What is Real Read online

  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 2011A JC813’.54 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

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, Stn. B PO BOX 468

  Victoria, BC Canada Custer, WA USA

  V8R 6S4 98240-0468

  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  To you.

  Contents

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  chapter 21

  chapter 22

  chapter 23

  chapter 24

  chapter 25

  chapter 26

  chapter 27

  chapter 28

  chapter 29

  chapter 30

  chapter 31

  chapter 32

  chapter 33

  chapter 34

  chapter 35

  chapter 36

  chapter 37

  chapter 1

  now.

  This is my real life.

  But I keep thinking…

  If things were different. In any way. In every way.

  If Before stretched into Now.

  Then…

  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.—CORNFIELD—EARLY EVENING, SUNNY

  And…

  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 and…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.

  But…

  And…

  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.—CHILD’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.

  Then…

  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.

  (He is losing control of this. But that seems to happen a lot lately. He starts it, and it goes from there.)

  In the corn, the light is so intense to no longer even be light but something more. Dex can’t open his eyes. He can, he does, and then slams them closed again. He can’t see. He is blind and he isn’t. The light is. It just IS.

  So obviously he is dead.

  Dex is dead.

  DEX

  I am not fucking dead.

  VOICE-OVER

  Everything is an illusion.

  (But who is doing the goddamn voice-over? Dex’s movies don’t have voice-overs. Or at least he hasn’t done any with voice-overs yet.)

  Dex isn’t dead. But maybe this isn’t his movie, after all.

  Dex is in the cornfield on his back, getting high. Except that he isn’t. And the light is going right through him, and he’s lifted. He’s up in it, on it, under it, within it, a vacuum of it, and he’s spinning. And there is something in his mouth that tastes like pennies and dog hair. And he can’t breathe the air because it is thick like snot, and he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe.

  He’s sick.

  Gagging on the air. Dry heaving himself inside out. A somersault, then four more. His torso is twisting in a way that is not possible, his whole body being wrung out.

  And Dex is slammed down hard on concrete ground— where?

  Somewhere else.

  He’s bleeding. He must be, but he can’t tell; red isn’t visible here. Now. What happened to red? His bones broken, or not, his tongue somewhere misplaced, the place pitch-white, not black. Nothing is black. He yearns for black in a way he’s never yearned for anything before.

  The ground is wet and sticky.

  There are people crying. Children. A hiccupping sob that isn’t him. It isn’t the corn; it isn’t the sad wail of the corn ghosts. Or it is? He can’t see. He can. Shadows in the mist. And what is this?

  Aliens.

  He’s crazy. This can’t be real. But then there is the ground and the pain and the wetness and a ringing in his head and something…

  Someone. That he isn’t making up.

  Imaginary things don’t hurt like this, a pain that sings through him and makes him think, absurdly, of how mermaids lured sailors into the deep.

  The seductive big eyes of…

  The thing in front of him is…

  All eyes. (He saw this once in a movie, a real one. The oil-pool sliding surface of eyes so big you can fall into them. And then he thinks of the tar pits and the dinosaurs forever frozen in the black, sinking ground. And he thinks maybe he understands something, suddenly, about prehistory that he’s never understood before. But that could be the weed, is the weed, must be the…)

  His head hurts; his brain is too big or too small or exploding or imploding. The aliens are two plate-sized eyes and nothing more…colors sliding around too fast, a gale storm on an oil puddle in a parking lot. He’s crazy. That’s it, he’s lost it.

  The creature is waist-high, its eyes the size of Dex’s own head. Its head the size of a pillow.

  Dex doesn’t even like sci-fi.

  He doesn’t believe in this.

  He was only imagining.

  Is only imagining.

  DEX

  I am making this up.

  He feels around for the ground. For the corn.

  Then a hand is on his left knee. A hand-like shape. A human hand. A non-human hand. It’s white but it isn’t. It’s whiter than all that white light and somehow less solid— liquid, cold. Something metallic smooth, pressing hard inside his knee, inside his purple, blue-black knee, sinking into his skin like a faith healer tearing a chicken heart from a believer.

  The blood is red.

  Dex throws up. (Suddenly. For real.) Show Dex throwing up. Everything he’s ever eaten. A volcano powerful enough to make islands in the earth. Molten.

  He is on fire.

  He is fire.

  The burn will kill him. It has to kill him.

  So he’s dead then.

  He falls.

