The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

by DC Pierson

  Eric takes out his phone.

  “It could be tapped,” I say.

  Eric nods like, of course, then crosses the street and calls Christopher from a pay phone. Christopher is, I imagine, still at the show or maybe in the back of a paddywagon or maybe having his nuts shocked by mysterious government agents in order to get him to surrender our location, so Eric leaves a voicemail, something along the lines of we’re sorry we got them mixed up in our mess, we never meant to drag them down with us. It sounds overdramatic but we haven’t been home or at school in almost a week and we’re fugitives from some cipher with whole stores of really good drugs and we’re feeling pretty overdramatic, if you want to know the truth.

  We walk south down side streets parallel to Central Avenue, not wanting to actually go down the well-lit main street. “I used to have T-ball down here,” I say.

  “Oh yeah?” Eric says. “Were you good?”

  “No,” I say, “terrible.”

  Come to think of it the aluminum bat I had for T-ball got thrown in my brother’s trunk the night he and his friends were supposed to take care of our problem. I am sort of disgusted that something from my childhood was almost used to bludgeon somebody, but then I think how if it actually had been used to bludgeon somebody, I might be home in bed instead of walking down side streets parallel to Central Avenue, and Eric might be home, not in bed, listening to early music on the NPR affiliate or thinking about fractals. I feel a weird mix of emotions, none of which seem like they go together but they all get felt at the same time. I’m getting more of these lately.

  Central terminates at the mountains. On the other side of the mountains is our neighborhood and lots of others. We hit a cul-de-sac and just keep walking. I remind myself that they’re not even technically big enough to be mountains, they’re really just hills we call “the mountains,” but it’s dark and past midnight and there could be coyotes and God knows what else up here, the homeless junkies who’ve been kicked out of their model homes, anything. But no one would think to look for us up here. So two unathletic boys stumble upwards in the middle of the night toward the big TV antennas with red lights on them that always meant home to me after coming back from vacation or summer camp.

  “This is really scary,” Eric says. I’m glad he thinks so, too.

  When we get to the top of the mountains or the hills or whatever they are, I am not surprised to see there are not actual TVs mounted on the antennas showing what they’re broadcasting. It is too bad the red lights are serving their purpose of keeping planes from flying too low: if they were low enough we could grab on to their bellies and get away.

  “What if we left?” I say to Eric. “Like, drove away, or flew? Went to California?”

  “No,” Eric says, right on top of me. “Running is just running. Let them come.”

  With our neighborhoods spread out below us, most everything dark except for the orange streetlights wrapped in strands around blocks with mansions and blocks with normal houses and blocks with no houses at all yet, Eric tells me we’d better just stand and fight.

  “You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he says.

  “Nah, I will. I will. But who are we fighting and what are we fighting them with?”

  “I gotta show you something,” Eric says, and starts down the hill towards home.

  It’s faster going downhill and by the time we get to the bottom the cuffs of my jeans are full of stickers and cactus needles. Nothing has stuck itself straight up into my shoe yet, which is good, but I’m looking forward to walking on pavement again at the bottom of the hill. There’s a fence and on the other side of it are construction sites that become neighborhoods farther along. We hop the fence and Eric veers right, towards more desert. We’re heading away from the hills, walking alongside civilization, houses on our left and more desert on our right.

  There used to be desert behind my house, then they threw a band of highway a mile or two away in the desert and filled that space with houses, and that’s where Eric’s house is. Someday they’ll throw a highway to our right and fill the space we’re in now with houses. It’s just starting to get light on the very edge of the sky by the time we get to where I guess we’re going, which is the desert that’s behind Eric’s house right now and won’t be anymore someday. I followed him out here one day and caught him looking like Lord of the Flies. I know sort of where we are because of the fast-food signs I can see from here, the Sonic and the Wendy’s and the Exxon that go together near the freeway. My head does that thing where you had no idea where you were and everything’s a strange blur but then you see a landmark and that orients you and suddenly you can fit everything in your head.

  Eric stops, looks around. “We can rest here for a while until it gets light.” He lies down with his back against something big and artificial, a dug-up drainpipe or something. I lean back against it as well and start trying to pick stickers and burrs out of my jeans but it’s dark and I can’t really see and I keep pricking myself, so after a while I just lay my head back and fall asleep.

  Later the sun’s up almost completely and I sort of forget where I am and I really want to get the sun out of my eyes so I turn my head to the left. There’s some graffiti or something on the drainpipe near my shoulder. It’s this elaborate, bent fleur-de-lis: the banner of the Thragnacian Sentinels, who are charged with keeping a baby wormhole from devouring the universe in TimeBlaze. I didn’t know Eric did graffiti. But the symbol is kind of way too good and intricate to be graffiti. I think I must still be asleep but I’m pretty sure it’s broad daylight two miles out of town and I am dozing with my back against a Thragnacian Containment Pylon.

