Crystal Eaters (9 page)

He reaches the bottom of the mine. The drivers circle around
his truck. Crisscrossing headlights illuminate mine workers who wear black shorts, no shirts, and jog with wheelbarrows dirt-brimmed with crystals. Tonight’s late-night undocumented batch will be sold to the city and used for engagement rings, special occasion earrings, displayed in New Age yoga studios, given to the hospital-sick for positive energy. They have their own crystals, but they don’t have these crystals. Some will be sold to parents for their children who play a game called Lyfer, trade the crystals back and forth in a test of who can maintain closest to a hundred, the brightest colors worth extra. They hurry between the ringing bells of classes to lie about what they hold behind their backs and to trade furiously as teachers watch. Skip listens to the roar of truck engines shifting gears as he tries to comprehend what he just saw.

Ken Horgan, a rat-like man whom Skip has seen several times bleeding from the head after work shifts, rolls his window down. His neck turned back and up, eyes squinting in the rain, he says, “Whole-e-shit. Was that a werewolf?”

Skip drives a loop around the trucks. Gas pedal floored, the truck buckles through shifting gears. He heads back up and out of the mine on the road he just descended. Ugly is the sky coming over the wall. Skip wants to help because he is a person hardwired to help. He couldn’t help his mom. Tires roll over the hand-prints over paw-prints. Ken Horgan says from the pit of the mine, standing in the rain with eyes like a rat being flicked with water, “COME BACK AND TELL ME WHAT THAT WAS SKIP I’VE NEVER KNOWN A HALF DOG PERSON BEFORE LET’S HAVE DINNER AND TALK ABOUT IT BUDDY.”

Halfway to the house they stop because Hundred has something in his paw. He’s been running on three legs. Remy, covered in mud, sits in the road and cradles him in her lap. The rain lets up to a spit. Steam places the village in a cloud and the lower
half of the city disappears. She pulls out a triangle of dark crystal from his paw. Blood splatters across her fingers in a Z. His eyes break as his spine twists. Remy tries to say something like, “stop” but it comes out as “hop.” He runs from her arms with impossible strength and Remy follows until they both enter the house.

“Hey, hop it.”

“…”

“Hop it now.”

They run up the stairs and down the hall, doors slamming shut behind. They jump into the tub. Remy turns the water on as Hundred play-bites her forearms. She laughs and can’t believe he wants to be in the tub, he hates baths, but he seems to be loving it, barking and leaping and smiling the way dogs sometimes appear to be smiling. She slaps his body with both hands. More blood from his paw, a stream of numbers entering the water. He acts wild, his eyes bigger than all dog eyes combined.

Thud thud thud
on the front door with a three second pause before another
thud thud thud
. They ignore it.

As the water splashes over her legs, rises above her stomach, the mud from Remy’s skin and Hundred’s hair washes off in black goops that she finger-paints on the tub’s walls. Hundred eases into a calm state, but something is off. Remy has witnessed a transformation. Good, bad, she doesn’t know yet, but something has happened. He’s not acting happy anymore. She can’t stop staring at the way he’s moving, not like a dog, but like a bug on its back, trying to flip over and right itself. It’s like he’s trying to move inside himself or leave his own body.

“You okay?”

Hundred barks twice and turns his head to the thudding.

“Who’s that?”

Before the water reaches her chest, Hundred leaps from the tub and leaves a wet slide of mud and dark goo extending out
the bathroom, down the stairs, and to the front door where the thudding just won’t stop.

“Hey, open up.”

Hundred stretches his front legs up on the door and barks.

“I don’t care what it is you’re doing. I’ve known crystal heads before and it doesn’t bother me, I just want to know if you are all right. Name is Skip and I work in the mine. I said, HELLO?”

Remy stays in the tub. Blood hangs from her feet. She sits back with the water at her chin and crosses her left foot over her right knee and inspects her foot. The air wobbles. She doesn’t feel like herself anymore and that’s a good thing. It’s her birthday and later tonight Dad will shoot a single firework into the sky. Pressed into her skin are dark crystals.
Thud thud thud
. She picks one out and blood pours down her leg. They look black. Scared, where is Mom and Dad? What is this? She squeezes the crystal back in. A flash of heat travels from her foot to her head followed by a desire to run. The liquid retracts back inside her. Lifts her. She breaths in bursts and closes her eyes where she sees a body being carried to the mine where burned. Mom cried at the kitchen table this morning because when you guess how many are inside, you guess how many days you have left. Remy doesn’t think about her lowering count because now she’s at the opposite end of that thought. Here in the pink tub, the discovery of black crystal is an escalating number widening her veins, making her believe, making her become everything – plant, bird, horse, dirt, sun, Mom – alive.

There’s one last series of knocks at the front door and then just Hundred barking, proud of himself for fighting off the knocks.

Skip Callahan stands shirtless in steam and rain. He only wanted to help. He turns and checks his idling truck.
What was that?
He walks back to his truck and looks at the fence. The city, like the sun, is way closer than yesterday.
What’s happening?
The buildings are fanning out around them like cards.
I don’t want
to die
. People are walking the edge of the city. Some are using binoculars. Skip turns his back, lowers his pants, and jiggles his big body.

25

L
ying under his sheet, he lifts his pelvis and builds a tent with his knees. He’s coming down from peaking on black crystal and the beating he took at the health meeting. They hit his legs with sticks until he fell. He thinks about the letters from Mom and with his right hand rubs his stomach and shoots a beam of light from his bellybutton. Through the sheet and around the prison bars and into the village the light travels until it rests in triangular form on her bedroom floor. She dips the black crystal into the light. Twin horses rise on their back legs and kick holes in the ceiling.

