What is Real

by Karen Rivers

  “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.

  I pull my pant leg up, half expecting to see it like it has been—swollen, purple streaks down the sides—half knowing it is going to look fine. We both peer at it, like it’s a specimen of something under glass. The knee looks totally normal. Knobbly, hairy.

  “Huh,” he says. “That’s…”

  “Yeah,” I say. “It is. A miracle, I guess. You want dinner?”

  “What the hell,” he says, scratching his head. “What the hell?”

  I shrug. “You want dinner or not?” I swallow. The spinning of the room is slowing. My mouth tastes like I’ve been sucking a sockful of rusty nails but I am okay.

  “I am okay,” I say out loud, and it seems to bounce around the room like something silver and shiny that we both watch for a few minutes, mesmerized.

  There’s a long pause. He’s looking at me like I’m a mosquito who has suddenly learned how to perform a guitar solo. Finally: “You cooking?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I tell him.

  Tonight I’m going to make meatballs. We can have meatball subs and a big green salad with our corn tonight. I’m ravenous. I need to eat. I need to eat everything. I roll up my sleeves. My arms are still shaking a bit. Not so much that Dad notices, but enough that I leave the room fast before he does.

  “Nice dollhouse,” I say over my shoulder from the doorway.

  “It is, isn’t it?” he says. “She’s a beauty. This may be my best one yet. I’m thinking yellow. Or taupe. But…she seems to want to be yellow. Do you think?”

  “Yellow’s nice,” I say. “I like yellow.”

  Our old house was yellow. Mom used to say that yellow houses held on to only happy memories. She also said that no monsters ever lived in yellow houses.

  Of course, my mom turned out to be full of shit.

  Right before she left, she went down to the basement and she took all those glass jars of tomatoes that she ’d worked so hard to preserve. Dozens and dozens and dozens of them. She took them and she stood on the stairs and, one by one, she smashed them on the cement floor.

  When I came home, it looked like a sea of blood. I was only fourteen and I’d just seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I thought someone had been killed.

  Who does that to their kid?

  Happy memories, my ass.

  I wonder if he ’ll add that detail. A basement flooded with red, like the house itself was hemorrhaging from the inside out.

  My dad does okay selling his houses, but I don’t know why he bothers. In his best month, he made six hundred dollars selling them online. We make that in a week selling pot, sometimes ten times that. But he likes to think that other people think that the houses are carrying us.

  I slowly take vegetables from the fridge and line them up on the counter. I reach for the knife and I wonder who will defend Dad in court when we get caught. In the divorce, Dad represented himself and lost badly. Mack Wong represented Mom, and now Mack is my dad’s archenemy. But he’s also the only other lawyer in town.

  I guess I have to just hope we don’t get caught.

  But I know we will. It’s just a matter of time.

  The blade on this knife has been sharpened so many times that it’s lost its shape. The edge is so sharp, it’s paper thin and cuts into the cutting board like a razor.

  Dad goes back to his work, and I chop up an onion and I think about how I read somewhere that Tibetan monks can control their heartbeats. I am not a Tibetan monk. My heart is going so fast, with no sign of slowing down, and yet it’s not scaring me. It feels normal, a thousand birds in my chest flapping their wings. I slowly mush the onion into the meat with an egg and some bread crumbs. I look out the window. Aliens. I think about how the smell permeated everything, how it perm
eated me. I can still smell it.

  It happened. Or it didn’t.

  Did it?

  “No,” I say. I pound my fist hard onto the countertop.

  “You okay?” calls Dad.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “You cut yourself or something?”

  “No, Dad. Sorry,” I say.

  The sky is alive with stars, but nothing up there is moving. No flashing lights. No indication that what happened was real. My thoughts slow to a jog, like pigs wading through mud. I feel like I’m dreaming. Still. Again.

  The window starts to steam up.

  Through the condensation, all I can see are shadows and the distant lights of houses, the neon sign of the Motel 6 at the exit from the freeway. The headlights are so far away that they are just dots, shrinking and vanishing over the foothills.

  Dots of light everywhere.

