Crystal Eaters

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 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.

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.

“I’m saying I’m sorry why aren’t you stopping please why aren’t you stopping?”

Dad grabbed his hand and dragged him to the center of the room, the belt a blur, difficult for Pants to predict where the next hit would strike. The buckle landed in his palm and produced a rectangular welt.

“Enough,” said Mom.

Dad kept going. The belt discovered new skin to plant bruises. But Pants wasn’t trying to run away anymore. He was holding on to his father because he thought being close enough would make him stop. It appeared that he was trying to hug him, to get so close that the beating would have to stop and the only option would be an embrace. But it didn’t work because Dad couldn’t stop himself, everything emotional pouring through his swinging arm, his limbs buzzing with blood, everything coming out and onto his screaming son crumpled around his thighs, arms loosening with each strike down.

After Dad drove off in the truck Mom told her son to take off his shirt. She inspected his body. She was too shy to tell him to take his underwear off, but she never would have made it. His back was divided thirteen times in thirteen places. Stomach puffy and red, and in one area, split and bubbling crystal puss. All doors were shut now. Smelled like dead dogs, but mostly shit because his sweat had warmed the underwear that didn’t fall out. Mom just stared at his heaving and bloodied back, the back that had once unfolded out of her. She sat on the couch. She couldn’t stop thinking about his birth, the exact moment of it, and she connected it to this moment. He walked over and pulled her hands from her face.

“How many did I lose?”

She always told him a bedtime story about the sun leaving the sky because it had to visit the other side of the world and that night she told it to him in extended form, detailing villagers who ate light, rode crystal-armored horses, fought city workers in misty green mountains, until he fell asleep and she walked from the room, leaving him to the images, his recovery dreams. Mom stopped herself from feelings when Dad came home. They didn’t talk. She lay in bed pretending to be asleep and hoping he wouldn’t smell the underwear in the garbage.

The next morning his body was swollen. When he stood, his left hip slipped from the socket before finding its new place a quarter inch left. Both ankles were loose. It hurt to put clothes on. He was scared to breath, and when he did, deciding on a big inhale to see just how bad it could be, the air flowed over something sharp.

Days later in the mine he found black crystals during a strong rainstorm and odd day of extreme heat, and desperate to heal, willing to try anything, he accepted a double-dog-dare from Bob T. and ate three chunks. He brainstormed ideas on count when his brain unfolded and folded and unfolded again, the feeling of black crystal in his body a new machine to revisit. He had no anger toward Dad, only fear, and thought of giving him, not Mom, a black crystal as a gift, an apology for being the type of kid who embarrassed his parents, who deserved to be punished for the way he was, what he did.

The pain from the punishment has stayed. He moves in ways so he doesn’t feel it. For example, he knows not to lean too hard on his left hip. He forgets at moments, like playing basketball, when he drives the baseline and tries for a lay-up he’s too far under to make. He takes a step under, to the far side of the rim, and his hip makes a loud pop, turning the guard’s hamburger-head in the window. He launches three-pointers that force him to land hard on the heels of his feet. His foot throbs numbers.

He can’t hit a shot. Everything bricks. When the ball gets trapped between rim and backboard the guard with the hamburger-head who has a belly like a bag of trash comes in and knocks it free by jumping with his club, his keys jangling and pants sagging. He grabs the ball and continues shooting, trying to hit the simplest of shots and misses each one.

With every missed shot his body hurts and he can smell his shit coming in through the vents in waves, crashing into the fans above who spin the shit and flatten-out the shit. Guards crowding by the window crawl over each other and laugh as he misses. He stands two feet from the hoop and raises the ball with one hand. Push. And miss. A muffled yell from a guard against bulletproof glass says, “Gotta be kidding me!”

It’s my fault for hiding my underwear and it’s my fault she’s sick.

The steel white doors unlock and open, meaning the hour is up. He has one shot left. Flick the wrist. Swish.

Pants says, “I’m a winner,” with his arms raised, ponytail a dog’s tail, the ball rolling to a stop at the colored, padded wall. He thinks of Mom and the previous health meeting when he discussed the rape in the mine and how it dug up sadness, frustration, odd attraction, things no boy should witness or have to process. How he felt guilty for doing nothing. But now he has another chance. He will escape. He will see her again. He will find a way to add and make things better. He stops jumping, a sharp pain connecting his foot to his lower back.

When the guard with the hamburger-head puts a hand on his left shoulder Pants falls to his knees and grabs the guard’s hand which goes limp. The guard reaches for his baton at his belt. The shit comes down from the ceiling and Pants vomits blue slush into his right hand and the guard says to him they need more crystal. Pants tells him to stop, there’s little left, who are you, who is anyone.

A village myth says the sun will rage war on the earth. This is not a myth. Another village myth says the city will move into the village and crush it, that the city is alive, that it’s a creature who eats the small. This too is not a myth. A third village myth says the black crystals are reaching up and pulling on the sun’s flames, but no one knows for sure if that’s true or not. Could just be a myth.

18

Ricky and Bobby T. take turns shoving each other into the fence. The chain-linked metal absorbs their bodies before springing them back. Coating half the sky, the sun. There’s a theory that if you put a frog in water and raise the temperature half degree by half degree the frog won’t notice, that the frog will stay in the water and die in the water. The Brothers walk and Ricky and Bobby T. continue shoving each other.

“You know what I hate,” says Ricky. “Frogs.”

“So?” says Bobby T.

Z. tells them to be quiet and they nod. He’s trying not to act nervous, but this is the big day, this is the beginning of becoming remembered forever and his legs are shaking.

They total seven men dressed in khaki pants and powder-blue shirts. Z. is the exception. He wears black pants and a cream-colored button down. A dogtooth-shaped whistle on a string dangles around his neck. Green fabric torn from his grandfather’s robe is tied around his left wrist.

“This is it,” he says. “No turning back now.”

Ricky moves the knife. With the help of Bobby T. they open the fence.

They stand at the bottom of the cliff. At the top is The Bend. Before they climb, everyone but Z. removes handcuffs from their pockets. Z. locks their wrists behind their backs. All eyes sting with sweat.

The sun boils clouds.

The sky bleached.

They follow Z. up the cliff. They fall and slide and claw and become covered in dirt, just how they planned. They climb with their heads down, blinking from the raining dirt. Ricky is a bit dramatic and falls several times on purpose, flopping back down the cliff with his legs outstretched. Dirt fills their shoes and dirt pours down their backs and dirt becomes stuck in their sweat. They find levels of harder dirt they use as stairs and they climb to the top. A few city gawkers holding binoculars step back and mumble. A young girl holds a phone into the sky and moves her thumb up and down against the screen. A man with a face like a horse says they look funny. He tries to say more but chokes on the candy he’s eating. His wife slaps his back and he walks away, head down, one arm raised, swallowing.

They walk in a single file line with Z. leading and the sun following. After a half mile through the outskirts of the city, the Brothers looking into the streets and seeing things like dogs dressed in leather jackets, big suits on little men, hairy neck = gold chain, twenty types of bottled water, electronic shirts, traffic lights somersaulting green-yellow-red, neon signs, everything electric and somehow not powered by yellow crystals, everything big and ugly and loud, the intricate brickwork of the prison comes into focus.

“Everyone okay?” says Z.

If there was a problem someone would speak because the plan said so.

Z. walks painfully tall. He tells himself that he’s in control because he’s the kind of person who is never in control. He doesn’t perspire much, but the heat pulsates against his ears. His heart beats scary fast so he relaxes with conscious rhythmic breathing (Pants wrote that city people do yoga and detailed something called Prana). He tells himself everything will be okay. The jailbreak in reverse will be his greatest accomplishment because it has to be.

“Good,” he says. “Let’s go.”

They prepare their facial expressions as they reach the prison.

A glass booth shouldered by gates and barbed wire is the first encounter. Behind the gates and glass booth is a paved road to the prison entrance. There’s a door, ADMINISTRATION, with two guards standing at either side. The guards are dressed like the guard inside the glass booth Z. makes eye contact with — perfectly pressed blue pants and crisp tucked-in blue shirts.

A drain in the glass booth, face level, holds a metal net that distorts his voice when he speaks into it, “Good morning. Reporting.”

“What?” says the guard, a short man with blue eyes, head shaved and wrinkled with fat. There’s a motorized fan clipped in the corner of the booth on full blast. It appears to do little to cool. He’s the sweatiest person Z. has ever seen.

“Reporting,” he repeats, the last few letters, the “ing,” an embarrassing high pitch, Z. not totally positive if what he was told to say by Pants is right.

“Reporting?” says the guard who draws his gun from the holster. “Reporting what?”

Z. wonders if what he was told, what he remembered from the letters, has become scrambled in his head and he’s getting it all wrong. But that’s impossible. He’s spent endless hours memorizing the plan nailed to his bedroom wall, highlighted with red pen.

“Exchange inmates from Willows Bay,” he says looking at the Brothers. “Standard set here. Shouldn’t take long. You believe this heat? The sun. Heck, I remember when I’d stand at The Bend and watch the turquoise sky and don’t think we’ll ever see that again. Nah, all different now.”

“Right,” says the guard.

His gun is halfway drawn. Z. looks like the typical transfer guard with necklace whistle and cream-colored shirt. There’s a weird piece of green fabric at his wrist but that’s nothing too strange because transfer guards are an odd bunch and there’s such a high turnaround for the job. And the exchange inmates all have the facial expressions of men with nothing to do but think about what they are recently found guilty of. The guard studies them. Nods Z. up and down.

“They say we’re not coming?” says Z. “Typical.”

“I get mad,” says the guard.

The Brothers, minus Z., take turns looking at the sky, their boots, everyone making tough-guy faces.

Just trust and follow the plan — Pants.

Inside the glass booth is a computer. The guard’s fingers graze the letters QWERTY, his eyes narrowed and mean at Z. before he slaps the gun back into his holster. The noise makes Z. flinch and prepare to absorb a bullet. Then the guard says, “Ah, I’m messing with YOU. You need a blood transfusion? Look white. GOT YOU. Got you real good. Oh man did I get you good.”

“R-r-r-reporting,” repeats Z. This was never mentioned. “I’m just… reporting like I’m s-s-s-supposed to. Reporting.”

The guard bounces inside the booth drum-slapping the walls. Then he starts patting his pockets. He’s incredibly short — his height barely increases when he stands from the swivel stool and Z. notices a rectangular clip on his breast pocket engraved with his name, Karl.

“I do this all the time, newbie,” says Karl. “Getting people is what I do.” With a pen he pulls from his pants pocket he writes a single | in a notebook filled with pages of |.

Z.’s shoulders drop. He remembers his breathing. The air is disgusting. He composes himself back into character, remembers something Pants said in a previous letter and he laughs, shakes his head, slaps the glass twice and says, “Fucker, you did. Now open up before these boys die of heat stroke.”

“Heat wave gonna kill us all,” says Karl jingling a ring of keys. “But nobody wants to listen to me. Man, did I get you guys. Might be the best get I’ve ever gotten. Hold on.”

Z. and the handcuffed Brothers mingling behind him stay on script. Some stand looking at their feet hiding their smiles, others are puffed-chest and tight-jawed. Ricky, on the verge of fake crying, rubs the side of his face against his shoulder. Karl comes out of his booth and a buzzer goes off. He nods at Ricky and says to Z., “Always one in the bunch, huh.”

“Yeah,” says Z. “It’s the guys who can shut themselves off who survive.”

