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

Central terminates at the mountains. On the other side of the mountains is our neighborhood and lots of others. We hit a cul-de-sac and just keep walking. I remind myself that they’re not even technically big enough to be mountains, they’re really just hills we call “the mountains,” but it’s dark and past midnight and there could be coyotes and God knows what else up here, the homeless junkies who’ve been kicked out of their model homes, anything. But no one would think to look for us up here. So two unathletic boys stumble upwards in the middle of the night toward the big TV antennas with red lights on them that always meant home to me after coming back from vacation or summer camp.

“This is really scary,” Eric says. I’m glad he thinks so, too.

When we get to the top of the mountains or the hills or whatever they are, I am not surprised to see there are not actual TVs mounted on the antennas showing what they’re broadcasting. It is too bad the red lights are serving their purpose of keeping planes from flying too low: if they were low enough we could grab on to their bellies and get away.

“What if we left?” I say to Eric. “Like, drove away, or flew? Went to California?”

“No,” Eric says, right on top of me. “Running is just running. Let them come.”

With our neighborhoods spread out below us, most everything dark except for the orange streetlights wrapped in strands around blocks with mansions and blocks with normal houses and blocks with no houses at all yet, Eric tells me we’d better just stand and fight.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” he says.

“Nah, I will. I will. But who are we fighting and what are we fighting them with?”

“I gotta show you something,” Eric says, and starts down the hill towards home.

It’s faster going downhill and by the time we get to the bottom the cuffs of my jeans are full of stickers and cactus needles. Nothing has stuck itself straight up into my shoe yet, which is good, but I’m looking forward to walking on pavement again at the bottom of the hill. There’s a fence and on the other side of it are construction sites that become neighborhoods farther along. We hop the fence and Eric veers right, towards more desert. We’re heading away from the hills, walking alongside civilization, houses on our left and more desert on our right.

There used to be desert behind my house, then they threw a band of highway a mile or two away in the 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.”

“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?”