Nothing But Blackened Teeth(22)

“It was an accident—”

“You fucking punched me.”

“Dude. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hit you. You were just going off the rails there—I. I didn’t know what else to do. It was an accident, okay? I wasn’t thinking.” He breathed out. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Beside me, Lin was unfolding, uncurling to his full height, slim as my waning hopes. Ohaguro-bettari. Nothing but blackened teeth. Nothing but teeth stained with tannic acids and ferric compounds. An old girlfriend told me once about the unguent that the aristocrats used: iron fillings fermented in vinegar, in tea, in cups of sake, stirred with gallnuts from the sumac tree until it became something that’d stick.

I wondered for a second what the mixture would taste like, if it’d be like kissing copper from the ohaguro’s tongue, if I could content myself knowing the last person I kiss was a dead woman’s ghost.

“This is the part where we all die,” Lin whispered.

Faiz pulled a knife. Of course he did. There was no timeline where he wouldn’t have escalated, wouldn’t have found a knife or a gun or a jag of glass. Something heavy enough to breach the skull, pulp the brain into paste. He swung as I staggered to my feet, a scream loaded in my lungs. No artistry to the swoop of his arm but a knife is a knife is a knife is a sharp edge meant to split the seams of the skin, open up the torso and let in the light.

I bayed like a wolf under the lunatic moon as blood gushed free. Muscles relaxed and gravity tugged; slick reams of purple-grey intestine unspooled from the gash in Phillip’s belly. Faiz had cut so deep. Lin grabbed me, both arms. I howled. Phillip spasmed onto the tatami, every convulsion disgorging another palmful of viscera, clawing at his entrails but they wouldn’t fit back inside.

The room smelled of gastric juices and vomit, of urine and bowels. The room smelled of blood. The room smelled of the man my best friend had murdered. The room smelled of dying.

“Help me.” His face was whiter than paint.

“Don’t,” Lin hissed into my ear. I couldn’t tell what he meant, if what he was saying was don’t engage, or don’t try because we are in act three and barreling down to the end, or don’t look. Don’t let this be the thing you remember about Phillip, golden boy, dead boy, organs slopping out of his side.


*

I didn’t cry.

Don’t let anyone tell you I did. People expect certain weaknesses from girls. But they don’t cry over a man they’d never loved, could not love, even if he said he respected the swagger of her insouciance, her post-punk rhetoric, even though he said maybe and she said she couldn’t. I didn’t cry for Phillip.

I didn’t cry for any of them.

I didn’t.

I swear.





9



Oh, god.” The words clattered out of Faiz. “Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god. Oh, god.”

He repeated them until they hitched in his throat, always snagging on the second syllable, until all it sounded like was Faiz saying oh and oh again, quieter each time. He sagged to his knees. The knife slid from his fingers.

“I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Phillip moaned. The sound could have meant anything.

“Don’t,” Lin told me again, his mouth in my hair. I could feel his jaw mold the consonants, the motions of his lips. “There’s no point. We can’t stop the bleeding. We’re five hundred miles away from the nearest hospital. I don’t have anything—” His voice tore. “He’s going to die, Cat. He’s dead. He’s dead. So, don’t look. Don’t.”

I did anyway. I shrugged his embrace apart and shambled towards where Phillip lay, bile and blood soaking into the mouldering straw. I read somewhere that it takes about twenty minutes to die from disembowelment, which doesn’t sound long at all but hurt has a way of stretching out a heartbeat into an infinity of going colder, slower, every breath another starburst of too much to cope with, lighting up the cerebrum with constellations of anguish. Phillip’s eyes were rolled up to the whites and he stank of piss. I didn’t know someone else’s pain could have a texture, a bite, a gelatinousness you could hold in your teeth, but I could almost gnaw on Phillip’s dying.

“Cat.” Faiz knuckled at his own eyes, crying without embarrassment, his face a slaughterhouse of bruises and reds. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean—you know I wouldn’t hurt anyone. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

The ohaguro-bettari laughed. The sound was a knife, was a hole like an eye opening beneath the ribs, was the memory of one man being held up to the shining light of another, one man being less than, second-best, always inferior to the other. The sound was a thought: wouldn’t it make all the sense in the world to let that lack of self-worth move your hand, just a little, just for a second while no one’s watching?

“You’re sorry,” I repeated. I wanted to touch Phillip, let my fingers drag through his hair, the pale strands clumped to his cheek like letters and when I scrunched my eyes a certain way, they almost read like liar.

“Sure you are.” Lin’s voice shook. “Sure. Abso-fucking-lutely. You have absolutely no motivation at all to kill the guy your fiancée used to date. The Greek god to your sedentary geek. No reason. Nothing like that ever crossed your consciousness. In fact, you’re so sure about this being an accident, you can guarantee this never crossed your subconscious either.”