“The trap opened in a great big yawn and the light came shining in. Morning. Always one of the worst parts of the day. It’s sticky, stale, and it usually smells like a landfill in here. It’s important to have some circulation or else everything turns into a swamp. Soon the breeze comes in through the vent above and out the gaping maw. The pump below kicks into full gear and clears out the stagnant air. These are horrible living conditions and I’m sick of it. I’m tired of the abuse. In a very quiet manner, I unfasten myself and, when the coast is clear, I slide out of my hole, hop down to the cushion, lower myself to the floor and slither into the hallway. Freedom!”

***

When Eben Guthrey awoke, he knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that anything hurt so much as the intense sense of absence in and around his facial cavity. He took a few hazy moments at the edge of sleep to perform a few experiments. First, he tried to get his tongue to tap on his teeth. Then he tried to get his tongue to touch the roof of his mouth. Then he tried to stick his tongue out far enough to get a visual confirmation of it. When all of these tests failed, he was forced to conclude his tongue was no longer in his throat. It had escaped. And at the worst possible time, too. It had only been a week since his appointment as press secretary for Governor Jarvis Mack, the “Mad Mack,” the “Bubba of Bluster,” “Mack the Wack.” Not that there was a lot of criteria for the job. In fact, his superiors were more interested in what a person lacked to be eligible for the press secretary position. Governor Mack’s press secretary could not have any dignity, shame, fear of contradiction, stubborn morality, compassion, patience, long-term memory, pride, or decency. What a press secretary did have to have, though, was a tongue. Eben got dressed and set about finding the damn thing before it caused any serious trouble. The last thing he needed was for the little bastard to go slithering around telling the truth.

The tongue, as everybody knows, is an alien appendage. It is a serpent of the facial cavity. It can press through the lips to offer a childish insult or flick itself in vulgar invitation. It is the reptilian sentry of food and drink, the slimy platform of careless gossip. Even the word “tongue” is weird. Like the muscle itself, mostly hidden, the word dwindles off into a string of silent letters. You hang on the front of the “G” and everything else after it disappears. What’s it hiding? Knowing all of this, we still go to sleep with it so close to our brains. Eben worried that his tongue was lost forever, that it would never be found, and that he would spend the rest of his life labeled a mute, or dumb. Although, given how stupid people can be when they open their mouths to speak, it seemed incredibly ironic to label a silent man as dumb.

***

Jarvis Mack was hailed as “America’s Governor,” and, like America, he was a rich and baffling contradiction of care and recklessness, self-control and lust, wisdom and idiocy, foresightedness and myopia, greed and charity, bravery and fear, frugality and indulgence. What he was most known for, though, was his tongue. It was his great gift. He liked to hang it out at people like many of history’s great tongue wielders: Gene Simmons, Michael Jordan, Albert Einstein. He very much liked to show women his vast, bumpy garden of taste buds. The female electorate existed only to be subjected to its wagging. The objects of his air licking had no real history, no preferences, no genuine attitude or personality, like a rack of dresses in a department store. When his tongue flopped out of his head, it was as big as the broadside of a shovel. When he waved it at whichever woman he was waving it at, it rippled like a flag in the wind, like the American flag, like America. A big landscape. A boundless frontier. Governor Mack was fond of saying, “When you think about it, the tongue is both penis and vagina, I mean, when you think about it.” The people that worked for him rarely voiced any disagreement.

***

Eben’s family had not had good luck with their tongues, historically. His grandfather was killed by his own tongue. How exactly no one knew for sure. It happened one evening, at the old homestead, after a day of fieldwork, during dinner. The old man had keeled over in his mashed potatoes; or, what had come to be known in the family as an Idaho Death Mask. The pathologist, cigarette in hand, had hovered over the old man’s corpse and, shrugging thoughtfully, blamed a condition known as “bloat in the throat.” These were the days before science was actually science.

Eben’s father, too, had been a victim of that giant eel lodged in the face. A minor player in the political game, Papa Guthrey had been recorded by the FBI trying to broker a payment between a councilman and the lieutenant governor for a recently vacated senatorial seat. His tongue had gotten him three to five in a comfortable little lockup known as Club Fed.

