Crystal Eaters (15 page)

Z. imagines an entire network of black crystals underground. It has to be a fantasy. But he saw it, Jug held it up for that quick moment, and he’s never seen a crystal like that before. Was it just a red, this messed jail lighting, his exhaustion, his mind dimming the color? Why would someone like Jug make up such a story if it wasn’t real?

“What I’m saying is, you had your own idea of a game to keep you occupied. A jailbreak in reverse. I mean,
fuck
, stupid and somehow brilliant. That’s why you can do this. And we have a game in here where guards take black crystal, and when they don’t they act like idiots. They hurt more. What are we suppose to do – fire them and let them tell the media what’s going on?
PR disaster. I feel like I’m talking to myself here. This is the game we want to keep playing and there isn’t anything wrong with that. The game is what keeps you distracted from the universe bearing down on you.”

“I understand,” says Z., “but I don’t know what’s happening.”

“I’ll give you a few days. I’m not sure your friends can last more. Come back with it and they walk. Pants too. As a matter of fact, all the villagers in here, everyone goes, why not. You’ll be remembered as the man who sprung your people free. They’ll build you a statue and you’ll be remembered forever. Don’t let me keep you longer. The guards get wild without it. No telling what they might do to your friends while you’re away. And no telling what they may do if we can’t control them, maybe run rabid to his home and find the one his mom has in that box. Only so much I can do here. Come on, let’s go.”

Z. runs under the sun-clogged sky. He makes eye contact with a man wearing a dress sitting on the stoop of a brick building. The man raises his arm slowly, the sleeve of his blue dress gathering around his elbow, and while coughing, he gives Z. the middle finger. Z. runs faster. He puts the city on his back. The man holds his middle finger as high as his arm will stretch, leans forward in the direction of Z. who slides down the cliff, creating long dusty tunnels in the air above.

17

T
he sky is laced with turquoise worms, and where the sun normally is there’s two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth. Her bed contains 24 stacked pillows that form a wall. She gets into bed and looks up at the black crystal drawn on the ceiling. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and touches the pillows. The mouth in the sky fills with red and the teeth vanish and it’s the sun. The worms wail and turquoise cascades down an arc in the sky.

The first pillow Remy places on her feet. The next, her legs. The next, her stomach. Finally, her chest. She builds layers until she has to balance the pillows on her body with her breathing. She puts the last three pillows on her head and hugs her face until she passes out. Her arms flop off the sides of the bed and her fingertips dangle near the floor.

She’s a baby. She takes wide, unsteady steps, and on a few occasions, tips backward, arms extended as her diaper thumps the floor. She wears a blue shirt with a hand-drawn black crystal (Brother). Her face is blond hair. She stumbles from her bedroom and into the hallway where she falls down the stairs, blond hair blown open and her body awkwardly sliding down the stairs as Mom shouts from below. Afterward, Remy cried for fourteen hours. Mom stayed awake the entire time, tapping her back in
sets of ten, feeding her sips of tea, telling her it would be okay, they will come back on again.

Remy twitches in the wobbly picture and her eyelids flicker. Her arm as baby arm snaps like a bird’s spine beneath a boot. The pillows fall. One hits her arm. Mom moans from her bedroom. Her negative weight floats upward from her refusal of food. Her falling numbers hurt everything around her, even the carpet looks depressed. Dad skips between loving companion to distant husband to angry father. He spends his days alone. Each day this week he’s been sitting gargoyle-perched on the roof. Recently, Remy’s thought the problem of Mom’s sickness isn’t Mom’s sickness exactly, but Dad’s reaction to Mom’s sickness.

Remy writes in a notebook:

FELL DOWNSTAIRS AS A BABY -5 CRYSTALS.

SUBTRACT -1 FOR EVERY YEAR AFTER FROM AGING.

She puts three pillows on her face and grips tight until she passes out again, her hands falling off the bed, eyes now moving over a dark road. She’s riding her bike with the blue and yellow tassels tied to the handlebar. She wanted red and green, to be special, but Dad bought the commons. This vision like the last is broken from reality but more severe – Remy riding her bike on the road to the mine, blue and yellow tassels blowing endlessly backward and touching her home. Her hair is also endlessly long and it touches the house. She’s followed by a spotlight. Her feet blur on the pedals. She’s trying to escape the light. Skin three inches above her right ankle catches on the rear derailleur and the bike breaks into a severe slide. Water sprays from where the tires skid. The road becomes a beach and Brother is standing there covered in glistening sweat, jogging in place, with Harvak at his side who is also jogging in place. Sea crystals the shape of
hexagons colored white foam then harden to black stone on the sand. An octopus is flung by the sun across the sky. The spotlight disappears and the man, who looks just like Dad, who held the spotlight, twirls his hand goodbye, bows, then jumps off the cliff at the top of The Bend.

-8 CRYSTALS FROM BIKE ACCIDENT.

She creeps down the staircase and sees only legs in the kitchen. She can’t understand how they can stand so close to each other and yell so loud, how can their faces not split and bruise. Mom is doing almost all the shouting and her legs are following Dad’s legs around the kitchen. He’s cooking something and trying to avoid her. The thrill of watching her parents in this raw, private moment makes Remy’s heart race and hands grip the wooden banister. They have always been so troubled, so doomed. They have always talked around each other. The pillows tumble again and the black crystal drawing on her ceiling comes into focus.

