by Shane Jones
9
Dad enters Remy’s room and says Mom has one remaining. He tells her to leave her alone because something has happened to her mouth. Remy sits atop a mountain of pillows on her bed. She’s drawn pictures of black crystals all over the walls and ceiling. Where the red crystal once was, with the baby inside, has been blackened in scramble.
“We should just go.”
“Can’t,” says Dad.
“Why? Because of the fence? Because of Adam? Sorry. Actually, I’m not. I don’t think there’s anything in this world that can’t be said. Just because we’re different from them doesn’t mean we’re bad. It doesn’t mean we can’t try to save her. They are coming in anyways.”
“It doesn’t matter where we go because you can’t reverse what is happening to her.”
“You see everything as dying.”
Remy moves forward on the mountain of pillows which are balanced in a way so she slides down and lands on her feet with a jump. Dad extends his hands like he’s going to catch her but she stands tall, doesn’t need his help. From outside, Remy hears something. She makes a shhhhhhhhh sound with a finger over her lips and Dad turns toward the window. Running circles around the house is Hundred barking at the sun. He speeds past the window like black liquid, red sky behind him. He disappears for a few moments, the barking going small, the red sky appearing touchable, then reappears, a noisy smear going past the window.
“I’m sorry,” says Dad.
“I’m sorry too.”
“You are?”
“I’m sorry we never tried everything we could to save Mom.”
Dad climbs to the roof and watches the city lights come on. They look brighter. The heat turns his shirt transparent with sweat and in several random places on his body he picks the fabric off his skin. The only thing he has to think about is her. He considers going to the hospital where people are rumored to be pumped full of crystals (Chapter 14, Resurrection, City Hospital Myth) but that means making a decision. Besides, he’s never believed in the myth. It means taking a risk instead of just letting time decide. He understands what her face says without her saying a thing, that she wants to go. He’s spent so much time doing nothing for her because everything stays inside him and rings his head and the grip of his thoughts can’t get any tighter. And then there’s Remy, what she wants him to do.
He sits with his knees drawn into his eye sockets and wishes he could move himself to tears because he feels crystals crushing, buildings burning, dogs dying. Inside, he is a blubbering mess, but outside he’s a man who just can’t show it. He was never like this in Younger Years. He spoke more. He expressed himself with chosen words and hand gestures. There was a time when Mom asked how he was feeling and without hesitation he gave an honest answer, not a reply like good. He once told her while sitting on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands that he felt depressed, don’t laugh, something was wrong. He described his body as cement filled and horizontal. On some days he didn’t speak to anyone until he got home and said hello, how was your day, the words leaving his body feeling alien. He said he was an awful father and husband because the way he was limited her and Remy, their life. Back then he spoke openly, and he remembers the way he was. That version would go to the city.
Beneath the roof Remy stands in Mom’s room. On the bed her body and face are covered in a sheet. Where her mouth is, a black oval. Dad has placed a green crystal on her chest and a red on her stomach. With each breath the wet oval of her mouth expands then collapses. Remy stands motionless, watching the sheet move up and down. There’s a silence. The room is surprisingly cool. Remy can’t understand why Dad won’t do anything, she’s at the end, it’s gone on too long, they can’t keep watching this. She thinks about lifting her up right there and running to the city, saving her. She thinks about entering the hospital and being bathed in green light. But this is it, they will watch her become zero because of tradition. Remy runs away.
Under the blanket Mom’s hands move up her body. It takes minutes to pull the sheet from her face, but Remy is already outside as dog-child – her and Hundred running into the mine where a man digging never-ending tunnels swears at walls of dirt. The air outside the sheet feels cool and new. Her mouth is broken. She tries to say something, the letters are bobbing inside her head like jellyfish, but she can’t arrange them correctly.
8
He screams into the wall. He kicks the wall. Inmates think the noise is the heat wave howling against the prison and moving them closer to the village. There’s a general uneasiness with Pants in isolation, a vibe amongst inmates that something holy is about to be destroyed. Their orange jumpers and blue shirts are damp and wrinkled. They listen to the howling and wait.
