What is Real

by Karen Rivers

  I am playing basketball, and practice is over but I don’t want to stop playing. I gulp down bottle after bottle of Gatorade and picture myself sweating blue, like in the commercials. I drink more and more.

  Coach claps his hands. “Nuff,” he says. “Change room, showers, move it.”

  The team moves. Lots of clapping each other on the back. Lots of sweat. Lots of dripping.

  Then no one is left but me and T-dot.

  “One time?” I say.

  “One time,” he says. He crouches low. I grab the ball.

  Coach is in his office. He looks up every once in a while and points to the change room. He’s choosing the captain. It’s not going to be me. I’m happy.

  The ball keeps flying through the hoop, leaving my hands like it’s charmed, the hollow sound of it bouncing onto the wood floors, again and again, the bang of it against the backboard, our harsh breathing. The sweat is spattering everywhere. And there is the stink of it and the sound of our sneakers on the floor of the gym, which makes me feel like I’m ten or eight or twelve or some other age than seventeen, some age from before. The squeak is what I think of first when I think of being a kid in school. When I think of first grade.

  Sneaker squeak at assemblies, games, gym class. The dusty smell of the gym. The layers of sweat that line the floor.

  The skin of the basketball is more familiar to me than anything, anyone, ever. I want to absorb it. Somehow. I want to hold the ball so tight that I become it and it becomes me. The sweat is dripping from my nose like a fucking nosebleed, salty and unstoppable. And I am holding the ball so tight it might explode in my hands, shards of rubber everywhere. And there is something else, while I’m there in the gym with T-dot, my best friend. There is the knowledge that I’m better, I’m better, I’m better than him. It is in my blood and in my sweat and everywhere, like something Alice drank when she fell down the well. I am not better than Phil Stars, but I am better than T-dot. And so what and so what and so what? Why do I even care?

  I loosen my grip on the ball and spin it and bounce it, and bam, it’s back in my hands, like it belongs there, like it’s alive and it’s choosing.

  Choosing me.

  I throw the ball hard to T and it whoomps into his chest. He winces in pain and says, “Settle down.”

  I go, “One more set.”

  He goes, “I don’t know, man. I gotta get home.”

  “One more,” I say. “Or are you scared I’ll beat you again?”

  He shrugs.

  T-dot’s got a scholarship to a university Down Under in Melbourne, Australia. He’s a fucking good swimmer. The kind of good that gets money and medals. The kind of good that I am not. Not at basketball. Not at anything.

  “Over here, mate.” “Bad call, mate.” “Hit the rim, mate.” “Mate, mate, mate,” I say, like it’s funny. And he is grinning. When he does that, I can remember us being nine and twelve and fourteen and how we laughed. And it makes me madder. Mate, mate, mate. Throw a shrimp on the barbie, mate. His jaw is popping and he keeps saying, “Hey.” Like as in, “Hey, let up.” Or, “Hey, SHUT UP.”

  I remember how me and T-dot built this skateboard ramp once. I don’t know why I’m suddenly thinking of it, but I am. I almost go, “Hey, remember the ramp?” but then he scores and swaggers around the court, high-fiving the air, and then I’m pissed again. The ramp was a long time ago.

  Before Vancouver.

  Before Mom met her man.

  Before Feral discovered smack.

  Before Dad jumped.

  Before I went from someone who thought that “fun” happened after a Slurpee and half-pipe to someone who thought he could control the party to someone who only knew how to fake it.

  The ramp went halfway up a tree and then curved down and around, and it was amazing. Even now, I don’t know how we built that. It was good. Back then, all we could talk about was skating and how great it would be when we grew up and we ’d never stop. Did you ever notice how you rarely see an adult on a board? And that wasn’t going to be us.

  We thought that was hilarious.

  Everything was awesome and dude and nothing mattered, not really, and we ’d fight about which band was better or which cola. And we’d laugh most of the time, almost all the time, like we were young, which we were. All that fucking laughing. Like maybe we laughed so much, we used up our quota. Or I did.

  Not T-dot. He’s still laughing.

