What is Real Read online

  She was one specific imaginary girl. I sound like an asshole, but I’ll say it anyway. Why not? I have nothing to lose. I have nothing to hide.

  The girl was the prize. My prize. That I’d earn by being a big-shot celebrity. That’s the truth.

  I made up every part of her: fine blond hair that swooped to her waist, wavy like she was just surfing, even though there ’s no surf around here. Big eyes, glasses like mine, quirky. Skin like porcelain. A brain like a whip. Always a book in her hand, her hands with pale pink nails. Four freckles on her left cheek. Vegetarian. Great taste in music. Plays a guitar and has a good singing voice. The whole package. The kind of girl who would have a place in New York but would also hike the Himalayas. The kind of girl who would never live in this town, no way. The kind of girl who knew how to leave and not look back. An artsy girl. A hippie chick. Someone other. Someone unreal. A model. An actress. Someone with that glow. Better than. Hotter. Smarter. Someone who understood that no matter where you were, you were alone and you were you. And someone who was okay with that.

  Someone who the guy with the award, the books, the movie camera—that guy—would deserve.

  She was specific. A specific person who didn’t exist. The fantasy changed a lot—the type of movies I’d make, for example—but the girl was always the same. And you know, the older I got, the more The Girl became The Plan and The Plan itself was about The Girl.

  I was totally in love with the girl. Crazy, fucked up, right? Maybe that’s when it started to slip away.

  It.

  Me.

  Maybe that’s when I started slipping away.

  It’s not my fault. All I did was believe. You’re supposed to believe, right? What the adults say. So I did. I believed all the lies about how “You can be whatever you want to be, son. Dream it and you can become it.” Now I want to go back in time and punch myself in the jaw. I want to break my bones. I want to smash myself until I understand.

  It ’s all bullshit. Carefully crafted bullshit, but still bullshit. Like Santa and the Easter bunny and love.

  Maybe I knew it was bullshit, and I just didn’t care. I was in love with myself. My future self. I was in love with that imaginary girl.

  With The Girl on my arm, I’d win prizes. My speeches would be short and funny. My tux would be cerulean. I’d wear it with a T-shirt underneath. (I’d no sooner wear a collared shirt than I’d wear a ball gown.) I would have three days’ stubble. I would refuse to comb my hair. In this footage of me, I’m not the real me, but a trumped-up movie-star version of me that only really resembles me at one angle in a particularly flattering photo.

  The only part of my great dream that came true was the glasses, the “I’m a writer; I’m famous” glasses. I wear them, even though the rest of it is as likely to happen as the polar ice caps refreezing. The glasses are so pretentious; they make me hate myself just that much more.

  I used to be so stupid. How can anyone that stupid actually survive?

  They can’t.

  Bam.

  I’m dead.

  So yeah, when I look back on before, I see myself skipping through a meadow singing tra-la-la so loudly that I missed all the obvious things about life, such as, “It never turns out the way you expect, young asshole.”

  But you can see how I got it wrong, right?

  I mean, I was so cute. And smart. And back then, my dad grew tomatoes in the basement.

  Dad loved those tomatoes, red and green and yellow, some of them as big as a baby’s head. We ate them constantly, raw and covered with salt. Cooked in sauces. Sliced in sandwiches. Fried. Mom canned them—we had rows and rows of glass jars in the basement, full of red flesh. It would probably make a better story if I hated tomatoes or was allergic to them or worse. But I loved them. We all did. Dad especially. I don’t know how a person gets into tomatoes, but he sure was. He took care of them better than he took care of us, and he was okay at that too. He just loved the tomatoes more.

  And my mom. He loved my mom. The joke was on him, though, because it turned out she loved some other guy she met on the Internet who claimed to love sailing and travel and her. A politician with striped ties and a tuft of hair sticking out the back of the collar of his shirt. I guess that canning tomatoes and living with us weren’t her thing after all, although she faked it pretty well all that time.

  Some people are better actors than others.

  Maybe I get that from her.

  Maybe.

