3

By October we have three notebooks full of concept art for Time-Blaze. By this time Dr. Praetoreous, instead of being the main character, is just another player in a universe of characters, including the Praetoreous family (each of whom is actually another version of Dr. Praetoreous in a different timestream, so there’s cowboy Praetoreous and postapocalyptic Praetoreous and two-dimensional Praetoreous in a universe rendered in 2D), the Time Squad (the Temporal Ranger’s extended posse of villains, rogues, and scoundrels from the outskirts of time), and an entire pantheon of gods drawn from the Greek, Aztec, Indian, and Chinese mythologies who have been summoned by The Man using Dr. Praetoreous’s invention known as The Mortalizer. (Aside from cracking the whole time-travel deal wide open, Dr. Praetoreous’s strong suit is inventions that make unreal things real, from The Legitimacy Engine all the way up to The Mortalizer.) It helps that Eric knows shit-tons about all these different mythologies, even though all we ever learned about gods in school was a three-week Greek mythology unit in English freshman year, and the time D’andrea Rhys-Phelps, a Jehovah’s Witness kid, got so offended by the fact that there was a fortune-telling booth at the school carnival that we had to have a two-hour assembly on religious sensitivity.

I am proud of the way, in this one drawing, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl seems to be almost 3D, his feathered tail way off in the distance in the bottom right corner of the page and his semi-reptilian head roaring toward you in the top left as The Man stands passively at the top of an ancient South American ruin, directing the newly Mortalized god to go out and fuck shit up.

On Halloween we decide that dressing up and trick-or-treating is for kids so instead we’re gonna stay inside and work on merchandising ideas. No detail is too small, we’ve decided, from the soundtrack to possible directors for the movies to the cover art for the books to the fast-food tie-ins, which we realize is sort of commercial and sell-out-y but we definitely know we’re going to have to consider if anybody is going to take on an expensive project like this, especially from two fifteen-year-olds. We’ve watched enough DVD commentaries to know that money is a big factor.

Eric is going to come over at eight but my brother and his friends are dressed as pirates in the front yard, and Eric doesn’t show up until they go off down the block, and by then it’s nine thirty.

“Your brother and his friends are seniors” is the first thing Eric says when he gets in the door.

“Yeah, I dunno,” I say. “They dress up all the time. Why should Halloween be any different?”

“Are they going to trick or treat?”

“I dunno.”

“They’re probably going to steal candy from kids.”

“I dunno what they’re going to do,” I say. “You don’t have to avoid them. You can just come up when they’re out front. They’re pretty loud but they’re harmless.”

Eric doesn’t say anything.

We spread paper out on my bedroom floor. Around eleven thirty we go downstairs for sodas.

“What’s the grossest way you can think of to die?” I ask Eric.

“Grossest or out-and-out worst?” Eric asks.

“Both, I guess.”

“It’s the same answer for both. Having your brain eaten away by spiders nesting in your ear canal.”

“Eww! That’s fucking gross!”

“You asked. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Now you go.”

“Uhmm…”

But before I can think of one (I obviously hadn’t thought about it as much as Eric) the front door crashes open. My brother comes in, hair spiked up like an anime character with a red bandanna tied around his neck and a plastic sword tucked into a plastic sheath on his hip. He comes into the kitchen and makes for the fridge. Eric suddenly becomes interested in the cracker cabinet, or pretends to.

“We have any whipped cream?” my brother asks.

“I dunno,” I say.

He answers his own question by pulling an aerosol can of whipped cream from the condiment part of the fridge, which is most of the fridge.

“Do you have a house, or …?” my brother says to the back of Eric’s head.

“Me?” Eric says, half turning around.

“Yeah, you’re over here, like, all the time. Where do I know you from?”

Eric basically has his head in the cracker cabinet between the Original Wheat Thins and the Sour Cream N’ Onion Wheat Thins, that’s how hard he’s avoiding eye contact.

“I dunno,” Eric says.

“Operation Chaos!” my brother says.

Operation Chaos was when my brother and his friends watched Fight Club fifty times in a row one weekend and decided it was their mission to spread anarchy in our subdivision. I don’t know what form it ended up taking, really, just that my brother and Alan both got community service for shoplifting, and my brother came home that weekend with a YIELD sign he then hung on the wall of his bedroom.

