Crystal Eaters (18 page)

“Parents worked here. You know my father, Richard? We look the same. This is his idea. Mom says we have the same bone structure, something about our foreheads. We cross our legs the same way when we sit. Drives her nuts when we’re watching the TV.”

“At Eddies?”

“I don’t drink. And I don’t forget a face.”

Skip studies the man before him and thinks maybe it’s the heat, or the shock from seeing a girl run like a dog, an image that continuously haunts him, because his mind keeps breaking, keeps going black like he’s passing out for a few seconds here and there and then coming back into a gauzed reality. He can’t sleep at night. He stares at walls. He’s impressed that someone is not only working, but working so hard in the heat wave. The call for more workers – parchment nailed to trees and public bathrooms – was put out weeks ago and too few new faces have arrived. The village dims in evening because workers are mining less yellow and the city has taken notice, men at newly installed binocular stations writing in lined notebooks noting it as a weakness, another reason it should be overtaken. There’s a “binocular station attendant” dressed in blue who walks back and forth, nodding and smiling in a depressed kind of way.

Z. knows what to say, how to change Skip’s eyes. “What matters is work,” he says. “Dad always told me that if you’re not working, then you’re not working.”

Skip goes, “Ha!”

Z. finds a pick-ax. The workers stay away because Z. is insane with motion and he’s making them look bad. When the evening aims for dark, the workers gone for the day and shaking their heads in disbelief over pints of ale at Eddies at the man who accomplishes more than five of them combined, Z. uses the pick-ax to break into a shed. He steals a helmet with a light and a shovel with a short handle. Before running back into the tunnel he stops and looks up at the sky. From a great distance, looking down from where Z. stares,
is that a star, maybe that’s a star
, he is tiny standing in the mine, almost unnoticeable, nearly nothing. He stops looking up when he suddenly enters a coughing fit. The air is a black oven. Bugs drip from the sky and Z. has swallowed one.

Inside the tunnel he stabs the dirt wall with the shovel where
his hands and pick-ax previously clawed. He digs until he forms a door. He digs until he’s working in a hallway. He throws piles of dirt behind him until he’s so deep inside he has to walk piles out. Soon he’s traveling through another hallway, this one too lacking black crystal. When he finds yellow, or blue, he tosses them into separate piles for the trucks to gather in the morning. He works until he can’t lift his arms.

He sleeps huddled in a fetal position against a wall of dirt which is surprisingly cool and comforting.

He wakes, rolls onto his side with rocks piercing his skin, and vomits something red. His count is lowering with having to live. With slits for eyes caked closed with dirt he walks from the mine tunnel and into the low sunshine of morning to workers drinking coffee from ceramic mugs. They roll their eyes at Z., sneer dirt, then go back to their conversations about what will happen to them, what’s the deal with the sun, what’s your number. Even in morning the heat is shocking.

Skip Callahan walks past. “Saw a girl running like a dog once. Like, a real dog, on all fours and everything. Everyone, yeah you, gives me a hard time for talking about it. Keeps me up at night because I only wanted to help, see if she was okay. I think of going back to the house but what would I say? You’re like a mole and we need more moles. Jesus, you worked all night, huh? Don’t need another person who sits around drinking coffee,” says Skip, the last few words louder and directed at the workers.

Z. smiles, looks worried.

“Thanks,” says a worker to Z. “THANK YOU FOR HELPING!”

The workers climb into gun metal trucks and drive into the tunnels. Some grab shovels leaning against idling trucks and walk in. The clang and bang of machines, hammers. When Z. looks up from left to right the sky scans from red to white.

9

D
ad enters Remy’s room and says Mom has one remaining. He tells her to leave her alone because something has happened to her mouth. Remy sits atop a mountain of pillows on her bed. She’s drawn pictures of black crystals all over the walls and ceiling. Where the red crystal once was, with the baby inside, has been blackened in scramble.

“We should just go.”

“Can’t,” says Dad.

“Why? Because of the fence? Because of Adam? Sorry. Actually, I’m not. I don’t think there’s anything in this world that can’t be said. Just because we’re different from them doesn’t mean we’re bad. It doesn’t mean we can’t try to save her. They are coming in anyways.”

“It doesn’t matter where we go because you can’t reverse what is happening to her.”

“You see everything as dying.”

Remy moves forward on the mountain of pillows which are balanced in a way so she slides down and lands on her feet with a jump. Dad extends his hands like he’s going to catch her but she stands tall, doesn’t need his help. From outside, Remy hears something. She makes a
shhhhhhhhh
sound with a finger over her lips and Dad turns toward the window. Running circles around the house is Hundred barking at the sun. He speeds past the
window like black liquid, red sky behind him. He disappears for a few moments, the barking going small, the red sky appearing touchable, then reappears, a noisy smear going past the window.

“I’m sorry,” says Dad.

“I’m sorry too.”

“You are?”

“I’m sorry we never tried everything we could to save Mom.”

Dad climbs to the roof and watches the city lights come on. They look brighter. The heat turns his shirt transparent with sweat and in several random places on his body he picks the fabric off his skin. The only thing he has to think about is her. He considers going to the hospital where people are rumored to be pumped full of crystals (Chapter 14, Resurrection, City Hospital Myth) but that means making a decision. Besides, he’s never believed in the myth. It means taking a risk instead of just letting time decide. He understands what her face says without her saying a thing, that she wants to go. He’s spent so much time doing nothing for her because everything stays inside him and rings his head and the grip of his thoughts can’t get any tighter. And then there’s Remy, what she wants him to do.

