5

Eric always insists that our characters have a weakness. The Thragnacian hell-beast has a soft and glowing underbelly which Martian Praetoreous can hit with his arm-mounted crossbow. Being cybernetic, the AltraTroops are susceptible to biohacking, an arcane art practiced by the laptop monks who dwell in The Spoke, an aborted half-constructed space platform. The Man is the only character without a weakness. He is holographic and infinitely self-replicating. No one knows where he is or what he is or if he’s even human and you can’t kill him because it’s very possible there’s nothing there to kill.

I live in a world where what Eric told me is true. And it isn’t always an easy thing to fit into your head but it almost helps that Cecelia Martin didn’t believe him. Cecelia Martin has exactly zero imagination. It’s not that Cecelia Martin is dumb, it’s just that she’s so fucking standard and convinced that she isn’t because her hair is dyed a different color and she listens to music that she finds on LiveJournals that mostly feature pictures of emo boys making out with each other. I think I understand why Eric told her. If this were a movie she’d be the person you’d go to. The freaky chick, the outcast. But Cecelia Martin is on yearbook and newspaper. Cecelia Martin gets straight A’s. Cecelia Martin is about as outcast as the head fucking cheerleader. I want to believe where she had the chance to and didn’t because it doesn’t fit in with Cecelia Martin’s worldview, which pretty much begins with Cecelia Martin and her friends Jen Ackerman and Teresa Saylor and whatever cute vintage finds they’ve made this week, and their college friends and how sophisticated and ironic they are.

I can imagine it: Eric hears Cecelia use the words temporal and agonize in some in-class discussion. Eric suspects that Cecelia may, in fact, be smart. That night at home Eric looks up Cecelia’s Namespot profile, Namespot being the social networking site on which millions of American kids advertise their specialness, despite the fact that there is a search-engine tool right there on the sidebar that will allow you to find out just how hugely unspecial you are. Eric sees that under “Music” Cecelia has expressed a preference for The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, a pretty okay and sort of obscure group people found out about from their older siblings who are in college, which Eric, underexposed as he is to anybody, ever, doesn’t realize is a thing anyone else is into, takes it to be a sign, and without hesitation camps out waiting for Cecelia outside of English class the next day and, unbidden, stutters at her something about he has a secret only she can understand, and before she can even ask “What?” he blurts it out, all nervous and half-intelligible, so that now when she asks “What?” it isn’t because she wants to know the secret, it’s because he already said the secret and she couldn’t understand him. So he says it again, too loud this time, overcompensating, and she probably says something very close to what I said initially, something like “Oh, so don’t drink so much caffeine or whatever,” and starts to walk away, supremely weirded out, when Eric stops her and tries ultra-awkwardly to explain, but he has no idea where to start and this isn’t going at all like he planned it, and she stops him four half-sentences into his explanation and says, “I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about. I have to get to class.” One of the four half-sentences had something to do with how they both liked the same music, and so now she goes around telling anyone who will listen that Eric Lederer, you know, that weird kid, well, he basically stalked her and said some crazy stuff she doesn’t even know how to repeat and he ought to be red-flagged like Carl Whiteman, he probably has a hit list and everything, she’s probably on it, enjoy her while she’s here, alive, and hasn’t yet been murdered by the stalker nerd.

And that day, I probably walked right by them out of class, not really knowing either of them or having any idea who they’d end up being to me, but I can imagine it so accurately because I was then (and I guess I am still) in my own world of misreading people, reaching out to them in an awkward, overplanned way that blows up big-time, then retreating back in to my just-me existence, while they go around telling anyone who will listen what a tard I am.

Eric’s thing, I don’t know what to call it, sounds like something Eric and I would have made up. And I guess I want to live in a world where things like Eric can exist.

And for a while that in itself is exciting. If Eric can exist despite the fact that Eric existing is impossible, then other things that are impossible can happen. They’re out there living among us and we have no idea. I spend an entire day thinking about this. The gray-haired cashier at Safeway, he can sense people’s intentions and disarm robbers before they try anything, which is why the store has never been robbed. Shoplifters he lets through because they’re not worth blowing his cover, which is why my brother has never been caught at that particular store. The Mexican housekeepers waiting for the shuttle bus on what shouldn’t be a hot day because it’s November but it is, they house the reincarnated souls of Aztec warlords and if they got close enough to a certain temple in South America they’d become thirty-foot-tall fire-beasts instead of gossipy old women.

But then on the way into school I see Brendan Tyler, a varsity basketball player, standing in front of the black sports car his parents got him when he crashed his last car, arms folded. A bunch of people are gathered around. “I’d give my left nut for that car,” a kid says. Brendan reaches in the front window and tweaks a knob that makes his car stereo’s bass rattle, shaking the windows of the cars around him. I think, if anybody else had what Eric had, they’d probably show it off every chance they got. There would be no secret. They’d be in the school parking lot using their mysterious God-given mutation to make hot girls more receptive to finger-banging. Eric’s probably the only one of his kind, which makes him all the more important to protect. Protect, if that’s what I’m doing by being his friend and keeping his secret. For some reason protect is the word that comes to mind.

