We ate and sipped the La Geria wine sitting on the bed; the windows were open and the TV off. It was hot, the air in the room smelled of the decay in Ismael’s mouth, and we hadn’t switched on the television because we wouldn’t have known what to watch. Ismael talked about his plans for a real wedding ceremony. He said “wedding ceremony” but I decided that he meant that he was dreading surgery, thinking back with distaste on our sham wedding. It wasn’t its falseness that unsettled me but the fact that it seemed to have taken place in some distant era, or even never at all. The gum was the only real thing, and Ismael’s plans sounded like detailed advice on dental hygiene taken from the internet in an attempt to discover how to destroy the food debris trapped there. “But there’s something else I’ve got to tell you,” he added, barely giving me time to ask “what” before continuing: “I’m turning into an insect.” I cracked up and Ismael also laughed, but without ceasing to talk. “It’s not just flesh covering my tooth. Honestly.” He sat down near the bedside lamp and said, “Look.” I practically had to put the lamp into his mouth as his cheeks cast a shadow: it was true, what lay under the visor was not simply the miserable tooth, dotted with the particles of food Ismael was constantly trying to remove. There was also another sort of tissue, reminiscent of the tight-fitting shell of a beetle. I held my breath; the smell seemed especially bad that day, passing to my taste buds as if the sensation entered through my tongue rather than my nose. My retching had been conquered by the experience of the night before.

“It must be crystallized foodstuffs,” I commented with complete sincerity, as if I’d spent my whole life using a term I’d just invented. What are “crystallized foodstuffs”?

He was frightened, not because he believed that he was turning into an insect, but by my lack of surprise at his declaration. We gazed at each other and I became aware that we were experiencing the same sense of fear. Ismael said:

“Best not to overthink it.”

I had the urge to reply that there was nothing to over-think and no Wikipedia page or website was going to answer our questions, no matter how long he spent surfing the internet trying to scrape together knowledge about putrifying flesh. The hypothesis that he was turning into an insect was most likely the result of hours of research in the virtual world. Ismael never did things by halves.

“What’s important to me now is a proper marriage,” he pronounced, and this time there was no way I could misinterpret that as any dread of surgery.