The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (25 page)

Eric looks down at the ground.

“It is, man. It just is. There's no arguing that anymore. We just have to like, figure out how you can control it.”

“I can't.”

“You can't yet. I may not have thought as much about this thing of yours as you have, but if all you've thought is ‘Screw it, I can't,' then all that thought was wasted. I just found out about this and I'm telling you you can. I don't know that you can, but I'm telling you you can, because you have to.”

Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is not let them apologize for how special they are, to pass themselves off as mediocre. When Christine and I were together she never stopped telling me how good my drawings were. She wasn't sold on the subject matter and she thought I should spend more time in my “legit drawing” sketchbook, but she never let me cop to merely doodling. And even after all the shit we've been through I still feel a little cooler because of it. Eric is like me, obsessed with mutations and powers, so getting him excited about what he is should not be hard.

“So it's like, an accumulation of not sleeping. Like, whatever it is normal people get rid of when they sleep, you don't get rid of it. Or, whatever it is that enables you to not sleep, the side effect of an accumulation of that thing is, this. The bad days.”

“Right.”

“So the question is, how do we speed up that accumulation? How do we get you to sleep less than you already are?”

We slip back in from the desert. We go to the grocery store and buy a really ridiculous amount of energy drinks because the thought is, overstimulating Eric will tire him out quicker. Like, when I drink a bunch of Red Bull to stay up all night playing first-person shooters on Xbox, I am extraordinarily wired for a short period of time and then suddenly bone-tired, more tired than I would have been had I never drunk all that stuff in the first place. And after we go to the store we go to my house to steal my
brother's Adderall, because for someone who doesn't have attention deficit disorder, like Eric (who probably has way too much attention, if anything), it is apparently an incredible stimulant. And we are getting enough energy drinks for both of us to have way too many energy drinks, and we are going to get enough Adderall for both of us, because all this stuff he's going to do to try and affect his brain chemistry, I am going to do as well, even though I don't have the same brain chemistry as him at all and it will probably just make me momentarily super-stimulated and then shortly afterward very exhausted. And I'm going to do it because before we reenter society to go to the grocery store and my house, we have this conversation:

“Okay. But you have to do it, too.”

“Like the roofies? C'mon, man, why is it I have to do everything WITH you? Like when they're testing lab rats, scientists don't cut their own brains open as well, you know what I mean?”

“I'm a lab rat?”

“No! But you get what I'm saying. It was one thing when it was just us, but now there's someone after us, and maybe it would make sense to have one of us fully lucid while the other one's—”

Eric looks down and spits in the dirt and I stop. I don't even have that big of a problem with it. It's only like twice as much energy drink as I've ever had in me before (again, late-night Xbox FPS sessions—you decide you need to be the most stimulated when you really don't need to be at all). And I've never taken Adderall, which people take recreationally as a drug, so that'll be another milestone I will have conquered in my un-rewritable high school experience. There is so much in this world Eric can only experience alone because of who and what he is—so much he's had to do alone, that I guess basically what he's saying when he says “you have to do it too” is,
I want somebody to come with me as far as they possibly can
.

We put the gun back in its hiding place and cover the beast with the blue plastic tarp and put the sunglasses back in their black
plastic trashbag and Eric places them where he left them, in the bushes, and the two of us walk back into town.

When we get to my house we have two shopping bags each full of cans of various ridiculous sizes and absurd colors. If this were just a random Saturday night I would stick with old reliable Red Bull but we are each going to have to drink a lot of the stuff and the exact same thing in quantities that big would definitely get old and probably increase the (still honestly pretty big) chance of one or both of us throwing up. So beyond Red Bull we also have your second-tier Monsters and Rock Stars and weird, possibly local junior varsity energy drinks like NUCLEAR WARTHOG (all capitals) and something called Lizard Juice, which advertises itself on the can as the official Energy Beverage of the American Pro Dirt-Biking Circuit.

