Crystal Eaters Read online

  “Was it red? Have you ever seen a black crystal? Kids at school say no one has seen one after The Sky Father Gang. Other kids say black crystals never existed at all, that it’s only a story made up by people with sad brains. The older you get the more you believe in it, kind of like what you said before about adults getting weirder. If I found one I’d probably try it. Yeah, I would. I heard people believe –”

  “Hey, why are you thinking this?”

  “Because,” said Remy, “I want to prepare myself so I don’t suffer like Harvak. I don’t want to feel pain. People remember your suffering and the last memory they have of you is your face and I don’t want mine to be hurting. I want to help Mom.”

  “You shouldn’t spend your life worrying about dying.”

  “Unavoidable.”

  “Why?”

  “To not think hm wonder what’s my count, while you’re alive? I don’t think you can ignore the thoughts of zero. It’s scary to be alive. Sometimes, if I close my eyes and clear my head and just concentrate, like just really concentrate on what it would be like to be empty, to not have to live, to not get out of bed, my entire body goes into a kind of shock. It knows. I can feel what it will be like.”

  “City people don’t think that. They may not agree with us, but they just live their lives, I think. They just keep expanding and moving and, well, I don’t think they have time to think. Maybe it’s better.”

  “I bet they don’t believe it until they are about to die and start apologizing on their death bed. I saw a fat woman jogging The Bend and I barked at her. I’m sorry, but I did it.” Remy laughed the same child laugh she’s had since having a hundred inside and for a quick moment, like a finger poke between his ribs, it breaks him.

  “Don’t be scared by what you can’t control.”

  He looked around the room. His daughter was outgrowing the space he once proudly provided. He should have built the room larger, with a deeper closet for her games, clothes, art supplies taken from Mob of Mary’s, books on count, dozens of blue and yellow pillows, a poster of the sun.

  “Must be hard knowing there isn’t a way to help her. You just watch. Maybe Brother never did find a black crystal because if he did he would have given it to Mom and she wouldn’t be sick. There’s a kid in my school named John who says they were just dark red all along. You know what, I’ll find the solution so we’ll all live longer. I’ll do it.”

  “What did you get on your spelling test?”

  Mom vomited red slush, lost another crystal, and dabbed her mouth with the spitting cloth. The bathroom tiles on her palms were comforting. She stretched out and lay on the floor in front of the toilet, face turned to the side and smushed against the cool tiles. She thought about horses.

  “Haven’t gotten it back. I know why they want to move in. Because we’re different. Because they want to see, and then they want to take, what they don’t understand. We’re living a life they think is silly. Sometimes I feel like everything is pushing inward. You said I’ll always have one crystal inside me as long as Mom’s alive.”

  He wanted to say more and be comfortable inside the words to connect them. He couldn’t. His body carried him from the room. His body protected him. The imaginary conversation hurt too much. He stood in the doorway.

  “She okay?”

  “I’ll check.”

  “Will this heat wave ever end?”

  The universe breaths billions of worlds. The earth is tiny, but possesses crystals the sun is drawn to. The universe allows the sun to get closer, to create a heat wave across the city and the village, to become pulled by what is buried under the earth’s crust. This is another type of game.

  33

  Brother screams for Remy. With an arm three times longer than normal length he reaches through the circular door. His hand is several inches short from touching Remy who is crystallized in yellow light. He tries to extend his arm but the several inches short begin working backward until he’s being pulled over an ocean, fingertips spraying water, body dissected by a lighthouse. Somewhere near, Harvak is barking.

  A cloud in the shape of a mouth leans over the bed and chomps away at the crystals in severe animal angles. Cloud-teeth splinter and fly like spit fingernails. The mouth destroys itself into a million clouds. Remy presses two yellow crystals to her ears, tosses and turns and screams Mom can’t die because Mom is Mom, Mom can’t die because Mom is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is a dog, Mom can’t die because a dog is a god, tosses and turns, Mom can’t die because Mom is my Mom and my Mom is forever, tosses and turns until blue slush sprays from her mouth in a bridge to the ceiling. When she sneezes, the yellow crystal dust inside her nose becomes pollen-colored mist and she is pulled up and through the mist, through the circular door, and from the bed. Crystals fall from her feet like a gown. The bridge crumbles to salt, then rain. Animal paws press down on her and she hears herself breathing in the otherwise silence of the room.

