Crystal Eaters (2 page)

Dad’s answer when asked what’s wrong:
A disease has entered her and we can’t get it out
.

Remy as dog-child rolls in the dirt. She runs on all fours toward a mine tunnel. The only color on Remy under the moonlight is her eyes and several streaks of blond hair the dirt hasn’t covered. A man in the city stands at The Bend using binoculars. There are two other men, one on each side of the man, and they take turns passing the binoculars and laughing and drinking from tall moon-reflecting cans. Remy barks into the mine tunnel until her echo comes back.

38

I
t’s difficult to move under the heat wave twisting the sky into something new. For weeks the temperature has only risen. There’s no relief in the forecast.

The heat melted a green crystal. Z. smeared the green across his forehead and laughed from the shelling sensation on his skin as they walked the fence. So many men with long limbs and goofy faces. Their name is Brothers Feast, and according to Z., they will be remembered forever.

On both sides of the fence are enormous dirt fields. In the distance – the city and prison. Ricky heaves a bottle over the fence and they run in the dark, laughing, back to their humble homes so unlike the city’s structures. They have technology. The village has crystals. Tendrils of turquoise from city pollution screen the moon above.

“We’re going to be someone,” says Z. “C-c-c-come on, back to the fence. B-b-b-back to looking at the prison.”

The city is a weed. It grows closer with buildings being built and will soon cover the village. The elderly watch closely like they do the sun and they preach it’s end times. Others believe the city moves because they want to destroy what is archaic. The village has nowhere to run. Their way of life doesn’t match up with the city way of life. They are bigger. Here it all comes, they say. Open up, they say. We’re fucked, they say.

The prison is located on an island of land built slightly away from the main city buildings, connected by a single-lane road.

“We’ll be r-r-r-remembered,” says Z. “Just you guys wait.”

The lights illuminate curling barbed wire and concrete walls so tall and smooth the Brothers often ask each other during meetings
How did they build them so high without it collapsing? Is it magic? Must be magic
. The city is navy blue suits, cafeterias, ham sandwiches, granite counters, several types of stop signs, mouth-mint dentists, blacked-out car windows, bottled water, eight-to-six office jobs, drywall. But the prison is different, something special, like magic.

“Is anyone listening to me when I say g-g-g-great things will happen?” says Z. “Anyone, anyone at all?”

The Brothers answers yes, they know, great things are coming. They dream of prisoners running wild with guards trailing, the air above the guards’ heads whisked with batons, lights exploding through their bodies, the air sticky and sweet with perimeter flowers blooming like smoke on the single-lane road as they run.

“Men have always been scared of the city, r-r-r-remember our lives in hiding. Depressing. We can’t hide anymore, the city won’t let us. Here it c-c-c-comes.”

For inmates, the worst part isn’t being locked up and having a shoebox-sized window to squeeze their face against, observing the city and imagining their loved ones eating cherry pie. The worst part is they can’t see the beautiful place holding them. They can’t see the lights spiking the night sky like Brothers Feast can, standing, at the fence.

“If you’re remembered f-f-f-forever, you live f-f-f-forever.”

The Brothers aren’t listening. They can’t concentrate on anything else beside the prison. They know Z. is talking, but they don’t process what he’s saying.

“Agree,” someone says.

“Doing it,” says another.

“The t-t-t-trick,” says Z., “is to become part of p-p-p-people’s memories, their reality.”

37

Dog = 40

Ant = 3

Bird = 10

Mold = 678

Baby = 100

Mother’s tear = half

Plant = 230

Remy = unknown

Cat = 39

Spit = partial

Cloud = 88

Horse = unknown

Moon = 4,000

Frog = 12

City = infinite

Village = always falling

Tree = 480

Fly = 4

Sun = 10,000

Rabbit = 8

Mirror = reflective of object

Dirt = infinite

Pinecone = 7

Lamb = 22

Air = infinite

Flower = 1

Crystal count is depleted gradually over time but can be drastically decreased by events. Getting hit by a truck would most likely erase a baby’s one hundred. If the baby survived, wrapped in a tiny full-body cast, her count would be similar to a rabbit’s. Her count would no longer be a shining triangle of one hundred perfectly stacked crystals inside her body because it would resemble scattered shale.

The village survives on myth.

There is the story of Royal Bob, a myth so old it is easily dismissed today, but a story that is still told. Royal Bob is the first person to find a black crystal. He boiled it down into dark syrup that he sipped for decades. Seen running at night in blue shorts, mouth open, grinning, head tilted back with his gray hair stretching twenty feet behind him, dogs weaving in and out. Royal Bob rarely spoke, never entered daylight, but the myth says he preached several times at night, in a mine tunnel lit with hanging lanterns, about the black crystal to the elderly. His body was never found. All the glass tubes were empty inside his home – the elderly slowly walking the halls, picking up the glass tubes by thumb and finger and dropping them into burlap sacks. Some say Royal Bob lives inside the mine where he runs endlessly through the tunnels. You can see his hair. Some say Royal Bob will never be zero because he’s forever filled with black crystal. Some say his soul is tethered to the gravity of all village dirt. Others say he escaped into the city so he could destroy it. But no one knows because a myth is a myth.

The oldest books advise worshiping the crystals excavated from the mine. Today these practices are limited, deemed antiquated and pointless by many. Most crystals, especially red and green, are for selling now. The yellow are melted and poured through machines. Red crystals become knick-knacks displayed on tables and mantels. Few believe in their healing powers. But the mining still continues at a high rate, day and night, because
it’s what they’ve always done and they need the yellow (YCL) for their lamps, refrigerators, and generators.