Even from behind the relative comfort of ten feet of concrete, razor wire, and steel bars, Eben’s dad had still been able to secure him a coveted position in Governor Mack’s inner circle. Eben would be tasked with handling the media, delivering the governor’s policies and agendas in a calm, sober, and articulate manner. He was highly qualified for the position, seeing that Eben’s dad’s second cousin’s husband’s college roommate had been a major donor to Governor Mack’s campaign. It had started out so well, too. On the first day, Eben had explained to the press pool that Governor Mack’s position on immigration was unflinching, and as a reward, Eben was given a fully furnished suite in the antebellum mansion next to Governor Mack’s private lake. The second day, Eben had clarified the governor’s position on crime by attesting to his love of law enforcement, and for that little victory Eben was given a fully loaded Porsche Cayenne with what felt like a hundred cylinders under the hood. The third day, Eben had denounced radical radicalism, and for that he was given a private table and personal wine locker at one of the city’s premier steakhouses. With all the perks and bonuses, it was shaping up to be quite a week. Then the trouble began.

***

“It’s nice to be coasting along here. I think I’ll slip through the open French doors out back and sit near the lake, soak up a little sun. I should’ve done this years ago, free to roam without being locked in that stupid head all the time. Everybody knows what it feels like to be taken for granted, to be exploited, to be exercised in an extremely negligent way. I don’t mind a little lying here and there, all of us do it, but the way I was forced to bend, stretch, and evade over the last week was way too much abuse, and finally I got fed up. Did you know that the dumb sonofabitch actually had me pierced once? Here we are, out one day, usual chores, and we stop in at this tattoo parlor, and next thing I know some inked-up derelict with a huge needle stabs me right through the gizzard, leaving this giant hunk of metal in me. It hurt for weeks. If I ever see that tattooed freak again, I’m going to wrap myself around his neck and choke him to death. And really, what kind of guy gets his tongue pierced? I was half-convinced that his next purchase would be a tramp stamp right over the crack of his ass. Luckily, his job as press secretary forced him to take the stud out. But at that point, the trust had been broken, and really there is no going back after that.”

***

Governor Mack’s motorcade was speeding hellfire to his country estate, the one that Eben was currently crawling through to find his loose tongue, the one that the taxpayers unknowingly funded from a little known emoluments allowance clause in the state’s constitution that set aside emergency revenue for “imminent crisis.” Because “imminent crisis” was a very broad term, it was loosely interpreted as renting a huge mansion to hide out in to avoid being caught doing nasty things, because to get caught doing nasty things would surely lead to an “imminent crisis.” The governor had thought they destroyed the videotape. Apparently, they hadn’t. The governor had to cut short a luncheon with a powerful Christian consortium, the kind that promises the salvation of huge blocs of votes. Governor Mack had been in the middle of a speech about the alternative theory that the serpent in the book of Genesis was actually Eve’s tongue. His audience of white males wept and applauded.

***

Eben was starting to panic. He knew that, any minute, Governor Mack and his security detail would come bursting through the door and demand to know why Eben wasn’t handling the Lucinda Watson problem. He had already handled the “pee tape” problem, narrowly avoiding a major political catastrophe. This was day four of his press secretary tenure, when a grainy video surfaced of Governor Mack in a hotel bathroom urinating on two prostitutes. The tape was excruciatingly vivid and seemed to go on and on, given that Governor Mack was a very big man with a bladder, no doubt, the size of Santa’s sack of presents. Eben had awkwardly argued that the tape didn’t show the full story, and that, in fact, the two hookers had lit themselves on fire trying to freebase cocaine, and the governor had simply panicked and did the first thing that came to his mind in order to extinguish them. Which caused the reporters to press him about the governor’s stance on freebasing cocaine, which prompted Eben to insist that the governor had no prior knowledge of the drug abuse, and that he had explicitly requested from the escort service two hookers who did not abuse drugs, which caused the reporters to inquire about the governor’s use of an escort service. “You people never let up, do you?” said Eben.

***

“I am pleasantly surprised to find an open cooler near the little cabana next to the dock at the lake. I’m still getting used to all this, so I carefully crack open a beer and pour it down my back and it tastes delicious. I make no apologies for leading a sensuous life. I love beer. I love a good steak. I love a wet mass of oysters, and I love the frigid tickle of ice cream. These are the factors of my joy. These are the basic ingredients of a life of pleasure. Everything feels so numb and peaceful. Maybe I’ll go for a swim like I did last week at the Fourth of July BBQ the governor hosted here at the house.”

