The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

“And your subconscious mind works a bunch of things out while you sleep. Sometimes apparently you can go to sleep with something on your mind, and when you wake up, you just KNOW the answer, because your brain worked it out without you having to tell it to.”

  “I know.”

  “And besides, you’re legally insane after seventy-two hours! I saw this on Court TV, this guy used it as his defense in court when he murdered his wife, he had insomnia—”

  “Do I seem legally insane?”

  “Sort of! You’re telling me you don’t have to sleep—”

  “I CAN’T sleep.”

  “You’re telling me you can’t sleep! That seems insane.”

  “I don’t know. I just can’t do it and I’ve never had to and I’ve never been able to. I’ve tried. Trust me. I’ve tried. I don’t know.”

  “Dude.” I don’t know what to say. Then I think of something. “Prove it.”

  “It’s not a trick I can do. You would just have to sit and watch me not sleep.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  We go up to Eric’s bedroom. There’s a couch and a desk with a computer and a TV with a PlayStation 2 hooked up and three or four bookshelves completely full and a ton of other stuff. There’s a bed that looks like it was made up by a Marine, sheets perfect like in a furniture showroom.

  “Who sleeps in that bed, then?” I say. “Not me,” Eric says.

  It’s one in the morning when I settle in to watch Eric not sleep.

  “Dude, if you’re joking, now would be the time to tell me that you’re joking.”

  “Again: not joking,” Eric says, sitting down on the couch. “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “I mean, while we wait. While I prove it by not sleeping. I rented Bastion Of Heroes, the co-op mode is actually very—”

  “No. Sorry. Let’s just—” I don’t even know what “let’s just.” I shut up and collapse against the opposite wall of the room and slide down into a sitting position. And I guess I’m willing to stay this way until Eric tells me what his deal is.

  I am completely mind-fucked sideways by this. And that’s only assuming right up front that it’s not true. If what Eric’s saying is false, which it has to be, then it makes everything I know about him false, because I cannot imagine a reason for him to tell me this, this absolutely made-up story. It’s like when you’re taking a standardized test with one of those bubble sheets and you’re humming along, filling in the circles the whole way like they show at the top of the sheet, and you go to fill in the answer for question 58 and you realize the next empty circle is 59, you’ve been one number off for God knows how long, maybe since the teacher flipped over her one-hour egg timer. It might only be one number but now everything is wrong. I do not know him and I do not feel comfortable doing anything with him but sitting and waiting until he falls asleep, and this can all be over, our friendship probably included.

  Because you can’t just believe somebody, can you? I mean it: kids exaggerate how many people the party bus they’re renting this weekend can accommodate and the length of their family vacations in Greece. The general default pose of anyone towards anyone else on any subject is a sort of “yeah, sure, okay,” a general assumption that everyone is pretty much full of shit. Or if they’ve been honest, that this honesty is hiding some sort of deeper, far worse full-of-shitness. So if Eric seemed straight-up and genuine about everything so far then he was really only prepping me for this, the big crazy, or the big prank, or something. Some legitimately intensely delusional shit or some weird disgusting lie I can’t even begin to figure out a reason for. Everybody lies a little about everything for no reason and here I’m supposed to treat this huge, world-altering fantasy thing better, with more trust than I would treat Carter Buehl telling me the Hummer limo he rented for prom is literally a block long?

  Thing is, I don’t care about Carter’s block-long rape-mobile, but Eric’s thing, I would love for it to be true. And I think that’s part of the reason I’m pissed (because I am, among many other things, pissed right there against the wall): How dare he tell me something I want so badly to be true that so clearly isn’t, and can never be?

  Eric’s house is quiet. He has no brothers to lead in cackling herds of friends at two in the morning on a school night, or, if they’re alone, turn the TV in their room on full-volume and then get on their computer and put headphones on so they forget how on and loud the TV still is. Just the sound of two parents sleeping soundly in the same bed somewhere else upstairs, which isn’t a sound at all, and the occasional creak of the house settling or whoosh of the air-conditioning coming on.