“You know the drill,” says Karl.

The notes, the guidelines, the advice from the letters, are working. Even Z. is kind of surprised when they get access into the prison. Bobby T. smiles as the gates open to ringing bells and then he stops smiling when Z. gives him a real mean look. The bells sound like the days of worship when the mine workers announced green and red crystal finds. Bobby T. was a child running to the mine with dozens of kids, pushing and swerving around each other, never tripping. He held a big green one up to the sun and it looked like water.

The wind blows their shirts into fat suits. Bobby T., as instructed to do at various times, spits, and the saliva wraps around his cheek. He attempts to slap the spit from his beard but forgets the handcuffs and the hot metal digs into his wrists. He rolls a shoulder and the saliva comes off on his shirt in a solid leash.

“Pick up the pace,” says Karl.

They follow, trying not to stare at Karl’s height. Z. thinks about saying some city-speak, maybe ask him if there’s ever been a population increase of midgets.

Splitting the guards, they walk through the open door and into an office where three women in white blouses with blond hair sit behind a marble counter. The women look up at the group entering with the rush of humid air. Before the door shuts one of the women gets a good look at the sky and her eyes widen. When the door shuts, her expression goes right back to before, a numb forever-lost look. Gray and blue cubicles cram the room, phones ring, and the tops of people’s heads float above padded walls.

Z. takes a deep breath. “We made it,” he says and immediately feels judged, scared, for saying out loud what he meant to think.

“No, you didn’t,” says a woman in white, searching with her hands over the empty desk. “We don’t have a report for new inmates, or a transfer, or an exchange, or any paperwork at all.”

“You’re absolutely right, Toby,” says another woman. “Looks like we have ourselves a problem.”

Z. doesn’t have a wrap for this situation because he was told by Pants that once inside there would definitely be paperwork and the Brothers would be moved into the appropriate cells. He wonders how many midgets live in the city and why they exist. He hears someone slam a phone down followed by the phone crashing against a wall. A man in a charcoal suit with spiked hair runs from one end of the room to the other waving a folder. The women in white smile at Karl whose cheeks are full of air as his blue eyes wobble. Half his head is above the counter. His body is shaking. One of the women leans over, rolls her eyes, and pokes his right cheek. His face farts.

“BAHAHAHAHA,” says Karl, collapsing to the floor. “I get you again, and again, and again,” he says, emphasizing each again with a mock windmill punch on the carpet. When he stands, he marks another | in his book. “Shit,” he exhales. “I’m on fire.”

“Sorry,” says the woman sitting in the middle. “Little Karl is that kind of person. We agree, on occasion, to play along. Besides, it’s all in good fun. Nobody gets hurt.”

“What kind of person is he?” asks Z., smiling, maybe flirting with the woman because her face appears backlit by the sun. He’s heard about this before via a city television commercial — lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, and bronzer. She makes him smile like a dope, yes, fun fun. Or maybe he smiles because smiling, he was told by Pants, makes city people give you what you want.

“An asshole,” says the woman to the right. “That’s what kind of person he is.”

“Go in and I’ll pass this upstairs and these guys here will be set and good to go and they can move on with their lives and —” says the woman in the middle, saying the words so familiar they kind of bleed together, a script she’s said ten thousand times before. She trails off and her face is expressionless, dimming. “What was I saying?”

“Had my fun for the day,” says Little Karl. “Jug will finish the transfer up. Nice meeting you.” Little Karl walks out the door, says, “See ya later, fellas,” to the guards, waves his book at them, and re-enters the glass booth with the computer and corner fan which he holds his hand near to see if it’s working.

“Seriously,” repeats the woman, “What was I talking about? Toby?”

The Brothers move from the administrative office and through a seven-foot-high security turnstile and into the second floor of the prison — a place of blue metal, skylights, concrete floors, everything built in hard steel lines. People are yelling and hitting things made out of metal onto things made of metal and there are shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. The prison is huge but it feels small and cramped to the Brothers, every hallway and turn is like navigating a closet in extreme heat with no ventilation.

“This way.”

Following Jugba Marzan, inmates size up the Brothers as they walk a kind of open hallway with cells on the right side, a net on the left side. Below the net, and a good fifty feet down, an open concrete center with patrolling guards, more cells. Z. looks back and shrugs. The light in the prison fades with passing clouds. Jug walks in slow motion. His khaki pants are worn high, his backside large and lumbering and dimpled with sweat.

A man with a square head with hair like a bed of needles takes a plank of wood, a section of his bedframe, and thrusts it between the bars, stabbing Ricky in the shoulder who falls into the net attached between the ceiling and the metal railing. When the net tears, two guards catch him and pull him back. Inmates cheer.

The Brothers forget everything they’ve learned. This wasn’t supposed to happen, maybe it’s another game by Karl, but no, this is different, this is pure violence, and Z. rescans all the letters, and the plan, the red underlines all over his bedroom walls and comes up with nothing.

Z., breaking out in a full body sweat, overwhelmed with what he’s gotten himself into, the prison a place of terror, nothing like the pamphlet leads one to believe, taps Jug on the shoulder and says the paper specifies what inmates he’s taking.

“I know,” says Jug.

“McDonovan,” says Z. standing on his toes, aiming his words over Jug’s shoulder. “The Sky Father Gang.”

“I’m a counselor, well, a supervisor, so I understand people. We have these health meetings. I’ve learned things. I know what you’re telling me. Hey, I get it.”

Z. looks behind him and everyone is gone except Bobby T. who is on his knees and surrounded by guards holding batons high. One of the guards is wearing a giant gold cross and telling Bobby T. to pray, instructing him how to properly bend forward, where to place his hands on the floor which the guard guides with little kicks. Bobby T. keeps pulling his hands back toward himself because he’s being kicked. One baton moves.

“Jailbreak in reverse,” says Jug.

“What?” says Z.

“Amazing.”

Z. is covered in sweat and his clothes feel heavy, like they are pulling him to the ground. His legs are sore with the panic settling into his flesh. He wipes his forehead with the torn piece of green robe tied to his wrist and his hair is soaked. He pulls the sleeve of his shirt back over the piece of green fabric. He’s not sure what to say. He’s not sure what to do. What would The Sky Father Gang do. What would his grandfather do. What would anyone who doesn’t want to die do.

“Karl put you up to this? Keeps getting us.” Then village Z. coming out, the man who once jumped from a table in the street to a moving truck’s hood: “I’m leaving.”

“No joke,” Jug says, who opens an empty cell.

Z. considers running. Guards approach from either end of the hallway. More inmates cheering and bells going off and guards telling inmates to be quiet because there’s nothing to see. Sharpened spoons flung from cells. When Z. gets a good look of the prison from where he stands all he sees are dark boxes with bars, stacked side by side and on top of each other. A guard is picking up the spoons as more spoons are thrown.

“Come in,” says Jug. “I need to ask you a favor. You don’t know it now, but this will work out for the best, for both of us.”

Inside the cell Jug appears fatter. His face is doughy and his neck is red from shaving. He has the general appearance of a man once in good shape and in control of his life, in Younger Years, but is now someone uncomfortable with the body he’s in. He moves as if he doesn’t fully understand it. He hates the size of his shirts. When he showers, he stares not at the size of his dick, but his stomach.

“Black crystal,” says Jug, sitting down on the cot. “We’re addicted.”

“My job is to bring them in,” says Z., going back on script, still trying to pull off the impossible. He knows a black crystal doesn’t exist, so what Jug says about it doesn’t register. He moves back and forth from terror to strength and back again.

“You guys acting like kids, smearing shit on your faces to mess with others, putting a table in the middle of the road, I mean.”

“What?”

A guard locks the door. The clang raises Z.’s shoulders.

“Basketball accident,” says Jug wincing, reaching for his ankle to tie his shoe. “We have a court here. Half a court. Was going in hard when Little Karl, who will be happy to know can mark up his book when I’m done here, decides to take a charge. I sort of pulled back,” Jug leans backward with his right arm swan shaped, “and pulled off this beauty of a one-hand floater. That didn’t stop my body from toppling over into Little Karl. Damn, it hurt. Never felt pain like that before, like my whole body was shook-up inside. I didn’t make the shot.”

Z. backs up against the cell bars, cold. He’s four feet from where Jug sits but it feels like inches. He breaths in the prison and listens to the ugly sounds from within it.

“I,” says Z. “T-t-t-this place —”

Sweat and urine and men kept in vomit-filled boxes they decorated but are never cleaned have been molded in the heat for weeks. The prison isn’t like Z. was told. The prison isn’t like how it’s promoted to everyone outside it. The prison is a place worse than any part of the village. And since the heat wave was noticeable, since the black crystal has been depleting and getting scary low, things have only gotten worse.

“When it gets hot in here, right at peak late afternoon heat, it smells like a pig farted through a cigarette,” says Jug. “Is that an image or what?” Jug smiles way longer than anyone should smile after saying something so disgusting and then gets serious, smoothing the chest of his shirt, the professional version of himself coming on. “And every few months a group not totally unlike yourselves tries to rescue someone. Usually over-eager city folk with some messed up relative the system got wrong, should have been placed in Willows Bay, right. But everyone likes it here. Okay, not everyone, I see the way you’re looking at me, but why leave something that takes care of you? For example, you could have the worst mom in the world who brings home retards, but she feeds you chicken and buys you jeans and washes your bedsheets, and you forget how she yells and screams and drinks too much and makes the retards breakfast in the morning while they sit slumped, but not you, you don’t say a word because you have it easy with a mom like that, you’re taken care of and you don’t leave it.”

Z. senses bodies behind him. He’s lean and muscular, sure, a little belly on him, and he’s always prided himself that he can take care of himself in a fight, but now, he’s terrified.

“There’s been a mistake,” he says. “You said something about black crystal.”

“It’s tricky to reseal an envelope and not have the receiver be suspicious. What you do is use steam from an iron,” says Jug, and he runs an imaginary iron over his thigh.

Through the bars a hairy hand massages the back of his neck and Z. tries to walk forward and the hand squeezes. A hush of male voices blends with the concrete echoes and metallic sounds of the prison. Z. imagines crawling through the crystal mine dirt as a child, licking it, then getting yelled at by Mom, her hand gripping his neck.

“You don’t want to see what’s behind you,” says Jug. “I figured you’d want to free him. He’s a good one. That black crystal does all sorts of stuff. Makes you feel superman. Problem is we’re about to run out. That’s why I wanted to talk to you, that’s why I let you in here in the first place. All this is going to turn out for the better, you’ll see.”

“It’s a m-m-m-myth,” says Z.

“I’m afraid, good sir,” says Jug, so confident now, not like the previous health meeting, “that you’re incorrect.”

“It’s just dark-colored red,” says Z. “You’re living a lie.”

“Not sure that matters because really, we’re running out,” says Jug. He reaches his hand into a pants pocket and scratches himself.

“Then walk in and steal some. Send Mob of Mary’s.”

Inmates cheer in a rhythmic sing-song way and Z. wonders what’s happening. Is Bobby T. dead? The prison is evil. Arnold is probably saying something offensive. His arms will be torn off by dogs.

“I’ve read the letters. You’re smart,” says Jug, “and also dumb. My sister is like this. She’s the smartest dumb person I know. She has two college degrees and when we get together with Mom she always makes the last point, always breaks people down. She’s unemployed and has never held a job for longer than a month she’s so smart.”

“I remember looking for them,” says Z. “Everyone digging around like crazy in the rain because someone said they thought they saw one.”

