Crystal Eaters (11 page)
Authors: Shane Jones
D
riving in his truck at night, thinking about treating Remy with more kindness,
don’t be so short with her, she’s just a girl, you understand how hard she has it, she can name her dog whatever
he hits something that crumples the hood into a pile of tents.
The sound of the accident can be heard in the city and some run to The Bend with their binoculars.
His body hugs the steering wheel. His head touches the windshield which is the hood. Smoke rises from the headlights and the engine hisses. The tires on the left side go flat and Dad leans. When his arms slide off the steering wheel he jolts up with a loud gasp.
Hands on his chest, he exhales and coughs blue slush. Dad inspects his arms, chest, stomach, and thighs. No sign of blood or crystals leaking out from these parts, but from inside, yes, some organ split open. On the rearview mirror is a honeycomb hexagon in thin black marker with the words THIS IS WHAT OUR FAMILY IS LIKE written across it.
Remy how dare you what’s the matter with you
. She’s been acting strange, someone not Remy moving inside Remy, someone not the same daughter he sat with wearing floppy robes, talking his heart out.
He rolls his neck and practices breathing. His ribs are sore at each inhale and he’s reminded of the last time the wind was
knocked out of him – in the only fight of his life – by a kid in The Sky Father Gang. Dad wanted to talk to his son before he went into the city. Dad wanted to tell him not to go, maybe it was his fault he was acting this way, how about we try talking this out. The kid with the black crystallized facial scar in the shape of a key said his son didn’t want to talk and aimed his fist for the backside of Dad’s heart and landed.
When he opens the door, his knees and hands hit the ground. He crawls to the front of the truck. What he drove into is a table with dinner plates, melted candles, and a turkey leg with little meat. Dad massages his calves. His jeans are covered in dirt and some YCL from a mason jar that was to be added to the home generator. They’ve been running low lately and Dad is worried they will run out. It takes him ten minutes to stand.
“Hey, you. What you doing out here?” says a girl, a runaway, in purple spiked shoes. She smokes a cigarette awkwardly, her T-shirt looks shredded, and she stands in the glow of a break light.
“What am I doing out here?” says Dad. “What are YOU doing out here?” He spits up more blue slush and the girl steps back. “GET. NOW. OUT OF HERE.”
The girl runs toward the fence, back to the city.
“NO ONE FROM THE CITY BELONGS IN THE VILLAGE,” shouts Dad. “STAY AWAY.” Then, even though he knows it’s impossible, “I’M TELLING YOUR PARENTS ABOUT THIS.” His chest hurts from the words coming out and he imagines a jagged crystal now lodged across his lungs.
He leans inside the truck and turns the key, his breathing sharp and painful. Nothing. Key frozen. His hand slips in blue slush covering the key. The mason jar with the YCL is empty and shattered and he notices another patch of blue slush where he sat. He calculates he probably lost several. For a few minutes he sits sideways in the truck, his legs dangling out, not sure what to do, how to explain this, how to lie. Maybe just be honest
with her. What was he thinking. He could run into the city, it’s so close, but the accident is a red flag indicator of worse things to come. Besides, now he’s remembering the history of those who have entered the city, all those consequences, that prison. What was he thinking. That he could seriously drive in, sleep in his truck, eventually sell it, and start over as a man who wore a suit? He stands up and slams the door closed but it doesn’t fit anymore, appears to be the door to a much smaller vehicle, and bounces right back into his hand.
Dad looks for the moon as he walks home but sees only a massive black circle with a thin white border.
You can’t help someone who is too sick for help. There is no meaning in the offer when you should have done something before. You should worry about yourself and Remy now
.
He walks into his wife’s room. She sits on the floor holding a red box.
“I had an accident taking a drive,” he says, undressing. “A table, in the street. I’m okay. I’m not hurt, so no need to worry, no need to get worked up.”
Mom stands and needles pour down her legs (Chapter 3, Death Movement, Book 8). She rubs his arms. She appears shorter. The bedroom has taken on more of a grave-yellow hue, like the bathroom, from the heat.
“Why were you out so late?”
A black smudge left by the steering wheel horizons his forehead. She touches it and he moves her hand away. She goes back again and he lets her.
“Wanted to clear my head. Isn’t it strange that a table,
a table
, was in the middle of the street? I’m not talking about a piece of junk someone threw out. I’m talking about a full size dining room table. Kids. Brothers Feast. Black Mask. Royal Bob.”
“You ever talk to Maggie next door? She told me the buildings are moving closer with the sun and it’s the end of times. I
know, she’s old, don’t listen to her with that voice of hers. But everything moves inward. We okay?”
“I’m fine. What’s in the box?”
“Where were you driving?”
“A really big table.”
“You were driving to where you could see the prison, weren’t you,” says Mom, stepping closer, voice lowering a little, forcing eye contact. “Like we used to do. Don’t look at me like that. Don’t be the hard you, you were so gentle with me before, be like that. Remember sitting in the truck and watching the lights turn on at the prison and imagining that our thoughts were matching up with his thoughts? I do.”
He looks at his boots dotted with specks of blue. He immediately becomes worried that he’s lost more than just a few. He immediately becomes conscious that he’s moving toward zero, and as fast as the thought arrives, he rejects it. “Truck is wrecked.”
“I remember thinking I was kissing his forehead and hoped he was thinking of me kissing his forehead.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Nothing has changed.” He studies the gauntness of her face and tries to locate the past her with his finger.
