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
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.
