The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (28 page)

One kid, Eric Lederer, our high school, his dad's gun, “homemade weaponry,” and doubtlessly evil plans foiled by our crack security
staff and the local PD. That's the official story. He is now in federal custody, because some of the “homemade weaponry” may have strayed into domestic-terrorism territory.

My friend Eric has dirt all over his name, but mine is clean, at least in an official sense. According to my brother, the conventional wisdom at the school is that I had something to do with it, or failing that, that I knew enough to leave school that day before everything went down. I'm not there to hear it. I finish that year at a Catholic school where some of my brother's friends go, and I do my junior and senior years at another school on the north side of the city. Everywhere I go kids seem to have a vague understanding that I am not to be trusted. Someone tells me there is a Namespot group made by some kids at my old school called “DARREN BENNETT, HOW COME YOU GUYS WANTED TO KILL US?”

I could never rejoin the college kids at the house with the lemon tree from which Eric and I were going to conquer the world, because just about every kid who doesn't go out of state goes to that college and it would be the same kids who suspected I was ruined. I had to go across the country if I ever wanted to salvage anything of what we had that week or two where the world seemed like anything could happen in it. And my grades were okay and my record was clean, so I went.

“Homemade weaponry.” That hurts the most. Like we never dreamed up a universe and made parts of it real and almost got away with it. Like Eric never meant that anything could exist. Like Eric never existed.

But of course, he did exist. That's why we have Symnitol now. I'm 90,000 percent sure they got him, they juiced his brain and precipitated it and all the other shit my lab partner used to gape at me in honors chemistry for not understanding, and now experts are debating whether it's a good or a bad thing that medically the human race no longer has to sleep. They are not going to be debating for long.

The world had something in its pure unadulterated form and I fucked up and now it's accessible to everybody, people who won't have the scruples to go out into the desert when the things they imagine start becoming real, people without the imagination to form things that deserve to become real, their thoughts will start appearing too, one-dimensional, all violence and fucked-upedness. The world as it isn't, it will be.

And it's a little bit of that stuff that's in me now, a little bit of Eric that has let me stay up all night writing this down without once feeling tired, and a messed-up thing is that the kid who could've told it way better than I could is gone. A kid who dreamed so hard it exploded from his head and into the world, promising everything. And I sold him out hard.

The only hope I have is that if I take enough of this stuff I will push myself to Eric's levels really fast, and if
TimeBlaze
was our story and he made it real, then this will be my story and all of the sudden it will be real and he will be back. He won't materialize; suddenly he will have been there all along. I will turn around and he will be standing there, a nerd standing over my desk, confident, not shifting from foot to foot, telling me my drawings are good. And I can tell him how sorry I am.

This book would not have been written if Eliza Skinner hadn't told me “you should write a novel” one day on the N train. Thanks are also due to my family, Dianne McGunigle, Greg Walter, Phil Cassese, Meggie McFadden and the rest of DERRICK, Daniel Greenberg, Gerry Howard, Tim O'Connell and everyone else at Vintage, Charlie Rubin, Emilie Spiegel, Steve Stout, Amy Eckman, WNBC, the UCB Theater, and anyone who read an early draft and gave me notes and encouragement. Also important were pop-punk music and the state of Arizona.