  Those dots of light in the sky that I thought were stars: Are they? Is one of those dots moving away? Or moving toward? What else is there that we can’t see?

  I put the meatballs into the fry pan and they sizzle and spit, droplets of hot grease bouncing out and hailing onto my forearms, a tiny hailstorm of pain.

  “Smells good,” Dad calls.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Yeah, it does.”

  I’m starving. I could reach into the hot oil and eat one half raw. That’s how empty I am. I am completely empty. There is nothing in me, except my heart, racing in a hollow space.

  The pot of water for the corn bubbles and I go about making the salad. Chopping lettuce, tomatoes, radishes, cucumber. That’s one thing about living on Our Joe’s farm, we get food. Apart from corn, corn and more corn, he has a vegetable garden that’s just for us and him. Well, just for him, I think, but I take what Dad and I need.

  I have to. Someone has to look after us, and it sure isn’t going to be the man with the miniature kitchen sink clamped between his lips. He puts the sink into the hole in the counter. Then he is painting a dish to look dirty. Two dishes. Three. He breaks a dish in half and puts it on the floor.

  “Dad,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.

  Carefully, he cuts some of Glob’s hair into tiny strands and spreads them on the couch. It looks like he’s smiling, but it could just be a squint.

  chapter 23

  september 27, this year.

  In the morning, I wake up with a pounding headache, and I don’t light up because I’m scared to. And I am never scared. Not like this. I make myself shower and get dressed by saying it out loud, like a goddamn crazy person.

  “Shower and get dressed,” I say. “Fuck you,” I add.

  I have not had a shower and got dressed without lighting up for so long that I don’t know. I don’t know anymore when I started or how to stop or why I do anything that I do. And trying to think of when or why makes me think of the chicken and the egg, how one of them came first. But also how it’s more complicated than that. A chicken-like bird laid a regular chicken-like bird egg, but inside that egg was a slightly altered chicken-like bird and gradually it became a chicken. What was in the egg of that dinosaur bird? So fuck it, nothing came first.

  My hands feel empty and strange, like a creepy marionette in a horror movie, only this marionette’s hands are shaking too hard to be believed. I watch my shaking hands try to take out the ring in my ear but they can’t land on the ear. They are bees, trying to land on a flower in a windstorm. The ear moves. My head moves. I move my head. Which came first? I need a smoke.

  “Get dressed,” I say to my ugly goddamn reflection. “Put on your shirt.” But I can’t. I can’t button it. The buttons move and shift. The buttons are moths and they fly away. I throw it on the floor and put on a T-shirt instead. The T-shirt stinks.

  I take it off.

  I put on a sweater. I never wear sweaters. Is this even my sweater? The sweater is black and soft and has holes down the side, small perfect circles, and I don’t care. It doesn’t stink. I’m hot but shaking, cold but sweating, I don’t know what I am. Whose sweater is this?

  I go downstairs. I go back upstairs and change the stranger’s sweater back into a shirt that is mine—a white shirt, an old St. Joe’s school shirt—and I feel like someone else in it. It settles cold against my skin and I’m instantly clammy.

  “Get it together,” I say to myself. I hold my hands as still as I can and move fast, jam a stretcher in my ear, pulling so it hurts. “Fucking get it together.” I can hear Dad wheeling around the living room. Glob’s half-hearted morning bark that says, “Feed me already.”

  I go downstairs.

  “Morning,” I say. The shirt feels tight around my neck. I unbutton another button. Why am I so nervous?

  “It is,” says Dad. “It is morning.” He is shaking pills into his hand. Rattle, rattle. The sound hurts my ears. There is something wrong and I don’t know what it is. I know what it is but I can’t put my finger on it. There is something that I know. My knee feels too smooth, like it’s full of oil, like it’s going to slip right off, my leg bending backward, my body falling to the floor.

  I throw bread in the toaster and wait, watching, and suddenly it’s burning. The fire alarm goes off and I bang it with a broom handle until it stops. I go to open the kitchen window.

  I open the kitchen window and something inside my head splits open, and open again, and layers of it open and open and open like paper unfolding.