The guards take turns looking at the road for Z. to come back with his hands weighted to his thighs with black crystal. Jug imagines Z. carrying a crystal so massive he has to walk sideways through the door. A crystal so big Little Karl will fall off his chair, his book of | sent flying. More than half the guards don’t show for work anymore, they are crazies running through the streets, painting their bodies with black crystals and black crosses. Those who do show up hate themselves for being themselves, but they keep it together, they gather their paychecks. They believe, in a religiously devoted sense, that Z. will come back to them, that Jug has done the right thing. The idea of Z. never returning is a cruel joke, and those who make it are ignored.
Pants asks passing footsteps if they’re going to let him die in here and the silence means yes. His imagination is turning at an uncontrollable and sickening pace. What distracted him before was black crystal. He has to define his life some other way now. And with each thought comes layers of thoughts over that thought. How exhilarating to be a child. He never wondered then when his body would register zero and all color would leave his body, mouth, eyes. No need to acquire things. The days were an endless blur of games played in water and grass. The days, like what was inside, were never counted.
He mumble-sings Gimme gimme crystal (pop pop) gimme gimme bark bark (woof woof) and feels insane. He imagines baby Remy walking through the house. She fell down the stairs and broke her arm and he wonders what damage that must have done (-5). He remembers showing baby Remy the crystal mine, and how she sat in the black dirt molding clumps that soon rained from her spread fingers, and later, how she licked the glittering dust off her arms. He remembers killing a wounded bird because he wanted to experience, what he said to Mom, a little death, not too much, but enough to feel it. He wanted to try and move, with his shoe, the body of something once living.
He told Remy The Sky Father Gang would perform a demonstration like never before. She made a motion with her hands that symbolized city fireworks and he said no, not exactly, but just as thrilling, just you wait. They sat on his bed and when she saw the duffel bag packed with crystals she went Ew yucky. But he wasn’t present in the moment, he didn’t make eye contact. And there wasn’t glowing light coming from the bag, spotlighting baby Remy’s face. And there weren’t loving words said by him because he would miss her. And there wasn’t any true emotion conveyed at all because he had Dad inside him. When he kissed her on the head it felt choreographed, something he saw on television, which was true.
He vomits into his hands and looks for forty. His mind narrows in on the moment with Remy in his bedroom that at the time was so meaningless to him because he was young, and foolish, and he doesn’t go sad with emotion, but it’s anger with no place to go but from a pit in his chest and down to his stomach and through his legs and out his feet that kick the wall.
7
Z. climbs into a yellow machine that digs 10,000 times faster than the short-handled shovel. He creates so many tunnels he becomes lost. His head moves left to right and back again. He reverses the digging machine, climbs out, and inspects the walls with his hands. He’s covered in dirt and sweat. He jumps back into the machine, begins working again, and every time he reverses the ceiling rains rocks. He drives and digs, drives and dig
s, his mind a wet hornet on the fact that he needs to find the black crystal to not only save the Brothers, but to accomplish something that every child has dreamed about since the beginning of time. All his energy is placed in forward movement.
The machine, which is old and rattles with loose parts, is equipped with a shield-shaped light on the top that blazes the path Z. digs. The light misses corners. Z. stops, leaps from the machine, and uses a flashlight to closely inspect shadows. He can’t afford to be sloppy and miss what he needs. Beneath his feet he cracks yellow, blue, and green. He’s surprised by a red. His body is a field of gravel. He crosses his arms and rubs his forearms together until a mound of gunk falls off.
He leans against the machine. He moves the flashlight over his body and up and down the tunnel walls. The air is hot, heavy, and where the flashlight misses it’s dark with an occasional mist of gnats. Dust engulfs all space and the engine is at a low and rumbling growl. His concentration loosens, and for the first time since he began digging, he’s forced to reflect on who he is, what he’s doing, and his body deflates. He doesn’t feel like a solid person anymore. His arms ache and his hair is matted with sweat. His fingernails are black with work. He’s a person.