  I stand up and turn around and the thing is so white in the sun my eyes hurt from looking at it. The pylon isn’t floating at a point in space emitting an invisible antimatter field that, in concert with all the other pylons, keeps the wormhole from tearing up more of the universe’s fabric, and even weirder, it isn’t sitting all flat and miniature and two-dimensional on a drawing pad on my desk, it’s out here full-size, inactive, and buried halfway in the sand. All its curves, all its insignia, all the design details I cribbed from the cover of a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles I got from the school library, they’re all here two miles from my house in the real world with breathing people and cars.

  Beyond the pylon, farther into the desert, Eric is peeing behind a bush. When he turns around he sees me see the thing and the first thing I ask him is “How did you build it?”

  “I didn’t,” he says, “I sort of thought it. I thought it.”

  11

  “On your bad days.”

  “Yeah. For a long time, they were just. Well, bad. Really painful and I would sweat and hallucinate. It was like an awful fever or what Jesse told me a bad acid trip was like.” Jesse is one of the college kids we’ll probably never see again after getting them busted. “But the hallucinations were extraordinarily vivid, I couldn’t differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t. And that was scary, so I locked myself in my room, and, I guess, risked freaking out and jumping out the window like in an antidrug commercial but other than that I was reasonably okay. I put everything remotely dangerous in my closet or the garage so I wouldn’t hang myself with anything or swing on any hallucinations with something sharp and accidentally gouge myself.”

  “I saw you in the middle of one of those.”

  “You did. At least, I remember you. It’s kind of … hard to tell. Anyway, the hallucinations, after we started working on TimeBlaze they were almost exclusively derived from that. Characters, settings, monsters. The monsters were the worst. One time it was The Man. And I don’t remember exactly what was happening, but we were fighting, and I knocked his sunglasses off. They went flying into some corner of my room, and he went away, everything went away, I came out of it, I didn’t think about it again, and then I was digging in that corner for a record or something a week later and they were there. The sunglasses.”

  “Hmmm,
” I say. Because what you say when your best friend tells you things in his mind, things the two of you thought up together, those things get real at some point inexplicably, what you say is, “Hmmm.”

  “That was the first thing that, I don’t know, appeared, became real, something. Generated.”

  “Can you control it?”

  “I don’t know. I read this novel once where this character was having a dream and afterwards he couldn’t tell if he had been controlling the dream or what. I mean, obviously it’s all coming from me, so on some level, subconsciously … I don’t know,” Eric says, rapping his knuckles on the pylon, the whole thing resonating with this otherwordly metallic sound. “When it happens I don’t know what’s real, what isn’t. I’m insane.”

  “Isn’t part of being insane thinking things that aren’t real are real? People who kill their kids because they hear God’s voice, see visions, stuff like that?”

  “Right, that’s what I’m saying.”

  “What you’re telling me is, some of those things that aren’t real that you think are when you’re like this, they become real.”

  “Right.”

  “So you’re not insane at all, then.”

  Eric laughs. He uses one of the pylon’s gunwales to pick himself up off the ground. He dusts off his jeans.

  “It was kind of sad. It appeared like this, buried. It was working for a couple seconds, you should’ve seen it, it was pretty incredible. Its stabilization afterburners were firing these blue flames and I was concerned it was going to hit a cactus and start a brushfire or something. But then it sputtered out and died and after everything else in the dream or whatever you want to call it was over, it was still here.”

  “Do you still have the glasses?”

  Eric tramps into the brush a few feet, and pulls out a dirty black trashbag. He shakes the dust off of it, reaches in, and pulls out a completely normal-looking pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He tramps back over to the pylon and hands them to me. Not only do they look totally normal, they’re a little busted, probably from being in the middle of the desert and maybe from this fight Eric says he had.

  I hold them up like I’m going to put them on. When they’re a few inches from my nose, this sort of golden cloud appears between my eyes and the lenses. As they get closer and closer to my face, the cloud snaps into focus. It becomes a dancing collection of goldenrod yellow letters and numbers, all of them corresponding to and crowded around anything I can see: the bushes, the trees, the mountain, Eric. The pylon in particular swarms with information. I can’t read any of this information, of course, because it’s all in High Yewuan, the ancient language of the technological priesthood that were the forebearers to the Committee, and even if it were in English I’d have a hard time understanding it, because it’s coming at such a fast clip. The Man, whose every brainwave is trained and geared toward his mission, it just washes over him. He gets what he needs.

  “Dude,” I say.

  “I know,” Eric says.

  “So these …” I take them off because I’m starting to get a headache already. “And the pylon?”

