What is Real

by Karen Rivers

  I am sweating. It’s dripping off my nose like I’ve been running. I have been running. I am tired of running. I want to live in a split-level in the suburbs. I want my dad to grow tomatoes. I want Our Joe to pay for something, even if I don’t want to know what it is. I want everyone to pay, I want Gary to pay, I want my dad to pay and everyone, and maybe this was my idea.

  I am going to be sick.

  Was it my idea?

  I don’t have ideas.

  I have movies that play out in my head. It’s a movie. It’s just a movie and none of this matters or is real or will matter in a hundred years or…

  It’s a low-budget movie. A romance, an adventure, something old-fashioned where, at the end, the hero and his girl get out of town. And the other stuff is slow motion and implied. And then they are in New York, the jumble of it, implying happily ever after, implying everything.

  “Happily ever after,” I say out loud to myself, to no one, and out of my mouth the smoke keeps coming and coming and coming.

  I am close to knowing something I don’t want to know. And there is smoke in my eyes, the smoke alarm going off, my eyes burning, the smell of pot everywhere. I can’t breathe in this room, and I go to open the screen door and…

  “Where are you going?” Dad says. “You’re pretty late for school, aren’t you? Don’t get abducted on your way.”

  “Hilarious,” I say. “Funny, Dad. You need anything before I go?”

  “Nah,” he says, then adds, “Gary’s here.”

  I head out the door. I’m not going to school. School seems like something I’ve never done. Why do I need school? I turn north and just walk. I scratch my legs raw on the blackberries, just plunging through them like I don’t care, because I don’t. I like it. The scratching of my skin, the way my skin so easily opens and bleeds, crisscrossed with bloody x’s. The foothills are low and rocky. I walk with no plan. I walk. I just keep going. I start to climb.

  I walk and climb until I get to the wall of the valley. Our valley. It’s sheer and slippery, but I avoid the road, the easy path. I need to do something hard. Something impossible. I need to hurt. I need to fucking crawl in gravel and feel it.

  I need to feel it.

  I start to climb for real. The rock is as cold as the stone bench outside our house and as smooth as ice. It stops me from having to think about much else. All there is is me and the rock, and my hands, bleeding and raw, just barely holding me up, and the sound of my heavy breathing and grunting from the effort and the wind, just enough you can hear it, and birds. There are always birds.

  About halfway up there’s a ledge, and I haul myself up on it, gasping.

  I sit there for a long time. I have a bottle of water in my pocket and I drink it. It tastes like stale plastic. I can’t get enough of it all the same. I flip open my phone and scroll through my contacts. I could call Feral. I could call Mom. I could call anyone. Look at all these people who I never call. Phil Stars? Give me a fucking break. Like I’ll ever call him to just shoot the shit. As if.

  I call Tanis. It takes her ages to pick up.

  “Dex,” she says.

  “Tanis,” I say. “I don’t know. I just think New York might never have worked anyway.”

  “What?” she asks. “What are you talking about, Dex?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just…I don’t feel well.”

  “Are you okay?” she asks. “Why aren’t you here? Mrs. D is pissed.”

  “Tell her I’m researching my paper,” I say. I hear paper rustling.

  “I’ve got to go, Dex,” she says. “I’ll call you later, okay? Don’t freak out, Dex. We ’re so close.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Tanis?”

  She doesn’t answer. I don’t know if she’s still there or not. “Tan?” I say. “I love you.”

  I hang up.

  Tanis is real, I remind myself.

  I want to call her back. I want to say, “Not my dad.” Or “No.” Or something so she knows I’ve changed my mind. I can’t.

  But it’s probably too late.

  Glass came to town last March. I wasn’t expecting her. Ever. Having Glass in this town was nothing but totally impossible. She roared into town in her Mercedes, and everyone stared. It was like the whole place shrank as she approached it.

