The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep and Never Had To (18 page)

Or the three of us are together.

Or it's just me alone.

 

 

She thought it was a seizure.

The way she tells it, Christine had offered to burn Eric a CD and did and brought it over to give it to him, and when she did he was locked up in his room and she talked her way in and he was freaking out, one of his “bad days,” and he told her what he always tells me, which is “go and don't tell anyone,” and she went down to her car and sat there for a while and thought about calling the police and thought about telling his parents, but didn't do either of those things. She didn't leave. She went back upstairs and went back into his room and waited him out. He was tripping. He thought she was a werewolf. He punched her in the gut. But she stuck it out and finally when he was coming out of it, sweaty and glassy-eyed and shaking, the both of them, her from being scared and him
from whatever built-up tension the rest of us work out in our dreams, she held him, like La Pietà, that statue we learned about in humanities class, until he was completely recovered and realized what he'd done and apologized and thanked her for staying even though he had told her not to and thanked her for not telling anyone. Then they kissed.

Christine tells me first. I get one of those “can-I-come-over-we-need-to-talk” calls and this time I tell myself I'm going to be supportive and not say anything retarded or insensitive, whatever it is she has to tell me. She gets there and says we should go up to my room but not in a because-I'm-about-to-get-a-condom-out-of-my-purse way.

“He was having some sort of seizure,” she says. And she waited him out, she says.

“Yeah, he gets those,” I say. “He doesn't like to talk about it.”

Then I expect her to get mad at me for never telling her this big thing about my friend that I knew, and I gear up to say he wouldn't want me to tell anyone, I was being a good friend, I'm always a good friend, but she doesn't get mad at me, which is when I know something is really wrong, and she tells me they kissed.

“Who kissed who?”

“I don't know, it doesn't matter.”

“‘It doesn't matter'? That isn't something you say when it was just a mistake and it's never going to happen again.”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“Well I can't promise it won't.”

“You can't promise you won't, because …”

“I kind of like him. Eric.”

“I kind of like him too, he's my fucking best friend!”

Fuck not being able to sleep, now I have powers. I have eye-beams that fire pure rage. I have a black internal-combustion heart that never stops exploding. I have a red jealous streak that runs diagonally left-to-right across my chest and like Superman's crest it strikes fear into the hearts of certain people but in this case it's
those who do not hold up their end of relationships. I am a meteor headed to Earth that was once a part of a planet made entirely of fuck-off.

I need to see Eric and have him tell me this whole thing was a hallucinatory mix-up, that he thought my girlfriend was an extraterrestrial queen he had to make out with in his fantasyland and he didn't know what he was really doing, just like when he slugged her. I'm out the door and halfway down the driveway, Christine running behind me.

“Aren't you going to lock your front door?” she asks.

“I don't,” I say.

“Where are you going?”

“Eric's,” I say.

“Do you want a ride?”

I wheel on her and if I really had those eye-beams I think I would use them. I end up letting out a half-sob, which is embarrassing, because fuck her, she doesn't get to see me cry. Besides, I'm not crying. For all she knows I'm going over to Eric's to bash his head in, even though I'm not, I'm going over to have him tell me what I need to hear so I don't have to bash his head in.

“I'm sorry,” Christine says, but I'm halfway to the bus stop by then.

“I'm sorry,” Eric says.

“Well, she thinks … she thinks you guys are going to be boyfriend and girlfriend or something.” I laugh. Dudes. We can talk about this stuff. Eric doesn't speak, though.

“Uhm,” he says.

“Fuck,” I say.

“I…”

“FUCK!” I say.

“I really regret that it had to happen like this,” he says.

“It HAD to happen? Nothing fucking had to happen!”

“I like her too! And she likes me! No one's ever liked me before!”

“No one had ever liked me before her either, hardly!”

“Right! So … so you know how it feels.”

“I can't fucking believe this.”

“You said it yourself, in a weird way, I've been alive twice as long as you, and in all that time no one's ever liked me, or wanted to have any sort of contact with me at all. When is it my turn?”

“So you would throw away our friendship and fuck me over for ‘your turn.'”

“I'm not throwing away our friendship!”

“If you think we're still friends after this you're stupid. For all your books and interests and ‘films' you're an idiot if you think we're anything except enemies after this.”

Eric looks out his bedroom window. We're there, where it happened, the crash site.

“I'm really tired,” Eric says.

“Boo hoo,” I say.

I don't know every detail of what happened with Christine and Eric in Eric's room. But you can sure imagine a hell of a lot if you have an imagination that's used to getting inside of mechs and robots and thinking up political systems for other galaxies not yet discovered and how spiders would organize an army if they had to, and you turn it on something that's really small and you already know both of the people involved, know them really well, and know the things they could say and do that would hurt you the most and imagine them doing it in the most elaborate detail. You can flesh out the connection they have that you thought you had with both of them but I guess it turns out you didn't have with either of them. You know what their beds look like and you've seen them both with their shirts off. And as much as you don't want to be imagining it, that only makes you imagine it more, in sharper detail. You think, maybe when Eric and I were trying to imagine all this shit for our stupid fucking comic or whatever, maybe what we should've been doing is trying NOT to imagine anything. Because what this is
teaching me is, when you try NOT to imagine something, that's when it really comes pouring out. If all along we would've just tried to stop ourselves from thinking of anything, we'd have been done in a night. A single sleepless furious night.

