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

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.

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 twice as much energy drink as I’ve ever had in me before (again, late-night Xbox FPS sessions—you decide you need to be the most stimulated when you really don’t need to be at all). And I’ve never taken Adderall, which people take recreationally as a drug, so that’ll be another milestone I will have conquered in my un-rewritable high school experience. There is so much in this world Eric can only experience alone because of who and what he is—so much he’s had to do alone, that I guess basically what he’s saying when he says “you have to do it too” is, I want somebody to come with me as far as they possibly can .

We put the gun back in its hiding place and cover the beast with the blue plastic tarp and put the sunglasses back in their black plastic trashbag and Eric places them where he left them, in the bushes, and the two of us walk back into town.

When we get to my house we have two shopping bags each full of cans of various ridiculous sizes and absurd colors. If this were just a random Saturday night I would stick with old reliable Red Bull but we are each going to have to drink a lot of the stuff and the exact same thing in quantities that big would definitely get old and probably increase the (still honestly pretty big) chance of one or both of us throwing up. So beyond Red Bull we also have your second-tier Monsters and Rock Stars and weird, possibly local junior varsity energy drinks like NUCLEAR WARTHOG (all capitals) and something called Lizard Juice, which advertises itself on the can as the official Energy Beverage of the American Pro Dirt-Biking Circuit.

It’s ten thirty on a Friday morning, so no one is home. My house has that empty, on-a-school-day feel, like no one is supposed to be here. We put the drinks in the fridge for the moment and Eric follows me upstairs. In my brother’s room, I open the third drawer down and peel back the blanket reading Phoenix Suns Western Conference Champions. Underneath it is way more drugs than there were when I hit him up for the date-rape drug, and they’re all prescription bottles marked with the logo of Lunaspa-Albans. In addition to definitely putting Eric’s life and probably mine in danger, my ratting out of Eric to these people seems to have had the consequence of making my older brother, who was a small-time low-stakes drug dealer and frequent but low-stakes drug user, into either a way bigger drug dealer, a way bigger drug user, or probably a hazy not very well thought-out but certainly more dangerous combination of both. I take the only bottle I recognize, his Adder-all, remove four pills, put the cap back on, replace the bottle, and replace the blanket we got for Christmas when we were kids, and feel just awesome about myself. About the only thing I don’t have to feel that guilty for is taking his ADD medication. He might very well have ADD but he doesn’t take the pills himself, he mostly trades or sells them to kids who are also not taking them for the purposes of better focusing on their precalculus homework.

“I’m going to get some clothes out of my room,” I say. “Do you want any?”

“No, that’s okay,” Eric says. “I should probably go by my house for a little while today anyway.”

“Do you think that’s safe?”