What is Real (21 page)

I slump down into the chair.

I close my eyes. My lungs are wings that are trying to lift me up. I breathe in and in and they flap and spread.

“Fly,” I say.

When I open my eyes, Tanis is standing in front of me, arms crossed, tapping her toe. She's wearing pink sneakers covered with skulls, and jeans so tight it looks like she's just dipped her legs in blue paint.

“Well?” she says. “This is great. I mean, it's working.” She leans into me and then onto me, and she's too heavy. I can't breathe. “It's scary but it isn't. Right?”

I push her off. “Why are you so happy?” I say. “I thought your back was messed up.”

“It is,” she says. “But it feels better. Anyway, I'm happy. Because it's perfect,” she says. “Pro. Por. Tion.” She enunciates. “Perfect. It's so beautiful.” She smiles. There are freckles of light on her pupils. She sparks. I blink. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a photo that she's rolled up into a tube. She's almost reverential as she unrolls it. “Perfect,” she says. “No one would ever believe that humans did that.”

“Maybe they didn't,” I say.

She laughs. Cocks her head to the side. “Dex,” she says. She stops laughing. “Dex,” she says, “don't you…?”

“What?” I say.

She keeps talking. She has the accent of a small town. Sloping vowels. An “eh” she can't drop. But either I can't hear her or she's speaking in code. A blur hovers in the air between us. There is a starburst of white light behind her head, like the corn itself is sparking, reflecting what she is saying.

“I…,” I start to say. “I have a goddamn migraine or something.”

She puts her lips against mine. “Be okay,” she says. “Dex…”

“Forget it,” I say. I push her away.

I get up and sprint down the ramp so fast I know she can't keep up. Then I am running for real. I run into the sea of flashbulbs. It's like diving underwater, dazzling and suffocating, both. I run through them. I am swimming. I am holding my breath so I don't drown.

My whole life, I've always been so fucking afraid of drowning.

chapter 24
september 28, this year.

There's a
TV
show on in the middle of the morning, on one of those public channels with no ads. It's a kids' show about art. There's a British host who is a bit too sure of himself. He has a British way of lilting that grates. I lie on my bed, which is still soaking wet from the sweat of my bad dreams, and watch him. He makes art from a piece of plastic wrap. He paints things. The product at the end looks impossible. He paints shadows with black and some kind of tea.

At the end of the episode, he grabs a bag of vegetables and sports equipment. He starts laying them down on the ground in an empty parking lot. He tosses cabbages here, a tennis net there, a handful of badminton birdies and three ears of corn.

The camera pans further and further out. It's a dragon. The dragon is pouring fire from his mouth. A knight is aiming a sword at his heart.

It's a pile of cabbage and corn.

Outside, the sounds of people are like the buzz of insects in my ears, and suddenly something falls into place and makes sense and I gasp.

I want to call my mom.

I call my mom. I watch my fingers dialing her number in Vancouver, the drag of my finger past the one. The six. The zero. The four.

I hang up.

Whatever I was thinking slips away, leaving me feeling confused. I go outside. I want a goddamn hot chocolate. I want a T-shirt. I grab some money and make my way to Our Joe. I give him my money. The chocolate tastes like chalk on my tongue. The T-shirt smells like warehouse dust. When did he get these printed up? I wonder. When did he have time?

I'm missing something. It's like I have all the facts but nothing fits.

I don't have all the facts.

I
had
the facts, but I lost them.

The facts are fish and they are silver and tiny and they are swimming back up into the sky like a reverse rain.

I go closer and closer to the crowd. What is a crowd? There are maybe fifty people here. It seems like a lot. There is some kind of platform. I don't know where that came from. Raised up, so the crowd is all in one place, staring down at our field, and I think about the dirt and how it feels when you press your face into it, damp and real.

I go closer and closer. I am looking for someone. And you know exactly who I'm looking for if you've been following along. Because I haven't seen her for days and the orange stone is still in my pocket and I don't know why.

I look and look, as if looking for her will put her there in the scene where she isn't. And then she is.

So it worked.

A flash of Olivia's hair, and then I see her jacket. I see her hand gesturing. I see her step down from the platform. I see her turn to look at me, directly at me. I see her disappear into the corn. I want to follow her. I dump my hot chocolate on the ground and jam the T-shirt on inside out. I want to follow her, but I don't.

I can't.

The people on the platform are staring at me.

I go back to the house.

I wish I didn't feel so strange.

I sit in the mouse chair and smoke another spliff. Just one more. Just one more before.

chapter 25

EXT.—CORNFIELD—NIGHT TIME

And…

SCENE:

It's dark and the stars are out. Pan the sky slowly, showing
the stars. The sky is big here. Somehow demonstrate how
the sky is bigger here than in other places. Show the sky
in Vancouver for contrast. There are no stars. The stars are
there, but you cannot see them.

There is a difference between something being absent
and something being invisible. Take note of that. It could
make a difference.

Show how the corn makes shadows in the dark.