“Yeah, that’s it!” my brother says. “Darren, check it out, your friend was walking down Mountain Terrace at like three in the morning, right, and Alan and Tits and me were driving down Mountain Terrace and we saw him, so we like start flashing our lights and swerving over and honking like we’re gonna hit him, and he FREAKS and jumps into the bushes, so we stop and get out and we thought we lost him, but Tits tripped over his sneaker on the way to the car, so Tits drags him out of the bushes …”

“Stop,” I say. “No one cares.” I don’t know if you have ever heard someone describe beating someone else up in the presence of that someone else, not in a cruel way, just in a way that’s like it’s not supposed to bother that person.

“Man, you should’ve seen it,” my brother says. “It was classic, right?” he says to Eric. “ROIGHT?” he screams in his and Alan’s favorite British hooligan put-on accent.

Eric just looks at the kitchen tile.

“No one cares,” I say again. “Fuck off!”

“Chee-kee,” my brother says, punching me in the shoulder as hard as he can.

“DAN-yul,” Cathy shrieks. She’s hanging in the front doorway, her breasts apparent in a pirate blouse, wearing heavy makeup. “HURRY UP!”

“I’m COM-ing,” my brother shrieks back. He runs out with the whipped cream. Eric and I look at each other.

“They jump people,” Eric says.

“He’s a retard,” I say.

“I got kicked in the stomach by someone named Tits,” Eric says.

“They just call him Tits because he’s fat.”

Eric doesn’t say anything. My shoulder hurts where my brother punched me.

“You should have told me they beat you up.”

“We weren’t friends back then.”

“I meant, when you first came over. You knew it was them.”

“I didn’t want to start anything.”

I don’t think it’s within Eric’s power to start anything, but I don’t say that. It’s also not really within my power to start anything.

“You want to keep working on ideas?” I say.

Eric shakes his head.

“Yeah, me neither.” I look out at the pool. I can imagine a thousand kids out there beyond the fence, fucking up and getting into trouble, kids way dumber and less deserving of a good time than Eric and me, and here we are indoors, feeling like weak beat-uppable tools. I say: “You want to get them back?”

“Get them back? How would we go about doing that?” Eric asks. I don’t have any idea, but we are two fifteen-year-olds on Halloween and I’m sure deep within our ancestral teenage-boy lizard brains are all sorts of fun ways to cause problems after ten p.m.

What we have on the kitchen counter five minutes later makes it pretty clear we’ve never gotten revenge on anybody. Half a dozen eggs leftover from two weeks ago when my dad made breakfast for a woman who stayed over on a Saturday night. Processed, individually wrapped yellow cheese slices because I feel like I remember seeing or reading about a prank involving cheese slices somewhere, but maybe it was an art project, not a prank. Some rope from the garage, just in case we have to rappel up or down something. Neither of us knows how to rappel, in fact I’ve always counted myself lucky that our school doesn’t have that rope-climbing thing as part of PE like you see in movies. But rappelling seems like something you do as part of getting really excellent revenge. We could also use the rope to hang somebody in effigy, if we decide to go that way. But again, that’s straying into art-project territory.

It also seems like a good time to spray-paint somebody’s house or car, but we don’t have any spray paint. We have a can of wood-staining stuff from the time my dad painted our deck. It’s not even technically paint, and it’s heavy as hell. Also, we have some flashlights.

“It looks like we’re going to make an omelet,” Eric says, “rappel in through somebody’s window, and serve it to them.”

“You read my mind,” I say. Eric laughs.

We go out the door without much of a plan and everything in a paper grocery bag, becoming two of a ton of kids out tonight with some rotten eggs and bad intentions but probably the only ones with a can of Home Depot store brand chestnut wood stain.

My brother and his friends could be any number of places. They could be hanging out at one of their houses or at somebody else’s house. They could be hot-boxing my brother’s car in the Sonic parking lot. They could be speeding around in the car after hot-boxing it. They could be hopping out on middle-schoolers and threatening them with plastic pirate swords to make them give up their candy. Cathy could be flashing her boobs at eight-year-olds dressed up like Yu-Gi-Oh characters. And if they aren’t doing these things right now they probably will be later. But we know they’re not at my house so we decide to go to Alan’s house, because it’s the only one of his friends’ houses I know the address of.

It would take us a year to walk. Eric suggests we take the bus.

“He lives on Desert Wind Drive,” I say. “It’s over by the—”

“I know where it is,” Eric says.

I don’t ever take the bus. It’s not the city bus, it’s this little shuttle they added to our suburb a couple years ago, I guess to ferry around little old ladies and take kids who can’t drive yet to and from the movie theater. When it came out they had this big logo design contest. Tony DiAvalo submitted this winking cartoon bus he was sure was gonna win, but when it didn’t he told everybody the city should be glad they didn’t pick his design because the whole thing had been a goof and his cartoon was filled with hidden joints and subliminal gang symbols.