From his pocket where his hand scratched, Jug pulls out a tiny twisted branch of black crystal. He holds it up in the dull light between his thumb and finger, turning it and rolling it between his fingers. It’s about two inches long and in its thinness looks breakable. The blackness is undeniable, and without realizing what he’s doing, Z. reaches out to touch it and the hand on his neck digs in deeper and pulls him back. In the jerking-back-to-reality motion Z. thinks the crystal has to be a fake, a set-up, no way, how is it possible.

“They exist,” says Jug, carefully placing the black crystal back in his pocket. “It’s very simple what I’m asking here. No bullshit.”

Z. says it’s just a dark-colored red, you’re being fooled, total bullshit. Everyone is eventually fooled into believing in something that doesn’t exist. Give meaning to your existence no matter what. Z. remembers this passage from one of the books, and he’s proud of himself for being able to recite it, it seems so powerful, it sounds so good, but it has no effect whatsoever on Jug who just sits with a neutral facial expression. And the more Z. thinks about it, the more he thinks maybe it is a black. He too wants to believe.

“You’re perfect because you live there. Spending time in the mine won’t be odd compared to, you know, Mob of Mary’s, or someone from here going in that deep.”

“It does something to your insides?”

“Yes,” says Jug, kind of looking at Z. with a half smirk and general disbelief. “You’re not like my sister, no, not at all. You have things at stake and you’ll work hard to make sure everything works out.”

“It’s not supposed to happen like this. This place, in here, isn’t like how people think it is.”

“If one exists,” says Jug, “more exist.”

Z. getting anxious and self-conscious: “H-h-h-how am I s-s-s-suppose to f-f-f-feel about this?”

“Feel good.”

Z. races back through memories of Younger Years but can’t find a black crystal. Generations have looked and failed. Some believe that a combination of rain and heat bring them up, but this has never been proven, only rumored. It will be impossible to find in hours, days, what has been worked at for years. Z. feels lightheaded, like he might pass out with the next breath. Everything — the heat, the sun, the stress of the jailbreak in reverse, what his life is or isn’t — is killing him. He imagines his count as salt in a half circle around his boots.

There’s a long pause. More bells ringing. Someone from the second floor throws a shoe filled with rocks at a window. Jug shakes his head, rubs his face with two sweaty hands. “Go into the mine and bring back more black crystal. That’s it.”

Z.’s shoulders feel like they are arching around his head. The hand is still on him. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“We don’t trust anyone here.”

“I think we should just forget all this.”

Prison noise and silence in the cell, Jug just staring through Z.

“I could list everything that would happen to your friends,” says Jug. “Listen, I’ve read the letters multiple times, they’re fascinating. You want to be someone important, that’s fine, I understand that urge. But it’s greed. Don’t pretend it’s something more or something different. I’m here to help though, because my greed is black crystal and being the guy who gets it. Bring it back here and you’ll be remembered, that’s what you want, I know that and you know that. Win-win. See?”

Another hand from behind runs up the inside of Z.’s leg.

“But what you’re asking me to do is impossible,” says Z. “This feels like a t-t-t-trick.”

“What you’ll learn,” says Jug, “is that everything is a trick. Only thing that isn’t is the universe. I’m talking about outer space, the sun, the moon, planets, stuff we don’t know about. No humor out there. Serious business among those stars. The universe does whatever it wants while we’re forced to play games. We’ve all thought about our lives compared to what’s above, right? Think about it, the universe is going to live forever. No counting days or crystals. No last breaths with loved ones. The universe will just keep expanding. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s important that we just do what it is we do and we keep doing it for as long as possible.”

Z. imagines an entire network of black crystals underground. It has to be a fantasy. But he saw it, Jug held it up for that quick moment, and he’s never seen a crystal like that before. Was it just a red, this messed jail lighting, his exhaustion, his mind dimming the color? Why would someone like Jug make up such a story if it wasn’t real?

“What I’m saying is, you had your own idea of a game to keep you occupied. A jailbreak in reverse. I mean, fuck, stupid and somehow brilliant. That’s why you can do this. And we have a game in here where guards take black crystal, and when they don’t they act like idiots. They hurt more. What are we suppose to do — fire them and let them tell the media what’s going on? PR disaster. I feel like I’m talking to myself here. This is the game we want to keep playing and there isn’t anything wrong with that. The game is what keeps you distracted from the universe bearing down on you.”

“I understand,” says Z., “but I don’t know what’s happening.”

“I’ll give you a few days. I’m not sure your friends can last more. Come back with it and they walk. Pants too. As a matter of fact, all the villagers in here, everyone goes, why not. You’ll be remembered as the man who sprung your people free. They’ll build you a statue and you’ll be remembered forever. Don’t let me keep you longer. The guards get wild without it. No telling what they might do to your friends while you’re away. And no telling what they may do if we can’t control them, maybe run rabid to his home and find the one his mom has in that box. Only so much I can do here. Come on, let’s go.”

Z. runs under the sun-clogged sky. He makes eye contact with a man wearing a dress sitting on the stoop of a brick building. The man raises his arm slowly, the sleeve of his blue dress gathering around his elbow, and while coughing, he gives Z. the middle finger. Z. runs faster. He puts the city on his back. The man holds his middle finger as high as his arm will stretch, leans forward in the direction of Z. who slides down the cliff, creating long dusty tunnels in the air above.

17

The sky is laced with turquoise worms, and where the sun normally is there’s two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth. Her bed contains 24 stacked pillows that form a wall. She gets into bed and looks up at the black crystal drawn on the ceiling. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and touches the pillows. The mouth in the sky fills with red and the teeth vanish and it’s the sun. The worms wail and turquoise cascades down an arc in the sky.

The first pillow Remy places on her feet. The next, her legs. The next, her stomach. Finally, her chest. She builds layers until she has to balance the pillows on her body with her breathing. She puts the last three pillows on her head and hugs her face until she passes out. Her arms flop off the sides of the bed and her fingertips dangle near the floor.

She’s a baby. She takes wide, unsteady steps, and on a few occasions, tips backward, arms extended as her diaper thumps the floor. She wears a blue shirt with a hand-drawn black crystal (Brother). Her face is blond hair. She stumbles from her bedroom and into the hallway where she falls down the stairs, blond hair blown open and her body awkwardly sliding down the stairs as Mom shouts from below. Afterward, Remy cried for fourteen hours. Mom stayed awake the entire time, tapping her back in sets of ten, feeding her sips of tea, telling her it would be okay, they will come back on again.

Remy twitches in the wobbly picture and her eyelids flicker. Her arm as baby arm snaps like a bird’s spine beneath a boot. The pillows fall. One hits her arm. Mom moans from her bedroom. Her negative weight floats upward from her refusal of food. Her falling numbers hurt everything around her, even the carpet looks depressed. Dad skips between loving companion to distant husband to angry father. He spends his days alone. Each day this week he’s been sitting gargoyle-perched on the roof. Recently, Remy’s thought the problem of Mom’s sickness isn’t Mom’s sickness exactly, but Dad’s reaction to Mom’s sickness.

Remy writes in a notebook:

FELL DOWNSTAIRS AS A BABY -5 CRYSTALS.

SUBTRACT -1 FOR EVERY YEAR AFTER FROM AGING.

She puts three pillows on her face and grips tight until she passes out again, her hands falling off the bed, eyes now moving over a dark road. She’s riding her bike with the blue and yellow tassels tied to the handlebar. She wanted red and green, to be special, but Dad bought the commons. This vision like the last is broken from reality but more severe — Remy riding her bike on the road to the mine, blue and yellow tassels blowing endlessly backward and touching her home. Her hair is also endlessly long and it touches the house. She’s followed by a spotlight. Her feet blur on the pedals. She’s trying to escape the light. Skin three inches above her right ankle catches on the rear derailleur and the bike breaks into a severe slide. Water sprays from where the tires skid. The road becomes a beach and Brother is standing there covered in glistening sweat, jogging in place, with Harvak at his side who is also jogging in place. Sea crystals the shape of hexagons colored white foam then harden to black stone on the sand. An octopus is flung by the sun across the sky. The spotlight disappears and the man, who looks just like Dad, who held the spotlight, twirls his hand goodbye, bows, then jumps off the cliff at the top of The Bend.

— 8 CRYSTALS FROM BIKE ACCIDENT.

She creeps down the staircase and sees only legs in the kitchen. She can’t understand how they can stand so close to each other and yell so loud, how can their faces not split and bruise. Mom is doing almost all the shouting and her legs are following Dad’s legs around the kitchen. He’s cooking something and trying to avoid her. The thrill of watching her parents in this raw, private moment makes Remy’s heart race and hands grip the wooden banister. They have always been so troubled, so doomed. They have always talked around each other. The pillows tumble again and the black crystal drawing on her ceiling comes into focus.

— 4 CRYSTALS FROM DAMAGING PARENTS’ WORDS ENTERING MY BRAIN.

She continues the game until her skin turns blue and she needs a tiny black crystal flint to regain strength. She stabs her mouth. A freckle expands through her cheek in a red circle that covers one side of her face. The following visions of all things negative she sees awake: Harvak dying, Brother leaving, parents fighting, sun killing. Then, there’s the beach again and the clouds are slowly coming down and each one holds a cop holding a baby under an arbor rung with flowers.

Black crystal dissolves everything.

Black crystal is everything.

Here she is with limbs shaking, lungs sky-up and filling with the good kind of pain, head all air, Remy with eyes glazed-over and wanting everyone she loves to live forever.

+25 FROM BLACK CRYSTAL.

“Mom, I need to speak to you, Mom,” she says, knocking on the door and not waiting for an answer, flinging open the door and walking into the bedroom where Mom sits on the floor in a hunched lotus position. Her spine is visible through her nightgown (Chapter 4, Death Movement, Book 8) in the sunlight coming in through the window. When she turns and sees Remy, she slides a red box under the bed.

“What’s wrong?”

“I ran the mine during the rainstorm. I know, I know, I shouldn’t, but I did, and it happened.”

“You’re sick?”

“With Hundred. A truck almost ran us over. I have to tell you something.”

“I saw the mud. Come here.”

Remy sits in the folded angles of Mom’s lap and it’s the first time she thinks maybe she’s too big for this, but being so close to Mom is comforting, even in the heat. She places her head on Mom’s chest and there’s no heartbeat. Wait. There it is.

“Black crystals,” says Remy, looking up at Mom’s chin. “They exist. They cut my feet and I felt a rush. I know, it’s wrong. But Mom, I’m sorry. I’ve done it again and I’m telling you it adds. I have some left and I don’t think there’s more left in the whole world.”

Mom moves Remy’s head and body facing forward toward the window so Remy can’t see her skin. Last night, Dad found red scabs in the shape of a door on the back of her neck. “Your Brother talked about this.”

She couldn’t remember the last time Mom said the word Brother or his real name, Adam. Remy never saw him use black crystal for sure, but she assumed he had it. There was a night when she walked past his bedroom and he was in there with three kids and they were taking turns eating a dark-colored rock. Brother used one side of his mouth to gnaw on it while the others jumped on the bed and told him to keep going, eat it all. It was a dare. Then he acted funny. He ran in place and dripped sweat and slapped his face. He fell to the floor and barked. He rolled over and looked up at Remy and screamed to close the door. After one of the boys slammed it closed they laughed forever. They ran and threw their bodies against the door and she could see little slivers of light around the doorframe and she stepped back thinking the little slivers of light were forming a box around her.

