The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  Eric knew they’d ask to see the money up front, so we have it in the gym bag my grandma gave me two years ago with my initials stitched into it. I don’t go to the gym, or participate in any athletics, so the only use my gym bag has gotten is the time Eric and I filled it with my dad’s weights and threw it off our deck. We were settling a debate about gravity that had to do with whether or not Steam-punk Praetoreous could realistically toss a half-ton proton charge off the deck of an airship before it exploded. (We wanted to be believable. It was the only way we could hope to change the way people think about proton charges and airships.) Other than that it has gathered dust in my closet, until now, the time Eric and I pay my brother and his psycho friends to beat on a guy my dad’s age who may or may not be from the government but is definitely after us. Eric, and me for being with him.

  “Who is this guy?” my brother asks.

  “It’s a long story,” I say, “but basically, he’s—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eric says. “All that matters is he needs to get got.”

  Eric rips open the gym bag, revealing a very skeptical bank teller’s drawer full of one-dollar bills. Enough one-dollar bills to make that bank teller look hard at the couple of haggard-looking teenage boys who are asking to be handed their entire savings accounts in one-dollar bills, but not enough to make her not give us the money.

  Eric’s idea is to make my brother and his friends feel like hired muscle in a movie. They are hired muscle, not movie-quality, but except for a couple of scoffs and a “Who does this kid think he is?” from my brother, the idea is working. Where else do people have duffel bags full of cash? Where else do they say “get got”? We are tickling a very specific spot on my brother’s and his friends’ teenage lizard brains right now.

  “Alright,” my brother says. “But we do this our way.” Which is a stupid movie thing to say, but paying people to hurt other people is a stupid movie thing to do, so here we are.

  We call The Man on the number he gave Eric. Eric tells him he wants to turn himself in. Gives him directions to a cul-de-sac that’s a ways away from my house, up against the mountains, still mostly under construction.

  We don’t bring Eric. We decide that would be a little like bringing the kid to the kidnappers. And though it never gets said between us, one night not very long ago these guys did what they’re about to do, except to Eric. If he wants a pass I can’t blame him and he doesn’t have to say it. But I’m going along, the project manager, to make sure they don’t get distracted by drug scores or drunk girls or who knows, someone else to go wild on.

  I have to tell them not to dress like the guys from A Clockwork Orange.

  “But we get to do this our way!” my brother says as they’re loading implements of fuck-you-up into the trunk of Alan’s Altima. Two baseball bats: one wood, one aluminum. A samurai sword my brother got at the mall. A couple golf clubs. A coat hanger.

  I tell them the masks will make them more conspicuous, and the suspenders will make it hard to run, if that becomes a thing that needs to happen. What I really want to say is don’t, like, enjoy this so much.

  “Let them,” Eric says. “Whatever it takes.”

  So half an hour later I’m in the backseat of the Altima squished between Alan and Tits, who, because none of them have the actual masks from A Clockwork Orange, are wearing the faces of a Power Ranger and Dora the Explorer, respectively. My brother is driving and Jake is riding shotgun.

  “Five-oh!” Jake says as a cop car passes us in the other lane.

  “Fuck ’em,” my brother says, Eric’s movie magic having worked on everybody, or maybe this is how they always talk.

  “They can’t touch us,” Tits says. “We’re untouchable.”

  “Touch my dick,” Alan says, which is closer to how I imagine they talk normally. Jake and my brother had a twenty-minute argument about what music to play in the car on the way there, so we’re about five minutes behind schedule. They decided on the Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels soundtrack. My brother makes up the lost five minutes by flooring it in a way Alan doesn’t like, this being his mom’s car.

  We reach the cul-de-sac, which Eric picked based on his total knowledge of the neighborhood. Completely dark, no streetlights yet in the cul-de-sac itself, just some light leaking in from the street that leads to it, and the moonlight, and these red lights up on the mountains that are TV antennas. The red lights are so planes know the antennas are there and don’t crash into them. They’ve been there as long as I can remember and when I was a kid and I asked my dad what they were and he told me, I imagined on the back of every red light a TV was glowing, showing what that antenna was broadcasting.