“This isn’t going to change anything, is it?” Eric says when I see him for the first time Monday at lunch. “My thing?”

And that’s what we end up calling it. “Eric’s thing.” Not “Eric’s mutation” or “Eric’s evolutionary leap” or “Eric’s freak ability.” Although if I had my way we’d call it all those things and get to the bottom of what it is without tipping off anyone who might want to use it for evil and in the meantime use it for good, all while nobody has any idea and keeps on thinking we’re two kids who don’t talk to anybody and don’t eat in the lunchroom, all while everybody keeps on not knowing we exist at all.

“No,” I say, “it doesn’t have to.” But it’s pretty hard to keep drawing time travelers and biomodified quasi-humans when the real fucking thing is sitting next to you, eating pretzel sticks and whistling a Brazilian jazz tune. Eric’s really into Brazil this week.

On Monday night my brother finds me in my room doing my homework. Apparently he has not forgotten that four nights ago my friend and I tried to egg his friend’s house and made him run to chase us when he’d really rather not because he smokes half a pack a day and probably interrupted his best friend getting some from his girlfriend or whatever girl that was, and worst of all, got away so he didn’t get instant release right at the moment when he was at his angriest. And now he has to work hard to get angry again and that’s a pain so he takes that out on me, too. I barely feel it as he whales on me. He has no idea. Nobody does. My friend is a Greek god. My friend is an alien. My friend and I are the only people in the world who know that the world is not as simple and boring as everybody thinks it is and my friend is the only piece of evidence that that is true. I hit back a little so I don’t come off totally weird, but my brother works out and I don’t and it has no effect. It doesn’t matter. The joke is on him and Cecelia Martin and the rest of the world, and I would laugh if that wouldn’t come off totally weird in the middle of all the punching.

“So I’ve been pricing screenwriting software, and it’s pretty expensive, but once we sell the TimeBlaze franchise we’ll be—”

“Have you ever gone to the dentist?”

“What?”

“The dentist.”

“Yes, of course I’ve been to the dentist. Is this some subtle way of telling me to brush more often?”

“My brother had his wisdom teeth out a couple years ago, and they put him under. Like, gas.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think that would work on you? Do you think you’d go under?”

“I really have no idea. Do you remember what I told you about Children’s Tylenol PM when I was a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“I imagine it would have the same effect.”

“That’s Children’s Tylenol PM versus industrial-strength anesthesia. That’s like a bowie knife versus the A-bomb. If that doesn’t knock you out…”

“That’s assuming I want to be ‘knocked out.’”

“Don’t you?”

Eric doesn’t say anything. It’s lunchtime on Tuesday, the day after my brother whaled on me for the Halloween incident. We are out by the loading dock. My Styrofoam soda cup is full of teeth marks and Eric’s lunch is as elaborate as ever.

“Well anyway, it’s not about wanting to get knocked out, it’s about testing the limits of your power!”

“Can we please not call it a ‘power’? It’s not a ‘power’! I’m not enabled to do anything spectacular. There’s just something I can’t do.”

“It’s all how you think of it. It’s, like, either you can’t sleep, which implies that you would if you could, or you don’t HAVE to sleep, you have the power of never sleeping—”

“Can we just NOT call it a power? It’s just … a thing.”

“Okay, a thing.”

Eric starts nesting his Tupperware containers, one inside another, and then puts the whole thing in his backpack like he does every day.

“All I’m saying is, if your teeth start hurting, it might be your wisdom teeth coming in, and that might be a good opportunity to test the limits of your … thing.”

“I’ll be sure and let you know,” Eric says.

We go over to Eric’s house after school instead of my house so Eric doesn’t get the same treatment from my brother that I got. We are roughing out a gang of zombie outlaws that pursue Cowboy Praetoreous across the night-deserts of Hell County. Eric is writing their bios and stats on the back of profile pictures I’ve drawn.

“I like that he still has the noose around his neck,” Eric says, “and there’s a bite taken out of his shin.” He was bit by the gang as he kicked on the hangin’ tree, Eric writes on the back. For each different timestream, the bios are in a different voice, or if not that, a different style of lettering.

“So your body is constantly regenerating itself without the aid of sleep,” I say. “What does that feel like?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” Eric says, “or at least not anything I would notice as out of the ordinary.”

“Oh,” I say.

His parents invite me to stay for dinner. They are normal and boring. Nothing about them says they’d given birth to the next stage in human evolution. Eric’s dad looks nerdy like Eric. Eric’s mom looks like she could be an English teacher. They both work in computers. They’re not divorced, and I guess that’s unusual enough for this neighborhood that maybe there is something mutated in their genes. They ask me about my dad and my brother and how school is going. Dinner is less fancy than the stuff Eric makes for himself.

