Crystal Eaters (17 page)

The guard wearing the gold cross, which looks tiny now, says to another guard that it’s because Pants doesn’t believe in god, that’s the reason he’s unable to get over his guilt with what happened to his mother in the mine and the other guard says, “Frank, just stop.”

“Better make your move, boss man,” says Pants, and he pushes back on his heels.

Everyone watches as his weight shifts into the empty space of the room and into the odd frozen picture of a man tilting in the air, the body long, towering, insane.

The chair slides.

The guards have to react even if the reaction is not reacting.

Maybe you gain control by losing control.

The guard with the gold cross runs to the opposite wall and palm-punches a red button.

Maybe you’re never in control and knowing that is gaining control.

“Shit,” says a guard.

The chair hits the concrete wall, bounces backward and upward, spins and falls as Pants floats horizontal in the air. His face is flat and serene. His eyes are closed and all he sees is the blurry rose-tint of his eyelids, imagining the lights above are the sun.

Alarm bells ringing.

Guards running.

Jug shouts garbled letters. The power of his voice is one hand on each guard’s shoulder, pulling them away from the body
about to hit the concrete floor. They aren’t prepared for the landing. They aren’t prepared for the clean-up. What’s about to happen is a horror, a body meeting an unmovable object, and it isn’t the sound when his head cracks which is so horrendous, it’s their voices.

13

Z
. crawls under the fence. The air itself looks red, the wind a punishing speed, everything dusty, villagers walking in bent-over forward angles with eyes shut, hands as fists. There’s a howling. The sun is trying to burn everything up and the buildings are moving closer. Returning took Z. a shorter amount of time than reaching the prison. Dirt fills his eyes but he doesn’t care. He runs by a destroyed table and a crashed truck with flat tires. The tin roofs are blinding in the sun.

Everyone moves around the truck and table. Street vendors sell yellow crystal earrings, blue crystal necklaces, and green crystal headbands to a group of city tourists who have snuck in. There’s a gold pin with a red crystal triangle inside. Drawings of what a black crystal would look like are also for purchase. Someone points at an old woman who kisses a green crystal she wears around her neck. They look at the village and think it’s disposable, undesirable in modern time, something that can be washed away, or better, fixed. Z. moves past it all with the warning words of Jug ringing his head.

He runs to the mine dodging trucks. He jogs down the spiraling road. He passes little pyramids of dirt and mounds of yellow to be melted. Air conditioners from Mob of Mary’s have been running on max, dripping gray water, trembling in too-large
windows, poorly secured by old wadded up blankets. He runs unnoticed into a tunnel.

He scratches at the tunnel walls in random places and dirt and rocks rain on his shoes. He picks at silver flakes in the dark, truck headlights crossing him. He’s been in the mine before, but not like this, not as a worker trying to find the impossible. He remembers the crystal Jug held and he still can’t believe it because he’s lived through the myth. No one, absolutely no one, has seen one up close. He has to discover something that doesn’t exist. His mind buzzes, collapses, races. In the near distance the screech of a drill the size of the moon is terrifying, is some kind of machine at the edge of the city, is some kind of machine designed to build buildings impossibly fast. He saw them shooting up from the soil. He saw them moving closer. A man in a dress gave him the middle finger, what does that mean. They will bury the village in drywall, coffee shops, and wifi. He pulls off the dogtooth whistle and throws it behind him. They will bury the village in their future. He claws his hands into the wall of dirt and uses the weight of his body to drag his nails down until he lands on his knees. The city gets what it wants but so does the sun and one will destroy the other. He twists and turns his fist into the dirt until his knuckles tear.

Another chance to be remembered
.

He digs until he can’t feel his body, just the pain of dirt and rock beneath his fingernails. He digs until he believes, because he has to, that he can find a black crystal with no rain.

12

A
wet cloth is placed on her forehead and is warm within seconds. Remy feeds her a teaspoon of broken black crystal in applesauce, the black particles tweezed from the fabric of her bedroom rug. The applesauce and crystals mix with Mom’s saliva into a grim slush that glistens down her chin. Mom’s acting like Harvak did.

“We’ll check on you,” Dad says. “Sleep.”

When the door closes Mom throws her pillows to the floor, over the right side of the bed, and her body follows.

Reaching under the bed she grabs the red box. She drags herself across the floor, her legs motionless dead things, and into the sunlight triangle. She takes out the black crystal. Her hands have white veins, they look deep and faraway, drained. Little specks of flickering light swim through them. She angles the black crystal into the sun, and refracted high above and connected by thin bridges of light are the eight black crystal holograms. She smiles until her lips bleed. She plays the game perfectly. Miniature twin horses float in the air above her hands.

But it’s not enough. She needs the sensation again. She needs more. Mom considers eating the black crystal, all of it.

Horizontal bars of orange and pink stack inside each horse’s body and a river of creatures – snails, rabbits, birds, snakes – connect their mouths.
In this family the loss begins with you
. Above
the horses the black crystal holograms form a dark field bordered by a pulsating heat.
I don’t feel solid anymore
. When Mom leans forward the horses squeal and their legs come down and into the back of her neck.
Tell me there’s more than reality
.

Mom, now sitting up, eyes crazy and filled with tears, lifts the box and smashes it on the floor between her legs. She raises it and brings it down again and again. She shakes her head from side to side and her hair tries to follow and blurs. She keeps smashing. Red arcs splinter the air. The horses disappear through portals. Gripping the black crystal like a pestle she grinds the box into the floor.

