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,
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
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
