What is Real

by Karen Rivers

  I needed Feral.

  We did everything together. Every. Fucking. Thing.

  And he left me and I was alone and I stopped caring about everything. I know how that sounds.

  And I know that it’s true.

  And when school started again that fall, St. Joe’s without Feral was stupid. And he bounced in and out of rehab like neither place could hold on to him. I stopped talking. No one noticed. I started making movies every day, miles of movies, more and more movies. And I wasn’t talking—why didn’t anyone notice? Or care?

  I was making a documentary. “The Disappearance of Dex Pratt” it was called. Then I changed it to “The Invisible Dex.” Then I changed it back.

  Then I deleted it.

  Then I dragged it out of the trash and saved it in a file called Fuck You.

  Then it was November and my dad was out of rehab, and I was being called home. Imagine there were trumpets. There weren’t, but if you imagine them, it’s more dramatic. In real life, there were just a bunch of phone calls and “arrangements” and the strange set of my mom’s lips when she said, “You should go.”

  The gray hairs that freckled her haircut like lines of disappointment.

  The way her hand shook when she reached for the milk.

  SD said, “It’s not your fault.” He said that. SD is a big guy. When he hugged me, I could hardly breathe. But I didn’t believe him. He thought it was my fault. I know he thought that because he gave me a check. The number of zeroes on it said, “I feel guilty for blaming you for all of this shit, but I do.” I’m not stupid. I know how it works.

  I put the money in the bank. “For college.”

  Yeah, right.

  I was glad to leave that glass house. I would have been gladder to blow it up, watch all that glass fall down on the city like diamonds or snow. I don’t know if I told you about the house. The way it splayed out over the cliff and the wall of glass made it so that any room you were in allowed you to see the whole glittering city below you. Feral used to say that when we flushed the toilets, it rained on the people. “The people.” Like we were not included.

  Feral was kind of an asshole that way. Entitled prick. Doesn’t mean I didn’t love him, just means I could see what he was like.

  I used to think that it was like living in a fish tank with everyone down below staring up into our windows, watching us swim from room to room, blowing bubbles as we went. But by the time I moved out, it was still like that, only I’d forgotten how to breathe underwater and every inhalation was like drowning.

  Every time I think about Feral, I lie. I am lying right now.

  I am lying. I am a liar.

  I have a tattoo on the inside of my arm. It was my idea. It wasn’t even an idea. It was a thing that I did. I thought it was cool. I am the one.

  It was me.

  I drowned, but Feral died.

  See, I could do heroin for fun, once or twice. It didn’t matter. He couldn’t. Some people are like that. From the very first time, it owned him, creeping through his veins like mercury, turning him into a robot who existed only for more.

  And Feral, he was gone.

  And I was “home.” But it wasn’t my home.

  And Vancouver wasn’t my home.

  The truth was, I was only “home” when I was behind my camera. And without it, I was too light, like any minute I might just float up into the sky and never come down. I saw the whole world through that lens; it kept me just far enough away to be safe. And now that it was gone, it was like looking at everything through binoculars. The world was too big and there was too much of it.

  It didn’t help that this shitty town felt like a sweater I’d outgrown years ago that I was trying to pull back on and it wasn’t working. It itched and I don’t think it was really ever my sweater, ever. I never would have chosen it.

  In March, I lost Feral.

  In June, my dad jumped.

  In September, I began disappearing.

  In December, I moved back and started over. As someone else. Another Dex. If I still had the camera, I’d be filming “The Evolution of Dex Pratt.” Or “The Rebirth.” Only, that sounds good, and there was nothing good about this.

  And then there was the house. My dad thought it was genius. I couldn’t argue with him even though there were lots of good, decent arguments. I just didn’t have any left. And I wanted some drugs, something, anything to shut out all the noise. And that was the fucking irony because I wanted and I wanted and I wanted, but I didn’t mean…

  You know how they say, “Be careful what you wish for?” Yeah, it was like that.

