I can’t make this stop.
If this isn’t real, I can’t see how it isn’t. I am trying to force my eyes to stay open. It’s dizzying—I’m twirling around in the air. My arms and legs are so loose, they keep whipping around and it’s like I’m hitting myself. I force myself to not pass out. I force myself to keep breathing, even though the light does not feel like air. And when I look, it appears that the white light is going in through my mouth like smoke. It is going into me and I can’t stop it.
I’m really genuinely piss-my-pants scared and I want to get off this fucking ride. Now. I can’t even pretend this is a movie that I’m making, because it isn’t and I’m not. And the camera is somewhere under Chelsea’s old desk under the stairs and I haven’t touched it.
I’m going to die, I think.
I keep breathing it all in. It stinks and I feel sick, but I make myself not throw up.
“Stop this,” I try to say, but it comes out more like I’m gargling, which I guess I am. Gargling the light. And the light is bubbling in the back of my throat where the air is supposed to go and so it can’t, and the light is suffocating me and I am going to… I try counting but I can’t get past ten without feeling like letting go, passing out. I try picturing my mom and my sister. And my dad. I try picturing Olivia. I try picturing Tanis.
I picture the lake.
The light is water.
That’s all. Just water.
I know how to swim, because my dad taught me.
I say that part out loud, only not.
I am following the bubbles. I kick my legs. I don’t want to fall or sink.
My hands are in my pockets. There are stones in my pockets. Dozens of stones. Stones are pouring out of my pockets. Orange ones. They’re warm.
I smash to the ground. It hurts, but I’m awake. I’m aware. I force myself to sit up, but it’s like gravity is different. I wish I was high. If I was high, I’d wouldn’t be so terrified. I’d be able to sort this out.
“Help,” I say out loud, just to see if I can talk.
And then…
This is the part where you say, What the goddamn fuck about this is real?
Because…
Olivia is next to me. Her hand on my arm. Her hand.
My Olivia. Who I made up. Her hand. She was never real. Was she?
I never gave her a name before. She was just The Girl. She was no one. She had no name. She was never meant to have a name.
Her hand, broken nails. Wait. Not nails.
Claws. Fucking claws. Her hand has turned pale blue. Then lavender. Her nails are not nails. Her nails are stones, and they fall away and under them are the claws of a bird that isn’t a bird.
I think I am screaming.
Her eyes are black vacant pools.
“You came,” she says, but in a way that suggests what she’s saying is dirty. She leans forward and kisses me. I do not want to kiss her back, but then I am kissing her back. I think I lose consciousness. Am I conscious? My whole body is being touched; I cannot pinpoint sensation or feeling.
I look down, like I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself naked, and then…
I’m falling…
Again.
And…
I’m in the dirt. I’m in the dirt and I’m naked. I don’t know where I am. Where am I?
I lie on the ground. I can taste dirt in my mouth.
I spit. I sit up. I try to get my bearings. I don’t like this. I liked it better when it was a movie, even if it was a movie with no camera and no crew and no director and no actor. Because movies are fiction and they are not real.
I have lost. I am lost. I…
Fell.
Or jumped.
I took my clothes off first because I am…
Naked.
Just like he was.
I didn’t really; it wasn’t me. And why am I in charge anyway?
Olivia.
I am not broken; I can get up and I can run and there I am, running in the corn again and the dirt is soft under my bare feet. And then I am in the corn maze. I’m right in the center, marked by a statue of Our Joe’s dead wife, Roxanne. She looks like she is dancing in a ballet, something that old Roxanne likely never did. She looks young, which she wasn’t. I touch the statue, and it is wet and solid under my hand and definitely there. I am definitely here.
“Roxanne,” I say, and my voice sounds normal. Like my voice.
Roxanne looks exactly like Tanis. She has the same facial disfigurement. It’s genetic. Roxanne is Tanis’s grandmother. But you knew that. I knew that.
Roxanne, Tanis says, is the one who found the pictures, and when she did, Our Joe killed her.
Yes, that is what Tanis says.
What Tanis said.
At the lake.
And why Our Joe will pay.
And why I had to make it so big. Cinematic.
My fucking idea because I am the director of everything (of nothing) and she must love me or why would she agree? Why would she let me?
A crop circle?
And it was here. In this corn maze. What Our Joe did. Where Tanis tried to run. “But I wasn’t there,” I say out loud, and I am crying and I couldn’t save her and I can’t save her now and I don’t know what she wants from me and I still don’t know how the crop circle can save her.
LIVE.
Tanis was once running naked in this maze crying and she couldn’t get out.
I am naked in this maze. But there is a difference. I can get out. I can breathe. I can do this. I have done this maze before. Naked makes no difference. My penis flaps against my leg.
Our Joe hurt her and took pictures, and the pictures are in boxes in the basement of his house, and those boxes are labeled Christmas 1994.
And the RCMP will find them in the raid that we have staged that has to do with the crop circle. That has to do with nothing. But it would look good on film if someone was filming it. But no one is filming it. And this is real life. You can’t make the plot go the way you need it to go when you make it up in the first place.
Between here and my house, there are a dozen people. Not really reporters anymore; now it’s just handfuls of freaks and conspiracy theorists and kids getting high.
I try to think.
I’m shivering.
It’s not like I can go back up the cliff and get my clothes.
Why didn’t I die anyway? How can someone fall and not only survive but be fine? How far was it?
I make a decision. I start to slowly walk out of the corn maze. I speed up. I start to run. Who cares? There are so many stars up there. Other planets. Other lives. Billions on this one and billions out there. And I’m just one kid, running naked through the corn, hoping like hell not to run into some jackass with a camera.