The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “Maybe not,” Billy says.

  “Maybe not,” Lucifer says, his voice down to a soft hiss, almost drowned out by the rumbling traffic nearby. “But don’t you think you would be able to find someone better? Do you think you don’t deserve someone better?”

  “I like Denver,” Billy says. He does not say love.

  “Think, though, Billy, think about other women. Think about the women you didn’t pursue in the past because you thought they were out of your league. Think about being in the league that they’re in.”

  “That’s—” Billy says. “That seems creepy and wrong.”

  “Wrong? You deserve it, Billy. You deserve to be up a notch by now.”

  “I don’t,” Billy says. “I don’t deserve it. I didn’t do the work.” He remembers the speech he gave himself yesterday. “If I want that? The future you’re describing? With the book, and the—the women and stuff? If I want that future, I have to get there on my own.”

  “No one gets there on their own, Billy,” Lucifer says, his normal tone of voice returning. He draws back from Billy, hooks his thumbs into the heavy lapels of the peacoat. “That’s not how it works.”

  Billy considers this.

  “Besides,” Lucifer says. “If you do this, you’ll have saved the world. I would hope that you could categorize whatever ancillary benefits might emerge as things you had earned.”

  “Maybe,” Billy says. “But what exactly would I be doing? I still don’t get that part. How exactly would I be getting the thing from the dude?”

  “Let’s get off the street,” Lucifer says. An expression of deep appetite spreads across his features. “Have you had breakfast? I know a place.”

  They end up taking a quick cab to an Algerian creperie. They settle in on tufted ottomans and a lean man with the most impeccably groomed mustache Billy has ever seen brings them an octagonal tin samovar of what Billy can immediately tell is really good coffee. After his first sip, Lucifer begins speaking with more animation than Billy’s ever seen in him.

  “Until Ollard dispels all the seals,” Lucifer says, “the Neko still, in some real sense, belongs to me. I can sense it. I can’t tell you exactly where it is, but I can tell you that it is likely underground.”

  “Like buried?” Billy says.

  “Not buried,” Lucifer says. “More like in a basement. So you won’t need to waste time going through the upper levels of the tower. You get in, you go down.”

  “How am I even going to get in in the first place? If I were, in fact, to actually agree to go in.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucifer says. “You’ve seen through the cloak. You go in through the door.”

  “Okay, but, seriously, am I crazy to think that Ollard might just not, you know, be a hundred percent cool with me just walking in there and taking his cat?”

  “My cat,” Lucifer says. “But no, he probably won’t be.”

  “So what do I do? When he tries to stop me?”

  Lucifer shrugs. “You fight him.”

  “I fight him?”

  “You fight him like the fate of the world depended on it.”

  “You have the wrong guy,” Billy says. “I haven’t thrown a punch in, like, ever.”

  “This might help,” Lucifer says. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and takes out a little cylinder of self-defense spray, which he slides across the table. It has a key ring on it.

  “This?” Billy says. “Is it magical?”

  “No,” Lucifer says.

  “So, really? That’s the entire plan? Walk in the front door, pepper-spray Ollard, grab the cat and run?”

  “Billy,” Lucifer says. “It is dangerous to overplan. Plans, by definition, are rigid, and it is to our advantage to remain as fluid as possible. Thus, as you said: you walk in the front door. You find the Neko. If you need to, you fight Ollard. If you encounter any difficulties, simply retreat, and you and I will make a new plan that accounts for whatever difficulty we have encountered. That is the plan. Simplicity, Billy. The great virtue of a simple plan is that it leaves one with fewer, far fewer, things to fuck up. You can do this. Now: eat.”

  Billy’s savory lamb crepes hit the table, and he wolfs them down. They are the best thing he’s eaten in days, weeks maybe, and he feels a sudden swell of gratitude. He remembers Anil’s gag from the other night: a small, good thing in a time like this. But there’s something to that. Good food: that alone maybe makes the world worth saving. His mood picks up a little. Maybe the Devil is right; maybe he can do this. He stifles a belch with his napkin.