“Can Darren stay over tonight?” Eric asks. He hasn’t asked me if I want to, but he knows my dad won’t care and he knows I’d rather not go home until my brother has forgotten about being mad at me and has instead started being mad at the booker at the Pisscutter for not booking enough real hardcore bands or mad at Cathy for cigarette-burning the roof of his car near the dome light, both things he has been very mad about before.

Eric’s mom says it’s fine with them if it’s okay with my dad and I stand up from the table and go to another room, take out my cell phone, and have the following conversation:

“Hey, Dad?”

“Hello?”

“Hey, I’m gonna stay over at Eric’s tonight.”

“Okay. Got your phone on you?”

“Yep.”

“Alright. Be safe.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I go into the kitchen, where Eric’s parents are doing the dishes, and when I say “Thank you, Mrs. Lederer,” she doesn’t say, “Call me ———,” her first name, like parents of your friends sometimes do.

“He looks normal up-front,” Eric says, “but his back is full of holes,” referring to a zombie outlaw who in life was betrayed by a member of his gang. “Now, resurrected, he always sits facing the door.”

“Space dust,” I say, “or cosmic rays. I mean, I know those things sound comic-booky, but honestly, ANYTHING could be possible.”

“Can we not talk about it anymore?” Eric says. “Let’s just focus on the project.”

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just a lot more interesting than anything we’ve come up with—”

“You don’t like what we come up with?”

“It’s not that, it’s just this thing is REAL. I mean, you really wanted me to believe you, and I do, but part of me believing it is, I don’t know, it’s something you’ve known all your life or almost all of it so it doesn’t bother you, but me, Jesus, I just got used to life not being everything you think it’s going to be or might be when you’re a kid, and your thing kind of makes it seem like maybe that’s not true, like maybe stuff like this is possible, I mean, it’s not possible, but here it is anyway.”

“I guess I can’t blame you for being curious,” Eric says, “but if your friend couldn’t walk, everything you asked them wouldn’t be about how they couldn’t walk. The fact that they couldn’t walk wouldn’t be the sole focus of your friendship.”

“No, but if you just found out they couldn’t walk,” I say, “and besides, that comparison doesn’t even make sense, everybody wants to be able to walk, walking makes life easier, but I’ll bet you if you gave them the option there are tons of people who’d say they’d never sleep if they didn’t have to. I probably wouldn’t. Sleep is terrible. It’s like, you have to do it, your body forces you to, makes you want to. I mean, sometimes you dream, sometimes it actually feels like time is passing but you never really get to enjoy being asleep. Mostly it’s just like fast-forwarding to the next day. You go to school and come home and do your homework and by that time you’re tired and you go to sleep and you wake up and you have to go to school again. And if you do stay up to put off having to go to school the next day, when you DO have to go to school you’re exhausted and it’s even worse than it would’ve been otherwise. It robs you of all this time. Which I guess means you’ve had all that time. I guess … I guess that means you’re like twice as old as any of us.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’ve been awake while the rest of us have been asleep. You’ve actually had more life, in terms of being awake and aware of things. So you’re twice as old, in terms of experience. You’re like thirty.”

“I believe the average human being spends a third of their life sleeping, so technically I’m about twenty.”

“But still! There’s something about you that’s like, this kid is not like other kids, this kid is older, this kid knows something we don’t.”

“You wouldn’t think that if you didn’t know about my thing. You’re only saying that because you want to see me as different because now you know I’m different.”

“Nuh-uh! No, man, the first day when you stood in front of my desk and you wanted to know what I was drawing, I noticed there was something about the way you stood, like, you didn’t shift from foot to foot or anything like people usually do when they take the chance of getting up out of their seat and crossing the room and talking to somebody, and having to stand up in front of somebody and put yourself on the line, any time I’ve ever done something like that I get all weird and fidgety.”

“I wasn’t asking you out, I just wanted to know what you were drawing.”

“Regardless, dude, I noticed something different.”

And it’s true, I did. Those drawing books that don’t help, something they always tell you to do is observe people in real life. The way they stand, the “line” of their posture, so you can break it down into lines and basketballs and potato sacks and whatever. So I notice when somebody has their feet planted, when they’re standing straight up, as opposed to slouching or moving around like they’re nervous. Not that it helps. I have a hard time drawing anybody not standing straight up with their arms at their sides. I don’t stand as straight as the people I draw. Not at all.

“Anyway, I’m sorry, you’re probably sorry you told me about it now,” I say. “It’s just that if I had what you have I think I’d be more excited about it.”

“You wouldn’t.”

I think for a second about how it’s weird that I’ve been drawing on the floor in Eric’s room, papers spread around me, propped up on my elbows, whatever page I’m drawing on placed on top of a comic-book trade paperback. It makes me feel really young.

“I’m not sorry I told you,” Eric says. “It’s nice being up with someone to talk to.”

“I can lay off if you want,” I say.

Eric shrugs. It’s four in the morning. I yawn.

“Do you want to go to sleep?” Eric says.

