One Mouthful

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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

The spoon rattled against Nirmal’s teeth, although Mrs. Dutta’s hand was steady.

He caught it between his lips. The vibration went into a molar. Something in the tooth gave a tiny, wet click.

“Swallow this and I’ll go,” she said.

He wanted to know why the rice was moving. He wanted her out of his room more.

At fifty-one, he was being fed by the woman who collected his rent. She had heard him through the wall yesterday, telling nobody in particular that he wished he could go to sleep and not have to come back. Now she had brought khichuri and stood between him and his bed, waiting to inspect the inside of his mouth.

Outside, the Nabami crowd shouted over a microphone that had been feeding back since morning. The pandal occupied the lane immediately below his rented rooftop room. Somebody was announcing the names of people whose cars needed moving. Nobody moved them.

“Chew.”

“I can feed myself.”

“Then why haven’t you?”

There it was. A perfectly reasonable question which required him to explain his entire fucking life while a lentil hung from his chin.

He wiped it away. His tongue found the broken tooth. A sharp edge had appeared where there hadn’t been one.

Mrs. Dutta scraped some rice off his lower lip with her thumb. He turned his face away, ashamed of how long it had been since he brushed, ashamed that she must have smelled it, then grateful when she pretended she hadn’t.

He wanted the door closed. His fan on. An hour in which nobody expected him to account for being alive.

The microphone squealed.

Just split, he thought. Open the ground under the whole thing. Split the fucking planet if that’s what it takes.

A black line appeared between his feet.

For several seconds he continued chewing.

The line crossed a floor tile, divided a painted flower, and stopped underneath Mrs. Dutta’s sandal. Warm moisture gathered along it.

She was turning to close the tiffin.

Nirmal moved the bath mat with his foot.

He couldn’t afterward explain why that had seemed necessary. The thought, then the crack. If she saw the crack, somehow she would know the thought. There was also the familiar, immediate fear of being blamed for damage he couldn’t afford. Both explanations fitted in his head without touching.

“What’s that noise?” she asked.

“The pandal.”

“No. Under us.”

He put his heel on the mat.

Something pushed back.

He took his foot away.

Mrs. Dutta stepped toward the bed.

The floor opened under the mat with a sound like somebody biting a hard biscuit. Her right leg went through to the knee.

She didn’t scream immediately. She gripped the tiffin with both hands, trying to keep it level.

“Nirmal.”

He took it from her.

“Not that. Me.”

The gap closed a little.

Her scream was so loud he dropped the food.

He got his arms under hers and pulled. Her sandal remained below the floor. So did her heel until something tore, and then her leg came out with the foot pointing sideways.

A white knob protruded through the skin above her ankle. Blood ran into the broken tile and vanished.

She looked at the foot, then at the bath mat.

“Was that already there?”

He said nothing.

She understood enough.

They heard somebody running up the stairs outside. The door handle jerked.

“Open! Open the door!”

Nirmal had bolted it before eating. He hadn’t wanted the committee boys seeing him like that.

The bolt wouldn’t move now. The frame had gone crooked.

He pulled with both hands. Outside, the man hit the door twice, paused, and made a short, surprised sound.

The handle pulled downward.

Then the entire door leaned out of its frame, slowly enough for Nirmal to step back.

It fell away.

There were no stairs behind it.

The young man hung from the roof edge. His chin was pressed against the concrete. Below him, a section of staircase descended intact, turned over, and struck something out of sight.

Nirmal knelt and took his wrists.

The man was heavier than he expected. A strip of skin rolled up beneath Nirmal’s thumb. He adjusted his grip and felt the warm, slippery layer underneath.

“Don’t change hands,” the man said.

“I’m trying.”

“Don’t.”

Mrs. Dutta crawled toward them, dragging her ruined foot. She caught Nirmal’s shirt.

The roof edge broke under his knees.

He let go.

He hadn’t decided to. His arms had simply come back toward his body.

The young man’s fingernails scraped Nirmal’s palms all the way off.

He fell without making another sound.

Mrs. Dutta pulled Nirmal backward. His bowels emptied into his underwear.

Neither of them mentioned it.

Across the lane, the pandal’s bamboo poles stood on opposite sides of an opening wide enough for a bus. Electrical cables stretched across it. One speaker still worked. A recorded voice repeated that visitors should keep the entrance clear.

The idol’s platform had split through the lion. The front half remained under Durga’s feet. The hind legs tipped downward with the floor. A volunteer reached for the falling tail, an absurd little movement, as if catching it might keep everything else where it belonged.

The volunteer disappeared too.

For perhaps ten seconds, Nirmal felt relief.

Everyone was having the same day now.

Then a woman across the gap lifted a boy so he could see over the railing, not understanding yet, and the building beneath them moved.

It didn’t topple.

It went down.

Its ground floor vanished first. The upper windows stayed horizontal. A curtain fluttered out of one window and caught against the sill as the next floor entered the opening.

People on the roof remained standing until there was nothing above street level except their bodies.

Nirmal waited for the impact.

Instead, orange light came through the windows below them.

Mrs. Dutta began dragging herself toward the far end of the terrace.

“Help me.”

He did. He put her arm over his shoulder and lifted. Something grated in her ankle.

They reached the parapet facing the next building.

Yesterday, he could have stepped across.

The neighboring roof was moving away. A clothesline stretched, snapped, and whipped a wet towel into the gap. Farther along, people were trying to bridge another opening with a ladder. They pushed it out until there was almost nothing left on their side to hold.

The far end never reached anything.

One man kept pushing.

