The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (6 page)

Eric runs around Alan's pool. There's a back gate I didn't notice when we were zoning out on Alan's sex triumph. Eric blasts through the gate, I do too, and we're in a back alley between fences where there's trash bins and a couple of old couches and trampolines. My brother is right behind us.

“Throw eggs at moi mate's house, will you?” He cackles like a fucking demon.

I had no idea this alley was back here. I didn't know we had alleys. We come to what I guess is the end of the block. It looks like a dead end and I'm bracing myself to slow down and take whatever shoulder punches and nut punches and kicks in the gut from Tits are coming to us when Eric cuts into a dark corner and disappears. I run that way. Some steel rods demarcate a place where the alley opens onto a dry wash. Eric scrambles down the sharp gray rocks that look unsteady as hell and, as I find out when I try to scramble
down as fast as Eric, actually are unsteady as hell. Rocks clatter against rocks. I fuck my knee up bad a couple of times but manage to stay right behind Eric. Behind me, the thwappings of the sword against my brother's leg get farther and farther apart, and the cackles get less and less demon-ish. Eric hangs a right and climbs out of the wash. He holds his watch up, presses a little button that lights up the face. “We might be able to make this work,” he says. As I'm climbing out of the wash a shape flies past me and clatters on the pavement. A plastic sword, still in its sheath. I look over my shoulder. My brother stands panting in the dry wash. It doesn't look like Tits ever even made it down there. They're heavy smokers, of everything.

I try to tell Eric we could probably slow down but before I can he's let his little watch light go out and has jetted down the block we've just climbed up to. Most of the houses are under construction. At the end of the street, another shuttle is just pulling up.

“The eleven fifteen,” Eric pants, “right on time!” Its doors open and Eric sprints up the stairs without stopping. I climb on and nod to the driver, who's not Eulalio.

“GO GO GO!” Eric says when he gets to his seat, though he has to see no one's chasing us anymore. The bus pulls away at its own pace.

By now, I imagine the commotion has disturbed what Alan had going on. I don't know if it's a regular thing for him or a one-time full-moon Halloween anomaly, all I know is Alan has been to a place I haven't been to, and I'm really smart and I once heard Alan pronounce the word
especially
like this: “eck-specially.” So I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm not sorry.

We sit there catching our breath. I am so out of shape it feels like my body has given up trying to draw air from my underused lungs and is trying to run on a heart full of caffeine and a stomach that only knows Hot Pockets, and it's having a bitch of a time. Still, it's kind of great. We have these characters the Agtranian Berserkers, who jab each other in the chest with big syringes full of super-adrenaline
before they go into battle, so they're so euphoric they don't give a fuck if they die. As soon as I stop feeling like I'm dying, I start feeling like that.

“Your house won't be safe for a while,” Eric says. “We can go to mine.”

I've never been to Eric's house. I don't know what I'm expecting. I guess one of those homeschoolers' houses we talked about that one time: weird-smelling and dark and crammed with spelling workbooks and homemade candles, his mom in a dress like a farmer's wife, listening to religious radio. But it's not like that at all. It's normal. Big, even.

“How did you do that?” I say as we walk up the gravel path to Eric's front door. “You were like a fucking ninja.”

“I know the neighborhood pretty well.”

“Did you live over there or something?”

“No.”

Eric takes out his keys and opens the front door.

“Are your parents home?” I whisper.

“Yes, but they're asleep, and their room is upstairs, so don't feel the need to whisper.”

“Okay.”

Eric gets me a water bottle from the fridge and gets one for himself. His kitchen is cleaner than mine but essentially the same.

“You saved our asses. How did you know where the bus stop was? How did you know the way out of that … I mean, I didn't even know we had alleys.”

“I walk around at night a lot,” Eric says.

“Right, my brother said they saw you that night. Here's the thing: I think we got them back, but I'm not sure we did. I'm not sure we did anything, but it feels like we got them back.”

“They had to run,” Eric said, “but they never caught us. They were mad and they never got an outlet for their anger. One time I
tried to get away from them and couldn't and this time I did. And we probably put a hitch in things for, you know, that guy and … his girlfriend.”

“Man, right through Alan's backyard…” I'm still kind of excited. I mean, I can never go home again, but I'm never outside at night and I'm definitely never running from people at night and just narrowly escaping.

Then I think about Alan's backyard and what we saw back there. I think about it and I'm quiet. Eric's quiet so I figure he's probably thinking about it too.

“Can I tell you something?” Eric says.

“Sure,” I say.

Then Eric says, “I can't sleep.”

He says it fast and mumbly and quiet like the time I told Sara Eldensparr I liked her.
I like you. I can't sleep
. Like something you've thought about a million ways to sort of cleverly segue into and you get the attention of the person you intend to say it to and in that moment you reach down for your favorite clever segue and it's not there so you just figure “Let's get this over with as fast as possible,” and sometimes it's sloppy and they don't understand you but I hear Eric clearly I think.

“Well, don't drink so much caffeine or whatever.”

“No. That's not what I mean. I mean I can't sleep. I've never been able to and I don't have to. I am physically incapable of it and don't require it.”

“What?”

“Next you're going to ask if I'm joking. I'm not. Then you're going to accuse me of being crazy. I can't speak on that as definitively as I can on the fact that I'm not joking, but I don't think I am. It's been this way since I was born.”

“You're serious.”

“Yes.”

Eric sets his water bottle down on the counter and it lands with a quick series of sounds instead of just one, and that's when I notice he's trembling, which is also a lot like the time I told Sara
Eldensparr I liked her, except all I told Sara Eldensparr was that I liked her, not that I could walk through walls or spit fire or eat bullets out of midair.

“That's impossible.”

“I know.”

“You can't NOT sleep. I saw a thing about this on the Discovery Channel. While you're sleeping, your body regenerates. If you didn't sleep, you'd die.”

“I know.”

“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.