The Black Tongue

by Marko Hautala

  “Sure, why not. What is it?”

  “It does terrible things,” she said. “Only to be used in emergencies. If the bad folks come, we mix it into the caviar.”

  “Mix it into the caviar?” Pasi knew when he shouldn’t laugh, even when he was drunk.

  “Yes.”

  “What does it do?” he asked.

  “It makes you happy,” she declared.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes. It makes you too happy.”

  Pasi thought for a moment. Then he said, “I want to be too happy.”

  “Of course you do,” the woman said. “Everyone wants to. We called it Project Berserkir. Have you heard of it?”

  “Berserkir, you said?”

  “Yes. I’m sure everyone knows about it now that all the Russkies are gone!”

  Now Pasi couldn’t contain himself. He burst out laughing. Now that all the Russkies are gone?

  “So it’s a genuine Viking drink? In case the Russkies come?”

  She didn’t reply. She just smiled with the bottle in her hand. Pasi evaluated the situation. He’d been in this situation once before, at a kitchen table in a dorm room where lightbulbs and small crystals looking like sea salt were laid out in front of him, while young fools who pretended to be shamans surrounded him. That evening had ended up being quite nice.

  “In that case I must try it,” he said, “but ladies first.”

  Pasi was no idiot—he was just a hedonistic realist.

  The woman brought the bottle to her lips and knocked her head back.

  She gagged.

  “Looks like it doesn’t taste all that great,” Pasi said.

  “No,” she said. “But soon I’ll feel great. The stars grow so bright that everything else loses its meaning. Now close your eyes and open wide.”

  The liquid ran down her chin in gray streams. The right corner of her mouth was darker than the left. Pasi squinted his drunken eyes and thought about calling Maisa. He should tell her to get here right away. Or no, don’t come, for Chrissake, call the police. That would be so like her. She’d panic and think that the stupidest possible thing to do was to drink anything this crazy naked woman offered him.

  He took another moment to assess the situation, but just for a few more seconds. The memory of her skin was still on his palms and fingertips. Her stretchy, wrinkly skin. Like an old person’s skin. Nonsense. Stop worrying. Pasi closed his eyes and opened his mouth.

  He felt the cold bottle on his lower lip, and a couple of beats later, liquid began to flow onto his tongue. It tasted peculiar. It wasn’t wine nor straight-up alcohol. It wasn’t beer, either. He swallowed obediently although it tasted sickeningly bad.

  Pasi opened his eyes.

  He heard the woman whisper. Not to him—away from him.

  “Close your eyes,” she commanded and removed the bottle from his lips.

  He didn’t recognize the flavor. He didn’t know this woman. He looked around. There was no one else here. Who was she whispering to?

  And more importantly: who the fuck cared?

  “Let it flow,” Pasi said and closed his eyes again.

  The memory of the cold bottle against his lower lip lingered, but no liquid flowed into his mouth. He assumed the woman took her time to drink her share.

  “Hey, leave some for me,” he said.

  The woman lifted her weight off his thighs. Pasi tried to open his eyes, but a clammy hand was pressed over his eyelids.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Keep your mouth open.”

  The voice was no longer pleasantly scratchy. It was still scratchy, though.

  Pasi thought about it. “All right.”

  He opened his mouth.

  A swish. A clink.

  Completely harmless, delightful sounds among the wind and the waves. He really should’ve called Maisa earlier.

  I love you.

  The cold penetrating his throat felt like liquid at first. She must’ve been pouring more for him.

  Then Pasi tried to swallow. His throat muscles constricted.

  Pain.

  This probably would’ve registered as much more significant if he hadn’t been so drunk. Now the sensation was just an unpleasant object in his throat. Excruciating pain, but nothing he couldn’t get rid of.

  Pasi opened his eyes. Coughed. Then gagged. There was actually something in his throat. Not a problem. He gagged again. The pain became unbearable.

  He looked around.

  The woman was gone.

  He tried to speak, but his throat had stopped cooperating. His entire pharynx had stopped cooperating. The darkness hummed in all the colors of the world.

  The pain began to wash over his wall of numbness. There was no negotiating with it any longer. Instinctually Pasi shoved his fingers into his mouth, as if to fish out a strand of hair he’d accidentally swallowed. His fingers located a slippery string that led down to the back of his tongue and then deeper, much too deep to do anything. His hand tried to grab at the strange, taut shape that led a shivering sliver of light out of his mouth into the darkness beyond the porch, where the waves whispered under the moonlit clouds.

  Pasi tried to speak again, but by now his tongue had been rendered useless from the swelling. It was still his tongue, although it felt like an unfamiliar, sick slug in his mouth.

  He gagged again.

  What a mistake.

  The hooks dug deeper into the soft tissues of his pharynx. He felt liquid flowing slowly down into his stomach and only remotely realized that it had to be his blood.

  “Now nobody can help you.”

  The woman spoke right into his ear.

  He heard another swish.

