The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

when but the church guy probably resulted in this dude we have on our hands now, visiting Eric at home and handing his parents college brochures. And I tell him I called the church guy because Eric was being such a dick and that was my revenge.

“Oh,” Eric says. “It almost worked.”

“What almost worked?”

“Everything has been shitty. Everything. My thing. The bad days are substantially worse. I can still anticipate them, when they’re going to be, my stomach starts to hurt and I get these headaches and that day I’ll have to go out into the desert but now they happen more and more frequently and I feel shitty, I mean really physically shitty, pretty much all the time. So when I was doing all that stuff… the e-mails and whatever and just generally being a dick, I was hoping—Jesus, it sounds stupid—I was hoping you’d get fed up with me and knock me out. Like you said that one time.”

“I’d knock you out? I’m the least athletic person we know, dude.”

“I know, that’s why I really had to be an unbelievable dick. I was thinking maybe you’d get your brother to do it.”

This is such a dead-on echo of what I was contemplating a couple weeks ago, not in any real way, I don’t think, but just in the holodeck of revenge we keep around to make ourselves feel better, that for a second I don’t say anything. Then I think of something.

“You didn’t have to start dating my girlfriend just to get me to get my brother to rough you up.”

Then Eric is quiet. Then he says: “I didn’t do it for that. I did it for all the reasons I said I did it. I wish I hadn’t. But it helped me feel shittier, definitely. It helped me want to get knocked out, black out, take a few hours off, definitely. I felt really profoundly guilty and I still do.”

I ask why he didn’t come to Christine with all of this.

“I wanted to come to you with this, because this seems like it might be an adventure. And you bring adventures to the kids you make up comic books with. Christine, and those kids, those kids are more for blog entries and memoirs.”

“Ah,” I say, not really understanding what he means and also having to stop myself from automatically correcting him: Time-Blaze is, or was, not a comic. TimeBlaze is, or was, a ten-part movie maxi-series with the mythos filled in by comic books and graphic novels, culminating in a series-rebooting singularity at the end of the tenth movie, following which, using some technology not yet invented, all existing copies of all the previous movies will have their stories altered. I want to correct him out of habit, I guess.

“And also, I figured if I was going to come to you, which I knew I had to, I couldn’t come if I was still, y’know, dating Christine, so I’m not anymore.”

“You broke up with her?”

“I told her what the deal was.”

The fact that Eric, poindexter Eric, could not only land Christine, who was dating someone (never mind it was me), but then when the time called for it up and drop her, her and all the nakedness she entailed, makes me hate him and admire him and be happy to be on his side all at once. Then I wonder semiselfishly how it all went down, how she reacted. And I think to ask and I realize I’m really not ready to talk to Eric about her. There’s a clone of our dead friendship starting to grow in a tank full of pinkish fluid and I think talking too much about what happened, no matter the reasons for its happening, will flush the tank and leave the thing sputtering and dead.

So we’ve hit the reset button, but it doesn’t clear the board. There are forces after us, stuff I called down upon our heads. But I have a best friend with superpowers, and days to fill, and rage to direct. And Eric has superpowers, and days and nights to fill, and a best friend with rage to direct. We have both seen enough and read enough to know that the guy who says there are people after Eric is probably the person in charge of the people after Eric.

Now we have our adventure.

10

Eric marvels at the plastic jar of hot wings in our fridge. It’s big, like an economy-size pretzel-stick plastic jar. In fact, maybe that’s what it was at one point. I think so, then we had a barbecue and my dad filled the leftover jar with leftover wings and now it’s sitting in our fridge about half-empty. Me and my brother and my brother’s friends have all made assaults on it, but we haven’t come close to finishing it.

“Only a house full of guys has that,” Eric says. And except for when my brother’s girlfriend comes through or my dad’s girlfriend comes through or until recently, my girlfriend came through, that’s definitely what we are. (At least, I think my dad would call that woman his girlfriend. And I think that girl would probably say she’s my brother’s girlfriend, although my brother would probably identify her as “mah bitch” or “that cunt,” depending on which accent he feels like shouting in.)

We’re not sure where we’re going to, but the right thing to do right then seems to be to put a bunch of snacks in a backpack and walk out into the dark. We’re not sure where to, but before we go I throw on a hoodie. Eric doesn’t have a coat so I let him borrow one of mine. My brother has left a quarter-pack of cigarettes on the patio table in the backyard, he’s not even trying to hide his smoking from my dad anymore, so I snag it, and his lighter.

We ditch main roads and stick to side streets, which all have Native American names like Arapaho Peak and Native Crest, and come together to form subdivisions with names like Desert Pines and Mountain’s Edge At Tapatillo West. I dig into sandwiches we brought, the meal I’d ordinarily be eating right about this time in front of the three thirty Conan rerun. I offer one to Eric.

“No thanks,” he says, “I’m not hungry.”

When I finish the sandwich, I throw the plastic bag away in a big dumpster on the edge of a construction site where a big new house is going up.

“Creepy,” Eric says, “like, if I were a junkie who stumbled here from downtown, that’s exactly where I’d sleep.”

It is creepy, and being creeped out by it is actually kind of a nice change from being scared of this thing that’s after us and we don’t know what it is but we’re very sure it’s on our tail.

“Maybe he’s a guy from the Vatican,” Eric says, “and I’m supposed to be the Christ child or something, meant to bring about the apocalypse.”

“Maybe he’s from the government,” I say, “dispatched to bring you to Area 51, where they’ll run tests on you.”

“Maybe,” Eric says.

“But if we can imagine what it is, that probably statistically eliminates the possibility of that actually being what’s going on. Like, if we can imagine it, it can’t be real,” I say.

“Maybe,” Eric says.

I take out a cigarette.

“You smoke now?” Eric says.

“Not really,” I say, “it just seemed like the right thing to do. You want one?”

“No thanks,” Eric says. “At some point, I’m probably going to have to run.” And his certainty gives me the creeps more thoroughly than the imaginary junkie in the gutted model home.

But eventually it wears off a little bit and we get to talking about what’s happening on shows we both watch, whether the creators are staying true to what makes the shows so great or whether they’ve gone completely off the reservation, and we both got the Maxim issue with the girl who can phase through walls from our favorite show, Superlatives, even though we’d never, ever buy Maxim under normal circumstances, but some of the articles were surprisingly funny. And before long we’re sort of around Eric’s neighborhood and instead of turning back we drift towards his house, naturally enough and the whole thing not seeming particularly real. It’s, like, five thirty in the morning and just a little bit of daylight is chasing the desert hares off people’s lawns and as we’re walking up Eric’s front drive I hear