The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (11 page)

He reaches down past the blanket and pulls out a Ziploc bag containing two big pills. He says: “Roofies.”

I don't respond, but I try to make my face say, “Jesus, I know you are a dissolute behavior problem, but come on, we used to take baths together, and now you're in possession of the date-rape drug.”

“Fuck you! I don't use them. I'm not a fucking rapist.”

I make a point not to change my expression.

“Some dude paid me for something else with a bunch of stuff, and this was some of the stuff! Anyways, you asked! You think I need roofies? YOU need roofies. Date rapist!” He throws the baggie at me. I don't catch it and it hits the floor.

“Think of it this way: by you buying them, nobody who will actually use them will buy them. I mean, nobody who will actually use them for date rape.”

The disgusting thing is that from what little I know about them, they are actually perfect for what we're trying to do.

“How much do you want?” I say.

“Take them,” my brother says. “Merry Christmas.”

I bend down and pick the baggie up off the floor. As we're leaving
his room, we hear Eric shout from down the hall: “Oh, for PETE'S sake.”

My brother looks over and sees Eric sitting on the floor of my room cross-legged, playing Xbox.

“If you're gonna rape your friends, you should get female friends,” my brother says. “You're a real sick fuck.”

“It's called … roprophinol.” I stopped by the computer in my dad's office to go online and look up the actual scientific name before pitching it to Eric. I'm probably still pronouncing it wrong.

“The date-rape drug.”

“Well…”

“That's worse even than the baseball bat!” Eric goes to throw the controller in anger, then thinks better of it and sets it on the carpet in front of him.

“No it's not! If you think about it, it's actually pretty perfect. No human being stays awake through this.”

“Right. It's the date-rape drug.”

“It wasn't DEVELOPED for that, it just so happens that that's what some people … some really bad people … use it for. We could use it for good, here!”

“What good? I keep forgetting what exactly is supposed to be good about this. Either I fall asleep, and my life is abridged in this one little place, and it's true, yes, I can be unconscious, or I just suffer through it awake, or God knows what else, really, since my brain chemistry is undoubtedly … different.”

I shut my bedroom door and come inside and sit down. “I guess all that's, like, fair. Completely. But all this is about is testing the limits of your … thing. Finding out what there is to find out about it without us being, like, scientists. I mean, we could go to scientists, but, like we've talked about…”

I think both of us get visions of The Man, in his black suit and dark glasses, transparent and unkillable.

“You say that it's not a power, that it's just this thing, but we
don't know that. We don't know anything, really. Listen, if you're scared…”

“I am definitely not afraid.”

“Okay. I don't like it either. I don't like it that it's, like, for date rapists. Freaks me out just holding them.”

“Them?”

“Yeah, there's two.”

Eric picks the controller back up, thwaps it against an open palm.

He says: “I have an idea to mitigate the creepiness: we both do one.”

“Ha.”

“I'm serious. I'll take one if you do.”

“Dude.”

“Come on. It's for science.”

And that's how it ends up that the first drug I ever do in my life is a roofie with my best friend in my bedroom above the garage, late afternoon on a Friday with my brother still howling away downstairs.

We get cans of Dr. Pepper from the kitchen. We crack them open. Back in my room, Eric turns on the TV. A movie about frat boys trying to see boobs is playing on Comedy Central.

“So we just like, let them dissolve?” I say.

“I don't know. We should ask your brother.”

I put mine in my Dr. Pepper can and Eric does the same. He swishes his around like you see rich guys swish drinks in cartoons. We watch a few minutes of the frat-boy movie. The frat boys are at the bank applying for a loan, which is somehow convolutedly an important step in getting to see boobs.

“Waiting for mine to dissolve,” I say.

“Me, too,” Eric says.

Now it's a commercial break and neither of us has taken a sip when, halfway through a commercial for the new Medal of Honor game, Eric downs his. Like, chugs the whole thing in one go as I have
only seen my brother and his friends do in the backyard with beers before and after screaming “CASE RACE!” Eric belches righteously.

“You really can't taste it,” Eric says. “That is deeply, deeply evil.”

It now falls on me to down mine, so I do, before the movie is back on, though not half as fast as Eric did.

“Yech. I want to throw up. Not, like, because I'm nauseous, but because I know what's like. In my stomach right now.”

“Affirmative. But throwing up would be …”

“Unscientific.”

We watch the frat boys struggle to build a three-stage rocket, which I really don't get, and I don't feel any different. Then, suddenly, everything gets heavy. Not me, everything else. With a lot of effort I make it to my very heavy bed.

I wake up to Eric punching me in the arm. His punches do not hurt as much as my head. My head hurts a whole lot.

“Ow. Dude! What?”

Eric slumps back against the wall, his eyes splitting the difference between open and closed. It's sort of like when I saw him in his room, that day he told me to go away. Except that day he looked wired and now he looks, well, drugged.

“Lissenathat,” he says.

“What?”

“Listen to that!”

I prop my head up. From the next room there are sounds of my brother and some girl doing whatever.

“While you've been … asleep,” Eric drones out. He is, like, cartoon drunk. It's nighttime outside. I have this headache and I'm starving and still tired, but I do not feel anything like Eric looks and acts like he feels.

Eric raps on the wall with his knuckle, the wall through which you can hear my brother and some girl, at it. “When is it my turn?” he says. “When is it…” and he turns his head toward me, which takes an endless seven seconds, “my turn?”

“Did you sleep, dude?”

“Did not.”