  But now I am a thousand years old and he’s still young. That’s the thing that isn’t fair.

  “Awesome, dude,” I say. But it doesn’t sound the way it used to sound when I said it. It sounds different.

  He shoots me a look. “Yeah,” he says. “Look, I gotta go.”

  “One more,” I say.

  That’s what I say.

  I grab the ball and I hold it up so he can’t reach.

  “Jump, kangaroo, jump,” I say. It comes out mean. His eyes are pissed but he is laughing because that’s T-dot, and he reaches up for the ball and I jump to hook the shot over his head, a show-off shot, you know, and I fall.

  As I hit the ground, there is a pop from the inside of my knee that right away makes me think of grapes. A grape on the floor that you carelessly step on and it pops. And then splayed flat there on the floor, it no longer looks anything like a grape.

  My knee immediately no longer looks like a knee. I don’t know how long I sit there for. A few seconds or forever.

  “Holy shit,” says T-dot. “Oh man. Dex.” He gets right down on his knees and holds my knee in his hands.

  “Fuck off,” I say. “Don’t touch me, you perv.”

  Like he is touching me.

  He pulls his hands back like I’ve burned him, which I have. I can see the look on his face. The gym floor is slippery underneath me. Wet with our sweat. I smell dust. The painted lines are worn and blurry. Or maybe my eyes are blurry.

  I am not goddamn crying.

  T-dot disappears and comes back with ice and the coach. Coach is a small wiry guy. He jumps around nervously and says “ACL” six or seven times. I close my eyes and there are white dots there, bright white lights of pain and I can’t get my breath all the way in or out.

  “I just want to go home,” I say.

  “You gotta go to the hospital, kid,” he says. “We gotta get you an mri.”

  “It will still be messed up tomorrow,” I say. “I’ll do it tomorrow, okay?”

  T-dot goes, “I’ll take him home.”

  “You can’t go home!” says Coach. “You gotta get it looked at.”

  He has a tuft of black hair sticking out of his nose. His hands are nervous. They are scratching his bald head like talons. White flakes drift down. What does it matter? I think. It’s already over. No one’s knee does this and then gets better. He can write me off. But he’s got the new guy, the tall guy. He ’ll be fine. I want to say this, but instead I just go, “I’m fucking going home, okay?”

  T-dot is quiet. He stands under my arm like a crutch, and we hobble to the parking lot. He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything.

  The van stinks of chlorine.

  By the time I get home, the nausea is all up in me. Car sickness. From the smell, I think. I stand in the driveway and wait for him to leave, and I don’t say thank you or goodbye or anything, and he just lifts his hand in farewell. When he’s gone, out of sight, I puke in the shrubbery. I sit down on the ramp that Dad uses to go in and out of the house. I stare into the corn and I think: I am a prick and I deserve this.

  I do.

  Don’t for a second think that I don’t.

  chapter 12

  september 16, this year.

  I am self-medicating.

  It’s natural.

  I am lying down in the cornfield.

  My hair is full of dirt. When I sit up, it’s going to fall down all over me like clumps of black hail, like my own private storm. I can feel the soil, cool on the back of my neck like a million tiny zombie fingers touching me.

>   On my way to lunch today, Olivia stopped me in the hall. She leaned forward and whispered in my ear. I didn’t hear what she said, and you can’t ask someone to repeat a whisper. It’s too intimate. And I didn’t want her to touch me because any touch threw me enough off balance that my knee screamed in agony in a way that I could only pretend to ignore.

  The ground is damp and the corn is high and so am I. The “I” in that sentence stretches like a bungee cord. Iiiiiiiiiiiiiii.

  Hiiiiiiiiiigh.

  I laugh. Laughing when you are alone is…

  My laugh is like small brown birds hopping on my face and chest. Pecking.

  I stop laughing and the silence is water.

  I am smoking four or five times a day now. I must stink. I don’t care that I stink.

  I cannot feel my knee.

  It’s seeeerious. My brain stretching out like taffy. I’ve never seen taffy. What the fuck is taffy?

