The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  I think about the way I spent all day, and think that I guess it’s not that implausible for a teenage boy to spend the whole day in his room, with nobody bothering him and no reason for them to, especially on a weekend.

  Monday at lunch I’m Eric, which means I’m the one who’s spent all weekend obsessing over something, and I’m the one with diagrams and charts and pitches and ideas. Well, I don’t really have diagrams or charts or anything written down, even. But I have been thinking about this one thing a lot and I can’t wait to talk about it.

  “So this thing this weekend,” I say.

  At first I was mad at Eric for not telling me about these fits when he told me about his not-sleeping thing. And I’m mad at him for not letting us talk about or even name his “thing,” beyond it being just a “thing.” Remaining nameless makes it harder to talk about, which is probably what he wants. But either way, it is a part of his thing. It makes it more real and it means that whatever we call it, or don’t call it, it might go beyond just Eric lacking the ability to sleep. And of course it does, and I always sort of knew it did, but we can’t really explore it unless he lets us, and he hasn’t.

  “I have a theory about it,” I say. “When you sleep, your body works out shit in your subconscious. That’s what dreams are. But you don’t sleep so you never have a chance to work any of that stuff out. So it just builds up and builds up and it comes out when you’re awake. Which is always. But in these, like, superconcentrated bursts.”

  A second goes by. I’m waiting for Eric to say it’s genius. Instead he says, “Yeah, I know.”

  “You know? Know what?”

  “I know what they are. I’ve had them my whole life.”

  “Well first of all, you don’t know what they are, you don’t know anything about this or where it comes from or what causes it, you said so. So you don’t ‘know’ it any more than I do, and I’ve just … like I said, it’s a theory. And the other thing is, you pretend like you don’t think about this, your secret, but that’s bullshit, you think about everything, you obsess over details, and this has to be the biggest most interesting thing in your life, and you’re telling me you don’t think about it? Of course you think about it. Like, you already ‘know’ why you’ve had these hallucinations, you’ve thought about it, so quit acting like …”

  “Acting like what?” Eric says.

  “Like this isn’t important. Or I guess stop acting like it isn’t amazing. Just fucking admit to the fact that you’re special.”

  “I told you,” Eric says, “people can’t find out because …”

  “I know!” I say. “They’ll cart you away and hook you up to machines and whatever. I’m not saying you have to put it in the school newspaper.”

  “Okay I’m special,” Eric says.

  “If we let it this could be an adventure,” I say.

  “I don’t see how,” Eric says.

  “Somebody finds out they have special abilities, and then the adventure begins.”

  We both grew up on comic books and Star Wars. I just can’t understand how he wouldn’t be high all the time off the fact that he might be the chosen one.

  Eric’s elaborate self-made lunches come with their own brought-from-home silverware. He’s scraping the tines of his fork on the concrete in the shadowy corner of the loading dock.

  “Sorry if it scared you,” Eric says. “And thank you for not telling anybody.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “If you want. If you want, we could look into … what it takes for me to not be conscious.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Friday after school.”

  It’s quiet and then the bell rings.

  “Well, we’re NOT hitting me over the head with a bat. We just aren’t.”

  “No, right, of course. It wasn’t an ‘idea’ per se. Just more of, like, a concept.”

  Eric and I are walking home after school on Friday. Other kids’ cars speed by on the main road that runs past our school. The Drama Club has put flyers for their upcoming production underneath everybody’s windshield wipers and nobody’s taking them out, just driving away and letting them fly off on their own, so the street is a mess of Day-Glo-orange paper. Brendan Tyler’s new car, the one I overheard some idiot saying he’d give his left nut to have, accelerates to pass some band girl in a Camry. I am certain I would rather have both testicles than that car, even if it means I have to walk everywhere.

  “So the mob method is out. Your wisdom teeth aren’t coming in? Like at all?”

  Eric runs his tongue around his mouth for effect. “No.”

  “Okay. Well, I still don’t think Children’s Tylenol PM is a very good measure of how narcotics affect your thing.”

  “Narcotics? I’m not sure I’m all that excited about where this seems to be heading.”

  “Relax. I don’t mean like, black tar heroin. There are lots of substances that are legal and safe that we can get our hands on.”

  I don’t see my brother’s car speeding by, and I wonder if that means he’s home already.

  “It’s not for me, it’s for a friend.”

  “That glasses kid?”

  “… No.”

  “Really? Cause you pretty much have like one friend.”

  “If somebody wanted to really get knocked out, like, there’s no way they could stay awake. Not enough to kill anybody or get anywhere close—”

  “Pussy!” Tits says.

  Tits is standing over a laptop on a stool in our garage. When I came in the laptop was playing a tinkly GarageBand rhythm and my brother was howling into a microphone hooked up to the laptop in his best imitation of all the scream-o bands he likes and Tits and his other friends were looking at each other and nodding like “YES, THIS IS IT.”

  “Six Valiums. Or as we call it, Alan’s mom’s lunch.”

  “Fuck yaself!” Alan says from where he’s slumped in the corner in his green hoodie that says THE WORLD’S BEST FUCKING SKATERS.

  “Or, you know what? Oh … shit,” my brother says. “Follow me. ONE MOMENT, CUNTS, ONE MO-MENT!” he screams to his buddies in his soccer hooligan voice. He drops the mike on the concrete garage floor.

  “Hey!” Alan yells. I guess it’s his microphone.

  My brother goes into the house, and I follow him. On the stairs, he says: “One week they’re like, egging your friend’s house like a baby, next week they’re scoring drugs from you. THEY GROW UP SO FAST!” He punches the wall.

  Ow,” he says.

  My brother’s room is a refrigerator compared to my room. My room’s over the garage and insanely warm even with the air full blast. My brother also keeps his room surprisingly clean, for someone with so many personality problems.

  “This is NOT where I keep my stash. So if you ever go looking for my stash, don’t look here, because this is NOT where it is.” He goes to where he keeps his stash: third drawer down underneath a Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions blanket we got for Christmas the year the Suns almost beat the Bulls. I was a very heartbroken six-year-old after they lost and more or less quit liking sports. Same thing happened when it turned out Spider-Man’s Peter Parker was actually a clone and had to go into exile: I was hurt and abandoned comics. I get burned and swear off whole parts of my life. I miss comics more.

  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 hit
s 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.