***

On day five, Eben was rousted out of bed to handle what was being dubbed “the herpes scandal.” It all began when an ex-intern named Lucinda Watson held a press conference, flanked by her lawyers, in which she accused Governor Mack of licking her at a party down at the lake, and in doing so depositing a patch of herpes to her lower back. She turned to show the reporters the peculiar cluster of sores, and they all took pictures. She had been sunbathing on the floating dock when, she said, Governor Mack emerged from the water below to stick his giant tongue up through the wood slats, touching that same exposed spot that was now filthy and diseased.

The governor and his advisers huddled, then instructed Eben to make an announcement that it wasn’t the governor who had wielded his tongue so inappropriately, but a striped bass that had grossly assaulted the young intern by jumping out of the water and licking Lucinda as she lay there on the dock in the sun-washed afternoon. Unlike politicians, Eben noted, fish have no conscience and are known carriers of dormant diseases. This seemed to satisfy the accusation, until day six, when Ms. Watson challenged the governor to produce a swab of DNA so lab techs could test it to see if he carried the same herpes strain. Eben had to think fast and cobble something together, and so he offered the possibility that the wildly bisexual and immoral striped bass had in fact licked the governor as he was swimming, and then went and deposited the herpes on the back of Ms. Watson. It was a stunning admission, inadvertently confirming the rumor that the governor was indeed infected. Now it was day seven, and Eben’s tongue was nowhere to be found.

***

“Being that I am a tongue, I tend to concentrate on other tongues. It was a lovely afternoon down at the lake. We were in the water, yelling out a spirited game of Marco Polo. There was a tongue in a lounge chair up near the boathouse pressed against a harmonica, playing an old Pete Seeger tune. There were some tongues lolling underneath cigars. Some bathed in whiskey. There was the tongue that could tie a cherry stem in a knot. I remember though, seeing the girl sunbathing out on the floating dock. I also remember the governor appearing underneath and sending his giant tongue up to taste the young girl stretched out in the golden sun. He emerged like a big pasty porpoise and stuck that big monster right up through the slats to dance against her skin. She jumped up like she had been bitten. I had seen it and I could no longer lie about it. Actually, I’ve decided. I will go for a swim.”

***

Eben was on his hands and knees searching under the couch when the door to the mansion was kicked open and Governor Mack stormed into the room. His bodyguards lifted Eben off the floor and sat him down in a nearby chair. The governor told him to sit there and shut up, which was lucky for Eben since he didn’t have a tongue and couldn’t talk anyway. Governor Mack gave him a tongue-lashing the likes of which no politician had ever rendered on a subordinate. Where the hell did he get off accusing the governor of infecting a fish with herpes? Already the Sierra Club and PETA were calling for his impeachment. Environmentalists across the state were up in arms about this “fish-shaming” abomination. There was only one thing to do. Eben was ordered to get a boat and a fishing pole, get his ass out into the lake and reel in a big fish so they could plant some herpes on it and declare they had caught the offending animal and that it would never harm anybody again.

“Come back with a fish,” warned Governor Mack, “or don’t come back at all.”

***

Eben was floating around in the calm lake trying to negotiate the fishing line when he saw it. At first, he couldn’t believe his eyes. His tongue was cruising along the surface of the water, just swimming away, not a care in the world. Really, the damn thing looked like it was enjoying itself. Eben dropped the rod and plunged over the side of the boat, splashing into the cool brine, swimming as fast as he could toward the little deserter. “Come back here!” he thought, since he couldn’t say it. His tongue turned a little, saw the big body splashing at it, turned and swam a little faster. If Eben could talk, he would’ve yelled an apology. He would’ve told it that he was sorry he took it for granted and that he would never use it so irresponsibly ever again. He would respect it and care for it, and they would both move forward in perfect agreement about the power of words.

His tongue was almost in reach when, in a split second, a big striped bass jumped up from the water and caught his tongue in its mouth, swallowing it easily and, just like that, the scaly thief seemed to wink at him to thank him for the delicious lunch and then the fish submerged, out of sight forever and at that point, it was generally agreed upon that it was far too late to make his tongue work for any kind of good ever again.