Cavesick

I’m using a razorblade to scrape pang residue from the bottom of a plastic tub when Benji raises his hackles. He snarls and barks before anyone even knocks. I snap at him to be quiet, sit, and he does. Through the peephole Bronn and Malik are fidgeting, eyes all shifty, and I’m already annoyed.

“I’m dry,” I yell loud enough for them to hear through the door. “Come back tomorrow.” I watch as they whisper to each other before shuffling back into the colony.

I’m annoyed with them, but I’m mostly annoyed at myself for letting the stash run out. I put off the reup the same way you might put off getting a tooth pulled, or a suicide.

Benji and I hike through damp dirt and foliage. He pants beside me with wide eyes and his tail stuck straight up. You wouldn’t guess how old he is by looking at him. It's impossible to say how many times he’s made this trip. I know the trail better than any man alive, and he knows it better than I do. I’m sure he tasted the cave’s briny stink in the air long before I smelled it.

As we climb, the air gets thick with mist. Milky condensation collects on my windbreaker, beads off and falls to the forest floor. When we reach the cave mouth I wipe sweat from my forehead and roll up my sleeves. I run my finger along the crack in the cave wall. Take a deep breath, glance over my shoulder like it matters.

The first arm is always the hardest, and as I worm my hand into the crevice I feel the wall soften and turn slick. I keep pushing—wrist, elbow, shoulder. And I hate this part, I truly do, but I have to do it. So I hold my breath and squeeze my head into the quivering gap. The wall’s warmth presses against my face, slackening and expanding to make room for my shoulders and torso. I count backwards from a hundred just so my mind has somewhere else to be.

When I’m waist-deep, I don’t have to push anymore. The cave mouth undulates and heaves me through. I’m spat into a cavern that’s barely lit by a sliver of daylight. Benji follows, wriggling through the opening before it tightens back up, his gray fur wet with pallid streaks.

We’re left in a rumbling darkness until I click my headlamp on. I breathe through my mouth because the air is bitter. The ceiling drips.

We make our way through the cave. I’ve scraped these walls clean, but there’s always more. So we keep walking, footsteps slapping through hot puddles until the cave walls catch my lamp and glisten.

It took me a long time to figure out how to harvest scales efficiently. My dad only showed me once. I used to just hack at them and collect the scattered shards from the cave floor. The way they cracked off made my teeth grind.

That was years ago. Now I gently slide the blade of my knife under the scales and twist. They pop off easy. The cave quivers when they do, and the rumbling sound weighs into my stomach.

I spend hours sliding and twisting, sliding and twisting. The scales fall to piles at my feet. When the lamplight hits they glimmer like jewels.

I tell Benji to lie down but I know he won’t. He faces away and growls into the darkness. I’ve always wondered where it ends, if anywhere at all.

I have to cross through the colony on my way home. My stomach hurts and I smell like cave. People are staring. They always stare when I come out of the woods. They used to stare at my dad, too, but in a different way. He carried a certain air that bred a wary respect. An unfuckwithableness. I don’t have that. I get contempt, with a little bit of pity, maybe.

I know what they think of me and I don’t care. No amount of social stigma can pierce the numbness that follows a trip to the cave. I ache all over but don’t feel a thing.

Pestle grinds mortar and the scales crack to powder. I’m wearing a bandana over my face because I don’t want to inhale the glittering dust that hovers around me. Don’t get high on your own supply. Those words used to buzz from an old cassette my dad played when I was a kid. We’d listen while I watched him grind kilos of pang.

It’s almost four a.m. when I finish bagging grams.

Benji is curled up on a pile of rags in the middle of the floor and I just watch him for a while. The only sounds are his soft snores and the clicking of a broken box fan and the rumble of the cave that I know won’t leave my body for the next few days, and I feel desolate.

Bronn and Malik are back before I fall asleep. It’s six a.m., maybe, and part of me is grateful that I don’t have to stare at the ceiling anymore.

Benji is going crazy, running back and forth across the cabin, kicking up dust and howling. I don’t bother telling him to be quiet, just open the door. When he sees who it is he settles, but he doesn’t take his eyes off them. He’s suspicious of anyone who doesn’t smell like us.

“You got it?” Bronn's eyes bounce from me to the shotgun propped against the wall, back to me then to the floor.

I don’t answer but wave them in. Malik swings his backpack over his shoulder, opens it up and jabbers about what they have to offer: a pack of batteries, some porn magazines, a few strips of jerky dotted with mold. I can tell there’s more in his bag but he zips it closed real quick and I take the hint.

I go for the batteries and the jerky first, then decide to take the porn, too.

“Two grams,” and for once they don’t argue. I’m relieved because I don’t have it in me to argue with junkies right now.

Malik’s eyes look different, sharper, and it’s making me nervous. He must notice because he says, “You good?”

“Uh huh.” I lead them to the door.

“Don’t look it,” he says. “Maybe you should try some of this shit sometime. All this fuckin’ pang. And you the only one not takin’ it.”

“Guess I don’t need it.”

He stares hard. “Must be nice.”

The rest of the day is just serving pang, trying to read comics, or staring off into space between customers. At some point I put on one of my dad’s old cassettes. To all the killers and a hundred dollar billers. I asked him what that meant once, and he scrunched up his face trying to explain. I get it now, kind of, sort of, but back then it sounded like magic. He tried to pass down the stories that were passed down to him, but I always felt like things got lost along the way. I wish I had listened more, pressed him about it when I still had the chance.