“Is your brother going to kick our ass?” Eric says as we wait for the shuttle.

“As long as we don’t get caught, they’ll probably just chalk it up to it being Halloween. Random prank.”

“What prank ARE we going to do?” Eric asks.

I don’t know and I tell him we’ll figure it out on the bus, which has just pulled up with the winning logo, a boxy little cartoon bird flying in the direction the bus is going, painted on the side. We climb up. It’s free so we don’t have to put in any money or anything.

When we’re climbing on, Eric says, “Hey, Eulalio.”

“What’s goin’ on, man?” says the bus driver, whom I guess is Eulalio.

“You know the bus driver?” I ask as we make our way to the back of the bus, past a couple girls our age dressed as sexy Native Americans, and an old man in jogging clothes.

“Yeah, I take the bus a lot,” Eric says.

We take seats at the back of the bus. I’m extra careful with the bag to make sure the can of wood stain doesn’t roll over and crush the eggs. The cheese and rope are a buffer. “I mean, besides just egging his house … what can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Eric says. “I’ve been thinking about it…. If we tied an egg to the rope …”

“Right…” I say.

“Or if we tied the can with some rope …”

“Okay…”

“And then the cheese … The flashlight could …”

“Hmm.”

“To be honest,” Eric says, “I’m just combining all the things we have in my head like some Rube Goldberg contraption.”

“Okay, well, the contraption you keep thinking of … what does it do?”

“Make omelets.”

“Shit.” It’s the eggs and the cheese. The effect of those two items together makes everything around them seem breakfast-y. And “start your day off right” is not the message we’re hoping this prank will send.

“We could stain the eggs brown,” Eric says. “When he goes to clean them up he’ll think he’s been egged with some weird sort of animal’s egg as opposed to just a regular chicken’s egg.”

“I don’t think he’s going to think that.”

“You’re right.”

We hate to settle for a conventional egging, even though winging eggs at the side of some dude’s house would be a first for both of us. Like, with TimeBlaze, we are hoping to reinvent the scifi/fantasy saga as the world knows it, and with this prank, we are hoping to change pranking forever. Even if no one knows about it and we did just decide to do it with the materials we had on hand, I would be really disappointed if we settled for your typical pitch-eggs-at-stucco-and-bolt, and I’m pretty sure Eric would too. At that point we might as well just be my brother and his friends; in fact, they’d probably come up with something better than that if only because they’re meaner than us and willing to go further.

The bus makes a right into Alan’s subdivision, The Cliffs At Tapatillo Point. “I mean, if all else fails,” I say, “there’s no shame in just egging his house.”

“Right,” Eric says. “Or his car.”

Eric signals Eulalio and we get out on the corner of Mountain Terrace and Desert Wind Drive. It’s getting later so fewer little kids are out. Knots of older kids are up and down the street with trick-or-treat bags, not quite our age but close. They’re rowdier and pushier than the little kids and their costumes are shittier and they don’t have parents straggling along behind them. I feel like there’s a window after you get too old to trick-or-treat supervised by a parent where you can do it with your friends by yourselves and as long as you push and swear enough and don’t try too hard, you can keep getting free candy for a few years. I had a couple years like that in middle school with my friends Ethan and Chung Hoon. One year we were the Monty Python lumberjacks and the next year we were chess pieces. Chung Hoon moved away after that and Ethan went to a different high school. Actually, we did try pretty hard, but we definitely pushed one another and swore, too.

Alan’s house is at the end of the cul-de-sac. My brother’s car isn’t here but Alan’s is parked out front, covered in stickers from bands, newer stickers starting to cover old ones of bands Alan’s decided he doesn’t like anymore.

I get these knots in my stomach when there’s even the remote possibility of getting in trouble. I’ve gotten them since I was a kid. It’s not really a guilty feeling, it’s more a fear that I’m going to get caught and somebody’s going to tell my parents. I get them less since my mom moved away. I have one as we walk up to Alan’s house, but it doesn’t make me want to stop. It almost makes me want to keep going with whatever it is we’re going to do, which will almost certainly be stupid.

“Let’s go around back,” I say.

“Why?” Eric says.

I shrug. Eric nods. We go around back.

The pool light is on even though it’s October. All the lights in the house are off except for what I guess is Alan’s bedroom. I know it’s Alan’s bedroom because through the blinds I can see Alan lying on his bed and a girl is lying across him, going down on him. We were sneaky and quiet before but now we are frozen. The pool filter hums and Alan’s got some sort of music on, loud, not the kind of music I think I would put on but what the fuck do I know. Though he’s my brother’s friend and Eric’s tormentor I don’t think either of us has ever seen this sort of thing before. I definitely haven’t outside of the Internet and I don’t know that Eric has, ever. I don’t even know if he knows there is such a thing.