  “Okay. Okay,” he says, in a very small voice. “I have to tell you, though: I’m scared. I saw that tower. It’s scary.”

  “Well,” says Lucifer. He takes a sip of coffee. “It’s designed to look scary. It’s an illusion.”

  “It’s a really fucking good illusion,” Billy says.

  “Yes,” Lucifer says, “because Timothy Ollard is a really fucking good illusionist.”

  Billy frowns, tries out an alternate wording, frowns again. He takes the tiny pepper-spray canister into his hand.

  “You’re afraid,” Lucifer says, after watching this for a minute, “that Ollard is going to kill you.”

  “Yes,” Billy says, a little relieved to have it out there, on the table.

  “The You Getting Killed part,” Lucifer says. “You see? I remembered that.”

  “Awesome?” Billy says.

  “Ollard will not attempt to kill you. It’s a delicate time for him; while he works on the Neko he needs to lie as low as possible. Using magic to take a human life is—attention-getting. Disruptive. Sloppy.”

  “But what if he doesn’t use magic? What if he uses, like, a shotgun?”

  “Even sloppier,” Lucifer says.

  “Sloppy but possible.”

  “Not possible,” Lucifer says. “You have forgotten the details of our arrangement. You will be provided with a ward that will leave Ollard unable to harm you, by magical means or otherwise. Speaking of which.”

  Lucifer downs the last of his coffee, and then reaches into the inside pocket of his peacoat and draws out a cigar tube.

  “Here,” Lucifer says, unscrewing the end of the tube. He draws out the cigar and steers it firmly into Billy’s mouth. Billy sputters a bit around it, pulls it out and weighs it in his hand. It’s hefty, like something a billionaire might light with a bundle of money. It has no band or other identifying mark.

  “You’ll want to smoke that,” Lucifer says, rising, using the edge of his hand to smooth the front of his shirt.

  “What, why?” Billy says, looking from the cigar to Lucifer and back again.

  “The ward requires a variety of herbs and other assorted components to be transmuted by fire, the ceremonial smoke entering the body of the individual to be warded. The traditional swinging thurible is a little conspicuous, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

  “A giant cigar is conspicuous. It’s illegal for me to smoke that in a restaurant; maybe you didn’t get the memo.”

  “This place has a back room we can use,” Lucifer says. “That’s part of why I wanted to come here.” He drops some bills on the table and calls to the proprietor: “Hadadj! Back room?”

  “For you,” the lean man replies drily from the front counter, “anything.” He is punching numbers into a calculator. He does not look up.

  “Follow me,” Lucifer says to Billy. Billy pushes himself off the ottoman clumsily and follows Lucifer through a beaded curtain. They pass the restrooms and open a door bearing an EMPLOYEES ONLY placard. Behind it is a small, harshly-lit office almost entirely taken up by a steel desk and a filing cabinet, both of which are obscured under the burden of slumping piles of three-ringed notebooks. A portly man wearing a gold chain and white earbuds sits at the desk, leafing through what appears to be a catalog of men’s shoes. He looks up at Lucifer and glares with contempt and distaste. Lucifer ignores him, doesn’t even spare him a look, and instead crosses the room and opens another door.


  Billy follows briskly. The back room is a cramped, dim space, smelling strongly of lentils. Two overstuffed recliners marred with what Billy hopes are soup spillages squat on a dingy Persian rug, with an elaborate brass hookah placed between them. The chairs face a flat-screen TV, which has a stack of Algerian-market VHS cassettes and Xbox games heaped in front of it like an offering. Lucifer takes up one of the hoses from the hookah, sniffs it, makes an assessing face, and then replaces it.

  “Sit,” Lucifer says. Billy sits, the cigar still in his hand. Lucifer takes the cigar, lops one end off it with a handheld cutter that he’s produced from somewhere, and directs it back into Billy’s mouth, whereupon Billy promptly takes it out again.

  “I still haven’t said that I’m doing this,” Billy says.