“It could help you. Or what about the hospital?”

“You’re still doing it? You have some left?”

The lace curtains pulled open are singed black at the edges.

“No,” lies Remy. She can still feel the black crystal inside her. Her feet keep moving when she doesn’t want them to move.

“Remy.”

“Just try?”

“Do you have any left?”

“I said no.”

Mom rubs Remy’s shoulders. “Children replace their parents.”

Remy stands, her legs momentarily tangled inside of Mom, and stomps her feet. She marches. Mom pushes herself backward trying to avoid getting crushed. Remy’s face is all knots, and her cheek, where she placed the black crystal flint, is swollen. She gives one more monster stomp and the sunlight triangle shakes.

A fire truck’s siren can be heard in the distance and they both look at the window. More city buildings are burning, flames mending seamlessly with sunlight.

Mom looks up at Remy, a shifting adult-to-child perspective that saddens Mom. “This is what happens.”

Remy asks, “How many?”

“It’s something you don’t need to know.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“I’ll feel better knowing what’s inside you.”

“Remy, please.”

“But how many? If I have to accept it, I should know it. Mom? Please?”

“Two.”

16

He sits on the roof in the midnight dark. New lights shine from the city. Buildings built in hours. One building shoots up so fast that Dad closes one eye and with his opposite hand finger-walks the sky with each level completed. Windows with workers’ flashlights open to his touch. The sound of hammers fold inside the sound of saws.

City inspectors are told to sleep outside and report back to Sanders if the city is growing. The inspectors wear white helmets with flashlights and one-piece jumpers the color of pearl. At night they patrol the fence with their lights crisscrossing as they examine the ground. They measure the dirt between the fence and the nearest buildings, and each time the measurement shrinks a quarter-inch.

“What’s going on?” says one inspector to another, in a concrete stairwell that rises with each word spoken. “We losing our minds from the heat?”

“Beats me.”

“We have to report something, Jim.”

“I told you, it beats me.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means I don’t know.”

“How can we not know?”

“Just don’t.”

Later: “Well,” says Sanders, who is aging quickly, not the young buck who once gave a speech at the opening of the prison. He’s balding. In his closet in his office, worn under a suit jacket and pressed between two suits, is a blue dress. Only his wife knows about this fetish, and one day soon, his son.

The ten dirt-encrusted inspectors stand in the room and their jumpsuits crinkle with movement. Sanders stares. One inspector has his flashlight on. Another inspector pulls the helmet off his head and with the heel of his palm knocks the batteries out and onto the floor. They do their best to stand silent.

“We don’t know why, or how,” says an inspector. “Also, the sun might be getting closer, but our reports say it’s an optical illusion.”

“And how, exactly, is that supposed to make sense?” says Sanders.

“What? The sun, or the city? Or both?”

“Let’s start with the city.”

“It doesn’t,” says the same inspector. His black mustache is saturated with sweat. “It doesn’t make any sense at all, that’s what we’re trying to tell you. Not sure if the land is retracting or these buildings are new buildings. I know what that sounds like. We orange-tag them and the tags disappear. Is someone, maybe a villager, taking the tags off? I doubt it. Could be the guy who keeps lighting our buildings on fire. What I’m saying is that one of us sleeps in a building only to wake up with a building in front of that building.”

“Ghosts are working the night shift?” asks Sanders.

The inspector without a helmet says, “I touched the sky where the sun is and burned my fingers.”

“No, well, not exactly,” says the sweaty black mustache. “We can’t prove that. We can’t prove that because we have no physical proof of seeing the buildings going up. Yes, we see, we understand, there is less land between the village and here. Yes, there seems to be more random buildings, but, I, we, just don’t know.”

“Did you ever think,” says Sanders, rubbing his face with both hands, “to have one, maybe two people, stay up for a few days and just watch, or, I don’t know, take a few pictures? We have so much technology, use it.”

“But we did,” says the sweaty black mustache. “And we didn’t see anything. There’s no proof of construction, only what our eyes see, which is new buildings, fully constructed.”

“That sounds,” says Sanders, “insane.”

“We know.”

“Last question,” says Sanders, sighing and looking frustrated at a maroon-draped window. He wants to take over the village, he wants it more than anything, but he also wants to control it, to understand it. He has speeches to give. He has an election to win. “In your inspectors’ opinions, is the city, however impossible that it can grow on its own accord, actually growing?”

The sweaty black mustache takes a deep breath and his protective suit crinkles. “Yes,” he exhales.

Half of Dad’s body hangs over the edge of the roof. He asks a group of nightwalkers below dressed in dark robes with droopy hoods if they’ve noticed the city changing shape. Dad wonders if they’re Black Mask, the ones burning the buildings.

With faces turned up they whisper-yell, “OF COURSE WE HAVE YOU FOOL FACE. THEY WILL MOVE RIGHT IN. HA! HA! HA! DID YOU HEAR US? WE SAID, HA! HA! HA!”

“Are you Black Mask?”

“NO!”

“Are you sure?”

“POSITIVE!”

The air is so hot he doesn’t want to breath. He lies back on the roof, studies the sky, and sees a woman in a constellation whose elbows are stars. Circling his finger he spins a crystal balanced on her lips. He whispers her name. He wants to cry, the idea is there, but he doesn’t because his emotions kept inside have cemented him, have hurt him over the years, and to let it out now would be impossible. He imagines his count attacked with sun-red knives. But whatever he’s at is nothing compared to Mom because she could be at one. She could be an ant. She could be a flower. He didn’t help her. Dad doesn’t have relationships, he has obligations, like making dinner and keeping the generator going. He spins the crystal until it burns a hole through her mouth.

When he stops spinning she vanishes and white lines that connected stars, created legs, arms, her face, become birds, rats, deer. He thinks he sees a rabbit, her favorite animal, fall from the sky and land on the roof of a building being set on fire by a man without a shirt.

I need sleep, I’m losing it, help me.

Below him his family is trying to sleep. He imagines the house is transparent, a dollhouse, and he’s a hand crawling the floors, pulling a blanket to Remy’s chin, moving the hair from his wife’s eyes. He moves into the city, glides over the prison where his son sits on the roof… just… like… him… and Dad’s hand pats him on the back then tugs his ponytail.

Standing on the roof, Dad admires the homes that are falling apart. Through a home’s window, he sees water pouring from the ceiling. An old woman holds a bucket in her right hand and with her other hand she shakes her fist at the water. Skip Callahan runs into the room waving his arms, telling the woman to get away, he’s here, he can help. He stands under the water with arms raised and the water gets stronger. He keeps screaming that he wants to help, he’s a born helper, until the old woman pushes him out of the way with surprising force, nearly knocking Skip to the floor. She fills the bucket and signals him to get another. Dad looks back up at the buildings then back down and over the shacks.

As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.

Dad leaves the roof by jumping into a pile of hay built in the backyard for such a stunt. One of the nightwalkers jerks his head around and whisper-yells, “BIRD MAN, CAREFUL, YOU’RE GOING TO HURT YOURSELF.”

15

I’m going to bed,” says Mom.

Remy reaches for words with her arms. When Mom peeks her head further into the room and sees her lying on her back in bed, knitting the air with her hands, Mom thinks Remy’s dreaming so she closes the door.

Remy’s taken the remainder of the found black crystals by tongue cutting. She hoped the black crystal contained powers. Total desperation to try and reverse what’s always lowering. Remy scared and failing to save Mom. Ingesting black crystal is an effect similar to a flooding of poisonous berries in the bloodstream. But it does make you feel better, so she should just take it. Why should she watch Mom be pulled from her life without trying the one thing that contains movement? Most people are content to be squashed by city and sun. Like Dad.

Remy falls asleep and sees herself as a toddler. She’s recently learned how to walk and Brother is running circles around her. They’re playing spit-tag in the crystal mine. Brother runs, shouts, “You got crystal fungus ON YOUR FACE. IT’S ON YOU,” and she can’t keep up. Her spit is drool and bubble. Most kids would cry, but Remy laughs, she loves any game played with him, and she slaps her arms in the air as her spit and his spit mix on her face. Even when he rides his bike right in front of her, lands a glob across her eyes, she giggles, stomps her feet, and tries to open her eyes by blinking through the froth. The idea to run after him results in her falling.

When she wakes she asks for Mom to come back, she wants to say goodnight, she wants to say sorry for acting the way she did before. What does it feel like to have two left?

The black crystal drawing on the ceiling tells her in flashes of light that Mom will be taken. She understands the cruelty of the universe. She doesn’t move and she doesn’t speak. The black crystal inside her dissolves and cleans her blood black. She feels so alone. There’s never anyone to talk to even when there’s someone to talk to. You put your words onto a body and hope for an equal return. Tonight she’ll stand naked at the bathroom mirror, and touching her stomach, wonder what’s left.

14

A guard wearing a gold cross on a gold necklace picks at the donuts. One leans back to admire, he’s actually smiling, the flow of coffee into his cup. Another sits on an invisible chair, his back against the wall, his face pained. His hands are on his thighs and every few seconds he adjusts his body, rubbing his ass against the wall, until he falls and the guard from the table touching all the donuts says, “You owe me ten.”

Voices echo off metal and concrete. The door opens and then closes.

“Are you lazy now?” says Jug, sitting in a chair, legs spread wide, his torso leaning to the left, finger running back and forth between ankle and knee. “Used to iron in these creases so sharp I’d get goose-bumps. Seriously, goose-bumps.”

When Pants rolls his neck he can’t feel his head. His teeth hurt. His hair is uncombed and filthy, a hard mat of blond that has grown to the middle of his back. He still requests the top shaved and the look is disarming and absurd and the inmates aren’t sure what to think but most decide to stay away.

“I’m doing the same job I’ve always done,” Pants says, entering the circle of chairs.

The guards at the table take notice except the one on the floor fingering through his wallet.

“Sit,” says Jug.

Pants pulls a chair away from the others, as far away as possible without being told to move closer.

“What,” says Pants, sitting down, smiling, looking around the room. “This about laundry, really? I’ll be more aware. I’ll double check, but, you have to give me a break because, I’m just going through some stuff right now.”

“You have it easy here,” says Jug. “Everyone does. You do what you want, have a nice room —”

“Are told when to eat, sleep, shower, exercise. It’s not like before. It’s not like the beginning when we decorated our cells. What happened? Power and corruption. City values. This place is rotting from the inside. A guard told me there’s moldy streaks running down the outside walls.”

Jug smiles. In a way, he respects him for being disrespectful, and what Pants says is true. “Okay, some structure. A prison is a place to hold people who didn’t follow the law and to help those people recover. The word is re-ha-bil-i-ta-tion. Nothing wrong with that I don’t think. The way I see it, I’m part of helping people. Hey, you feeling all right?”

Pants hasn’t had crystal in days. Besides, he’s leaving this place soon. He’s heard a rumor about the failure of the jailbreak in reverse, that some of the men are now in the prison for good. But he hasn’t seen anyone and his closest gossipers — Tony and Pete — haven’t said anything. He scratches his head and the sound is amplified and migraine producing. His forearms have blue-black veins like tangled wires. He imagines his count — 74, 55, 39, 28, 16, 10 — as actual numbers, three dimensional, falling in rain.

“Mom?”

Jug looks around the room and so does a guard. “Huh?” says Jug, leaning forward. From where Pants is sitting, combined with how Jug is sitting, Jug is two spread legs and just a head, a confused face in the middle, and Pants smiles, looks haunted.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“I’ve had enough too. Got in a lot of trouble for what you did before. What I want to tell you is that we read your letters from Brothers Feast and the ones to and from your mother.”