  Eric doesn’t say anything. He turns and walks away from our town, into the desert. I follow him. He scrambles down a little hill and turns. Carved out of the hill is what you’d call a cave, if you called the hills we walked down “mountains,” it’s really more of a hole in a dirt mound but it’s more cave than I’m used to. I follow him in out of the sun and it takes a second for my eyes to focus and before they do I’m ready for anything, prepped to have anything from my imagination ripped out and splattered on the actual world, ready to see a buzzing underground wasp-city or row upon row of Neanderthal clones in glowing orange jars, but instead I see dirt walls and something under a dirty blue tarp. There’s blood everywhere. Dried onto the walls of the dirt hole and dried on the floor after oozing out from underneath the tarp. I think, oh my God, somebody stumbled upon Eric while he was out here in the midst of his thing and they didn’t have the sense, weren’t enough of a friend to him to run when he told them to run, and he killed them. Wittingly or unwittingly, sane or insane, and now I’m going to have to help him bury whoever’s under the tarp.

  Eric reaches down and pulls the tarp back and instead of the body of a ten-year-old skate punk or Mexican migrant worker, it’s a dog. A dog with horns, but still a dog. A Yerum Battlebeast to the people of the Argot Cluster, but still a dog, a really weird dog, to anyone who isn’t me and Eric, the people who came up with it.

  “Holy shit dude,” I say, “holy fucking shit.”

  You can tell Eric is weirded out by me crying. Hell, I’m weirded out by me crying.

  “It attacked me,” he says, “I had to. But you should’ve seen it before. It was amazing. We did a really good job.”

  But it isn’t that it’s dead, I’m not crying about a dog from a made-up galaxy that probably has no business existing anyway, it’s not any of that, it’s, I don’t know, I had sort of just started dealing with the fact that Eric meant anything is possible, because if he is able to exist, imagine what else could exist out there, imagine what else could be coming true. But what the sunglasses and the pylon half-buried in the dirt and the dead dog at my feet, the dog with the skin just as rough as I shaded it on a piece of notebook paper on some afternoon last November, what these things mean is that he’s not only a signifier that anything can be real, he’s the thing that makes them real. And that fucks me up so completely, makes me so crazy happy that I have to cry and like any teenage boy I’m proud for almost never crying but now I’m even more proud because I saved it for this, this is a moment that deserves it. I wish I hadn’t cried about a girl a couple of months ago so I’d have more tears for this moment, this moment that rips up the term reality, forever un-marries it from the word boring. I am also, I have to admit, terrified, because I have always lived in this one world, and I am leaving it, right now in this moment, for a whole different one. I imagine it’s a lot how leaving for college feels, if you were going to college in Atlantis.

  But I can’t tell Eric that right this second, I don’t even know it well enough to say it and I barely know it well enough now. What I end up saying is, “How did you kill it?”

  “My dad’s gun,” Eric says, and moves aside a rock to reveal a handgun in the dirt.

  I put the sunglasses back on, even though we’re in the shade, even though it means being showered with a whole lot of arcane symbols that I designed but don’t know the meaning of. I guess it’s uncomfortable to me, having my eyes out there, unprotected, with tears streaming out of them that I can’t do anything to stop. The glasses were a by-product of the fact that I’m not great at drawing eyes, that I could get nine tenths of the way through a really successful depiction of some character and then have it ruined by the delicate balance that eyes are, the way we have so much deep unconscious experience with them that when an artist has done a shitty job of striking that balance we look at them and the whole thing feels wrong. And now here they are on my face, here they are collecting my tears.

  They have the unintended side effect of making the whole world look like a video game: one of the only things on the projected HUD (heads-up display) that I can actually make sense of is the status bars. It scans every living thing in your field of vision and tells you how healthy they are, how close to death. Every animal, anyway, or artificial construct that’s close enough to an animal. This is useful to The Man when he is fighting somebody and he needs to know how many more bullets it will take to bring them down, or when he’s presented with a dying alien and he needs to know how much longer he has to get whatever information he needs from the creature before it expires completely. Terrestrial plants get a pass, which is a good thing, too, or the desert would be a forest of green, yellow, and red status bars. It’s interesting to me because I look at Eric and see that his status bar is yellow, less than half full, meaning he’s closer to dying than not.

  “When’s your next bad day?” I ask.

 
; “Hard to say,” Eric says. “They’re happening closer together now.”

  “That’s not gonna be good enough,” I say. “We can’t afford to wait for it, and we can’t afford it being erratic when it happens. You need to be able to control when it happens, and what we get out of it when it does.”

  “Okay,” says Eric.

  And in case you were wondering, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But my friend the alien is dying and the forces arrayed against us are closing in and it’s time to make moves.

  And in case you were wondering, the handgun in the dirt is the gun they said he had on him when everything happened.

  12

  The rest of the day is me teaching Eric to be the best world-busting genetic anomaly he can be. It’s basically Yoda teaching Luke how to use the Force if Yoda didn’t know anything about the Force and couldn’t use it himself.

  “So here’s the thing,” I say when I have stopped crying and removed the sunglasses and emerged into the sun feeling like our suburb’s teenage General Patton. “What does he really have, right? The guy who’s chasing us. We think he might be part of some vast government conspiracy. There’s also a chance he’s just some guy from, like, an evil pharmaceutical giant and he’s bribed his way into the cops working for him. But that’s it. He has cops, and cops have guns and authority. But what we have—what you have … is a power.”

  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.”