I don’t. “You know what it must be like?” I say. “Crossfire.”

“Like our character?” Eric says. We have a character named Crossfire. Every part of him is a gun.

“No, there was this game when we were kids, Crossfire. A board game. It had awesome commercials, it looked awesome. Like two of my friends in first grade had it, and whenever I’d go over to their houses I’d want to play it, but they would never want to. They had Crossfire, they knew it wasn’t as awesome as the commercials made it look. And you know what? It did suck. But it seemed cool to me because I didn’t have it, so I didn’t know.”

“It doesn’t suck,” Eric says, “not completely.” He smiles. “Not as much as Crossfire.”

On one of his night walks, Eric found a Super Nintendo on the sidewalk with a bunch of things people were throwing out. We play old-school games until it’s really totally morning.

I realize I’m going to be wearing the same clothes at school today that I wore yesterday. Eric offers to let me borrow one of his shirts, but they’re all the kind of short-sleeved polo shirts he always wears that I would never wear, so I say I’m okay. I wear this black T-shirt pretty much every day anyway, and these same jeans, and either way I doubt anyone will notice. We put on our backpacks. School is within walking distance of Eric’s house.

Walking to school I have that weird euphoric giddiness you get from being up all night. It’s sunny, of course, but it’s the first cool day this year, it’s the desert version of “crisp,” like 70 degrees, but noticeably different. It might be 90 again by lunch but for now it’s cool. I will crash by third period but for now everything is beautiful. I wonder if Eric ever gets like this or if it’s all pretty much the same, since he never has to get sleep he never gets giddy from the lack of it. I don’t ask, though. We stop at the gas station around the corner from school to get Mountain Dew and something to eat for breakfast.

Our routine goes pretty much like this: I go over to Eric’s house after school or Eric comes over to my house after school. If Eric is over at my house he calls his parents to see if it’s cool if he stays for dinner, except there’s really no dinner to stay for a lot of times, it’s just whatever dinner we can scrounge up or whatever my dad orders in. Occasionally he barbecues something or we go out to eat and we bring Eric along and Eric stares in awe as my dad and my brother swear at each other playfully in the middle of Outback Steakhouse. Sometimes when my dad’s not around Eric cooks whatever we have in the kitchen, so he’s gotten pretty creative with eggs and frozen steaks and five-pound freezer bags of stir-fry vegetables from Costco.

If I’m over at Eric’s house I don’t have to call but sometimes I do anyway right in front of Eric’s parents so they don’t think I’m some child of neglect or something. If I’m going over to Eric’s I’ll stop off home and put my Xbox in my backpack. There’s enough room for it and two controllers if I take all my school stuff out. It comes in handy when Eric and I are tired of making stuff and want to use somebody else’s characters to kick the ever-living shit out of each other for a while.

I start to crash at around four or five in the morning, especially if it’s a school night. Eric and I will shoot the shit for a while before I fall asleep, on the nights that I do fall asleep. Sometimes I stay awake the whole time despite Eric telling me it’s cool and I can sleep whenever I want to. It’s sort of like being at a restaurant with somebody and you’re hungry and they’re not and they tell you it’s fine, go ahead and order, so you do and when the food comes no matter how many times they tell you they’re really not hungry, they couldn’t eat a thing, you can’t help but feel awkward about eating. It was like this with my mom once at a Perkins when she visited, and it’s how it is with me and Eric and sleep.

Most of the time I sleep right through my weekend days. I get home around nine or ten in the morning, or Eric leaves around then if he’s been over, and I spend the whole day in bed with the TV on drifting in and out of naps, half-following whatever it is I’m watching. One Sunday I have TBS on and I’m half-asleep. Some mob movie is on. The same five or six actors that are always in mob movies are in this movie, and at the moment, three or four guys have one guy down on his knees caught in the headlights of this car they’ve got parked out in the middle of nowhere. I gather the guy on his knees was a crooked cop and people started to catch on to him so he squealed and sold out the mob guys he was crooked for and they’re not too happy. One of the goons goes into the trunk and pulls out a bat, and in my almost-dreaming way I get an idea I think I should tell Eric about. I resolve to get up and go tell Eric about it but instead I close my eyes and fall asleep for another hour or two. I wake up around three and the movie is over but I remember the idea so I get up, take a shower, pull on some clothes, and take the bus over to Eric’s. My whole reasoning for the idea or why I thought it was so great is gone with whatever half-dream I was half-having involving mobsters and probably sex and probably my mom or something equally dream-fucked, but the idea is still there and the resolve to tell Eric and the conviction that for some reason it’s a great idea.

I’m going to tell Eric that I think if we knock him out, like physically knock him out, maybe that will work. Maybe that’s worth a try, in place of waiting for his wisdom teeth to come in, as a way to test his susceptibility to unconsciousness. My hair is dry by the time I get off the bus near Eric’s street.

Eric’s mom answers the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Lederer.” I still haven’t been invited to call her whatever her first name is. She lets me in and tells me Eric’s upstairs and hasn’t been down all day.