  So she left Dad and became someone else, someone unrecognizable. She morphed as easily as a caterpillar. But we were the cocoon that had to be torn open so she could become some kind of creepy, unrecognizable butterfly, flying away.

  You don’t really heal from that.

  I look at Mom now and I can hardly remember her living in this town. Going to her job at the bank every day, driving past the farmers’ fields that she was going to repossess. It’s a different place now. All the farms have signs at the ends of the driveways. Corporate signs. Proudly Growing Corn for_____! Proud Supplier to_____.

  Yeah, I bet they’re proud. But signs that say, Forced to Sell Soul to the Corporate Devil and Proud to Genetically Modify Corn for Profit tend to make people uncomfortable.

  I can conjure up certain memories of Mom being here: the clip-clop of her high heels on the polished wood floors. The screech of her brakes when she stopped in the driveway because she was always in such a hurry that she sometimes forgot to slow down in time and she ’d hit the garage door with her front bumper.

  But I try to picture her and I can’t. Her face keeps getting away from me, and even when I watch the old videos, I can’t quite see her clearly. It’s like she ’s got that blurred-out spot over her face the whole time. Somehow she ’s never in focus. I try and try and try to really see her, but as soon as the screen flickers off, she ’s gone again, like a slippery dream you can’t keep in your mind after you’ve woken up. I don’t think she was ever really here. That’s the thing. This was the detour in her life plan. This wasn’t it.

  Here’s a moral: Plans are a waste of time.

  I watch those stupid movies over and over again, until one day I just stop.

  My dad changed too, but that’ll happen after you try to kill yourself and fail. That, by the way, is a real slap in the face to your kid. Maybe think about that if you’re ever perched naked on the top of a grain elevator, contemplating all the different ways to get down.

  Dad stopped thinking about me sometime around the day I moved to Vancouver and started going to St. Joe ’s Academy. Mom wasn’t the only caterpillar. I was a hick kid from a hick town, but I polished up okay and flew just fine. Maybe I was a moth though. I preferred the night to the day. I flew into the flames all the time.

  I did all right there. He said I was different, and I was, but I wasn’t bad-different yet. Just different. No, scratch that. You are always you, right? No matter where the fuck you live. But I was happy. It felt easy to be that version of me. Worse, it felt better. Shinier. Brighter. I got mixed up. I thought rich meant “more important.”

  Does money change you?

  Stupid question. But hey, it turned out that I loved sailing and travel too. Is that so shocking?

  Dad said he could see the city on my face when I came home. And I don’t know what the fuck he was talking about, but I will say that my skin was better (Accutane) and I had way nicer clothes and a haircut that wasn’t done by the barber on Main Street. I was fit as hell, my body as hard as steel. That’s true too. But I don’t think that’s what he meant.

  He said I was my mother’s son. That was supposed to be an insult, right?

  I didn’t know for sure. He loved my mom. So maybe it wasn’t.

  Thinking about it tears a hole in me wide enough that I can see through me. That’s how it feels.

  Love.

  What a joke.

  Speaking of jokes, Dad used to be a lawyer. A lawyer. It’s all he ever wanted to be, and that’s what he was. Dad had that kind of life.
He’d pick something (the house, Mom, a career, kids) and then he ’d get it. He just kept plodding forward and getting what he wanted, and even if he wasn’t happy, he sure looked it.

  Now he cries during sitcoms and pees into a bag that’s taped to his chair. And he grows marijuana. If our house burns down, everyone within a mile will be high for a week and the insurance won’t even begin to cover the cost of all the burnt cash.

  And you thought the tomatoes were impressive.

  I say he grows marijuana because that’s what he believes. The truth is that I grow marijuana. Because only one of us can make it down the cellar stairs, and it isn’t the guy in the shiny new wheelchair.

  So now look at my life:

  The milk in that glass jug is curdled. It’s yellow and spongy and you’d as soon gag as look at it. And don’t even think about taking a sniff. The thing with milk is that you can’t uncurdle it. It can’t ever go back to what it was.

  I’m a different person. I’m not the person I was meant to grow up to be when we lived in a four-bedroom colonial in a subdivision outside of town. I’m not the laughing kid who would never shut up and thought he ’d be a star. I’m not the smart, funny, athletic, popular, all-star, wake-up-smiling kid.

