The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  “Everyone’s lost someone,” he said, hoping that his remark would kill the conversation. He turned to look away at a group of teenagers sitting down at a table. One of them was oblivious to how uncool piercings were these days. But then again, how would Samuel know what was cool?

  “I’m an actress,” the woman said.

  Of course you are, he thought. You’re an actress when you get liquored up or forget your meds. Samuel was no longer feeling safe.

  “I was in a movie with Chuck Norris.”

  Listen to this bullshit.

  “My dad organized it. That is, if I hadn’t died.”

  “I see,” Samuel said and gripped his coffee cup tighter. The woman’s confusion made him laugh, but then he remembered the discounted tenderloin in his dad’s fridge. Everything was so unreasonable. This life wasn’t easy on anyone. Why should he laugh at this sad, insane woman? She was driftwood, and the waves had tossed her onto the same shore where he already lay. There was no need to pretend he was better than anyone else.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, looking at the woman. She was a pretty woman, a real person. Nothing was forcing him to do this. He could get up anytime. His car was outside, the keys in his pocket.

  The woman was delighted by the attention. Her shoulders shot up. A charming smile from days long gone spread across her face.

  “Video Tape,” the woman said quietly.

  Samuel stared into her light-green eyes. One of the eyes looked past him.

  “Excuse me?” he blurted.

  “Video Tape.”

  The woman was absolutely ecstatic that Samuel had asked her. She looked like an employee who’d gotten a promotion and then realized she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone yet.

  Samuel looked intently into her eyes, demanding to make some sort of sense of this conversation. But no. Doll eyes stared back at him.

  He chuckled. “Nobody’s called Video Tape,” he said calmly.

  A trickle of sweat tickled his back.

  “My name is Video Tape.”

  They kept facing each other. Her immobility was distressing. It was sick. Samuel was suddenly certain that something extremely important had happened while he wasn’t paying attention. As if he’d nodded off and it had snowed in the meantime. Someone had been observing him. His dad’s death and the invisible victim of his hit-and-run. This was sick as hell. Who would do this to him? Yet the sliding doors at the gas station kept on moving back and forth, letting people in and out. Customers kept on chatting behind him. Everything appeared normal.

  “What do you mean by that?” Samuel asked, clutching his coffee cup.

  The woman smiled and watched him with her doll eyes. “This,” she said.

  There was no gesture, no indication of what she was talking about. Her light-green plastic eyes stared at Samuel, gray hair here and there among the black crow’s nest.

  “And by ‘this’ you mean . . . ?” Samuel asked, although his mouth had gone dry.

  I’ll show you the w—

  He should’ve kept on driving.

  “Well . . .” The woman pulled something out of her pocket. It got stuck in the fabric of her coat before it came loose. She shoved the object in her mouth before Samuel got a glimpse of it. Her jaws began their work.

  “Yes?” Samuel said. He was suddenly afraid he might cry again. Maybe because of his dad, or Julia, or because he was just so damned exhausted.

  The woman opened her mouth.

  It brimmed with blood.

  Samuel looked away.

  One of the teens was sitting on the table, an earbud in one ear. He was gabbing away while the others listened to him. His friend was tapping a rhythm on the table. Samuel turned back to the woman.

  He saw a tiny fish in her mouth; he saw its eye. He saw the fish hook. Then the mouth clamped shut.

  The woman tilted her head. What the hell are you ogling at? the gesture inquired.

  “You have a lure in your mouth,” Samuel said.

  He said it just like that, calmly and coolly. He even took a sip of coffee to punctuate the end of his sentence.

  “Ee nah,” she responded and squeezed her mouth into a tight line.

  Her pale lips spasmed into a smile, then were forced back into a line. A small red dot appeared in the left corner of her mouth. It began to expand as the blood spread slowly, first in small fractals into the wrinkles around the lips. Samuel wouldn’t have noticed the wrinkles in the gas station light without the revealing red.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ee nah luah,” she muttered, barely opening her mouth. Blood spurted out in thin lines from both corners of her mouth, sliding down as dark spittle onto her neck and dripping in a rapid rhythm off her chin. Samuel looked around. The man at the nearby table was reading a newspaper and yawned.