“Oh my God,” Eric whispers.

The girl is rubbing her boob up and down Alan’s cock.

The thing that’s weird about it, besides all the things that are obviously weird about it, is that it’s real: I know that sounds dumb or oversimple but it’s the fact that, like I said, up until this point the only time I’ve ever seen anything remotely resembling this is in porn, and this is most definitely not porn. Alan is sort of fat and the girl, who I actually think I might recognize, is almost too skinny and they’re more dressed than they are naked. Alan has this hoodie on that I recognize from when he forgot it at our house for like a week and it was draped over the chair by the front door, green with white lettering that reads THE WORLD’S BEST FUCKING SKATERS, and it’s real and if it’s happening right now it’s happening all over in the backs of normal-looking houses all the time while Eric and I sit indoors and draw. I mean, you hear rumors, even if you’re not friends with anyone named in the rumors, but I guess I always figured it was like fights: you know, people say they’re going to kick each other’s asses but all they really do is meet on the basketball court after school and push each other and call each other “bitch” enough so that nobody will be considered one when they both end up walking away and not actually fighting. Just like fighting is mostly just talk about fighting, I figured sex at our age was mostly just talking about sex. But it really happens. People born not long before me rub each other all over each other in their bedrooms with the music up.

“Let’s go around front,” Eric says.

It is a good five seconds before either of us moves.

Back around front we’re a couple of kids with rotten eggs on Halloween and even though we’re not dressed as Disney characters and saying “twick or tweat” with adorable speech impediments we might as well be. We’re standing on the curb. Eric takes the eggs out of the bag, opens the carton, and looks at them. I grab one and throw it at Alan’s house. I guess the driveway is longer than it looks or I am weaker than I already feel because it doesn’t even make it. It breaks in front of a red clay pot next to the front door. I am wondering if being so awful at being a teenager that you can’t even prank right counts as originality when my brother’s car pulls into the cul-de-sac.

Eric struggles to close the egg carton and get it back in the bag. He gives up and drops them to the concrete.

“Well well well,” my brother yells out his rolled-down window in his British hooligan voice, “what’s all dis den?”

I take off running. Since it’s a cul-de-sac, really I’m running towards the people we’re trying to get away from.

“DARREN,” Eric says. I turn. Eric tilts his head back the way we came, towards Alan’s backyard. It’s kind of a cool move. I’ve never seen Eric have a cool move. Then he runs in the direction he nodded. I follow. My brother gives chase, plastic sword thwapping against his thigh. Tits has jumped out on us too, and whoever else was in the car, a couple of dark forms following my brother when I look back over my shoulder. I hope Eric’s not planning something stupid like jumping in Alan’s pool. I hope somebody tripped over the wood-stain can.

Eric runs around Alan’s pool. There’s a back gate I didn’t notice when we were zoning out on Alan’s sex triumph. Eric blasts through the gate, I do too, and we’re in a back alley between fences where there’s trash bins and a couple of old couches and trampolines. My brother is right behind us.

“Throw eggs at moi mate’s house, will you?” He cackles like a fucking demon.

I had no idea this alley was back here. I didn’t know we had alleys. We come to what I guess is the end of the block. It looks like a dead end and I’m bracing myself to slow down and take whatever shoulder punches and nut punches and kicks in the gut from Tits are coming to us when Eric cuts into a dark corner and disappears. I run that way. Some steel rods demarcate a place where the alley opens onto a dry wash. Eric scrambles down the sharp gray rocks that look unsteady as hell and, as I find out when I try to scramble down as fast as Eric, actually are unsteady as hell. Rocks clatter against rocks. I fuck my knee up bad a couple of times but manage to stay right behind Eric. Behind me, the thwappings of the sword against my brother’s leg get farther and farther apart, and the cackles get less and less demon-ish. Eric hangs a right and climbs out of the wash. He holds his watch up, presses a little button that lights up the face. “We might be able to make this work,” he says. As I’m climbing out of the wash a shape flies past me and clatters on the pavement. A plastic sword, still in its sheath. I look over my shoulder. My brother stands panting in the dry wash. It doesn’t look like Tits ever even made it down there. They’re heavy smokers, of everything.

I try to tell Eric we could probably slow down but before I can he’s let his little watch light go out and has jetted down the block we’ve just climbed up to. Most of the houses are under construction. At the end of the street, another shuttle is just pulling up.

