chapter 17
september 23, this year.

I am in the corn again. I saw a horror movie about corn once. I saw a documentary about corn once.

Corn is the cheapest food in the world.

Cornfields house psychopathic kids wielding weapons.

Corn is almost all genetically modified.

Even this corn is probably not what it appears to be: strong, green, healthy.

It’s the last corn of the season. It’s so sweet now, it’s like biting into candy. Even raw.

The rats are on a sugar high.

In Vancouver, we had this tree in the yard with dark red leaves, and if you lay under it and looked straight through it at the sun, you could see a silver outline around each and every leaf. But pull the leaves off and bring them in to inspect, and they were just red leaves, dark and flat.

It was a trick. The light can do that.

I feel like I could write, but I haven’t written a single word since I left Vancouver. I used to write lyrics. For our band. Mine. And Feral’s.

I wrote good lyrics.

When Mom married Feral’s dad, we became brothers. We used to talk so much. I feel like I’ve forgotten how to talk. I never talk about anything anymore. I try to listen to other people talking, and it seems like they don’t know how either.

Ninety percent of conversations are about nothing.

I could write good lyrics about that. Or about just this. The corn and the cobweb that’s hanging above me and the slanting sunlight and those aluminum-rimmed words. But as soon as I think of what, exactly, I’d write, as soon as I try to squish all these microscopic yellow/blue/brown/ green metallic thoughts into some kind of black and white sentence, it’s gone, like a dream dripping out of my head even as I’m still watching the end of it play out.

Anyway, fuck that.

I sit up.

I lie down.

My ab muscles pull taut and loose. I lift my shirt and look at them. I have good abs. Maybe I could be a model.

No matter how I look at the future, it all seems unlikely and ridiculous. Is there a future?

I was kidding about the modeling. There’s the laugh again. The brown birds of it on my chest.

My summer-brown skin is speckled with sprinkler dew. How did I get so brown? I was at the lake a lot. I hardly ever wore a shirt. When I was at home, I sat outside and read books and pretended to not hear my dad calling me. I found a box of books in the basement.

I read Moby Dick.

It’s true.

I read books of poetry about red wheelbarrows and felt like I understood but maybe that’s because I was high. I started getting high in the spring. I never sampled the crop before. But when I started, I couldn’t stop.

Won’t stop.

Can’t stop.

Maybe that’s what it was like with Feral and the heroin. Obviously that’s what it was like with Feral and the heroin. I’m not an idiot. I know what addiction is. I don’t know why the heroin didn’t catch me like it did him. Maybe I wasn’t worth bothering. When I picture heroin, it’s a pale-skinned man, dark hair slicked back, a wolfish grin, tight suit, hands with long nails painted like a girl’s, promises he can’t keep. He toyed with me and took Feral, laughing the whole time.

Fuck him. Fuck him. A million times fuck him. He didn’t want me. I could care less about heroin. But the lumpy, old, stinky, aging surfer who is pot has me in his grip and he won’t let me off the board. Ever. We’ll drown together.

There are crows in the cornfield. They peck back the husks and fill their bellies with the sugar-sweet corn. They call each other, and more and more and more come until the blackness of their feathers is the norm and the crows are only noticeable in places where they aren’t.

I could write that.

Do people still write poems? What a bullshitty thing to do. Imagine saying it out loud, “Oh, I wrote a poem.” Worse than “I’m a model,” but not by much.

I’d punch me for that. A solid punch. Fist to bone. Red blood. The surprise factor of the pain. Someone shouting.

But still, a goddamn poem. Take that.

I close my eyes and try thinking only about words to block out the movies that want to come that I don’t want to see. There is one movie, lying in wait for me.

Starring my dad.

And my mom.

I am not going to let it start. The mist is coming off the sprinklers, making small rainbows between me and that blue sky, which is starting to sink down on my chest like a giant knee, pinning me. There are flies, dark clouds of them, shifting the air around. A giant knee. Why did I say knee?

I don’t want to think about knees, not that I can stop thinking about my knee because of the pain of it and because I know it means that there will be a shift. I won’t be an athlete anymore, so I’m going to have to find a different role to play. I’ve exhausted all the ones I can think of.

Maybe now I should be the bad guy. Take this drug thing and run with it. Expand.

Why not?

I’ve already been everything else.

The brain, the jock, the musician, the filmmaker, the athlete, the nurse, the horticulturalist.

I roll over, facedown in the dirt. I can feel it in my nose. Chemicals, rocks, bugs, dirt. I think about earthworms, their long elastic bodies stretching taut, their blind eyes reaching for the darkness. My heart is galloping away from me. Seriously, that’s how my mind says it: “My heart is galloping away from me.” When I thought that, I could see it, a black horse. A black horse trying to breathe but snorting instead. Foaming at the mouth.

There are fewer horses in this town than you’d think. Being a farm town and all. People always imagine horses. Glass gave me a cowboy hat when I moved back here. It’s brown. I told her it wasn’t small-town like on tv. I told her there were no horses.

I think Zach Meyer’s ranch is the only one in town, and even then it’s outside of town. So it really doesn’t count.

I can hardly remember Glass. We dated for almost two years and I can’t really remember anything specific except that she panted when we kissed, like she was only occasionally remembering to come up for air.

I can’t breathe.

I should roll over, but I don’t.

The dirt is filling up my mouth, and then I come up, suddenly choking on it, like I just remembered I couldn’t swim.

Only I, Dexter Pratt, could be enough of an asshole to actually drown myself in a fucking cornfield.

I am going to break up with Tanis. It isn’t her fault. It’s Olivia’s.

“It’s over,” I say in my papery voice. And the words are all scrunched up in my mouth, and so I spit and spit and spit, and it has a tang like tin and not like soil at all.

Tangs are fish. Those bright ones you see in dentist’s offices. When did all dentists decide that fish were de rigueur?

I’m soaked cold from the sprinklers.

I stand up and my knee screams from the pain of it, and for a second I think I might black out. I force myself to stand tall. Just me, taller than the corn, my filthy head sticking up above the surface like a zombie slowly rising from the depths, all wide red eyes and stealth. I wait and there’s nothing but the machine-gun sound of the sprinklers and a bird flying between me and the clouds, making them seem somehow extra3-D. I scratch my hair greedily, like I can’t get enough. Then I head for home, my phone buzzing in my pocket, bloodsucking mosquito buzzing in my ear.

Nothing ever happens in the corn. Not really.

No ax-murdering toddlers.

No blood.

That’s why I like it.

It’s everything that happens when I’m not in the corn that’s the problem.