  Anyway, even broken, my dad was not someone you argued with.

  Even in the pictures in the ad, the house looked like the kind of house where you end up. Not one that you choose. It was not the kind of house where the Dad that I thought I knew would ever live. Where were the polished wood floors and the fucking stainless steel appliances? Where was all the stuff? Soaker tubs and a front lawn? A deck?

  “It has a perfect basement,” he said. “Think about it. It’s on a working farm so no one will question the power use, and it has a huge basement. It’s perfect.”

  This was the New, Improved Dad™.

  The New, Improved Dad™ had had it. He ’d had enough lawyering, he said, for ten lifetimes. The dealers made the money and ran, and he made shit and stayed. And now he was going to rake it in. He knew people. He knew everyone. He knew loopholes. It was like his whole life had been building up to this decision and he was going to fucking go for it whether or not it cost him everything. Because he had nothing left to lose.

  And now it was his turn. And, oh, by the way, son, all that hydroponic equipment from the old house is about to be very, very handy.

  “Our Joe is a psychopath,” I said flatly. “This is a nightmare.”

  “I know Our Joe,” said Dad. I stared at him.

  Everyone knew Our Joe, like you know the bad guy in every town. Rich as fuck and always doing things like riding his bike into town naked and handing flowers to “the ladies.” Then the next day sending the newspaper letters about how the government was affecting our minds through radio waves, and the next burning down his neighbor’s barn. He was the guy who you’d guess would end up with bodies in the basement or at least a mysteriously dismembered dog. He was Stephen King–creepy, but this wasn’t Maine, or a novel. This was our life.

  He was one tinfoil hat short of an insane asylum, one more crime away from jail, and living on his land sounded about as good an idea as rooming with a werewolf.

  Never mind that the house he was renting out was pretty much appropriate only for the set of a horror movie.

  “Yeah,” I said finally. “You know him. So why are we moving in with him?”

  “We’re not.” He laughed. “We’re renting a house on his property. Don’t be so stupid. It works and you know it.”

  I thought about how, when my sister and I were little, Dad made us cross the street when Our Joe was coming. I thought about how Mom flinched and screamed when he knocked on our car window once to offer her a half-dead flower, grinning enough to reveal the gaps between his silver teeth. How she stomped on the gas and squealed away.

  The thing with Our Joe was that, from a certain angle, he looked like a kindly old man. But everyone knew that he wasn’t.

  Just knew. Like how dogs always know when you’re scared.

  Everyone knew, that is, except him. He thought he was charming, you could tell. He thought he was “fun.”

  Crazy fucker.

  So then we were driving toward Our Joe’s cornfields, lurching and sliding this way and that in the snow, narrowly missing the ditch so many times that I thought we’d both be in wheelchairs before long.

  Dad didn’t seem to notice, he was rambling on about our new “life.” The car stank of stale cigarette smoke even though neither of us smoked. I felt sick from that smell. I felt like the smell was in my throat, choking me.

  “We ’re going to make a k
illing,” Dad said.

  I wanted to grab him and say, “What the FUCK, Dad? What are you SAYING?” But there was a ringing in my ears, and my eyes kept blurring. I kept thinking of the time he taught me to swim in the lake down the road. Like that’s anything to do with anything, but it’s what I thought about. How he stood there waist-deep in the lake for what felt like the entire summer with mosquitoes biting a belt around his waist. The water was not quite clear, and through the silty screen my feet looked a million miles away. I kept pushing off because he told me to, letting go of the ground with my feet. And each time I’d float for a second, and then I’d stop.

  I sank and I sank and I sank and cried a million times. I remember crying. Snot bubbles. The whole works. But he wouldn’t let me quit. T-dot would swim by like a goddamn mermaid, and I just couldn’t do it and couldn’t do it. My dad kept waiting and trying and showing me again, and suddenly I could do it. I did do it. I took in great mouthfuls of that filthy water, which I could taste in my nose for days, but I did it. I splashed along for a few strokes and I stopped crying and I didn’t drown, and my dad said, “There.” Like that was that. The end of swimming lessons.