  My brain stretches for miles. The last sweet corn of the season stretches for miles, waiting. It goes on forever, into the horizon. It is the horizon.

  The corn is making waves with the wind. The corn is the sea. If the corn were the sea, I’d already be drowned, lungs full, heart slowing. And the sun would be wavering above something green and glassy and impenetrable. Just like that.

  Over and out.

  It’s corn, not water. I’m not dead. I’m breathing; look at me. In and out. Out and in. Too fast, too slow, too raspy, too dry. I need a drink so bad. Water. I’d die for water, but I don’t move. Because I can’t.

  I hold my breath as long as I can, and my eyes hurt and my ears. And then I let it out and tears are streaming down my cheeks and getting lost in my hair, in the dirt, in the seaweed.

  There’s no seaweed.

  I never swam in the sea even when I lived in Vancouver and the sea was everywhere. The sea is too cold, too dirty, too full of teeth.

  T-dot can swim underwater for so long that you think he’s drowned, but you know he hasn’t because you can see him moving, a big dark blur like a shark lurking below you.

  I haven’t gone swimming with T-dot for years. Haven’t seen him swim. I don’t even know him anymore. T-dot is just another prop in my act. He is my “friend.” Tanis is my “girlfriend.”

  I am acing this project. The project of faking “me.”

  Maybe I could get a special-project grade at school. Some kids who live on farms get random A’s for “special projects” like cross-breeding cows or inventing an egg.

  I pull deeply on the joint, and my lungs are blanketed by the gravy-thick unbreathability of it. It’s like smoking an animal, something once alive and now dead.

  The corn moves like girls, swaying low. Humming.

  I am humming.

  The ground is humming. Somewhere under me there are a million bugs so tiny you need a microscope to see them. I wish I had one, but I’m also glad I don’t. If you have a microscope, you’re probably obligated to keep finding tiny things and inspecting them. Problem is, I’d never know what I was looking for.

  I have all these thoughts. They are shiny on the edges, like a migraine or a potato wrapped in foil. I am thinking in words.

  I am thinking this:

  I. Am. So. Baked. Over and over again, like a mantra. If my mom could see me now, would she care?

  Check one:

  A) No.

  B) Not really.

  C) I doubt it.

  “I am so baked,” I say out loud, and my voice is crumbly and dry like balled-up paper, so I stop talking, because that’s just psycho to lie in a cornfield talking to yourself. Next stop, Crazy. Straitjackets provided, free of charge.

  I lie in the cornfield and there is no mental movie. Not this time. The shit is strong enough that the movie doesn’t even start, and I am free.

  Just me and the pot and the stretched-out air.

  chapter 13

  september 20, this year.

  There are things I’m leaving out.

  Important things.

  I don’t know why I’m leaving them out. Lately, I’ve been confused. It’s hard to know where to edit your own life. Which parts to leave. Which parts to erase. Movies top out at two hours before the audience starts tuning out. True fact.

  I will tell you some things I’ve cut:

  Feral is not dead.

  Tanis and I fucked on the night we met. Re-met. In the car. Afterward, I felt like I’d been turned inside out. It wasn’t Tanis’s fault. She said, “I don’t do that.” She cried. And she probably doesn’t. As a rule anyway.

  I changed her. I told her it was okay, that I didn’t think less of her, but secretly I was happy that she was a slut, because then I could feel that she wasn’t quite good enough for me.

  Mom calls me every night and I refuse to take the call. Dad talks to her. For about an hour after he’s done on the phone, he’s smiling.

  The smile kills me.

  I talk to Chelsea on Sunday nights at ten, which is past her bedtime. Chelsea is my sister. I’m leaving her out on purpose.

  Those are some of the things I left out.

  I think that there are more.

  chapter 14

  september 21, this year.

  Dad is in bed. His room smells like mold and mothballs and bo and piss and worse. I need to do his laundry. His sheets are my job, not Gary’s. Gary has all my old jobs. He showers Dad and changes him. He does the pot. He does everything. Dad’s sheets are crusty. I try not to think about it.

