The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (10 page)

If I'm over at Eric's house I don't have to call but sometimes I do
anyway right in front of Eric's parents so they don't think I'm some child of neglect or something. If I'm going over to Eric's I'll stop off home and put my Xbox in my backpack. There's enough room for it and two controllers if I take all my school stuff out. It comes in handy when Eric and I are tired of making stuff and want to use somebody else's characters to kick the ever-living shit out of each other for a while.

I start to crash at around four or five in the morning, especially if it's a school night. Eric and I will shoot the shit for a while before I fall asleep, on the nights that I do fall asleep. Sometimes I stay awake the whole time despite Eric telling me it's cool and I can sleep whenever I want to. It's sort of like being at a restaurant with somebody and you're hungry and they're not and they tell you it's fine, go ahead and order, so you do and when the food comes no matter how many times they tell you they're really not hungry, they couldn't eat a thing, you can't help but feel awkward about eating. It was like this with my mom once at a Perkins when she visited, and it's how it is with me and Eric and sleep.

Most of the time I sleep right through my weekend days. I get home around nine or ten in the morning, or Eric leaves around then if he's been over, and I spend the whole day in bed with the TV on drifting in and out of naps, half-following whatever it is I'm watching. One Sunday I have TBS on and I'm half-asleep. Some mob movie is on. The same five or six actors that are always in mob movies are in this movie, and at the moment, three or four guys have one guy down on his knees caught in the headlights of this car they've got parked out in the middle of nowhere. I gather the guy on his knees was a crooked cop and people started to catch on to him so he squealed and sold out the mob guys he was crooked for and they're not too happy. One of the goons goes into the trunk and pulls out a bat, and in my almost-dreaming way I get an idea I think I should tell Eric about. I resolve to get up and go tell Eric about it but instead I close my eyes and fall asleep for another hour or two. I wake up around three and the movie is over but I remember the idea so I get up, take a shower, pull on some
clothes, and take the bus over to Eric's. My whole reasoning for the idea or why I thought it was so great is gone with whatever half-dream I was half-having involving mobsters and probably sex and probably my mom or something equally dream-fucked, but the idea is still there and the resolve to tell Eric and the conviction that for some reason it's a great idea.

I'm going to tell Eric that I think if we knock him out, like physically knock him out, maybe that will work. Maybe that's worth a try, in place of waiting for his wisdom teeth to come in, as a way to test his susceptibility to unconsciousness. My hair is dry by the time I get off the bus near Eric's street.

Eric's mom answers the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Lederer.” I still haven't been invited to call her whatever her first name is. She lets me in and tells me Eric's upstairs and hasn't been down all day.

There's a strong possibility, I think, that both of us were lying around in our underwear watching TV all day on opposite sides of town, except one of us was falling in and out of sleep and the other one had his eyes open the whole time with nothing to succumb to when the show he was watching got boring. I go upstairs and knock on Eric's door.

“Go away,” comes Eric's voice from inside.

“Dude, it's me.”

“GO AWAY.”

“What's wrong?”

Nothing for a second, then the sound of the door unlocking. Eric just barely opens the door and sticks his head out of the crack. He looks like an absolute nightmare: his eyes are bloodshot, there are dark circles under them, he looks like he's sweating out malaria or something.

“Just trust me, okay? You have to go. Don't tell my mom. I'll see you later. I'll be fine. Just go.”

“Dude, what's going—”

All of the sudden Eric yelps and turns to look into the room like someone's coming at him and I can't see in the room well enough
to know what's going on but it doesn't sound like there's anybody in there and Eric pulls his head back in and screams and slams the door shut all in one motion like he's trying to keep something from getting out, but like I said, I don't hear anything or anybody except for his breathing, heavy on the other side of the door. Just like he asked me to, I go downstairs. His mom is standing at the bottom of the stairs and asks me if everything's alright in a way that indicates she suspects that not everything is alright.