  I guess a good end to that story would be that I turned into an Olympic swimmer but I didn’t. At least I know how not to drown. But in that Volkswagen with the heat blasting on that freezing cold day, driving toward “home,” listening to my dad talking about different strains of marijuana, drowning was exactly what I was doing. All that was missing was the snot bubbles.

  “It’s a plant,” Dad added, like that clarified everything. “Anyway, fuck it. Fuck the system. Fuck it all.”

  “Dad,” I said. But didn’t know really what to say. When my dad said “fuck,” it stung. He kept saying it. It’s all I could hear. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Here’s your fucking childhood, and fuck it. I was dizzy with images. Dad reading me bedtime stories. Dad pretending to be Santa Claus for the school Christmas party. Dad laughing, bent over by the side of the road while I rode by on my bike. Dad smiling, Dad talking, Dad not fucking swearing. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He kept talking.

  I felt like I was being swarmed by wasps. I needed him to stop. I had to concentrate on the road. A brown deer suddenly darted out in front of the car and stopped, stock still, in my path. I slammed on the brakes, swearing. The swerve spun us in a whole slow-motion circle. My heartbeat swirled. I held my breath. The deer stared and then took off.

  “Be careful,” Dad said mildly when we finally stopped, still pointing in the direction we were going in the first place. “Try not to kill us.”

  “That’s fucking ironic,” I muttered, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me.

  And then we were there, and it was worse than I thought, and it was home.

  I was surprised how quickly my friends came back to me.

  T-dot, at least. He was there the day we moved in, just sitting there on the front stoop like that was a totally normal thing to do. Waiting to help me move like I was moving into a college dorm or something.

  That was T-dot. Big grin like it was a Welcome Home party and not as entirely messed up as it was. When we were kids, we ’d egg this house on Halloween. This exact house. It was as close as we had to a haunted house in our town, and besides, Our Joe’s presence made it scary enough. We used to toilet paper the front porch. No one had lived here, ever, as far as I knew, except Our Joe and his wife, back in the day.

  It was snowing lightly and snow was stuck in T-dot’s hair. The white dusting on the house made it look pretty from a distance, but from up close, it looked like a clapboard catastrophe, like a place where squatters would smoke crack or a house where someone had died ten years before and no one had noticed.

  “Dude,” T-dot said. He clapped me on the shoulder, hard enough that my skin hurt through my ski jacket.

  “What’s up?” I said. “Don’t have anything better to do than hang around this dump? It isn’t Halloween, you know.” Embarrassingly, my voice kind of caught, like a stuck zipper. He pretended not to notice. I stared at him with cold eyes, daring him to say something about the house, about me, about the whole fucking mess that it was, but he didn’t.

  He grinned.

  I laughed. It felt weird. I hadn’t laughed for a long time. And then we were both laughing, hitting each other, but not really. Doing that thing where you wrestle but maybe it’s a hug, but it’s not. And then we’re lying in the snow-covered dirt, him all wholesome white teeth and wet hair from the pool, and me too skinny and wild-eyed and given up for dead, laughing in the snow.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “Where have you been? I totally missed you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, I was in Vancouver.” That was the truth, but there was more that I couldn’t say. That he wouldn’t understand. T-dot had never once stuck something in his arm. Never once smoked anything. Never once left himself, twirled around the universe and came back fucked in the head.

  “I know it,” he said. “Vancouver’s awesome.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Good to see you too.”

  We lay there and watched it snow for a while. It wasn’t long ago that we would have played in the goddamned snow. Now we just looked at it.

  “Snow sucks,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. Moving was shitty enough without slipping on the steps. I wanted so much in that moment to go back to the me that would have thrown a snowball or written my name in the snow with piss or something. I felt like I could practically reach out and grab that part of myself, but there was glass in between the two of us, or ice, and then the moment passed and it was too late.

