4
“Who else have you told? You said you’ve said it before three or four times.”
“Both my parents. You. Cecelia Martin.”
“You told Cecelia Martin?”
“I thought she was cool. I thought she would understand.”
“Really? What gave you that impression?”
“We like the same things. Or at least I thought we did.”
“That’s, like, a pretty lame reason to tell somebody this.”
“I know. I fully realize. But in the past year or so I’ve gotten really aggressively tired of nobody knowing. I tried to evaluate who might be a good person to tell, and I realized there was no one immediately close to me, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job.”
“Can I be honest with you? Before I decided to believe you, I was pretty much convinced that this was like, some practical joke you and Cecelia were playing on me.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Her and her friends are sort of fixated on you. And I thought maybe it was that they were fixated on you talking to me, because you were working on selling me on this prank, looking at you like ‘what a good job he’s doing, how hilarious is this?’ You know?”
“Well, it’s not that. She thinks I’m crazy and has probably told everyone she encounters just that.”
“She told me that. I guess I thought it was all part of your big plan, or something. I don’t know. I was really tired and this is … a lot.”
“Thank you for believing me. You are now officially the only person who knows.”
“But your parents know?”
“Just because I told them doesn’t mean they believed it.”
“When did you tell them?”
“When I was ten.”
“I thought you said it’s been like this your whole life.”
“It has been, but I never realized I was different. As a baby I probably just lay there awake, but once I got old enough to understand that other people slept, and that every night I was in bed just like everybody else, I guess I figured I was sleeping. I guess I thought lying in bed with your eyes closed was what everybody did. I didn’t realize your state was supposed to change, or that people actually shut off. I guess I just thought it was a really boring eight hours everybody had to go through, lying there awake and calling it sleep. A ritual or something.”
“So you just laid there for your whole childhood?”
“Yeah. It got boring after a while. After I learned to read, once my parents were asleep and they thought I was asleep, I would get up and go get a book. I felt guilty, like if you were in church and you were supposed to be praying but instead you were thinking about girls or something. I didn’t think anything was wrong with me, I just thought maybe I was a bad kid who didn’t dutifully lie there. But it was too boring to keep doing it like I thought you were supposed to.”
“But dreams … You must’ve seen people in movies or cartoons or whatever have dreams and thought, ‘I don’t have those.’”
“I thought I did. I guess they were just daydreams. But incredibly vivid ones. You know that subconscious thing you were talking about? I think my mind just processes those things all the time behind the scenes. My imagination is something of a badass.”
It is weird and kind of funny to hear Eric say “badass.” I am used to describing some TimeBlaze character or vehicle as “badass” before he goes to write its dossier, and him asking me if I can’t be more specific.
“So how did you figure it out?”
“A cartoon, like you said. Donald Duck is trying to get to sleep and water keeps dripping out of the faucet and waking him up. He gets progressively angrier.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve seen that one.”
“Right. And I didn’t understand why he was so upset. I thought, if I were him, I’d be happy for the distraction. I wouldn’t want to go back to bed and just lie there. It wasn’t an instant thing. I didn’t say ‘Eureka.’ But that was the first time I thought something might be off about me.”
“And you told your parents?”
“Yes. They took it to mean I was having trouble sleeping. I was trying to articulate it to them, but if something’s been a certain way your entire life, it’s difficult to make someone understand how it’s weird, when you yourself just started to realize that it’s weird.”
“So they just gave you warm milk and whatever.” My mom used to give me warm milk when I was a kid and couldn’t sleep. I slept easier nights afterward just wanting to avoid drinking warm milk, which is the strangest thing your mouth can experience, being used to cold milk in cereal and in a glass beside every meal growing up. It’s like seeing your teacher outside of school. It’s them, but they’re all wrong and out of context.
“Warm milk, yes. And Children’s Tylenol PM. So I would just lie there … you know … stoned.”
I laugh. Eric laughs.
“I told them. I kept telling them. My mom told me that if it was really bothering me, we could go to a sleep specialist. So I stopped telling them.”
“You’ve never been to a doctor for it?”
“No. Not a chance. If they found out…”
“Who’s THEY?”
Eric looks at me like, you oughta know.
“If they found out, what? Man, you were a paranoid ten-year-old.”
“I’d seen E.T.”
“Yeah, I gotcha.” Somewhere we picked up the unspoken idea that if there’s something unique about you, men in suits and dark glasses will show up to take you away. Something about it felt scary and right, like yes, that is exactly what goes down when you’re special.
“So what do you think it is?”
“You mean what do I think caused it?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. A mutation or radiation exposure or a new stage in human evolution.”
