The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  “So you just laid there for your whole childhood?”

  “Yeah. It got boring after a while. After I learned to read, once my parents were asleep and they thought I was asleep, I would get up and go get a book. I felt guilty, like if you were in church and you were supposed to be praying but instead you were thinking about girls or something. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me, I just thought maybe I was a bad kid who didn’t dutifully lie there. But it was too boring to keep doing it like I thought you were supposed to.”

  “But dreams … You must’ve seen people in movies or cartoons or whatever have dreams and thought, ‘I don’t have those.’”

  “I thought I did. I guess they were just daydreams. But incredibly vivid ones. You know that subconscious thing you were talking about? I think my mind just processes those things all the time behind the scenes. My imagination is something of a badass.”

  It is weird and kind of funny to hear Eric say “badass.” I am used to describing some TimeBlaze character or vehicle as “badass” before he goes to write its dossier, and him asking me if I can’t be more specific.

  “So how did you figure it out?”

  “A cartoon, like you said. Donald Duck is trying to get to sleep and water keeps dripping out of the faucet and waking him up. He gets progressively angrier.”

  “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that one.”

  “Right. And I didn’t understand why he was so upset. I thought, if I were him, I’d be happy for the distraction. I wouldn’t want to go back to bed and just lie there. It wasn’t an instant thing. I didn’t say ‘Eureka.’ But that was the first time I thought something might be off about me.”

  “And you told your parents?”

  “Yes. They took it to mean I was having trouble sleeping. I was trying to articulate it to them, but if something’s been a certain way your entire life, it’s difficult to make someone understand how it’s weird, when you yourself just started to realize that it’s weird.”

  “So they just gave you warm milk and whatever.” My mom used to give me warm milk when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep. I slept easier nights afterward just wanting to avoid drinking warm milk, which is the strangest thing your mouth can experience, being used to cold milk in cereal and in a glass beside every meal growing up. It’s like seeing your teacher outside of school. It’s them, but they’re all wrong and out of context.

  “Warm milk, yes. And Children’s Tylenol PM. So I would just lie there … you know … stoned.”

  I laugh. Eric laughs.

  “I told them. I kept telling them. My mom told me that if it was really bothering me, we could go to a sleep specialist. So I stopped telling them.”

  “You’ve never been to a doctor for it?”

  “No. Not a chance. If they found out…”

  “Who’s THEY?”

  Eric looks at me like, you oughta know.

  “If they found out, what? Man, you were a paranoid ten-year-old.”

  “I’d seen E.T.”

  “Yeah, I gotcha.” Somewhere we picked up the unspoken idea that if there’s something unique about you, men in suits and dark glasses will show up to take you away. Something about it felt scary and right, like yes, that is exactly what goes down when you’re special.

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “You mean what do I think caused it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know. A mutation or radiation exposure or a new stage in human evolution.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I would say, except…”

  “None of those things are real.”

  “Right.”

  “Right, well … here I am.”

  “Do you ever get tired?”

  “I guess. I mean, there are times I feel tired, but from what I understand, people who have to sleep feel tired sometimes and it has nothing to do with whether or not they’ve gotten enough sleep.”

  That’s true. Every day I tell myself I’m not going to fall asleep in geometry, and no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten the night before I still end up nodding off with my head propped up on my hand.

  “If I experience fatigue, I just feel it for a while and before long I feel better.”

  “What do you do with all that time? I mean, when everybody else is asleep?”

  “I get interested in things. I might get really interested in jazz music and just want to learn everything about jazz, so I do. I get my homework done fast. I get projects done a week in advance so I have time for other things. It’s like … this is … I’ve thought this but I’ve never said it out loud before, but it’s like, there’s me and there’s everyone else in the world, and everyone else is in a constant state of joining me and leaving me. When they leave, it’s sort of lonely, I suppose, but I have time to think and do things uninterrupted. I go for walks.”

  I guess that’s how my brother and his friends found him that night. I guess that’s how he knew the ins and outs of that street all the way across town when my brother and his friends found us on Halloween, getting flimsy and unoriginal revenge.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t just…” I say. “I’m sorry, I just had to see for myself that you don’t … you know.”

