The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  “It’s not a comic, but, uhm,” I say. “It’s actually a movie trilogy and a series of novels.”

  “Awesome,” Eric says, breaking his weird stillness to hop just a little on his toes. It’s geeky but it’s pretty much the way I’d want somebody to react if they were the first person I told I was planning a movie trilogy and a series of novels. Eric is the first person. He says “awesome” again and we go off to fourth period in opposite directions.

  “What’s it about?”

  Eric is standing over me again the next day towards the end of third period. No “hi” or “what’s up” or anything, like our conversation from yesterday never ended.

  “The movie trilogy and series of novels.”

  “It’s sort of a lot to like, go into,” I say. “You know the loading dock by the auditorium?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I eat lunch over there,” I tell him.

  “Okay,” he says. “Fifth-period lunch?”

  “Yep,” I say.

  “Good,” he says all conspiratorial like we’re planning a high-stakes daylight robbery. “Good.”

  When I round the corner of the auditorium, Eric is sitting cross-legged on the concrete loading dock in direct sunlight, his lunch spread out in front of him.

  “Aren’t you hot?” I say.

  “Hmm?”

  “Aren’t you hot?” I say. “I usually sit in the shade.”

  At lunchtime, the way the sun hits the school there’s a big wedge of shadow on one side of the dock. It’s cool up against the brick and easier to read over there.

  “Oh, right,” he says. “Thanks.”

  I don’t know why he’s thanking me, I didn’t really do it for him. The truth is he’s so pale that in the sunlight he sort of hurts to look at.

  He starts packing up his lunch to move. There’s four or five little Tupperware containers and something wrapped in tinfoil. He puts them all in a small paper bag and moves toward the shade.

  “So?” he says.

  I start unwrapping my lunchroom burrito. I have two chili-cheese burritos and a fountain Dr. Pepper. I remember coming to high school when the fact that they had soda seemed like a huge deal. The thrill has worn off but I still get it every day.

  “It starts with this scientist who works for the government. He invents these cybernetic modifications for soldiers. His technology ends up causing the deaths of millions of people. Then one day he stumbles upon the technology to make time travel possible, and he knows that if the government gets their hands on it, they’ll make things even worse. Then he realizes that he can actually use the technology to go back and prevent those millions of people being killed. But the government busts in just as he’s about to go and there’s a shootout and he ends up getting sent too far back in time, to the Stone Age, through a temporal distortion.”

  I take a bite of my burrito. They’re pretty messy, but I’ve figured out how to eat them so not too much stuff leaks out one end.

  “Then in the Stone Age …” I won’t repeat the rest here but there’s cybernetic cavemen and a race to an energy crystal at the heart of the universe and the dead and the living keep switching places. When I finish I realize I’ve never said the whole thing out loud before, or any of it, really. Then I realize I forgot a bunch of things.

  “That’s dynamite,” Eric says. “Really.” In the time it’s taken me to tell the whole thing he’s worked his way through four of the five Tupperware containers (string beans, some kind of potatoes, spinach, fruit salad) and half of what was wrapped in the aluminum foil, which turns out to be a pork chop sandwich.

  “Who packs your lunch?” I ask.

  “I do,” he says, and I remember I have a lunch.

  “Leftovers?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “I cook.”

  I expect he’ll talk now so I can eat without it being awkward but he doesn’t, he just sort of stares straight ahead. I eat anyway, and when I’m done I chew on the rim of my Styrofoam cup.

  “What if the scientist—?” he says.

  “What if the scientist what?” I say.

  He shakes his head. The bell rings.

  Wednesday in English Mrs. Amory splits us into groups for group projects. When she announces that Eric is in the same group as Cecelia, Cecelia sighs and looks at Jen and her other friend Teresa. She goes up to talk to Mrs. Amory when we’re all supposed to be getting together with our groups. After Cecelia and Mrs. Amory are done talking in very hushed tones, Mrs. Amory calls Eric and Ashlyn Taylor up and tells them they’ll be switching groups. My group is Chris White, Alicia Henry, and some girl whose name I always forget but I think might be in choir. Alicia has already divided the project up into four equal sections, assigned one to each of us, and written her e-mail address on three identical-sized strips of notebook paper so we can just e-mail her our sections when we’re done and she’ll assemble them all in a nice little binder before the due date. She actually says “nice little binder.” We all just give in to how badly she wants to get into a good college and go back to our desks with lots of class time to spare.

  I’m almost done with The Great Gatsby and if we don’t get assigned something else soon, I’ll have to start reading my own books at the end of class, which I would enjoy except for the questions about what I’m reading and why I’m reading it. Getting asked what book you’re reading isn’t as bad as getting asked what you’re drawing. What you’re drawing is coming right from your head onto the page, it’s all you, but if a book you’re reading looks particularly nerdy, like it has a guy straddling a dragon on the cover, or when you start to describe it to the person asking you realize it sounds particularly nerdy, you can always defuse it by tacking “… it sucks” to the end of your description. But then the question becomes “So why are you reading it?” Like, people stop reading assigned books once they realize they suck, they stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical, so the fact that you’re pressing on with a sucky book that no one is even forcing you to read is now a red flag.