  “We better do it now,” I said. “It’s only going to get worse. I can’t believe this fucking weather.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but he was grinning. We got up. He kicked some snow into a little pile. Bent down and rolled it into a ball. Threw it hard against the mailbox, where it exploded like a hand grenade. Ice flying through the air.

  “Score,” I said.

  We dusted ourselves off and slowly unloaded the U-Haul that Dad had packed all those months before. Everything was dirty. I don’t know how it got so dirty. We didn’t talk much, except when the couch slipped out of our hands and fell hard, upside down, the underside issuing up a giant belch of dust, and we fought to right it just as the snow turned thick and started to fall for real.

  “Never thought you’d be back, dude,” said T-dot.

  “Never thought I would be either,” I said. I was sweating. My breath steamed hot against the falling flakes.

  “Dex?” he said. “Sorry about your dad.”

  “Well, you didn’t do it,” I said. I noticed he was sweating too. Red-faced. There was a lump in my throat. I wasn’t going to goddamn cry. “Everyone’s sorry,” I added. “Especially me.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I just meant…nah, forget it.”

  I shrugged. Pretended there was something in my eye.

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Tell him everything? Nothing? Pretend it was all normal?

  In the end, that’s what I went with: Pretending.

  I never told him about Feral.

  In return, T-dot didn’t tell me what I missed. I figured I knew. Enough anyway.

  We shoved the furniture around in the rooms. In the end, we had all this extra junk: My little sister Chelsea’s bedroom stuff. The bed that was in the guest room at our old house. Mom’s old desk. Two couches and nowhere to put them. A TV the size of a fireplace.

  “I’ll dump them,” offered T-dot.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Let’s just shove them downstairs.” I was exhausted. My entire body hurt. But it was done. The work was done. I was home. I shook T-dot’s hand. “Thanks,” I said. “Really. I totally couldn’t have done this alone.”

  “Hey,” he said, “forget it.”

  I drove him back home. T-dot lived down at the bottom of the valley in a “new” subdivision that was twenty years old. His house was all lit up with Christmas lights and a fake Santa on the lawn that waved and sp
un. It looked so normal. My mouth filled with acid. It was something about how the windows glowed in the falling snow. I guessed that our windows would glow too, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same. I bet his family still had a family game night.

  “See you,” he said.

  “Tell your mom and dad ‘hi,’” I said. I wanted him to invite me in. I wanted hot chocolate and SpongeBob movies, just like when we were kids. I wanted.

  But whatever.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Will do.” He didn’t mention my dad.

  As soon as he got out, I wished I’d said more. I needed to talk to someone. I needed it bad. I had never felt so fucking alone.

  Never.

  Enter Tanis, stage right. Or left. Or wherever.

  Tanis Bowerman.

  I’d known her my whole life, but I’d never paid much attention to her. I don’t know why.

  But there she was, behind the till at the Safeway I stopped at on the way back to the motel where Dad was watching TV or mapping out our future with a Bic pen and a yellow legal pad. Calculating. Waiting.

  I had dried sweat itching all over me, and the cold made it worse. I felt like my entire head was chapped. I wanted something, but I wasn’t going to find it at Safeway. I felt like I was hopping under my skin. I wanted.

  I wanted.

  I grabbed some chips and soda, a bag of apples, my dad’s favorite tea.

  Tanis rang in my stuff. Then she looked me slowly up and down, and she said, “Dexter Fuckin’ Pratt. Slumming, are you?”

  “Fuck you, Tanis,” I said automatically. She had the most bizarre-colored eyes. Gray, I guess, but they looked silver. One big, the other much smaller, or maybe they just seemed that way because of the way her face was. Everything about her made me think of shadows.

  “Hey,” she said. She bit her lip, and I almost threw myself over the counter to kiss it. It was like that. Instant. Like I didn’t have a choice. Like a brainstorm, only this one came from somewhere in my pants. I shuddered.