Let the silence play. No soundtrack. Then the sound of
breathing and shuffling feet. Then giggling.

Definitely giggling.

Pull the camera out far and then farther and then farther
still. Use some kind of a crane. Get so far up you can see the
house at the end with the lights glowing. From far away,
you can't see the cracked windows and moss on the roof.

Zoom in to show that.

Zoom out again. Make it so silent you can hear the
camera buttons being pressed.

If there were buttons.

Which there aren't.

TANIS
All you have to do is follow the map in your
hand.

KATE
But how does it make sense? Our footsteps are
all different sizes.

T-DOT
This isn't going to work. I can't do this.

TANIS
You have to do this. We agreed.

T-DOT
If I go to jail, I blow my scholarship.

TANIS
Todd, don't be an asshole.

KATE
I don't know, Tan. This seems…far-fetched.

TANIS
Everything is far-fetched. Just do it, okay?

Go back to silence.

Zoom in on Dex Pratt. Dex thinks he is alone in a cornfield.
Somehow show that he thinks he is alone. Show that
Dex is high.

DEX
What the fuck?

Show the crisscrossing of headlights, passing over Dex.
Show Dex rolling to avoid being crushed. Show that.

Add a soundtrack. It needs to be the kind of music you
get lost in, loud, thrashing music that negates your ability to
think anything else.

Show the cornstalks in the moonlight.

Show the stillness.

Zoom the camera out and show the crop circle,
perfectly formed.

Show how the pattern is a Celtic knot with no beginning
or no end.

CUT TO:
INT.—DEX'S BEDROOM

Show Dex and Tanis. Show that they are naked. Zoom in
tight on the tattoo on Tanis's back.

A Celtic knot.

With no beginning and no end.

CUT BACK TO:

Dex Pratt running through the corn. The soundtrack so loud
now, it's impossible to make out what song is playing.

And…

CUT.

Delete scene.

It doesn't make sense.

Undelete the scene. Wait until you can think of a way to
make it come together.

Delete it.

You will never know.

Undelete.

Delete.

Add a voice-over. Have Captain Obvious announce the
obvious thing that Dex Pratt cannot seem to…

Show Dex Pratt trying to reach something and hold on
to
it. Show how the thing is a fish. Show how it's slippery.
Show how it's really a bird. Show how it flies away. Show
how it's actually a joint as big as his thumb and show how he
is choking to death. And then don't show that at all.

chapter 26
september 29, this year.

Getting through the cluster of reporters, even at 8:00 am is like swimming upstream. I've answered the same questions so many times, my voice is hoarse. When I talk, I can taste sandpaper, the wood dust of a thousand lies. My tongue is dry again, still, always. I've forgotten what is true. A lot of the “reporters” look like kids from my school who I can't quite place. They are strange, misshapen reporters. They aren't real, glossy
TV
reporters. They are from the free newspapers you get in the box on the corner. They are pretend reporters. We are all pretend. They are making it up. I am making it up.

Everything is made up.

Guess what I've been doing?

I have been smoking.

And smoking.

And smoking.

I inhale inhale inhale, but the trick is not to exhale, not ever, so that inside you become the smoke and the smoke becomes you. Picture a place where organs used to be and instead, now, there is the cool fog of smoke, a gray emptiness that is a relief.

I have to stop.

There is no way that I can fucking stop.

Not now. It's too late.

I don't think I could take clarity. I need the blur to be able to see anything at all.

Feral and I went to Central America last year. SD had business. Mom loves the sun. The beach had sand that was so fine, you could mistake it for cocaine and snort it. You don't think about the beaches in Central America. Belize. Or do you? I used to think of coffee and cocaine. But now, the beach. The beach was awesome.

Feral and I went diving. The water was a dark turquoise blue, a color that seemed impossible but was real. It was so pretty, it seemed…

Safe.

Another lie. The blues always lie. Think about that: cerulean. The sky.

I flipped off the boat like the instructor said and I knew I was in trouble. The panic started before I was even submerged. I followed Feral. If I could still see him, I was alive and it was okay. And it seemed like it would be a good story to tell later. Diving with a fake license. The way I couldn't concentrate on anything but my breathing sounds in the tubes. And how I breathed so fast I knew I was in trouble, panting like a dog, drowning. I hate water. I hate it. I can't stay away from it, but I hate it. I knew which way was up. We never dove so deep that I lost the sun. But even though I knew which way was up, I always felt like it was wrong. Like down was up. I couldn't get it right. My body just wanted me to swim for the bottom when I needed air. Twice, three times, Feral left me. He swam up and I went down, and when I looked for him, he was gone and I was gasping. And there were fish there with long noses and rows of jagged teeth, staring me down, cold and empty eyes waiting to see if I was going to be…

Food.

Later he was joking around, like it was funny that I couldn't find my way out. I couldn't find the light.

It was like when Dad threw me into the lake.

It was like the bubbles from my mouth going down instead of up.

It was like forgetting.

All these people.

Like water, always telling goddamn lies about the path to the surface.