What is Real (18 page)

I pull in my breath sharply. Who else noticed?

I look at Tanis. She's still giving me the half-grin.

“Anytime you're ready, Mr. Pratt,” says Mrs. D. I hand her my phone and try to give her a charming smile, trying to keep the gums to a minimum. Too wolfish, I think. And I can tell she doesn't buy it. She shakes her head. Whatever Olivia put in my pocket is actually warm. I put my hand in my pocket, but I can't feel anything.

I sit down. My hand jammed in my pocket. Trying to feel.

T-dot raises his eyebrows at me. “What are you
doing
?” he says.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Okay,” says Mrs. D. She's shouting, so I know it isn't good. “Okay.” She takes a deep breath. “Since Mr. Strait and Mr. Pratt don't feel they need to listen to the requirements for the final paper, I assume that means they are ready right now to pitch their ideas. Gentlemen?”

“Huh?” says T-dot. “What?”

The ripple of laughter around the classroom is nervous. Mrs. D glowers. “ENOUGH!” she shouts. She repeats it more quietly. “Enough.”

“Boys,” she says, “you'll give me your topics, now. It's ten thousand words. I'm sure you didn't hear that the first time. Ten thousand words on a topic of your choice. And you better love what you pick because this is going to be the paper that matters more than any other paper you've ever written,
capisce
?”

“Yeah,” says T-dot. He hardly even hesitates. “I'll write about swimming, man. No worries.” He looks pretty pleased with himself.

My brain is blank.

What are my interests. Pot? Olivia? Being miserable? Movies?

I am no longer interested in movies.

I have quit the movie business.

I was never in the movie business.

My head throbs.

“I don't know,” I say.

“I'm waiting, Mr. Pratt,” she sighs. “Ten seconds, and then Mr. Strait here gets to pick for you.”

I have nothing to say. The room is frozen in a diorama. I feel like I'm holding it all in my hand, in miniature, my mouth half open, no one talking, nothing, and I'm in control of that. “Wellll…,” I say.

T-dot coughs. “Drugs,” he murmurs.

“ALIENS!” I shout. “Like, you know. Something. I don't know. Yeah. Aliens.”

“Done,” says Mrs. D.

And that's that. The bell goes and the class spills out the door like liquid mercury, scattering in the hallway into a million tiny droplets of silver, splitting and multiplying and splitting until there are so many people I feel like I've disappeared.

The thing in my pocket is a small orange stone. It is perfectly smooth. It is tinged with blue.

I don't get it.

I spend all of my lunch hour looking for Olivia, but she's nowhere. I look everywhere. She's just gone.

chapter 21
september 26, evening.

You aren't going to believe me, but when it happens, the last thing that I am thinking about is aliens. That's the truth.

I am in the corn.

And…

I am in the corn and I am high and the movie starts. I am not directing this movie.

It happens.

There are aliens.

Listen.

There was a vortex.

The taste of pennies and dog hair.

Plate-sized eyes.

It
happens
.

What kind of sick fuck would make that up?

Real.

Not real.

I am there and then I'm not. And then I'm nowhere and everywhere, and it is a vacuum and I'm spinning and there is a hand in my knee and…

And…

And.

You want me to tell you that I made it up, but I didn't.

Look at my knee. You can't make that up.

You can't make any of this shit up. All of it is real.

All of it.

Sometimes I think there's a kind of a hitch, and the difference between what is real and what isn't becomes like one of those sun spots I saw this morning. It's not really a black spot, is it? It's something else. I just don't know exactly what.

Sometimes there is proof: an orange stone, a cured knee.

Sometimes there are just your memories competing.

I just remembered something about that day when I learned to swim. I just remembered how, after being patient all day, Dad threw me in like a stick for a dog. He threw me. The water was over my head and it was darker than any room could ever be. I remember how the weeds tangled around my arms and legs and when I opened my eyes, all I could see was black liquid and death.

I remember how I fought my way up.

I remember how he was proud of that.

I don't know why I'm telling you this right now.

There were fucking
aliens
and my knee was fucking
cured
. That should trump everything else, real or imagined, remembered or forgotten.

There was something about the whiteness, which was the opposite of the blackness of that water on that day. There was something about the air that was liquid, and I am losing my shit and I am losing my shit and I am losing my shit and I am losing my self.

Was it real?

No?

You tell me. Someone tell me, goddamn it.

Please.

chapter 22

“Where were you?” Dad says when I finally stumble inside. No time has passed. All the time has passed. Enough time has passed that species have become extinct and been reborn.