  Into the soft, soft dirt. He becomes a valley, which rises up and becomes a crevasse, which softens to a dent and thrusts him upward. His body is an outline.

  Dex Pratt is on his back in the cornfield. The stars are out, flattened cornstalks all around.

  He either is or is not dead.

  DEX

  Not.

  He either imagined this or didn’t.

  He stands up and he runs. The running feels like flying. Or skating. It is so smooth. Too smooth. Oiled-metal smooth, ball-bearings smooth, ice smooth, dream smooth.

  He runs back to the ramshackle half-house where he lives with his dad, perched there on the back of Our Joe’s cornfield like an afterthought, but older than the corn, so really a beforethought.

  FLASHBACK TO:

  EXT.—THE OLD HOUSE—WINTER

  DAD

  Original means old. Old is the new New. (laughing) Isn’t that what your mother would say?

  DEX

  Dad, it’s a shithole. We can’t live here. There’s snow in the living room.

  DAD

  (shaking hands with Our Joe)

  Yes, we can. And now we do.

  OUR JOE

  Welcome home, kid.

  DEX

  Great. This is just perfect.

  CUT BACK TO PRESENT:

  Dex runs from the frame. The herky-jerky camera that doesn’t exist tries to keep up.

  His legs are new. His lungs are new. He’s alive.

  Or at least not dead.

  Is it the same thing?

  There is lightning somewhere, but there isn’t. It’s in him. It is him.

  He falls, runs, stumbles, finds himself on the porch, sweating.

  DAD

  That you?

  DEX

  Me. Who else would it be?

  DAD

  Never know, kid. You never know.

  Pan down Dex’s body, soaked with sweat. Shaking. Focus tight on his knee. His left knee. Show how it is unmarked.

  And also, how it doesn’t hurt.

  Also how the purple, swollen bruising is gone and the skin glows white.

  Seriously.

  What the FUCK?

  There is no such thing as ALIENS.

  And all that is Mrs. D’s fault. And T-dot’s. And Tanis’s. And Olivia’s.

  Behind him, the corn is flattened.

  In front of him, his dad is a shadow through the screen door.

  And…

  CUT.

  It was real.

  Or was it?

  chapter 3

  september 1, this year.

  My life used to be a glass pitcher of white, pure, clean, delicious milk just bubbling over with goddamn wholesomeness. My entire life. My whole family was shiny and perfect, snipped right out of the stereotype catalogue: Mom, Dad, me, Chelsea, and our loyal dog, Glob. We had a fish in a bowl on the granite kitchen counter and a ride-on lawnmower and shiny new bikes for our birthdays and five food groups a day and family fucking game night on Wednesdays. We had a stainless-steel barbecue the size of a small ca
r and an above-ground pool. Friends slept over and we had our own tents in the backyard during the endless summer months–an interminable paradise of boredom and adventure and safe predictability.

  I’m seventeen now, and that ’s all gone. Seventeen doesn’t sound old. But it is. Trust me.

  What can I tell you?

  A lot happened. Most of it was inevitable. I just didn’t see it coming.

  I learned to read when I was three years old. Maybe every book is a lifetime. Maybe it is the fault of the books and not the fault of everything else. That I’m so old. That I got so fucking old.

  But I don’t believe that. Do you?

  There’s a home movie of me riding down the street on my bmx bike, a book taped to the handlebars. I’m grinning at the camera, two teeth missing, freckled nose, messy hair sticking out from under my orange flame-painted helmet. I look like a goddamn commercial for back-to-school clothes or chewable vitamins. I ride right into the person holding the camera and the camera gets dropped and you hear my dad’s voice saying, “Dex!” and then the laughter is all you hear and you see my sneaker and some gravel and that’s it.

  It’s over.

  When people asked, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

  “A writer-director,” I answered. And they’d be surprised because, if you didn’t know me, you’d take me for a kid who would say “fireman” or “hockey player.”

  But I had a plan. A fucking great plan.

  My plan was to be the guy they talked about in the New York Times and argued about on the Internet. But then they’d love me anyway because my stories would be so amazing that they wouldn’t be able to help themselves. I’d write movies and books and everything everything everything because that’s how I felt when I was a kid. Like everything was waiting to be created.

  By me.

  My great master plan was to be: Funny. Smart. Happy. Popular.

  That’s what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  Was that too much to ask?

  I wanted to grow up to be the guy who got the girl. The Girl. Even now, thinking about it, I don’t know if the whole plan was to get to the part with the girl or if the girl was just a part of the plan. A detail.