  “I want you to know that it’s okay if you don’t believe me right away.”

  “Please shut up.”

  Books are everywhere. You could make a pretty good case for this room actually being part of a larger room and having been partitioned off by walls of books. There’s a record player on the floor with three milk crates full of records next to it. A box full of disassembled action figures. Some electrical equipment I can’t identify as part of one thing or another. The computer and the TV and the PlayStation. Stacks of magazines I haven’t heard of. More books. Where there is wall that you can see, including what I have my back up against, TimeBlaze art is tacked up. Most of it is stuff we’ve worked on together, but every so often there’s a movie poster mocked up in Eric’s really-can’t-draw style. He doesn’t go stick figures, the cowardly route of most people who’ve accepted the fact that they suck at drawing; it’s just this mushy little-kid assemblage of characters with arms and legs that don’t bend, just curve, big black circles for mouths, and eyes that can only convey the emotion “these shapes represent eyes.” And more books.

  For all that, it’s not messy. My room has probably one tenth the stuff in it and is ten times as messy because everything doesn’t look like it was placed where it is on purpose, just put aside without any thought before it could make its final stop in the dishwasher or the trash can or the hamper.

  Eventually I have to pee. Then I really, really have to pee. I get up off the floor and tell Eric I have to go to the bathroom.

  “Alright. It’s down the hall on your left.”

  “Thanks. And let me guess: you don’t ever have to pee, either.” I say it a little angrier than I should if we’re still friends, and I feel bad. Then I think I shouldn’t feel bad, I didn’t put us here, I’m not the one who said some dumb shit about not being able to sleep. But Eric laughs a little, like it’s a joke. I leave and when I come back from the bathroom I am hoping to open the door and see Eric curled up on the couch with his eyes closed but he’s still sitting straight up and when I come in he looks up at me, not mad or happy or anything. Not really anything but awake.

  The next morning Eric and I walk to school. It has the feeling of me walking Eric to school, like I have a gun pressed to Eric’s back out of sight of everyone and I’m instructing him to just act natural. Walking has the added advantage of me not having to stare directly at him: as long as he’s still walking, he’s not sleeping.

  At school I shadow him. I am five minutes late to all my classes because after each of Eric’s classes I go in and tell each one of his teachers I’m conducting research for an article in the school newspaper on stress and fatigue and Eric Lederer is my guinea pig and did you notice him sleeping in class today? All of them say no and after enough teachers telling me I picked the absolute wrong kid and Eric is always “attentive” and “polite” and “one bright little guy” I start to feel like Eric’s dad at an extended parent-teacher night. Mrs. Cartwright says, “You look like you could use some duermo yourself, chico.”

  In English, the class we have together, I give Eric the Cecelia Martin looking-at-a-guy-who-blew-up-a-bus stare and never waver, but he isn’t anything less than one bright kid, like any other day. He never plants his elbow on the desk so his hand can hold his head somewhat upright while he dozes off mid-lecture, my personal favori
te sleeping-in-class position. And at lunch he’s out by the loading dock as usual and I suck down a Mountain Dew, watch him, and neither of us says anything.

  None of this means anything, of course. I haven’t slept either, and I’m not claiming to have some superhuman ability. Today despite being unable to focus on anything in any class because I’m late to each one and can’t think about anything but Eric and his made-up thing and how knocked flat I am, I try super-hard not to sleep in any classes just to prove that hey, look, I can do it too. If somebody were shadowing me around school today, they wouldn’t see me close my eyes, either, though they would see me get more and more irritable and death-resembling and every so often they would see my eyelids bang together involuntarily for just a half a moment longer than a blink is, as my head dips down just slightly until I pull it back up and in my head yell at my eyelids and neck for being so fucking weak.