Mrs. Dutta squeezed Nirmal’s shoulder.

“Put me down.”

He lowered her beside the parapet. Her injured foot knocked against the wall. She vomited onto her sari without bending forward.

The smell made him gag. His mouth still contained rice. He spat it out, except for a grain lodged in the broken tooth.

Below, the widening opening had exposed the underside of the lane.

He saw pipes hanging from compacted dirt. Roots. A concrete drain broken lengthwise, its contents pouring into the dark. Deeper down, enormous sections of rock detached and fell through red light.

There was space under the city.

Too much space.

It extended beneath both sides of the split, a vast chamber of molten rock with a roof that was coming apart. Another chamber opened beyond it as a partition collapsed. The far edge was too distant to make out.

The other side would not be safe.

The land over there was falling into it too.

His phone vibrated.

He nearly laughed. Somebody would want a bill paid.

A video arrived from his sister, followed by six messages asking whether he was indoors. The last message said not to stay indoors.

He opened the video.

A television broadcast. An image of Earth, then the same image with a wide, luminous division across it. The presenter wasn’t at her desk. She stood close to the camera, holding her earpiece in place.

Nirmal dragged the video backward.

The images had timestamps. They were not a diagram of what might happen. The division widened between one picture and the next. Clouds stretched across it and shredded. Along both edges, brown and green areas crumpled inward.

There were two parts now.

The presenter said “deep rupture” twice. Somebody off camera said they had lost the connection.

His sister called.

He answered. Her kitchen fan rattled in his ear.

That familiar noise undid him.

“Dada?”

“I said something.”

“What?”

“I was angry. About the music. I thought something and then—”

“Listen to me. Can you get downstairs?”

“Don’t be angry.”

The call stopped.

He kept the phone against his ear until Mrs. Dutta touched his arm.

“What did you say?”

He told her.

It took longer than it should have. He wanted to describe the exact order, the wish and the line in the tile, because there might be something in the order that could be reversed.

Mrs. Dutta listened with her mouth open. Her teeth were red.

“The spoon,” she said.

“What?”

“Before. Your teeth.”

He remembered the rattling. Her steady wrist. The tooth breaking before he had wished for anything.

She took out her own phone. An earthquake alert had arrived while she was bringing his lunch. She had dismissed it because she didn’t feel anything.

The time was twenty-two minutes earlier.

He stared at it.

“Please don’t do this now,” she said. “I need you to hold my leg.”

He knelt and supported her calf. Blood dripped between his fingers.

The crack hadn’t obeyed him. It hadn’t even waited for him.

He tried to feel relieved.

Instead, he began shaking so hard her leg bounced in his hands.

If he hadn’t started it, there was nothing he could take back.

The room behind them sank six inches.

His bed slid through the doorway. It stopped against a pile of broken bricks, sheet still tucked under the mattress on one side.

He had been looking forward to that bed all morning.

A deep concussion came from beneath the terrace.

The air pressed his cheeks inward. His ears hurt. Across the opening, a whole block of buildings collapsed into molten rock, throwing up a swelling mass of steam, debris, and orange spray.

The heat arrived before the debris.

His eyelashes curled.

Mrs. Dutta lifted her sari over her nose. The cloth darkened where it touched her lips.

Nirmal tried to drag her toward the bed. There was a water bottle beside it. He could see it. Half full.

They moved less than a yard.

The parapet dropped onto her hips.

She made a noise he had never heard a person make, very low, almost conversational.

Nirmal caught the wall with both hands.

It was a ridiculous thing to do. He kept doing it.

A broken rod projected from the concrete. Beneath it, her abdomen had opened. He could see a wet fold moving each time she tried to breathe. Her left hand went down to hold it in.

“Don’t look,” she said.

He looked at her face.

She was trying to pull her sari over herself with her free hand.

He helped.

They both knew it would not cover what had happened. He tucked the edge underneath her elbow anyway.

The bed burned.

First the polyester sheet shrank into little hard beads. Then the mattress began giving off thick smoke. The bottle beside it softened and folded onto itself.

Nirmal’s thirst became unbearable.

Across the widening division, the other half of the planet was breaking up. He could no longer pick out buildings. Whole stretches of land tilted toward the exposed interior, paused against one another, then broke and fell.

The molten chambers underneath emptied into one another. Their collapsing roofs forced white-hot material upward.

The first explosion lifted the far horizon.

For an instant, Nirmal could see underneath it.

Mrs. Dutta caught his wrist.

He bent close. Her lips moved against his ear.

He thought she was asking him to do something about the wall. He couldn’t. He didn’t want her to spend the time left asking him for something he couldn’t do.

“Stay here,” she said.

He nodded before she finished.

He put his face against her shoulder. Her blouse smelled of sweat and the mustard oil she put in her hair. He tried to get closer, although there was nowhere closer to get, and his hands kept moving over her back, looking for a place he could hold without hurting her.

Something hot struck him between the shoulders.

He stayed there.

The ground beneath their piece of roof broke open. Magma rose through it in a solid, blinding column. The remaining land on both halves collapsed inward, and what was left of the planet blew outward.

The terrace lifted.

Mrs. Dutta’s shoulder went out from under his cheek.

He caught her hand. The concrete turned between them. He felt her fingers tighten, felt the pull go up his arm, and then the pull stopped.

He was holding only the hand.

The cut end bumped his wrist. A white cord stuck to his skin and stretched when he tried to move.

Everything around him was moving, bricks and hot wire and pieces of people. There was no floor on which to put anything down.

Her thumb touched his lower lip.

He closed his mouth around it so she couldn’t leave.