  I was in Wing’s, or the shithole that everyone calls Wing’s even though it’s been called the Purple Garden for years. Tanis and I were holding hands, but when Glass screeched to a stop outside, I dropped Tanis’s hands like they were something disgusting, like a cockroach in the noodles, and I couldn’t get far enough away from them. I watched through the window as Glass adjusted her hair and lip gloss and gave a little bounce as she got out of the car. Somehow she saw me through the window and came tearing in.

  “DEX, you fucking HOT STUD!” she screamed.

  Tanis got up and left. Just like that.

  Glass hadn’t called me in months by then. I moved in winter. It was spring. There was some kind of goddamn blossom tree opening up in the parking lot, and the flowers made the whole place look nicer than it ever really was. I’d forgotten the exact shade of her purple hair, the way she waved her hand in front of her all the time like she was wiping away cobwebs when she talked. The way her tongue crept out of her mouth when she paused for the next word and tapped her top lip. That used to make me crazy.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. I couldn’t decide if I was happy or sad or just pissed off. And I wanted to know where Tanis was. I was always looking after girls who were walking away, and there was always another one standing in front of me.

  Then I saw, in Glass’s car, someone else.

  Feral.

  Frank.

  I walked out of the restaurant and he was just sitting there. Sunglasses on the back of his head like a douche bag. It was cloudy but bright. He looked smaller. He probably was. More cheekbones, less cheek. He smiled but it didn’t make it up as far as his eyes or really anywhere past his mouth.

  He looked like shit.

  He looked like an addict.

  He looked high.

  I was so pissed with him. For wrecking it. For taking the whole glam-boy prep-school drug-dabbler rock-band BULLSHIT and turning it from something that was a fucking lark into a serious death wish and a head that was one step away from skeletal.

  “Douche bag,” I said. It was the backward glasses and the way they pissed me off.

  I could see even by the way he moved his arms, the way he took the glasses carefully off the back of his head, put them on his face, then tipped them down so he could look at me over the top, eyes as dilated as marbles. “Bro,” he said.

  I didn’t do any of what I wanted to do:

  Punch him.

  Cry.

  Scream.

  I just walked away.

  I wanted heroin.

  I wanted Feral to die.

  I wanted to die.

  I wanted I wanted I wanted.

  The bubbling in the needle. The exhalation of relief when you find the surface is closer than you think.

  I cried.

  I was walking. Side of the highway. Not running. Not fast. Just walking. Trying, but also not trying, to get away. Glass slowed the car down beside me. I hated her. I hated her car.

  “Hey,” said Feral. “Brought you this.”

  He dumped it on the side of the road. It probably broke. I didn’t check. Just picked it up and kept walking. My feet slapping the pavement, one step two three four five. I was counting and I kept counting, holding my camera in my arms like a baby and I walked all the way home the long way, along real roads, and beside me was corn. Miles of corn.

  That much corn can make you feel crazy. Rustling. Like it’s telling you things that aren’t possible but they are. Whispering stories that you start to believe.

  Feral died in August, right before school went back. Right before we made the Plan. LIVE. Fucking LIVE.

  Which is why, maybe, I wasn’t paying enough attention to anyth
ing except trying to smoke enough that the water would close over me and fill up my ears so that I didn’t have to hear Dad saying, “Dex. Dex. You can go if you want to, Dex. Not that I ever saw the point in funerals in the first place.”

  Water does a good job of filling in just enough space that the rest of the sounds are blocked out. The ringing phones. The way Dad kept saying, “Dex.” The way Tanis said, “Talk to me, Dex.” The way T-dot, said, “Man, Dex.” The way everyone was saying “Dex Dex Dex Dex Dex” until I didn’t want to hear my own name at all. And I didn’t want to hear Feral’s either. So I swam deeper.

  Let’s just say that. I went as deep as I could go.

  I left that part out on purpose before because it didn’t matter because he was dead. But it did matter. It always matters when someone dies even if you say, “He was already dead to me anyway and he was already dead.” But the thing was, he wasn’t dead. And then he was. So when he actually died for real, I just thought that I could say, “Fuck the whole world.” And somehow it was Dad’s fault.