-4 CRYSTALS FROM DAMAGING PARENTS’ WORDS ENTERING MY BRAIN.

She continues the game until her skin turns blue and she needs a tiny black crystal flint to regain strength. She stabs her mouth. A freckle expands through her cheek in a red circle that covers one side of her face. The following visions of all things negative she sees awake: Harvak dying, Brother leaving, parents fighting, sun killing. Then, there’s the beach again and the clouds are slowly coming down and each one holds a cop holding a baby under an arbor rung with flowers.

Black crystal dissolves everything.

Black crystal is everything.

Here she is with limbs shaking, lungs sky-up and filling with
the good kind of pain, head all air, Remy with eyes glazed-over and wanting everyone she loves to live forever.

+25 FROM BLACK CRYSTAL.

“Mom, I need to speak to you, Mom,” she says, knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, flinging open the door and walking into the bedroom where Mom sits on the floor in a hunched lotus position. Her spine is visible through her nightgown (Chapter 4, Death Movement, Book 8) in the sunlight coming in through the window. When she turns and sees Remy, she slides a red box under the bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I ran the mine during the rainstorm. I know, I know, I shouldn’t, but I did, and it happened.”

“You’re sick?”

“With Hundred. A truck almost ran us over. I have to tell you something.”

“I saw the mud. Come here.”

Remy sits in the folded angles of Mom’s lap and it’s the first time she thinks maybe she’s too big for this, but being so close to Mom is comforting, even in the heat. She places her head on Mom’s chest and there’s no heartbeat. Wait. There it is.

“Black crystals,” says Remy, looking up at Mom’s chin. “They exist. They cut my feet and I felt a rush. I know, it’s wrong. But Mom, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again and I’m telling you it adds. I have some left and I don’t think there’s more left in the whole world.”

Mom moves Remy’s head and body facing forward toward the window so Remy can’t see her skin. Last night, Dad found red scabs in the shape of a door on the back of her neck. “Your Brother talked about this.”

She couldn’t remember the last time Mom said the word
Brother
or his real name, Adam. Remy never saw him use black
crystal for sure, but she assumed he had it. There was a night when she walked past his bedroom and he was in there with three kids and they were taking turns eating a dark-colored rock. Brother used one side of his mouth to gnaw on it while the others jumped on the bed and told him to keep going, eat it all. It was a dare. Then he acted funny. He ran in place and dripped sweat and slapped his face. He fell to the floor and barked. He rolled over and looked up at Remy and screamed to close the door. After one of the boys slammed it closed they laughed forever. They ran and threw their bodies against the door and she could see little slivers of light around the doorframe and she stepped back thinking the little slivers of light were forming a box around her.

“It could help you. Or what about the hospital?”

“You’re still doing it? You have some left?”

The lace curtains pulled open are singed black at the edges.

“No,” lies Remy. She can still feel the black crystal inside her. Her feet keep moving when she doesn’t want them to move.

“Remy.”

“Just try?”

“Do you have any left?”

“I said no.”

Mom rubs Remy’s shoulders. “Children replace their parents.”

Remy stands, her legs momentarily tangled inside of Mom, and stomps her feet. She marches. Mom pushes herself backward trying to avoid getting crushed. Remy’s face is all knots, and her cheek, where she placed the black crystal flint, is swollen. She gives one more monster stomp and the sunlight triangle shakes.

A fire truck’s siren can be heard in the distance and they both look at the window. More city buildings are burning, flames mending seamlessly with sunlight.

Mom looks up at Remy, a shifting adult-to-child perspective that saddens Mom. “This is what happens.”

Remy asks, “How many?”

“It’s something you don’t need to know.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“I’ll feel better knowing what’s inside you.”

“Remy, please.”

“But how many? If I have to accept it, I should know it. Mom? Please?”

“Two.”

16

H
e sits on the roof in the midnight dark. New lights shine from the city. Buildings built in hours. One building shoots up so fast that Dad closes one eye and with his opposite hand finger-walks the sky with each level completed. Windows with workers’ flashlights open to his touch. The sound of hammers fold inside the sound of saws.

City inspectors are told to sleep outside and report back to Sanders if the city is growing. The inspectors wear white helmets with flashlights and one-piece jumpers the color of pearl. At night they patrol the fence with their lights crisscrossing as they examine the ground. They measure the dirt between the fence and the nearest buildings, and each time the measurement shrinks a quarter-inch.

“What’s going on?” says one inspector to another, in a concrete stairwell that rises with each word spoken. “We losing our minds from the heat?”

“Beats me.”

“We have to report something, Jim.”

“I told you, it beats me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I don’t know.”

“How can we not know?”

“Just don’t.”

Later: “Well,” says Sanders, who is aging quickly, not the young buck who once gave a speech at the opening of the prison. He’s balding. In his closet in his office, worn under a suit jacket and pressed between two suits, is a blue dress. Only his wife knows about this fetish, and one day soon, his son.

The ten dirt-encrusted inspectors stand in the room and their jumpsuits crinkle with movement. Sanders stares. One inspector has his flashlight on. Another inspector pulls the helmet off his head and with the heel of his palm knocks the batteries out and onto the floor. They do their best to stand silent.

“We don’t know why, or how,” says an inspector. “Also, the sun might be getting closer, but our reports say it’s an optical illusion.”