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.”