Dad speaking at her back as she moves around the bed: “I thought that. I’ve thought about a life by myself and thought how much easier —”
Mom lies down in bed. Dad stands next to the bed.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I?”
“Why didn’t you walk in? You could have made a life selling crystals, running back and forth and grabbing the best ones.”
“Did you just say there’s a problem with your dreams?”
She spits on the chest of her nightgown. The goo shines with red crystal or thick blood. Dad circles the bed, an ache in his lower back developing from the accident that will only get worse from now on. He wants to change the subject away from what he’s feeling. She seemed so much stronger before, when they held each other and he hummed that song.
“Remy talks about dying.”
“We’ve talked about it,” says Mom. “The city, the sun, but she can’t discuss death?”
“She’s small.”
“Not thinking about dying is living in denial,” says Mom, touching the liquid on her chest. “My legs hurt.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You were.”
“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have come back.”
“You know those television shows that go really fast to zip through a scene, and it’s funny? Like that show we watched with the family who lived on the beach? I see us like that, but it’s not funny. It’s just the two of us moving to opposite sides of the house and the house is shrinking. His imprisonment changed us but we never talked about it enough. I saw it in you the first time we sat in the truck, watching. You were damaged. You should have gotten it out of you back then but you didn’t.”
“I don’t know. How am I supposed to respond to that? Anything I say is going to be unhelpful. I don’t have anything to say.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I care about you and Remy more than anything.”
“I think the most selfish people are the quietest.” More spit, a deeper shade of red. “Promise you won’t leave again. I need you here. We do. What do you think it’s like to be zero?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s like the city.”
“Concrete and endless noise?”
“Wonder if I’ll feel anything.”
“Phones, politicians.”
“Wonder if it smells like anything.”
“Does that matter?”
“They have a hospital.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” says Dad, and comes back to her and sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her legs in long deep strokes that she doesn’t notice. He loves her, but can’t handle what is happening because he can’t control it. Later, he’ll walk to the kitchen for the spitting cloth. It will be the last time — the cloth the texture and color of smashed cherries disintegrating over his hands as he rinses it out. He wants to ask her again about her dreams. He wants to know what’s wrong with them.
“I can’t feel you.”
Part Two
19
He receives a letter from Brothers Feast saying the jailbreak in reverse has been finalized and they are coming into the prison. He’s traded letters with Z. and they’ve worked together on the escape plan and everything is ready. McDonovan knows breaking in is risky, teetering on the absurd, but it’s worth it because there’s a chance he will see his family. Mom 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.