“The eleven fifteen,” Eric pants, “right on time!” Its doors open and Eric sprints up the stairs without stopping. I climb on and nod to the driver, who’s not Eulalio.

“GO GO GO!” Eric says when he gets to his seat, though he has to see no one’s chasing us anymore. The bus pulls away at its own pace.

By now, I imagine the commotion has disturbed what Alan had going on. I don’t know if it’s a regular thing for him or a one-time full-moon Halloween anomaly, all I know is Alan has been to a place I haven’t been to, and I’m really smart and I once heard Alan pronounce the word especially like this: “eck-specially.” So I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m not sorry.

We sit there catching our breath. I am so out of shape it feels like my body has given up trying to draw air from my underused lungs and is trying to run on a heart full of caffeine and a stomach that only knows Hot Pockets, and it’s having a bitch of a time. Still, it’s kind of great. We have these characters the Agtranian Berserkers, who jab each other in the chest with big syringes full of super-adrenaline before they go into battle, so they’re so euphoric they don’t give a fuck if they die. As soon as I stop feeling like I’m dying, I start feeling like that.

“Your house won’t be safe for a while,” Eric says. “We can go to mine.”

I’ve never been to Eric’s house. I don’t know what I’m expecting. I guess one of those homeschoolers’ houses we talked about that one time: weird-smelling and dark and crammed with spelling workbooks and homemade candles, his mom in a dress like a farmer’s wife, listening to religious radio. But it’s not like that at all. It’s normal. Big, even.

“How did you do that?” I say as we walk up the gravel path to Eric’s front door. “You were like a fucking ninja.”

“I know the neighborhood pretty well.”

“Did you live over there or something?”

“No.”

Eric takes out his keys and opens the front door.

“Are your parents home?” I whisper.

“Yes, but they’re asleep, and their room is upstairs, so don’t feel the need to whisper.”

“Okay.”

Eric gets me a water bottle from the fridge and gets one for himself. His kitchen is cleaner than mine but essentially the same.

“You saved our asses. How did you know where the bus stop was? How did you know the way out of that … I mean, I didn’t even know we had alleys.”

“I walk around at night a lot,” Eric says.

“Right, my brother said they saw you that night. Here’s the thing: I think we got them back, but I’m not sure we did. I’m not sure we did anything, but it feels like we got them back.”

“They had to run,” Eric said, “but they never caught us. They were mad and they never got an outlet for their anger. One time I tried to get away from them and couldn’t and this time I did. And we probably put a hitch in things for, you know, that guy and … his girlfriend.”

“Man, right through Alan’s backyard…” I’m still kind of excited. I mean, I can never go home again, but I’m never outside at night and I’m definitely never running from people at night and just narrowly escaping.

Then I think about Alan’s backyard and what we saw back there. I think about it and I’m quiet. Eric’s quiet so I figure he’s probably thinking about it too.

“Can I tell you something?” Eric says.

“Sure,” I say.

Then Eric says, “I can’t sleep.”

He says it fast and mumbly and quiet like the time I told Sara Eldensparr I liked her. I like you. I can’t sleep. Like something you’ve thought about a million ways to sort of cleverly segue into and you get the attention of the person you intend to say it to and in that moment you reach down for your favorite clever segue and it’s not there so you just figure “Let’s get this over with as fast as possible,” and sometimes it’s sloppy and they don’t understand you but I hear Eric clearly I think.

“Well, don’t drink so much caffeine or whatever.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I mean I can’t sleep. I’ve never been able to and I don’t have to. I am physically incapable of it and don’t require it.”

“What?”

“Next you’re going to ask if I’m joking. I’m not. Then you’re going to accuse me of being crazy. I can’t speak on that as definitively as I can on the fact that I’m not joking, but I don’t think I am. It’s been this way since I was born.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

Eric sets his water bottle down on the counter and it lands with a quick series of sounds instead of just one, and that’s when I notice he’s trembling, which is also a lot like the time I told Sara Eldensparr I liked her, except all I told Sara Eldensparr was that I liked her, not that I could walk through walls or spit fire or eat bullets out of midair.

“That’s impossible.”

“I know.”

“You can’t NOT sleep. I saw a thing about this on the Discovery Channel. While you’re sleeping, your body regenerates. If you didn’t sleep, you’d die.”

“I know.”

“And your subconscious mind works a bunch of things out while you sleep. Sometimes apparently you can go to sleep with something on your mind, and when you wake up, you just KNOW the answer, because your brain worked it out without you having to tell it to.”

“I know.”

