The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  He chooses a random direction and marches off, into the void. He goes for less than a minute before being seized with a certainty that the door is no longer behind him, that by spurning it he’s lost his chance. He whirls to look, terror clawing at the base of his brain. The door, mercifully, is still there.

  Fine, he thinks. Let’s get this over with. He advances to the door, puts his hand on the knob, and finds it cool to the touch—this goes a little way toward allaying his unvoiced suspicion that on the other side of the door he’ll find nothing but hellfire.

  He turns the knob and the door opens onto a corridor, a corridor within what appears to be a moderately-priced chain hotel.

  He steps through, scopes out the scene. The walls are some noncolor, some color positioned midway between peach and beige, a color chosen by a decorator for whom the choice of either peach or beige would have been just too bold. There are doors on both sides, with the usual numerical placards. Room 2001 on the left and 2002 on the right. So Billy’s either on the second floor or the twentieth floor or maybe the two hundredth, for all he knows.

  Well, he thinks, it could be worse.

  He closes the door behind him, leaving his loose change in the void. All he has to do is find an elevator or one of those fire plan signs and he can beat it out of here. He sees no reason not to go, so he goes, off down the hall. It comes to a T end and he looks to the left and the right. More corridor. No elevator, no helpful signage. He notes that to his left the corridor terminates in some sort of open nook—a lobby, maybe?—so he heads that way. As he gets closer he sees that it’s not a lobby but rather a little institutional lounge, with a few bistro-style tables and chairs, a few sad-looking plants, and a little kitchen station: a coffee service, a Plexiglas case containing an array of baked goods.

  He also notices that there’s a woman sitting at one of the tables, her back to him. Maybe she knows the way out of here.

  “Hey,” Billy says, hurrying toward her. “Excuse me!”

  She turns, and Billy stops where he stands. It’s Elisa Mastic, author of Sanguinities, MIA since last night’s reading. She’s not wearing makeup, and she’s in yoga pants and a Duran Duran Rio T-shirt instead of the skirt and coat that Billy remembers her in, but it’s definitely her. He also takes the time to notice that she’s not wearing a bra.

  She recognizes him, too: he watches the surprise flood into her face, matched, he’s certain, by the surprise that’s flooding into his own.

  “What are you doing here?” Billy says.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Elisa says. A pissed-off look wipes away the surprised expression. “Are you friends with that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “That guy from the reading last night.”

  “Wait a second—you remember that guy?”

  “Remember him? Are you kidding? He’s been stalking me for two weeks now. When you pointed him out in the audience last night I was like Oh shit, he’s here and then I went outside to figure out what the fuck I was going to do, like whether I was going to go through with the reading or just take off or—I don’t know what. And then I could hear shit just start to go crazy in there, like a brawl going down or something, and I was like Fuck this, I’m out of here. You said you knew him. That guy’s not your friend, is he?”

  “No,” Billy says. “I don’t think so.”

  “Good,” Elisa says, “because that guy fucking abducted me.”

  His brain gives up on trying to make sense of Elisa’s appearance here, opts instead to crumple into a dull headache. He eyes the coffee station warily: he has his doubts about exactly how good this coffee will be, but he feels like his mind would benefit from some sharpening right now, so he pours himself a cup, sits down across from Elisa.

  “He abducted you?” Billy repeats. He blows across the top of the coffee hopefully.

  “Yeah,” Elisa says. “But I first met him like two weeks ago when he showed up in my apartment. I woke up in bed and he’s there in my bedroom. Said he had a proposition for me, wanted me to look at something on his computer or some shit.”

  “What did you do?” Billy asks.

  “What the fuck do you think I did?” Elisa says. “I told him to get out, and I called 911.”

  “Oh,” Billy says. “Yeah. That would have been smart.”