  The string escaped Pasi’s fingers and was pulled taut like a bow. It shivered in his field of vision, like a spiderweb. He now recognized it as fishing line. Heavy-duty fishing line. The kind used for a big catch.

  His pain crossed an unknown limit.

  First it electrified him, then turned into fog. Pasi followed the thin line with his eyes, slowly realizing he had to follow its every movement. He stumbled off the porch, walked down the steps on all fours, and crawled across the lawn. He could see the woman’s bare feet in the corner of his eyes; he could hear her laugh. Her feet had walked this path before. Then something swung next to her legs. The rusty blade of a tool. The woman said something, but Pasi was no longer listening. A male voice responded to her from the darkness.

  Pasi was no longer interested in their words. He howled and crawled like an animal.

  As the waves hit his knuckles, he understood. He was a small pike, pulled toward his death by a fisherman. He wasn’t being pulled out of the water, but from the air into the water, with the same hollow inevitability. What a pitiful little drama.

  Then his consciousness exploded.

  These colors.

  These shapes.

  Russkies are no more.

  The things you could see within the sea foam of the waves. Entire worlds as the bubbles were born and burst and everything in between.

  Pasi turned his head to look up toward the moon and began to scream. Not because of the pain, but because of an unknown feeling he felt pounding beyond the pain. The pain had died and been reborn as music that welled and welled and welled, and even flowers awoke in bloom to this music. Pasi kept on screaming at the old mute moon he had never really seen before. He screamed at its pale beauty and dark-blue craters, as if in a dream he could not wake up from, because it was the first and deepest dream of all times that had dreamt everything else in this world.

  He felt a whack between his shoulder blades, but it felt inconsequential, like a disturbance on a distant planet. The woman turned him on his back and brought her face too close to his. Her tongue stuck out and the eyes shivered with some raw emot
ion Pasi had never seen before. The corner of her mouth did indeed stretch out too far into the cheek, but who cared about a careless dentist now that he was flying into the stratosphere.

  As the seawater pulled one of his rubber boots off and flooded in through the sleeves of his jacket, Pasi felt for his face and its numb cavities and realized he was a moon.

  “I should make a phone call,” Pasi tried to say, but his throat and its muscles were already like moss, their petrification almost complete.

  Water rushed into his ears and the world turned silent.

  One phone call.

  The hatchet hurtled down and sank into the mute dust of the moon.

  VIDEO TAPE

  Samuel and Julia agreed to meet every day at ten in the small park between the single-family houses and the townhomes. They hadn’t verbally agreed to not ring each other’s doorbells, but he was still shocked to see her at his door.

  He heard the doorbell through the noise from his Walkman but didn’t move. Who else could it be? Aki’s bratty friends coming over to make a mess and ask stupid questions about Samuel’s records and books and then brag about finding a broken cigarette on the street or that they’d seen this or that neighbor drunk somewhere? Harri had come by the previous night to drop off a cassette tape through the mail slot in the door: he had copied a demo he’d gotten from his older brother in Germany. He’d written a note in all caps, SABBATH: FRAGMENTS OF A FAITH FORGOTTEN. LISTEN TO IT! Samuel had listened to the demo all morning, deep in thought, but he hadn’t bothered to look up the word “fragment” in the English-Finnish dictionary to find out what it meant.

  Then suddenly his dad was at the door, looking slightly embarrassed. Samuel removed his headphones.

  “There’s a girl,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Looks like she got her ass beat. She’s crying.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Samuel said, jumping out of bed.

  I’ll take care of it? What did that even mean? That everything was all right, and his dad should take a hike before he came up with a sarcastic comment? Samuel wasn’t truly worried until he reached the front door.

  “Hey,” Julia said.

  She had a scar on her cheek. Sure, it was a small, maybe a centimeter long, line of coagulated blood, but the skin around it was maroon red and puffy like a balloon.

  “Does she need any help?” his dad called behind him.

  Julia shook her head.

  “No, we’re fine,” Samuel said without turning away from her. Why, why did his dad have to open the door wearing houndstooth-patterned underwear, now of all times? He quickly pushed his embarrassment to the back of his mind. He couldn’t take his eyes off the wound.

  “I can take her to the doctor,” his dad called again. “Or if you’ll tell me who did that to her, I can walk over and—”

  “We really don’t need any help,” Samuel repeated, then walked into the stairwell and closed the door behind him.

  “He’s completely mental,” Julia said. “I can’t go home.”

  She really had been crying.

  “I’ve got my bags downstairs. I packed whatever I managed to grab.”

  A faint pink scratch trailed from the wound to the corner of her eye. Julia had probably wiped her cheek with the back of her hand before it began to scar.

  “Where are you thinking of going?” Samuel asked.

  She shrugged, then looked at him with puppy-dog eyes. He got it.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said and hugged her. The gesture was stiff at best, as he couldn’t shake off the image of his dad standing behind the door in his patterned underwear.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He went back in and got dressed quickly.

  “It wasn’t that Jape and his gang who did that to her, was it?” his dad asked from the living room. Even Aki had appeared to gape at the scene.