“Yeah, that’s what I would say, except…”
“None of those things are real.”
“Right.”
“Right, well … here I am.”
“Do you ever get tired?”
“I guess. I mean, there are times I feel tired, but from what I understand, people who have to sleep feel tired sometimes and it has nothing to do with whether or not they’ve gotten enough sleep.”
That’s true. Every day I tell myself I’m not going to fall asleep in geometry, and no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten the night before I still end up nodding off with my head propped up on my hand.
“If I experience fatigue, I just feel it for a while and before long I feel better.”
“What do you do with all that time? I mean, when everybody else is asleep?”
“I get interested in things. I might get really interested in jazz music and just want to learn everything about jazz, so I do. I get my homework done fast. I get projects done a week in advance so I have time for other things. It’s like … this is … I’ve thought this but I’ve never said it out loud before, but it’s like, there’s me and there’s everyone else in the world, and everyone else is in a constant state of joining me and leaving me. When they leave, it’s sort of lonely, I suppose, but I have time to think and do things uninterrupted. I go for walks.”
I guess that’s how my brother and his friends found him that night. I guess that’s how he knew the ins and outs of that street all the way across town when my brother and his friends found us on Halloween, getting flimsy and unoriginal revenge.
“I’m sorry I didn’t just…” I say. “I’m sorry, I just had to see for myself that you don’t … you know.”
“It’s okay. I understand. Even that, even waiting around to find out, was a kind of believing, I think. More than anybody else has ever done, anyway. While you were, I guess, thinking about how Cecelia and I were getting one over on you, I was thinking that. That the fact that you didn’t just immediately say, ‘Screw off, Eric,’ that was as close to complete and immediate trust as something as wild as this deserves.”
I think of Eric in that one moment between fast-forwards, crying it looked like. Even if he says it’s okay I still feel like pretty much of an asshole, following a stone miracle around for thirty-six hours going, “Prove it!”
We sit there talking about it for hours. Even with the unintentional nap, I expected to feel tired at some point. I thought I might need coffee or soda or something. But I guess your best friend telling you he can’t sleep and then finally deciding you believe him has the same effect as not needing to sleep and not being able to, at least for a little while.
Eventually, the sun has risen. I can hear Eric’s parents rustling around downstairs.
At some point I tell him I should go home. I am never away from home for this long consecutively, and before Eric, I was barely away from home at all, but because of my brother being my brother, I know how long my dad can stand one of his offspring not being around and not checking in at all. It’s not when anyone normal’s parents start to worry, it’s more a time about twelve hours after normal people’s parents start to worry that my dad realizes he isn’t worried and that’s what starts to worry him.
“When was the last time you saw your brother?” he’ll ask me.
“Tuesday night.”
And I think in his head he starts up an imaginary conversation with a custody judge or my mom or the cop who comes by to tell him they found my brother floating in the canal after not quite being able to jump it with his car, and realizes that for the sake of looking not-so-bad in that imaginary future conversation he should probably start to worry, or go through the phone-dialing motions worried people go through, though he knows we’re okay.
Phones are like these talismans for me and my brother and my dad. Like, as long as we have our phones on us, my brother and I, there is no way we could be hurt or kidnapped or impaled on anything. The one or two times I’ve been out of the house and needed to call and let him know I’d be out the house longer have gone like this:
“Hey, Dad?”
“Hello?”
“Hey, I’ll be late tonight.”
“Okay. Got your phone on you?”
“Yep.”
“Alright. Be safe.”
“Bye.”
We have the same kind of phone and we’re all on the same phone plan. I know full well that when I call him from my phone my name shows up, indicating that I’m calling from my phone, and that in order to be doing that, I must have my phone on me. It’s so dumb I think with any other kind of dad it would be a dad joke. But my dad doesn’t joke so much as he goes to the gym all the time.
I get up off the floor of Eric’s room. “It was nice having someone to stay up with,” he says.
When I get home at ten or so on Saturday morning my brother’s car isn’t there. It’s probably wrapped around a pole or he got arrested for lighting trash cans on fire and rolling them into traffic last night or he’s at the morning youth mass with Cathy and Alan and Tits, who’s Jewish but goes because of peer pressure. I go to my room and lock the door and fall asleep on top of my sheets with my clothes on and when I wake up it’s dark outside and I have one of those weird is-it-morning-what-day-is-it half-awake slept-the-day-away feelings, and I remember what Eric told me. I try to think whether it was a dream or not, and then I remember that it wasn’t, and I think that Eric’s been awake this whole day while I’ve been asleep, and Eric’s been awake since I’ve known him, and Eric’s been awake since he was born.
