The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (9 page)

“This isn't going to change anything, is it?” Eric says when I see him for the first time Monday at lunch. “My thing?”

And that's what we end up calling it. “Eric's thing.” Not “Eric's mutation” or “Eric's evolutionary leap” or “Eric's freak ability.” Although if I had my way we'd call it all those things and get to the bottom of what it is without tipping off anyone who might want to use it for evil and in the meantime use it for good, all while nobody has any idea and keeps on thinking we're two kids who don't talk to anybody and don't eat in the lunchroom, all while everybody keeps on not knowing we exist at all.

“No,” I say, “it doesn't have to.” But it's pretty hard to keep drawing time travelers and biomodified quasi-humans when the real fucking thing is sitting next to you, eating pretzel sticks and whistling a Brazilian jazz tune. Eric's really into Brazil this week.

On Monday night my brother finds me in my room doing my
homework. Apparently he has not forgotten that four nights ago my friend and I tried to egg his friend's house and made him run to chase us when he'd really rather not because he smokes half a pack a day and probably interrupted his best friend getting some from his girlfriend or whatever girl that was, and worst of all, got away so he didn't get instant release right at the moment when he was at his angriest. And now he has to work hard to get angry again and that's a pain so he takes that out on me, too. I barely feel it as he whales on me. He has no idea. Nobody does. My friend is a Greek god. My friend is an alien. My friend and I are the only people in the world who know that the world is not as simple and boring as everybody thinks it is and my friend is the only piece of evidence that that is true. I hit back a little so I don't come off totally weird, but my brother works out and I don't and it has no effect. It doesn't matter. The joke is on him and Cecelia Martin and the rest of the world, and I would laugh if that wouldn't come off totally weird in the middle of all the punching.

“So I've been pricing screenwriting software, and it's pretty expensive, but once we sell the
TimeBlaze
franchise we'll be—”

“Have you ever gone to the dentist?”

“What?”

“The dentist.”

“Yes, of course I've been to the dentist. Is this some subtle way of telling me to brush more often?”

“My brother had his wisdom teeth out a couple years ago, and they put him under. Like, gas.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think that would work on you? Do you think you'd go under?”

“I really have no idea. Do you remember what I told you about Children's Tylenol PM when I was a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“I imagine it would have the same effect.”

“That's Children's Tylenol PM versus industrial-strength anesthesia. That's like a bowie knife versus the A-bomb. If that doesn't knock you out…”

“That's assuming I want to be ‘knocked out.'”

“Don't you?”

Eric doesn't say anything. It's lunchtime on Tuesday, the day after my brother whaled on me for the Halloween incident. We are out by the loading dock. My Styrofoam soda cup is full of teeth marks and Eric's lunch is as elaborate as ever.

“Well anyway, it's not about wanting to get knocked out, it's about testing the limits of your power!”

“Can we please not call it a ‘power'? It's not a ‘power'! I'm not enabled to do anything spectacular. There's just something I can't do.”

“It's all how you think of it. It's, like, either you can't sleep, which implies that you would if you could, or you don't HAVE to sleep, you have the power of never sleeping—”

“Can we just NOT call it a power? It's just … a thing.”

“Okay, a thing.”

Eric starts nesting his Tupperware containers, one inside another, and then puts the whole thing in his backpack like he does every day.

“All I'm saying is, if your teeth start hurting, it might be your wisdom teeth coming in, and that might be a good opportunity to test the limits of your … thing.”

“I'll be sure and let you know,” Eric says.

We go over to Eric's house after school instead of my house so Eric doesn't get the same treatment from my brother that I got. We are roughing out a gang of zombie outlaws that pursue Cowboy Praetoreous across the night-deserts of Hell County. Eric is writing their bios and stats on the back of profile pictures I've drawn.

“I like that he still has the noose around his neck,” Eric says, “and there's a bite taken out of his shin.”
He was bit by the gang as he kicked on the hangin' tree
, Eric writes on the back. For each different
timestream, the bios are in a different voice, or if not that, a different style of lettering.