  Elisa goes on: “It scared him off. I thought. But the guy wouldn’t leave me alone. He’d disappear for a couple of days, then I’d be walking down the street on my way to pick up my mother-fucking laundry and he’d pull up alongside me in this stranger-danger van, leaning out the window, trying to convince me to get in. He kept saying that he could—that he could explain something that was going on with me. I’m like, Yeah, no thanks, I know what happens to women who get into vans with random guys. It was freaking me out—but every time I’d tell him to fuck off he’d always leave, and he’d always be like superpolite about it—which actually almost freaked me out more; I mean, if the guy is a raving psycho I at least know how to deal with that. It was almost as if he thought that I might come around eventually, decide on my own to get in the van, which I found—creepy. Like pro foundly so.”

  Billy takes a sip of the coffee, swallows, and immediately hisses with reflexive, lizard-brain distaste. He notes that the longer this adventure of his goes on, the worse the coffee seems to get. That bodes poorly. He wishes he’d drunk the Americano of Evil back when he had it.

  Elisa continues: “But then today—I don’t know, I can’t really explain what happened today. I was doing my yoga DVD and there’s a knock at the door—I remember looking through the peephole and seeing him—I know I didn’t open the door, I wouldn’t, there’s just no way—but then somehow he was talking to me—he must have drugged me, I guess, ’cause the next thing I know I was here? And, I gotta tell you, this place is awfully weird, ’cause I’ve been wandering around for like two hours and I can’t find the way out.”

  “I have something to tell you,” Billy says.

  He takes another sip of the wretched, brackish coffee, grimaces again, wonders if the powdered whitener would improve it in any demonstrable way. “This is going to sound crazy but—fuck it—I’m just going to put all of the cards on the table. I think that guy is the Devil. Like, I really believe that. I know how that sounds, but—”

  To his surprise, Elisa is looking at him straight-facedly, as though she does not find what he has said to be even the slightest bit absurd.

  Emboldened, Billy continues: “I think that guy is the Devil, and I think you and I are in Hell. And I think—I think something is going to happen to us. Something maybe—something bad.”

  “Let’s figure this shit out,” Elisa says. “You want all the cards on the table? I have a question for you. Is there anything unique about you? Anything that you’ve never told anybody before? Anything that if you said out loud everybody would think you were crazy?”

  “I don’t know?” says Billy. “I have a ward on me? Or had? I guess? A—magical thing?”

  Elisa peers at him, frowns, and then lets out a little, exasperated laugh, shaking her head. “Okay, Ridgeway, I gotta hand it to you, that was not what I expected that you were going to say.”

  “Well,” Billy says, “what about you? Do you have something that you never told anybody before? That makes you unique in some kind of crazy way?”

  “Yeah, no, we’re not going there,” says Elisa.

  “Come on,” Billy says. “You said you wanted all the cards on the table.”

  “You said that.”

  “Look, are we going to help one another or not?”

  “Okay,” Elisa says, “yes. But I need a little more from you. I’m angry and scared and pissed off and all I really know is that I’m somewhere I don’t want to be, and the guy who put me there is somebody you know. So go ahead, Billy, illuminate me. Tell me a story. Tell me the one about the Devil.”

  It’s right then that the lights dim for a moment, as though some leviathan-sized appliance in a
subbasement has just kicked on, sucking down a massive allotment of juice. A faint hum he wasn’t aware of before clicks off for a moment and then seems to click back on, its frequency adjusted minutely.

  Elisa sighs. “Or not,” she says.

  Billy begins to feel strange. He feels dizzy. Some fluish wave passes across him and he starts to feel sweaty at the same time that his body spasms with chills.

  “Something’s happening,” Billy says.

  “No shit, Sherlock,” says Elisa. For some reason she steps out of her slippers. “Tell me honestly: has this ever happened to you before?”

  “I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been sick before—”

  “This isn’t being sick,” Elisa says. “This is something different.”

  He tries to take his final sip of coffee but his hands seem wired all wrong: the cup falls to the floor and the coffee spills out into the carpet’s unholy design.