  Remy opens her eyes, shakes the strange dream away, and pets a barking dog at her side. It’s young, shorthaired, brown, with floppy ears that she pinches and rubs. One eye is yellow, the other black. She’s not sure where the dog came from, but she can hear Dad running through the house slamming doors. She hides the dog in her closet and listens to his nails scratch the door.

  “Shhhhhhhhhhh,” she says to the closet.

  The dog lets out a small yelp.

  “Shhhh, be quiet.”

  When Dad comes in he’s covered in sweat and his face is roasted. He doesn’t say anything, looks mad at first, then takes a deep breath that relaxes his jaw and he sits down on the bed the way all Dads do. But there’s a weakness to his posture that wasn’t there before. His left hand is stained yellow. Every home is using more YCL because of the heat wave and there’s been talk amongst elders of stockpiling yellow. Dad believes that the value of yellow will rise until it’s equal to red but no one else believes him. In his closet he has three denim jackets, twelve pockets total, all stuffed with yellow crystals.

  “Remy?”

  “That was the weirdest dream ever. It was like, more than a dream. Like I was sick or something. My foot hurts. I’ve been running in the mine and, I don’t know, it was more.”

  “I’m not angry,” he says looking around the room, “just tell me.”

  “What?”

  “Remy, come on now.”

  “Seriously, whaaaaaaaat.”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  The dog barks.

  Dad leaps from the bed and in three steps reaches the closet and opens it. The dog jumps out and runs circles around his legs.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong. He just came into my room after my nap. On my test I got a C minus.”

  “We were going to try and hide him until your birthday. It was your Mother’s idea.”

  In the presence of Dad, in the way the dog is revealed to her, Remy feels like she’s done something wrong, feels guilty, and she’s not sure why, other than this is how the family operates. He doesn’t acknowledge hearing her test score and she doesn’t wait for it to register.

  “Dad,” she says. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you hurt Adam?”

  “Because.”

  “Dad?”

  “Anything.”

  “Are you dying because Mom is dying?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  She sits up. The dog jumps into her bed and licks her face. The yellow eye is dull and the black is shining. His gums look black and pink and chewed up.

  “Last night I saw Mom crawling across the floor.”

  “He likes you. She’s resting and everything’s fine.”

  “You said I could ask anything.”

  “And you did.”

  “What do you name a dog after your first dog dies?”

  32

  All prison c
ells are decorated with the exception of Jackson’s Hole which is located behind the laundry room and has no lights, no running water, is four feet by four feet, and smells like chemical lavender. Imagination by the inhabitant is encouraged. The administration is proud to promote this fact to curious city residents who skim glossy magazines and blogs for prison gossip. Reports of creativity make the inmates more human to workers in cubicles who spend their days living in screens. When they read about a prisoner painting a mural of skeletons wrapped in roses on a wall in the courtyard where the inmates exercise, it’s not with fear, but relief and an odd sense of comfort and admiration.

  Guards interact with the inmates in a friendly but reserved manner. Fights are occasional. By the low night level noise it seems everyone sleeps well. The administration is also proud of this detail and reports often to the press how calm the prison can be because a calm prison makes the inmates seem less capable of the terrible acts they are guilty of. For example, there is a man named DeWeese, housed on the upper level, who is Grade A. DeWeese is polite, rarely speaks, and volunteers shelving history books in the library. He gives blood every Monday, both drunk-tattooed arms exposed, his face a big warm smile blasting the nurse. Multiple pool owners watched from inside their homes as DeWeese performed what he is guilty of: drowning squirrels in paint buckets.

  Pants McDonovan lives on lower level east, and from his cell bars sees the upper level where more than fifty villagers are mixed in with hundreds of city prisoners. Many of them wandered into the city because they were attracted by streetlamps, big buildings, festive music, a new way of life, a way to start over, but they couldn’t adjust. They slept nude on street corners, dipped their toes into crosswalks, pawned crystals in trash-lined bricked alleys without permits. An elderly man with long gray hair wearing blue shorts prayed for ten hours to a storefront of televisions on please-stand-by. At night he smashed out the glass and threw the televisions into the streets, the colored bars on the screen cracking to distant lines the color of iron. How many villagers are in the prison isn’t widely known, especially not to Pants who occasionally recognizes a depressed face hovering over macaroni salad during cafeteria hours, but he’s never tried to keep track. The village knows about their people being imprisoned. Makes them suspicious about the city’s intent.

  New inmates are stuffed inside a briefing zone on the upper level covered with blue mesh before being moved into their cells. Often, they are heckled from the lower levels by everyone except Pants who only watches, feeling awful about seeing men being placed in here, sometimes unconsciously tapping his thumb and pointer-finger together in sets of ten.

  Upper level inmates complain about the temperature. In the current heat wave sleeping is pretty much impossible and the administration has poorly addressed the problem by installing cooling vents to offset what is a serious design flaw. Prisoners throw cups, food trays, books, spoons, their shoes, their teeth, whatever will learn to fly, at a window they hope will one day break. The lower levels are cool, dry, a design-flaw-mystery, which agrees with Pants who consumes so much black crystal his body temperature runs ten degrees above average. Because the administration considers him an agreeable and mild-mannered inmate who possesses a crystal that the guards have taken a liking to (Grade A) he’s in charge of laundry duties three days a week and allowed an extra shower with the heat turned up to a skin-reddening temperature.

  Your cell is a reflection of your inner self.

  McDonovan spent more time decorating his cell than all currently housed inmates combined. His mattress is cradled inside a hull of plastic branches. The headboard becomes an octopus when he’s on black crystal, and the ceiling a forever green that welcomes him in moans. He enters it. He peels back layers of forest as the ceiling breaths and he goes inside, splitting ferns. But as soon as he enters, he’s back on the bed. Drawings of black crystals on white paper hang on the walls all signed Love, Remy. The cement floor is the color of the dirt in the crystal mine – painted in an unusual, but allowed by the administration, “Universal Black.” White lights caged-in on the ceiling polish the floor with glare. A toilet is in one corner, a square sink adjacent extends from the wall, and a two-foot-deep closet without a door containing clothes and a white box completes the living quarters, the reflection.

  A window allows Pants to view the ugly blocks of the city and a curved road called The Bend where people the size of fleas sweat and jog. Below The Bend, the cliff leading to the village.

  You have done wrong, but you are an individual with choices and we allow you to be yourself here. You are an individual constantly becoming a better individual.

  Tonight he studies his reflection in the window. If he concentrates hard enough he floats through his head and home, into what is childhood-him playing spit-tag with Remy, jumping on his bike as motorcycle, finger-shooting Remy as he pedals away in a dust cloud with Remy running, falling several times, crying, laughing, spitting on herself, Mom watching, standing with her arms crossed and clutching at her throat a necklace of ten yellow crystals. After the childhood him smokes into the sun, the bike turning to blue gas beneath him, everything becoming a runny liquid hiss over the ground, he’s brought back into his cell and wonders when Mom will write next, how is she feeling, how many does she have left.

  He looks forward to her letters. Remy’s been asking about count, his involvement in The Sky Father Gang, if a black crystal exists or not, does touching your body in sets of ten do anything or does it just feel good. He tells Mom the only black left is the one in her possession. His gift to her when he was scared and didn’t know what it was. When he first found the black crystals during the endless rainstorm he made sure to hide them from everyone, even himself, because he didn’t believe what he held. The rumors of it spread. People just need something to believe in. It turned out he was no different. He wanted Mom to live forever so he gave it to her.

  He opens his mouth and stabs a sliver of black crystal inside his cheek. In the window a blue honeycomb-hexagon frames his mouth, eyes, every joint, tooth, fissure, nerve, and canal. The human skull stripped to bone is smiling. A fire rises from his stomach and when he coughs is blown across his chest. Ears hurt. Throat constricts. Hair echoes Mother. He stands looking at his head, his big ugly head that is even bigger today on his narrowing, via the black crystal, shoulders. When he stomps his feet the boom rattles his teeth. He grins and sees not the reality of the blood in his mouth but a thousand red crystals. Then, he sees something new. Mom’s patting a cut on his knee with his own shirt, the injury from falling off his bike, his motorcycle, after the game of spit-tag with Remy. She’s discussing the concept of pain. It’s when the crystals inside your body go out. She explains by touching the cut with a press of the shirt. They are trying to turn back on, that’s why it hurts. She stops pressing. Trust me, they’ll come back on, here. She pushes the shirt deep into the cut and he wants to be strong for her so he holds back tears and grins while grabbing fistfuls of grass. Your body is getting brighter, I see it. He smiles and a cry escapes. She presses again, this time lighter, and he shuts his eyes. You’re at a hundred again.

  When a guard passes his cell McDonovan reaches into his pocket and drops a mini plastic bag filled with black dust through the bars. The guard says, “Thank ya, business man Pants,” and skips off to tell four more guards that the bags are ready.

  Back in the reflection he tilts his head to the left and the hexagon doesn’t follow. He moves more, then a little more, and then a little more, until he’s standing to the side of the window, slightly below, crouching. He craves it but knows it’s not true – the black crystal increasing his count. When he reaches up and places his palm on the hexagon it morphs to fit the twenty-seven bones in his hand. Pants laughs, his head turtling into his shoulders. Inmates are yelling from above.

  Tony throws a sharpened spoon and it bounces off the window. Everyone goes AHHHHHHHNOOOOOOOOOOO. The noise snaps McDonovan to the right. The hexagon is gone. The prison gets quiet. Pete,
from the upper level says Next time instead of a spoon use, like, your own body or some shit and he realizes that doesn’t make any sense at all so he follows up with a vague just use a really sharp spoon, okay. The heat wave is killing them with sleep deprivation. They can’t think straight. Pete rubs his face with both hands and goes dizzy. Someone coughs and Pants turns again. His head feels like a microwave heating spoons. Four guards stand in a row with their right arms extended through his cell bars, hands open.

  31

  It’s time for a crystal mine search.

  They find yellow nuggets and blue shale. The sun fell hours ago but left its heat pinned like a dress in the sky and everyone moves slow beneath it. Remy wears dirty red shorts and her blond hair hangs over the front of her shoulders. Her dog, whom she calls Dog Man because she can’t settle on a name – seems impossible to move on from Harvak – digs up a green crystal and she grabs it and slides it into her pocket.

  “Keep looking. We’ll find it. Keep going, Dog Man.”

  Brothers Feast walk past discussing a jailbreak in reverse. A hairless man slows and smirks at Remy as the others walk ahead shoving each other and laughing on the road out. The man smells like dead dogs and Remy instinctively begins tapping her finger on her thigh. Moonlight filtered through trees forms a birdcage around his head. Remy throws dirt into the air and he ducks, not sure where it will land until it’s heard raining on a truck’s hood and he stands back up with a jump.

  He says, “Freak-o,” and walks backward three steps before turning and catching up to the group, tripping once and falling to his knees before picking himself up and running again even though he’s hurt and badly limping.

  “Smell you later,” she says, remembering the saying from a city show she once heard from the family radio while sitting in Brother’s lap. He had new hair on his arms and she had no idea what the phrase meant but she loved it and wrote the words several dozen times in her school notebook around and inside of previous drawings of crystals.