  I think he’s waiting for me to notice.

  I half limp, half slide into the house. I want to tell him about this, whatever it is, that I have smoked and how it’s messed me up, but my tongue is both too big and too small to form words. My knee looks like a zombie’s brain.

  I stand in the doorway of Dad’s room and watch him pretending to sleep. I can always tell when other people are faking. Underneath the other stinks, his room smells like a hospital room. I don’t know why. There isn’t any reason. I never clean it, so you can’t blame Pine-Sol. Glob is lying next to Dad. She will lie next to him forever.

  Sometimes when Dad thinks I’m not home, I hear him talking to Glob in the way that I wish he ’d talk to me. He talks about things that are interesting. Shit he heard on the news. A book he read. Just things. The weather. The way his mom used to fry chicken.

  Dad never talks to me about just things.

  He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Son,” he says, “go to bed.”

  “My knee’s worse,” I say, which isn’t true, but it isn’t a lie either. I don’t know what I want from him.

  Dad sighs, like he’s asleep, which I know he isn’t.

  “We ’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he says. He holds so still that I almost think he’s holding his breath. I flick off his light switch and leave him to it. Limp up the stairs. The pain in my knee is unbelievable, like by just saying that it’s worse, it got a lot worse.

  Every step, it feels like something is tearing.

  I flop down on my bed and call Tanis.

  She answers, out of breath. She’s on her bike, riding home from work.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “Hang on. I’ll just stop, so we can talk.”

  “Come over,” I say.

  “I can’t,” she says. “I’m doing a project.”

  Tanis does projects. The one she is working on is the town, done entirely to scale. She is making a map of her life. All over town, there she is, in miniature, at different ages. The farms are carefully demarcated. The whole thing takes up their entire rec-room floor. Her dad is cool about it. In the parking lot of Safeway, she’s put my dad’s car. Dad would like this shit. He would understand the need to make things tiny. It’s only me that’s left out of the joke.

  Is it a joke?

  I don’t know.

  She says she got the idea from him. It fits her perfectly though because it involves her math and his art. I feel like they are ganging up on me, and it makes no sense because they barely talk.
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br />   “Please come over, Tanis,” I say. “I need you.”

  She hesitates. I can picture her biting her lip, and I get a hard-on just imagining her face. I know she’ll come.

  “Okay,” she says. “Just for a while.”

  “Long enough,” I say. I grin. I throw the phone into the laundry basket with a bunch of fetid laundry. I am always throwing my phone and it is always somehow coming back to me. I lie back and wait for Tanis to come and take care of me.

  Don’t I deserve at least that?

  My knee hurts so fucking much.

  I’ve never had anything hurt this bad. Not ever.

  chapter 15

  september 21, this year.

  Here is another one of the things that I left out:

  When I came home from school on the first day, Gary was punching my dad in the head. I saw it through the screen. My dad’s head snapped backward and then lolled forward like a bobblehead in a car crash.

  Gary looked up and saw me.

  My dad did not.

  I waited on the front steps for twenty-five minutes. I smoked a joint and listened to four songs on my iPod. Then I swung open the door and went in.

  “What happened to your head?” I shouted at my dad. I wasn’t mad at him until I saw him, just sitting there like nothing had happened.

  chapter 16

  september 22, this year.

  Tanis drives me to school in my dad’s car. I’ve been driving, but every time I have to punch the clutch, I scream in pain. This is better.

  Tanis stayed the night and my dad is furious. He has lines, he says. And I’ve crossed them.

  I make a mental list of my dad’s “lines”:

  Doing drugs? Okay.

  Having sex? Not okay.

  I am grown-up enough to be the man of the family and I am also not. I am the kid. Have I forgotten that I’m the kid?

  Yes, Dad. I have.

  When we got up this morning, sweaty and sleepy, the alarm scaring the crap out of me, Dad was waiting for us in the kitchen. In his chair, he looked regal, like a man on a throne. If you overlooked the fact that he was in his pajamas and smelled like he hadn’t showered in days, that is. He had three days of stubble. His beard was gray now. It made him look old.