He aims the flashlight in the opposite direction of the machine. The light ends ghost-like where the tunnel splits into three different directions. He presses his head into the tunnel wall until rocks pierce his skin. He turns his back to the wall and sits on the ground where the air is so full of shit that when he opens his mouth to drink from a canteen his tongue is blanketed. He pulls his legs in and cleans his eyes with his knees. He tries to calm his shaking legs by massage. What horrible things are happening to them? With his tongue he cleans his front teeth. He swallows dirt and grips his calves. He’s digging a tunnel to nowhere and in the thought, the clichéd metaphor for life of digging a tunnel nowhere, he laughs.
What does it all mean, and the thoughts go more sentimental: wonder when I’ll die, a body as husk, a body as zero. Will anyone remember me? HAHAHAHA.
He once prided himself as someone who didn’t think these thoughts. He mocked people who expressed feelings. But here, in this dark tunnel exposed by flashlight and machine light (what happens when these lights burn out?) his thoughts are inescapable. You have to keep moving because it’s the only thing a person can do. He pulls himself up and into the machine and extends the tunnel.
Dig.
Breaks a new layer of wall.
Dig.
There’s no black crystal.
Dig.
A waterfall of dirt attacks him.
Dig.
Z. ducking even though he’s covered by the metal roof of the machine.
It doesn’t exist so just get a dark-colored red, a bunch, and trick them.
When Z. was a child he met Adam McDonovan who told him he was breaching the city to achieve something no one had ever done before. Z. asked if it would be bigger than fireworks and he said yes, different, why was everyone talking about fireworks. He said that the true way to extend one’s count was to have others remember you. He held a bag with dark crystals, looked like red. Everyone wants to be amazing in an ordinary world, said Adam. Z. listened and memorized every word. He didn’t want to be stomped out like some bird. Just be great enough so someone younger will remember you, said Adam.
6
The division began with the night of separate bedsheets. For years, Younger Dad insisted on sleeping under the same sheets because that is what married couples do, no matter how much sheet Younger Dad took in twists during the night. Sometimes, Younger Mom woke with her fingers touching an edge of blanket as Younger Dad, deep in dream, held the blanket from her.
“Why’s it such a big deal,” said Younger Mom. “How do you expect me to sleep if I don’t have any covers and you have to, absolutely must, sleep with a window open?”
Younger Dad had a theory that he’d achieve a better sleep if fresh air was blowing in. He spent his days working in the crystal mine, harvesting yellow and melting it down. It was difficult, messy work, that clogged his body. If fresh air wasn’t circulating, his mouth and nose went dry and would cause him to wake throughout the night. Not that he could remember, the next day, of waking up, but he said he felt it. He said the sleep didn’t catch right.
“What about a bigger blanket?”
“That’s not a solution.”
He took three blankets into the garage and placed them on the table where Harvak would one day expel his last crystal, and using a needle and black thread, he stitched. It took two hours and the stitching was poor. When Younger Dad pulled at the new seams triangle-shaped holes formed. He went back and added thread – quick loops to help hold together the triple blanket that wasn’t a solution, but an attempt.
He pulled the blanket from the garage and into the house where he let it drag across the floor and up the stairs. The blanket extended from the bottom of the stairs to the top and into the bedroom where it slithered from a fearful Remy who watched half-hidden, but standing, in her bedroom.
It took another hour to figure out how to display the blanket. The trick was to fold it in a way so it appeared to be three separate blankets stacked. He wanted it to be a surprise when Younger Mom entered the room, ready for bed, dressed in her gray nightgown, brushing her teeth with one hand while pulling the bedsheet down with the other.
“What’s going on here?” she asked, looking at the bed stacked high with blankets.
“Watch THIS,” Younger Dad said.
