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

By October we have three notebooks full of concept art for Time-Blaze . By this time Dr. Praetoreous, instead of being the main character, is just another player in a universe of characters, including the Praetoreous family (each of whom is actually another version of Dr. Praetoreous in a different timestream, so there’s cowboy Praetoreous and postapocalyptic Praetoreous and two-dimensional Praetoreous in a universe rendered in 2D), the Time Squad (the Temporal Ranger’s extended posse of villains, rogues, and scoundrels from the outskirts of time), and an entire pantheon of gods drawn from the Greek, Aztec, Indian, and Chinese mythologies who have been summoned by The Man using Dr. Praetoreous’s invention known as The Mortalizer. (Aside from cracking the whole time-travel deal wide open, Dr. Praetoreous’s strong suit is inventions that make unreal things real, from The Legitimacy Engine all the way up to The Mortalizer.) It helps that Eric knows shit-tons about all these different mythologies, even though all we ever learned about gods in school was a three-week Greek mythology unit in English freshman year, and the time D’andrea Rhys-Phelps, a Jehovah’s Witness kid, got so offended by the fact that there was a fortune-telling booth at the school carnival that we had to have a two-hour assembly on religious sensitivity.

I am proud of the way, in this one drawing, the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl seems to be almost 3D, his feathered tail way off in the distance in the bottom right corner of the page and his semi-reptilian head roaring toward you in the top left as The Man stands passively at the top of an ancient South American ruin, directing the newly Mortalized god to go out and fuck shit up.

On Halloween we decide that dressing up and trick-or-treating is for kids so instead we’re gonna stay inside and work on merchandising ideas. No detail is too small, we’ve decided, from the soundtrack to possible directors for the movies to the cover art for the books to the fast-food tie-ins, which we realize is sort of commercial and sell-out-y but we definitely know we’re going to have to consider if anybody is going to take on an expensive project like this, especially from two fifteen-year-olds. We’ve watched enough DVD commentaries to know that money is a big factor.

Eric is going to come over at eight but my brother and his friends are dressed as pirates in the front yard, and Eric doesn’t show up until they go off down the block, and by then it’s nine thirty.

“Your brother and his friends are seniors” is the first thing Eric says when he gets in the door.

“Yeah, I dunno,” I say. “They dress up all the time. Why should Halloween be any different?”

“Are they going to trick or treat?”

“I dunno.”

“They’re probably going to steal candy from kids.”

“I dunno what they’re going to do,” I say. “You don’t have to avoid them. You can just come up when they’re out front. They’re pretty loud but they’re harmless.”

Eric doesn’t say anything.

We spread paper out on my bedroom floor. Around eleven thirty we go downstairs for sodas.

“What’s the grossest way you can think of to die?” I ask Eric.

“Grossest or out-and-out worst?” Eric asks.

“Both, I guess.”

“It’s the same answer for both. Having your brain eaten away by spiders nesting in your ear canal.”

“Eww! That’s fucking gross!”

“You asked. It’s bad, too, isn’t it? Now you go.”

“Uhmm…”

But before I can think of one (I obviously hadn’t thought about it as much as Eric) the front door crashes open. My brother comes in, hair spiked up like an anime character with a red bandanna tied around his neck and a plastic sword tucked into a plastic sheath on his hip. He comes into the kitchen and makes for the fridge. Eric suddenly becomes interested in the cracker cabinet, or pretends to.

“We have any whipped cream?” my brother asks.

“I dunno,” I say.

He answers his own question by pulling an aerosol can of whipped cream from the condiment part of the fridge, which is most of the fridge.

“Do you have a house, or…?” my brother says to the back of Eric’s head.

“Me?” Eric says, half turning around.

“Yeah, you’re over here, like, all the time. Where do I know you from?”

Eric basically has his head in the cracker cabinet between the Original Wheat Thins and the Sour Cream N’ Onion Wheat Thins, that’s how hard he’s avoiding eye contact.

“I dunno,” Eric says.

“Operation Chaos!” my brother says.

Operation Chaos was when my brother and his friends watched Fight Club fifty times in a row one weekend and decided it was their mission to spread anarchy in our subdivision. I don’t know what form it ended up taking, really, just that my brother and Alan both got community service for shoplifting, and my brother came home that weekend with a YIELD sign he then hung on the wall of his bedroom.

“Yeah, that’s it!” my brother says. “Darren, check it out, your friend was walking down Mountain Terrace at like three in the morning, right, and Alan and Tits and me were driving down Mountain Terrace and we saw him, so we like start flashing our lights and swerving over and honking like we’re gonna hit him, and he FREAKS and jumps into the bushes, so we stop and get out and we thought we lost him, but Tits tripped over his sneaker on the way to the car, so Tits drags him out of the bushes…”

“Stop,” I say. “No one cares.” I don’t know if you have ever heard someone describe beating someone else up in the presence of that someone else, not in a cruel way, just in a way that’s like it’s not supposed to bother that person.

“Man, you should’ve seen it,” my brother says. “It was classic, right?” he says to Eric. “ROIGHT?” he screams in his and Alan’s favorite British hooligan put-on accent.

Eric just looks at the kitchen tile.

“No one cares,” I say again. “Fuck off!”

“Chee-kee,” my brother says, punching me in the shoulder as hard as he can.

“DAN-yul,” Cathy shrieks. She’s hanging in the front doorway, her breasts apparent in a pirate blouse, wearing heavy makeup. “HURRY UP!”

“I’m COM-ing,” my brother shrieks back. He runs out with the whipped cream. Eric and I look at each other.

“They jump people,” Eric says.

“He’s a retard,” I say.

“I got kicked in the stomach by someone named Tits,” Eric says.

“They just call him Tits because he’s fat.”

Eric doesn’t say anything. My shoulder hurts where my brother punched me.

“You should have told me they beat you up.”

“We weren’t friends back then.”

“I meant, when you first came over. You knew it was them.”

“I didn’t want to start anything.”

I don’t think it’s within Eric’s power to start anything, but I don’t say that. It’s also not really within my power to start anything.

“You want to keep working on ideas?” I say.

Eric shakes his head.

“Yeah, me neither.” I look out at the pool. I can imagine a thousand kids out there beyond the fence, fucking up and getting into trouble, kids way dumber and less deserving of a good time than Eric and me, and here we are indoors, feeling like weak beat-uppable tools. I say: “You want to get them back?”

“Get them back? How would we go about doing that?” Eric asks. I don’t have any idea, but we are two fifteen-year-olds on Halloween and I’m sure deep within our ancestral teenage-boy lizard brains are all sorts of fun ways to cause problems after ten p.m.