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