  “It’s okay. I understand. Even that, even waiting around to find out, was a kind of believing, I think. More than anybody else has ever done, anyway. While you were, I guess, thinking about how Cecelia and I were getting one over on you, I was thinking that. That the fact that you didn’t just immediately say, ‘Screw off, Eric,’ that was as close to complete and immediate trust as something as wild as this deserves.”

  I think of Eric in that one moment between fast-forwards, crying it looked like. Even if he says it’s okay I still feel like pretty much of an asshole, following a stone miracle around for thirty-six hours going, “Prove it!”

  We sit there talking about it for hours. Even with the unintentional nap, I expected to feel tired at some point. I thought I might need coffee or soda or something. But I guess your best friend telling you he can’t sleep and then finally deciding you believe him has the same effect as not needing to sleep and not being able to, at least for a little while.

  Eventually, the sun has risen. I can hear Eric’s parents rustling around downstairs.

  At some point I tell him I should go home. I am never away from home for this long consecutively, and before Eric, I was barely away from home at all, but because of my brother being my brother, I know how long my dad can stand one of his offspring not being around and not checking in at all. It’s not when anyone normal’s parents start to worry, it’s more a time about twelve hours after normal people’s parents start to worry that my dad realizes he isn’t worried and that’s what starts to worry him.

  “When was the last time you saw your brother?” he’ll ask me.

  “Tuesday night.”

  And I think in his head he starts up an imaginary conversation with a custody judge or my mom or the cop who comes by to tell him they found my brother floating in the canal after not quite being able to jump it with his car, and realizes that for the sake of looking not-so-bad in that imaginary future conversation he should probably start to worry, or go through the phone-dialing motions worried people go through, though he knows we’re okay.

  Phones are like these talismans for me and my brother and my dad. Like, as long as we have our phones on us, my brother and I, there is no way we could be hurt or kidnapped or impaled on anything. The one or two times I’ve been out of the house and needed to call and let him know I’d be out the house longer have gone like this:

  “Hey, Dad?”

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, I’ll be late tonight.”

  “Okay. Got your phone on you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Alright. Be safe.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  We have the same kind of phone and we’re all on the same phone plan. I know full well that when I call him from my phone my name shows up, indicating t
hat I’m calling from my phone, and that in order to be doing that, I must have my phone on me. It’s so dumb I think with any other kind of dad it would be a dad joke. But my dad doesn’t joke so much as he goes to the gym all the time.

  I get up off the floor of Eric’s room. “It was nice having someone to stay up with,” he says.

  When I get home at ten or so on Saturday morning my brother’s car isn’t there. It’s probably wrapped around a pole or he got arrested for lighting trash cans on fire and rolling them into traffic last night or he’s at the morning youth mass with Cathy and Alan and Tits, who’s Jewish but goes because of peer pressure. I go to my room and lock the door and fall asleep on top of my sheets with my clothes on and when I wake up it’s dark outside and I have one of those weird is-it-morning-what-day-is-it half-awake slept-the-day-away feelings, and I remember what Eric told me. I try to think whether it was a dream or not, and then I remember that it wasn’t, and I think that Eric’s been awake this whole day while I’ve been asleep, and Eric’s been awake since I’ve known him, and Eric’s been awake since he was born.

  5

  Eric always insists that our characters have a weakness. The Thragnacian hell-beast has a soft and glowing underbelly which Martian Praetoreous can hit with his arm-mounted crossbow. Being cybernetic, the AltraTroops are susceptible to biohacking, an arcane art practiced by the laptop monks who dwell in The Spoke, an aborted half-constructed space platform. The Man is the only character without a weakness. He is holographic and infinitely self-replicating. No one knows where he is or what he is or if he’s even human and you can’t kill him because it’s very possible there’s nothing there to kill.