There’s a strong possibility, I think, that both of us were lying around in our underwear watching TV all day on opposite sides of town, except one of us was falling in and out of sleep and the other one had his eyes open the whole time with nothing to succumb to when the show he was watching got boring. I go upstairs and knock on Eric’s door.

“Go away,” comes Eric’s voice from inside.

“Dude, it’s me.”

“GO AWAY.”

“What’s wrong?”

Nothing for a second, then the sound of the door unlocking. Eric just barely opens the door and sticks his head out of the crack. He looks like an absolute nightmare: his eyes are bloodshot, there are dark circles under them, he looks like he’s sweating out malaria or something.

“Just trust me, okay? You have to go. Don’t tell my mom. I’ll see you later. I’ll be fine. Just go.”

“Dude, what’s going—”

All of the sudden Eric yelps and turns to look into the room like someone’s coming at him and I can’t see in the room well enough to know what’s going on but it doesn’t sound like there’s anybody in there and Eric pulls his head back in and screams and slams the door shut all in one motion like he’s trying to keep something from getting out, but like I said, I don’t hear anything or anybody except for his breathing, heavy on the other side of the door. Just like he asked me to, I go downstairs. His mom is standing at the bottom of the stairs and asks me if everything’s alright in a way that indicates she suspects that not everything is alright.

“Yes. It is,” I say, just like Eric asked me to, and although he didn’t ask me to lie in such an unconvincing way, I’m doing my best here. I walk calmly to the front door and see myself out.

I’d think maybe Eric has a drug problem if I didn’t spend all my time with him and know for a fact that he’d have no idea where to get heroin, and that he’s never expressed interest in anything besides the thousand little nerdy corners of things he gets interested in for a week at a time before discarding and maybe, MAYBE the slightest interest in girls, and even then not really girls but more the idea of girls. I’d think maybe Eric has some tropical disease if I didn’t know for a fact he hasn’t been to any third-world jungles recently.

I wait for the bus for a little while. I wait but as I’m waiting I think, “It’ll be faster just to walk,” and even though I know that isn’t true by that time I’m already committed to walking.

Eric calls me that night. My phone vibrates on the edge of my nightstand. My dad pointed out one time that my minute use makes up only 1 percent of our “family plan” bill, and he and my brother had a good laugh about that, but one month when my brother sent more than five thousand text messages we both got our phones taken away.

“Hey, man.”

“Hi. I’m sorry about earlier.”

“Yeah, what the fuck?”

“It’s another thing with … the thing.” For somebody who usually throws around so many words, when Eric talks about his “thing” he gets extremely vague. “Every couple of weeks, I’ll have a twenty-four hour-period where … I don’t know. Essentially it’s miserable. I start hallucinating. These extremely vivid hallucinations. I get headaches. I sort of have to lock myself away and there’s nothing to do until it passes.”

You can’t sleep it off, I almost say but don’t. “Jesus, dude. You never told me about this.”

“Yes, I don’t know, I guess … I know it’s troublesome. I’ve never seen myself from the outside, I guess. Was it bad?”

“You looked really bad.”

“Jeez, I’m sorry, I guess I should’ve warned you about it before …”

“How does your mom not know? Or your dad?”

“I just shut myself in my room. I just shut myself in my room and they don’t really bother me.”

I think about the way I spent all day, and think that I guess it’s not that implausible for a teenage boy to spend the whole day in his room, with nobody bothering him and no reason for them to, especially on a weekend.

Monday at lunch I’m Eric, which means I’m the one who’s spent all weekend obsessing over something, and I’m the one with diagrams and charts and pitches and ideas. Well, I don’t really have diagrams or charts or anything written down, even. But I have been thinking about this one thing a lot and I can’t wait to talk about it.

“So this thing this weekend,” I say.

At first I was mad at Eric for not telling me about these fits when he told me about his not-sleeping thing. And I’m mad at him for not letting us talk about or even name his “thing,” beyond it being just a “thing.” Remaining nameless makes it harder to talk about, which is probably what he wants. But either way, it is a part of his thing. It makes it more real and it means that whatever we call it, or don’t call it, it might go beyond just Eric lacking the ability to sleep. And of course it does, and I always sort of knew it did, but we can’t really explore it unless he lets us, and he hasn’t.

“I have a theory about it,” I say. “When you sleep, your body works out shit in your subconscious. That’s what dreams are. But you don’t sleep so you never have a chance to work any of that stuff out. So it just builds up and builds up and it comes out when you’re awake. Which is always. But in these, like, superconcentrated bursts.”

A second goes by. I’m waiting for Eric to say it’s genius. Instead he says, “Yeah, I know.”

“You know? Know what?”

“I know what they are. I’ve had them my whole life.”