“And besides, you’re legally insane after seventy-two hours! I saw this on Court TV, this guy used it as his defense in court when he murdered his wife, he had insomnia—”

“Do I seem legally insane?”

“Sort of! You’re telling me you don’t have to sleep—”

“I CAN’T sleep.”

“You’re telling me you can’t sleep! That seems insane.”

“I don’t know. I just can’t do it and I’ve never had to and I’ve never been able to. I’ve tried. Trust me. I’ve tried. I don’t know.”

“Dude.” I don’t know what to say. Then I think of something. “Prove it.”

“It’s not a trick I can do. You would just have to sit and watch me not sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

We go up to Eric’s bedroom. There’s a couch and a desk with a computer and a TV with a PlayStation 2 hooked up and three or four bookshelves completely full and a ton of other stuff. There’s a bed that looks like it was made up by a Marine, sheets perfect like in a furniture showroom.

“Who sleeps in that bed, then?” I say. “Not me,” Eric says.

It’s one in the morning when I settle in to watch Eric not sleep.

“Dude, if you’re joking, now would be the time to tell me that you’re joking.”

“Again: not joking,” Eric says, sitting down on the couch. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know!”

“I mean, while we wait. While I prove it by not sleeping. I rented Bastion Of Heroes, the co-op mode is actually very—”

“No. Sorry. Let’s just—” I don’t even know what “let’s just.” I shut up and collapse against the opposite wall of the room and slide down into a sitting position. And I guess I’m willing to stay this way until Eric tells me what his deal is.

I am completely mind-fucked sideways by this. And that’s only assuming right up front that it’s not true. If what Eric’s saying is false, which it has to be, then it makes everything I know about him false, because I cannot imagine a reason for him to tell me this, this absolutely made-up story. It’s like when you’re taking a standardized test with one of those bubble sheets and you’re humming along, filling in the circles the whole way like they show at the top of the sheet, and you go to fill in the answer for question 58 and you realize the next empty circle is 59, you’ve been one number off for God knows how long, maybe since the teacher flipped over her one-hour egg timer. It might only be one number but now everything is wrong. I do not know him and I do not feel comfortable doing anything with him but sitting and waiting until he falls asleep, and this can all be over, our friendship probably included.

Because you can’t just believe somebody, can you? I mean it: kids exaggerate how many people the party bus they’re renting this weekend can accommodate and the length of their family vacations in Greece. The general default pose of anyone towards anyone else on any subject is a sort of “yeah, sure, okay,” a general assumption that everyone is pretty much full of shit. Or if they’ve been honest, that this honesty is hiding some sort of deeper, far worse full-of-shitness. So if Eric seemed straight-up and genuine about everything so far then he was really only prepping me for this, the big crazy, or the big prank, or something. Some legitimately intensely delusional shit or some weird disgusting lie I can’t even begin to figure out a reason for. Everybody lies a little about everything for no reason and here I’m supposed to treat this huge, world-altering fantasy thing better, with more trust than I would treat Carter Buehl telling me the Hummer limo he rented for prom is literally a block long?

Thing is, I don’t care about Carter’s block-long rape-mobile, but Eric’s thing, I would love for it to be true. And I think that’s part of the reason I’m pissed (because I am, among many other things, pissed right there against the wall): How dare he tell me something I want so badly to be true that so clearly isn’t, and can never be?

Eric’s house is quiet. He has no brothers to lead in cackling herds of friends at two in the morning on a school night, or, if they’re alone, turn the TV in their room on full-volume and then get on their computer and put headphones on so they forget how on and loud the TV still is. Just the sound of two parents sleeping soundly in the same bed somewhere else upstairs, which isn’t a sound at all, and the occasional creak of the house settling or whoosh of the air-conditioning coming on.

“I want you to know that it’s okay if you don’t believe me right away.”

“Please shut up.”

Books are everywhere. You could make a pretty good case for this room actually being part of a larger room and having been partitioned off by walls of books. There’s a record player on the floor with three milk crates full of records next to it. A box full of disassembled action figures. Some electrical equipment I can’t identify as part of one thing or another. The computer and the TV and the PlayStation. Stacks of magazines I haven’t heard of. More books. Where there is wall that you can see, including what I have my back up against, TimeBlaze art is tacked up. Most of it is stuff we’ve worked on together, but every so often there’s a movie poster mocked up in Eric’s really-can’t-draw style. He doesn’t go stick figures, the cowardly route of most people who’ve accepted the fact that they suck at drawing; it’s just this mushy little-kid assemblage of characters with arms and legs that don’t bend, just curve, big black circles for mouths, and eyes that can only convey the emotion “these shapes represent eyes.” And more books.