  I come upon Eric at his locker after school and once he’s done putting books away and taking books out and he zips up his backpack we take up our formation again and walk to his house, and I am so goddamn tired. It’s very hot for November first, and sweating on the way home, Eric’s steps next to mine an indication that he hasn’t given in yet, the whole thing becomes clear to me. Cecelia Martin and her friends pointing at Eric talking to me, quizzing me after class about our friendship: Eric and Cecelia are in cahoots. Far from enemies, they are way older friends than me and Eric. They really are friends, unlike me and Eric. She was not in English class today, so they could not pull back the curtain on their sick, ingenious, super-labor-intensive prank in front of everyone, the nerdy kid and the quasi-Goth girl revealed to be secretly in league against the kid so awkward he does not belong anywhere. It’s either a very committed class project on trust or magical realism or The Picture of Dorian Gray, somehow, or just a gotcha, good for some cruel laughter. So: if he really wants to hold on until Monday, sleepless until the next time we have English, so he and Cecelia can unveil this thing to maximum effect, that’s fine. I can wait. There is Mountain Dew in this world.

  Settling back in on Eric’s floor, I have that feeling you get when you walk into school on, say, a Wednesday: Fuck, here I am again, the same shit guaranteed by the fact that everything and everyone is obeying the same schedule and sitting in the same seats, all of us students and teachers, bored to shit. At least at school everyone’s changed clothes overnight. I am in my clothes from Halloween. So is Eric. Somehow this is evidence to me.

  “Why didn’t you change before we went to school today?”

  “Oh. I guess I didn’t think of it. I have to remind myself oftentimes, and this morning I guess I had other things on my mind.”

  “Hmm.”

  “If it’s alright with you I’m going to start in on my homework.” Compared to staring at an unsleeping kid every second when I want so badly to sleep myself, homework sounds kind of refreshing. But pulling out my notebook and doing Spanish freewriting right now seems like surrender somehow. Eric takes out our new English book, Billy Budd. Maybe he sleepwalks in a sitting position by keeping his eyes open and placing a different-colored Post-It on every third or fourth page. It’s not impossible. Nothing is impossible except that this kid doesn’t sleep, is physically incapable of sleeping.

  JETHRO TULL—THICK AS A BRICK—REPRISE

  BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN—THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE—COLUMBIA

  My eyes are filled with words like this stacked one on top of the other. One of Eric’s record crates. I am waking up on Eric’s floor. I fell asleep on Eric’s floor. I would like to say I had a very appropriate dream in which Eric and Cecelia Martin cut me up with kitchen knives in front of our whole English class, but I didn’t, and what I did dream is disappearing fast and it had something to do with my brother and me in an empty but fully lit furniture store. It’s fully lit in Eric’s room, too, and with every detail of the furniture dream that evaporates I remember more of what I’m doing there, and I’m pissed at myself for falling asleep. (I almost always wake up pissed, from sleeping late, or not sleeping enough, and if you don’t always wake up pissed I think you’re living wrong.) I sit up and Eric is on the couch, awake, pages from the end of Billy Budd, it looks like. A piece of data that means nothing since I haven’t been consistently awake to watch Eric be the same, he could’ve just flipped to the end of the book after a nap just a little shorter than mine.

  There is also now a video camera on a tripod standing at one end of the couch, pointing at Eric, with its screen flipped to face him as well.

  Eric notices me. “I taped myself,” he says, “so you can see.”

  “What time is it?”

  Eric holds up his digital alarm clock. It reads 11:00 p.m.

  “I started right after you fell asleep,” Eric says. “Would you like to see it?”

  Before I can respond, Eric gets up, stops the camera recording, and hits Rewind. The tape whirs while Eric goes to his closet, which is just as full of stuff as his room, and gets out a cord he uses to connect the camera to his TV. The tape finishes rewinding. Eric hits Play.

  On TV, colorful magnetic fridge letters dance on a carpet, spelling out Cannibal Island 3: The Reckoning.