“So your body is constantly regenerating itself without the aid of sleep,” I say. “What does that feel like?”

“It doesn't feel like anything,” Eric says, “or at least not anything I would notice as out of the ordinary.”

“Oh,” I say.

His parents invite me to stay for dinner. They are normal and boring. Nothing about them says they'd given birth to the next stage in human evolution. Eric's dad looks nerdy like Eric. Eric's mom looks like she could be an English teacher. They both work in computers. They're not divorced, and I guess that's unusual enough for this neighborhood that maybe there is something mutated in their genes. They ask me about my dad and my brother and how school is going. Dinner is less fancy than the stuff Eric makes for himself.

“Can Darren stay over tonight?” Eric asks. He hasn't asked me if I want to, but he knows my dad won't care and he knows I'd rather not go home until my brother has forgotten about being mad at me and has instead started being mad at the booker at the Pisscutter for not booking enough real hardcore bands or mad at Cathy for cigarette-burning the roof of his car near the dome light, both things he has been very mad about before.

Eric's mom says it's fine with them if it's okay with my dad and I stand up from the table and go to another room, take out my cell phone, and have the following conversation:

“Hey, Dad?”

“Hello?”

“Hey, I'm gonna stay over at Eric's tonight.”

“Okay. Got your phone on you?”

“Yep.”

“Alright. Be safe.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I go into the kitchen, where Eric's parents are doing the dishes,
and when I say “Thank you, Mrs. Lederer,” she doesn't say, “Call me ———,” her first name, like parents of your friends sometimes do.

“He looks normal up-front,” Eric says, “but his back is full of holes,” referring to a zombie outlaw who in life was betrayed by a member of his gang. “Now, resurrected, he always sits facing the door.”

“Space dust,” I say, “or cosmic rays. I mean, I know those things sound comic-booky, but honestly, ANYTHING could be possible.”

“Can we not talk about it anymore?” Eric says. “Let's just focus on the project.”

“Sorry,” I say. “It's just a lot more interesting than anything we've come up with—”

“You don't like what we come up with?”

“It's not that, it's just this thing is REAL. I mean, you really wanted me to believe you, and I do, but part of me believing it is, I don't know, it's something you've known all your life or almost all of it so it doesn't bother you, but me, Jesus, I just got used to life not being everything you think it's going to be or might be when you're a kid, and your thing kind of makes it seem like maybe that's not true, like maybe stuff like this is possible, I mean, it's not possible, but here it is anyway.”

“I guess I can't blame you for being curious,” Eric says, “but if your friend couldn't walk, everything you asked them wouldn't be about how they couldn't walk. The fact that they couldn't walk wouldn't be the sole focus of your friendship.”

“No, but if you just found out they couldn't walk,” I say, “and besides, that comparison doesn't even make sense, everybody wants to be able to walk, walking makes life easier, but I'll bet you if you gave them the option there are tons of people who'd say they'd never sleep if they didn't have to. I probably wouldn't. Sleep is terrible. It's like, you have to do it, your body forces you to, makes you want to. I mean, sometimes you dream, sometimes it
actually feels like time is passing but you never really get to enjoy being asleep. Mostly it's just like fast-forwarding to the next day. You go to school and come home and do your homework and by that time you're tired and you go to sleep and you wake up and you have to go to school again. And if you do stay up to put off having to go to school the next day, when you DO have to go to school you're exhausted and it's even worse than it would've been otherwise. It robs you of all this time. Which I guess means you've had all that time. I guess … I guess that means you're like twice as old as any of us.”

“How do you mean?”

“You've been awake while the rest of us have been asleep. You've actually had more life, in terms of being awake and aware of things. So you're twice as old, in terms of experience. You're like thirty.”

“I believe the average human being spends a third of their life sleeping, so technically I'm about twenty.”

“But still! There's something about you that's like, this kid is not like other kids, this kid is older, this kid knows something we don't.”