For all that, it’s not messy. My room has probably one tenth the stuff in it and is ten times as messy because everything doesn’t look like it was placed where it is on purpose, just put aside without any thought before it could make its final stop in the dishwasher or the trash can or the hamper.

Eventually I have to pee. Then I really, really have to pee. I get up off the floor and tell Eric I have to go to the bathroom.

“Alright. It’s down the hall on your left.”

“Thanks. And let me guess: you don’t ever have to pee, either.” I say it a little angrier than I should if we’re still friends, and I feel bad. Then I think I shouldn’t feel bad, I didn’t put us here, I’m not the one who said some dumb shit about not being able to sleep. But Eric laughs a little, like it’s a joke. I leave and when I come back from the bathroom I am hoping to open the door and see Eric curled up on the couch with his eyes closed but he’s still sitting straight up and when I come in he looks up at me, not mad or happy or anything. Not really anything but awake.

The next morning Eric and I walk to school. It has the feeling of me walking Eric to school, like I have a gun pressed to Eric’s back out of sight of everyone and I’m instructing him to just act natural. Walking has the added advantage of me not having to stare directly at him: as long as he’s still walking, he’s not sleeping.

At school I shadow him. I am five minutes late to all my classes because after each of Eric’s classes I go in and tell each one of his teachers I’m conducting research for an article in the school newspaper on stress and fatigue and Eric Lederer is my guinea pig and did you notice him sleeping in class today? All of them say no and after enough teachers telling me I picked the absolute wrong kid and Eric is always “attentive” and “polite” and “one bright little guy” I start to feel like Eric’s dad at an extended parent-teacher night. Mrs. Cartwright says, “You look like you could use some duermo yourself, chico.”

In English, the class we have together, I give Eric the Cecelia Martin looking-at-a-guy-who-blew-up-a-bus stare and never waver, but he isn’t anything less than one bright kid, like any other day. He never plants his elbow on the desk so his hand can hold his head somewhat upright while he dozes off mid-lecture, my personal favorite sleeping-in-class position. And at lunch he’s out by the loading dock as usual and I suck down a Mountain Dew, watch him, and neither of us says anything.

None of this means anything, of course. I haven’t slept either, and I’m not claiming to have some superhuman ability. Today despite being unable to focus on anything in any class because I’m late to each one and can’t think about anything but Eric and his made-up thing and how knocked flat I am, I try super-hard not to sleep in any classes just to prove that hey, look, I can do it too. If somebody were shadowing me around school today, they wouldn’t see me close my eyes, either, though they would see me get more and more irritable and death-resembling and every so often they would see my eyelids bang together involuntarily for just a half a moment longer than a blink is, as my head dips down just slightly until I pull it back up and in my head yell at my eyelids and neck for being so fucking weak.

I come upon Eric at his locker after school and once he’s done putting books away and taking books out and he zips up his backpack we take up our formation again and walk to his house, and I am so goddamn tired. It’s very hot for November first, and sweating on the way home, Eric’s steps next to mine an indication that he hasn’t given in yet, the whole thing becomes clear to me. Cecelia Martin and her friends pointing at Eric talking to me, quizzing me after class about our friendship: Eric and Cecelia are in cahoots. Far from enemies, they are way older friends than me and Eric. They really are friends, unlike me and Eric. She was not in English class today, so they could not pull back the curtain on their sick, ingenious, super-labor-intensive prank in front of everyone, the nerdy kid and the quasi-Goth girl revealed to be secretly in league against the kid so awkward he does not belong anywhere. It’s either a very committed class project on trust or magical realism or The Picture of Dorian Gray, somehow, or just a gotcha, good for some cruel laughter. So: if he really wants to hold on until Monday, sleepless until the next time we have English, so he and Cecelia can unveil this thing to maximum effect, that’s fine. I can wait. There is Mountain Dew in this world.

Settling back in on Eric’s floor, I have that feeling you get when you walk into school on, say, a Wednesday: Fuck, here I am again, the same shit guaranteed by the fact that everything and everyone is obeying the same schedule and sitting in the same seats, all of us students and teachers, bored to shit. At least at school everyone’s changed clothes overnight. I am in my clothes from Halloween. So is Eric. Somehow this is evidence to me.

“Why didn’t you change before we went to school today?”

“Oh. I guess I didn’t think of it. I have to remind myself oftentimes, and this morning I guess I had other things on my mind.”

“Hmm.”