It’s hard to say who is more shocked by his reaction — the guards who have their hands on their clubs, their fingers tracing the metal rings in the wood, or Pants himself, who feels the few muscles left in his body tighten like anchored rope. Even Jug is uncomfortable, his eyes zigzagging around the room as he ignores Pants who is crying the type of crying where the eyes are bloodshot and filled with water and the upper body shakes.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” says Jug, regaining his role as the one in control, his voice getting deep and serious, professional Jug acting quickly now, the guards wondering how he’s going to handle this situation (a man crying!) after the last health meeting mishap. “Your friend will bring back the crystal or you’re never going to leave this prison, never going to see your mom, never going to do a thing. Do you understand what I’m saying, a thing.” He leans back and sneers, then leans forward again. The guards smile at each other and one tries to hold back his laughter by biting his bottom lip but exhales an odd half-hiss half-fart sound.

“I can’t control what he does and doesn’t do. If he comes back with it?”

“Everyone released,” says Jug, proud of himself, relaxing back into the chair with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s been able to handle Z. and the Brothers and now Pants. He’s on top. He’s in control. “Your poor mom.”

Pants stands and jumps up on his chair. He grabs the back for balance before standing tall, arms outward.

“Hey,” says Jug.

Everyone watches, not moving, not sure what to do.

Shuffling his feet, Pants turns so his back faces the guards. The plastic seat of the chair blows a bubble at the floor. He says he’s going to fall backward. “Your choice to catch me.”

Jug looks at the guards and shakes his head no.

But from instinct, maybe it was the trust-fall they did months ago, the guards begin to form two lines behind Pants. They disband when Jug says to them, “Stop, stop it. We can’t let him tell us what to do. We’re the ones in control.”

Pants says to the wall, his feet a little shaky on the small surface of the chair, “Mom is slush.”

The guard wearing the gold cross, which looks tiny now, says to another guard that it’s because Pants doesn’t believe in god, that’s the reason he’s unable to get over his guilt with what happened to his mother in the mine and the other guard says, “Frank, just stop.”

“Better make your move, boss man,” says Pants, and he pushes back on his heels.

Everyone watches as his weight shifts into the empty space of the room and into the odd frozen picture of a man tilting in the air, the body long, towering, insane.

The chair slides.

The guards have to react even if the reaction is not reacting.

Maybe you gain control by losing control.

The guard with the gold cross runs to the opposite wall and palm-punches a red button.

Maybe you’re never in control and knowing that is gaining control.

“Shit,” says a guard.

The chair hits the concrete wall, bounces backward and upward, spins and falls as Pants floats horizontal in the air. His face is flat and serene. His eyes are closed and all he sees is the blurry rose-tint of his eyelids, imagining the lights above are the sun.

Alarm bells ringing.

Guards running.

Jug shouts garbled letters. The power of his voice is one hand on each guard’s shoulder, pulling them away from the body about to hit the concrete floor. They aren’t prepared for the landing. They aren’t prepared for the clean-up. What’s about to happen is a horror, a body meeting an unmovable object, and it isn’t the sound when his head cracks which is so horrendous, it’s their voices.

13

Z. crawls under the fence. The air itself looks red, the wind a punishing speed, everything dusty, villagers walking in bent-over forward angles with eyes shut, hands as fists. There’s a howling. The sun is trying to burn everything up and the buildings are moving closer. Returning took Z. a shorter amount of time than reaching the prison. Dirt fills his eyes but he doesn’t care. He runs by a destroyed table and a crashed truck with flat tires. The tin roofs are blinding in the sun.

Everyone moves around the truck and table. Street vendors sell yellow crystal earrings, blue crystal necklaces, and green crystal headbands to a group of city tourists who have snuck in. There’s a gold pin with a red crystal triangle inside. Drawings of what a black crystal would look like are also for purchase. Someone points at an old woman who kisses a green crystal she wears around her neck. They look at the village and think it’s disposable, undesirable in modern time, something that can be washed away, or better, fixed. Z. moves past it all with the warning words of Jug ringing his head.

He runs to the mine dodging trucks. He jogs down the spiraling road. He passes little pyramids of dirt and mounds of yellow to be melted. Air conditioners from Mob of Mary’s have been running on max, dripping gray water, trembling in too-large windows, poorly secured by old wadded up blankets. He runs unnoticed into a tunnel.

He scratches at the tunnel walls in random places and dirt and rocks rain on his shoes. He picks at silver flakes in the dark, truck headlights crossing him. He’s been in the mine before, but not like this, not as a worker trying to find the impossible. He remembers the crystal Jug held and he still can’t believe it because he’s lived through the myth. No one, absolutely no one, has seen one up close. He has to discover something that doesn’t exist. His mind buzzes, collapses, races. In the near distance the screech of a drill the size of the moon is terrifying, is some kind of machine at the edge of the city, is some kind of machine designed to build buildings impossibly fast. He saw them shooting up from the soil. He saw them moving closer. A man in a dress gave him the middle finger, what does that mean. They will bury the village in drywall, coffee shops, and wifi. He pulls off the dogtooth whistle and throws it behind him. They will bury the village in their future. He claws his hands into the wall of dirt and uses the weight of his body to drag his nails down until he lands on his knees. The city gets what it wants but so does the sun and one will destroy the other. He twists and turns his fist into the dirt until his knuckles tear.

Another chance to be remembered.

He digs until he can’t feel his body, just the pain of dirt and rock beneath his fingernails. He digs until he believes, because he has to, that he can find a black crystal with no rain.

12

A wet cloth is placed on her forehead and is warm within seconds. Remy feeds her a teaspoon of broken black crystal in applesauce, the black particles tweezed from the fabric of her bedroom rug. The applesauce and crystals mix with Mom’s saliva into a grim slush that glistens down her chin. Mom’s acting like Harvak did.

“We’ll check on you,” Dad says. “Sleep.”

When the door closes Mom throws her pillows to the floor, over the right side of the bed, and her body follows.

Reaching under the bed she grabs the red box. She drags herself across the floor, her legs motionless dead things, and into the sunlight triangle. She takes out the black crystal. Her hands have white veins, they look deep and faraway, drained. Little specks of flickering light swim through them. She angles the black crystal into the sun, and refracted high above and connected by thin bridges of light are the eight black crystal holograms. She smiles until her lips bleed. She plays the game perfectly. Miniature twin horses float in the air above her hands.

But it’s not enough. She needs the sensation again. She needs more. Mom considers eating the black crystal, all of it.

Horizontal bars of orange and pink stack inside each horse’s body and a river of creatures — snails, rabbits, birds, snakes — connect their mouths. In this family the loss begins with you. Above the horses the black crystal holograms form a dark field bordered by a pulsating heat. I don’t feel solid anymore. When Mom leans forward the horses squeal and their legs come down and into the back of her neck. Tell me there’s more than reality.

Mom, now sitting up, eyes crazy and filled with tears, lifts the box and smashes it on the floor between her legs. She raises it and brings it down again and again. She shakes her head from side to side and her hair tries to follow and blurs. She keeps smashing. Red arcs splinter the air. The horses disappear through portals. Gripping the black crystal like a pestle she grinds the box into the floor.

She slumps onto her side and lies gasping for air, covered in sweat, her gown transparent against her skin. She drops the black crystal. She moves her legs but her legs don’t move. Hundred barks, his paws visible in the space between floor and door.

Her face sideways, one eye open and tear-filled, the other dark against the carpet, she grabs the crystal and pulls it toward her.

She opens her mouth and closes her eyes.

Her teeth come down on the crystal so hard her lower jaw shifts an inch to the left and her mouth balloons liquid. She eats. She’s flooded with pictures. She looks inside her right lung and sees a garden inhabited by rabbits and a bear eating blueberries. Hidden in ragweed, a fox pops his head out and says she never was a very good mother, better to just leave and let Remy take her place. The bear walks with both hands outstretched, smearing blueberries on her ribs.

The carpet is rough as gravel and her face burns. She chews hard bits, not sure if it’s black crystal or teeth. She sees herself running from the garden and across a beach and Tock Ocki is there, running with her, telling her she’s one of the special ones, I told you, I told you that you’d be special, hey, slow down, look at that. For a moment, she sees numbers racing past a thousand as a road coming out of the ocean and connecting to the sun.

11

He is led down a blue hall by four guards. His body feels broken. When he steps down the flesh of his right ankle sinks into the heel of his foot, or at least it feels that way to Pants who is a total mess physically and soon-to-be mentally. With each step he takes he skips three. His right arm, in a sling, is signed by an inmate that says your perception is your reality so just make it be whatever. His head is wrapped in white bandages with a dark spot seeping through in the shape of a key. They stop at the end of the blue hall.

Jackson’s Hole is four feet by four feet with a fourteen-foot-high ceiling containing four lines of light. The door becomes a concrete wall when it shuts. Pants sits on the floor with his head throbbing. He wonders what the record length for a headache is, how much of his skull had to be cleaned off the floor. He’s not completely sure why he’s here, but he has a basic understanding.

The administration’s decision to place him in solitary is based on fear. Without black crystal they remove him from the population not to protect him from inmates, but from the guards who have become irritable and are acting strange. Yesterday a guard showed up to work in a gorilla costume spray painted in graffiti and another guard, seemingly drunk, held a dark-colored rock that he rabidly chewed while doing squat-thrusts. The guard with the gold cross has gone missing. His gold cross was found nailed to the mural of skeletons and roses. There has been talk of a riot not among inmates, but guards. They don’t want to be themselves anymore, they want to get back outside themselves, to the version with the black crystal inside them.

Pants falls asleep on the concrete floor. It’s probably due to the green medication they injected him with because his arm is covered in crystals and he tries to brush them away but they’re ghosts. He’s inside a white building. From a window he sees the prison and it’s pretty with the lights on. The crystals on his arm are different sizes, and in certain spots, a large crystal has small crystals consisting of smaller crystals. He digs his arm. They snap off, turn to pulp between his rubbing fingers, change to the color of smoke, rise. Looking under his arm he picks at gold colored rock hanging blob-like from his skin. He curls his fingernails in, pulls and tears away thick layers of gold alive in dream.

A bed lines the length of his arm. On the bed are hundreds of identical horses filled with colored bars. When he shakes his arm they fall. The horses land on the prison floor and flail their legs in a struggle to stand. Thirteen different versions of Mom from childhood — thirteen images of her from his favorite moments including playing with her in the rain, and lying in bed while she read to him, and standing behind her while she cooked at the stove — jump from his arm and dive into the flooding fog from the horses’ mouths. Then he runs across every floor in the white building, smashes out every window with a hammer, rides a coffin-sized and chain-powered elevator to new floors, to more windows that need smashing. He runs until he can’t feel his legs. He runs until he’s on the roof of the white building, the fog coming up and after him, horses squealing, guards fucking on white clouds in a million different positions above him saying to relax, it’s all going to work out, we’re all sky fathers here, grab a limb, join us.

It’s dark when he wakes. He’s torn the sling off his arm and also the head bandages. His arm, from inner wrist to armpit, is shredded like forked meat. Puss colored blue with weak sparkle drips from his elbow. If Z. comes back with black crystal he’ll be able to see the family he loves, dislikes, needs, wants to connect with once more before his body turns to husk. He can’t forgive himself. He can’t get outside himself.

