The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

but still a dog, a really weird dog, to anyone who isn’t me and Eric, the people who came up with it.

“Holy shit dude,” I say, “holy fucking shit.”

You can tell Eric is weirded out by me crying. Hell, I’m weirded out by me crying.

“It attacked me,” he says, “I had to. But you should’ve seen it before. It was amazing. We did a really good job.”

But it isn’t that it’s dead, I’m not crying about a dog from a made-up galaxy that probably has no business existing anyway, it’s not any of that, it’s, I don’t know, I had sort of just started dealing with the fact that Eric meant anything is possible, because if he is able to exist, imagine what else could exist out there, imagine what else could be coming true. But what the sunglasses and the pylon half-buried in the dirt and the dead dog at my feet, the dog with the skin just as rough as I shaded it on a piece of notebook paper on some afternoon last November, what these things mean is that he’s not only a signifier that anything can be real, he’s the thing that makes them real. And that fucks me up so completely, makes me so crazy happy that I have to cry and like any teenage boy I’m proud for almost never crying but now I’m even more proud because I saved it for this, this is a moment that deserves it. I wish I hadn’t cried about a girl a couple of months ago so I’d have more tears for this moment, this moment that rips up the term reality, forever un-marries it from the word boring. I am also, I have to admit, terrified, because I have always lived in this one world, and I am leaving it, right now in this moment, for a whole different one. I imagine it’s a lot how leaving for college feels, if you were going to college in Atlantis.

But I can’t tell Eric that right this second, I don’t even know it well enough to say it and I barely know it well enough now. What I end up saying is, “How did you kill it?”

“My dad’s gun,” Eric says, and moves aside a rock to reveal a handgun in the dirt.

I put the sunglasses back on, even though we’re in the shade, even though it means being showered with a whole lot of arcane symbols that I designed but don’t know the meaning of. I guess it’s uncomfortable to me, having my eyes out there, unprotected, with tears streaming out of them that I can’t do anything to stop. The glasses were a by-product of the fact that I’m not great at drawing eyes, that I could get nine tenths of the way through a really successful depiction of some character and then have it ruined by the delicate balance that eyes are, the way we have so much deep unconscious experience with them that when an artist has done a shitty job of striking that balance we look at them and the whole thing feels wrong. And now here they are on my face, here they are collecting my tears.

They have the unintended side effect of making the whole world look like a video game: one of the only things on the projected HUD (heads-up display) that I can actually make sense of is the status bars. It scans every living thing in your field of vision and tells you how healthy they are, how close to death. Every animal, anyway, or artificial construct that’s close enough to an animal. This is useful to The Man when he is fighting somebody and he needs to know how many more bullets it will take to bring them down, or when he’s presented with a dying alien and he needs to know how much longer he has to get whatever information he needs from the creature before it expires completely. Terrestrial plants get a pass, which is a good thing, too, or the desert would be a forest of green, yellow, and red status bars. It’s interesting to me because I look at Eric and see that his status bar is yellow, less than half full, meaning he’s closer to dying than not.

“When’s your next bad day?” I ask.

“Hard to say,” Eric says. “They’re happening closer together now.”

“That’s not gonna be good enough,” I say. “We can’t afford to wait for it, and we can’t afford it being erratic when it happens. You need to be able to control when it happens, and what we get out of it when it does.”

“Okay,” says Eric.

And in case you were wondering, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But my friend the alien is dying and the forces arrayed against us are closing in and it’s time to make moves.

And in case you were wondering, the handgun in the dirt is the gun they said he had on him when everything happened.

12

The rest of the day is me teaching Eric to be the best world-busting genetic anomaly he can be. It’s basically Yoda teaching Luke how to use the Force if Yoda didn’t know anything about the Force and couldn’t use it himself.

“So here’s the thing,” I say when I have stopped crying and removed the sunglasses and emerged into the sun feeling like our suburb’s teenage General Patton. “What does he really have, right? The guy who’s chasing us. We think he might be part of some vast government conspiracy. There’s also a chance he’s just some guy from, like, an evil pharmaceutical giant and he’s bribed his way into the cops working for him. But that’s it. He has cops, and cops have guns and authority. But what we have—what you have… is a power.”

Eric looks down at the ground.

“It is, man. It just is. There’s no arguing that anymore. We just have to like, figure out how you can control it.”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t yet. I may not have thought as much about this thing of yours as you have, but if all you’ve thought is ‘Screw it, I can’t,’ then all that thought was wasted. I just found out about this and I’m telling you you can. I don’t know that you can, but I’m telling you you can, because you have to.”

Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is not let them apologize for how special they are, to pass themselves off as mediocre. When Christine and I were together she never stopped telling me how good my drawings were. She wasn’t sold on the subject matter and she thought I should spend more time in my “legit drawing” sketchbook, but she never let me cop to merely doodling. And even after all the shit we’ve been through I still feel a little cooler because of it. Eric is like me, obsessed with mutations and powers, so getting him excited about what he is should not be hard.

“So it’s like, an accumulation of not sleeping. Like, whatever it is normal people get rid of when they sleep, you don’t get rid of it. Or, whatever it is that enables you to not sleep, the side effect of an accumulation of that thing is, this. The bad days.”

“Right.”

“So the question is, how do we speed up that accumulation? How do we get you to sleep less than you already are?”

We slip back in from the desert. We go to the grocery store and buy a really ridiculous amount of energy drinks because the thought is, overstimulating Eric will tire him out quicker. Like, when I drink a bunch of Red Bull to stay up all night playing first-person shooters on Xbox, I am extraordinarily wired for a short period of time and then suddenly bone-tired, more tired than I would have been had I never drunk all that stuff in the first place. And after we go to the store we go to my house to steal my brother’s Adderall, because for someone who doesn’t have attention deficit disorder, like Eric (who probably has way too much attention, if anything), it is apparently an incredible stimulant. And we are getting enough energy drinks for both of us to have way too many energy drinks, and we are going to get enough Adderall for both of us, because all this stuff he’s going to do to try and affect his brain chemistry, I am going to do as well, even though I don’t have the same brain chemistry as him at all and it will probably just make me momentarily super-stimulated and then shortly afterward very exhausted. And I’m going to do it because before we reenter society to go to the grocery store and my house, we have this conversation:

“Okay. But you have to do it, too.”

“Like the roofies? C’mon, man, why is it I have to do everything WITH you? Like when they’re testing lab rats, scientists don’t cut their own brains open as well, you know what I mean?”

“I’m a lab rat?”

“No! But you get what I’m saying. It was one thing when it was just us, but now there’s someone after us, and maybe it would make sense to have one of us fully lucid while the other one’s—”

Eric looks down and spits in the dirt and I stop. I don’t even have that big of a problem with it. It’s only like