and the like, or suffocated under the parson; but one beefy nephew was still thumping and kicking with belligerent persistence. The Father of Teeth squatted and bit off something small but necessary, whereupon the noise was stilled.

However, the grey thing on the bed displayed no concomitant access of serenity. "If you cannot ease my passing nor prolong my life, you creature of unhallowed halitosis," it wheezed, "can you at least tell me something of its meaning?"
"That depends on who you ask," said the Father of Teeth; "to your employers you were no doubt an expendable resource and scheming peril, to your wife a meal ticket with some tedious fleshly urges, to your children an absent threat and punitive stranger, and to your government and your lawyers a useful dupe."
"That's all so subjective," wheezed the grey thing on the bed; "what of its ultimate meaning?"
"Meanings change," said the Father of Teeth, "just like manners and morals and monkeys. Your life has spanned a mere handful of decades during which you have effected nothing special in a civilisation which is in any case destined to collapse and leave to the memory of posterity only the material imperishability of what it threw away. If immortality is meaning, then the meaning of a used plastic bag is more ultimate than yours. Then again, in as much as bacteria have a purpose there is meaning in biodegradability."
"Monkeys?" wheezed the grey thing on the bed indignantly.
"The Creator of the universe insists on chronic changeability," said the Father of Teeth. "Placing the lust for Eternity into finite and temporary creatures was hardly the most tasteful of His jokes; but then He is a whimsical old bugger, and He never could make up His mind."
"But I have made all due arrangements for an airtight lead-lined coffin to await the resurrection of my flesh in a nuclear-proof bunker half a mile underground," wheezed the grey thing on the bed, and this information proved useful to the Father of Teeth when he passed that way again in a hurry some fifty-one thousand two hundred and seventeen years later, and remembered just in time to avoid banging his head on the reinforced titanium sepulchre.