She slumps onto her side and lies gasping for air, covered in sweat, her gown transparent against her skin. She drops the black crystal. She moves her legs but her legs don’t move. Hundred barks, his paws visible in the space between floor and door.

Her face sideways, one eye open and tear-filled, the other dark against the carpet, she grabs the crystal and pulls it toward her.

She opens her mouth and closes her eyes.

Her teeth come down on the crystal so hard her lower jaw shifts an inch to the left and her mouth balloons liquid. She eats. She’s flooded with pictures. She looks inside her right lung and sees a garden inhabited by rabbits and a bear eating blueberries. Hidden in ragweed, a fox pops his head out and says she never was a very good mother, better to just leave and let Remy take her place. The bear walks with both hands outstretched, smearing blueberries on her ribs.

The carpet is rough as gravel and her face burns. She chews hard bits, not sure if it’s black crystal or teeth. She sees herself running from the garden and across a beach and Tock Ocki is there, running with her, telling her she’s one of the special ones, I told you, I told you that you’d be special, hey, slow down, look at that. For a moment, she sees numbers racing past a thousand as a road coming out of the ocean and connecting to the sun.

11

H
e is led down a blue hall by four guards. His body feels broken. When he steps down the flesh of his right ankle sinks into the heel of his foot, or at least it feels that way to Pants who is a total mess physically and soon-to-be mentally. With each step he takes he skips three. His right arm, in a sling, is signed by an inmate that says
your perception is your reality so just make it be whatever
. His head is wrapped in white bandages with a dark spot seeping through in the shape of a key. They stop at the end of the blue hall.

Jackson’s Hole is four feet by four feet with a fourteen-foot-high ceiling containing four lines of light. The door becomes a concrete wall when it shuts. Pants sits on the floor with his head throbbing. He wonders what the record length for a headache is, how much of his skull had to be cleaned off the floor. He’s not completely sure why he’s here, but he has a basic understanding.

The administration’s decision to place him in solitary is based on fear. Without black crystal they remove him from the population not to protect him from inmates, but from the guards who have become irritable and are acting strange. Yesterday a guard showed up to work in a gorilla costume spray painted in graffiti and another guard, seemingly drunk, held a dark-colored rock that he rabidly chewed while doing squat-thrusts. The guard with the gold cross has gone missing. His gold cross was found
nailed to the mural of skeletons and roses. There has been talk of a riot not among inmates, but guards. They don’t want to be themselves anymore, they want to get back outside themselves, to the version with the black crystal inside them.

Pants falls asleep on the concrete floor. It’s probably due to the green medication they injected him with because his arm is covered in crystals and he tries to brush them away but they’re ghosts. He’s inside a white building. From a window he sees the prison and it’s pretty with the lights on. The crystals on his arm are different sizes, and in certain spots, a large crystal has small crystals consisting of smaller crystals. He digs his arm. They snap off, turn to pulp between his rubbing fingers, change to the color of smoke, rise. Looking under his arm he picks at gold colored rock hanging blob-like from his skin. He curls his fingernails in, pulls and tears away thick layers of gold alive in dream.

A bed lines the length of his arm. On the bed are hundreds of identical horses filled with colored bars. When he shakes his arm they fall. The horses land on the prison floor and flail their legs in a struggle to stand. Thirteen different versions of Mom from childhood – thirteen images of her from his favorite moments including playing with her in the rain, and lying in bed while she read to him, and standing behind her while she cooked at the stove – jump from his arm and dive into the flooding fog from the horses’ mouths. Then he runs across every floor in the white building, smashes out every window with a hammer, rides a coffin-sized and chain-powered elevator to new floors, to more windows that need smashing. He runs until he can’t feel his legs. He runs until he’s on the roof of the white building, the fog coming up and after him, horses squealing, guards fucking on white clouds in a million different positions above him saying to relax, it’s all going to work out, we’re all sky fathers here, grab a limb, join us.

It’s dark when he wakes. He’s torn the sling off his arm and
also the head bandages. His arm, from inner wrist to armpit, is shredded like forked meat. Puss colored blue with weak sparkle drips from his elbow. If Z. comes back with black crystal he’ll be able to see the family he loves, dislikes, needs, wants to connect with once more before his body turns to husk. He can’t forgive himself. He can’t get outside himself.

The sun wants to swallow the earth not for reasons of expansion, but attraction to the black crystals. The universe will not miss the earth. There are billions of planets. The black crystals reach for the sun in a moving spider web, coming up from the earth’s center, ready to break through all dirt, rock, grass, and bone.

10

A
man is working in one of the tunnels. He looks familiar, but not familiar in the sense that he’s a mine worker. Skip Callahan asks where his work clothes are and Z. says he forgot them at home, that everything he owns is saturated with dirt and sweat from working and the weather. Skip shrugs, not recognizing Z. from the table in the street incident, but still thinks they’ve met before. He considers asking if he knows him from Eddies or if he’s a member of Brothers Feast who Skip has always actively ignored. At first Skip decides on saying nothing. He’s impressed at how hard Z. is working because the heat wave has slowed everyone. He watches and tells himself to back off, let this man work, don’t upset him, but he can’t help himself.

Skip says, “Might want to consider going shirtless. It’s my move, but you can have it.”

“Thanks,” says Z. “I’m new here. Thank you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Skip. There’s a break in his thinking, his eyes kind of glazing over. Then: “Have we met?”