  He looks at his hands. His hands don’t look right. He remembers the first time he took acid, with Anil, remembers Anil saying Whatever you do, don’t look at your hands; I can’t stress that enough. And of course as soon as he started peaking Billy couldn’t resist looking at his hands, and sure enough they looked really strange, and then he thought too much about the connection between his hands and his brain and promptly had a panic attack, and Anil had to swaddle him in up to his neck in blankets and give him a stuffed raccoon to cuddle until he calmed back down. This is worse than that. He needs a stuffed raccoon and one is not available.

  “Okay,” Elisa says. “Take off your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t have time for questions,” Elisa says. “You just have to trust me. You’re going to want to take off your clothes.”

  As she says this, she slides her yoga pants down over her hips, steps out of them. She has nice legs but Billy’s not really in a position to enjoy looking right now.

  “You’re not listening,” she says.

  “Okay,” he says. He kicks off his shoes.

  “One last thing,” she says. “This is maybe going to sound alarming but I think I should tell you.” She pauses, winces. “If what I think is happening is happening, I’m going to want you to fuck me.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Billy says.

  “You heard me,” Elisa says. She pulls her shirt off over her head. Before Billy really gets a chance to check her out, he jolts and falls out of his chair, needs to use his hands to catch himself. It feels more natural, suddenly, to be on all fours.

  Something is happening to his face. That’s no good. He kind of likes his face, his boyish good looks. And then he vomits, a hot torrent of slime ejecting out of him. He experiences one acute moment of embarrassment, at having thrown up in front of Elisa, who he thinks is probably not going to want to fuck him now, but then the embarrassment is erased, wiped away, replaced by pain, the pain of his bones beginning to change shape. It sounds like kindling, crackling in fire, and it feels, well, it feels like shit.

  His spine extends and his shoulders broaden. He gains mass. His shirt and jacket split across the back. He tears through his pants also. Turns out Elisa was right: he should have taken off his clothes.

  He is growing what can only be described as a pelt.

  As his jaw extends and his teeth begin to change, Billy finds himself wanting his mother. Not for the first time today. He wants her there, by his side, her swords at the ready, in full fighting stance, ready to fuck somebody up.

  His skull extends uncontrollably, his ears flaring back and out, his bristling face exploding into a muzzle. The world of smells opens up to him. He can smell the coffee he spilled on the carpet, and the acrylic fiber of the carpet itself, and the dull note of industrial rubber that lies beneath. He can smell the shit on his torn clothes; he can smell microscopic particulates of goat from Apple Cheeks Farm.

  And he can smell Elisa.

  She smells like an animal.

  He turns his head to look but she is gone. In her place is a wolf: a massive wolf, her coat so black it’s almost blue.

  Maybe he should feel afraid, but then, his very capacity to think or feel anything is disrupted as something happens to his brain.

  It’s as though his id and his ego are changing positions in some kind of Freudian square dance. Normally the part of him that is Billy—the part that is clever and funny and talented and distractible—remains front and center, merrily overriding the part of him that is something else—the wants and appetites, drives and instincts. The animal part. But now it’s the reverse. He can still hear his voice in his brain, frightened, trapped in some dark oubliette, repeating Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway, as though he might lose even that.

  Your name is William Harrison Ridgeway, he thinks, helplessly. You prefer to be called Billy. You live in New York City. You are a human being. You are not a wolf.

  Except a wolf is exactly what he is.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SOCIAL ANIMALS

  NO LONGER FRAIL • FUCKING AND WINNING • MONSTROUS BEHAVIOR • GRECO-ROMAN EMBRACES • SNEAKERS WITHOUT SOCKS • BIBLES, MOLESKINES • OLD DUDES AND SEX MAGIC • MINIBARS IN HELL • MISUNDERSTOOD

  Billy doesn’t think anything for a while. Because his brain belongs to the animal now.

  The animal is not afraid, and the animal is not in doubt, and the animal doesn’t want a book deal or to save the world or to reconcile with its girlfriend or even to be cared for by its mother. The animal only wants what an animal wants. To eat. To fuck.

  He looks at the dark wolf and the dark wolf looks back at him.

  She begins to walk a circle around him, rubbing her flank against his. He growls, low, and with pleasure.