Discussing your count in the village is like discussing the weather in the city.

Count is not a city belief. They want to take over the village. Those in the city have little understanding of the village and are comfortable with destroying it and capturing the crystal mine because it’s all so different from their way of life. The city believes in the new ways of progress, not the old ways of tradition and simplicity. Many use The Bend not only as a curved road to jog, but to look in at the village and wonder why they live the way they do. They bring binoculars and get drunk and stare. Legislation has been passed to install high-powered stand-alone “binocular stations” costing taxpayers fifteen thousand dollars, including the salary of a part-time “binocular attendant” and not one complaint to date has been filed. The city lives like it will never die.

Remy spends hours touching her stomach, trying to predict her count. She wants a hundred crystals shining like a campfire. When she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror she only sees the dark and wonders if she’d be prettier if she lived in the city, had lipstick, dresses, shampoo infused with rose oil, sunglasses to cover her face.

Once, she saw green crystals in the corner of her eye. Four of them hung like beads of water from her eyelid and when she ran downstairs to show Mom they broke into a pea-green pool clouding her vision.

“I swear they were there.”

“I know,” said Mom, inspecting Remy’s eye. It wouldn’t stop blinking. “I’ve seen them before.”

“Really?”

“As a baby they blinded you.”

“Scary.”

“The body is small then and the crystals are everywhere. Sometimes, they come out.”

“And now they’re gone?” said Remy. She touched her eye.

“And now,” said Mom, pulling Remy’s hand from her face, “they’re gone.”

She thinks about her parents, and Brother in prison, and wonders who is closest to exhaling their final crystal. Who will become a husk? Who will become zero? She thinks
Definitely Mom
. She thinks
Then Dad
. She thinks
Then just me filling up their space
.

Mom’s illness diminishes Dad because he is helpless against it and is forced to fall back on vague coping mechanisms of, “She is sick and losing, and it’s natural. Let the process be the process.” He crushes everything inside. Emotion comes in outbursts, the occasional closed eyes and biting-his-bottom-lip while standing over the kitchen sink, washing dishes with the sun seeping in hot and ugly. Remy hates the way he moves through the house – slowly and with caution – as if he knows, selfishly, egotistically, that he’s the one who will hear her last breath.

Dad shouted about count through every wall, floor, and ceiling in the house last night. “Doesn’t she understand you start with a hundred and then you lose them,” he said. Mom sat in bed, covered in dandelion-print sheets and used the spitting cloth to expel the color red. “It’s simple,” he said.

36

H
e keeps a box in the closet. The bottoms of hanging shirts cover the box like a hiding child. The box is white. Inside is a crystal with eight smooth sides, a sharp point, and a rough fire-burned looking end.

Gripping a sharpened spoon he uncurls a fingernail-sized piece from the black crystal. Tapping the edge with his thumb he makes sure there is a sharp edge to cut his mouth. More dangerous if the edge is dull.

He sits on his bed with the crystal floating in a pool of saliva beneath his tongue. His legs are splayed in a wide V. He throws himself back, aiming for the pillow, but bangs his head against the headboard. Moving the piece of crystal around the bottom of his mouth he inhales and exhales, feels a surge of expecting blood widening its cells. Sliding down on the bed he positions the pillow behind his head and gets ready.

Before the prison was erected there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony. There were pink-skinned politicians and a crowd of shoulder-shruggers and a pair of giant scissors an intern held for two hours. A politician named Sanders stood at a podium too short for his height and struggling to speak into the microphone said: “Ellsworth Correctional… we will treat inmates with respect and compassion here. They will live with minimal supervision. Cells will be similar to our own bedrooms at
home. The idea is simple – those who break the law should be kept away from the general population, but in the community that lawbreakers create inside Ellsworth Correctional they should feel free and normal no matter if they are uneducated people with poor social skills.” And then later, near the end of his speech: “Inmates are not animals!” The crowd cheered but they weren’t sure what they were cheering for other than the sweaty enthusiasm of Sanders. Construction began immediately with men in orange hats and yellow machines zigzagging the grounds. Sanders pressed his suit jacket to his heart when a backhoe struck rock. For months the villagers watched the prison rise slowly, dangerously, blinking and craning their necks, wondering how something so large could be so real.

Head on pillow, box resting on his stomach, Pants McDonovan presses his tongue on the crystal until it’s angled against his gums, aimed at the roots of his bottom front teeth. He grinds it in. Ringing his head, the tearing of cheesecloth. He sees himself as a child kissing Mom goodnight, Harvak barking, when the family was a family. He played spit-tag with Remy in the mine and jogged with Dad through the streets and the family glowed, discussed their day over plates of pork and carrots. Before bed, Dad poured YCL into the generator and he helped with little nervous hands because Dad always corrected him, always told him he was either pouring too fast or too slow, he wanted to get it right, he wanted to pour smoothly, and sometimes, he did, but Dad never noticed with Pants holding the bucket just so with his arms trembling. This was a time of worship and prayer. The sun didn’t scream and spit a heat wave. The city was faraway and could be laughed at, could be mocked by thrusting your hips at it or turning and lowering your pants. He collected bugs in mason jars and hid them in his closet. He asked Mom for potted plants to be placed near his crystals. He wanted living things to always be in his room. At night he would listen to the bugs and position the plants in the moonlight.