  Mostly people ask what your book is because they’re worried it’s something we were assigned when they were ditching out to go huff with some friends they have who go to Catholic school downtown, and they don’t think that just because they missed one day means they have any less of a right to know what books they’re supposed to half-try to read and give up on for being too dense, gay, and historical.

  Eric never comes over to me. He just nods when he catches my eye.

  “What if the scientist COULDN’T return to the present?”

  Eric is sitting in the shade of the loading dock when I go there after the cafeteria.

  “He sends the cavemen back to the present to do his bidding, but why can’t he just go back and lead them himself?”

  “Because the time-proof signals he sends the cavemen in the present need to get intercepted by the Temporal Ranger—”

  “I know. I know he needs to stay in the past for the story to work. But what I’m saying is, there ought to be a reason he has to stay.”

  Eric looks at me with wide eyes, expecting something, like as long as I don’t hit him, this whole thing will be very exciting.

  “Like—”

  He jumps before the words are even out of my mouth.

  “Like what if, unbeknownst to him the government has created a clone of him in the present and the clone him has invented an apparatus to prevent the real him from coming back? And what if … well, here, let me show you.”

  He takes his math book out of his backpack, opens it, and a folded sheet of paper falls out. He unfolds it, and it just keeps unfolding until there’s a diagram spread out in front of us. It’s covered in words like “scientist” and “Temporal Ranger” and “government.” Question marks are everywhere. Things are circled and connected to each other with arrows. It looks like a football play drawn on the blackboard in the locker room in a sports movie, except the players are words I’ve had in my head for the s
ix months since I came up with this idea. Plus some new ones I don’t recognize, like “Dream Spider” and “O.M.N.I.” and “Wolfpack Genetically Modified Not To Feel Fear.”

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “I got sort of excited about your idea. I thought about it a lot and I sort of assembled this last night. If there’s anything in here you don’t like, that’s fine, it’s your idea, but if there’s anything you do like, it’s all yours. Anyway, the thing I find hard to buy about the caveman troopers is their human behavior. It seems right now they’re your average everyday cyborg, only hairier. I mean, isn’t the fun of cavemen that they’re cavemen?”

  By the time the bell rings the world of this has tripled in size. We barely touch our lunches.

  “I think this is too big for three movies,” Eric says as he slips on his too-high backpack.

  “Even with the novels filling in the gaps?”

  “Even then.”

  “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”

  “Also I don’t think the title TimeBlaze: An EVILution necessarily applies anymore.”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know what else we’d call it…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eric says. “The title is the least important part.”

  I spend all sixth and seventh period drawing. I’ve finished Gatsby so I just say fuck it and draw through the last five minutes of class both periods. I cover worksheets front and back, graded-and-handed-back tests, and most of the school-picture order form we got in homeroom.

  Eric spends the next two periods making a list of possible titles, which are the least important part.

  It’s not until I get home that I realize I’m starving.

  The next morning when my dad is driving me to school I think the school parking lot would be a good place for The Committee to attack. The Committee is the government agency Dr. Praetoreous used to work for that’s now pursuing him through time. They are ultra-secret, their motives are unclear, their funding is unlimited, and it’s very likely they’re connected to some ancient architects-behind-every-great-historical-disaster-type society. (Eric and I have decided the scientist’s name should be Dr. Praetoreous.)

  The Committee decides to kill Dr. Praetoreous back when he’s a teenager, before he can do them any harm, so under the protection of the Temporal Ranger, an immortal avatar Dr. Praetoreous accidentally awakened with his TimeBlaze technology, they send a legion of bio-engineered AltraTroops back in time to carry out the task. Dr. Praetoreous erased his own history, but they’ve somehow gained the name of his high school and the year he graduated so they’re going to eradicate everyone at his high school just to be sure they get him.

  The troops timejump onto the marching band practice field. They’re cloaked, but there’s hundreds of them so the grass moves in this unnatural way as it gets trampled by a legion of invisible feet.

  One of the troops sends out an electromagnetic pulse. Simultaneously every car in the parking lot dies. They’re all new, people’s sixteenth-birthday gifts, so they won’t run without a million computers working right inside them and the electromagnetic pulse just took those out. Everyone’s green parking pass hanging on their rearview mirror is like a toe-tag on their freshly killed cars.

  At the same time, every cell phone in everyone’s pocket winks off. Kids text messaging in the back of class are cut off in the middle of their thoughts. Their iPods and PSPs and BlackBerries all become bricks in the same second.

  The troops take the doors with extreme precision, fearing Dr. Praetoreous may have forseen their attack somehow and protected his young self with a battery of dinosaur-mounted Plasma Calvary sitting right outside the school library, or counterinsurgent nano-mines that will release a million self-replicating mecha-wasps as soon as the enemy cracks the door to the teacher’s lounge. But there’s nobody: just teachers and kids and lockers and soda machines and plastic furniture, and the AltraTroops go through them all, fist-cannons blazing blue.

