What is Real (2 page)

(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 car 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.

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.