  “I understand,” Lucifer says. “Nonetheless, I see no reason to postpone your preparation. It is my sincerest belief that once the pieces are all in place you will act with no further hesitation. Regardless, it is probably a good idea for you to receive the ward: now that more people know that you and I are … affiliated, word may get to Ollard before too long, which will put you at risk, risk that this ward will mitigate.”

  “Affiliated?” Billy says. “We’re not affiliated.”

  “Shall we commence?” Lucifer says.

  He points at the cigar with a tiny, steel lighter which has somehow surreptitiously replaced his handheld cutter, and then he points the lighter at his own face, encouraging Billy to mirror the gesture by lifting the cigar to his mouth. Which he does.

  “Very good,” says Lucifer, in a tone one might use to speak to a dog. He leans in and presses a button on the lighter, which emits a blue flame with no perceptible sound. Billy awkwardly angles the cigar into the flame, and takes a long pull, which immediately dispels whatever goodwill toward the world the lamb crepes and coffee had helped him to muster.

  “Oh,” Billy says, a huge cloud of rank smoke rolling out of his mouth. “That’s bad.”

  “My apologies,” says Lucifer.

  “It’s like smoking compost.”

  Lucifer regards him.

  “It’s like smoking compost through a raccoon,” Billy says. He sticks out his tongue, scrapes it against his upper row of teeth in an attempt to scour off the dank, fungal taste. “It’s like you put a fur-lined shit in my mouth.”

  “It will keep you alive,” Lucifer says.

  And with that, he struggles his way through the rest of the cigar. He doesn’t feel like a billionaire. He doesn’t feel like some badass toughening up before a combat mission. He feels like a kid who got caught smoking a cigarette and was forced to finish the whole pack. The decorative pattern in the rug begins to swim and waver disorientingly. Billy stares through watering eyes behind the TV at a poster that he hadn’t noticed when they first came in, depicting the full roster of the New York Mets. Their faces appear sallow, dead-eyed, cheerless. Billy blinks repeatedly, as though if he exerts enough willpower he can make them resolve instead into happy Yankees. Another long suck on the cigar and some violet form begins to bloom in his head, like ink blossoming in water. He hears a voice, distant, drowned in buzzing, as though reaching him only through a thick curtain of flies: he turns his head and sees Lucifer talking on the phone, saying words, words that sound somehow familiar, that Billy feels like he should be able to parse. After a minute of turning them over in his mind, Billy manages to make the syllables resolve into an address, the address of the tower, in Chelsea.

  “I’ve arranged for a cab,” Lucifer says to Billy, placing the phone back in his pocket. The words wind their way through Billy’s consciousness, only slowly, fighting through the thicket of noise. Less flies now. More like the massed baying of wolves.

  Before Billy’s head fully clears, Lucifer has marched him out of the tiny room, back through the office and corridor and restaurant, past Hadadj and out onto the street again. The cab arrives and Lucifer pops the door open, steers Billy into the seat.

  “Just—wait—just do me one thing,” Billy says groggily. “You can change my mind about stuff, right? You can—what was it you said?—simple binary beliefs? You can change those?”

  “I can,” Lucifer says, looking down at him.

  “Well—can you—can you just change it so that I think that I’m making the right decision here? I’d really feel a lot better going into this if I knew I wasn’t—fucking up.”

  “I don’t think you’re a fuck-up, Billy,” Lucifer says, with what sounds like real sincerity.

  “No?” Billy says.

  “No,” Lucifer says. “So rather than inscribe more beliefs into your tender brain, I want to simply urge you to stop second-guessing yourself, for once. If you look at your life, you’ll see that it’s never been your decisions that have pointed you in the wrong direction, but rather your resistance to your decisions. Every time. So: Trust yourself. And watch your fingers.”

  And with that, Lucifer slams the door, and thumps a palm on the trunk of the cab, and Billy’s off, headed toward Chelsea.

  Billy spends the ride looking out the window and mulling over what the Devil said. It’s never been your decisions, but your resistance to your decisions? It had a sort of horoscopy applicability that made it ring true at first, but the more Billy subjects it to careful scrutiny, the less he thinks it actually makes sense.

