The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

down Christine. Normally I just stand around and look dumb while Christine and Antonia and Marlee talk fast. Tonight at least I’ll have somebody to stand around and look dumb with.

“Ohmigod,” says Antonia. “We just saw the Godard retrospective.”

“Seminal,” Marlee says. “SEMINAL.”

“I’ve been meaning to see his stuff,” Christine says, “but I haven’t yet.”

“You have to,” says Antonia, “you absolutely have to.”

“You really should, he’s pretty great,” Eric says.

“You know Godard?” says Marlee.

“A little,” Eric says. “I went through a phase.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“Well, it’s a toss-up between Breathless and…”

I lose the thread for a little while and focus on feeling betrayed by Eric, who is supposed to be a dude with me. Then I see my window.

“… just like Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress was ripped off by Lucas with Star Wars,” Eric says.

“Speaking of Star Wars, did you guys know that in the first draft of the script, Luke Skywalker was called Annakin Starkiller?”

Everybody, even my girlfriend, even my best friend, looks at me like blood just started gushing from my mouth. In fact, I think they would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, instead of these stupid words that are trying so hard. In fact, I would prefer blood was coming out of my mouth, because then I’d have an out from this stupid evening.

“What film are you guys seeing?” Marlee asks.

“The Paucity of Feeling,” Christine says.

“I saw it when I interned at the film festival,” Antonia says. “You’re going to love it.”

They’re called “movies,” not “films,” you fucking muffin-hats, I think as we make our way to Theater 2.

The movie, the “film,” is a lot of shots of bridges and rosaries swinging from rearview mirrors and a guy with a beard is very mean to a French girl. It doesn’t start where it starts or end where it ends for any particular reason and I keep wanting zombies to jump in from the margins of the frame and eat everybody but they don’t. Everyone stares at the ocean for two hours, which forces us to as well, even if we don’t want to, even if we would rather watch a thing in which a thing happens.

Usually when these movies are over I wait for Christine to weigh in and if she hated it I hate it with her and if she liked it I say, “Ah, interesting.” But tonight I’ll have Eric on my side, and we will be able to argue with the authority of two dudes who have conceived of a seventy-hour multimedia sci-fi epic that this movie was a piece of shit.

“Bradgate was right, for once,” Eric says when he comes out of the bathroom.

“Yes, for once,” Christine agrees.

“Who’s Bradgate?”

“The film critic for the Republic,” Eric says.

“Usually he hates movies like this and loves, like, dinosaur island movies,” Christine says.

“But every so often, he picks an art movie to champion, mostly because everybody else is. He gave this one a good review.”

“Which actually had me worried,” Christine says. “But he was right.”

“So you guys liked it?”

Christine and Eric look at each other.

“You didn’t?” Christine asks.

“Uhm…” I say, “it was interesting.”

On the walk to Christine’s car I listen as they dissect motifs and symbolism and mise-en-scene and Eric, whom I thought was loyal to clones and alien broods and movies that are actually, you know, about something, reminds me that while I jerk off and sleep, he stays up being interested in things. Christine drives and Eric sits in the front seat and the kid sits in the back.

A typical afternoon in the Eric/Christine/Darren trio goes like this: I’m either at Eric’s house or Christine’s house or one of them is at my house. At last it seems I don’t have to choose, like my time is perfectly balanced. I’ll be drawing the sails on an ultralight skiff designed to ride on the surface of the sun, and Eric will be contemplating ways we can cut down the length of our titles (we’ve gotten them down to just two colons) when Eric’s cell phone beeps. Before Christine I never heard Eric’s phone ring because I don’t think it ever rang when I wasn’t with Eric because I’m the only one who ever called. Eric flips his phone open and says to me, “What’s a seven-letter synonym for perspicacity? Christine is beating me at this word game,” and before I can answer, he’s texting her back, not that I could answer. Or I’ll be at Christine’s house doing something to her I think I’m actually getting really good at, considering my previous lack of experience, and Christine’s phone will ring, and she’ll listen to the voicemail immediately after we finish, and she’ll say to me, “Eric says you said the cutest thing at lunch,” and before I can ask if Eric really described whatever thing I said as “cute” she’s calling him back to find out what the cute thing was.

Or the three of us are together.

Or it’s just me alone.

9

She thought it was a seizure.

The way she tells it, Christine had offered to burn Eric a CD and did and brought it over to give it to him, and when she did he was locked up in his room and she talked her way in and he was freaking out, one of his “bad days,” and he told her what he always tells me, which is “go and don’t tell anyone,” and she went down to her car and sat there for a while and thought about calling the police and thought about telling his parents, but didn’t do either of those things. She didn’t leave. She went back upstairs and went back into his room and waited him out. He was tripping. He thought she was a werewolf. He punched her in the gut. But she stuck it out and finally when he was coming out of it, sweaty and glassy-eyed and shaking, the both of them, her from being scared and him from whatever built-up tension the rest of us work out in our dreams, she held him, like La Pieta, that statue we learned about in humanities class, until he was completely recovered and realized what he’d done and apologized and thanked her for staying even though he had told her not to and thanked her for not telling anyone. Then they kissed.

Christine tells me first. I get one of those “can-I-come-over-we-need-to-talk” calls and this time I tell myself I’m going to be supportive and not say anything retarded or insensitive, whatever it is she has to tell me. She gets there and says we should go up to my room but not in a because-I’m-about-to-get-a-condom-out-of-my-purse way.

“He was having some sort of seizure,” she says. And she waited him out, she says.

“Yeah, he gets those,” I say. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Then I expect her to get mad at me for never telling her this big thing about my friend that I knew, and I gear up to say he wouldn’t want me to tell anyone, I was being a good friend, I’m always a good friend, but she doesn’t get mad at me, which is when I know something is really wrong, and she tells me they kissed.

“Who kissed who?”

“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”

“‘It doesn’t matter’? That isn’t something you say when it was just a mistake and it’s never going to happen again.”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“Well I can’t promise it won’t.”

“You can’t promise you won’t, because…”