  But it wasn’t.

  It was Feral’s. And he was dead, forever dead. The cold rotting corpse in the ground kind of dead…with maggots. And I didn’t want that, so I went on thinking about him at St. Joe’s in one of those white shirts. And then I smoked some more and made The Plan, and smoked again and pretended that it hadn’t happened and nothing was real.

  Pretending is like a gentle lie. Pretending is blurring the lens so you don’t have to see what you aren’t ready to see.

  I am refilming the ending. I don’t know what it will be, but it won’t be that. It won’t have anything to do with how I didn’t go to my own brother’s funeral because I am more of a douche bag than he will ever be, that fucking douche bag. I hate him not even close to how much I hate myself.

  I drag myself back to the moment. Be in the moment. That’s some kind of Buddhist shit that Tanis talks about and I pretend to understand and take it in. And I don’t really understand it or take it in. It sounds a lot like the stuff that my mom used to talk about, finding her “center” and being one with herself, which excused her for the fact that she lied and cheated and then she left.

  And I don’t feel at one with myself or anyone else. And I can’t sit and listen to nothing. And the birds are making me think of something I remember that might be a nightmare or real or somewhere in between.

  I sit on the flat unrelenting rock and I think and I don’t get high. I want to. I have five jays rolled and ready in my pocket. I hold them in my hand and look at them, and who the fuck cares if I smoke them or not? I want to make like someone does, but no one does, so that’s bullshit too. I unroll one and crumble the shit between my fingers and then just let it fall to the ground. The smell of it makes me think of something hopeless, like a dried-up caterpillar that died in its cocoon and never became a moth or a butterfly or whatever it thought was going to happen when it crawled in there. Dried caterpillars. That’s what it smells like. Hopelessness and the corpse of something that was meant to be something else.

  My mouth is so dry. My insides are dry. My throat. I imagine that if you cut me open, I’d be crumbly inside just exactly like a dried plant, and maybe I’m getting mixed up with some kind of kids’ story, but maybe I’m not real anymore because somewhere along the way someone forgot to love me.

  That’s the kind of crap that I think about when I have to think and I’m not high. I’d rather be high and thinking about how high-fructose corn syrup is going to wipe out America, than not high and thinking about how I’m not even real.

  That’s fucked up.

  I’m fucked up.

  Even though it tastes like shit, all that water makes me feel clean. I drink and drink and drink. I eat an apple and a granola bar and I get a fake feeling of wholesomeness, like an actor on TV who advertises kayak adventures or bungee jumps, but who is really a drug-addled wreck. Someone playing a fresh-milk kind of guy.

  I sit and sit. Until I can’t even feel my ass, that’s how long I sit for. The light changes, like the day itself is letting out a long, slow sigh. The corn looks like a lawn from here. Tiny and inconsequential. The Celtic knot is unrecognizable.

  I concentrate on breathing, which freaks me out slightly and makes me feel like I’ve forgotten how to do even that properly.

  My dad is probably worried, but I can’t bring myself to move. School must be over by now. It’s almost twilight.

  Maybe I fall asleep.

  I definitely fall asleep.

  I don’t dream.

  There is no movie.

  Maybe there are no movies left in me; maybe just like that, they’ve gone.

  And the aliens came down and touched us with their white hands and everything was cured forevermore.

  Yeah, right.

  I put the camera under the stairs where we were storing all the furniture from the old house that didn’t fit in any of the real rooms. The space under the house was huge. Cavernous. Dark.

  Which is where that camera belonged.

  In the dark.

  I went into the dark to put the camera in there, and that’s when I found the boxes. Of photographs. The boxes and boxes of photographs. That’s the part I don’t want to remember. That’s it and now I’m remembering it. I’ll tell you why I don’t want to: it’s because, when you see pictures of some people as a kid, you don’t recognize them. Because they don’t have a genetic defect that gave them a crooked grin. When they were a baby, when they were five or seven or eight or…

  All those pictures. Why would he even keep them?