  I’m not even the in-between guy—the rich, artsy, pretentious, prep-school one who lived in Vancouver with his mom and her new husband, with his little sister and his stepbrother, in a house made of glass that hung over the edge of a cliff like it was mocking nature. The one who visited his dad for a week in the summer and two days over Christmas break in the farm town where he grew up and thought, Man, this place is sad. I’ll never move back.

  Never say never.

  Now I’m the teenaged, pissed-off, raging stoner who fails hard and who lives with his broken dad in a broken house on the back acre of Our Joe ’s corn farm and sleeps on a mattress stuffed with money that can’t ever go into the bank.

  Actual money. Mostly twenty-dollar bills.

  Money smells. Did you know that? It stinks of must and ink and other people ’s hands and a life you don’t want to have.

  I could take the money and go, but where would I go? I might sound like a jerk but I’m not the kind of jerk who would leave his broken dad behind. Not yet anyway.

  I used to use words like cerulean because I liked how it felt in my mouth. Now I just say blue.

  Why bother saying things you have to explain?

  That’s who I am now. Someone who doesn’t explain.

  And I’m sure as hell not the guy who grows up, follows The Plan and gets The Girl. That guy took a different turn in the maze and got out a long time ago. Whereas I’m still in here, looking for something I never wanted to find.

  chapter 4

  september 5, this year.

  I am slumped on my bed, staring out the window at the sprawl of the cornfield, and I don’t know who I am here or what to do with my hands, but here I am.

  I am Dex Pratt. I am seventeen years old. I am living at home with my dad. I have a girlfriend. I have friends. Summer is winding down and school is about to begin. I don’t have to know more than this, but I want to know more than this. I feel like I’m watching a movie and everyone else knows something about the plot, the key to it, and I don’t know it. Or I was in the bathroom when the secret was revealed and now I’m just watching.

  Except it’s more like the movie is watching me.

  I am the movie.

  It’s like that.

  My dad and I run out of things to say to each other and the air is full of my lies and his depression. And I go down to the basement and I take more pot, and more and more and more pot, and I buy rolling papers in bulk on the Internet. And I go into the corn. I go lie in the corn. And I’ve lost track of what day it is, but what does it matter? The movies come whether I want them to or not. And I lie on my back in the cornfield and right below me are the worms and grubs and maggots, seething through the dirt. And above me is the blinding white ball of the sun and the shadows that are being thrown down on me by the endless stalks of corn. And down there, I am the grub. I am the dirt. I am the ground. And I don’t have to be Dex Pratt, age seventeen, troubled kid. I can just sink until there are no spaces between my molecules anymore and there is no difference between me and the dirt. The grubs and the worms are me.

  It’s my safe place. That’s how shrinks talk, you know. They want you to find your “safe place.”

  Mine is on the ground. In the ground, maybe. Safe, safe. Held up. Held down.

  So that is where I go, screen door banging behind me. Phone buzzing in my pocket. Dad yelling, “When are you coming home?”

  Me leaving.

  EXT.—CORNFIELD—EARLY AFTERNOON, SUNNY WITH LOOSE CLOUDS

  Dex’s mental film is shaky today, all Blair Witch Project heavy breathing and a wobbling lens. A Tilt-A-Whirl effect complete with nausea and sweating. People hate that. So they say, but they always watch it.

  Dex breathes.

  His heart is crooked. His head is crooked. This shit is making him feel crooked. He keeps forgetting to ask Gary what is different about this weed. Gary has done something. Something has changed.

  Is it different or just more?

  More and more. And, fuck it, MORE.

  Show how Dex is smoking more and more. Splice together a hundred scenes, fast, of Dex with a jay in his hand, in his mouth, in his hand, rolling and smoking, and smoking and rolling, and how fast his fingers go. Speed up the film. Speed it up and speed it up until it blurs and melts.

  Not that film really melts anymore. Not like that.

  Add the lie of melting.

