D. Pierson - The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To

I’m almost done with The Great Gatsby and if we don’t get assigned something else soon, I’ll have to start reading my own books at the end of class, which I would enjoy except for the questions about what I’m reading and why I’m reading it. Getting asked what book you’re reading isn’t as bad as getting asked what you’re drawing. What you’re drawing is coming right from your head onto the page, it’s all you, but if a book you’re reading looks particularly nerdy, like it has a guy straddling a dragon on the cover, or when you start to describe it to the person asking you realize it sounds particularly nerdy, you can always defuse it by tacking “… it sucks” to the end of your description. But then the question becomes “So why are you reading it?” Like, people stop reading assigned books once they realize they suck, they stop reading on page two if page one was too dense or too gay or too historical, so the fact that you’re pressing on with a sucky book that no one is even forcing you to read is now a red flag.

Mostly people ask what your book is because they’re worried it’s something we were assigned when they were ditching out to go huff with some friends they have who go to Catholic school downtown, and they don’t think that just because they missed one day means they have any less of a right to know what books they’re supposed to half-try to read and give up on for being too dense, gay, and historical.

Eric never comes over to me. He just nods when he catches my eye.

“What if the scientist COULDN’T return to the present?”

Eric is sitting in the shade of the loading dock when I go there after the cafeteria.

“He sends the cavemen back to the present to do his bidding, but why can’t he just go back and lead them himself?”

“Because the time-proof signals he sends the cavemen in the present need to get intercepted by the Temporal Ranger—”

“I know. I know he needs to stay in the past for the story to work. But what I’m saying is, there ought to be a reason he has to stay.”

Eric looks at me with wide eyes, expecting something, like as long as I don’t hit him, this whole thing will be very exciting.

“Like—”

He jumps before the words are even out of my mouth.

“Like what if, unbeknownst to him the government has created a clone of him in the present and the clone him has invented an apparatus to prevent the real him from coming back? And what if… well, here, let me show you.”

He takes his math book out of his backpack, opens it, and a folded sheet of paper falls out. He unfolds it, and it just keeps unfolding until there’s a diagram spread out in front of us. It’s covered in words like “scientist” and “Temporal Ranger” and “government.” Question marks are everywhere. Things are circled and connected to each other with arrows. It looks like a football play drawn on the blackboard in the locker room in a sports movie, except the players are words I’ve had in my head for the six months since I came up with this idea. Plus some new ones I don’t recognize, like “Dream Spider” and “O.M.N.I.” and “Wolfpack Genetically Modified Not To Feel Fear.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“I got sort of excited about your idea. I thought about it a lot and I sort of assembled this last night. If there’s anything in here you don’t like, that’s fine, it’s your idea, but if there’s anything you do like, it’s all yours. Anyway, the thing I find hard to buy about the caveman troopers is their human behavior. It seems right now they’re your average everyday cyborg, only hairier. I mean, isn’t the fun of cavemen that they’re cavemen?”

By the time the bell rings the world of this has tripled in size. We barely touch our lunches.

“I think this is too big for three movies,” Eric says as he slips on his too-high backpack.

“Even with the novels filling in the gaps?”

“Even then.”

“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.”

“Also I don’t think the title TimeBlaze: An EVILution necessarily applies anymore.”

“Yeah. But I don’t know what else we’d call it…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eric says. “The title is the least important part.”

I spend all sixth and seventh period drawing. I’ve finished Gatsby so I just say fuck it and draw through the last five minutes of class both periods. I cover worksheets front and back, graded-and-handed-back tests, and most of the school-picture order form we got in homeroom.

Eric spends the next two periods making a list of possible titles, which are the least important part.

It’s not until I get home that I realize I’m starving.

The next morning when my dad is driving me to school I think the school parking lot would be a good place for The Committee to attack. The Committee is the government agency Dr. Praetoreous used to work for that’s now pursuing him through time. They are ultra-secret, their motives are unclear, their funding is unlimited, and it’s very likely they’re connected to some ancient architects-behind-every-great-historical-disaster-type society. (Eric and I have decided the scientist’s name should be Dr. Praetoreous.)

The Committee decides to kill Dr. Praetoreous back when he’s a teenager, before he can do them any harm, so under the protection of the Temporal Ranger, an immortal avatar Dr. Praetoreous accidentally awakened with his TimeBlaze technology, they send a legion of bio-engineered AltraTroops back in time to carry out the task. Dr. Praetoreous erased his own history, but they’ve somehow gained the name of his high school and the year he graduated so they’re going to eradicate everyone at his high school just to be sure they get him.

The troops timejump onto the marching band practice field. They’re cloaked, but there’s hundreds of them so the grass moves in this unnatural way as it gets trampled by a legion of invisible feet.

One of the troops sends out an electromagnetic pulse. Simultaneously every car in the parking lot dies. They’re all new, people’s sixteenth-birthday gifts, so they won’t run without a million computers working right inside them and the electromagnetic pulse just took those out. Everyone’s green parking pass hanging on their rearview mirror is like a toe-tag on their freshly killed cars.

At the same time, every cell phone in everyone’s pocket winks off. Kids text messaging in the back of class are cut off in the middle of their thoughts. Their iPods and PSPs and BlackBerries all become bricks in the same second.

The troops take the doors with extreme precision, fearing Dr. Praetoreous may have forseen their attack somehow and protected his young self with a battery of dinosaur-mounted Plasma Calvary sitting right outside the school library, or counterinsurgent nano-mines that will release a million self-replicating mecha-wasps as soon as the enemy cracks the door to the teacher’s lounge. But there’s nobody: just teachers and kids and lockers and soda machines and plastic furniture, and the AltraTroops go through them all, fist-cannons blazing blue.

Through the chaos and screaming kids walks The Man. Skinny with close-cropped hair, a black suit, a black tie, and black sunglasses. He is the seeming head of The Committee. He’s a hologram, given weight and mass when necessary by The Legitimacy Engine, a technology the teenage Praetoreous will invent one year from today, if he lives. No one has ever seen The Man in the flesh, no one knows if there’s even flesh to be seen. Cannon discharge rips through him doing no damage, just passing through his unwrinkled suit and out the other side to incinerate a hand-painted homecoming poster. He strides into the attendance secretary’s office and punches a few keys on the keyboard. He wants to know who’s absent.