“…”
Everyone wears orange with white sneakers, black Velcro straps replace laces. A man named Crumb — small, mean — pinches the ashy tattooed praying hands on his neck while leaning back in his chair until the front legs hover off the ground, his cheeks puffed with air, his eyes blue and distant. There’s Pete with his forearm tattoos inked in arial black — left arm: Everything I Kill I Fuck, right arm: Everything I Fuck I Kill — who chews watermelon flavored gum and crumples the tent of orange fabric at his crotch with a bouncing finger. Tony sits slumped, his arms larger than most men’s thighs, folded over his chest, his left shirtsleeve rolled up above the bicep revealing a rash of raised skin in the shape of a key. Others sit looking at their shoes waiting for the health meeting to just end.
Jug has donut powder on his face. “All right, gotta play,” he says, chewing his lips.
“…”
Pants shuts down when attempting to externalize emotion. This fact he’s learned from these meetings. Something about family systems or was it family of origin. He stares at Jug. He leans forward. His big toe rubs the bottom of his shoe and his entire foot feels wet, hot, but he can’t get moving. Not here. Not like this. He can’t enter the high because of their faces. The black crystal isn’t strong enough for him to escape this time even though he’s done it before on less. The obligation surrounding him is suffocating. Jug’s question is drawing him out. Reality has a way of breaking you.
“Donut,” says Jug. “Now speak.”
“…”
Two invisible chambers floating in the center of the room are this: Jug asking Pants to talk, his chamber filling up, and the reaction chamber is Pants shuts off, the chamber emptying. They are connected. He knows this. Things learned. Basic Distancer vs. Pursuer. His emotions are hidden under crystals. He wants to flip the chambers and come out with so much hiss and words that Jug will blow back through the wall and dissolve. The black crystal rushes through his veins and creates bumps on his skin. There are no bumps on his skin, Pants just imagines them, but he starts rubbing his arms. He needs to get on the beach. It’s getting stronger, he can feel it.
“Crystal shithead,” says Crumb. “Go and we get this over with.”
“…”
A guard circles holding a club in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. He’s eaten three donuts, smells like clean laundry, and has a chicken dinner waiting at home. He’s one of the few guards who doesn’t eat crystal and is against the other guards taking it. He’s friends with the guard who wears the gold cross and together they pray in a room located in the prison used for nothing but praying. The praying room is labeled Praying Room. There’s an oil painting of an illuminated Jesus and a carpeted kneeling bench in royal purple. They really love to pray. The other guards who are hooked on the black crystal dislike them for what they interpret not as personal belief, but a moral judgment on their souls. The guard looks around the room for something to attack.
Everything looks weird to Pants. The guard’s eyes are a horizontal slit across his head which is a grape and the lights on the ceiling slither and drool. The air is pixilated. Tony’s arm rash is raised and jellied. His chair feels hot and alive.
“Holy shit,” says Jug.
“…”
“I think,” says Crumb. “I’d eat the village cold.”
Pants speaks. The story is this:
When he was nine years old he followed Mom into the mine. He thought she was a witch because she wore a black robe. Seeing her without her usual gray gown reminded him of seeing Dad for the first time without a mustache — a cruel trick with paralyzing aftershock for a toddler. He followed her. She was a shadow in that black gown floating over the truck-pressed roads, past the vegetable stands, poorly constructed leaning shacks, homes with crude metal roofs, the loud-lighted bars with street corners gorged with drunks vomiting count. He followed her into the mine, keeping his distance in the dark. She performed a séance. Knees bent, body bouncing from side to side, she growled as she reached for the sky. She placed an invisible towel over the head of the moon and cleaned it. Years later he’d find out many mothers conducted séances to increase their count when they felt sick. It was normal. But what’s not normal is her wearing a black robe instead of a gray gown. What’s not normal is what happened to Mom and his reaction after and his following guilt.
“Well, okay,” says Jug. “Good start. Weird. But discussing your childhood opens you up to the person you are now,” he says repeating the words from a training manual. “Everyone see how that’s good? You build on that.”
Crumb and Tony check for more donuts and if the orange light is still lit on the coffee urn. With a swirling club the guard tells them to turn around.
Before Jug asks his first question, Pants says more. He speaks quickly, racing over the top-half of his words. Black robes walked into the mine. They tore the robe off Mom, and from where he was, his body flat, dirt in his mouth, trembling against the dirt, he watched them act in a way he had never seen before. He could have done something. He made fists.
Curl, straighten, curl, straighten. His big toe is a pumping valve. Concentrate with calm. The crystal sinks deeper and his ripped skin shrieks along a fuse behind his ears. Finally maxed out.
He sits up in the white plastic chair so straight it’s freakish. He describes a man’s measured punches through Mom’s hands which moved like they were cleaning fog off a windshield. They took turns falling on her, pushing her body into the dirt, fucking her into deeper plateaus. The first man went back. Pants floods the room with words, eyes wet, the veins in his neck worm-thick and making even self-proclaimed tough-guy-Tony wince. His body needs to move. Usually he can jog in his cell where he imagines the beach and Harvak at his side. The worst part wasn’t that he didn’t stop the men, but that his dick got hard against the dirt and he slithered and he screwed the ground. His fists became caresses. Pete whispers into his hands cupped over his nose and mouth What the fuck, dude and Crumb defense-mechanism-laughs while shaking his head no.
“I returned to the mine and replayed what happened to Mom who never reported or said a thing about what happened to anyone and I would lay in the dirt and rock and push into it and I was messed up back then because I thought, I really believed that I would die from such thoughts, like a force would reach down and yank every crystal from my body like a spine or something and leave me there like that and I’ve thought afterward and being here in the prison I could have done something, banner, banner, banner, that Mom is so sick now cause of what happened and I didn’t do anything, but I was a good boy, I didn’t do anything wrong, and now Mom is sick cause of me and I just need to help her cause I’m good.”
Pants stands and kicks the chair backward and it flips, the soldered metal glob where the legs sprout from hits the guard’s knees and he falls into a crossed-leg sitting position with a comical Uhf. Everyone else slides their chair back by extending their legs. Pants curls and uncurls his big toe. His foot is a puddle. Down the hall come extra guards. Pants keeps talking. He says he formed The Sky Father Gang to find answers on how to increase count, have Mom live forever, have Mom always be Mom, Mom as a god, until he stops, the inmates squeezing their fists looking back and forth, the guard rubbing his knees and standing with the cross in his mouth, the other, outside guards, wielding expandable batons turning the nearest corner, and Pants says to Jug who sits upright, eyes wide, a wet spot of sweat, or is it piss, it can’t be piss, jesus, pooling from his stomach and through his khakis, “I wanted to save her but I didn’t do anything” and tears stream from his eyes, “I could have done something but I didn’t,” and he readies, for the batons to open at the back of his knees, a ray of pain.