It instantly becomes epic-length. It doesn't stay just the one event. You've had it out of both of their mouths that they have every intention of doing it again sometime. So you get to imagine it live as it probably happens across town, again. It goes from a short film to a movie to a series of movies and comic books and an interactive online game.

And you can also imagine horrible shit that makes you feel a little better. You can imagine borrowing your dad's SUV and figuring out how to drive just enough to run them both down. You can imagine hiring your brother and his wacko friends to hunt them down and wild out
Clockwork Orange
-style and leave them in the desert. You can imagine all these things, but mostly you just die.

In the next couple of weeks I step back into a world with just me in it. Christmas break comes up. My dad likes to take us somewhere because my mom sometimes just shows up unannounced on Christmas if we're home. We drive to San Diego and stay in a hotel on the beach. My brother pushes me in the freezing ocean and calls me “fucking creepy” when I stay in a minute too long. For presents we all get each other Best Buy gift certificates.

On the drive back from San Diego with billboards for strip clubs and Sonic drive-thrus speeding by, we are listening to smooth Christmas jazz on a Southern California radio station, except my brother is listening to something hard and scream-y on headphones, and I'm not really listening, I am convincing myself that when I get home I will have an e-mailed apology/take-me-back notice from Christine waiting for me. I will splash my fingers across the keys, my user name, and splash my fingers again, password,
and hit enter, and the little world will spin and there in my in-box surrounded by messages from casino porn robots will be an e-mail from “christines_cliche_email_address” that says she was really 100 percent wrong and wants to take it all back and my company, my boyfriend-ness, is better than all the experimental theater pieces in the world laid end to end. San Diego turns into desert, and we stop at a Sunoco to pee and gas up and so my brother can buy a thirty-two-ounce energy drink to give him the energy he needs to like, sit there and listen to really awful punk, then the California station fades out and my dad switches to classic rock as desert turns into our subdivision.

Right as we're about to get off the highway, in sight of familiar configurations of fast-food and hotel signs, something big and brown darts onto the road and into our headlights. My dad slams on the brakes but it's too late, we hit whatever it is, a dog or a deer. We come to a full stop and my dad pulls over to the shoulder.

“Fucking shit,” my brother says.

Whatever it was is already gone from the roadway.

“Jesus,” my dad says, and puts the car in gear.

When the SUV hits the end of our driveway the classic rock on the radio changes briefly, mysteriously, to mariachi then back into classic rock and the car is barely parked before I'm out of it and in the house running upstairs to check my e-mail.

There is no way I won't be getting an apology and take-me-back notice from Christine, by the way. All the mental work I have done composing exactly what it's going to say, all the heart I have put into wanting it, there is just no way it's not going to be there. It's like when I was nine or ten years old and this video-game magazine I had a subscription to was giving away a Street Fighter II arcade machine. I filled out the application blank and sent it out and as the contest came closer to being over I became more and more absolutely convinced I was going to win. I don't know when me really, really wanting to win became “I already won,” and my
mom did her best to manage my out-of-control hope. The fact that I did not end up winning the Street Fighter II arcade machine doesn't matter here. Willing one piece of electronic information to be in a place that doesn't even really exist is without a doubt way easier than willing an arcade game to show up in a crate on your front lawn through sheer force of want, and I'm older now. My powers of imagination and wanting are way more powerful, and add to that they're less focused on things like video games and more focused on grown-up mature things like winning back the girl who took my virginity.

But when the little world stops spinning there is not an apology notice from Christine. There are the anticipated messages from the casino porn robots and there are also fifteen messages from Eric. None of them have subject lines and they all have images attached. I open them one by one.

Attached to the blank e-mails are pictures of Eric and Christine, Christine and Eric among her friends she knows from blogs, the college kids she knew when they were seniors in Theater Division. Cutesy artsy pictures Christine's friends who make photo-zines have taken. Eric and Christine flash concert tickets. Christine dances with hipsters to live music in a tiny art gallery/music venue. Christine and Eric kiss in a booth at IHOP. Eric and a guy I don't know with a scruffy beard smoke cigarettes. All the guys who aren't Eric are like seven feet tall and have beards. He looks ridiculous, like a nerd pet they keep around to amuse them. Christine and the nerd pet kiss in a parking lot. At first I think maybe he's accidentally sent them to me but the time stamps show they were all sent hours apart from one another, nice and intentional.

It is so out of character that for a minute I imagine one of Christine's friends has a garage where they disassembled Eric and modified him into somebody who would do something like this. But in a world where my best friend and girlfriend start fucking, I believe there is nothing so bad that it won't happen to me, and I believe this instantly.

I guess it is only a little bit of a surprise that people have these
hidden personality explosions where they turn out to be someone entirely different than who you thought they were. When I was like ten, my mom kind of went haywire. She realized that what she'd always really wanted to do was, not be an artist exactly, but live around artists and have the sort of lack of attachment or responsibility that an artist has. She wanted to start a whole new life with those kinds of rules, or lack thereof, and so instead of moving anywhere she just started living like that in the middle of having a husband and two kids. My parents got divorced, my dad got us, and my mom drove east. She met a guy in Atlanta and they got married in Palm Springs. As a general rule my dad is not huge on knowing where we are all the time, but when my brother and I went to my mom's wedding we had to call every half an hour and check in.