The sun wants to swallow the earth not for reasons of expansion, but attraction to the black crystals. The universe will not miss the earth. There are billions of planets. The black crystals reach for the sun in a moving spider web, coming up from the earth’s center, ready to break through all dirt, rock, grass, and bone.

10

A man is working in one of the tunnels. He looks familiar, but not familiar in the sense that he’s a mine worker. Skip Callahan asks where his work clothes are and Z. says he forgot them at home, that everything he owns is saturated with dirt and sweat from working and the weather. Skip shrugs, not recognizing Z. from the table in the street incident, but still thinks they’ve met before. He considers asking if he knows him from Eddies or if he’s a member of Brothers Feast who Skip has always actively ignored. At first Skip decides on saying nothing. He’s impressed at how hard Z. is working because the heat wave has slowed everyone. He watches and tells himself to back off, let this man work, don’t upset him, but he can’t help himself.

Skip says, “Might want to consider going shirtless. It’s my move, but you can have it.”

“Thanks,” says Z. “I’m new here. Thank you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Skip. There’s a break in his thinking, his eyes kind of glazing over. Then: “Have we met?”

“Parents worked here. You know my father, Richard? We look the same. This is his idea. Mom says we have the same bone structure, something about our foreheads. We cross our legs the same way when we sit. Drives her nuts when we’re watching the TV.”

“At Eddies?”

“I don’t drink. And I don’t forget a face.”

Skip studies the man before him and thinks maybe it’s the heat, or the shock from seeing a girl run like a dog, an image that continuously haunts him, because his mind keeps breaking, keeps going black like he’s passing out for a few seconds here and there and then coming back into a gauzed reality. He can’t sleep at night. He stares at walls. He’s impressed that someone is not only working, but working so hard in the heat wave. The call for more workers — parchment nailed to trees and public bathrooms — was put out weeks ago and too few new faces have arrived. The village dims in evening because workers are mining less yellow and the city has taken notice, men at newly installed binocular stations writing in lined notebooks noting it as a weakness, another reason it should be overtaken. There’s a “binocular station attendant” dressed in blue who walks back and forth, nodding and smiling in a depressed kind of way.

Z. knows what to say, how to change Skip’s eyes. “What matters is work,” he says. “Dad always told me that if you’re not working, then you’re not working.”

Skip goes, “Ha!”

Z. finds a pick-ax. The workers stay away because Z. is insane with motion and he’s making them look bad. When the evening aims for dark, the workers gone for the day and shaking their heads in disbelief over pints of ale at Eddies at the man who accomplishes more than five of them combined, Z. uses the pick-ax to break into a shed. He steals a helmet with a light and a shovel with a short handle. Before running back into the tunnel he stops and looks up at the sky. From a great distance, looking down from where Z. stares, is that a star, maybe that’s a star, he is tiny standing in the mine, almost unnoticeable, nearly nothing. He stops looking up when he suddenly enters a coughing fit. The air is a black oven. Bugs drip from the sky and Z. has swallowed one.

Inside the tunnel he stabs the dirt wall with the shovel where his hands and pick-ax previously clawed. He digs until he forms a door. He digs until he’s working in a hallway. He throws piles of dirt behind him until he’s so deep inside he has to walk piles out. Soon he’s traveling through another hallway, this one too lacking black crystal. When he finds yellow, or blue, he tosses them into separate piles for the trucks to gather in the morning. He works until he can’t lift his arms.

He sleeps huddled in a fetal position against a wall of dirt which is surprisingly cool and comforting.

He wakes, rolls onto his side with rocks piercing his skin, and vomits something red. His count is lowering with having to live. With slits for eyes caked closed with dirt he walks from the mine tunnel and into the low sunshine of morning to workers drinking coffee from ceramic mugs. They roll their eyes at Z., sneer dirt, then go back to their conversations about what will happen to them, what’s the deal with the sun, what’s your number. Even in morning the heat is shocking.

Skip Callahan walks past. “Saw a girl running like a dog once. Like, a real dog, on all fours and everything. Everyone, yeah you, gives me a hard time for talking about it. Keeps me up at night because I only wanted to help, see if she was okay. I think of going back to the house but what would I say? You’re like a mole and we need more moles. Jesus, you worked all night, huh? Don’t need another person who sits around drinking coffee,” says Skip, the last few words louder and directed at the workers.

Z. smiles, looks worried.

“Thanks,” says a worker to Z. “THANK YOU FOR HELPING!”

The workers climb into gun metal trucks and drive into the tunnels. Some grab shovels leaning against idling trucks and walk in. The clang and bang of machines, hammers. When Z. looks up from left to right the sky scans from red to white.

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 digs, 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.”

“To see if she’s dead?”

“To check.”

“Just help her. Let’s go. Come on, please.”

Dad walking toward the front door: “I’m doing everything I can.”

“You’re not doing anything.”

“Remy.”

“You’ll be remembered for doing nothing.”

“Who will remember?”

“Me.”

“Stop it.”

“I’ll stop when you help her. This has been going on for too long. Please.”

“Remy, I told you.”

“Let me see her face.”

“No.”

“I’m going to see her face before she’s gone, you owe me that.”

“You shouldn’t see her like this.”

“You can’t stop me.”

She follows Dad into the house where he dumps the triple blanket on the couch. They walk to Mom’s room, Remy stepping on the heels of Dad. The house is heavy with heat and difficult to navigate. Things are melting: a diamond-print reclining chair holds the impression of a giant, and the flesh-toned paint on the walls is dripping on the floor. When they enter the bedroom their bodies move slower in her presence. Mom looks tiny on the bed. Dad removes the blanket from her face in a quick passive-aggressive sort of way, looking at Remy the entire time, as if he knows what her reaction will be, as if he knows, and doesn’t care, that it will hurt her.

“You wanted to see.”

Remy’s shoulders fold inward and her stomach absorbs a hammer. Sharp pieces of crystal trickle down inside her. She’s never seen a body get this far.

Mom’s face has lost meat the skull once held. And Dad was right, something is wrong with her mouth, as if she chewed bricks. Her eyes are glazed and rust-colored. Soon, her left eye will drip crystals (Chapter 5, Death Movement, Book 8). Her nose is hardened ash that Remy imagines if she touched would crumble. Gray hair gunked with shit fans her pillow. Dad repeats Can you hear us? Can you? Are you okay? and Remy thinks Don’t leave me. Smell of dead dogs. Smell of burning. She peels the blanket from Mom’s feet and sees the skin is a darker red compared to her face and neck, and even her veins, once strong and blue, have disappeared beneath this new red shell. A lack of circulation results in the color red drying everything up, erasing the last crystals in the body (Chapter 9, Death Movement, Book 8). The red is moving toward her chest and aiming to stop her heart.

“You don’t have to be here,” says Dad, in a softer tone now that he’s seen Remy’s reaction. “I know you’ve heard this before, from me, from books, and maybe you don’t believe it, but it’s never been disproved. Parents go and their children step into their place. There’s nothing wrong with just letting that happen.”

The blanket on the bed, also significant in size but not quite triple blanket size, falls off the bed and to the floor. Shards of broken black crystal and blood dot the carpet and there’s something resembling half a tooth. Remy wants to pick up the black pieces and eat them. Mom’s face is turned up to the ceiling, throat exposed and seemingly not moving with breath.

“Do something,” says Remy.

“But I can’t,” Dad says.

“Let’s just go.”

“No.”

“Come on. Like you said, it doesn’t matter.”

Dad kisses Mom on the forehead and her throat moves. He turns his ear toward her mouth and listens. Remy can’t hear her, but whatever the words are, whatever the sound does, it makes Dad put his hand over his mouth and nose like he can block the emotion from coming out. He speaks into her ear. A block of melted ceiling crashes on the floor next to the bed but Dad doesn’t notice because he puts his ear back on her mouth and listens. He cries and then laughs, nodding. He rubs her head then says more, none of it audible for Remy to pick up on other than her name and Adam and the word younger. When Dad listens again it’s just sick person air. Maybe she’s smiling, with her lips like that. Dad turns to Remy, his body still leaning over Mom and says, “She’s such a —” He turns back to Mom. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll go.”

“Yes!”

Remy immediately feels embarrassed for being so excited.

“We’ll figure out how to navigate the city. We have nothing to lose, you’re right. I don’t care if we get arrested. Okay, let’s go.”

“It’s going to work,” says Remy. “I can feel it.”

Dad picks Mom up and feels the odd non-weight of her body. Seemingly unhinged, her head flops back.

“Careful,” says Remy, and moves in to support her head.

Before they leave Dad puts Mom back down on the bed and covers his face with two hands. He can’t handle it anymore. The emotion is pushing him around. But Remy is ready. She’s been waiting for this. She picks Mom up in the blanket and says it’s going to be okay, they won’t let her die, the city has powers (Chapter 14, Resurrection, City Hospital Myth). Thumb and finger around the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, Dad makes a snarl-face, inhales, and composes himself, says okay, just be careful with her. The house is full of hot disease and it throbs — walls, ceilings, floors — beating inward. Another block of melted ceiling, it appears saturated with water, crashes near the closet. Remy holds Mom to her body in the blanket. She’s so light. Remy unfolds wrinkles of fabric to find her legs which are tucked up to her chest and look like dried fruit.

She has at least one left.

“Ready?”

“Yeah.”

Remy exits the bedroom with Dad following like Remy followed him before into the house, Dad now the one stepping on Remy’s heels.

Outside, and walking quickly with the city in the near distance, everything is blowing dirt and bugs and heat. Most people are hiding inside, but a few dozen are out in the streets, watching. An elderly woman wears necklaces of green crystals that cover her entire neck, bracelets of blue and yellow from wrist to elbow on both arms. She stands on a rock and screams at the buildings. She smirks at Remy and Dad and Hundred. She tells them that everything comes for the village because the village is pure, this is the end of times, soon nothing will exist but dirt and it’s going to be better. Remy tells her to get inside, protect your number, you crazy.

The temperature today will shatter records with the sky creamed. They just need to keep moving toward the hospital and they won’t notice their dehydration, their exhaustion. A group of villagers point at three buildings built directly on top of the fence and there seems to be dozens of skyscrapers in the near distance too. Remy holds Mom closer. Dad walks beside them. They move toward the fence.

Mom’s weight increases when she suddenly stretches her legs out. The blanket trips Remy who stumbles but keeps her balance. More dirt and dust blows through the air and she squints, makes sure the blanket covers Mom. Dad offers to carry her. Remy says no, she does this, and Dad says okay, just please, be careful. They check her breathing by gazing into her mangled mouth, listening for wheeze and air. If this smell, like dead dogs, an odd sourness burning, is part of the death process, Remy’s never read about it, only experienced it from Harvak and smelled it on Mom that day in the kitchen. Her left eye drips a skinny trail of red.

“She’s close,” says Remy.

They run.

The sky isn’t a sky because the sky is a sun.

They run.

The sky isn’t like skin.

They run.

The sky is shit.

They run.

Dad loses his balance before standing still with his arms braced outward and he says Hold on, the ground tilted. Is this really the end of everything? He’s sure of it, the ground moved.

Remy stops. The towering buildings are scattershot in her vision because of the heat and swirling dirt. Windows are black boxes containing the faint outlines of nine-to-five workers eating ham sandwiches and discussing what they’ll have for dinner. She felt something move too, her feet trembled, but isn’t sure what, and figures it’s her own exhaustion, lowering count, causing her to lose her balance like Dad. She waits to feel something move beneath her but there’s nothing.