  “Nawwhan wio heop you,” she said and wiped her mouth, smearing blood all over her upper lip and cheek.

  Samuel thought of his dad’s protective hand. He wished he could feel it again. Instead he felt the smooth, warm surface of the coffee cup slipping away from him although he held it in his palm as firmly as a marble column or a doorknob.

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say,” he said.

  How incredibly calm he sounded, although his heart was beating out of his chest.

  The woman leaned toward Samuel, looking him in the eye. One of her pupils was a minuscule dot. The other was enlarged, covering almost the entire iris.

  “Naw. Whan. Wio. Heop. You.”

  She nodded toward the man with the newspaper.

  “Eh doh see oh heoh.”

  The woman burst out laughing. Blood sputtered onto her chin, droplets falling onto the table. Her swollen tongue lolled, pierced with hooks. It was split in half. Lolled in red foam like a mouthless, eyeless prey.

  Samuel considered the possibility of having a heart attack. Not because he was panicked, but because he thought it was time to think about it rationally. He was in his forties. It wasn’t impossible. People his age collapsed when they were jogging or lifting weights at the gym all the time. He thought about himself in the violent throes of death at a gas station after midnight.

  “Excuse me,” he whispered to the man with the newspaper.

  He just kept on reading, ignoring Samuel and turning the pages.

  Eh doh heoh.

  Samuel felt his lungs slowly collapsing. Some large animal was squeezing his chest, and it caved in like a mouse’s rib cage.

  “Excuse me,” he said. A little louder this time.

  The man jumped but didn’t turn to look. He pretended to read for a while longer, then glanced at Samuel briefly. Their eyes met.

  “Yes?” the man said.

  Samuel was relieved, although he could hear the woman’s cackling in his left ear, the lure jangling. The man didn’t pay any attention to her.

  “Yes?” he repeated and put his newspaper down. His expression was cautiously friendly.

  Samuel stared at him until he was sure. The man didn’t even glance at the woman.

  “What’s the time, please?” he asked.

  The man first turned to look over his shoulder, then took his cell phone out.

  “It’s ten past midnight,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Samuel blurted, a bit too fast.

  “No problem,” the man mumbled with a smile and continued reading the newspaper.

  Samuel knew he had to get out of there. He finished his coffee and got up.

  Nawwhan weo—

  Samuel stuck around to buy the daily paper, which was something he never did. He didn’t let Krista buy them, either, no matter how interesting the headlines were. It was all crap. He folded the paper under his arm like any normal human being and fished his car keys out of his pocket. He saw the woman’s reflection in the sliding doo
rs before they opened. She was sticking her tongue out at him in protest. Her pitch-black tongue.

  Samuel walked to his car, sat down, and focused on his breathing. He called Krista.

  “I have to stay here for a while,” he told her voice mail, imagining all the hardships this caused Krista—taking the kids to school and losing her temper from all the added stress—but right now it didn’t matter. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m sorry.”

  Samuel started the car and headed back to Suvikylä and his dad’s apartment.

  I’ll show you the way . . .

  “. . . that I went,” Samuel finished his thought. His voice sounded drowsy in the hum of the car.

  It was from a poem by Eeva-Liisa Manner from the collection Inscribed Stone. The book cover was pale yellow, drawn over with sharp, vertical black lines, like a seismograph reading imitating the surface of a stone. The book’s spine audibly cracked each time it was opened, making Samuel worry that one day the pages would come off, and the library would send them a bill.

  If you should one day come back to look for me.

  Samuel pushed harder on the gas pedal although the rain had fogged up all the windows. He tossed the daily paper over the videotape on the front seat to cover its stupid, staring eyes.