“You sure?”

“Yes! I have NEVER. SLEPT. I would KNOW. Every second kept following every other second. Sequentially.”

“So … that's good?”

“I dunno! You're the one that wanted to do this … is it good? I tried to watch … TV. Couldn't follow anything. No, like, fun drug amusement. Just. A lack of understanding. And then … an hour or whenever ago. This!” Eric knocks on the wall again.

“Is it going away? At all?”

“No.” Eric seems mystified. “What if I never come out of it?”

“You'll come out of it.”

“You don't know that. You don't know that. We don't any of us know. You said that. And now I'm never gonna come out of it.”

“Dude, you are.”

Eric nods like a toddler, emphatic.

“You are. When my brother and his friends do drugs, Tits always freaks out, and my brother says they always take him to IHOP and feed him coffee and pancakes and he's fine. Do you want to go to IHOP?”

“Well, if it works for
Tits.”

“C'mon, let's go to IHOP.”

“I mean, just do for me whatever you would do for Tits.”

I get up, which makes my head really thunder, and reach out to help Eric up.

“Whatever you'd do in this situation for a really good friend. Someone like Tits.”

I finally pull him up and his full weight falls on me. I am still half-narcotized and not super-strong to begin with, and we almost collapse into the Xbox.

“Sorry, forgot,” Eric says. “My legs barely work.”

Supporting a roofied Eric it takes twelve minutes to get to the bus stop. “We've got fifteen minutes until the bus comes,” Eric says. “Take your time.” We get there with three minutes to spare, so I get three minutes of Eric, his head resting on my shoulder, saying, “Tits is a class act. Real pillar of the community,” et cetera.

The bus pulls up and I drag Eric on.

“Eulalio!”

“Eric, what's up, man?” Eulalio says.
“Estás borracho?”

“Así así,”
Eric says.

At IHOP it's just us, a big table full of kids from our school, and a table with a Native American family. I recognize some of the kids from school as kids who put a lot of effort into everything. I'm worried they'll see Eric, sloshed-looking, dangling off me, and think, I don't know what. But they are way too self-involved to notice us. Their food is almost all consumed and now they're each getting up and making a little speech, it seems like. I don't get it but it seems too weirdly healthy and I have no doubt they will all get into their first-choice colleges.

We slouch into a booth and Eric tells me he's not hungry and I can order whatever I want, but when the waitress comes I order us both “The Delicious Dozen,” which is a lot of food, and two cups of coffee, which are “bottomless.”

“I'm not hungry,” Eric says when the waitress leaves.

“You should eat,” I say.

Eric says, “I thought about
TimeBlaze
. We should … shorten the titles. The titles are getting long. More colons than a proctologist.”

I laugh at that.

“I'm the only one. Thought about that, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Of me. Of people with my thing.”

“We don't know that.”

“Sure we do. If there were others, they wouldn't have kept it quiet. They wouldn't keep it secret like I did.”

I think of Brendan Tyler and his left-nut-worthy car and how if anybody else had what Eric had they would probably change their Namespot status to “Nicole Allgraden HAS SUPERPOWERZ YOU GUYS!!!”

“Or if there were, we didn't hear about it 'cause they all got…”

I think we both think of The Man again.

“Someday, when you have kids, you'll pass it on, and there will be more. It's a total genetic advantage. Someday, we'll all be like you.”

“Wouldn't want that, necessarily,” Eric says. “It's Crossfire.”

I laugh and look away because Eric's made me sad. Over at the overachiever table, everyone is packing up. A girl tells another girl that she forgot her balloons. I see the girl, the one reminding the other girl, and she sees me. She has her hair tied back elaborately with ribbons and stuff. She's gone before I think to smile.

“She's pretty,” Eric says.

“You mean that Navajo mom?” I say.

“Oh yeah, her. Just hook me up with whoever you think Tits would like.”

When the food shows up, Eric makes it further into his Delicious Dozen than I do into mine. He drinks coffee before I would necessarily deem it a drinkable temperature. When the bill comes, I pay it, and think about how it's fine because it's all money I had allotted in my mind to paying my brother for whatever chemical solution to Eric's thing we were going to try. So I am paying for this meal with money I saved by getting free roofies. Eric is not the weirdest thing in my life, I think. I am.

Outside IHOP, on the sidewalk, Eric insists he's totally walking-capable.

“Are you sure?”

Eric nods, and it seems like a sober and collected nod. So I let him walk to the bus under his own power.

“It seems unfair that the hash browns are counted as one item in the Delicious Dozen,” Eric says. “They're called ‘browns.' Plural. As in, multiple items. So they should count each brown. Are browns the unit of hash browns?”

Then he falls hard to the pavement.

 

 

“I thought about asking Tony DiAvalo to draw something on my cast.”

It's a little dramatic to call it a cast. It's more like, I don't know, an arm brace. I've seen girls on the soccer team wear them. Eric's arm is just sprained. Some joints are sort of messed up but nothing's broken. He has some minor cuts and abrasions on his face where he hit the street. It actually looks like he gave a pretty good account of himself in a really cool fight.

“I know I said it already, but I am really sorry.”

“I thought I could walk,” Eric says. “It really felt like I could.”

“You were pretty insistent.”

“My mom hates you. I've been over at your house a ton and she
gets called to the emergency room. So that's the great loss here, all the esteem my mom had for you previously.”

“Did she?”

“I don't think so.”

“Anyway. Sorry.”

“It's okay. But can we put a moratorium on testing my limits?”