  Everyone is trying hard to be businesslike, but can’t help bailing from the car guffawing because somebody farted, and everyone agrees it’s Jake except Jake. They get their game faces back on. My brother pops the trunk. Alan picks up the aluminum bat; Tits, the wooden one. Jake, two golf clubs, one in each hand. My brother, his sword. My brother puts on a Phantom of the Opera half-mask that disguises his identity, like, not at all, and Jake puts on a full Boba Fett helmet I’m actually pretty jealous of. They all adjust their suspenders. They cackle. I don’t have a mask or suspenders or a weapon, just my phone, and I’m supposed to call Eric when it’s over.

  We have about four minutes until The Man is supposed to meet Eric, and Eric alone, here. We have ditched the car up the road, out of sight, and we hoof it into the dark cul-de-sac. Everybody takes up positions in the dark half-built homes. I follow my brother, thinking about Eric’s imaginary junkie as we duck through planks and blue plastic tarps.

  “This is gonna be fun,” my brother says. “I guarantee.” We sneak behind a dumpster. My brother peeks out around it, I slide down so I’m sitting in the dirt, facing away from the cul-de-sac where The Man is supposed to pull up any minute. I am looking up at the mountains. My brother recites rap lyrics about snitches and what happens to them until there’s the sound of a car pulling up and headlights chase rabbits out of the half-homes whose skeletons you can see just for a second. My brother whistles. A car door opens and shuts.

  I should get visual, I think, in the movie terms we are all thinking in, I should have visual confirmation of what’s about to go down. But maybe audio will do. Maybe I’ll just sit here staring up at the red lights. That’s what I’ll do, I think, and I do, I stare up at the lights and I think, You find out your best friend can’t sleep and won’t ever have to and you expect it to open up this world of heaven-on-Earth amazingness and instead it opens up a world where you have to sic the people you hate the most on a guy you don’t know and get them to do what they would do to you given the right reasons or no reason at all, that is to say, kick your teeth in and laugh. I will stay focused on the lights, I think, and not the sound of bone on new pavement.

  There’s more cackling and Jake yells, “Throw me the keys!” There’s the sound of keys. A man’s voice, low. My brother and his friends’ voices, loud and wanting to swing, but nobody has yet. The Man’s voice again. My brother and his friends, lower this time, more conversational, sounding less like they have a couple of golf clubs they’re about to bring down on dude’s head. The sound of a trunk opening. Alan, audible: “Hol-ee shit!” The Man’s voice, my brother’s voice, Jake’s voice, my brother’s voice. My brother and Jake’s voices, closer, like they walked away from everyone else for a war council.

  “… their money back,” Jake is saying, “and the money we’d make just selling the shit ourselves! And think of how much we could still keep.”

  “How do we know it’s real?” my brother says.

  “Alan knows this shit. You’ve seen Alan’s mom. Fucked up. Alan knows pills, dude.”

  “How about we just fuck him up and take it?” my brother says.

  “Look at this guy,” Jake says. “I think he might be somebody.”

  A moment, then the sound of something sliding out of the trunk, the trunk shutting, the man’s voice, the car keys,
the car door, the car turning on and driving away.

  Alan, again: “Hol-ee shit.”

  My brother comes around the side of the dumpster and says, “Change of plans, fag.”

  And that is how instead of assaulting this mystery guy and getting him to leave me and my friend alone, my brother and his psycho friends accepted, as payment for not fucking him up, a suitcase full of pharmaceutical tranquilizers, antipsychotics, and painkillers, hundreds of bottles with “Trial” written on the side, from the mystery guy. Who they said was really cool. Who they said didn’t seem fazed by their masks or weapons, and knew just what to offer. Who, they say on the way back to Jake’s house, cracking open bottles of pills, washing them down with whatever half-empty bottles of flat soda are rolling around the floor of the car, they should really invite to their parties because dude clearly has the hook-up. When we pull up to Jake’s house my brother says he’s sorry, but I gotta understand, right? Alan says he already can’t feel his face, so they’re in business, definitely in business.