  Stop second-guessing! says the part of him that really wants to latch on to the Devil’s diagnosis.

  But that’s just it, says the more rational part of him. Wasn’t your first instinct to just say no to the Devil? So agreeing, today: that would be the part where you’re second-guessing yourself. And that would make this batch of reservations technically third-guessing. The Devil didn’t say don’t third-guess yourself.

  Well, he has to admit, that’s true.

  “Okay,” says the driver, pulling up on the curb next to the gallery with the Styrofoam shapes in the window. “Here we are.”

  Billy peers miserably out at the Seafood Warehousing building, which looks dense and imposing even when it’s not in its Warlock House form. He makes no move to get out of the cab.

  “Hey,” he says to the cabbie, suddenly. “That guy I was with: he’s paying for this ride, right?”

  “Yep,” says the cabbie.

  “So if I wanted to go somewhere else? If I wanted to have you drop me off in Queens, instead?”

  “Yeah, whatever, buddy,” says the cabbie. “I’ll take you all the way to Florida, just say the word.”

  Florida! thinks Billy, for a second. That could be good! But no. Instead he thinks of Denver. You could go to her. You could go to her, and apologize, and explain. She would understand.

  Or you could go through with this plan, says his internal counterpoint. He’s not sure if this counts as second-guessing, or third-guessing, or fifth-guessing. You could save the world. Be a real writer. Have a different life.

  He remembers Lucifer saying Do you think you don’t deserve someone better?

  But I don’t want someone better, he thinks. I want Denver.

  Then go to her, he tells himself.

  And he’s about to tell the cabbie to take him to Queens when someone he recognizes walks by outside. Of all people. It’s Anton Cirrus, marching along with a businesslike stride, his trench coat billowing in the wind. Billy’s blood begins moving. He thinks the same word he thought last night at Barometer: enemy. He feels a sudden urge to confront Cirrus, to engage him in argument, to come out on top in some exchange of verbal jabs. To win, for once.

  “One second,” Billy says to the cabbie. And he lets himself out.

  “Cirrus!” Billy shouts at Cirrus’s back, which has gotten a good ten paces ahead of Billy by this point. “Anton Cirrus!”

  Anton stops and turns, and when he sees Billy he wrinkles his face into a mask of distaste, as though Billy has just opened the conversation with a robust fart.

  “Do I know you?” he asks.

  “Do you—” Billy begins, incredulous, and then ra
ge throttles his voice and he goes silent. I’m going to kill you, he thinks. I’m simply going to kill you. “Yeah, you know me, you fuck,” he finally manages. “The storehouse of tired forms and stale devices?”

  “Well,” Anton says. He manifests a plainly insincere smile. “This is a pleasure. The great Billy Ridgeway, fresh off his triumphant Barometer reading, deigns to make a street appearance to the humble critic.”

  Billy’s face burns at the mention of the reading. “I was interrupted,” Billy says. “It was just about to get interesting.”

  “Please,” says Anton. “The story of how you met the Devil? Everybody has a story about how they met the Devil.”

  Billy opens his mouth to reply, and then he pauses. He gnaws on Anton’s response for a second. Something seems off about it. Laurent said that the audience didn’t remember anything past the punch line of Billy’s joke. Therefore, Anton shouldn’t remember that Billy had even mentioned the Devil. And if Anton does know that Billy spoke about the Devil, then he must not have had his memory wiped. Which means—which means what?

  Billy has no idea. But the discrepancy provides some kind of opening, in any case, so he lunges into it, making his voice go all fake casual: “Oh, you remember that? That’s very interesting. Not too many people remember that, I hear.”

  Anton looks quizzically at Billy for a second, but then Billy gets to watch him have the realization that he’s tipped his hand somehow: he looks away, clicking his tongue minutely against the roof of his mouth, annoyed over having revealed—something. Billy’s still not sure what, exactly, he’s revealed, but seeing Anton pissed at himself is a little more information, a second slip, in a way, and Billy revels in receipt of it, finally having the opportunity to look stupid Anton Cirrus right in his stupid face and think Not so goddamn smart now, are you?