I always knew we were different, but the how and why of it never made sense.

The sun is low in the sky and the cabin’s getting bleak. I need a break, so I decide to take Benji out.

A couple custies are laid out on the road and staring into the sun, drooling. Didn’t even have the patience to make it home before guzzling pang. One turns to me and gives me a stupid smile as I pass, tells me he loves me. I ignore him.

Bronn and Malik are there, too. When I nod to them Bronn looks away. Malik nods back but his eyes are cold.

We used to be friends. All the colony kids were. We hunted rabbits and chased girls, snuck out at night to climb the grain silos and drink stolen hooch.

When did it start to get weird? I guess there wasn’t a single moment. Just a gradual widening until the space between us was too big to cross. Maybe they heard their parents’ whispers about my dad, maybe they just got sick of watching me go where they couldn’t. Maybe they were jealous that we had the pang and they didn’t.

I avoid the colony and walk into the woods where everything turns damp. The trees weep mucous and the dirt sloshes against my boots. Benji sniffs at a pile of vertebrae, a mandible.

There’s a fresh body a little further in. Skin sloughing to wet piles that melt into the soil. This person—man? Woman? It’s hard to tell—got further than they usually do. Most people drop a few steps past the treeline. It’s morbid, but it’s also the one thing that makes this place better than the colony: the absolute assurance that I’ll never see another living soul.

My discomfort in the woods is different from my discomfort in the colony. In the colony, it comes from knowing that I don’t belong. In the woods, it comes from the opposite.

I end up at the lookout point without even meaning to. The boulder on the edge of the cliff still has our names carved into it. A yellow crust covers the rock everywhere except where we etched TYIII and TYIV all those years ago.

Thomas Yancy the Third, Thomas Yancy the Fourth. It doesn’t look like there will be a Thomas Yancy the Fifth. I don’t think a single person in the colony trusts me enough for that, but I’m fine being the last of our line. Let them get their own fucking pang.

I’d like to see them try.

From the boulder I look out over the valley, where greens and browns and yellows and blacks blur into a warped, beautiful mass. My dad told me that the caves run under the whole forest, under the whole world, and that our family is a part of them. That our ancestors mined minerals underground long before the caves turned soft and rumbled. That we scraped coal before we scraped scales.

He said that when the caves rooted in the earth, they rooted in us, too.

I don’t know how he knew but I believe him, because I can feel it. I feel it when I’m in there, popping scales. Each time one falls the world winces and so do I.

Over the years I watched the color leave his face, his fingernails turn yellow. Eventually he barely spoke. It had always been the two of us but more and more often it was just me, alone in the cabin, waiting to hear his key in the lock. He’d enter with a grunt, still dripping cave, and the room would turn sour.

I was sixteen when he finally brought me. I followed him through the pulsing fissure. Sat on the cave floor lightheaded and shaking. When we found the scales I slid my fingers across them and shivered as they clacked together.

“I wish I had more to offer you,” he said, “but this is it. This is all we are.”

The next morning he left and never came back. I found him in the woods days later slumped against a tree, shotgun lying in the dirt beside him. The blood was dry but glistening. He left me the cabin, Benji, and a nest egg that was rotten.

He couldn’t run it anymore, and I’m starting to understand why.

We get back as the sun sets over the hills to the west. A few fiends are waiting at the cabin. I hook them up. The last couple days are catching up to me and I’m tired. I fall asleep clutching moldy jerky and a Walkman, headphones half-on.

The first thing I hear is Benji. He’s not growling, he’s barking. When it registers I’m up and out of bed.

Too late.

There’s an explosion of splintered wood and black smoke and then I’m on my back. I cough and groan, I think, but I can’t tell because there’s a ringing that chokes out all other sound. I try to get up but my legs give out. Something warm runs down my side. When I look down I see a shard of cabin sticking from my stomach. It’s oozing red.

Two figures appear through the smoke. They’re wearing ski masks, but I know who they are. They didn’t even bother changing clothes. They were wearing the same thing when I served them this morning, and when they showed up pang-sick last night.

I make a move toward the shotgun but collapse.

Then: a boot to the face, and nothing.

I don’t know how long it’s been when I open my eyes, but I can tell I’m in the woods. The air is heavy and dank, wet in the way only the woods are. The night is absolutely still.

I push my body up and sit against a tree. Blink as my eyes adjust to the dark. Everything hurts and mud is caked across my face, in my hair. My side is burning.

There are two bodies laid out in the dirt before me. I don’t know what they thought would happen. Maybe that I could protect them from whatever keeps people out. Maybe that I could get them into the cave. I guess it doesn’t work that way.

For a second I’m distracted from the pain by a flicker of something like amusement. How will the colony get by when the last Yancy is gone? I wonder what they’ll do without their precious pang. I wish I could be around to see it.

Then I see a third body. It’s smaller, with gray fur barely reflecting the moonlight. I don’t think about the pang anymore.

I lift my shirt. The wound is long and deep. Without thinking, I pull at the hunk of jagged wood still lodged in my gut. It burns. I think I scream. Fresh blood pours out.

There’s something in the gash. A glimmering. What I always felt was there. As my vision goes dark, I ease a finger in.

Then a knuckle.

Then a hand.

My flesh loosens and makes space for me to enter. The wound undulates.

I plunge into myself.

Run my fingertips along the scales.

Where does it end, if anywhere at all?