What is Real (15 page)

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.

“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.

He didn't look at either of us while he spoke, but he said all the things that proper dads are supposed to say. I was nearly proud of him. Right up until the part where he called Tanis a slut and me a loser.

He might be right about me, but he should have left Tanis out of it.

She holds the steering wheel so tightly, her knuckles are white. She is mad at
me
.

“You don't fucking understand anything, Dex,” she says. The windows are steamed up. I want to roll the window down but that might be rude, so I don't.

“I do understand,” I say. “I'm sorry. It was my fault and my dad is a total wang. What do you want me to say?”

“I don't know,” she says. When she's mad, the bad side of her face gets even more scrunched up than normal. She looks bad. Her hair is flat on one side where she fell asleep on my chest. I should probably find that sexier than I do.

“I'm sorry,” I say again. “You aren't a slut.”

“That's not why I'm mad!” she says. “God, you're so freaking stupid. Don't you get it? I'm wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Everyone's going to know.” Then she says, “You're making me someone I'm not, you fucking idiot.”

“My knee hurts,” I say. The whole time she's yelling at me, my knee has been pulsing with this pain that feels like something gnawing at my flesh from the inside. The pain has taken over my whole body. It's radiating everywhere like some kind of internal octopus of pain, arms stretched to cover all of my flesh. “I'm not making you anything. You are who you are.”

“Fuck you,” she mutters.

I think I probably should go to the hospital. I probably need some kind of surgery.

But I can't have surgery.

Who would take care of Dad?
Gary
?

Forget it.

“You're not even listening!” she yells. Then she bursts into tears. I don't know how to deal with tears.

“I'm sorry,” I say again.

Her lips are moving. Numbers, numbers. She whispers 25:15 and 16:209. Her knuckles are so white, it hurts to look at them.

We pull into the parking lot and I see Olivia getting out of a car. This time I get a good look at the driver. An older man, probably her dad. I'm relieved.

Tanis looks at me looking at Olivia. “No fucking way,” she says.

“What?” I say. Then I go, “Do you see her?”

“I can't believe you, Dex Pratt,” she says. “You are too much.”

I don't know if that means that she sees Olivia or not. “Is she real?” I say, before I can stop myself. Tanis gets out of the car, leaving the keys in. We aren't even in a parking stall. She storms off. When she's mad, she walks like she's on a catwalk. I half expect her to turn and spin.

I think about proportions. I try to think about proportions. I think about why proportions matter so much to Tanis.

I think about how no one knows about Tanis's proportions but me.

I think about the proportion of time passing to time needed.

Needed to do what? There is nothing I need to do. I put a pencil through the stretcher in my ear. When I first ran into Tanis, she leaned across the counter of Safeway and said, “Whenever I see someone with one of those things in their ears, I want to put a pencil in it.”

I think about leaving a pencil in it all day to make her laugh.

I have to park this car now. People are honking and going around me and staring. They think I'm crazy because of the way I'm acting. Because of the way I'm overacting. They can tell that I am not being me.

Or, more likely, they don't care and I'm in the way.

I struggle to lift myself over the stick shift and slide into the driver's seat. The pencil pokes my cheek awkwardly. My earlobe is twisting. I take the pencil out.

I drive the car into the last parking spot and now I am late. I have to limp all the way up the stairs and that just seems like too much. So instead, I just sit in the car.

I sit and I sit. I sit in the car for the entire day of school until my bladder feels like it's gonna burst, and then I drive home. I don't know how many people see me there, sitting in the car. But no one comes over. Not one person comes to see if I'm okay.

chapter 17
september 23, this year.

I am in the corn again. I saw a horror movie about corn once. I saw a documentary about corn once.

Corn is the cheapest food in the world.

Cornfields house psychopathic kids wielding weapons.

Corn is almost all genetically modified.

Even this corn is probably not what it appears to be: strong, green, healthy.

It's the last corn of the season. It's so sweet now, it's like biting into candy. Even raw.

The rats are on a sugar high.

In Vancouver, we had this tree in the yard with dark red leaves, and if you lay under it and looked straight through it at the sun, you could see a silver outline around each and every leaf. But pull the leaves off and bring them in to inspect, and they were just red leaves, dark and flat.

It was a trick. The light can do that.

I feel like I could write, but I haven't written a single word since I left Vancouver. I used to write lyrics. For our band. Mine. And Feral's.

I wrote good lyrics.

When Mom married Feral's dad, we became brothers. We used to talk so much. I feel like I've forgotten how to talk. I never talk about anything anymore. I try to listen to other people talking, and it seems like they don't know how either.

Ninety percent of conversations are about nothing.

I could write good lyrics about that. Or about just
this
. The corn and the cobweb that's hanging above me and the slanting sunlight and those aluminum-rimmed words. But as soon as I think of what, exactly, I'd write, as soon as I try to squish all these microscopic yellow/blue/brown/ green metallic thoughts into some kind of black and white sentence, it's gone, like a dream dripping out of my head even as I'm still watching the end of it play out.

Anyway, fuck that.

I sit up.

I lie down.

My ab muscles pull taut and loose. I lift my shirt and look at them. I have good abs. Maybe I could be a model.

No matter how I look at the future, it all seems unlikely and ridiculous. Is there a future?

I was kidding about the modeling. There's the laugh again. The brown birds of it on my chest.