The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

“It HAD to happen? Nothing fucking had to happen!”

  “I like her too! And she likes me! No one’s ever liked me before!”

  “No one had ever liked me before her either, hardly!”

  “Right! So … so you know how it feels.”

  “I can’t fucking believe this.”

  “You said it yourself, in a weird way, I’ve been alive twice as long as you, and in all that time no one’s ever liked me, or wanted to have any sort of contact with me at all. When is it my turn?”

  “So you would throw away our friendship and fuck me over for ‘your turn.’”

  “I’m not throwing away our friendship!”

  “If you think we’re still friends after this you’re stupid. For all your books and interests and ‘films’ you’re an idiot if you think we’re anything except enemies after this.”

  Eric looks out his bedroom window. We’re there, where it happened, the crash site.

  “I’m really tired,” Eric says.

  “Boo hoo,” I say.

  I don’t know every detail of what happened with Christine and Eric in Eric’s room. But you can sure imagine a hell of a lot if you have an imagination that’s used to getting inside of mechs and robots and thinking up political systems for other galaxies not yet discovered and how spiders would organize an army if they had to, and you turn it on something that’s really small and you already know both of the people involved, know them really well, and know the things they could say and do that would hurt you the most and imagine them doing it in the most elaborate detail. You can flesh out the connection they have that you thought you had with both of them but I guess it turns out you didn’t have with either of them. You know what their beds look like and you’ve seen them both with their shirts off. And as much as you don’t want to be imagining it, that only makes you imagine it more, in sharper detail. You think, maybe when Eric and I were trying to imagine all this shit for our stupid fucking comic or whatever, maybe what we should’ve been doing is trying NOT to imagine anything. Because what this is teaching me is, when you try NOT to imagine something, that’s when it really comes pouring out. If all along we would’ve just tried to stop ourselves from thinking of anything, we’d have been done in a night. A single sleepless furious night.

  It instantly becomes epic-length. It doesn’t stay just the one event. You’ve had it out of both of their mouths that they have every intention of doing it again sometime. So you get to imagine it live as it probably happens across town, again. It goes from a short film to a movie to a series of movies and comic books and an interactive online game.

  And you can also imagine horrible shit that makes you feel a little better. You can imagine borrowing your dad’s SUV and figuring out how to drive just enough to run them both down. You can imagine hiring your brother and his wacko friends to hunt them down and wild out Clockwork Orange-style and leave them in the desert. You can imagine all these things, but mostly you just die.

  In the next couple of weeks I step back into a world with just me in it. Christmas break comes up. My dad likes to take us somewhere because my mom sometimes just shows up unannounced on Christmas if we’re home. We drive to San Diego and stay in a hotel on the beach. My brother pushes me in the freezing ocean and calls me “fucking creepy” when I stay in a minute too long. For presents we all get each other Best Buy gift certificates.

  On the drive back from San Diego with billboards for strip clubs and Sonic drive-thrus speeding by, we are listening to smooth Christmas jazz on a Southern California radio station, except my brother is listening to something hard and scream-y on headphones, and I’m not really listening, I am convincing myself that when I get home I will have an e-mailed apology/take-me-back notice from Christine waiting for me. I will splash my fingers across the keys, my user name, and splash my fingers again, password, and hit enter, and the little world will spin and there in my in-box surrounded by messages from casino porn robots will be an e-mail from “christines_cliche_email_address” that says she was really 100 percent wrong and wants to take it all back and my company, my boyfriend-ness, is better than all the experimental theater pieces in the world laid end to end. San Diego turns into desert, and we stop at a Sunoco to pee and gas up and so my brother can buy a thirty-two-ounce energy drink to give him the energy he needs to like, sit there and listen to really awful punk, then the California station fades out and my dad switches to classic rock as desert turns into our subdivision.

