Crystal Eaters (6 page)

Sunlight sprays the kitchen window and everything from the
wet cloth towels in the sink to the legs of the wooden chairs to the YCL in the bucket gets hotter.

“I figured out his name,” says Remy.

“Uh-huh,” says Mom. She smiles. She asks if Remy wants some apple. There’s honey near the breadbox. Again, she eyes the bacon.

“Hundred.”

“Come on now,” says Dad, still looking at Mom. He opens his mouth so Mom opens her mouth. It doesn’t work. Then his voice gets sharper: “Why’d you pick such a terrible name?”

“It means he’s full. A living creature who will never lose his count. Like a person. Hundred.”

Dad bites his bottom lip. “It means,” he says and then stops, composes himself. “It means,” he says, this time even softer, “that every time you look at him you will think about your count.”

“But,” says Remy.

“Change it.”

“I think,” says Mom, “it’s a beautiful name.”

Her voice is strong.

“It’s death obsessed,” says Dad. “It’s not a name. It’s not a name a little girl gives her pet.”

Mom stares at Dad and something shifts inside him because here is something Mom wants for her daughter, she doesn’t ask for much, and he knows it. Remy grabs the bacon.

“You can name your dog whatever you want. Hundred is perfect. I love it,” Mom says. “Hundred! Hundred! Hundred! Is beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful! Hundred! Hundred! Hundred! Is beautiful! Beautiful! Beautiful!”

Remy starts singing along with Mom.

Hundred comes running so fast into the kitchen that he sweeps the length of the floor with his body.

30

S
he called him Dog Man. She wore red shorts and dug in the dirt for crystals. When she threw dirt at Bobby T.’s face he crouched in the darkness and rocks clanged off truck metal.

Arnold said, “Hurry up, Bobby T.,” so he did, he ran.

In the distance a building burned. Z. said the girl was Remy. Her Brother was the founder of The Sky Father Gang. Remy acting like a dog was normal, that when she stands she looks like any teenager. Her family has hellish problems so it’s her way of getting things out of her, don’t call her a freak-o. Bobby T. made an
Ahhhhhhh
sound while nodding emphatically and said, “That makes sense,” though he wasn’t sure it did.

Viewing the building illuminated with fire they applauded.

Then they walked to their favorite spot to admire the prison. They kicked wind-blown garbage at the holes in the fence. The night sky was starless and smoky with a full moon. Everything felt crushable, even the trees. Z. had a feeling he couldn’t define that rattled him, made his heart hurt. He wanted to be more than a person. He wanted to live through people’s memories and through history, something his grandfather once told him, to pass along stories and myths (some of which he wrote), that’s how you live forever, become part of another’s reality after you’re gone. This talk has never left Z., the words coming just
before his grandfather went to zero, his parents screaming to not watch, leave the room, stop standing in the corner like that. Z. has the idea of a colossal performance burning into the minds of thousands, his name inked in books and scatter-dropped into computers.

The Brothers, about a dozen of them, ran until they leaned their chests into the fence and pressed their faces against the metal wire that left hexagons on their skin. Bobby T. played the song of the dirt and rocks clanging off the truck in his head and moved into a warm spot of good while the prison shimmered like a heaven.

Z. fantasized about the jailbreak in reverse and tried to untie the knot of what it was. All the images were murky, people running in and out of the prison without reason. Bobby T. faced him, the prison now at his back. Mouth twisted, Z. was thinking it out, pacing like a starved cat, mind on overdrive, mouth mumbling at high speed. He said they had to do more than protests. He stopped and jumped forward, leering at Bobby T., and said it involved breaking out The Sky Father Gang. His hand was a sleeping spider on Bobby T.’s shoulder and Bobby T. looked scared to move. “A j-j-j-jailbreak in reverse,” Z. said and stepped away. “A jail… break… in… r-r-r-reverse?” He scratched his head. “Breaking out of a prison, but twisted, reversed, inmates entering a prison in exchange for inmates already inside. Or maybe it’s… who knows what it is because I’m the o-o-o-one who can d-d-d-define it.”

“We’ll do it,” Bobby T. said, not knowing what he meant exactly but feeling uncomfortable with Z. and thinking he had to say something, anything, to break the strangeness. He looked at Ricky and shrugged and Ricky shrugged back.

“I’ll do it all right,” mumbled Z. more to himself than to Bobby T.

Z. wore a green robe in the old style. The collar and wrists were white and fur lined. His feet were covered in dirty white
sneakers with fat tongues. Extreme heat didn’t bother him. He randomly shouted, “This heat wave is a joke!” The robe belonged to his grandfather and held memory and magic. His eyes were the color of truck exhaust. His stutter came and went, but the closer he got to defining the jailbreak in reverse, the less it appeared. He would erase it. He would become smooth and living forever in people’s memories. When he spoke, the Brothers believed and followed every word, sentence, idea, believing that Z. was powerful and special and would eventually change their lives too.

“Question,” Z. said. “Your attention, please.”

They turned their backs on the prison, joined Bobby T., and leaned into the slight give of the fence. Bobby T. tongue-clicked rock noises and stopped when Z. gave him a real serious look.

Arnold said, “Let’s do this thing,” to which Z. rolled his eyes and allowed a moment of shame. “Sorry,” said Arnold.

In the breeze Z.’s green robe fluttered open. He wore a white t-shirt and had a belly that he quickly covered up. “How many of you are w-w-w-willing to go into the prison with me?”

Everyone raised their hands and their upper backs fell into the give of the fence.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and again began mumbling the phrase “jailbreak in reverse” while pacing back and forth as the Brothers breathed in nothing but the hot air of their doomed land.