  I have to call Eric and tell him my fuck-up brother fucked up, and though we got a full refund, it’s still the case that neither of us can really go home.

  We can’t go to Eric’s house and we can’t go to my house and we don’t really have much in the way of other friends to stay with, at least I don’t. But Eric does: Eric has those kids I saw him with in the pictures he sent me when he was trying to make me furious, Chrstine’s college buddies.

  “Those kids in the pictures you sent me,” I say to Eric after we’ve dealt with the fact that my brother disappointed us, which isn’t really a surprise but is still a bummer because we thought we could use the enemy we know against the enemy we don’t, like in volume 3.4 of TimeBlaze where Dr. Praetoreous rallies the Hinterland Scourges to fight the malevolent Zethi Railroad Co. that threatens them both. I don’t say Christine’s friends because Christine’s name is still this big hot word between us.

  “Those kids,” it will turn out, are Randy and Christopher and Benjamin and Chelsea 2 and Arthur and Larissa and Punk-as-Fuck Jess.

  Eric has Randy’s number.

  “Hey. Randy?” Eric says when Randy picks up. “Hello, it’s Eric,” Eric says. “My associate and I are in something of a pickle and I was wondering if you could provide invaluable assistance,” Eric says.

  I look at him like, what is wrong with you?

  “Really? Outstanding. We’re at the gas station at Ray and Ranch Circle. Yes. We’ll be here,” Eric says. “And we’ll buy you gas. And that won’t even begin to make up the debt.

  “Alright, then,” Eric says, and hangs up.

  I was looking through the gas-station magazines, but I give it up to glare at Eric.

  “How I talk when I’m around them,” he explains.

  While we wait for Randy I page through a gaming magazine’s E3 wrap-up and Eric buys Mountain Dew. I look at screenshots from a new World War II first-person shooter and think about me being dumb around everyone and smart around Eric and Eric being smart around me and smarter around Christine and even smarter around Christine’s friends. I expect that when these guys roll up, they will look like college professors, they will flash library cards, they will wear glasses, they may very well not arrive by car at all but instead pull up on a tandem version of one of those old-fashioned big-wheeled bicycles. But when Randy finally does pull up (in a car), Christopher in the passenger seat, they seem dumber than all of us. Randy isn’t wearing a shirt and Christopher isn’t wearing shoes.

  “Fellows, this is Darren,” Eric says.

  “Hey man,” says Randy.

  “Oh, right,” Christopher says.

  The “oh, right” seems like recognition, like one night after Eric was a part of their circle everyone was sitting around on the floor at somebody’s place and Christine, from where she lay with her head in Eric’s lap, got around to mentioning me like a crappy town where she met Eric and they escaped from it just in time. I think how good it is that Eric can be around these guys without Christine’s having to be there, because I am not ready to be in a room with both of them and act like everything’s cool.

  I don’t know how to think of these kids, and I guess if I could they’d want to kill themselves or change because they’d be labelable.

  These kids, I come to find out, love their full names. Christopher. Benjamin. Franklin.

  And they talk in this way I can’t pin down, either, that sounds sarcastic but is actually sincere. Unless it is actually sarcastic.

  I first notice this right after Randy and Christopher pick us up. We get on the freeway and get off by where the college is, and they take us to lunch at this place Cheba Hut, a weed-themed sandwich place which on the way there Christopher admits is “pretty lame but the sandwiches are really good,” and if he means it the sarcastic way it sounds like he means it then he thinks the weed theme is really good and the sandwiches are pretty lame but it turns out the weed theme is pretty lame and the sandwiches are really, really good. And I start to figure out that as much as it sounds like the things they say are sarcastic because of the simplicity of what they’re saying and their tone of voice, they actually really do unironically think that dancing is fun and local music is a good thing and so is making stuff, just things in general. And I wouldn’t expect college guys who consider themselves intelligent to say so many things that don’t have cynicism attached to them, but the sandwiches are only the first thing they’re right about.

  Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

  Eric’s sandwich has sauerkraut which goes with the sort of little-old-man image he seems to have built for himself and he pays for all of our lunches to thank Christopher and Randy for “coming to our aid in such a gallant fashion.” Christopher chuckles when Eric says this, toasting with his Styrofoam cup full of Mister Pibb, and Randy says “You’re the best” while picking lettuce off his toasted sub which on the menu is called The Dank. Eric makes them promise not to tell anyone our whereabouts, and tells them we’ll be “off your hands just as soon as we formulate a plan to spring ourselves from the situation in which we are currently embroiled,” and they do. They probably don’t think we’re in any more serious trouble than maybe having been caught with some of the product that’s depicted in murals all over the walls, spiraling organically out of Bob Marley’s hair, raining down from a UFO, being dreamed about by Hendrix in a thought bubble shaped like a marijuana leaf. Tony DiAvalo should be apprenticing at the feet of whatever burnout da Vinci painted the wall in here.

  Then Christopher says something about how quiet I am, then after we’re done with lunch they take us back to their place, which they share with two other guys but it’s still really clean, and it’s theirs and it doesn’t smell bad in the least, and there are five couches in the living room because “people crash here a lot.”

  Christopher is right, people do crash at their house a lot. Albert, one of the housemates, is in a band and they’re off on tour, but he offers up the house to other bands that come through town and they do the same for him, I guess, when he’s in their town. So Eric gets a couch and I get a couch and the other couches are split up at different times among members of Get Your Own Back, Tears In The Schoolyard, Andre The Client, and a singer-songwriter named Randall Coats. They’re almost all really nice guys. If they’re staying here it means Albert and his band are staying at their places in other states which means there are houses like this in a lot of towns all over the country, and I have to admit it’s kind of cool. But for a while I don’t want to.

  A lot of time Eric forfeits his couch to these guys, since he doesn’t need a place to sleep.

  “Someone is trying to kill us,” Eric says. “I mean, we don’t know that for sure. In fact, that’s probably the last thing he wants to do. At least to me.”

  “T
hat must give you a lot of comfort,” I say.

  “Sorry,” Eric says. “But for the purposes of self-preservation, to trigger our deepest self-preservational instincts, we have to think of it like somebody’s trying to kill us.”

  “So what you’re saying is, we shouldn’t just sit on the couch reading comics all day?” Because that’s what we’ve been doing since we got here: picking our way through the Preacher series, which Christopher says is his but we can totally read them if we want, in fact, we totally should.

  “No. We want these guys to think everything’s cool, and we’re normal, and we want them to not mind having us around because having a place to go is the only thing that’s keeping us … well, ALIVE, if we’re going to think about it like we’re going to get killed. Which I said was a good idea.” He’s doing that more often now, sort of rambling, and where before he would talk for a long time but everything he said would be a new thought and you understood it was relevant even if you didn’t understand exactly what he meant, now he’ll talk and not everything means something. And it takes him a second to get back into his Preacher book, a second of just sort of staring off into space.

  I wish I could say that that’s what’s bothering me, that someone is trying to kill us, or capture us, or whatever. It isn’t. It’s more that this place kind of seems like the scene of the crime, the crime being Eric and Christine. Or if not the actual physical scene of the crime, the criminals’ postcrime getaway flophouse where they brought their haul, spread all the money on the bed and fucked on it. Or any one of these couches for all I know. So Christopher forgive me if I’m a little quiet, it’s me still being angry about it and feeling like shit for still feeling angry because I guess if I’m being honest with myself it’s what I did when I was angry that brought us here.

  All of the houses where Eric and I live are new, probably newer than either of us, but out here by the college everything’s about as old as it gets for the desert, meaning one-story houses from the fifties and sixties. It’s kind of cool, actually. Randy and Christopher’s house is mostly shaded from the street by a lemon tree that must be older than anything in our suburb, the movie theater, the Olive Garden, our high school, any of it. Before dinner our first night, Eric says something pretty important that I somehow hadn’t thought of up until this point: