Crystal Eaters Read online

  Remy tells Dog Man that if she can increase her count she will possess the power to reverse Mothers. She pictures Mom gathering crystals by the valley-full with flowered fingers, light radiating in tunnels from her mouth and eyes, green looping inside her body from throat to stomach in an endless U. A tunnel of light from her left eye connects to Brother and guides him across a bridge built from prison to her. Just for her. Brother comes back to the house and into a seated position with Remy in his lap pulling his hairy arms over the front of her body. The radio shouting cartoons. The family at full count forever. Mom says, making eye contact with Remy inside the dream, cartoons blaring rain and cars and speech bubbles We have one person to thank and it’s Remy!

  “Come on, dig more.”

  He looks up at her before churning the ground with alternating paws, nose down.

  “I know they exist.”

  Yesterday Mom spent the afternoon in her room. She dropped something heavy on the floor that moved the house. Inside the drawing on the wall of the red crystal, the baby moved, and suddenly, Remy hated the drawing and wanted it gone. Dad was with her, and they both looked up before looking at each other, no idea what causes a thudding sound like that – dense, sharp, centered. Remy asked for paint. Later, Dad walked out of the room and ran to the bathroom to see if Mom was okay. Remy waited and waited, nothing to do with her fingers but tap her knees until falling asleep, only to be told when she woke from the weirdest dream ever, a new dog on her lap, that yes, Mom was fine, nothing to worry about.

  But she took forever to descend the stairs that night for dinner which was pork chops seared gold with garlic potatoes prepared by Dad who was wearing the same stained clothes. When Remy asked what was wrong he spoke with food mashed in his mouth, said she was sick, an illness, old age, How about we don’t talk about it right now, we went over this before, okay? Play with your new dog. Several times during dinner Mom was given the spitting cloth for the red drizzling her chin and throat. Her face looked scared, almost childish, and pained in a way that made Remy tell herself she would do anything to help, even sacrifice herself.

  A loud bang and Remy says, “Buildings coming from the city? Dig around more, hurry.”

  Dog Man doesn’t look up, his nose buried inside a cone of dirt.

  Remy has had nights where she can’t sleep, thinking about her parents, Brother, the family pulled like puppets away from each other, strings severed by stars. Disease cuts all. Remy wonders when she too will catch an illness and rush toward zero. She wonders what it feels like to have nothing inside. What will she see in those final seconds? Will there be colors?

  “Last try.”

  Something is happening in the city: sky-stretched screams, ambulance howls, rising smoke, breaking glass. The Brothers leave the mine by way of the dirt road and run to watch. The moon weakens from clouds. In a final attempt to find a black crystal Remy picks a random spot on the ground and makes a hole by kicking her heel downward. Dog Man barks. Nothing. Not even yellow. Remy hears the noises too, sees the trails of smoke above, wonders what it could be.

  They run up the road and out of the mine and watch the fire in the city. Night-framed bodies leap from a burning building before ladders can fall against the roof. The moon pulls flames from the windows in ribbons of yellow and red. Six arcs of water extend from flashing lights positioned below. At this distance, in this moonlight, when a helicopter turns and slants itself when pouring dirt from above and onto the burning building the helicopter disappears and what Remy sees is a slit in the sky spewing dirt. She looks and wonders where the hospital is. Dog Man moans.

  “It’s okay,” she says, holding him in her arms, his nose wet and covered in dirt. “That’s city fire.”

  “You’ll let me die like Harvak.”

  “I won’t,” says Remy.

  “I’m not really talking,” says Dog Man. “I eat my own shit.”

  “Will Mom die?”

  A large temple-shaped flame spurts skyward from the roof and more people scream.

  “That is exactly what will happen.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  Trucks driving toward the fire drown buildings in flashing lights. Curious faces hang from apartment windows. Someone drops their phone ten stories and shouts, “My phone!”

  Dog Man says, “They consume because they want to live forever.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  The chopping of the helicopter narrows to a distant and silent dot.

  “I sleep under your bed and puke there. There’s an entire floor of puke and you don’t know about it.”

  “Why are you telling me that?”

  He laugh-barks. “A lake of puke.”

  “Stop it.”

  “Puke ocean.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Puke city.”

  “Come on.”

  “Puke kingdom.”

  “We’re going now.”

  “You know what you are?”

  “What?”

  “The princess of castle puke.”

  They run home with the smoke and clouds and heat a union above, following.

  Remy wakes in her bed. She sneezes black gunk into her palm and wipes her hand on the flower-print bedspread. When she stands, she steps on her sleeping dog and immediately jumps to the side, raising her foot.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “…”

  “Hey, said I was sorry.”

  Dog Man sits up, head angled.

  “I’m not looking under the bed.”

  “…”

  “How is Mom?”

  “…”

  After washing her hands in the bathroom Remy walks downstairs. Smell of bacon. She trips on a bucket of YCL placed on the floor just around the corner to the kitchen entrance. Some of it sloshes out and spills on the floor and Dad yells because they need every drop. Remy cleans the spill up with a wet cloth from the sink and Dad watches her every move.

  Dad attempts to get Mom to eat a sliced apple with honey. She eats with hesitation, little interest, her mouth caged with saliva. Her eyes say she wants the bacon on the stove, Remy sees this, but Dad doesn’t notice. He holds the apple to her lips. Dad prepares meal after meal to show he cares. He spends countless hours cooking only to rush through eating and then moving on to the next meal. He thinks time spent together at the table is important, family time, a duty and obligation that must be filled, but you wouldn’t guess it by watching his rushed movements that he cared, never asking what they would actually like to eat.

  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

  She 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

  On 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.