  Maisa woke up way too early. She had set her alarm for ten, but she was already up before six thirty. Her mouth tasted like hangover.

  She managed until afternoon before opening a fresh bottle of wine and calling Kirsi. They chatted for a while about anything but Sagal and Maisa’s research. Kirsi agreed to go out with Maisa in the middle of the week, although she was slightly worried about her reputation at the school.

  More repetition of the same followed. Kirsi sat with Maisa at Crystal Bar until eleven, but Maisa continuing drinking by herself at the apartment until three in the morning, writing in her notebook and on the computer, drawing graphs, leafing through Nasr, Eck, and even good old Corbin in search of choice quotes that would confirm her hunch that she had something more meaningful than a ghost story within her grasp. She looked at the newspaper clipping about Samuel, touching its dry surface. She was sure she felt two souls reaching out to each other in a drunken haze. She decided to call Kirsi again before going to bed to seek absolution for how she had wronged the Somali girl, but Kirsi had turned her phone off.

  Maisa kept at it for two more days. She started drinking already at three in the afternoon and then she was off to a bar, where she could easily convince herself that everyone led the same kind of life. Everyone had been granted a gift at birth, and Maisa’s was the ability to drink all day, every day. When she stopped it wasn’t because she couldn’t go on any longer; she stopped because she got bored.

  On her last hungover morning Maisa got out of bed and was determined to not think or be ashamed about anything that had recently happened. The sun shone into her apartment; she could pay the rent for at least six months with the grant she’d get. Once the grant was squeezed dry, the only option would be to leap off the Raippaluoto Bridge like all the desperate, abandoned mail-order brides. She’d never ask her mother and father for money. Other people had it way worse than she did, and they couldn’t ask their parents for money because they had no parents.

  Maisa slipped into her tracksuit before her hangover even registered. She ran north along the Prison Shore over to Hoviska Park and then to the small island of Vaskiluoto. She stopped to catch her breath on the jogging path for fifteen minutes, allowing herself to admire what a determined woman she was. Yet she wondered whether she should’ve done everything differently when she was twenty; she could be on the deck of a sailing boat right now, stretched out on top of fiberglass worth a million dollars while some tanned man in a white cotton shirt who had graduated from the Hanken School of Economics steered the boat and told her how the wind would certainly turn in their favor before they’d dock at Bora-Bora.

  Maisa ran all the way back home, wishing either for a heart attack or Bora-Bora. Or she could simply transform into a blue-collar woman who has been painfully aware since childhood that the last person she should take advice from was her drunken father. She’d work as an office cleaner, and on her smoking break with her cleaning buddy, she’d talk about how that no-good husband of hers was unemployed again and the band Yö would be playing at Hullu Pullo, a bar just down the road. No self-doubts, no ethical choices about food; just pure survival and poorly sung karaoke straight from the heart.

  She kicked the morning newspaper and the envelope on top of it out of her way in the doorway, took a shower, and turned the coffeemaker on. She sat on her towel, naked, watching the last leaves of the summer hanging on to the trees and the sea behind them. Memories of the conversations she’d had the past few nights flooded back; the unknown men and women who’d assumed she belonged to their party just because she’d shamelessly sat down at their table.

  Her thoughts led her back to the envelope on top of the newspaper. How come the mail had been delivered already? It wasn’t even ten yet. The mail didn’t usually come before noon.

  Maisa walked into the foyer and picked up the envelope.

  No address. It hadn’t been glued shut, either. She opened it and pulled out a piece of paper. Something dropped onto the floor. Maisa expected an invitation to the HOAS fall picnic or something equally inspiring, but as she looked down she saw it was a photo. A warped, old-timey photo. She crouched down to pick it up.

  She stared at the photo, not quite understanding what she was seeing. Her hangover and the uselessly long run had exhausted her, and her brain wasn’t putting two and two together. Slowly she began to comprehend.