“Yes. It is,” I say, just like Eric asked me to, and although he didn't ask me to lie in such an unconvincing way, I'm doing my best here. I walk calmly to the front door and see myself out.

I'd think maybe Eric has a drug problem if I didn't spend all my time with him and know for a fact that he'd have no idea where to get heroin, and that he's never expressed interest in anything besides the thousand little nerdy corners of things he gets interested in for a week at a time before discarding and maybe, MAYBE the slightest interest in girls, and even then not really girls but more the idea of girls. I'd think maybe Eric has some tropical disease if I didn't know for a fact he hasn't been to any third-world jungles recently.

I wait for the bus for a little while. I wait but as I'm waiting I think, “It'll be faster just to walk,” and even though I know that isn't true by that time I'm already committed to walking.

Eric calls me that night. My phone vibrates on the edge of my nightstand. My dad pointed out one time that my minute use makes up only 1 percent of our “family plan” bill, and he and my brother had a good laugh about that, but one month when my brother sent more than five thousand text messages we both got our phones taken away.

“Hey, man.”

“Hi. I'm sorry about earlier.”

“Yeah, what the fuck?”

“It's another thing with … the thing.” For somebody who usually
throws around so many words, when Eric talks about his “thing” he gets extremely vague. “Every couple of weeks, I'll have a twenty-four hour-period where … I don't know. Essentially it's miserable. I start hallucinating. These extremely vivid hallucinations. I get headaches. I sort of have to lock myself away and there's nothing to do until it passes.”

You can't sleep it off, I almost say but don't. “Jesus, dude. You never told me about this.”

“Yes, I don't know, I guess … I know it's troublesome. I've never seen myself from the outside, I guess. Was it bad?”

“You looked really bad.”

“Jeez, I'm sorry, I guess I should've warned you about it before …”

“How does your mom not know? Or your dad?”

“I just shut myself in my room. I just shut myself in my room and they don't really bother me.”

I think about the way I spent all day, and think that I guess it's not that implausible for a teenage boy to spend the whole day in his room, with nobody bothering him and no reason for them to, especially on a weekend.

Monday at lunch I'm Eric, which means I'm the one who's spent all weekend obsessing over something, and I'm the one with diagrams and charts and pitches and ideas. Well, I don't really have diagrams or charts or anything written down, even. But I have been thinking about this one thing a lot and I can't wait to talk about it.

“So this thing this weekend,” I say.

At first I was mad at Eric for not telling me about these fits when he told me about his not-sleeping thing. And I'm mad at him for not letting us talk about or even name his “thing,” beyond it being just a “thing.” Remaining nameless makes it harder to talk about, which is probably what he wants. But either way, it is a part of his thing. It makes it more real and it means that whatever we
call it, or don't call it, it might go beyond just Eric lacking the ability to sleep. And of course it does, and I always sort of knew it did, but we can't really explore it unless he lets us, and he hasn't.

“I have a theory about it,” I say. “When you sleep, your body works out shit in your subconscious. That's what dreams are. But you don't sleep so you never have a chance to work any of that stuff out. So it just builds up and builds up and it comes out when you're awake. Which is always. But in these, like, superconcentrated bursts.”

A second goes by. I'm waiting for Eric to say it's genius. Instead he says, “Yeah, I know.”

“You know? Know what?”

“I know what they are. I've had them my whole life.”

“Well first of all, you don't know what they are, you don't know anything about this or where it comes from or what causes it, you said so. So you don't ‘know' it any more than I do, and I've just … like I said, it's a theory. And the other thing is, you pretend like you don't think about this, your secret, but that's bullshit, you think about everything, you obsess over details, and this has to be the biggest most interesting thing in your life, and you're telling me you don't think about it? Of course you think about it. Like, you already ‘know' why you've had these hallucinations, you've thought about it, so quit acting like …”

“Acting like what?” Eric says.

“Like this isn't important. Or I guess stop acting like it isn't amazing. Just fucking admit to the fact that you're special.”

