The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

desert and filled that space with houses, and that’s where Eric’s house is. Someday they’ll throw a highway to our right and fill the space we’re in now with houses. It’s just starting to get light on the very edge of the sky by the time we get to where I guess we’re going, which is the desert that’s behind Eric’s house right now and won’t be anymore someday. I followed him out here one day and caught him looking like Lord of the Flies. I know sort of where we are because of the fast-food signs I can see from here, the Sonic and the Wendy’s and the Exxon that go together near the freeway. My head does that thing where you had no idea where you were and everything’s a strange blur but then you see a landmark and that orients you and suddenly you can fit everything in your head.

Eric stops, looks around. “We can rest here for a while until it gets light.” He lies down with his back against something big and artificial, a dug-up drainpipe or something. I lean back against it as well and start trying to pick stickers and burrs out of my jeans but it’s dark and I can’t really see and I keep pricking myself, so after a while I just lay my head back and fall asleep.

Later the sun’s up almost completely and I sort of forget where I am and I really want to get the sun out of my eyes so I turn my head to the left. There’s some graffiti or something on the drainpipe near my shoulder. It’s this elaborate, bent fleur-de-lis: the banner of the Thragnacian Sentinels, who are charged with keeping a baby wormhole from devouring the universe in TimeBlaze. I didn’t know Eric did graffiti. But the symbol is kind of way too good and intricate to be graffiti. I think I must still be asleep but I’m pretty sure it’s broad daylight two miles out of town and I am dozing with my back against a Thragnacian Containment Pylon.

I stand up and turn around and the thing is so white in the sun my eyes hurt from looking at it. The pylon isn’t floating at a point in space emitting an invisible antimatter field that, in concert with all the other pylons, keeps the wormhole from tearing up more of the universe’s fabric, and even weirder, it isn’t sitting all flat and miniature and two-dimensional on a drawing pad on my desk, it’s out here full-size, inactive, and buried halfway in the sand. All its curves, all its insignia, all the design details I cribbed from the cover of a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles I got from the school library, they’re all here two miles from my house in the real world with breathing people and cars.

Beyond the pylon, farther into the desert, Eric is peeing behind a bush. When he turns around he sees me see the thing and the first thing I ask him is “How did you build it?”

“I didn’t,” he says, “I sort of thought it. I thought it.”

11

“On your bad days.”

“Yeah. For a long time, they were just. Well, bad. Really painful and I would sweat and hallucinate. It was like an awful fever or what Jesse told me a bad acid trip was like.” Jesse is one of the college kids we’ll probably never see again after getting them busted. “But the hallucinations were extraordinarily vivid, I couldn’t differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t. And that was scary, so I locked myself in my room, and, I guess, risked freaking out and jumping out the window like in an antidrug commercial but other than that I was reasonably okay. I put everything remotely dangerous in my closet or the garage so I wouldn’t hang myself with anything or swing on any hallucinations with something sharp and accidentally gouge myself.”

“I saw you in the middle of one of those.”

“You did. At least, I remember you. It’s kind of… hard to tell. Anyway, the hallucinations, after we started working on TimeBlaze they were almost exclusively derived from that. Characters, settings, monsters. The monsters were the worst. One time it was The Man. And I don’t remember exactly what was happening, but we were fighting, and I knocked his sunglasses off. They went flying into some corner of my room, and he went away, everything went away, I came out of it, I didn’t think about it again, and then I was digging in that corner for a record or something a week later and they were there. The sunglasses.”

“Hmmm,” I say. Because what you say when your best friend tells you things in his mind, things the two of you thought up together, those things get real at some point inexplicably, what you say is, “Hmmm.”

“That was the first thing that, I don’t know, appeared, became real, something. Generated.”

“Can you control it?”

“I don’t know. I read this novel once where this character was having a dream and afterwards he couldn’t tell if he had been controlling the dream or what. I mean, obviously it’s all coming from me, so on some level, subconsciously… I don’t know,” Eric says, rapping his knuckles on the pylon, the whole thing resonating with this otherwordly metallic sound. “When it happens I don’t know what’s real, what isn’t. I’m insane.”

“Isn’t part of being insane thinking things that aren’t real are real? People who kill their kids because they hear God’s voice, see visions, stuff like that?”

“Right, that’s what I’m saying.”

“What you’re telling me is, some of those things that aren’t real that you think are when you’re like this, they become real.”

“Right.”

“So you’re not insane at all, then.”

Eric laughs. He uses one of the pylon’s gunwales to pick himself up off the ground. He dusts off his jeans.

“It was kind of sad. It appeared like this, buried. It was working for a couple seconds, you should’ve seen it, it was pretty incredible. Its stabilization afterburners were firing these blue flames and I was concerned it was going to hit a cactus and start a brushfire or something. But then it sputtered out and died and after everything else in the dream or whatever you want to call it was over, it was still here.”

“Do you still have the glasses?”

Eric tramps into the brush a few feet, and pulls out a dirty black trashbag. He shakes the dust off of it, reaches in, and pulls out a completely normal-looking pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He tramps back over to the pylon and hands them to me. Not only do they look totally normal, they’re a little busted, probably from being in the middle of the desert and maybe from this fight Eric says he had.

I hold them up like I’m going to put them on. When they’re a few inches from my nose, this sort of golden cloud appears between my eyes and the lenses. As they get closer and closer to my face, the cloud snaps into focus. It becomes a dancing collection of goldenrod yellow letters and numbers, all of them corresponding to and crowded around anything I can see: the bushes, the trees, the mountain, Eric. The pylon in particular swarms with information. I can’t read any of this information, of course, because it’s all in High Yewuan, the ancient language of the technological priesthood that were the forebearers to the Committee, and even if it were in English I’d have a hard time understanding it, because it’s coming at such a fast clip. The Man, whose every brainwave is trained and geared toward his mission, it just washes over him. He gets what he needs.

“Dude,” I say.

“I know,” Eric says.

“So these…” I take them off because I’m starting to get a headache already. “And the pylon?”

Eric doesn’t say anything. He turns and walks away from our town, into the desert. I follow him. He scrambles down a little hill and turns. Carved out of the hill is what you’d call a cave, if you called the hills we walked down “mountains,” it’s really more of a hole in a dirt mound but it’s more cave than I’m used to. I follow him in out of the sun and it takes a second for my eyes to focus and before they do I’m ready for anything, prepped to have anything from my imagination ripped out and splattered on the actual world, ready to see a buzzing underground wasp-city or row upon row of Neanderthal clones in glowing orange jars, but instead I see dirt walls and something under a dirty blue tarp. There’s blood everywhere. Dried onto the walls of the dirt hole and dried on the floor after oozing out from underneath the tarp. I think, oh my God, somebody stumbled upon Eric while he was out here in the midst of his thing and they didn’t have the sense, weren’t enough of a friend to him to run when he told them to run, and he killed them. Wittingly or unwittingly, sane or insane, and now I’m going to have to help him bury whoever’s under the tarp.

Eric reaches down and pulls the tarp back and instead of the body of a ten-year-old skate punk or Mexican migrant worker, it’s a dog. A dog with horns, but still a dog. A Yerum Battlebeast to the people of the Argot Cluster,