  I open the kitchen window and I shout. Glob is barking. Dad is dropping his pills. The alarm starts up again. There is so much noise.

  And…

  And.

  And there it is, laid out before me in the half-light of the dawn, sprawling across the acres of corn. The dew makes it sparkle, makes it even more surreal than it is. Circles and lines, a pattern so huge that I cannot see where it ends or where it begins.

  I cannot possibly be making this up.

  For a second, I think I’m going to faint again, and then my phone beeps on the counter. I pick it up out of habit sort of and partly out of relief that I have to look at something else. It’s Tanis.

  Wrecked my back bad last night, it says. There’s a sad smiley.

  Feel better, I type with one hand. I start to type more and then I backspace, key by key, over the words CROP and CIRCLE.

  “Dad,” I say. It comes out like a croak. “DAD!” I yell louder.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Can you help me pick these up?” His wheels are crushing the pills into dust. “Can you help me?” He sounds panicked. “Son,” he says.

  “Come here,” I say.

  “Whatever it is,” he says, “you bring it to me.”

  “Dad,” I say, “I can’t exactly do that.”

  I guess there is something about the tone in my voice that gets him to finally pay attention. He wheels over, bumping his fingers on the doorframe. His knuckles are already scarred from that, and there is a dark stain on the wood at that level. I should help him, but I can’t move. I’m holding on to my phone and staring out the window. He rolls up behind me too quickly and the phone falls on the floor and the battery cover pops off.

  “Now I’ve done it,” Dad says. “Sorry. I’ve busted it.”

  “Dad,” I say, “I don’t give a shit about the phone. LOOK OUTSIDE.”

  He wheels up to the window, which is his only vantage point without counter and sink in his way. He doesn’t say anything. I watch his face.

  Finally, “You do that?” he asks.

  “What?” I go.

  “Did. You. Do. That?” he enunciates, like I’m deaf or an idiot.

  “Dad,” I say, “don’t be insane. How could I do that? It’s…huge. It would be impossible. I didn’t do it. I think… it was…aliens.”

  My voice is going up and down like the lines on a polygraph. And I say it again, “How would I do that?” I feel like I’m lying, and I wonder if I am and I’ve forgotten what I know and what I don’t know.

  Do I know something?

  He laughs, a short, sharp bark of a laugh.
“Aliens,” he repeats. “My sorry ass, aliens did that. More likely Our Joe needs to make a mortgage payment.”

  I look at him to see if he’s kidding. He’s not kidding. He does not think it’s real. Which is okay, because I don’t either.

  Only I know that it is. I can’t tell him that it is. For one thing, he won’t believe me.

  I also know that it isn’t. There is something.

  Okay, there is more than something.

  I recognize that shape. The shape is not a crop circle shape. It’s a Celtic knot. It means…

  I know that Celtic knot.

  “Live,” I say out loud. And I remember without wanting to remember, like someone is grabbing my brain and forcing it to crank backward into the summer.

  “No,” I say. But fuck me, right? Whoosh, I fall backward through time, tripping and falling and sick, and I’m at the lake and we, all four, are lying on a blanket, head-to-head, bodies pointing outward like the arrows on a compass, and T-dot is saying, “We need a motto.”

  “A motto?” Tanis says. “Like what, ‘All for one and one for all’?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “but not stupid.”

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  “Hey,” says Kate. “Stop.”

  “Something shorter,” says Tanis. “Something that’s like a word with two meanings. Something that means something to us.”

  We are all lying there, and the sun is so hot on my skin. And I like how it feels, like I can hardly stand it, but I’m not moving. Like I know I’m burning but I don’t care, like how moths feel when they die in a candle flame. My eyes are closed and they keep talking and I feel like I should have the answer, but I can’t be bothered. Why do we need a motto anyway? Are we some kind of fucked-up club? But I say that part out loud, and Kate says, “Yeah, it’s sort of a club. I guess. Right? It’s like we are all in this thing together.”

  “In what thing?” I say. I stand up. The ground is gravelly under my feet, hard-packed, too dry. I want to dive into the lake. My skin is burning. “Life? We ’re in life together?”