  I live in a world where what Eric told me is true. And it isn’t always an easy thing to fit into your head but it almost helps that Cecelia Martin didn’t believe him. Cecelia Martin has exactly zero imagination. It’s not that Cecelia Martin is dumb, it’s just that she’s so fucking standard and convinced that she isn’t because her hair is dyed a different color and she listens to music that she finds on LiveJournals that mostly feature pictures of emo boys making out with each other. I think I understand why Eric told her. If this were a movie she’d be the person you’d go to. The freaky chick, the outcast. But Cecelia Martin is on yearbook and newspaper. Cecelia Martin gets straight A’s. Cecelia Martin is about as outcast as the head fucking cheerleader. I want to believe where she had the chance to and didn’t because it doesn’t fit in with Cecelia Martin’s worldview, which pretty much begins with Cecelia Martin and her friends Jen Ackerman and Teresa Saylor and whatever cute vintage finds they’ve made this week, and their college friends and how sophisticated and ironic they are.

  I can imagine it: Eric hears Cecelia use the words temporal and agonize in some in-class discussion. Eric suspects that Cecelia may, in fact, be smart. That night at home Eric looks up Cecelia’s Namespot profile, Namespot being the social networking site on which millions of American kids advertise their specialness, despite the fact that there is a search-engine tool right there on the sidebar that will allow you to find out just how hugely unspecial you are. Eric sees that under “Music” Cecelia has expressed a preference for The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, a pretty okay and sort of obscure group people found out about from their older siblings who are in college, which Eric, underexposed as he is to anybody, ever, doesn’t realize is a thing anyone else is into, takes it to be a sign, and without hesitation camps out waiting for Cecelia outside of English class the next day and, unbidden, stutters at her something about he has a secret only she can understand, and before she can even ask “What?” he blurts it out, all nervous and half-intelligible, so that now when she asks “What?” it isn’t because she wants to know the secret, it’s because he already said the secret and she couldn’t understand him. So he says it again, too loud this time, overcompensating, and she probably says something very close to what I said initially, something like “Oh, so don’t drink so much caffeine or whatever,” and starts to walk away, supremely weirded out, when Eric stops her and tries ultra-awkwardly to explain, but he has no idea where to start and this isn’t going at all like he planned it, and she stops him four half-sentences into his explanation and says, “I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to get to class.” One of the four half-sentences had something to do with how they both liked the same music, and so now she goes around telling anyone who will listen that Eric Lederer, you know, that weird kid, well, he basically stalked her and said some crazy stuff she doesn’t even know how to repeat and he ought to be red-flagged like Carl Whiteman, he probably has a hit list and everything, she’s probably on it, enjoy her while she’s here, alive, and hasn’t yet been murdered by the stalker nerd.

  And that day, I probably walked right by them out of class, not really knowing either of them or having any idea who they’d end up being to me, but I can imagine it so accurately because I was then (and I guess I am still) in my own world of misreading people, reaching out to them in an awkward, overplanned way that blows up big-time, then retreating back in to my just-me existence, while they go around telling anyone who will listen what a tard I am.

  Eric’s thing, I don’t know what to call it, sounds like something Eric and I would have made up. And I guess I want to live in a world where things like Eric can exist.

  And for a while that in itself is exciting. If Eric can exist despite the fact that Eric existing is impossible, then other things that are impossible can happen. They’re out there living among us and we have no idea. I spend an entire day thinking about this. The gray-haired cashier at Safeway, he can sense people’s intentions and disarm robbers before they try anything, which is why the store has never been robbed. Shoplifters he lets through because they’re not worth blowing his cover, which is why my brother has never been caught at that particular store. The Mexican housekeepers waiting for the shuttle bus on what shouldn’t be a hot day because it’s November but it is, they house the reincarnated souls of Aztec warlords and if they got close enough to a certain temple in South America they’d become thirty-foot-tall fire-beasts instead of gossipy old women.

  But then on the way into school I see Brendan Tyler, a varsity basketball player, standing in front of the black sports car his parents got him when he crashed his last car, arms folded. A bunch of people are gathered around. “I’d give my left nut for that car,” a kid says. Brendan reaches in the front window and tweaks a knob that makes his car stereo’s bass rattle, shaking the windows of the cars around him. I think, if anybody else had what Eric had, they’d probably show it off every chance they got. There would be no secret. They’d be in the school parking lot using their mysterious God-given mutation to make hot girls more receptive to finger-banging. Eric’s probably the only one of his kind, which makes him all the more important to protect. Protect, if that’s what I’m doing by being his friend and keeping his secret. For some reason protect is the word that comes to mind.

  “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 ho
use 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…”