“Well first of all, you don’t know what they are, you don’t know anything about this or where it comes from or what causes it, you said so. So you don’t ‘know’ it any more than I do, and I’ve just … like I said, it’s a theory. And the other thing is, you pretend like you don’t think about this, your secret, but that’s bullshit, you think about everything, you obsess over details, and this has to be the biggest most interesting thing in your life, and you’re telling me you don’t think about it? Of course you think about it. Like, you already ‘know’ why you’ve had these hallucinations, you’ve thought about it, so quit acting like …”

“Acting like what?” Eric says.

“Like this isn’t important. Or I guess stop acting like it isn’t amazing. Just fucking admit to the fact that you’re special.”

“I told you,” Eric says, “people can’t find out because …”

“I know!” I say. “They’ll cart you away and hook you up to machines and whatever. I’m not saying you have to put it in the school newspaper.”

“Okay I’m special,” Eric says.

“If we let it this could be an adventure,” I say.

“I don’t see how,” Eric says.

“Somebody finds out they have special abilities, and then the adventure begins.”

We both grew up on comic books and Star Wars. I just can’t understand how he wouldn’t be high all the time off the fact that he might be the chosen one.

Eric’s elaborate self-made lunches come with their own brought-from-home silverware. He’s scraping the tines of his fork on the concrete in the shadowy corner of the loading dock.

“Sorry if it scared you,” Eric says. “And thank you for not telling anybody.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“If you want. If you want, we could look into … what it takes for me to not be conscious.”

“Serious?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Friday after school.”

It’s quiet and then the bell rings.

“Well, we’re NOT hitting me over the head with a bat. We just aren’t.”

“No, right, of course. It wasn’t an ‘idea’ per se. Just more of, like, a concept.”

Eric and I are walking home after school on Friday. Other kids’ cars speed by on the main road that runs past our school. The Drama Club has put flyers for their upcoming production underneath everybody’s windshield wipers and nobody’s taking them out, just driving away and letting them fly off on their own, so the street is a mess of Day-Glo-orange paper. Brendan Tyler’s new car, the one I overheard some idiot saying he’d give his left nut to have, accelerates to pass some band girl in a Camry. I am certain I would rather have both testicles than that car, even if it means I have to walk everywhere.

“So the mob method is out. Your wisdom teeth aren’t coming in? Like at all?”

Eric runs his tongue around his mouth for effect. “No.”

“Okay. Well, I still don’t think Children’s Tylenol PM is a very good measure of how narcotics affect your thing.”

“Narcotics? I’m not sure I’m all that excited about where this seems to be heading.”

“Relax. I don’t mean like, black tar heroin. There are lots of substances that are legal and safe that we can get our hands on.”

I don’t see my brother’s car speeding by, and I wonder if that means he’s home already.

“It’s not for me, it’s for a friend.”

“That glasses kid?”

“… No.”

“Really? Cause you pretty much have like one friend.”

“If somebody wanted to really get knocked out, like, there’s no way they could stay awake. Not enough to kill anybody or get anywhere close—”

“Pussy!” Tits says.

Tits is standing over a laptop on a stool in our garage. When I came in the laptop was playing a tinkly GarageBand rhythm and my brother was howling into a microphone hooked up to the laptop in his best imitation of all the scream-o bands he likes and Tits and his other friends were looking at each other and nodding like “YES, THIS IS IT.”

“Six Valiums. Or as we call it, Alan’s mom’s lunch.”

“Fuck yaself!” Alan says from where he’s slumped in the corner in his green hoodie that says THE WORLD’S BEST FUCKING SKATERS.

“Or, you know what? Oh … shit,” my brother says. “Follow me. ONE MOMENT, CUNTS, ONE MO-MENT!” he screams to his buddies in his soccer hooligan voice. He drops the mike on the concrete garage floor.

“Hey!” Alan yells. I guess it’s his microphone.

My brother goes into the house, and I follow him. On the stairs, he says: “One week they’re like, egging your friend’s house like a baby, next week they’re scoring drugs from you. THEY GROW UP SO FAST!” He punches the wall.

Ow,” he says.

My brother’s room is a refrigerator compared to my room. My room’s over the garage and insanely warm even with the air full blast. My brother also keeps his room surprisingly clean, for someone with so many personality problems.

“This is NOT where I keep my stash. So if you ever go looking for my stash, don’t look here, because this is NOT where it is.” He goes to where he keeps his stash: third drawer down underneath a Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions blanket we got for Christmas the year the Suns almost beat the Bulls. I was a very heartbroken six-year-old after they lost and more or less quit liking sports. Same thing happened when it turned out Spider-Man’s Peter Parker was actually a clone and had to go into exile: I was hurt and abandoned comics. I get burned and swear off whole parts of my life. I miss comics more.

He reaches down past the blanket and pulls out a Ziploc bag containing two big pills. He says: “Roofies.”

I don’t respond, but I try to make my face say, “Jesus, I know you are a dissolute behavior problem, but come on, we used to take baths together, and now you’re in possession of the date-rape drug.”

“Fuck you! I don’t use them. I’m not a fucking rapist.”

