Crystal Eaters

by Shane Jones

  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.”

  Part Two

  19

  He 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 wr
ote 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.

  His first shot is a fourteen-foot jumper with no arc that arrows through the no-net. He runs to the ball that bounces off the padded wall. Sneakers squeak with each sharp but careful turn. Pants, on the baseline, drives in for a lay-up while a guard with a head like a hamburger looks in from a window above. He takes more shots, lost in thoughts of childhood because his only future thought has been breaking out and seeing his family again and he can’t think about it anymore, when it will happen or not. He’s been putting together his childhood memory by memory. One shot comes close, bounces high off the back of the rim and nearly hits one of many spinning fans. The guard looking in shakes his head and blows on his lips.

  When Pants McDonovan was a child he didn’t use toilet paper. He’d pull his underpants up, and using three fingers, wiggle them into the fabric, into his ass, and once there, curl-pick his fingers until assumed clean. In his bedroom, he’d take the underwear off and roll the soiled pair into a tube he hid in a dresser drawer. This continued until Mom noticed his lack of underwear in the laundry. She walked into his bedroom late one night with an armful of clean laundry and opened the bottom dresser drawer and found fourteen perfectly aligned rolls of dirty underwear. When she picked one roll up she noticed another beneath. The smell was so strong she thought Pants would wake, so she hurried from the room and into the bathroom where she unfolded the underwear revealing a wide splotch of dried shit in the shape of a hammered butterfly. She turned the sink on, let them soak in hot water, and tried not to feel that she had done something irreversibly wrong as a mother. She would confront him in the morning. She wouldn’t sleep that night.

  He said he didn’t know why he did what he did, but boy it felt good, toilet paper was rough and sometimes didn’t flush because the water pressure was so weak in their house. Their plumbing is city plumbing a hundred years ago. This is something the city knows and makes fun of. Men in city bars like to talk about how dirty the villagers are. It’s another reason why the city should continue building. Just look at them, men in city bars say. They don’t shower. They lie in rocks and mud and make babies in the mud. They don’t worship a god. Mom said none of that mattered because what he did was wrong and it had to stop.

  Dad couldn’t look him in the eyes. He let Mom deal out the punishment. Grounded for a week. No play time in the mine with Remy. Also, forced to wash all his underwear to an insane brand new clean. The task taught him how to do laundry better than all, something he was strangely proud of but didn’t tell anyone else about until the prison. But the punishment didn’t work because Pants continued the habit and found new places to hide his dirty underwear: between his mattress and bedspring, between the window and screen with the blinds drawn, in a shoebox kept in the closet, behind the YCL generator in the basement, and finally, and best, behind his dresser.

  He skipped school once a week to make the trip – a somewhat long walk from one side of the village to the other – to get the same kind of underwear his Mom bought with a matching design consisting of a red elastic band and bubble-words written across the crotch and backside that said WINNER. CHAMPION. VICTORY. They were different because they came from the city, traded for crystals curious city-folk displayed in their homes or taken from Mob of Mary’s who always had a steady supply. He used these pairs not to wear, but to throw into the dirty laundry after he purposefully dropped them on the ground, dragging them through dirt and weeds.

  But the room took on the bottom-drawer smell. The bright yellow paint above the dresser turned to the shade of straw. At first Mom blamed the moon, an unusual lighting effect caused the paint to look that way, but the smell couldn’t be ignored and her denial wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to believe that her words, her punishment, had been received and she was not only a good mother but an effective one who was developing her son to be a greater person than her and Dad. Again, she went into his room, this time when he was at school. She opened each drawer before pulling the dresser from the wall where a heap of underwear spilled to the sides, the paint behind the dresser peeled off in curling sheets, half a dozen brittle hooks fingering the air.

  “I mean, how ridiculous. No more spending time with those boys. I’m telling your father. I don’t know what to do with you.”

  What was said between parents: slightly worse than a spanking. Something to be remembered. He sensed the beating coming from Dad’s truck heading home from the mine. He had never seen Mom so angry and had overhead the word belt. Even her cough was angry. He feared bruises. What he did to protect himself was take the rolled up dirty underwear on the floor and stuff it down the inside of his pants, covering his legs front and back. He put the underwear under his shirt and fattened his belly. He positioned underwear on his shoulders and became a little anxious monster waiting for Dad’s anger to liquefy out and onto his body.

  He lay on the bed with his chest rising and falling in the silence of the bedroom.

  Mom greeted Dad in the driveway. Pants startled when Dad slammed the truck’s door. Then he heard their voices through the window before they decided to go for a walk. Pants got up, kind of penguin-shuffled with the shit-underwear covering him and watched from the window until they came back up the road. He thought maybe nothing would happen. He thought maybe a big body wouldn’t hurt his small body. A walk meant things were okay. Walks relaxed. You talked and felt better after a walk.

  Again, they stood in the gravel driveway talking closely, the wind sweeping dirt from the road into brown wings against the sky above them. When Mom looked up at his window he fell backward and onto the bed and began hyperventilating. He couldn’t control his air. The bed squeaked and he tried to calm himself down by saying it would be okay. Would it be okay?

  Remy woke from her nap and shouted Wake me up!

  His body felt miniature because the bed felt like it was the size of the room.

  His breathing hurt.

  Mom lifted Remy from the crib and she stopped crying.

  Footsteps
in the hallway.

  A drawer being opened then closed.

  Someone in the bathroom.

  A body near the door.

  Footsteps.

  Then no footsteps.

  When the door opened a hole opened in his heart.

  Dad lunged in. The belt extended from his fist and hung against his thigh. His work shirt was stained with long drips of YCL and he smelled like mold. Pants sat up in bed, swung his legs over the edge, fell to his knees on the carpet scattered with underwater, and apologized. Mom said from the doorway maybe he would learn something this way because she had tried everything else. Her father had done the same to her, and so did Dad’s, and it worked, look at them, adjusted people. She didn’t necessarily believe what she thought, but her family history was stronger than her head. The important thing was a punishment that he would remember.

  Going in for a lay-up that won’t go in because Pants is directly under the rim, he understands Dad was so mad that day because of Mom. The fights, the silence at dinner, all things he saw but couldn’t process, building up inside Dad, exploding against his boy’s body. What was said during the walk was what upset Dad, and because he couldn’t vocalize then, to her, what he felt, it came out against him. Why Mom allowed it he wasn’t sure. It was so unlike her. He’s not sure who is more at fault. He’s not sure what it’s like to be a parent, how difficult it is, all the mistakes made even though a parent is constantly trying not to make mistakes. But maybe that’s the problem.

  He can’t make a single shot because his mind is in the bedroom.

  He was lashed across the back of his legs and down his arms. Rolls of dirty underwear falling from his shirt in a strange and terrible magician ta-da! kind of way. One pair, from his left leg, wrapped around his ankle and stayed there for the remainder.

  “I’m sorry,” he babbled.

  Dad flung him into the ceiling when he tried to hide in the space between wall and bed.