“We can’t keep stopping,” she says. “Come on.”

Remy pulls the blanket over Mom’s head before running again. She’s incredibly fast, much practice in the mine. Dad runs several steps behind, to the side. He concentrates on the tails of blanket sweeping Remy’s feet and Hundred darting around them, biting them. Can’t have Remy trip and drop Mom so he yells at Hundred, feels like he’s doing something important when really the dog has never listened to him. The ground tilts again. Dad slows down, a sad little trot because he doesn’t want to stop but he’s tired and has that side/back pain he’s had since the truck accident. Besides, the ground is trembling, he’s sure of it.

“Hurry,” Remy says, nearing the fence.

“The ground.”

“I know, just, come on.”

Those in the village shield their eyes from the sun. Growing smaller in the distance — Remy, Dad, and Hundred. Standing at the fence is Skip Callahan, crouched and holding up a section of peeled open fence, a pair of wire cutters next to his boot, his hands covered in thermal burns, a giant grin plastered over his face telling them to hurry up, he’s always wanted to help, come on.

4

He sits with his knees drawn to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs. He’s playing Mom memories. She let them play in the mud during a rainstorm. Pants laughed in his soaked clothes and Mom said she’d clean them up later. The sky was a feathery gray. Dad isn’t in the memory because Dad was somewhere else. Mom bounced baby Remy in her arms as baby Remy covered her eyes with forked fingers, partially protected from the rain, but wanting to see the outside world, the movement of raindrops, light. He can still smell the mud.

But he can’t avoid the later Mom memories. Dinner table fights. Slammed doors. All those angry clichés proving true and hurting. The evening when she went after him with flailing fists and he had to restrain her against a wall, and how that moment triggered the night he saw her with the robed men. He pressed her fists into the wall, the wall thudded, and Dad asked from his bedroom Is everything okay in there? but didn’t get up. He was in bed eating eggs. Mom said to stop and twisted her head from side to side and he couldn’t stop because he was so scared from what he had to do. He pushed her onto the bed and ran.

Then he plays the night he can’t process. The night he discussed during the health meeting. He sees her with the men in dark robes who at the time, at his young age, possessed a creature-like quality with pawing claws and freakish hip sways. Or maybe that was his imagination because in his revisiting of the memory he isn’t watching from a distance, he’s standing there as one of them. He puts his hand inside his mouth and screams. His eyes hurt from his voice. There is no key to life only doors. He rolls on the floor and watches Mom with the men so close he could comb her hair. When it’s his turn, when the men with their evil green grins tell him Get it, son, don’t stop, get it get it, Pants crawls to the corner of the cell and balls himself up until he can push his neck into the wall by extending his legs against the other wall. He wants to get back inside the memory of the rainstorm, of being a boy again, but each time he tries to focus on his reflection in the puddles, Mom’s gown soaked at the very bottom, his bare feet running through wet grass, the calmness he felt knowing nothing about death, it’s all shredded by the hands of the men. In this version they’re from the city, just dressed like villagers, just trying to make things worse for the village, just trying to make it feel unsafe so the city is a hero riding in, and Pants thinks yes, that’s who it was all along.

He can’t turn his head off. When his neck can’t be pressed further, his legs fully extended, his body goes limp and he rolls onto his back. For a moment, he sees nothing, and that feels good. Hands on his chest he breaths in bursts that raise and lower his chest in such a dramatic fashion that he screams for help even though he knows the guards can’t hear him or don’t care to. He thinks he should have been a better son, and should have been a better brother, but he did the best he could, and it’s only in this present moment, looking back, can he think such a non-helpful thought as I should have done better. In the past you can change yourself into someone better, or worse, but not in the present moment, no, that’s impossible because the memory can’t be molded yet into what you want it to be, and Pants thinks this, and laughs, and he moves his hand across the always cool prison floor imagining the dirt from the crystal mine as he breaks apart a layer of static.

3

After he hits something hard, the machine abruptly stopping, the back two wheels bouncing up a few inches and jarring Z., he jumps out. A cloud of dust and debris takes a moment to clear. He looks under the machine for broken machine parts. He’s a mud mask with white eyes. He swallows another bug, a lightweight thing consisting of only wings, and waits for visibility to return inside the tunnel he’s created. He stares at the wall.

In front of the machine he crouches at the wall and uses the flashlight to form a head-sized white circle around a protruding spike. Tilting the flashlight up, down, left to right, the spike gleams. One side appears mirrored, and Z. doesn’t even recognize himself. He licks his lips and tastes dirt. A triangular section of the spike is smooth as glass. Using his fingers, he digs a little deeper into the wall, around the base of the spike, and dirt pours around what becomes a crystal. The more dirt that falls away the wider it becomes. He can’t believe what he’s seeing. He wonders what it tastes like, what it can do to a person, how is this possible.

He grabs tools from the machine. He moves faster now, trembling with excitement. Here he is, someone who has discovered something thought never to have existed. He picks and digs. The crystal is double the size of his torso and it’s an unmistakable solid black. The light from the machine flickers, makes a terrible short-circuiting sound, and Z. turns to the change in light like it’s a bottle breaking. He checks the flashlight propped up on a rock that he has aimed in his direction. It’s already going to be impossible to find his way out of here, he can’t have the lights go. He imagines driving aimlessly through the tunnels, a flashlight held in his mouth, the machine full of black crystal rumbling through darkness, dirt swells, bug colonies.

He raises the hammer.

He breaks off fist-sized chunks. Clanging echoes reverberate through his arms. There’s gunk in his nose and he blows it out on his right arm, then raises the arm, aims, comes down and breaks off another chunk. He only needs so much to bring back but the more he gets, the bigger the hero he is or something, or so he thinks in the moment, so he cracks off more ham-sized pieces and leaves the remaining black crystal protruding from the wall. He can’t stop smiling. He wonders how far the crystal extends, maybe a network of black roots covering miles.

He places the chunks in the back of the machine where the toolbox is. Then the light on the machine burns out in a burst. Everything goes dark. Z. makes a noise he’s never heard before.

He sits in the idling machine with a narrow path of light filled with dust extending from his mouth where he holds the flashlight. How deep am I? He hears footsteps. Why has no one come? He jumps from the machine again and walks to where the remaining black crystal is and puts his ear against the wall, one hand flat against a cool side of the crystal. Through the wall gritty and cutting against his ear there’s water rushing through sewers, cars accelerating under yellow lights.

2

They run in a nightmare of heat and dust. Everything looks red. The sun pierced by buildings wrapped in tornadic filth. Flames as kites are being pulled endlessly from the windows of several burning buildings and men below in red and gold helmets aim their hoses skyward where the water’s arc disappears just as it begins. Newspapers, umbrellas, plastic bags, fast food cartons, black flies, clumps of hair, dirty diapers, spaghetti, magazines, a million types of colored garbage, all blow across the sky. There’s a howling. It’s so loud because in the city everything makes a noise. Their eyes sting with sweat. They squint as they run.

Into the city streets scattered with people they run. Cabs, motorcycles, sidewalk corners crowded with men who stand in the sweltering heat wearing suits — their faces expressionless shining with sweat in the sun. There is a store that sells just coffee. There is a store that sells just cheese. There is a store that sells just pie. A man holding a plastic plate holding a slice of pie takes a bite and his eyes widen. He turns to his wife and says, “Fresh apples,” while pointing to the pie with his fork. She tries the pie and nods while chewing. After she swallows she says, “Really fresh.”

Remy overhears someone say that the city is moving, it’s crawling over the village now because it’s destiny, it’s what god wants, hooray! The man stops people by placing his hands on their shoulders. He asks if they’ve seen his gold cross necklace. Everyone shrugs him off and the man keeps running, starts tackling people. City people hate touching so the man is their worst enemy. Eventually three cops stop him, the man saying he’s a cop too, hey, stop that, until he goes quiet in the mush.

City people wear fancy t-shirts. City people don’t show their fear. Babies are pushed in carts by parents in sunglasses so you can’t guess their count. City people run for fun and call it jogging. The howling sound dips lower and pummels legs with wind. Again, the ground moves.

“Hurry,” Remy says, and they cross a street, dodging cars and bicycles.

City people scream with blood-red faces and slap the air with their fists. “You wait for the man to glow in the box to tell you when to walk,” says a small angry woman to Remy and Dad as they cross, the woman’s facial expression stoic in the blowing filth. “That’s what you do.”

“You tell ’em, Mom,” says a man standing next to her.

A car tire comes an inch from running over Remy’s heel and she leaps onto the sidewalk, tilting Mom a little, but not dropping her. Dad says to be careful and puts his hand on her back, pulling her further from the street, but not really doing anything, Remy already jumped. They have no idea where they are going but the hospital is somewhere and there’s an end point they are working toward. The small angry woman begins crossing the street while walking bent forward at a severe angle, the wind pushing her back, her will stronger and pushing her forward, facial expression not changing even as she peels, with finger and thumb, a plastic bag with a red smiling face with pigtails, from her own face, her other hand holding the grown man’s hand and seemingly pulling him along to an undesirable appointment.

Remy bounces Mom in her arms as she runs. Hundred barks at the end of a street lined with trucks that sell food to long lines of impatient people. A man with a chrome cart sells a product called hot dogs that float in bins of hot water, little puffs of steam rising each time the lid is taken off. The chrome cart has a glossy red hot dog with legs and the hot dog is smiling as a salivating mouth from the right chomps away at the hot dog’s bun-clad body. Remy thinks They put that in their mouths.

Another rumbling is felt through the soles of their feet, this one larger, this one knocking people to the ground who curse the sky while trying to stand back up. They look to see what new buildings are rising. They scream and laugh and cry. Everyone in the city is insane. Everyone is touching technology. Free space in the city doesn’t exist. Every inch is filled, and from a cloud’s view, it’s all moving like a tidal wave of concrete and blinking lights toward the village.

“Moms should never be allowed to die because Moms are forever,” says Remy, seemingly to no one, only concentrating on finding the hospital, her eyes trying to read the letters painted on windows. There’s a store that sells just dog food.

“What?” says Dad.

“Moms are a void never to be filled.”

“What are you saying? Slow down.”

“We can’t.”

“Are we close?”

“Just come on.”

The hospital is a towering white building of glass windows with a glowing +. It’s so white it blinds through the red sky, the blowing filth of the city. Hoards of people stand outside the entrance. It’s hurricane windy but many don’t care. A woman in a wheelchair smokes a cigarette with her hair flying around her head like a baby’s handwriting. She stares blankly ahead until she sneezes blood and smoke and loses her cigarette. A man dressed in green lights another and places it between her lips.

The earth shakes and blurs and Remy fights back tears as she runs holding her dying mom.

A half-naked man with his face covered in black crosses stands on a wooden box and yells, “THE SUN IS COMING TO CLEANSE US ALL, HALLELUJAH, THE SUN IS COMING TO CLEANSE US ALL,” and the man selling hot dogs slaps the air. The half-naked man grins and drawn on each tooth is a black cross and the hot dog vendor looks scared. He continues to yell, “THE SUN IS COMING TO CLEANSE US ALL, HALLELUJAH, THE SUN IS COMING TO CLEANSE US ALL.”

They run down street after street and Remy bleeds as people take pictures and upload videos.

Another ground trembling, another slight tilting of the universe, another inch the sun pushes in.

A collective moan as the sky vines with cracks.