  “It’s none of your business,” Samuel said and grabbed the keys hanging off the hook in the hallway.

  “It is my business. Just tell me a name. And the girl can stay with us if she needs to.”

  Samuel didn’t reply. He ran out and slammed the door behind him. Julia and his dad eating breakfast together? No way. He would die of embarrassment. She would run away after the first morning. But where else could she go and hide?

  He carried Julia’s bag out from under the stairwell on the bottom floor and weighed his options. There weren’t many.

  “He’ll come looking for me,” Julia said when he walked back to her. “He’s gone nuts and he has a gun.”

  Samuel remembered Julia’s dad’s quick, languid movements and his clipped, nervous way of speaking. He didn’t have a hard time imagining the hands he’d seen flipping burgers strangling someone’s neck or pulling a trigger.

  Then he had an idea.

  “Follow me.”

  When Samuel and Aki were younger, they wanted to spend a night inside their little storage unit up in the building’s attic. It was a little hut made out of a wooden frame and chicken wire, and back then it had been the most exciting place ever to them. All the other buildings had storage units in the basement, which made them scary and oppressive. Attics, however, always felt like places ripe for adventures. Samuel and Aki had built a little nest for themselves between an old drawer and a box full of Christmas ornaments, and they carried stacks of comics and piles of toy soldiers to their new home. Their mom was still alive and had been against it, so she did her best to scare the kids with stories about mice and rats and ginormous daddy longlegs that would creep into their mouths when they slept. Samuel and Aki had cried themselves to sleep from sheer disappointment.

  He showed Julia the way to the attic.

  When the door closed behind them, the hum of the wind made Samuel stop.

  “Wait, you can’t stay here,” he then said. He thought about his dad’s suggestion. It was an idiotic option, but what else could they do? His dad would fart at breakfast and talk about the magnificent tractors built in the Soviet Union.

  “Yes, I can,” Julia said.

  She walked along the corridor lined with chicken wire and let her fingers trail across the wire.

  “This place is amazing.”

  Her exhausted voice had a glimmer of familiar fearlessness, the kind that sounded much too large to fit into a small person like her.

  “Really?” Samuel asked.

  “I’ve never been anywhere like this.”

  When she turned back and smiled, her swollen cheek partially covered her eye.

  “You look like an Eskimo,” Samuel said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Half-Eskimo, half-Californian.”

  Julia attacked him, tickling his armpits.

  That was the old, familiar Julia. Not the one who had been beaten up to form a half-Eskimo.

  They rolled on the floor for a while, then slowed down to kiss each other, then rushed to tear each other’s clothes off. Samuel managed to control himself long enough to open their storage unit and pull out his mom’s old curtains to use as drapes over the doorway for privacy. Neither of them cared enough to worry about condoms. Some things just happened within larger waves. The time for worrying came once the wave had pulled away, and they were left panting helplessly on the shore.

  “Everything’s even more fucked now,” Julia said.

  “You’re right.”

  They looked at the ceiling and squeezed each other’s hands.

  “Can I stay here?” she asked.

  “Of course. Let’s both stay here.”

  They took some time to rearrange boxes and shelves so that it would be impossible to tell by glancing from the doorway that someone was living up in the attic. The boxes formed a comfortable, small cave in the back, where they could easily forget about the world outside. An old mattress f
it on the floor of the cave, and Samuel used a laundry bag filled with his and Aki’s old baby clothes as a pillow. A perfect nest for two. They would have to leave only to shower or pee in the public washrooms in the basement, but that was not a big deal.

  “I have just one wish,” Julia said when they sat down to rest.

  She pulled something out of her bag. It was a small videotape.

  “My final message to that asshole.”

  Samuel took the tape.

  “Drop it in the mailbox. Early in the morning would be best. He won’t wake up until eleven.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “Revenge,” Julia whispered and smiled so hard her right eye was almost completely shut.

  Of course Samuel would perform this favor, although the mere thought of walking up to Julia’s dad’s house was absolutely horrifying. But he’d do anything to protect their cave, their home.

  “Some man has called you three times,” his dad said when Samuel got back from the store. It had been Aki’s turn to go, but he’d pretended to have the flu, in the middle of summer of all times.

  Samuel dropped the shopping bag on the floor and kicked his shoes off.

  “Who?” he asked, fearing the worst.

  “He didn’t say, but he said he was your friend’s—”

  The phone rang.

  “Sheesh, must be something really important,” his dad said and went to the living room.

  Samuel stared at the phone and didn’t move.

  “Pick it up already!” his dad yelled and turned the radio up. In the other room Aki was overcome by a flurry of fake coughs.

  He picked up the receiver and stated his name.

  “I saw that tape,” a man said. “Your dick’s in it.”

  The radio was so loud in the background, Samuel wasn’t sure if he’d heard him right.

  “I don’t know about any videotape,” he said.

  “Don’t lie to me, you little runt. I’m watching it right now. It shows you messing around with a condom wrapper like a fucking retard. It’s shot in some slum, which I assume is your home, and my . . .”

  A wavering sigh.