  Right as we’re about to get off the highway, in sight of familiar configurations of fast-food and hotel signs, something big and brown darts onto the road and into our headlights. My dad slams on the brakes but it’s too late, we hit whatever it is, a dog or a deer. We come to a full stop and my dad pulls over to the shoulder.

  “Fucking shit,” my brother says.

  Whatever it was is already gone from the roadway.

  “Jesus,” my dad says, and puts the car in gear.

  When the SUV hits the end of our driveway the classic rock on the radio changes briefly, mysteriously, to mariachi then back into classic rock and the car is barely parked before I’m out of it and in the house running upstairs to check my e-mail.

  There is no way I won’t be getting an apology and take-me-back notice from Christine, by the way. All the mental work I have done composing exactly what it’s going to say, all the heart I have put into wanting it, there is just no way it’s not going to be there. It’s like when I was nine or ten years old and this video-game magazine I had a subscription to was giving away a Street Fighter II arcade machine. I filled out the application blank and sent it out and as the contest came closer to being over I became more and more absolutely convinced I was going to win. I don’t know when me really, really wanting to win became “I already won,” and my mom did her best to manage my out-of-control hope. The fact that I did not end up winning the Street Fighter II arcade machine doesn’t matter here. Willing one piece of electronic information to be in a place that doesn’t even really exist is without a doubt way easier than willing an arcade game to show up in a crate on your front lawn through sheer force of want, and I’m older now. My powers of imagination and wanting are way more powerful, and add to that they’re less focused on things like video games and more focused on grown-up mature things like winning back the girl who took my virginity.

  But when the little world stops spinning there is not an apology notice from Christine. There are the anticipated messages from the casino porn robots and there are also fifteen messages from Eric. None of them have subject lines and they all have images attached. I open them one by one.

  Attached to the blank e-mails are pictures of Eric and Christine, Christine and Eric among her friends she knows from blogs, the college kids she knew when they were seniors in Theater Division. Cutesy artsy pictures Christine’s friends who make photo-zines have taken. Eric and Christine flash concert tickets. Christine dances with hipsters to live music in a tiny art gallery/music venue. Christine and Eric kiss in a booth at IHOP. Eric and a guy I don’t know with a scruffy beard smoke cigarettes. All the guys who aren’t Eric are like seven feet tall and have beards. He looks ridiculous, like a nerd pet they keep around to amuse them. Christine and the nerd pet kiss in a parking lot. At first I think maybe he’s accidentally sent them to me but the time stamps show they were all sent hours apart from one another, nice and intentional.

  It is so out of character that for a minute I imagine one of Christine’s friends has a garage where they disassembled Eric and modified him into somebody who would do something like this. But in a world where my best friend and girlfriend start fucking, I believe there is nothing so bad that it won’t happen to me, and I believe this instantly.

  I guess it is only a little bit of a surprise that people have these hidden personality explosions where they turn out to be someone entirely different than who you thought they were. When I was like ten, my mom kind of went haywire. She realized that what she’d always really wanted to do was, not b
e an artist exactly, but live around artists and have the sort of lack of attachment or responsibility that an artist has. She wanted to start a whole new life with those kinds of rules, or lack thereof, and so instead of moving anywhere she just started living like that in the middle of having a husband and two kids. My parents got divorced, my dad got us, and my mom drove east. She met a guy in Atlanta and they got married in Palm Springs. As a general rule my dad is not huge on knowing where we are all the time, but when my brother and I went to my mom’s wedding we had to call every half an hour and check in.

  So it’s not surprising to me that people can just blow up and change or I guess reveal who they always were, it’s just disappointing that the people who stay the same are people like my brother or Cecelia Martin and the people who change or I guess peel back their façade are the people who you thought were the good ones.

  I go downstairs and out into the garage to get a case of soda to put in the fridge. There’s a mark on the front of my dad’s SUV where he hit the animal on the road. There’s no blood or gore, just a big yellow stain like we hit America’s biggest bug. I don’t like to think about what angle we would’ve had to hit something at for it to leave a mark like that. And also, we hit a mammal, a pretty big one, not an insect. I think. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was in my head building a world where everything is back to normal that felt so real for a second I thought I could step into it.