I want to cry. I want so fucking much to cry.

Why can't I cry?

“Nowhere,” I say.

My brain keeps ticking over a slide show of disconnected images:

I am carrying a tray of glasses made of thin crystal and the wind going over the tray makes a sound of whistling.

In black and white, I am disappearing.

There is a bowl of fruit.

My dad is a dog. The dog is dead. The dog is dying.

I am alone.

I am the dog.

I am dying.

I think maybe I faint, I don't know.

I open my eyes and I'm on the floor in the front hall and Dad is looking down on me, confused.

“I'm okay,” I lie.

My dad is asking me something.

“Where were you?” he says again. He doesn't sound mad, but then again, I can tell by his flat affect and the way he's holding his hands extra carefully, like a drunk trying to walk a straight line, that he's taken an extra something from his vast array of
somethings
.

“Uh,” I say, “I got dizzy.”

I glance at the clock. Again.

“Are you high?” he says. Then, “Christ, answer me. Your eyes are red as hell.”

He rolls over to the kitchen table. He is behind the house he is building. The house stands between me and him. There are people in the window of his house. A boy and a girl.

There are people in between us. Those people are us. We are in between us.

My brain is screaming. There is a Tilt-A-Whirl and I want to get off.

I shift from foot to foot to foot and I'm rocking like a little kid, and he pulls his magnifying lens back down over his eyes. I haven't seen this house before. It's new. Did he do all this today? It is nearly complete, with gingerbread trim and detailed siding. His big saw is out in the living room. Did Gary bring it up or has it always been in the living room?

I am still dizzy, or dizzy again.

Plate-sized eyes. A hand on my knee.

Come on. Make it goddamn stop.

I grab the doorframe to stop myself from tumbling headfirst onto the table. I feel funny, bad, strange. Like I've got amnesia but not enough to make me forget, just enough to make everything look slightly strange and unfamiliar. Wrong. Out of place. A film that's offset from its soundtrack, the mouths moving faster than the words can be heard. The feeling you sometimes get when you fall asleep too fast, too deep and are startled awake and it seems like the walls of the house shifted while you were dreaming.

Dad coughs. “Like it?” he says. He points at his construction. The dollhouse is tiny, too tiny to
even be
a dollhouse. It's just a tiny house. Tiny stairs and tiny windows. Tiny doors and tiny people. His dollhouses always come with a family, did I mention that? Father, mother, brother, sister, dog.

Like we used to be.

He looks at me, expectantly.

I shrug. I'm still feeling like I can't get a breath all the way in. I'm so tilted inside, the room feels like it's shifting away from me. I'm sick, that's all.

My memories are tiny. I am tiny.

I want to tell him what just happened.

But what did just happen?

I don't want to tell him.

Can't tell him.

What would he do? “Dad, I think that I was just abducted by aliens in the cornfield.” I don't think he could take it.

I can't take it.

But this is my goddamn problem.

This is
my
crazy.

It's a cry for help, I tell myself. I'm just asking for attention.

I don't tell him.

He looks so old, squinting through his half-glasses at the tiny toilet he's cradling in his hand like it's a precious gem, pretending to care about where I've been.

“I actually was just running,” I say firmly, forcing my voice to be strong.

“Running,” he repeats. “What are you playing at?” He turns around and stares right at me. “You can hardly walk,” he says finally. “I'd think even you could come up with a better lie than that. Just how baked are you?”

I can't answer that because I am baked. Can you measure bakedness? I want to answer him, give him a number like Tanis would. “Seven.” Or “Eight thousand.” What measurement would I use? Miles? Pounds?

I am always baked.

I cannot remember not being baked.

The entire time I have been back home, I have been one-hundred-percent high, one hundred percent of the time. Two hundred and fifty percent. “Any percent higher than one hundred is just stupid,” says Tanis. But Tanis isn't here, so I guess she says it in my head or has said it enough that it echoes there.

“Baked,” I say. Maybe it sounds like agreement or an admission of guilt, but I don't care. The eyes were like quicksand and pulled me inside. Can you ever explain that to a person?

“How baked?” he says again.

“Yeah,” I say. “Well, I don't know, Dad. I think…my knee. It's better.”

He takes off his glasses and gives me a look. A look that says, “Yeah, right.”

“I'm serious, Dad,” I say. “Look at it.”

I stand next to him, so close I can smell his unwashed stink. Urine and cigarette smoke and whiskey and that dusty tang of medicine, the salt of sweat.