It's ten thirty on a Friday morning, so no one is home. My house has that empty, on-a-school-day feel, like no one is supposed to be here. We put the drinks in the fridge for the moment and Eric follows me upstairs. In my brother's room, I open the third drawer down and peel back the blanket reading Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions. Underneath it is way more drugs than there were when I hit him up for the date-rape drug, and they're all prescription bottles marked with the logo of Lunaspa-Albans. In addition to definitely putting Eric's life and probably mine in danger, my ratting out of Eric to these people seems to have had the consequence of making my older brother, who was a small-time low-stakes drug dealer and frequent but low-stakes drug user, into either a way bigger drug dealer, a way bigger drug user, or probably a hazy not very well thought-out but certainly more dangerous combination of both. I take the only bottle I recognize, his Adder-all, remove four pills, put the cap back on, replace the bottle, and replace the blanket we got for Christmas when we were kids, and feel just awesome about myself. About the only thing I don't have to feel that guilty for is taking his ADD medication. He might very
well have ADD but he doesn't take the pills himself, he mostly trades or sells them to kids who are also not taking them for the purposes of better focusing on their precalculus homework.

“I'm going to get some clothes out of my room,” I say. “Do you want any?”

“No, that's okay,” Eric says. “I should probably go by my house for a little while today anyway.”

“Do you think that's safe?”

“It might not be but I really should.” He says it with too much conviction for me to argue.

I change my shirt in my room, then I pack a couple of additional T-shirts into a backpack I haven't used since sixth grade. Before we leave I get on my dad's computer and I Google Lunaspa-Albans. Their website is well designed but remarkably barren and nonspecific. It's mostly pictures of multiracial women in goggles looking happily at test tubes, with a lot of slogans like “Providing Solutions for a Changing World.” They claim to have offices in seven nations, with their main one in Reading, Pennsylvania. Rather than make me scared, their seeming bigness and mystery gives me mental images of me and Eric pulling up in front of their Reading headquarters in a stolen car, taking the fight to them. It's really unrealistic for two teenage boys with six hundred dollars in the world between them who've been truant for the past several school days, but not so much for two teenage boys, one who's a remarkable transcendent being and the other who's obsessed with pushing the first to discover the limits of his abilities. Like a lot of things that make me happy, I have to keep reminding myself about Eric's making things real, but when I remember, it chases all the lonely and scared and tired out of me. Eric comes out of the bathroom and in a ritual honed in late-night looking-at-Internet-porn sessions, I close out of the browser, open it back up, erase the cache of viewed websites, and we go downstairs and take our bags from the fridge.

“Do you still have any of the
TimeBlaze
art?” Eric says.

“Not really,” I say, “it was all at your house.” I don't mention the reason it's gone, the reason we're both well aware of, which is that Eric scattered it in front of my house and we only recovered that one page from the bush and everything else I never cleaned up out of spite, it was just gone, carried away by the wind.

“Right,” he says. “Bring a notebook and some pencils.” We are going back to the desert together to try and get Eric to have one of his bad days. Hopefully, to have a hallucination that becomes real. And this time, instead of him telling me to go away and me going away, as fast as I can, hopefully avoiding his mom, he isn't going to ask me to go away and I'm not going to go away. Even if in some unexpected spasm of really bad hallucination he asks me to go away, I'm not going to go away.

We walk through the dusty alleys behind my house, switching paths erratically, taking the backstreets of the backstreets, which are actually just dirt paths filled with tumbleweeds and people's bulk trash. I think it's the tumbleweeds and the dirt, and the fact that we are walking side by side like Western lawmen on the way to the showdown, if instead of passing a flask of whiskey back and forth the lawmen were drinking fizzy yellow energy drinks with names like NUCLEAR WARTHOG, but I start to get pretty psyched on us and how cool we are. I kill the last already-flat sips of my third energy drink and drop the can at my feet.

Eric stops. He turns and walks back and picks the can up, then takes it over to somebody's dumpster and tosses it in.

“Don't litter,” he says.

A couple minutes later and my heart is trying to get up enough speed to go back in time and we're coming out of the neighborhood to the edge of the desert, the new home for kids like us. I imagine this is how Agtranian Berserkers must feel right before they go into battle, with hearts the size of human heads pretty much bursting with superadrenaline. I think how neat it might be if I ever got to meet one. We could compare notes. The sun is right
overhead, completing my Western showdown delusion. But this isn't the showdown, yet. This is just the training sequence.