I make a point not to change my expression.

“Some dude paid me for something else with a bunch of stuff, and this was some of the stuff! Anyways, you asked! You think I need roofies? YOU need roofies. Date rapist!” He throws the baggie at me. I don’t catch it and it hits the floor.

“Think of it this way: by you buying them, nobody who will actually use them will buy them. I mean, nobody who will actually use them for date rape.”

The disgusting thing is that from what little I know about them, they are actually perfect for what we’re trying to do.

“How much do you want?” I say.

“Take them,” my brother says. “Merry Christmas.”

I bend down and pick the baggie up off the floor. As we’re leaving his room, we hear Eric shout from down the hall: “Oh, for PETE’S sake.”

My brother looks over and sees Eric sitting on the floor of my room cross-legged, playing Xbox.

“If you’re gonna rape your friends, you should get female friends,” my brother says. “You’re a real sick fuck.”

“It’s called … roprophinol.” I stopped by the computer in my dad’s office to go online and look up the actual scientific name before pitching it to Eric. I’m probably still pronouncing it wrong.

“The date-rape drug.”

“Well…”

“That’s worse even than the baseball bat!” Eric goes to throw the controller in anger, then thinks better of it and sets it on the carpet in front of him.

“No it’s not! If you think about it, it’s actually pretty perfect. No human being stays awake through this.”

“Right. It’s the date-rape drug.”

“It wasn’t DEVELOPED for that, it just so happens that that’s what some people … some really bad people … use it for. We could use it for good, here!”

“What good? I keep forgetting what exactly is supposed to be good about this. Either I fall asleep, and my life is abridged in this one little place, and it’s true, yes, I can be unconscious, or I just suffer through it awake, or God knows what else, really, since my brain chemistry is undoubtedly … different.”

I shut my bedroom door and come inside and sit down. “I guess all that’s, like, fair. Completely. But all this is about is testing the limits of your … thing. Finding out what there is to find out about it without us being, like, scientists. I mean, we could go to scientists, but, like we’ve talked about…”

I think both of us get visions of The Man, in his black suit and dark glasses, transparent and unkillable.

“You say that it’s not a power, that it’s just this thing, but we don’t know that. We don’t know anything, really. Listen, if you’re scared…”

“I am definitely not afraid.”

“Okay. I don’t like it either. I don’t like it that it’s, like, for date rapists. Freaks me out just holding them.”

“Them?”

“Yeah, there’s two.”

Eric picks the controller back up, thwaps it against an open palm.

He says: “I have an idea to mitigate the creepiness: we both do one.”

“Ha.”

“I’m serious. I’ll take one if you do.”

“Dude.”

“Come on. It’s for science.”

And that’s how it ends up that the first drug I ever do in my life is a roofie with my best friend in my bedroom above the garage, late afternoon on a Friday with my brother still howling away downstairs.

We get cans of Dr. Pepper from the kitchen. We crack them open. Back in my room, Eric turns on the TV. A movie about frat boys trying to see boobs is playing on Comedy Central.

“So we just like, let them dissolve?” I say.

“I don’t know. We should ask your brother.”

I put mine in my Dr. Pepper can and Eric does the same. He swishes his around like you see rich guys swish drinks in cartoons. We watch a few minutes of the frat-boy movie. The frat boys are at the bank applying for a loan, which is somehow convolutedly an important step in getting to see boobs.

“Waiting for mine to dissolve,” I say.

“Me, too,” Eric says.

Now it’s a commercial break and neither of us has taken a sip when, halfway through a commercial for the new Medal of Honor game, Eric downs his. Like, chugs the whole thing in one go as I have only seen my brother and his friends do in the backyard with beers before and after screaming “CASE RACE!” Eric belches righteously.

“You really can’t taste it,” Eric says. “That is deeply, deeply evil.”

It now falls on me to down mine, so I do, before the movie is back on, though not half as fast as Eric did.

“Yech. I want to throw up. Not, like, because I’m nauseous, but because I know what’s like. In my stomach right now.”

“Affirmative. But throwing up would be …”

“Unscientific.”

We watch the frat boys struggle to build a three-stage rocket, which I really don’t get, and I don’t feel any different. Then, suddenly, everything gets heavy. Not me, everything else. With a lot of effort I make it to my very heavy bed.

I wake up to Eric punching me in the arm. His punches do not hurt as much as my head. My head hurts a whole lot.

“Ow. Dude! What?”

Eric slumps back against the wall, his eyes splitting the difference between open and closed. It’s sort of like when I saw him in his room, that day he told me to go away. Except that day he looked wired and now he looks, well, drugged.

“Lissenathat,” he says.

“What?”

“Listen to that!”

I prop my head up. From the next room there are sounds of my brother and some girl doing whatever.

“While you’ve been … asleep,” Eric drones out. He is, like, cartoon drunk. It’s nighttime outside. I have this headache and I’m starving and still tired, but I do not feel anything like Eric looks and acts like he feels.