  In fourth period our first day back I have to run a class survey up to the office. I want it to take as long as possible. I’m in no hurry to get back to Mr. Webber’s history class because I guess he got in trouble for showing us too many movies last semester so now he’s pledged to lecture all day every day and he would clearly rather be running Glory or a Ken Burns documentary and you can feel him boring himself. So I walk around the side of the school and Christine and Eric are sitting in the loading bay. Christine is sharing Eric’s enormous lunch, which he’s not supposed to be here eating until next period, fifth period, when we both have lunch. I’m not going to stop or say hi, I’m just going to clutch my manila envelope and ignore them, but Christine says, “Hey, Darren,” and stupidly, I turn my head. Just enough to acknowledge that they actually exist.

  “You don’t ditch class,” I say to Eric.

  “I am right now,” Eric says.

  “He’s being very rebellious,” Christine says. She smiles. She thinks this is all a joke.

  I walk away, and Eric actually says, “That’s right, walk away.”

  “Eric!” Christine says.

  I actually, actively want to punch him in the face. I think about turning and running back and putting a sneaker in his stomach, and it’s confusion that keeps me from doing it.

  Sex with Christine has turned him into an asshole, I think, and that actually kind of makes me smile. Or maybe it’s just hanging out with all the assholes in all the pictures I keep getting. All the muffin-hats.

  That day after school Eric is waiting for me by my locker. Maybe Christine made him come apologize for being a real cock at lunch. Maybe he’s come to do that on his own.

  “Hey,” Eric says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He looks skinny. Skinny even for how skinny he is. Behind his glasses his eyes are retreating into his brain. There’s a scraggly sort-of mustache on his upper lip. I think maybe this is Christine’s older friends making him into one of their own. But he has the same clothes and the same backpack and the same glasses, there’s just less of him for everything to hang off of.

  “So …” he says. “How do you wanna do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “This,” he says. “We have to have it out.”

  “You mean like fight?”

  “Yeah,” he says, sounding totally unsure of himself, then again, “Yeah,” like he knows he sounded like a pussy the first time.

  “You’re serious.”

  “It needs to happen.”

  “Fucking stop it. Stop e-mailing me pictures of you and Christine. What the fuck is that about? I don’t want to know you guys. Go fool around and take pictures of each other and die.”

  What’s left of Eric squares up to me. “Come on, then,” he squeaks.

  “Fuck you, you fucking mutant.” And for the second time today I walk away and for the second time Eric says “Walk away” like he’s seen it in an action movie.

  My life is strange and I don’t know anyone in it, except my brother, who’s still my brother, so it doesn’t surprise me when he comes in the house that night singing an Irish drinking song with Alan and it doesn’t surprise me when he comes up to my dad’s office where I’m playing a space strategy game online and shoves a wad of paper in my face, he’s just that kind of asshole, but what does surprise me is what’s on the paper. It’s the dossier of a member of the TimeBlaze zombie posse.

  “Tha fuck iz this?” he says in his British fuckhead accent. “Someone exploded yer faggit library all over tha droiveway, ya bastahd.”

  I push him to one side and run downstairs and out the front door and when I get there, sure enough, six months of made-up universe is all over the driveway, flapping in a half-assed January wind. Steampunk Praetoreous is stuck in the rubber plants. His cyberpunk counterpart is underneath the wheel of the blue recycling bin. Paper is everywhere and I’m completely fucking done.

  I’m going to go back upstairs and tell my brother I will pay him and Jake whatever Christmas money I got in various cards from various relatives to have them go to Eric’s house and push his eyes all the way back in his brain. Then I think of a better idea. Inside my junk drawer, next to porn I’ve printed off the Internet, I find the business card of that guy from my brother’s church. I take out the phone I haven’t had reason to use in a few weeks, and I dial the number on the business card.