“I told you,” Eric says, “people can't find out because …”

“I know!” I say. “They'll cart you away and hook you up to machines and whatever. I'm not saying you have to put it in the school newspaper.”

“Okay I'm special,” Eric says.

“If we let it this could be an adventure,” I say.

“I don't see how,” Eric says.

“Somebody finds out they have special abilities, and then the adventure begins.”

We both grew up on comic books and
Star Wars
. I just can't understand how he wouldn't be high all the time off the fact that he might be the chosen one.

Eric's elaborate self-made lunches come with their own brought-from-home silverware. He's scraping the tines of his fork on the concrete in the shadowy corner of the loading dock.

“Sorry if it scared you,” Eric says. “And thank you for not telling anybody.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“If you want. If you want, we could look into … what it takes for me to not be conscious.”

“Serious?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Friday after school.”

It's quiet and then the bell rings.

“Well, we're NOT hitting me over the head with a bat. We just aren't.”

“No, right, of course. It wasn't an ‘idea' per se. Just more of, like, a concept.”

Eric and I are walking home after school on Friday. Other kids' cars speed by on the main road that runs past our school. The Drama Club has put flyers for their upcoming production underneath everybody's windshield wipers and nobody's taking them out, just driving away and letting them fly off on their own, so the street is a mess of Day-Glo-orange paper. Brendan Tyler's new car, the one I overheard some idiot saying he'd give his left nut to have, accelerates to pass some band girl in a Camry. I am certain I would rather have both testicles than that car, even if it means I have to walk everywhere.

“So the mob method is out. Your wisdom teeth aren't coming in? Like at all?”

Eric runs his tongue around his mouth for effect. “No.”

“Okay. Well, I still don't think Children's Tylenol PM is a very good measure of how narcotics affect your thing.”

“Narcotics? I'm not sure I'm all that excited about where this seems to be heading.”

“Relax. I don't mean like, black tar heroin. There are lots of substances that are legal and safe that we can get our hands on.”

I don't see my brother's car speeding by, and I wonder if that means he's home already.

“It's not for me, it's for a friend.”

“That glasses kid?”

“… No.”

“Really? Cause you pretty much have like one friend.”

“If somebody wanted to really get knocked out, like, there's no way they could stay awake. Not enough to kill anybody or get anywhere close—”

“Pussy!” Tits says.

Tits is standing over a laptop on a stool in our garage. When I came in the laptop was playing a tinkly GarageBand rhythm and my brother was howling into a microphone hooked up to the laptop in his best imitation of all the scream-o bands he likes and Tits and his other friends were looking at each other and nodding like “YES, THIS IS IT.”

“Six Valiums. Or as we call it, Alan's mom's lunch.”

“Fuck yaself!” Alan says from where he's slumped in the corner in his green hoodie that says THE WORLD'S BEST FUCKING SKATERS.

“Or, you know what? Oh … shit,” my brother says. “Follow me. ONE MOMENT, CUNTS, ONE MO-MENT!” he screams to his buddies in his soccer hooligan voice. He drops the mike on the concrete garage floor.

“Hey!” Alan yells. I guess it's his microphone.

My brother goes into the house, and I follow him. On the stairs, he says: “One week they're like, egging your friend's house like a baby, next week they're scoring drugs from you. THEY GROW UP SO FAST!” He punches the wall.

Ow,” he says.

My brother's room is a refrigerator compared to my room. My room's over the garage and insanely warm even with the air full blast. My brother also keeps his room surprisingly clean, for someone with so many personality problems.

“This is NOT where I keep my stash. So if you ever go looking for my stash, don't look here, because this is NOT where it is.” He goes to where he keeps his stash: third drawer down underneath a Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions blanket we got for Christmas the year the Suns almost beat the Bulls. I was a very heartbroken six-year-old after they lost and more or less quit liking sports. Same thing happened when it turned out Spider-Man's Peter Parker was actually a clone and had to go into exile: I was hurt and abandoned comics. I get burned and swear off whole parts of my life. I miss comics more.