The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

“Yes,” Billy says, with contempt. “I’ve seen his photo before. On Gawker.”

  “You should go over there and punch him in the face.”

  For a long moment Billy actually considers this as a viable direction in which the evening could go.

  “I think you could take him,” says the Ghoul.

  “It would be in the tradition of great literary brawls,” Anil says. “You know: Hemingway vs. Stevens?”

  “Mailer vs. Vidal,” adds the Ghoul.

  “Ridgeway vs. Cirrus!” Anil exclaims. “Think about it.”

  “No,” Billy says.

  “You could impress your woman.”

  Denver rolls her eyes.

  “No,” Billy says.

  “You could make your reputation.”

  “The only thing that is going to make my reputation tonight is if I read something good. Something that will get fucking Anton Cirrus to print something about how awesome I am, which will involve getting fucking Anton Cirrus to change his fucking mind. To say, Oh, actually, I was wrong. How often can you remember that happening?”

  None of them can come up with even a single time.

  “So,” Denver says, to break the deathly silence that has settled over the table. “What are you going to read?”

  “I had this idea, actually,” Billy says. “That I wasn’t going to read anything? I was going to get up there and just—improvise something? To tell a story, you know, from within? From the unconscious?”

  Everyone stares at him.

  “You know,” he says. “Like oral storytelling?”

  Everyone keeps staring.

  “That’s what storytellers do?” Billy tries.

  “Do something else,” Denver says, finally.

  “Do anything else,” Anil adds.

  “This is a horrible idea, isn’t it?” Billy says.

  No one confirms this, but no one denies it either.

  “Shit,” Billy says. “All right. I’ll just pull something out of the file. But there’s nothing in there that’s good. Not good enough.”

  He looks around at the base of the table but can’t find his backpack. It occurs to him that he left it behind, at the other bar, down the block. He calculates how long it would take him to run down there, get it, and get back. At least seven to ten minutes. Which he doesn’t have. Laurent is already on stage, gleaming white in the spotlight, fiddling with the microphone.

  “I don’t have the file,” Billy says.

  “Why not?” Anil says.

  “Why not isn’t important. What’s important is that I need a story. I need a story in the next thirty seconds.”

  “I’d like to thank everyone for coming—can you all hear me?” Laurent is saying.

  “Tell the one about the Devil,” Anil says.

  “I thought of that,” Billy says.

  “It’s a good story,” Anil says.

  “It needs a third act.”

  “It needs a second act. But it’s interesting, at least.”

  “Wait,” Denver says. “Which story?”

  “The one about the Devil,” Billy says. At the periphery of his attention he can hear his biographical details being declaimed on stage by Laurent.

  “What devil?” Denver says.

  “The Judeo-Christian Devil,” Billy says.

  “You met the Devil?”

  “It’s a long story. But you’ll hear it in a second. And then after this we’ll work everything out. I promise.”

  And then, fuck it, he goes for the Hail Mary. He looks straight into Denver’s eyes and says, “I love you.”

  Denver responds with a tired smile, a smile that expresses a sense of bitter confirmation rather than actual pleasure. Billy’s heart sinks. Laurent, on stage, says, “Please welcome our first reader, Billy Ridgeway.”

  Light applause. Billy is up, out of his chair, and he walks toward the stage, still kind of half contemplating bolting across the room and punching Anton Cirrus in the face as a way to get out of having to do this. He turns and he looks back at the table: Denver, Anil, the Ghoul. They look so happy there, without him. It occurs to him just how easily he could be replaced.

  He takes the stage, and the room falls into a dull murmur.

  It’s okay, Billy thinks, you can do this. And he speaks: “Hi there,” he says. He coughs. “Thanks for coming out. Really. Thank you. Everybody.”

  He shades his eyes and peers into the bar, trying to cast a pointed look at Anton Cirrus. When he can finally pull Cirrus out of the gloam, though, he sees that Cirrus is not paying any attention whatsoever to the weak taunt embedded in Billy’s intro, but rather is looking at his phone, texting something.

  Texting something! Goddamn him!

  White rage begins to throttle Billy’s mind, and his mouth begins to wind down as he watches Anton Cirrus type away. “I’m glad you’re all here tonight because I wanted to tell you a story,” he says. “A story about … some things.”