  Evidence.

  You never want to see pictures like that of anyone, not any kid. There is an evil that does that to kids. An evil that makes petty evils like drugs and pot and your parents’ fights seem like a joke. The worst thing.

  Which is why Tanis was always hiding in her numbers and how she could never make anything add up to why anyone would do that to her.

  Anyone.

  “Some things you see, you can never unsee.” That’s from a Nicholas Cage movie called 8MM. And it’s true. I can’t unsee. I can’t not make Our Joe pay.

  But if.

  I could have hidden the camera anywhere. I could never have opened those boxes. I could just have turned him in, but then it turned into this sideshow. Somehow. It was symbolic, she said.

  I would have done anything for her because I knew and I had to save her, even though I had thought that it was her job to save me. Do you see?

  I see.

  I don’t want to see.

  It was so grandiose. A crop circle. The T-shirts. It got more and more layered and I got lost. But when and where and where and when did the aliens come into it?

  Because we can’t have done that.

  So it wasn’t real.

  It was.

  It’s the one piece that doesn’t fit. Two pieces: Olivia.

  Now that I remember, I don’t want to remember. Can I unremember?

  I could jump. From here. This cliff. I could just quit this fucking plan. I don’t want my dad to pay for a big, romantic, movie-worthy gesture, because I just realized that the movie doesn’t quite make sense. And if it was a script, we ’d need to fix the ending because why didn’t I just call the cops right then and tell?

  Because.

  Because I wanted my dad to pay too.

  Because I am tiny. So tiny he can barely even see me anymore, not even through his bifocals.

  The field looks quiet tonight. From here, the crop circle is lit by the glow of floodlights.

  I think that none of this matters. Nothing matters.

  I flip open my phone. I want to call Olivia, but I don’t know her number. I want to call her, but what would I say? “Hi, it’s me”?

  You can’t call someone who doesn’t exist.

  There are the stars, same as the other night. There’s the ground holding me up. There’s me, lying down. I can feel myself starting to relax. I have to be careful though, because if I get too high, I won’t b
e able to climb back down. I won’t want to bother. I don’t remember the moment when I swept the pot back up and rolled it into a joint with all the rest of what I had, five joints in one, it looks like a goddamn cigar. And there it is, in my hand.

  What about the milk? I think.

  Then I pull all that smoke in and hold it tight, lungs clenched white-knuckled tight, starbursts falling in front of my eyes, my highs, my…

  I have music in my head. Songs we played or never got around to playing or practiced or said we were going to practice. It’s all mixed up, jumbled up, messed up, fucked up.

  Like me.

  chapter 30

  FLASHBACK TO:

  INT.—STORAGE UNIT WHERE BAND EQUIPMENT IS SET UP

  Show the band, practicing. Feral. Me. A guy named Jon. His twin sister Reid. Show the instruments. Zoom in close on our hands.

  Show Dex Pratt playing the bass guitar. He’s pretty good. Show his fingers. Close up on the fingers. Closer and closer until what you actually see is the whorls of his fingerprints and turn that into a Celtic knot into a crop circle and pan out. And now you’re really losing it, Dex Pratt.

  Cut that entire scene and put the fucking camera in the trash at an airport.

  Start again.

  Show the band, warming up. Discordant chords. Show that it’s dark outside. Show kids outside, waiting to listen. Show the band drinking. Show the mark on Dex Pratt’s arm. Show him stabbing the needle in. Show him giving the needle to Feral. Show Feral shaking his head.

  Show Feral running.

  Show the band playing without him.

  Show Feral coming back, picking up the guitar. Show him putting down the guitar. Show him punching the living shit out of Dex. Show Dex’s half-smile. Show him slumping down to the floor. Show that.

  Show it again.

  Put it in a loop and show it over and over again.

  Zoom in on that tattoo inside his elbow and zoom out and make that the Celtic knot and the crop circle… And…