What is Real
What
is
Real
KAREN RIVERS
ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS
Text copyright © 2011 Karen Rivers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Rivers, Karen, 1970-
What is real [electronic resource] / Karen Rivers.
Electronic monograph in PDF format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-55469-357-3
I. Title.
PS8585.18778W43 2011AÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â JC813'.54Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â C2010-908047-5
First published in the United States, 2011
Library of Congress Control Number
: 2010942087
Summary
: When Dex Pratt returns to his small-town life to care for his wheelchair-bound father, he finds his world turned upside down and goes to extreme measures in order to cope.
Orca Book Publishers is dedicated to preserving the environment and has printed
this book on paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council
®
.
Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Cover design by Teresa Bubela
Typesetting by Jasmine Devonshire
Cover photo by Getty Images
Author photo by Meg VanderLee
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Printed and bound in Canada.
To you.
Contents
chapter 1
now.
This is my real life.
But I keep thinkingâ¦
If things were different. In any way. In every way.
If
Before
stretched into
Now
.
Thenâ¦
I would still be me.
But it doesn't.
Everything changes.
I am me, but I'm also not myself. I am a guy who is playing himself on
TV
.
(Except I am not on
TV
.)
But on the one hand, I'm still trying to get it right: My lines. My
motivation
.
On the other hand, I want to know what is going on here. I have lost something. There is a line that I have crossed, and I can't go back. I didn't cross it. The line crossed me. My mind was crossed.
I am not me.
But what is real?
Are you?
Am I?
Is anyone?
chapter 2
september 26, this year.
EXT.âCORNFIELDâEARLY EVENING, SUNNY
Andâ¦
SCENE:
Dex Pratt is on his back in the corn. Eyes half shut. He is
holding a spliff. There are shiny scars from old burns on his
fingertip because, as it turns out, he isn't very good at this.
(Or anything.)
The audience will recognize his character in the first
frame. He's that kid.
(Is there more? They won't know that he didn't used
to be.)
Close up on the burn scars, the flat shine of his fingertip.
The lit ember at the end of the joint. Dex's face. His redveined,
pink-high eyes. The stain of the smoke.
Pan the field. Pan the blue-fading-to-gray sky, messy
with clouds. Back to Dex on his back, sweating through his
shirt. His T-shirt is ripped: Che's face gapes open from ear to
chin. His shorts are not exactly clean. Below the frayed hem,
his left knee bulges purple-gray, yellow-green, a bruised
fruit, throbbing with pain.
Focus on the joint, burning, the ash as he raises it slowly
to his lips, the long slow pull of it. And then the lips, sealed
shut, holding it all in.
(Hold it all in, that's what he does, isn't it?)
Because.
Now there is the wind blowing through the corn, making
sounds like ghosts or someone so sad that his pain becomes
a low sound.
Add a layer of music. No words, just some flutes dismally
whistling spit through silver tubes. No, violins. The whine of
the strings.
Show how Dex is hearing the ghosts in the corn, and the
pot is high andâ¦no, wait, that's the corn. His eyes are open.
No, closed. The corn is high in the maze. The maize maze.
The corn maze that frames him, walls holding him in, walls
trapping him here.
In this town.
In this life, which is not his.
But it is.
Our Joe's maze is built out of lies and funds more lies.
There is no money in corn or there is. The money is in the
maze or maybe Our Joe just likes kids getting lost in there,
crying. That is close to a truth that Dex doesn't want to know.
Look away, look away. Show a bull's-eye. Show Dex, looking
away. Don't let your eyes settle on what you don't want to
know, because there is a point at which it is too much, and
sometimes a maze is just a way of getting high-school kids to
part with ten bucks to scare the shit out of themselves.
Butâ¦
Andâ¦
Then.
There is something about Our Joe that Tanis said.
There is something. Show Dex trying to think of what it
is, without looking at the obvious thing that he knows but
can't deal with.
Show how Dex can't deal.
What does that look like? Crying?
No.
It doesn't show.
Asshole.
Show a shadow in the corn. The shadow of a child,
running.
Show Dex in the corn, standing. No, sitting. No, lying
down.
Show Dex not helping.
But then, like a lot of Dex's thoughts, it slips away, and
what Tanis said is a bird. Show the bird flying through the
maze, toward the center. Away from Dex. Show the bird in
the center of the maze turning into a child with a crooked
face, crying.
Show Dex shaking his head. Blank. He was thinking
something. What was it? It was something about Our Joe.
Bile rises in Dex's throat. Show Dex spitting on the ground. In the bubbles of the spit, show the shape of the bird and the
thing he is forgetting, which is important, but what is it?
Show Dex inhaling and inhaling and inhaling and
never ever, ever exhaling and the ember burning orange-red.
Show how that is suffocating him, like his mom used to
when she slept with him, wrapped around him so tightly he
couldn't breathe. Show him struggling for air.
FLASHBACK TO:
INT.âCHILD'S ROOM
Show Young Dex, sleeping. Pan his room, all the stuff of a
regular boy who laughs so hard he pees, sometimes, and
even that is funny. Show plastic toys,
Star Wars
posters,
books, stuffed animals. Show his mom's lips in his hair. Show
her whispering. Show him smiling in his sleep.
Show happy. Can you show “happy”?
How?
CUT BACK TO PRESENT:
And then to the now, Dex's face a blank place where smiles
don't quite fit.
Thenâ¦
All of a sudden!
The scene is interrupted.
DEX
Huh?
It's light.
Really light.
Eyes open now.
DEX
What the fuck?
He either says that out loud or he doesn't. Inhales tight. Holds
it. Then the gallons of smoke escape from his lips like something
liquid.