  The murmuring audience shifts into hush, but not a good hush, the kind of fixed, uncomfortable hush that people get when they begin to suspect that they’re watching someone who may be about to have a public meltdown. Anton Cirrus is still texting. Billy wrenches his gaze away, lets it fall on the table that’s closest to the stage.

  And who should be sitting there but Lucifer, his eyes meeting Billy’s, enacting an emotionless imitation of pleasured recognition. Billy’s entire body breaks into a cold sweat. It’s one thing to talk about the Prince of Darkness behind his back, but it’s another thing entirely to do so when he’s sitting three feet from you, staring into your face, prepared, at least potentially, to pitchfork you in the guts or something the second you make a joke at his expense. Billy needs a new idea.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Some … things.” The hush redoubles, grows more acute, progresses ever closer to perfect silence. Billy begins to pat at his pockets, in the hope that one of them will yield some fiction. He finds a folded-up napkin in his back pocket, and he pulls it out, and unfolds it, and reads the slashed words he wrote to himself at lunch:

  COWARD

  FUCK-UP

  He looks at this for a long moment.

  “So there’s this guy,” he says, finally, his voice ringing hollowly in the room. “And the guy, he’s lived a good life, okay, a mostly good life. He’s made some bad decisions here and there. Nothing like—he hasn’t killed anybody or anything like that, he’s just—he’s just fucked up here and there. Like—like you do.

  “And it turns out that’s okay. When the guy dies, at the end of his long life as a sometimes fuck-up, he doesn’t go to Hell. He goes to Heaven. He meets St. Peter there, at the gates, the whole deal.

  “And St. Peter says Welcome, guy, let me show you around. And he takes the guy on a quick tour around Heaven. The guy gets to meet Aquinas; it’s great. But after a couple of hours the guy is feeling pretty bushed, and he says to St. Peter, I’d kind of like to, you know, unwind.

  “And St. Peter says, Oh, sure, we have your quarters all ready, and they go to this room which is like, it’s like this lavish hotel suite. And the guy is really impressed. He’s checking everything out. And he opens the closet and he’s stunned! ’Cause in there is every pair of shoes the guy has ever owned. All there like waiting for him. From, like, his tiny baby shoes, to the shoes he was buried in at his funeral, all there in a row. So many memories! But the guy turns to St. Peter and says, you know, like What’s the deal? I get to heaven and all my shoes are here?

  “And St. Peter is like, Yeah, didn’t you know? Shoes have souls.”

  He can hear Lucifer give a single great haw, but other than that, the room is silent.

  I suck, Billy thinks. Everyone knows that I suck. Denver, Anton Cirrus, Elisa, Laurent, the fucking bartender, everyone. He tries to come up with something else to say. He can only think of one other joke, about two people who get frozen to death outside of a whorehouse, and he’s not telling that one.

  Okay, he thinks. You may be a fuck-up, but you do
n’t have to be a coward. You can tell the story. Don’t be scared of the Devil. He can’t hurt you.

  He has no idea how he reaches that conclusion, but he’s surprised to find that it feels true.

  “But seriously,” he says. “I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you the one about the Devil. It just started yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write it down. In fact, it’s still going on, right now.”

  He takes a step toward the edge of the stage and points down at Lucifer. Lucifer regards him. His face still holds a laugh formation, left over from the joke, but his eyes are mirthless, flat.

  “You see this guy?” Billy says. “Yesterday morning, I woke up, and this guy was in my apartment.”

  “Adversarial Manifestation!” someone in the audience shouts. Billy and Lucifer turn toward the source. A bearded dude, somebody Billy’s never seen before, a few tables away. “Adversarial Manifestation!” dude shouts again, rising from his chair, pointing.

  Billy’s a little dismayed to be interrupted by what appears to be a crazy person, but at least some of the room’s attention is off of him. There’s a commotion back at the bar, and someone—a heavyset guy in a tight black T-shirt, probably the bouncer—begins parting the crowd and moving toward the front. Billy assumes the plan is to eject the crazy guy, who is now shouting “Adversarial Manifestation” a third time, practically frothing, but the bouncer moves past that guy and instead stands across from Lucifer, staring him down.