“The sun is to blame,” says a woman named Sharon or Carol or Tammy or Julie or Amy or Mom or Cathy or Kelly. “But you know something, I don’t really know.”

“Everyone is a falling number,” says Remy. “Get inside, protect yourself.”

A boy named Joey, the son of Sanders who has recently begun airing political ads claiming victory over the village says, “What’s that?” and points.

In the center of an intersection a fountain of dirt sprays the sky with a rush like a stream grown after a storm. Men and women scatter away and clog up doorways. A man drops his phone, starts to go back for it, but is pulled away by his wife. Roads split and the earth tilts and those still standing don’t wait to fall. From inside the fountain a giant yellow insect crawls upward.

“COME ON!” says Remy. “PLEASE COME ON!”

They sprint down a final area of sidewalk and reach the hospital, the fountain in the intersection still in partial view from the hospital entrance. Mom is going to be saved. There’s a hotel attached to the hospital and there’s a church attached to the hotel and all three are in a race to consume the most sky. Two men dressed in green standing at the sliding glass doors take the blanket and pull the fabric down to reveal her face. Mom will be Mom forever. They call, without emotion, for a stretcher. The woman in the wheelchair smoking, hair in the wind a fighting nest of odd angles, laughs at the sky and then coughs in a way that makes Remy think she’s near zero. The two men look at Remy, ask if she’s okay, and she nods. She hasn’t seen what her feet look like. Mom is safe now, don’t worry about me. One of the men looks Dad up and down, Dad trying to catch his breath, he’s so out of shape, his stomach hurts, his back throbbing. But he also feels a strange kind of opening, something like success because they’ve made it.

“She’s red because she’s losing her final crystal,” says Remy.

One of the men turns and looks at her. “What?”

“She’s a red giant.”

“What she’s trying to say,” says Dad, “is that she needs an injection, or whatever, to increase her count.”

“Okay,” says the other man, looking so totally lost that he smiles. “Wait, what?”

The stretcher arrives. They place Mom on it and enter the hospital. Dad stays outside because he can’t stop looking at what’s happening back in the intersection, the fountain growing taller, getting louder, more people screaming. He’s completely distracted by something he’s never seen before, that no one has seen before, all that dirt blowing into the air with this thing, this yellow insect, coming up and out of it.

“Wha,” says Dad. “HOLY.”

There’s another eruption and triangular shapes of street bloom outward from inside the fountain of dirt and the yellow insect rises. It makes a high-pitched whining sound as it struggles to pull itself from the hole. Those on the ground crawl on their stomachs toward building entranceways where people scream to hurry, their heads filled with sci-fi endings. The wind shatters a bank’s ATM window. A man crouches, holds his head, looks for his ATM card with the password LIZ&MONTY. The sun bends pavement. Laughing teens run in place, the wind holding them in place as they sink into the road. The yellow insect drags itself from the hole and becomes a machine with clumps of dirt spilling around it.

“How is that,” says Dad.

Two black crystals fall off the back as the yellow machine rights itself with two final flops. The engine buckles with the changing of gears, the whine relaxes to a growl, and a part, looks like a rusty pipe, falls under a tire as the machine moves forward.

Z. is hunched over the wheel, covered in gunk, dirt still raining down all around him. A few rocks clang off the metal roof. He screams for everyone to get out of his way and swats the air wildly in front of him. The tires leave two trails of dirt clumps shaped like hexagons in the street as he drives, trying to remember where the prison is. Dad steps back, turns, and runs into the hospital.

Inside, orderlies and patients and doctors and janitors pressed to the walls allow a clear path for Dad to follow. Ahead of him is Remy. The walls are an endless smear of green. Dad has the weird expression of a man terrified but smiling, catching up to her and the wildly swerving stretcher disappearing around corners, then reappearing again and scaring old men glued to the walls, clutching their metal poles on wheels. He runs and feels himself come alive.

Doors fly open and inside are doctors with rubber-gloved hands. They turn their heads, their bodies not reacting. Free-standing fans blow hot air.

Then they take Mom in a sudden group effort. A hand grabs Remy’s wrist and she slaps it away, runs to the table where they lay Mom, but Remy is pulled back again, this time by hands all over her body.

“Easy,” says Dad.

The doctors in green move in smaller and faster packs around the room. They not only unwrap the blanket, but also put Remy on a table, who fights them off with flailing fists and feet — the feet what they are trying to inspect.

“Hey,” says Dad. “Be careful with her. Don’t touch her if she doesn’t want you to.”

Mom on the table is all bone. Her mouth is open under the white lights, her body motionless with electrical cords being attached to her red skin. There’s so many white sheets. There’s so many gray cords and clear bags with clear liquid hanging from metal rods like the old men in the hall had.

The doctors in green speak a different language.

A red light beeps in drip-like rhythm.

A black machine hooked up to Mom warms up with glowing green numbers — 76, 55, 40, 32, 80, 100, 74, 38.

Dad asks if those are what her count will be.

The doctors in green ignore him and inspect Remy’s bloodied feet with tweezers. Again Dad speaks up, doesn’t shut down, tells them to stop hurting her. Remy attacks them. She’s so strong. Remy goes limp and slides off the table and runs to the door leaving behind bloody footprints.

“Give her one hundred,” says Dad. “Please give her one hundred.”

1

Driving in a straight line at a steady rate of speed, oblivious to his surroundings, machine maxed out and containing black crystals, Z. leaves the intersection of screaming people, burning buildings, blowing garbage, and heads to the prison. He finds the path the Brothers previously walked and the prison comes into focus through the swirling dirt in the final sky.

The guards see him coming from the prison windows. They’ve waited for this. They run down and open the gate. Little Karl drops his book.

He stops the machine and the guards circle around and begin inspecting the crystals. The only shine to Z. is a few clean teeth in his smiling head. One guard takes a razor, peels a layer of crystal off, and places it on his tongue. He smiles, says it’s the right stuff, and Z. says as long as it’s the right stuff he’ll take them home.

Jug knocks on a crystal to hear if it’s hollow, fake. He says this must be what remains and the ground trembles. He pats the largest piece and gives Z. a thumbs up.

The Brothers exit the prison shielding their eyes. Some limp and many have bruises ringing their necks. They straighten their curved backs and stand upright in the sunlight and then they do something Z. has never experienced before: applaud. The guards, his Brothers, and the village inmates walking from the prison all clap, whistle, and shout, and Z. bows and puts a hand in the air like Okay, thank you, thank you very much, you don’t have to do this you can stop now, but he’s so overwhelmed with emotion, he’s been through so much, that his eyes fill with tears as he listens to the applause. He lets it wash over him. He notices how young the guards are. There’s admiration in their eyes, and they keep shouting his name, and one guy makes an odd hooting noise while jumping and pumping a fist, and some guards slap Z.’s back and two guards, one for each leg, try to lift him up but they’re too weak. Jug says he will be remembered forever now and the applause grows louder, seems to shake the ground. Jug will get his applause later. Z. takes another bow and smiles, this time blushing, not crying, this time thinking I did it, yes. He tries to guess the ages of the youngest guards.

Tall, scrawny, blond ponytail with top shaved head, Pants McDonovan exits the prison last. He claps and squints in the sun he hasn’t felt in years. He licks his lips and tastes dirt and to him it tastes good, real. His skin looks dented. Black pools under both eyes, no sleep. When he sees a piece of black crystal he thinks about chomping down on a big edge right there but his lungs burn as they adjust to the air and he stands with both hands on his chest.

The guards carry the crystals inside. They walk hunched over in wide stances slobbering and pushing their crotches against it. There’s enough for a lifetime and it’s what they’ll do, forever. They’ll add inmates to keep the game going. Jug thinks about the party they will throw for him with no limits on coffee or donuts.

“Saw your Dad,” says Z. “I was driving so fast and there was so much dirt and I’m so tired, but I think it was him walking into the hospital. We did it.”

“How is everything not on fire,” says Pants. “Are you sure?”

“He was standing outside the hospital next to a woman in a wheelchair.”

“My head hurts.”

“We’re going to be remembered.”

“But I don’t feel alive.”

“I never thought in a million years the black crystal existed. You should feel more than alive.”

“What’s a hospital? Was he okay?”

“It’s a place people go to get injected with crystals,” interrupts Bobby T., who stands but keeps losing his balance, his legs bruised from being hacked with batons, the ground again shaking. “I read that in Death Movement. He’s in trouble.”

“Listen,” says Arnold, interrupting. “A hospital is suppose to help people. And Bobby T. is right, you should hurry.”

“Where is it?”

0

Remy kicks a doctor in the throat. She’s been kicking doctors in the throat. The doctor falls backward and slips in her blood. She spins and ducks from the grip of the others. She reaches for the door again.

Here he comes, dazed, light-headed, worried-eyebrows, never seen a place like this before, Brother.

“Who is this?” says one of the doctors. “Is he friend or family? SECURITY!”

“Adam,” says Remy.

His orange jumpsuit is covered in black holes of sweat. He walks with a limp. His hair is matted with crusted blood from landing on a concrete floor. Transparent skin. His overall look is what you’d imagine someone to look like who spent days in solitary confinement, little light. Remy wraps her arms around his thighs and they both want to believe that their counts rise. They both want to slip backward in time, and together, here holding each other in the hospital with everything around them fogging away in green dream, they feel like children again. Adam pats Remy’s head and kisses her. She imagines each pat adding one inside her. She feels so good in the swirling moment that the outside world is obliterated, it’s just them now, they are together and bright now.

Adam looks at Dad and smiles, then sees Mom on the table and realizes nothing is wrong with Dad at all, it’s Mom, that’s why they are here. It’s been Mom this entire time. He’s known this. He walks to the side of the table where she is, where a few doctors continue to work. One doctor stands against the wall. He’s on the phone with the police. Each step is floating, as if walking through connected tunnels of dream. Adam touches her face with the backside of his hand and combs her hair to the one side it wants to go. He leans over, almost falls onto the table, and the doctors give space.

He slides his arms under and around her body, the hospital sheets cool against his skin, dirt cracking off his forearms. He lifts her from the table until his body and her body touch with her head resting on his shoulder. She weighs nothing. She is nothing. Against his ear her breathing sounds like mouth-blown mud. She smells sour with something inside burning and leaving. All her life, all her numbers, have led up to this point, this hospital reckoning. She’s trying to remember all the good moments. She’s trying to make sense of it all.

Remy walks over and supports Mom’s head with her hands.

“It’s okay,” Adam says to Mom.

Her breathing gets louder.

“I’m here,” he says.

He’s a good one. He’s a good one he’s a good one I knew he’d be a good one he’s a good one.

Her body jolts forward.

“No,” says Adam. “I have you.”

There’s a Mom breath so deep that her chest expands into his chest. He feels the connection, the beating, the whatever it is inside them that makes them what they are. Two of the doctors nod and unhook wires.

“Call it,” says a doctor snapping off his gloves. “What’s everyone doing for lunch?”

“11:11 on her.”

“I could eat.”

Remy points to her feet.

Red slush. It flows from Mom’s back and oozes off the edges of the table and drips warm on Remy’s feet. She’s never seen a color so bright. The twin horses appear in the center of the room and tell her it’s time to go and she opens her eyes for the last time against Adam’s chest and her mouth falls open. Hundred the dog howls from the sidewalk surrounded by cops looking at the sky. Remy taps Adam on his shoulder, who is connected to Mom because he still holds her, he can’t let go, and they are connected to Dad who stands on the other side of the bed squeezing Mom’s hand and it’s true, the sun is here.