“Nothing has changed,” she repeats and shakes her head away from his hand. Outside there’s that sound bugs make when it’s too hot and another building burning. The firemen wear pearl-colored heat-resistant suits and shine like soap bubbles as they fire hopeless streams of water from long hoses kids stomp on. “Can you say how you’re feeling? Why has it been like this for years and years and years and I just put up with it? I know that look, you don’t want to get into this. And don’t tell me it’s because of the separate beds thing. It’s always been this way. We’d drive out and look at the prison and I cried and said everything I felt but you never said anything. You just kind of sat there. Numb and cold.”
Then Dad blurts out, “Okay, I considered leaving.”
It’s difficult for her to stand without the black crystal fully in her bloodstream. Her legs are stilts. She’s taken more of it, but it’s leaving her system again and she’s losing the energy for everything. She’s not fully shocked by what he says, but it still hurts.
“I was going to drive as far away as possible. I wanted out. I couldn’t take it anymore. Sometimes it all feels so unlivable.”
“Would have been easier to leave than watch me die. Where’s my cloth? I have the worst dreams now.”
Dad speaking at her back as she moves around the bed: “I thought that. I’ve thought about a life by myself and thought how much easier –”
Mom lies down in bed. Dad stands next to the bed.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I?”
“Why didn’t you walk in? You could have made a life selling crystals, running back and forth and grabbing the best ones.”
“Did you just say there’s a problem with your dreams?”
She spits on the chest of her nightgown. The goo shines with red crystal or thick blood. Dad circles the bed, an ache in his lower back developing from the accident that will only get worse from now on. He wants to change the subject away from what he’s feeling. She seemed so much stronger before, when they held each other and he hummed that song.
“Remy talks about dying.”
“We’ve talked about it,” says Mom. “The city, the sun, but she can’t discuss death?”
“She’s small.”
“Not thinking about dying is living in denial,” says Mom, touching the liquid on her chest. “My legs hurt.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You were.”
“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have come back.”
“You know those television shows that go really fast to zip through a scene, and it’s funny? Like that show we watched with the family who lived on the beach? I see us like that, but it’s not funny. It’s just the two of us moving to opposite sides of the house and the house is shrinking. His imprisonment changed us but we never talked about it enough. I saw it in you the first time we sat in the truck, watching. You were damaged. You should have gotten it out of you back then but you didn’t.”
“I don’t know. How am I supposed to respond to that? Anything I say is going to be unhelpful. I don’t have anything to say.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I care about you and Remy more than anything.”
“I think the most selfish people are the quietest.” More spit, a deeper shade of red. “Promise you won’t leave again. I need you here. We do. What do you think it’s like to be zero?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s like the city.”
“Concrete and endless noise?”
“Wonder if I’ll feel anything.”
“Phones, politicians.”
“Wonder if it smells like anything.”
“Does that matter?”
“They have a hospital.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” says Dad, and comes back to her and sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her legs in long deep strokes that she doesn’t notice. He loves her, but can’t handle what is happening because he can’t control it. Later, he’ll walk to the kitchen for the spitting cloth. It will be the last time – the cloth the texture and color of smashed cherries disintegrating over his hands as he rinses it out. He wants to ask her again about her dreams. He wants to know what’s wrong with them.
“I can’t feel you.”
H
e receives a letter from Brothers Feast saying the jailbreak in reverse has been finalized and they are coming into the prison. He’s traded letters with Z. and they’ve worked together on the escape plan and everything is ready. McDonovan knows breaking in is risky, teetering on the absurd, but it’s worth it because there’s a chance he will see his family. Mom wrote there’s a new dog named Hundred who has one yellow eye and one black. She and Dad haven’t been getting along (nothing new) and something about a truck accident in the street (truck wrecked, bad back). In his reply letter he asks for a specific date and time, wondering how they could forget something so crucial.
She’s tried the black crystal and the sensation is an illusion to a rising number. Black crystal foams your eyes with what you think are crystals stacking inside your body, the pyramid growing, but it doesn’t hold. At first she felt better from her sickness, but later, the rush of illness flooded back stronger. He wrote
And everyone wants to live longer, how sad. I will see you guys soon. There’s been talk of my release. Love and all things good, Adam
. She touched his name.
Pants is escorted by a guard through the prison’s exercise room and into the basketball court. Inside his left shoe his foot is bandaged from the destruction of his big toe, the shard of
black crystal that ate away the nail and much skin during the health meeting. The guard tells him to stop dragging his feet by tapping his club on the back of his thighs.
Today is a privilege day. This occurs about once a month. Administrators have inmates use the basketball court, run a track outside, or allow a one-hour session in the gym with light weights. There’s a rumor about a swimming pool, but Pants has never been taken because the follow-up rumor is that someone drowned in the swimming pool, the body quickly disposed of, wrapped in painter’s plastic and tossed into the afternoon garbage truck.
Two steel doors painted white open. He’s pushed inside, the guard kind of shrugging when Pants gives him a look back. The doors close with a clang followed by a second clang that is the lock. The floor is shoe-scuffed parquet. A layer of shellac seals dents and gives glare. The single basketball hoop is a transparent charcoal-dusted backboard with red rim, no net, which is attached to a cement wall. Glued on all four walls are six-foot-high sections of cushioned matting in gray, red, and blue. The ball sits under the hoop and Pants jogs slowly, his white shorts riding up, and grabs it.