  The pain of the transformation is gone. He no longer hurts. In fact he feels good. In fact being a wolf feels better, a hundred times better, than being a human being, riddled with human frailties. His heart is stronger. He can hear more things than he could before. His dick is bigger.

  The female wolf completes her circle, brings her head next to his, snaps her jaws playfully, a bid for his attention. As though she didn’t already have it, every iota of it. And then she steps in front of him and he sees her hindquarters and they do something crazy to him. He wants her. The force with which he wants her is a force he has never known before, not with his human mind, not with his human body. It is like a living cord that runs down his center is being yanked.

  He does what he wants to do, what she wants him to do. He gets up on her, slots his forelegs in front of her hind legs, uses the leverage to pull himself up.

  He feels the yanking cord again; he thrusts. His heart pulses faster and faster. His whole body surges up into her and there is only the smell of her in his long nose and the sensation of being inside her, which might as well be destroying the world and everything in it because it’s the only thing he knows at this second. He thrusts, and a throbbing grows, deep in his groin, and it builds and doubles and then an orgasm jets into her and the wanting disintegrates and then there is a long still peaceful moment during which he does nothing but breathe her in and feel content, at long last, finally, content.

  And then the dark wolf pulls away from him and yanks her head with animal alarm to look at something in the hall.

  Billy can smell what she’s looking at before he turns his head to follow her gaze: it’s another wolf. A male. Massive, stark white, grizzled, glaring at them.

  It smells familiar. But Billy doesn’t really have time to reflect on this, because the white wolf bares its teeth and he launches himself at Billy.

  The collision knocks Billy to his side, smashing him into one of the bistro tables, toppling it, and he has to kick up into the throat of the white wolf with all four of his feet to block it from biting him while he’s down.

  If Billy—the old Billy, the human Billy—were in charge here, he would be thinking This is it. This is the part where I die.

  But Human Billy’s not in charge. Human Billy’s locked in the trunk som
ewhere with a gag stuffed in his mouth while the wolf drives. And Wolf Billy knows how to fight.

  He slithers out to the side while the white wolf tries to stand on his chest. The white one loses its balance and falls over and gets trapped between Billy’s uprighted body and the edge of the toppled table. Now Billy’s on top and he bites down into his enemy’s face. The first time Billy lunges in, the white wolf jerks away just in time and Billy gnashes air. The second time he gets that son of a bitch’s ear in his teeth and he locks down onto it like a rawhide strip and jerks it hard. Just jerks the fuck out of it. He wants to feel it detach from the other wolf’s skull. He wants blood in his mouth.

  Billy clenches and feels the ear perforate in his jaws, and the white wolf’s guttural growls give way to distressed yelping, and then, abruptly, that’s it. It’s over. He won. Billy feels a sense of satisfaction switch on, and it’s like a breaker coming down on his aggression. He lets go. He backs off a step, lets the defeated white wolf right itself, slink around the overturned chair, curl up in the corner, cowed.

  And then something happens. Billy’s body begins to change again; it begins to soften. His snout and ears begin to retract. His paws are turning back into hands. He’s losing his tail. And his consciousness begins to reassert itself, to take over the forefront of his mind again.

  His first instinct is to panic. He wonders whether the white wolf is just catching its breath, getting ready to come back at Billy twice as hard. For that matter, it occurs to him, the dark wolf formerly known as Elisa might also opt to eat him. But before his imagination even really gets around to detailing these gruesome visions, he notes that he might be safe after all, for he can see that the other wolves are undergoing a transformation as well: they’re also twisting and shrinking, also becoming human before his eyes.

  Elisa is the first to return fully to human form, and she sits up, cracks her neck with a sudden, swift jerk to the left, and folds her arms across her tits. She heaves a sigh, gathers up her clothes from a loose pile on the floor, turns around, and begins to get dressed. As Billy’s skull snaps back into shape he thinks: You cheated on Denver. You cheated on Denver and it wasn’t even really with another woman, but with an animal. You’re a monster. And yet, even as he’s hating himself, he sneaks a look at Elisa’s ass, and allows himself to enjoy its admittedly fine qualities.