24

A
s they struggle to position the table Z. stands on it and shouts at the sun. His face is dark with shadows and sweat. His green robe is strapped tight by his arms. Everyone is excited by this new project. Once the table is in proper place, according to Z., they sit down.

Trucks, wagons, bicycles, the few cars in the village, become a fat U shape of traffic forced to flow around them. A man driving a truck who is shirtless and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette lays on the horn. He reverses his truck and accelerates before stopping inches from the table. Arnold tells Skip easy, says to keep his cool. He reverses and accelerates again and again. It’s a tactic to psyche the Brothers out that doesn’t work. Skip is drenched from the rainstorm, his eyes crazed, his hair matted to his forehead in the shape of a bird’s gray wing.

“Easy, Skip, easy,” says Arnold. “Look like you’ve seen Royal Bob!” Arnold waits for someone to laugh but no one laughs.

Red globs stretch then drip from the rim of the sun.

“Skip, come on now,” says Ricky. “No need, no need.”

“I got this,” says Z.

Everyone stops and looks at Z. who somehow appears more natural standing on a table as opposed to sitting. He runs the length of it, huffing dramatically, moving his arms robotically, legs like pistons, and everyone leans back as he leaps from
the edge of the table and lands in a crouched position on the truck’s hood. His feet crumple metal. He screams at Skip with a pointed finger and says he’s trying to enjoy his dinner and Skip, head down, head filled with images of a dog-child, and not really looking at Z., he hates Brothers Feast, but still looking up slightly just enough to see him, dislike him, holds up a hand and mouths
okay
. When Z. walks back across the table he glances in Bobby T.’s direction, shrugs his shoulders, and smirks like a child reaching into a drawer.

“S-s-s-sorry, Bobby T.,” he says. “I’m s-s-s-stressed.”

He dance-walks, hips humping in the direction of the sun, and the Brothers, not knowing what to do exactly from this new behavior, drum the table.

“Hey,” says Bobby T., “it’s been hard.”

Which is true. Z. has wrecked his mind trying to define the jailbreak in reverse. He’s close. They’re close. The time spent defining the jailbreak doesn’t matter because once it’s completed no one will ask how long they spent working. You’re remembered for your actions not your planning. People who are remembered are remembered forever because they travel in memories, from old to young, and what’s greater than that. What’s greater than living forever and not being alive to see the consequences.

“I’m this close,” says Z. and holds his thumb and pointer finger a quarter inch apart before sitting back down. “That means really close,” he adds.

A bag of hot air in the sky moves like an ameba. The Brothers have dinner by candlelight at the table in the street. Inside the bag, the ameba, thousands of tiny things are moving and it’s only Z. who looks up, smiling and admiring the strangeness of this sky creature.

“SMART ASSES,” someone says. It’s one of the mine workers. “We should sell and be done with this nonsense. They will take over no matter what, just look at the buildings, you dolts.” A crowd of Brothers Feast supporters including Ken Horgan
shoves the mine worker away, down the street, as he continues to shout backward over his shoulder about the end of times, their imminent destruction resulting in nothing but city.

Another mine worker says, “Nice…
reeeeaaal
nice. They are laughing at us every day and this, what does this do to help?”

The Brothers have no reaction. They enjoy their dinner in the street.

A man outside a bar reaches into a rusty barrel and extracts a turkey leg. With a big swinging arm he launches the leg skyward, toward the stretching bag, the ameba in the sky. The turkey leg lands on the table and wobbles their plates. They thank the man and portion off the gristle-rot. Men and women in their traditional robes, their backs hunched from mandatory years working in the mine boo the Brothers with spittle.

“Just working on our public image,” Bobby T. tells the crowd.

“Quiet and obedient is what we need,” says Ricky.

“It makes sense to be disciplined,” says Z. “Don’t act weird, right, right.”

They all smile and nod and eat. They drink coffee from a metal urn kept hot by the air. The sweat on their skin thickens to a clear goo that traps lightweight bugs. Z. takes a long drink from his mug. He notices one bug has a sucking mouth and he leaves it there, sucking, on his wrist.

A woman in an orange robe runs up and slaps the cup from Z.’s hand. The coffee paint-splatters Ricky’s sleeve. The cup rolls across the table and falls to the ground while Z. sits frozen, mouth open, pretending to still hold the cup until the woman walks away mumbling, calling him a lost child.

“The s-s-s-service here is
awful
,” says Z. and everyone laughs. He heard the “lost child” comment and it hurt. He just needs to define the jailbreak in reverse and his life will work out. Everything that has become before will be nothing.

Daylight wastes to dark. Residents retreat to their homes. The Brothers stay at the table in the street, candles flickering, the bag
of hot air in the sky, the moving ameba, pops and pours millions of locusts, black bugs, bugs with sucking mouths, invisible tiny things with just wings. The Brothers barely notice, they look at the city. Another building is on fire. Village radicals known as Black Mask are trying to stop the city’s growth by burning sections. This has happened several times and no one in the village is sure who is doing it exactly, but it’s most likely two or three mine workers. Some think it’s Royal Bob, running in his blue shorts, his long gray hair burning and swatting the base of the buildings. But no one believes burning buildings will stop the city. For every building burned to the ground, three more rise in its place.

Full dark from above. They stay up with the heat figuring out what the jailbreak in reverse is. Z. reads over the letters received from the prison. There’s a new one that he somehow missed and Z. blames Arnold for the letter being placed in the old, already read piles. Arnold’s skin burns so bad from the heat he thinks he’s covered in biting bugs and he slaps his arm. There are bugs, tons of them, on him. He apologizes. Z. reads the letter once, twice, then three more times, holding it up with two hands. He cross-checks it with several letters and notes, then goes back to this new letter. Arnold notices, his nose practically touching his arm, that little bugs, barely visible, are burrowing into him.