He sits with his knees drawn into his eye sockets and wishes he could move himself to tears because he feels crystals crushing, buildings burning, dogs dying. Inside, he is a blubbering mess, but outside he’s a man who just can’t show it. He was never like this in Younger Years. He spoke more. He expressed himself with chosen words and hand gestures. There was a time when Mom asked how he was feeling and without hesitation he gave an honest answer, not a reply like
good
. He once told her while sitting on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands that he felt depressed, don’t laugh, something was wrong. He described his body as cement filled and horizontal. On some days he didn’t speak to anyone until he got home and said hello, how was your day, the words leaving his body feeling alien. He
said he was an awful father and husband because the way he was limited her and Remy, their life. Back then he spoke openly, and he remembers the way he was. That version would go to the city.

Beneath the roof Remy stands in Mom’s room. On the bed her body and face are covered in a sheet. Where her mouth is, a black oval. Dad has placed a green crystal on her chest and a red on her stomach. With each breath the wet oval of her mouth expands then collapses. Remy stands motionless, watching the sheet move up and down. There’s a silence. The room is surprisingly cool. Remy can’t understand why Dad won’t do anything, she’s at the end, it’s gone on too long, they can’t keep watching this. She thinks about lifting her up right there and running to the city, saving her. She thinks about entering the hospital and being bathed in green light. But this is it, they will watch her become zero because of tradition. Remy runs away.

Under the blanket Mom’s hands move up her body. It takes minutes to pull the sheet from her face, but Remy is already outside as dog-child – her and Hundred running into the mine where a man digging never-ending tunnels swears at walls of dirt. The air outside the sheet feels cool and new. Her mouth is broken. She tries to say something, the letters are bobbing inside her head like jellyfish, but she can’t arrange them correctly.

8

H
e screams into the wall. He kicks the wall. Inmates think the noise is the heat wave howling against the prison and moving them closer to the village. There’s a general uneasiness with Pants in isolation, a vibe amongst inmates that something holy is about to be destroyed. Their orange jumpers and blue shirts are damp and wrinkled. They listen to the howling and wait.

The guards take turns looking at the road for Z. to come back with his hands weighted to his thighs with black crystal. Jug imagines Z. carrying a crystal so massive he has to walk sideways through the door. A crystal so big Little Karl will fall off his chair, his book of | sent flying. More than half the guards don’t show for work anymore, they are crazies running through the streets, painting their bodies with black crystals and black crosses. Those who do show up hate themselves for being themselves, but they keep it together, they gather their paychecks. They believe, in a religiously devoted sense, that Z. will come back to them, that Jug has done the right thing. The idea of Z. never returning is a cruel joke, and those who make it are ignored.

Pants asks passing footsteps if they’re going to let him die in here and the silence means yes. His imagination is turning at an uncontrollable and sickening pace. What distracted him
before was black crystal. He has to define his life some other way now. And with each thought comes layers of thoughts over that thought. How exhilarating to be a child. He never wondered then when his body would register zero and all color would leave his body, mouth, eyes. No need to acquire things. The days were an endless blur of games played in water and grass. The days, like what was inside, were never counted.

He mumble-sings
Gimme gimme crystal (pop pop) gimme gimme bark bark (woof woof
) and feels insane. He imagines baby Remy walking through the house. She fell down the stairs and broke her arm and he wonders what damage that must have done (-5). He remembers showing baby Remy the crystal mine, and how she sat in the black dirt molding clumps that soon rained from her spread fingers, and later, how she licked the glittering dust off her arms. He remembers killing a wounded bird because he wanted to experience, what he said to Mom, a little death, not too much, but enough to feel it. He wanted to try and move, with his shoe, the body of something once living.

He told Remy The Sky Father Gang would perform a demonstration like never before. She made a motion with her hands that symbolized city fireworks and he said no, not exactly, but just as thrilling, just you wait. They sat on his bed and when she saw the duffel bag packed with crystals she went
Ew yucky
. But he wasn’t present in the moment, he didn’t make eye contact. And there wasn’t glowing light coming from the bag, spotlighting baby Remy’s face. And there weren’t loving words said by him because he would miss her. And there wasn’t any true emotion conveyed at all because he had Dad inside him. When he kissed her on the head it felt choreographed, something he saw on television, which was true.

He vomits into his hands and looks for forty. His mind narrows in on the moment with Remy in his bedroom that at the time was so meaningless to him because he was young, and foolish, and he doesn’t go sad with emotion, but it’s anger with no
place to go but from a pit in his chest and down to his stomach and through his legs and out his feet that kick the wall.

7

Z
. climbs into a yellow machine that digs 10,000 times faster than the short-handled shovel. He creates so many tunnels he becomes lost. His head moves left to right and back again. He reverses the digging machine, climbs out, and inspects the walls with his hands. He’s covered in dirt and sweat. He jumps back into the machine, begins working again, and every time he reverses the ceiling rains rocks. He drives and digs, drives and digs, his mind a wet hornet on the fact that he needs to find the black crystal to not only save the Brothers, but to accomplish something that every child has dreamed about since the beginning of time. All his energy is placed in forward movement.

The machine, which is old and rattles with loose parts, is equipped with a shield-shaped light on the top that blazes the path Z. digs. The light misses corners. Z. stops, leaps from the machine, and uses a flashlight to closely inspect shadows. He can’t afford to be sloppy and miss what he needs. Beneath his feet he cracks yellow, blue, and green. He’s surprised by a red. His body is a field of gravel. He crosses his arms and rubs his forearms together until a mound of gunk falls off.