  It was a plate. A knife set on the right. A fork on the left.

  An eyeball on the plate.

  Next to the eyeball was a collection of teeth.

  It had to be an invitation to a premiere at a theater in Turku. Maisa had been getting such invitations for years although she’d left the university theater group. She unfolded the accompanying piece of paper. The text had been written with a good old typewriter.

  Dear Miss,

  A learned “old spinster” like yourself would likely find it most unpleasant to be tied to a chair and observe this sight with your one remaining eye and swollen gums, all the while knowing that there will be no sons or daughters left behind to grieve you or maintain your grave. In the serving suggestion you see in the image, the eye and the teeth were removed from an old sow who’d oft given birth, so of course they are much too large and otherwise inappropriate for your case.

  With kind regards,

  The Ever-Devouring Night

  P.S. You leave the lights on too often. You sit on your windowsill, drinking wine in your underwear. Picking your nose and shoving your finger in your mouth. You piss in the Holy Trinity Church park in the wee hours of the morning. I assume you are trying to rid yourself of these vices, especially that one. You know which one.

  Maisa shrieked in laughter. Once she was in control of herself again, she read the letter five more times, then laughed some more. She walked into the kitchen, sat down, and read the letter once more. It had to be a sick joke, but it had been committed with too much care for a joke.

  The threat revolted her. An eye and those teeth with an arching line of discoloration between the root and the rest of the tooth—right where the gum line had been. Did her teeth look like that, too? The thought made her nauseous.

  The accusations in the postscript brought up hazy memories from the past few days, manifesting themselves as a sharp ache behind her eyes. Shame and fear stirred their heads. She’d never leave the apartment again. How could she? What had all the passersby thought and what had she looked like? Memories of faces, snippets of conversation. Maisa Riipinen was a disgusting human being: shameful through and through, overly pontifical when she was drunk, ready to take on anything, too useless a whore to be a mother, a childish, unskilled naysayer wholly
dependent on grant money. She didn’t care about others and never knew when to stop. Her life was a series of failures, whose misery enforced her deluded notion that she was somehow special and one day other people would see it, too. How pathetic. So pathetic that she should’ve just died. That would have been the easiest solution: dying. To one day suddenly be overcome by an odd sensation at the breakfast table and have just enough time to ask the empty kitchen, “What now?” before she’d smash her face into the cereal bowl.

  Maisa collected herself. She read the letter out loud.

  “Dear Miss. A learned ‘old spinster’ like yourself . . .”

  She imagined a teenager, a loser smelling of moped grease, writing these words.

  “In the serving suggestion . . .”

  Highly unlikely.

  “I assume you are trying to rid yourself of . . .”

  No way. Teenagers living in these suburbs wouldn’t approach her with such a respectful tone, let alone spare a single second to think about old spinsters and sows who had birthed “oft.”

  Maisa looked at the photo again. It was still revolting, but this time she felt like she had the upper hand. Most likely it was an image from some old film that has since been used to scare people for decades. That thought felt even better.

  “A ghost story, huh?” Maisa chuckled.

  The hot winds of Bora-Bora caressed her face. In her mind she saw the vastness of an open ocean, the undiscovered shadows on the approaching island, the natives greeting her from their canoes, if Bora-Bora had any inhabitants. No man of Hanken behind the steering wheel—she’d steer the boat herself.

  Maisa went back to the foyer to get her cell phone from her purse.

  “There’s been a so-called development,” she said when Pasi picked up. “Listen to this.”

  She read the letter out loud without a trace of fear. She sounded confident. She felt no shame about peeing in the church park.

  The yard in front of the Patteriniemi apartment buildings was strange, yet familiar.

  As Samuel stood at his dad’s kitchen window in the morning, he tried to grasp at details that had changed. The brick barbecue pit was now covered by a corrugated steel shelter. The sandbox had been replaced by a jungle gym and a device that looked like a carousel, but Samuel didn’t quite understand what it was used for.