  Because, truth is, there is never enough for Dex to fully blot it all out, you understand? Everyone says that pot blurs the edges, but it doesn’t. Not for Dex. The edges of his life are as sharp as knife blades cutting through the air and leaving behind wounded oxygen molecules, bleeding red into the blue.

  Focus.

  Dex is on his back.

  In the cornfield.

  And no one knows where he is.

  And no one cares.

  Somehow show that no one cares. A shot of Dad (INT.— KITCHEN TABLE) hunched over the kitchen table, building another house; show his hands moving the tiny refrigerator closer to the tiny stove, the squint of his eyes, the way he is holding his breath until the angle is just right. Then the dilated pupils, a slow shot of the wheelchair and the bottles of pills that are never out of his reach. Then his wasted legs. The golden bag of piss. The soles of the new white shoes, brand-new shoes that have never touched the ground.

  Then cut away. Dizzyingly. Like something being dropped.

  FLASHBACK TO:

  EXT.—GRAIN ELEVATOR

  Show Dad standing at the top of the grain elevator, the blue sky arcing above him without any clouds. (Were there clouds?) Show the heat, shimmering like translucent wings, the nearly transparent melting of everything real into the scribbled blur of sky.

  It was too much sky, maybe that was it.

  He is naked except for his shoes. Show that.

  Show Mom laughing with SD in Vancouver, maybe in front of a landmark to make it recognizable. Show them holding hands. She’s wearing sunglasses. Her hair is perfectly cut, razor sharp, swinging. Show SD’s teeth and how they look like the teeth of a dog, long and yellow, blackened rims. Show Mom’s toothpaste-white, perfect (new) teeth. And her high-heeled shoes. A color: expensive dusty blue. Show Dad’s mouth, unsmiling. No teeth showing. Show his shoes too. Worn leather loafers. Brown. No socks.

  Where are his clothes?

  Mom laughing and laughing and laughing. Nothing in the world is that funny, lady. Dex needs to tell her: You’re overplaying your part, ma’am.

  The woman playing the part of Mom does not take direction.

  Fire her.

  Back to Dad. How did he get up there? He’s standing on the top of a grain elevator, poised like he’s about to tag it with spray paint but he doesn’t have a can. His hands are empty. Clenched. Not clenched.
One of each.

  Definitely there should be wind ruffling his hair. Show how all that air felt on his skin. How can you show that? You can’t. Show the air and his skin, the small hairs on his arms rising and falling. Show how the air is like water, a current. His facial expression is…Blank? A small smile playing at his lips? (How did he feel? In that moment?) Is he looking up or down? Is he crying? Is he pissed off? Does he shake his fist at the endless dome of the sky, framing his sad, lonely life in oversaturated blue?

  Does he bother?

  No, he’s just there.

  Show the SOLD sign on the old house. The U-Haul truck with all his belongings parked at the base of the grain elevator.

  Show him climbing the ladder.

  Show the climb.

  Then, at the top.

  He is probably, maybe, (actually, not) crying and crying and crying, and everything in the world is that sad. (He should be crying but he isn’t.)

  Cut back and forth between Mom’s face and Dad’s, closer and closer. Zoom right in to their eyes like the camera is a goddamn mosquito, buzzing closer and closer. Happy, sad, happy, sad, happy, sad, happy, sad, happy, until the audience is sick from it. A frenetic, background song that’s all percussion and ear-splitting cymbals and discordant bangs on some kind of church organ.

  Then stop suddenly.

  Show Dad jumping. Or falling. No, STEPPING. (An important distinction. Did he reach down for the ground or reach up for the sky? Which way was he looking? Were his eyes open or closed? Did he lie back into the fall or swan-dive for the ground?)

  Don’t overthink it, Dex, for Pete’s sake. It’s enough.

  So.

  He dives. Holding his breath. It is water. The thing with corn is that it looks that way, from a distance. Like an ocean.

  No soundtrack.

  Add the sound of Glob, barking. Waiting for Dad to land. Bark, bark. The thud of the impact. The dog sniffing him, then running. Like Lassie. Getting help.

  Then pan into the distance, the wind moving the corn and maybe some birds chirping.