Читать онлайн "Crystal Eaters" - Jones Shane - RuLit

The Brothers have no reaction. They enjoy their dinner in the street.

A man outside a bar reaches into a rusty barrel and extracts a turkey leg. With a big swinging arm he launches the leg skyward, toward the stretching bag, the ameba in the sky. The turkey leg lands on the table and wobbles their plates. They thank the man and portion off the gristle-rot. Men and women in their traditional robes, their backs hunched from mandatory years working in the mine boo the Brothers with spittle.

“Just working on our public image,” Bobby T. tells the crowd.

“Quiet and obedient is what we need,” says Ricky.

“It makes sense to be disciplined,” says Z. “Don’t act weird, right, right.”

They all smile and nod and eat. They drink coffee from a metal urn kept hot by the air. The sweat on their skin thickens to a clear goo that traps lightweight bugs. Z. takes a long drink from his mug. He notices one bug has a sucking mouth and he leaves it there, sucking, on his wrist.

A woman in an orange robe runs up and slaps the cup from Z.’s hand. The coffee paint-splatters Ricky’s sleeve. The cup rolls across the table and falls to the ground while Z. sits frozen, mouth open, pretending to still hold the cup until the woman walks away mumbling, calling him a lost child.

“The s-s-s-service here is awful,” says Z. and everyone laughs. He heard the “lost child” comment and it hurt. He just needs to define the jailbreak in reverse and his life will work out. Everything that has become before will be nothing.

Daylight wastes to dark. Residents retreat to their homes. The Brothers stay at the table in the street, candles flickering, the bag of hot air in the sky, the moving ameba, pops and pours millions of locusts, black bugs, bugs with sucking mouths, invisible tiny things with just wings. The Brothers barely notice, they look at the city. Another building is on fire. Village radicals known as Black Mask are trying to stop the city’s growth by burning sections. This has happened several times and no one in the village is sure who is doing it exactly, but it’s most likely two or three mine workers. Some think it’s Royal Bob, running in his blue shorts, his long gray hair burning and swatting the base of the buildings. But no one believes burning buildings will stop the city. For every building burned to the ground, three more rise in its place.

Full dark from above. They stay up with the heat figuring out what the jailbreak in reverse is. Z. reads over the letters received from the prison. There’s a new one that he somehow missed and Z. blames Arnold for the letter being placed in the old, already read piles. Arnold’s skin burns so bad from the heat he thinks he’s covered in biting bugs and he slaps his arm. There are bugs, tons of them, on him. He apologizes. Z. reads the letter once, twice, then three more times, holding it up with two hands. He cross-checks it with several letters and notes, then goes back to this new letter. Arnold notices, his nose practically touching his arm, that little bugs, barely visible, are burrowing into him.

Z. shouts, “I GOT IT,” and startles Arnold and the others.

He’s covered in glistening sweat.

He’s shaking and smiling and holding the paper with two hands like he’s looking through it and into the sky and he screams again, “I–I-I DID IT I GOT IT I ACTUALLY DID IT Y-Y-Y-YOU FOOLS DID YOU HEAR ME I–I-I GOT IT.”

They finalize the plan that will free The Sky Father Gang and make Z. forever known. It’s all he’s ever wanted. As a child he spent eight days looking for a turtle because he heard they existed, came from the city. He never wanted something so bad. His mom ended up getting one from Mob of Mary’s and it died three days later. When he stands on the table again it’s not with anger, but joy. He carves circles in the air with his fingers and gyrates his hips. Streams of burning turquoise rain down a curve in the sky. Arnold slaps the table and Ricky and Scotty and Bobby T. mouth-fart a beat and shout, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” They dance and celebrate and swat bugs from their faces until the sun comes up, the temperature rising, the future as them in it, forever.

With a screwdriver from Dad’s toolbox Mom chisels off a piece of black crystal, why not. She listened for years to her son speak about increasing count (life, longer). He once walked home with the first black crystal and gave it to her. She didn’t know he had others. She didn’t know he would experiment and form something as dangerous as The Sky Father Gang. She should try something, anything, even if she doesn’t believe in it, yes, even if she doesn’t believe in it because the meaning of life is to feel some good even though what’s inside you is a waiting zero. She moves the screwdriver.

Mom has okay days and bad. At her worst, she stays in bed where she coughs crystals into the spitting cloth (Chapter 2, Death Movement, Book 8). Her number skims a green lake, dives, and tadpole-swims away from her. During her okay days Mom sits in the triangle of sunlight entering her window and warms her face for hours. At the dinner table she acts in a way that doesn’t turn Remy’s head in the opposite direction. But most days are bad. Under the covers at night she traces with her finger the sharpness of her hipbones and imagines a man fitting both hands around her as if she were a clay pot, lifting her up, and drinking what liquid is left.

She moves the screwdriver over the black crystal trying to peel it apart.

The family has broken apart over the years in a honeycomb hexagon of ways. That’s how she sees it — a solid shape but with separate pieces inside. She remembers the night in the mine, the men. They were dressed like mine workers. She didn’t speak to anyone about what had happened. The distance between herself and her husband is an endless black field, their bodies as shadows inside the black field moving away from each other, neither able to see the other. She didn’t want to be touched after it happened and Dad’s hand-on-hip move in the kitchen was viciously swatted away. She told herself, or was it Dad, she could push the experience away, and with time, destroy it.

She places the piece, which is the size of a clipped toenail, under her tongue. It’s sharp and with any movement will sink in. She sits on the floor in the sunlight triangle. She considers trying for the Horses Hologram again, and in the thought, doesn’t realize she’s chewing the crystal, breaking it into specks, and swallowing.

It’s a good amount of black crystal to take. When a hot flash blankets her body she inspects her arms because they feel swollen. There’s the tadpole-swimming-away-from-her feeling again but this time it’s pleasant and warm. Her body is at first underwater, then exploding out of the water and into the sun. Heat, a hard ball of it, rolls up from her stomach and clogs her throat. She screams, laughs, sees herself running the circumference of the earth. She swallows and the lump in her throat flattens. Mom thinks she’s added and with one finger she taps her chest and counts to fifty. She smiles into the sun with her eyes open, blinding, not caring. On thirteen pieces of paper she writes

I’m not sick anymore.