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.