  On the third ring the guy picks up, and I remind him of who I am, and then I start talking about a boy who can’t sleep.

  “I didn’t believe it either but I swear to God … err … I swear it’s true.”

  “I believe you. I was ready to believe when I heard thirdhand from your brother. I was ready to believe even before then. These are interesting times. For things like your friend to occur doesn’t come as a complete surprise.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I can’t be much more specific than I’ve been. Thank you for your honesty. If you need anything from me, anything, you let me know. And I hope I can feel free to do likewise.”

  “Uhm … okay.”

  “Thank you, Darren.”

  The creepy church guy hangs up.

  I’d like to say that that night I dream of Eric being carried off by monks and nuns and ultrareligious freakazoids and burned at the stake at the top of a hill, but I don’t. My dreams have no poetic justice, they’re just mind farts. I dream about checking my e-mail. There’s a thing where my brother and I are in a submersible in the ocean and he keeps trying to send text messages. I dream I’m fucking Christine. So no dreams about it but before and after I go to sleep I think about what I may have just opened Eric up to, and it never feels as good as I want it to. It feels pretty terrible, actually.

  A typical day after me and Christine and Eric explode: I walk home right after school. I should start driving, but it’s too late to switch into driver’s ed and I’ve been bothering my dad to sign me up for the same driving school my brother took but he keeps forgetting. So for now I walk home and it’s February so I’m not all sweaty when I get there. I go in the kitchen and eat everything. I feel a lot like human shit. I’ve started doing the occasional sit-up but it doesn’t move anything around on what is still the worst torso in North America. I check my e-mail in my dad’s office, but it’s a lot like checking my phone: asking for disappointment, a good activity for somebody who likes the numeral zero, and blank screens, and no change. I go in my room and turn on NPR. I masturbate to scenarios totally unrelated to my life: weird fantasy specifics like cat women and Venusian slave girls. Afterward I fall
asleep and wake up when it’s dark. I have a couple hours of groggy useless energy after that and it feels like I could stay up all night. I’ve become really involved in this massively multiplayer game online. My character is a daemon lord whose right arm is a scythe. The rest of my squadron is ten-year-olds whose voices are modified to sound like bugs or robots. I always fall asleep eventually, and the days keep going like this.

  In English we’re supposed to be turning in our modern-day adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath. Creative assignments usually send most honors students into a seizure, because there aren’t predefined rubrics for being creative, you’re encouraged to do exactly what you’re not supposed to do in any other assignment, which is MAKE IT UP, you’re not even asked to provide a bibliography, and before long you have to put a belt in soon-to-be-valedictorian Alicia Henry’s mouth to keep her from choking on her own tongue. But the Grapes of Wrath adaptation has a legendary, all-purpose solution: just make it about illegal immigrants. Some kid who was a junior when my brother was a freshman did it, and Mrs. Amory thought it was so great she used it as an example of the assignment for the next couple years, until people got the hint and just started copying it. I have one-upped everybody and made my adaptation, which is supposed to be a prose short story, seven to ten pages double-spaced, about Iraqi refugees. Plus, it’s in screenplay format. Eric and I were briefly debating buying really expensive screenwriting software to write the TimeBlaze movie scripts, but we eventually decided against it and Eric wrote thirty or so pages of the first movie in a Microsoft Word document he formatted very specifically. I just take out the names DR. PRAETOREOUS and TEMPORAL RANGER and THE MAN and replace them with SADIQ and HADIR and TOM JOAD, whose name I decided not to alter for obvious reasons. And I change the dialogue and action, of course.

  Mrs. Amory is coming around the room and I hand in my paper and then Chris White hands in his and then some girl whose name I can’t remember but I think is in choir hands in hers and when Mrs. Amory gets to Eric, Eric doesn’t have anything to hand in.