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

“It might not be but I really should.” He says it with too much conviction for me to argue.

I change my shirt in my room, then I pack a couple of additional T-shirts into a backpack I haven’t used since sixth grade. Before we leave I get on my dad’s computer and I Google Lunaspa-Albans. Their website is well designed but remarkably barren and nonspecific. It’s mostly pictures of multiracial women in goggles looking happily at test tubes, with a lot of slogans like “Providing Solutions for a Changing World.” They claim to have offices in seven nations, with their main one in Reading, Pennsylvania. Rather than make me scared, their seeming bigness and mystery gives me mental images of me and Eric pulling up in front of their Reading headquarters in a stolen car, taking the fight to them. It’s really unrealistic for two teenage boys with six hundred dollars in the world between them who’ve been truant for the past several school days, but not so much for two teenage boys, one who’s a remarkable transcendent being and the other who’s obsessed with pushing the first to discover the limits of his abilities. Like a lot of things that make me happy, I have to keep reminding myself about Eric’s making things real, but when I remember, it chases all the lonely and scared and tired out of me. Eric comes out of the bathroom and in a ritual honed in late-night looking-at-Internet-porn sessions, I close out of the browser, open it back up, erase the cache of viewed websites, and we go downstairs and take our bags from the fridge.

“Do you still have any of the TimeBlaze art?” Eric says.

“Not really,” I say, “it was all at your house.” I don’t mention the reason it’s gone, the reason we’re both well aware of, which is that Eric scattered it in front of my house and we only recovered that one page from the bush and everything else I never cleaned up out of spite, it was just gone, carried away by the wind.

“Right,” he says. “Bring a notebook and some pencils.” We are going back to the desert together to try and get Eric to have one of his bad days. Hopefully, to have a hallucination that becomes real. And this time, instead of him telling me to go away and me going away, as fast as I can, hopefully avoiding his mom, he isn’t going to ask me to go away and I’m not going to go away. Even if in some unexpected spasm of really bad hallucination he asks me to go away, I’m not going to go away.

We walk through the dusty alleys behind my house, switching paths erratically, taking the backstreets of the backstreets, which are actually just dirt paths filled with tumbleweeds and people’s bulk trash. I think it’s the tumbleweeds and the dirt, and the fact that we are walking side by side like Western lawmen on the way to the showdown, if instead of passing a flask of whiskey back and forth the lawmen were drinking fizzy yellow energy drinks with names like NUCLEAR WARTHOG, but I start to get pretty psyched on us and how cool we are. I kill the last already-flat sips of my third energy drink and drop the can at my feet.

Eric stops. He turns and walks back and picks the can up, then takes it over to somebody’s dumpster and tosses it in.

“Don’t litter,” he says.

A couple minutes later and my heart is trying to get up enough speed to go back in time and we’re coming out of the neighborhood to the edge of the desert, the new home for kids like us. I imagine this is how Agtranian Berserkers must feel right before they go into battle, with hearts the size of human heads pretty much bursting with superadrenaline. I think how neat it might be if I ever got to meet one. We could compare notes. The sun is right overhead, completing my Western showdown delusion. But this isn’t the showdown, yet. This is just the training sequence.

By Eric’s request, I draw a Tllnar Defender. It’s hard for him to ask, because neither of us really knows how to say “Tllnar” because it looks cool and alien on the page but it’s tough to say out loud with a human mouth. The Tllnar are cyborgs by birth, natural fusions of technology and flesh and it’s hard to pinpoint what created what.

“As detailed as you can,” Eric reminds me.

“Yup,” I say, putting the finishing touches on the Defender’s faceplate.

“I think I prefer Lizard Fuel to NUCLEAR WARTHOG, but neither of them stacks up to the more popular national brands. And I think that we can rest assured that none of them is the color they are when they’re done being mixed. Nothing comes out of the industrial process the color it is by the time you consume it. Everything comes out gray. I saw a special on the History Channel.” For the moment, we have the long-winded Eric back, thanks to energy drinks and ADD pills.

“Done,” I say, tearing the sheet from the notebook and handing it to Eric. Tllnar Defenders are small, around three and a half feet, and this one only takes up half the page.

“Cool,” Eric says. “I’m going to go off and study this. And probably pee a lot.”

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be back,” he says.

“Okay,” I say. Eric wanders off into the brush, away from town.

My hand was shaky when I was drawing, and I wonder if, if and when it comes into existence, the Tllnar Defender’s body will be all zigzagged and jittery, the way I accidentally drew it. I wonder if it will come into being piece by piece, slowly fading into our world, or there will be, like, a flash of blue light, or if it will literally spring out of Eric’s forehead like he’s Zeus giving birth to a new nymph or something. I wonder a lot of things really really fast, thanks to the caffeine and drugs. I have this image of my thoughts as football players bursting through a big piece of butcher paper as they come out of the tunnel at a pep rally, and then the players BECOME the paper, and more football-player thoughts burst through them, and on and on like that, while everybody cheers. I don’t know how much time passes.

Someone yells. A war cry. Eric comes running out of the brush like something’s chasing him. He turns and wheels on whatever it is once he reaches a clearing, but nothing ever comes. Still, he looks at a point in the dirt, like, that’s my enemy. Suddenly he’s knocked flat. His back hits the ground and he goes “WHUUF,” the sound of having the wind knocked out of you. His arms and legs strain like there’s something on top of him trying to push him off, but there isn’t. It’s like the world’s most convincing bit of pantomime: the thing on top of him has weight and strength, it just doesn’t have existence. It’s tough to watch, and creepy to watch, but it isn’t yet scary, because there’s just nothing there.

Eric grunts, loud, and sits up, his arms in front of him like he just pushed the thing off with a lot of effort. Then his face jerks to the side and there’s blood on it, like he was struck. Then, the thing that struck him is there. It just is. I blink and Eric is fighting a Tllnar Defender tooth and fucking nail.

If you’ve ever had something you’ve only ever previously seen in your head and on loose-leaf notebook pages just appear in front of you, you will sympathize with my first reaction, which is to be completely still. And if you’ve ever had that thing appear while trying to kill your best friend, and if you had a history of abandoning said friend when he was battling monsters both hallucinated and hallucinated-into-reality, then you will sympathize with my second reaction, which is to run screaming, literally screaming, at the little thing, and tackle it.

Eric has had us build a weakness into all our characters, and the Tllnar Defender’s weakness is its optical array, basically its eyes if it were all biological instead of half-and-half. I grab a rock from nearby and raise it high above my head and bring it down on the Defender’s face, or what would be its face, as hard as I can, cracking the V-shaped optical array down the middle. I bash it again, shattering it completely. It stops grunting and squealing underneath me. Metallic claws and tubes and valves begin retracting in on each other as the thing’s tech superstructure compresses itself into one tiny capsule that can be reclaimed by Tllnar Vultures sweeping the battlefield. The capsule can then be brought back to a lumbering, living Field Command Post, repaired, and reinjected with flesh, in accordance with the shrewd Tllnar precept that metal is expensive but meat is cheap. Or anyway, that’s what would happen to the capsule if this Defender had died in battle on the permanent warfields of Perseid 8, but since it died being bludgeoned by one of the human kids who made it up in the desert five minutes outside of an Arizona suburb, the capsule is probably just going to sit there embedded in its dead body, and maybe glint in the sun months or years from now when the wind uncovers it where Eric and I are going to bury it in the desert.