  “I completely forgot this was on here,” Eric says. “For a while I was really into stop-motion animation.” Eric hits Fast Forward and a little movie about Lego men on an island of mutants speeds by. I recognize a lot of the shattered action figures from the bin in the corner and I see how they got that way. (Stop-motion harpoons, stop-motion torpedoes, a stop-motion fall from a plateau that is probably also Eric’s kitchen table.) Then, super-fast, some credits in magnetic fridge letters then two seconds of black during which Eric hits Play, then on-screen this afternoon’s Eric is looking down the camera’s barrel, holding up the clock, which reads 4:30 p.m. Then he pans left to reveal me, curled up on the floor, eyes closed. Then he pans back, checks to make sure the angle’s okay, then carefully places the clock in the frame, sits down, and picks up Billy Budd. Eric on camera looks up, then readjusts the way he’s holding the book so the camera can see his open unsleeping eyes better. In real life, Eric hits Fast Forward again, and on screen, the clock starts advancing one minute per second or more and in the bedroom window behind Eric’s head the light starts changing, sharp white daylight to orange to purple as the sun sets. It’s almost totally dark when Eric’s head dips and his eyes close.

  “Wait!” I say. “What’s—stop the tape.”

  Eric hits Play. On TV, tears leak out of his closed eyes. His head turns away from the camera. He gets up, leaves frame, the bedroom light comes on, Eric returns, sits down again. The crying is over but his eyes are still red.

  Eric hits Fast Forward and the final three hours of dark speed by and the clock gets closer to the time it is now. I think about editing tricks, stop motion. I vaguely think of Cecelia, but she is getting harder and harder to work into the equation. On-screen, Eric speaks to someone off-screen, me waking up five minutes ago. The tape ends.

  “Good thing you woke up when you did,” Eric says, “or I would have had to switch tapes.”

  For a second I let myself live in a world where what Eric’s said is the truth, where all the evidence that it’s true isn’t a pack of lies to be debunked. In this world my betrayal and confusion about how to feel about this kid is replaced with relief, and my heart swells and my brain practically explodes out of the front of my head at the idea that this is actually happening to me. Then I put one mental foot back in the mundane world of Eric being crazy or a liar or both, where we say “yeah, sure, okay” even in response to the smallest stuff it’s easy and low-stakes to believe. I go back and forth, feeling my heart get either huge and kid-like or small and full of poison.

  “You didn’t have coffee, or anything?” I say to Eric.

  Eric says: “Are we talking now?”

  4

  “Who else have you told? You said you’ve said it before three or four times.”

  “Both my paren
ts. You. Cecelia Martin.”

  “You told Cecelia Martin?”

  “I thought she was cool. I thought she would understand.”

  “Really? What gave you that impression?”

  “We like the same things. Or at least I thought we did.”

  “That’s, like, a pretty lame reason to tell somebody this.”

  “I know. I fully realize. But in the past year or so I’ve gotten really aggressively tired of nobody knowing. I tried to evaluate who might be a good person to tell, and I realized there was no one immediately close to me, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”

  “Can I be honest with you? Before I decided to believe you, I was pretty much convinced that this was like, some practical joke you and Cecelia were playing on me.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Her and her friends are sort of fixated on you. And I thought maybe it was that they were fixated on you talking to me, because you were working on selling me on this prank, looking at you like ‘what a good job he’s doing, how hilarious is this?’ You know?”

  “Well, it’s not that. She thinks I’m crazy and has probably told everyone she encounters just that.”

  “She told me that. I guess I thought it was all part of your big plan, or something. I don’t know. I was really tired and this is … a lot.”

  “Thank you for believing me. You are now officially the only person who knows.”

  “But your parents know?”

  “Just because I told them doesn’t mean they believed it.”

  “When did you tell them?”

  “When I was ten.”

  “I thought you said it’s been like this your whole life.”

  “It has been, but I never realized I was different. As a baby I probably just lay there awake, but once I got old enough to understand that other people slept, and that every night I was in bed just like everybody else, I guess I figured I was sleeping. I guess I thought lying in bed with your eyes closed was what everybody did. I didn’t realize your state was supposed to change, or that people actually shut off. I guess I just thought it was a really boring eight hours everybody had to go through, lying there awake and calling it sleep. A ritual or something.”