“When do I get that pencil and paper that I been askin’ about?” Varik asks for the third time in as many weeks. As usual, he leans against his cell’s bars as close to the guards as possible to make it harder for them to ignore him.
The guards’ response is as curt as before. Without bothering to face Varik, the one on the left says, “You aren’t getting any, ever. Stop asking.”
“I keep sayin’ I only wanna solve mathematical equations. Just ‘cause I’m a professor with probability as my domain don’t mean my skills can’t get rusty.”
“Do mental math, then.” The guard crosses his arms and sucks his teeth, forcing the conversation to end. Once again, Varik has to find a way to pass the time using nothing but his imagination and the sparse furnishings of his cell. At this point, he’s about ready to give up. He’s already ran through all the harmless forms of self-entertainment that annoy the guards at most. Being in prison makes it so hard to change himself for the better, but he still wants to try, for Landon’s sake. The kid deserves a father that he knows he can trust. At the same time, a small corner of Varik’s brain still finds manipulating people entertaining, and the left guard in particular seems like a very easy target. He gets riled up quickly, and he can’t resist responding to Varik’s taunts. Maybe Varik can use him to get that pencil and paper. Surely that doesn’t count as malicious behavior — it’s not his fault the guards deprive him of entertainment, and writing supplies are harmless. Already, his brain starts whirring, cooking up a plan to get him what he wants. The solution it settles upon involves… His teeth.
Varik hasn’t looked in a mirror in weeks, but he knows that his teeth are too yellow. He meant to fix them before the semester started, but that process is always so messy, he put it off. Now he’s in solitary confinement with only the guards for company, and he isn’t even afforded the dignity of a clean-looking smile.
Or is he?
The thick lead braces around his wrists badly weaken him, but it shouldn’t be impossible to pull his teeth out. He waits until a guard delivers his sole meal of the day, a bowl of tasteless barley gruel. It’s a small serving, but it’s better than nothing, and it makes him feel a hair stronger. Once he’s done eating, he sits down cross-legged in the center of his cell and tugs at one of his bottom right molars. He likes to start in the back so that he can speak clearly for as long as possible, if necessary.
The molar is perfectly healthy despite its appearance, and it’s firmly rooted in Varik’s gums. It takes a few pulls for it to budge even a little bit. Eventually Varik feels the characteristic snap of a tooth that’s been severed from its socket. He yanks the molar out with a grunt and drops it onto the rough, stony ground. There’s no pain, but the wound bleeds all the same, and a dull crimson drips from Varik’s lips. He wipes it away with his shoulder and moves on to the next molar.
The pair of guards standing on either side of his cell door are alerted by the noise, though. When they turn around to look at him, disgust and confusion overtakes both of their faces. The one on the left asks, “What are you doing? Stop that!”
Varik just smiles and pulls the next tooth out, the same way he did the first. His mouth already feels like it’s overflowing with blood, but he’s so used to doing this he barely even tastes it. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I ain’t harmin’ nobody.”
“Just leave him,” the guard on the right says to his coworker. “He must be going stir-crazy.”
The left guard’s uncomfortable gaze shifts to Varik’s eyes right as he pulls out a bottom incisor. He curls his lip in response. He isn’t the type to let things go. “But this is disgusting. He knows we have to monitor all his behavior. We can’t just let him gross us out.”
“Gross y’all out?” Varik pulls out tooth number four and hocks a glob of blood and spit at the wall. His mouth is full again within seconds, and blood spills from his lips when he talks. “That ain’t my intention at all. Don’t y’all wanna know why I’m doin’ this?”
The right guard wisely ignores him outright, and the left guard has a sort of indignant look in his eyes that Varik counts as a response anyway. He does want to know why Varik is pulling his teeth out, because he’s convinced that satisfying his morbid curiosity will confirm his belief that Varik is the disgusting, reprehensible man that everyone in Sekharu makes him out to be. The old Varik was like that for certain, but this Varik is just understimulated.
“Like I’ve told y’all a million times before, I’m a very heavy smoker.” Varik’s bloody grin grows even bigger. He pulls out another tooth.