He pulled one layer off and to the right and another to the left. The blanket touched each wall of the bedroom. One side had to be folded back over. Younger Dad stood with his arms extended outward.
“Very you,” said Younger Mom smiling with her hand spread over her mouth. “Still going to keep the window open?”
That night, on each respected side, they crawled into bed and under the blanket with a good fifteen feet of fabric on each side.
Yes, the window was open. Yes, Younger Mom was smiling and laughing. Yes, Younger Dad felt pure joy for having injected pure joy into Younger Mom. Yes, Younger Dad asked if Younger Mom was tired and ready for sleep and she said yes and yes they went to sleep. They were years away from the first signs of her illness but it was there, inside her. It didn’t matter then. There was joy in that bed.
Younger Mom woke at 2:35 in the morning because of the breeze blowing on her arms. The blanket had dipped to her waist. She pulled it to her chin, fell back asleep, only to wake twenty minutes later with the edge of the blanket against the side of her body.
“It worked,” Younger Dad said in the morning, a spoon filled with oatmeal raised to his lips. “I’m good.”
“Not exactly,” she said, pouring a cup of coffee, looking through the kitchen window above the sink. “Put all the blanket on my side tonight.”
So, they put all the blanket on Younger Mom’s side in a ridiculously huge pile even Harvak was too scared to jump into. Younger Dad had barely enough blanket to cover his body. He had about two inches of blanket on his side, to the thirty feet of clump on Younger Mom’s.
It didn’t work.
“I’m sorry,” said Younger Dad. “Huh.”
They tried tucking the blanket under the mattress, and they tried wrapping Younger Mom in a tunnel of blanket, and they even tried having Younger Dad only touching the edge of the blanket, not even on him really, but none of it worked. The last attempt involved Harvak sleeping between them – the dog acting as a kind of anchor to the blanket. But after an hour Younger Dad flipped and flopped and Harvak leaped from the bed as the blanket shifted once again and the breeze blew in from the open window.
“People talk about people who don’t sleep together,” he said.
“You should care about me sleeping, not people.”
“I believe in a one blanket policy, I think,” said Younger Dad.
That night Younger Dad went into the bedroom and saw two blankets – one brown and one white – neatly folded
side by side on the bed.
Years passed. Remy grew. Adam imprisoned. Mom coughed a new sound. Dad fought through his blanket. That is, instead of taking blanket, which he couldn’t do now, his body moved toward the center of the bed and pushed at Mom who woke throughout the night from knees and elbows.
“Last night your elbow pressed into my spine.”
Dad tried sleeping on the couch. He couldn’t fall asleep because the flow of air from the window wasn’t right. Mom tried too, but the couch proved too lumpy, and she hated the feeling of her arm disappearing between cushions.
“It’s temporary,” she said. “What we’ll do is set up a bed in the spare bedroom. I know, his bedroom. I’ll get some sleep. My head hurts.”
“If that’s what you want,” said Younger Dad. “If sleeping in separate bedrooms is a good idea then let’s do it.”
Dad stands on the roof. He kept the triple blanket in the garage for years, and earlier, pulled it up the ladder. It hung blob-like over the eaves and became a flag some villagers waved at when Dad shook-out the dust. He placed it over the roof, corners to corners. Wondering what to do about Mom – can anything living be saved from death – the triple blanket covers all.
5
Remy runs through the mine with Hundred. Sharp yellow disregarded by workers because they won’t liquefy due to over-crystallization cut her feet. Remy imagines her count as twenty ice cubes pyramided inside her. I don’t have any color. Mom is leaving. Who will be strong enough to bury her body? Dad is with her now, he will watch her go. Leaving the mine, Remy looks toward the city so near, the fence smashed by three new buildings. The sun is a predator in its sky blistering. She heads home feeling helpless.
Dad climbs down from the roof by way of ladder holding the triple blanket.
“You’re not with her?”
Dad bunches the blanket against his face, trying to keep it from hitting the dirt, but most of it remains clumped at his feet. “Going in now.”