By Eric's request, I draw a Tllnar Defender. It's hard for him to ask, because neither of us really knows how to say “Tllnar” because it looks cool and alien on the page but it's tough to say out loud with a human mouth. The Tllnar are cyborgs by birth, natural fusions of technology and flesh and it's hard to pinpoint what created what.

“As detailed as you can,” Eric reminds me.

“Yup,” I say, putting the finishing touches on the Defender's faceplate.

“I think I prefer Lizard Fuel to NUCLEAR WARTHOG, but neither of them stacks up to the more popular national brands. And I think that we can rest assured that none of them is the color they are when they're done being mixed. Nothing comes out of the industrial process the color it is by the time you consume it. Everything comes out gray. I saw a special on the History Channel.” For the moment, we have the long-winded Eric back, thanks to energy drinks and ADD pills.

“Done,” I say, tearing the sheet from the notebook and handing it to Eric. Tllnar Defenders are small, around three and a half feet, and this one only takes up half the page.

“Cool,” Eric says. “I'm going to go off and study this. And probably pee a lot.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I'll be back,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. Eric wanders off into the brush, away from town.

My hand was shaky when I was drawing, and I wonder if, if and when it comes into existence, the Tllnar Defender's body will be all zigzagged and jittery, the way I accidentally drew it. I wonder if it will come into being piece by piece, slowly fading into our world, or there will be, like, a flash of blue light, or if it will literally spring out of Eric's forehead like he's Zeus giving birth to a new nymph or
something. I wonder a lot of things really really fast, thanks to the caffeine and drugs. I have this image of my thoughts as football players bursting through a big piece of butcher paper as they come out of the tunnel at a pep rally, and then the players BECOME the paper, and more football-player thoughts burst through them, and on and on like that, while everybody cheers. I don't know how much time passes.

Someone yells. A war cry. Eric comes running out of the brush like something's chasing him. He turns and wheels on whatever it is once he reaches a clearing, but nothing ever comes. Still, he looks at a point in the dirt, like, that's my enemy. Suddenly he's knocked flat. His back hits the ground and he goes “WHUUF,” the sound of having the wind knocked out of you. His arms and legs strain like there's something on top of him trying to push him off, but there isn't. It's like the world's most convincing bit of pantomime: the thing on top of him has weight and strength, it just doesn't have existence. It's tough to watch, and creepy to watch, but it isn't yet scary, because there's just nothing there.

Eric grunts, loud, and sits up, his arms in front of him like he just pushed the thing off with a lot of effort. Then his face jerks to the side and there's blood on it, like he was struck. Then, the thing that struck him is there. It just is. I blink and Eric is fighting a Tllnar Defender tooth and fucking nail.

If you've ever had something you've only ever previously seen in your head and on loose-leaf notebook pages just appear in front of you, you will sympathize with my first reaction, which is to be completely still. And if you've ever had that thing appear while trying to kill your best friend, and if you had a history of abandoning said friend when he was battling monsters both hallucinated and hallucinated-into-reality, then you will sympathize with my second reaction, which is to run screaming, literally screaming, at the little thing, and tackle it.

Eric has had us build a weakness into all our characters, and the Tllnar Defender's weakness is its optical array, basically its eyes if it were all biological instead of half-and-half. I grab a rock from
nearby and raise it high above my head and bring it down on the Defender's face, or what would be its face, as hard as I can, cracking the V-shaped optical array down the middle. I bash it again, shattering it completely. It stops grunting and squealing underneath me. Metallic claws and tubes and valves begin retracting in on each other as the thing's tech superstructure compresses itself into one tiny capsule that can be reclaimed by Tllnar Vultures sweeping the battlefield. The capsule can then be brought back to a lumbering, living Field Command Post, repaired, and reinjected with flesh, in accordance with the shrewd Tllnar precept that metal is expensive but meat is cheap. Or anyway, that's what would happen to the capsule if this Defender had died in battle on the permanent warfields of Perseid 8, but since it died being bludgeoned by one of the human kids who made it up in the desert five minutes outside of an Arizona suburb, the capsule is probably just going to sit there embedded in its dead body, and maybe glint in the sun months or years from now when the wind uncovers it where Eric and I are going to bury it in the desert.