Eric raps on the wall with his knuckle, the wall through which you can hear my brother and some girl, at it. “When is it my turn?” he says. “When is it…” and he turns his head toward me, which takes an endless seven seconds, “my turn?”

“Did you sleep, dude?”

“Did not.”

“You sure?”

“Yes! I have NEVER. SLEPT. I would KNOW. Every second kept following every other second. Sequentially.”

“So … that’s good?”

“I dunno! You’re the one that wanted to do this … is it good? I tried to watch … TV. Couldn’t follow anything. No, like, fun drug amusement. Just. A lack of understanding. And then … an hour or whenever ago. This!” Eric knocks on the wall again.

“Is it going away? At all?”

“No.” Eric seems mystified. “What if I never come out of it?”

“You’ll come out of it.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know that. We don’t any of us know. You said that. And now I’m never gonna come out of it.”

“Dude, you are.”

Eric nods like a toddler, emphatic.

“You are. When my brother and his friends do drugs, Tits always freaks out, and my brother says they always take him to IHOP and feed him coffee and pancakes and he’s fine. Do you want to go to IHOP?”

“Well, if it works for Tits.”

“C’mon, let’s go to IHOP.”

“I mean, just do for me whatever you would do for Tits.”

I get up, which makes my head really thunder, and reach out to help Eric up.

“Whatever you’d do in this situation for a really good friend. Someone like Tits.”

I finally pull him up and his full weight falls on me. I am still half-narcotized and not super-strong to begin with, and we almost collapse into the Xbox.

“Sorry, forgot,” Eric says. “My legs barely work.”

Supporting a roofied Eric it takes twelve minutes to get to the bus stop. “We’ve got fifteen minutes until the bus comes,” Eric says. “Take your time.” We get there with three minutes to spare, so I get three minutes of Eric, his head resting on my shoulder, saying, “Tits is a class act. Real pillar of the community,” et cetera.

The bus pulls up and I drag Eric on.

“Eulalio!”

“Eric, what’s up, man?” Eulalio says. “Estás borracho?”

“Así así,” Eric says.

At IHOP it’s just us, a big table full of kids from our school, and a table with a Native American family. I recognize some of the kids from school as kids who put a lot of effort into everything. I’m worried they’ll see Eric, sloshed-looking, dangling off me, and think, I don’t know what. But they are way too self-involved to notice us. Their food is almost all consumed and now they’re each getting up and making a little speech, it seems like. I don’t get it but it seems too weirdly healthy and I have no doubt they will all get into their first-choice colleges.

We slouch into a booth and Eric tells me he’s not hungry and I can order whatever I want, but when the waitress comes I order us both “The Delicious Dozen,” which is a lot of food, and two cups of coffee, which are “bottomless.”

“I’m not hungry,” Eric says when the waitress leaves.

“You should eat,” I say.

Eric says, “I thought about TimeBlaze. We should … shorten the titles. The titles are getting long. More colons than a proctologist.”

I laugh at that.

“I’m the only one. Thought about that, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Of me. Of people with my thing.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Sure we do. If there were others, they wouldn’t have kept it quiet. They wouldn’t keep it secret like I did.”

I think of Brendan Tyler and his left-nut-worthy car and how if anybody else had what Eric had they would probably change their Namespot status to “Nicole Allgraden HAS SUPERPOWERZ YOU GUYS!!!”

“Or if there were, we didn’t hear about it ’cause they all got…”

I think we both think of The Man again.

“Someday, when you have kids, you’ll pass it on, and there will be more. It’s a total genetic advantage. Someday, we’ll all be like you.”

“Wouldn’t want that, necessarily,” Eric says. “It’s Crossfire.”

I laugh and look away because Eric’s made me sad. Over at the overachiever table, everyone is packing up. A girl tells another girl that she forgot her balloons. I see the girl, the one reminding the other girl, and she sees me. She has her hair tied back elaborately with ribbons and stuff. She’s gone before I think to smile.

“She’s pretty,” Eric says.

“You mean that Navajo mom?” I say.

“Oh yeah, her. Just hook me up with whoever you think Tits would like.”

When the food shows up, Eric makes it further into his Delicious Dozen than I do into mine. He drinks coffee before I would necessarily deem it a drinkable temperature. When the bill comes, I pay it, and think about how it’s fine because it’s all money I had allotted in my mind to paying my brother for whatever chemical solution to Eric’s thing we were going to try. So I am paying for this meal with money I saved by getting free roofies. Eric is not the weirdest thing in my life, I think. I am.

Outside IHOP, on the sidewalk, Eric insists he’s totally walking-capable.

“Are you sure?”

Eric nods, and it seems like a sober and collected nod. So I let him walk to the bus under his own power.

“It seems unfair that the hash browns are counted as one item in the Delicious Dozen,” Eric says. “They’re called ‘browns.’ Plural. As in, multiple items. So they should count each brown. Are browns the unit of hash browns?”

Then he falls hard to the pavement.