“If it’s alright with you I’m going to start in on my homework.” Compared to staring at an unsleeping kid every second when I want so badly to sleep myself, homework sounds kind of refreshing. But pulling out my notebook and doing Spanish freewriting right now seems like surrender somehow. Eric takes out our new English book, Billy Budd. Maybe he sleepwalks in a sitting position by keeping his eyes open and placing a different-colored Post-It on every third or fourth page. It’s not impossible. Nothing is impossible except that this kid doesn’t sleep, is physically incapable of sleeping.

JETHRO TULL—THICK AS A BRICK—REPRISE

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN—THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE—COLUMBIA

My eyes are filled with words like this stacked one on top of the other. One of Eric’s record crates. I am waking up on Eric’s floor. I fell asleep on Eric’s floor. I would like to say I had a very appropriate dream in which Eric and Cecelia Martin cut me up with kitchen knives in front of our whole English class, but I didn’t, and what I did dream is disappearing fast and it had something to do with my brother and me in an empty but fully lit furniture store. It’s fully lit in Eric’s room, too, and with every detail of the furniture dream that evaporates I remember more of what I’m doing there, and I’m pissed at myself for falling asleep. (I almost always wake up pissed, from sleeping late, or not sleeping enough, and if you don’t always wake up pissed I think you’re living wrong.) I sit up and Eric is on the couch, awake, pages from the end of Billy Budd, it looks like. A piece of data that means nothing since I haven’t been consistently awake to watch Eric be the same, he could’ve just flipped to the end of the book after a nap just a little shorter than mine.

There is also now a video camera on a tripod standing at one end of the couch, pointing at Eric, with its screen flipped to face him as well.

Eric notices me. “I taped myself,” he says, “so you can see.”

“What time is it?”

Eric holds up his digital alarm clock. It reads 11:00 p.m.

“I started right after you fell asleep,” Eric says. “Would you like to see it?”

Before I can respond, Eric gets up, stops the camera recording, and hits Rewind. The tape whirs while Eric goes to his closet, which is just as full of stuff as his room, and gets out a cord he uses to connect the camera to his TV. The tape finishes rewinding. Eric hits Play.

On TV, colorful magnetic fridge letters dance on a carpet, spelling out Cannibal Island 3: The Reckoning.

“I completely forgot this was on here,” Eric says. “For a while I was really into stop-motion animation.” Eric hits Fast Forward and a little movie about Lego men on an island of mutants speeds by. I recognize a lot of the shattered action figures from the bin in the corner and I see how they got that way. (Stop-motion harpoons, stop-motion torpedoes, a stop-motion fall from a plateau that is probably also Eric’s kitchen table.) Then, super-fast, some credits in magnetic fridge letters then two seconds of black during which Eric hits Play, then on-screen this afternoon’s Eric is looking down the camera’s barrel, holding up the clock, which reads 4:30 p.m. Then he pans left to reveal me, curled up on the floor, eyes closed. Then he pans back, checks to make sure the angle’s okay, then carefully places the clock in the frame, sits down, and picks up Billy Budd. Eric on camera looks up, then readjusts the way he’s holding the book so the camera can see his open unsleeping eyes better. In real life, Eric hits Fast Forward again, and on screen, the clock starts advancing one minute per second or more and in the bedroom window behind Eric’s head the light starts changing, sharp white daylight to orange to purple as the sun sets. It’s almost totally dark when Eric’s head dips and his eyes close.

“Wait!” I say. “What’s—stop the tape.”

Eric hits Play. On TV, tears leak out of his closed eyes. His head turns away from the camera. He gets up, leaves frame, the bedroom light comes on, Eric returns, sits down again. The crying is over but his eyes are still red.

Eric hits Fast Forward and the final three hours of dark speed by and the clock gets closer to the time it is now. I think about editing tricks, stop motion. I vaguely think of Cecelia, but she is getting harder and harder to work into the equation. On-screen, Eric speaks to someone off-screen, me waking up five minutes ago. The tape ends.

“Good thing you woke up when you did,” Eric says, “or I would have had to switch tapes.”

For a second I let myself live in a world where what Eric’s said is the truth, where all the evidence that it’s true isn’t a pack of lies to be debunked. In this world my betrayal and confusion about how to feel about this kid is replaced with relief, and my heart swells and my brain practically explodes out of the front of my head at the idea that this is actually happening to me. Then I put one mental foot back in the mundane world of Eric being crazy or a liar or both, where we say “yeah, sure, okay” even in response to the smallest stuff it’s easy and low-stakes to believe. I go back and forth, feeling my heart get either huge and kid-like or small and full of poison.

“You didn’t have coffee, or anything?” I say to Eric.

Eric says: “Are we talking now?”