  “What?” Lucifer says. He raises his stout. “I’m just here to have a drink and to catch some contemporary fiction and poetry.”

  The bouncer raises something, aims it at Lucifer, and fires. Lucifer jolts, loses his drink, flails wildly out of his seat, hits the floor. The audience rears back from this. Billy suddenly fears that he’s about to witness a stampede. That people could be killed. It would, he realizes, be his fault.

  “Lock it down,” bellows someone nearby. “We have a Category Six situation here. Repeat: Category Six.”

  Category Six? Billy doesn’t know what that is, but the words have no immediate effect on the crowd, which is surging away from Lucifer’s convulsing form. He peers out, tries to catch sight of Denver, but she’s lost in the tumult. He looks down at the microphone, still in his hand. He still has the potential to speak to the crowd, to calm them, to direct them usefully. All he needs is to apply his kick-ass rhetorical skills. Does he actually have those?

  He holds the mic close to his mouth.

  “Audience,” he says. “Listen, audience.”

  And then there’s a twinge in his back, and suddenly everything in his body goes rigid as something horrible rips through his nervous system. Like some barbed white demon coming alive within him. He would think Oh my God I’m dying except he can’t think anything at all; his mind is like a jagged pattern of flashing triangles. It lasts only for a second. A very, very long second. And then he’s on the floor.

  He blurts out a syllable that is not kick-ass rhetoric. It is not even recognizable language. It is the kind of sound you might make if you were shitting your pants, which Billy is thankfully not doing. He doesn’t have the mic anymore. Someone is screaming. He hopes it isn’t anyone he loves. Before he has time to figure anything out someone clamps something foul-smelling over his mouth and nose and the world blurs. It’s all going away, Billy thinks as everything swims into darkness, someone please help. But no one does.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DOUCHEBAGS

  SUICIDE IS AN OPTION • CHEMICALS AND SEWAGE • EXCELLENT VERISIMILITUDE • SICK OF WARLOCKS • WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WITH FACE TATTOOS • PROBED BY THE INTERNET • LITERARY FLAIR • WHAT ABOUT GOD (REPRISE)

  Some little part of Billy’s consciousness wakes up, probes around tentatively, and learns that it hurts. Head, face, arms, legs, hands, feet: every part reports in with the same message: This sucks.

  Some higher-order function comes back on board and tries to figure out why he hurts.

  Someone Tased me, he thinks.

  All at once he’s not certain he’s safe. He yanks himself the rest of the way awake and lifts his head to get a look around. Inflamed muscles seize in protest and Billy lets out a low moan.

  He’s in a jail cell.

  Well, Billy thinks, this can’t be good, although actually? He can think of ways in which it could be worse.

  He lets his head drop back to the plastic pillow. The crinkling vinyl sounds incredibly loud, painful. He stares up into the dull fluorescent disk set in the ceiling for a long time, letting his body throb. Maybe if he waits long enough somebody will come along to give him some instruction, let him know exactly what he’s supposed to do next. Isn’t that supposed to be the silver lining to being in prison? You don’t have to make your own decisions?

  He pulls himself to a sitting position and he resists the impulse to just drop his head into his hands and leave it there for maybe the rest of his life. Instead he does a quick survey of the cell. Not really much to see. The bunk that he’s sitting on. At the opposite end of the cell is an apparatus consisting of two metal bowls attached to a single central column; he guesses that one bowl is a sink and the other a toilet. He has to take a piss but right now getting up and walking three feet exceeds the range of his ambition. There’s also a lightweight chair stamped out of one contiguous piece of plastic and a slab extruding from the wall which could maybe be used as a desk.

  The other wall has a door set into it, prison bars in the classic style. Beyond them is darkness. Billy wonders briefly why the cell is lit but not the hallway, but, with no answer forthcoming, he lets the question go.

  Aside from his shoes, which are missing, he’s still in the clothes he wore to the reading. A quick pat-down, however, reveals that everything in his pockets is gone. Phone, wallet, keys. Fuck, he thinks. He realizes, distantly, that he was supposed to be at work this morning. He’s not sure what time it is or if he still has a chance to save his job, but if he’s late, he can’t call in with some excuse. He can’t call Anil to get him to cover for him.