“You wouldn't think that if you didn't know about my thing. You're only saying that because you want to see me as different because now you know I'm different.”

“Nuh-uh! No, man, the first day when you stood in front of my desk and you wanted to know what I was drawing, I noticed there was something about the way you stood, like, you didn't shift from foot to foot or anything like people usually do when they take the chance of getting up out of their seat and crossing the room and talking to somebody, and having to stand up in front of somebody and put yourself on the line, any time I've ever done something like that I get all weird and fidgety.”

“I wasn't asking you out, I just wanted to know what you were drawing.”

“Regardless, dude, I noticed something different.”

And it's true, I did. Those drawing books that don't help, something
they always tell you to do is observe people in real life. The way they stand, the “line” of their posture, so you can break it down into lines and basketballs and potato sacks and whatever. So I notice when somebody has their feet planted, when they're standing straight up, as opposed to slouching or moving around like they're nervous. Not that it helps. I have a hard time drawing anybody not standing straight up with their arms at their sides. I don't stand as straight as the people I draw. Not at all.

“Anyway, I'm sorry, you're probably sorry you told me about it now,” I say. “It's just that if I had what you have I think I'd be more excited about it.”

“You wouldn't.”

I think for a second about how it's weird that I've been drawing on the floor in Eric's room, papers spread around me, propped up on my elbows, whatever page I'm drawing on placed on top of a comic-book trade paperback. It makes me feel really young.

“I'm not sorry I told you,” Eric says. “It's nice being up with someone to talk to.”

“I can lay off if you want,” I say.

Eric shrugs. It's four in the morning. I yawn.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” Eric says.

I don't. “You know what it must be like?” I say. “Crossfire.”

“Like our character?” Eric says. We have a character named Crossfire. Every part of him is a gun.

“No, there was this game when we were kids, Crossfire. A board game. It had awesome commercials, it looked awesome. Like two of my friends in first grade had it, and whenever I'd go over to their houses I'd want to play it, but they would never want to. They had Crossfire, they knew it wasn't as awesome as the commercials made it look. And you know what? It did suck. But it seemed cool to me because I didn't have it, so I didn't know.”

“It doesn't suck,” Eric says, “not completely.” He smiles. “Not as much as Crossfire.”

On one of his night walks, Eric found a Super Nintendo on the
sidewalk with a bunch of things people were throwing out. We play old-school games until it's really totally morning.

I realize I'm going to be wearing the same clothes at school today that I wore yesterday. Eric offers to let me borrow one of his shirts, but they're all the kind of short-sleeved polo shirts he always wears that I would never wear, so I say I'm okay. I wear this black T-shirt pretty much every day anyway, and these same jeans, and either way I doubt anyone will notice. We put on our backpacks. School is within walking distance of Eric's house.

Walking to school I have that weird euphoric giddiness you get from being up all night. It's sunny, of course, but it's the first cool day this year, it's the desert version of “crisp,” like 70 degrees, but noticeably different. It might be 90 again by lunch but for now it's cool. I will crash by third period but for now everything is beautiful. I wonder if Eric ever gets like this or if it's all pretty much the same, since he never has to get sleep he never gets giddy from the lack of it. I don't ask, though. We stop at the gas station around the corner from school to get Mountain Dew and something to eat for breakfast.

Our routine goes pretty much like this: I go over to Eric's house after school or Eric comes over to my house after school. If Eric is over at my house he calls his parents to see if it's cool if he stays for dinner, except there's really no dinner to stay for a lot of times, it's just whatever dinner we can scrounge up or whatever my dad orders in. Occasionally he barbecues something or we go out to eat and we bring Eric along and Eric stares in awe as my dad and my brother swear at each other playfully in the middle of Outback Steakhouse. Sometimes when my dad's not around Eric cooks whatever we have in the kitchen, so he's gotten pretty creative with eggs and frozen steaks and five-pound freezer bags of stir-fry vegetables from Costco.