  Through the chaos and screaming kids walks The Man. Skinny with close-cropped hair, a black suit, a black tie, and black sunglasses. He is the seeming head of The Committee. He’s a hologram, given weight and mass when necessary by The Legitimacy Engine, a technology the teenage Praetoreous will invent one year from today, if he lives. No one has ever seen The Man in the flesh, no one knows if there’s even flesh to be seen. Cannon discharge rips through him doing no damage, just passing through his unwrinkled suit and out the other side to incinerate a hand-painted homecoming poster. He strides into the attendance secretary’s office and punches a few keys on the keyboard. He wants to know who’s absent.

  Utilizing sub-thought communication, he signals small battalions of AltraTroops who scatter through the surrounding neighborhoods. Kids faking sick watching TV in their living rooms scream as the troops take out their sliding-glass patio doors. Kids who really are sick get the waiting-room magazines blown out of their hands as troops level their doctors’ offices with concussion grenades. A kid who looks a lot like Bret Embler is still asleep with a baseball cap on in bed next to his Catholic-school girlfriend when rocket boots scatter the red tile roof of his house in the hills and crash into his bedroom. There’s no blood: the fist-cannons’ antimatter fire just makes it so things don’t exist.

  My dad laughs at something the satellite-radio DJ says about the band Supertramp, then he tells me to have a good day and I hop out of the Jeep. As I walk into school, I imagine cannon discharge passing harmlessly through me.

  I tell Eric about this scene at lunch. He likes it, he says, except we could never storyboard it. We both agree that if we ever put it down on paper someone would see it and we’d be “red-flagged” and suspended like Carl Whiteman, who they found with a “hit list” of kids he thought “deserved it” freshman year.

  Eventually, Eric and I agree, Dr. Praetoreous will go back and counteract the high school hit and all the kids will be safe, restored to their places in the timestream whether or not time and space have missed them all that much. But in order for that to happen, it had to actually happen at one point in the timestream, so Eric and I both agree that it did. And our high school works because Dr. Praetoreus would be our same age at this year in time. We sort of hope we were born late enough in history that by the time we are in our forties and fifties “existence engineer” and “clone wrangler” will be viable career paths.

  “You should come over to my house this weekend,” I tell Eric at the end of lunch on Friday. “To work on this.”

  “Absolutely,” Eric says. Because Cecelia Martin and Carter Buehl and people like that, they hang out. Eric and I work.

  2

  My brother’s friends are inexplicably dressed as ninjas and jumping around the front yard when Eric shows up at eight thirty on Friday night. Or rather they have been jumping around the front yard dressed up as ninjas and Eric shows up as soon as they’re gone. He said he was going to come over at seven thirty and he shows up at eight thirty all sweaty.

  “I circled the block a few times,” Eric says. “There were ninjas.”

  “They weren’t really ninjas,” I say. “Just my brother and his idiot friends.”

  “I know,” Eric says. “I just didn’t want to—um—”

  I guess a bunch of seniors dressed as ninjas swearing and kicking each other in the chest for an hour before peeling away in their cars could be scary to some people, but I’m used to it.

  “My dad’s on a date,” I tell Eric. “We pretty much have the run of the place.”

  There are pizza boxes stacked four deep on the kitchen counter. “We have pizza on Fridays,” I tell Eric. “You want some?”

  “No thanks,” he says. “I ate.”

  “There’s sodas and stuff in the fridge.” I open the fridge. Somebody else being around makes me really look at what’s inside, and it really is just sodas and stuff. I try to think if there’s anything in our cabinets that makes it look like we cook or my dad cooks or we eat anything besides takeout, and I don’t think t
here is. We have a “chip cabinet” and a “cracker cabinet.” We have a lot of cabinets.

  “I was thinking about it,” Eric says, “when I was walking around the block, and I think TimeBlaze: An EVILution can still work. Can I have one of those waters?”

  I hand Eric a water bottle and get myself a Dr. Pepper.

  “I just think it has to be the full title. So you know how Star Wars is Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope? In our case the titles would go TimeBlaze: An EVILution: Crisis Endpoint.”

  “What’s Crisis Endpoint?”

  “That would be the name of that particular part. Like Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “It’s just an example, but do you like it?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I like it.”

  “Why do they dress like ninjas?”

  “I dunno. They’re retarded?”

  “Maybe it’s to jump people,” he says.

  “I don’t think they jump anybody. They’re my brother’s friends from church.”

  “Those kids go to church?” Eric says.

  “Yeah. It’s like this youth church or whatever. My family’s not religious, my brother just goes because his friends do.”

  “So they’re religious kids?”

  “They’re not anything kids.”

  Eric looks out at my pool. “I think maybe they jump people.”

  “I dunno,” I say.

  We play video games in my room. A fighting game my brother rented. Eric’s terrible.

  “Look at this guy! Who needs a sword that big?” Eric says about my character, a skinny guy with long blond hair in an admiral’s uniform who is obliterating Eric’s character with a big fuck-off sword. Eric’s character is a disembodied eyeball on top of a purple whirlwind.

  “It’s like a surfboard! Beyond your bigger broadswords, size just becomes a disadvantage. It’s bigger than he is!”

  The admiral’s sword glows blue and slashes the purple whirlwind, dealing the eyeball serious damage.