“Let’s do this thing,” repeated Arnold, and this time, Z. nodded and pointed with both hands at the prison and wouldn’t stop nodding until Ricky asked if he was okay.

29

O
n a typical morning he spends three hours in the laundry room, which is fifteen degrees warmer than the second-floor cells. The laundry room is a miniature warehouse of cleaning in the color gray. Hot air hangs like a curtain on a movable track. Metal tables edge-lined with machine-drilled dimples hold clothing pressed in stacks. Washers and dryers built into ten towers shake in front of windows covered in blue X wire. The sun creates bars of light through the steam and the outline of McDonovan’s body is visible while he irons a heap of shirts.

He silences his ears with toilet paper. In the afternoon part-time workers from Open Skies Cleaning Service arrive and finish whatever he didn’t get to. Having someone the administration can trust, like Pants, is cheap, allows them to pay less to Open Skies, and he does an exceptional job (Grade A, extra shower time, full heat), resulting in his nickname which makes him feel belittled, like when Dad called him “tiny man.” Not “little man” like some fathers lovingly call their sons, but “tiny man” in a tone that cut. The way he runs a crease from the thigh to kneecap before dropping to the ankle the guards can’t figure out. When Pants tells them he was an artist of sorts, in Sky Father, they nod, not understanding what participation in Sky Father has to do with working an iron like a seamstress. He
says when he was a boy his parents made him clean and iron his underwear until they looked new, the fabric thin and stretched, because it was part of a punishment, maybe that’s where he gets his talent from. The guards smile, don’t respond or ask about the punishment, and they walk away, which makes Pants feel worse, makes him feel like “tiny man.”

After the laundry shift, a guard, one of the few who don’t use, escorts him back to his cell where the weekly letters sit on his bed. The guard discusses the heat wave and the politicians debating whether to move in to the village or not.

“When the lord speaks his decision will echo through the politicians, like Sanders,” says the guard who sports a gold cross on a gold necklace. “The village doesn’t believe in a god and that’s what’s wrong. You believe in rocks.”

“The yellow ones are power,” says Pants. “You melt them into YCL. It’s important. Please stop talking. Thank you.”

“God wants civilized people to move into the village, which is godless. You see what I’m saying? Us moving in is a good thing for you people. We trust Sanders. It’s an opportunity to become educated in the ways of god and learn what actual medicine is. It’s impossible for you people to keep living the way you do as time moves forward.”

Pants says that the city gets what the city wants because of chaos, not god. He says they don’t want what they have to offer because the village has always been fine without the city. He again tells the guard to please stop talking, thank you.

The guard sneers, touches his cross. He’s heard the rumors before about the city nearing, buildings randomly sprouting up. The guard prays nightly. He doesn’t necessarily believe that a city can grow on its own accord, something alive and wanting more. What he believes in is god doing all things right, for him.

“We’ll see,” says the guard, but Pants is already not listening, thinking about Mom and home and the letters waiting to be opened in his cell.

Correspondence with Mom concerns crystals. She describes in pencil drawn diagrams what the holograms look like that extend from the black crystal he gave her.
The last attempt
, she writes,
two black horses appeared. Twins. I call this Horses Hologram. Do you know this? I’m not crazy. Don’t tell me that
. If he writes back asking if she’s eating black crystal, she never answers. He knows nothing about horses. He doesn’t think his Mom, whom he loves deeply and painfully, is in the slightest, crazy. He only wants to help her, but questions if his need to help is a way to lessen his own guilt because of what happened to her, and now, her sickness. Not because he’s a good person. He ignores this question as quickly as it arrived.

His letters discuss the effects of black crystal and how the guards are hooked.
They believe in immortality under a universe that will silence them
. What he has will run out. He’s convinced the guards that it increases longevity. They are good to him because he controls it. They don’t steal it from him because they don’t fully understand what the black crystal is besides village voodoo and aren’t sure they want the responsibility of its possibilities, so they keep this game going with Pants and it’s working out just fine. There is an understanding and a structure and that’s what people need. Besides, what the hooked guards believe is this: the city will eventually take over and then they won’t need Pants McDonovan ever again. They can study the mine and what the village lifestyle is like and finally be comfortable with what they now don’t understand. They can bring the village into modern living with god, carpeted cubicles, televisions, dishwashers, tooth x-rays, nuggets, yoga, babysitters, meat, car washes, air conditioning with floral scents, jogging, speed dating, screens, cat-shaped headphones, keyboards, raw juice, leather interior coffins. The guards like getting high, feeling new and different, on the black crystal.

Black crystal just feels good
he once wrote to Mom.
It makes the
blood jump inside your body and nothing else. They are going to need more and I’m scared about that day coming too soon
.

He knows Mom is ill, she’s mentioned it prior in letters, but he doesn’t know how bad it’s gotten, the layers of ache peeling up from her tiny screams, the rot expanding inside the tunnels inside her bones inside her body. If he could see her. If he could stand before her, he’d feel like a boy seeing her cry for the first time. How he watched hiding from the doorway his mother sob and shake under the bedsheets, and afterward, he realized while sitting on his bed and poking his stomach hard ten times, that she wasn’t invincible like he had previously thought. He wanted her to live forever after he witnessed her and the men in the mine that night, shortly after seeing her cry. He could have done something, but he didn’t. The men went back.
You could have done something
is a black mantra he repeats daily, an endless banner of
You could have done something
wrapping around his thoughts and getting tighter and tighter.

The cell door slams shut and distracts him from the memory. The guard tells him to believe in the power of god, the values of Sanders, and smooches his cross.