“Despite bein’ a viya, that tobacco stains my teeth just as much as it would stain yours. It’s mighty unsightly.” Varik is on the bottom incisors now, and the blood and missing teeth are slurring his words. He pulls out another tooth.
“Now, there are some cleaner ways of solvin’ this problem. I could try brushin’ my teeth with some of that tooth-whitenin’ paste, although that only helps so much.”
Another tooth.
“Or I could have somethin’ crush me to pieces. When my body reforms, my teeth return to their ideal, pearly state. But there’s a twenty-five percent chance I’ll explode into a pile of guts, and that’d be even worse, wouldn’t it?”
Another tooth.
The left guard looks about ready to throw up. He must be a new hire if this is all it takes to upset him.
“Really, the simplest solution is for me to pull out each of my teeth, one by one…”
Another tooth.
“… And wait for new ones to grow in. It ain’t so bad once you get used to it.”
Another tooth. This one is his top left canine. “The only real problem is this tooth right here, and the other three like it.” Varik motions to the bloody teeth scattered around him. Two of them are nearly sharp enough to be fangs, just like the canine between his fingers. The fourth one has yet to be pulled.
“It’s a bit sharper than those of a human’s, which I’d say qualifies it as a weapon. Obviously, you don’t want your prisoners to possess weapons, let alone four of ‘em, yeah?”
The guard, trembling now, manages to shake his head.
“That’s what I thought. Now, I don’t want these things neither. They ain’t conducive to bein’ the better man that I want to become. So I’ll give ‘em all to you, if you just grant me one thing.” Varik twists the last canine out of its socket, picks up the other two, and presents all of them to the guards. “All of these — hell, you can have the rest of my teeth too — in exchange for one sheet of paper, and one pencil. How does that sound?”
The left guard frantically sputters, then yells, “All of this for some stupid paper?”
“I told you he’s going crazy,” the right guard cuts in. “If he was thinking straight he’d know that fangs are useless when you can’t actually bite people with them. You should’ve just ignored him.”
“And let him keep doing—” The left guard waves at the blood-covered Varik “— Whatever the hell this is? He’s obviously trying to take advantage of us!”
By now Varik only has two teeth left, his top incisors. He chuckles as he pulls them out too, just to up the crazy factor even more. His gums throb with a dull buzzing sensation, and the feeling of those mushy, wet bars of flesh rubbing against each other when he talks or closes his mouth is indescribably gross. Thanks to the lead, it’ll take longer than usual for them to heal. “Wih’ all due respec’, if I wan’ed to do dat I wou’da ask for much worse. Y’all rea’y gonna ‘eave me hangin’?” He tries to stick his hand through the bars so he can wave the teeth under the left guard’s nose. He can’t quite reach that far, so it looks like he’s begging for alms in the form of spare teeth instead.
Even so, the left guard finally cracks. He snatches the teeth and jabs Varik in the chest with his lead baton, causing the viya to stumble and land on his butt. The guards start arguing about what to do from here: Should his behavior be reported to the higher-ups? Is it grounds for execution? His sentence doesn’t account for mental instability, right? Varik watches on with a look of satisfaction, although internally he is a bit worried. There’s technically nothing stopping the guards from taking all of his teeth and giving him nothing in return. If that happens, he really will go crazy.
Eventually, the guards decide to punish Varik for a week by strapping an iron muzzle over his mouth and chaining his wrists to the wall, high-up enough that he can’t even sit. They chain his ankles together too for good measure. To top it all off, he’s banned from receiving visitors until the punishment is up. So much for pretending to teach a class of imaginary Statistical Methods students about sampling distributions — he’s been turned a crucified dog.
But to his surprise, after the guards remove his muzzle and chains a week later, one of them tosses a worn-down pencil and a crumpled sheet of paper into his cell. He laughs genuinely this time, a full-bodied chuckle that echoes down the dimly lit hall. Who knew that getting his hands on just a pencil and paper would be like pulling teeth?