  Anil. It occurs to Billy suddenly that he doesn’t know where Anil is or whether he’s safe. Billy knows nothing about anything that happened after the Tasing. For all he knows, Anil, the Ghoul, Denver, Elisa, they could all be trampled to death.

  Okay, Billy thinks. That kind of thinking? Not helpful.

  It’s your fault if it’s true, he thinks. Everyone was there because of you.

  One thing at a time. He looks under the bunk and finds his shoes there. They still have laces in them, interesting. So he could at least still kill himself. Not really his number one choice at the moment but it feels good to at least have an option, any option. He looks around, briefly, for a beam he could hang himself from, finds nothing. But still. He feels certain he could make his laces into some kind of noose if he tried hard enough. He looks at the shoes in his lap, mentally unlaces them, tries out patterns of knots in his head, and eventually realizes he has absolutely no idea how he’d go about using his shoelaces to kill himself. He wishes, for a moment, that he had access to the Internet.

  He puts his shoes on.

  He tries standing. It hurts, but he can do it. Something in his pelvis seems banged out of alignment; he feels like if he twists at the waist something will pop and accord a degree of relief. He attempts a few test pivots but they don’t help.

  He looks around. Something about the whole cell feels familiar. He can’t quite place it. He looks at the combination sink/toilet unit. It’s ingeniously designed, in a kind of depressing way, but he has a foggy memory of having marveled at this precise ingenious design at some point in the past. Maybe just from some stock photo of a prison cell, accompanying some article he read once upon a time? He looks back at the sink/toilet unit, and he thinks I’ve been here before.

  That can’t be right. He’s never been in jail. The closest he came was one time that he had to run from the cops: that was also, he remembers, the first night he met Jørgen, three years ago thi
s past summer.

  He recalls the story. The Ghoul had somehow fallen in with this group of bored German pyrotechnicians, three guys in town to engineer special effects for an alien invasion movie that was annoying everyone by shutting down streets all over Manhattan. These guys—young, severe-looking guys from Berlin—were really only needed to orchestrate a few big explosions, which had gotten delayed, so they had a lot of time during which they were basically expected to wait around and do nothing. They quickly grew weary of fucking around in their hotel, the Ghoul explained to Billy, so they had begun hanging out in this art space in the Bronx, taking suggestions for things around the city that could be exploded, and then actually going ahead and exploding them, as little under-the-radar art events, or something. Their next event involved plans to detonate a row of chemical toilets at the edge of a torn-up lot down in Brighton. Billy and the Ghoul had been feeling pretty bored themselves that summer, and so when the night came, they went.

  They gathered with others in the pleasant early dusk, watching the German guys drill holes and run wires mirthlessly at the row of toilets, trying to make sense of the badly-translated Situationist pamphlets that had been passed out to the crowd, drinking wide-mouths. And this guy Jørgen had come over and engaged Billy in conversation. They got to arguing about the merits of Olde English 800 versus Colt 45, something like that, and by the time the German dudes shrilled upon their whistles to indicate that they were ready, Billy had thought Hey, maybe I’m making a friend.

  One more whistle blast. Billy, Jørgen, and the Ghoul huddled together behind an army-green plastic tarp. And then the lead German threw a switch and the toilets blew.

  It remains a sight that comes to Billy’s mind whenever he’s trying to define beauty.

  He remembers a string of tiny but deafening bangs crisscrossing the base of the toilets, opening a rift through which sluiced out a marvelously disgusting blue-green tide of chemicals and sewage, the sight of which elicited a tremendous collective groan from the audience, who had suddenly become concerned about their footwear, which they hadn’t been, just a moment before. One second later the plastic shells of the toilets were sundered by ribbons of terrifying white fire, a fire so hot and bright that it clearly indicated the presence of fantastic military-grade combustibles, the kind of thing that ordinary citizens just should not have. At the heart of the inferno, the toilets held for a second and then simply liquefied, becoming a pool of molten slime, still burning, producing a towering, fetid black cloud. And that’s when two cop cars screeched into the lot, their whirling lights suffusing the great, persistent pillar of smoke with color: red and blue, playing together to produce the most lovely range of violets. It seemed maybe like it had been intended as a final touch, and the audience broke into confused applause as the cops began barking imperatives through a megaphone.