The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  “Extinguisher!” Billy shouts. The mandated one is right there, mounted on the wall, behind Anil. Billy can’t get to it. Both Anil and Lucifer are in the goddamn way.

  “Anil! Extinguisher!”

  The flames cling to Anil’s back, lick at the locks of slightly greasy hair that peek out from under Anil’s work-mandated hairnet. Oh, Anil, Billy thinks, fuck the extinguisher; just stop, drop, and roll; every goddamn kid in America knows that that’s what you do, but Anil either doesn’t know that or he’s forgotten in a moment of panic, and Billy estimates that Anil has maybe two more seconds before the fire eats into his undershirt and then begins to do something bad to the skin underneath.

  And that’s when something funny happens with time.

  It reminds Billy of watching Denver edit video on her Mac, trying to decide where to make a cut. Things on the monitor happen at the normal speed until she adjusts some slider which slows everything down at some rate which exponentially curves very pleasingly until finally she gets to full stop, the point at which flowing experience has become a single soundless image, a thing to reflect upon, a moment about which to make a decision. It’s just like that. Anil frozen in space, his hand a good eight inches from the extinguisher; the unflickering flames silent on his back, still, looking delicate yet tangible, like an array of frozen orchids, a thing that could be lifted safely away from him and crumbled to dust.

  “So,” says Lucifer. “This is an interesting moment.” He has his hand held up in the air, two fingers together against his thumb, as though he were holding something tiny and valuable, a diamond, a precious mote, some invisible speck. He’s also still wearing the tuxedo shirt he had on earlier, bloody and tattered.

  “Help him,” Billy says, for it turns out that Billy can still speak, somehow, through the stasis. He isn’t entirely sure whether his lips are moving. “You can help him, can’t you?”

  “I could,” Lucifer says. He looks at Anil with a look that seems, to Billy, to be inappropriately dispassionate, given the circumstances.

  “Look, you asshole,” Billy says. “He’s my friend. He has nothing to do with any of this, and you set him on fire.”

  “Yes, well, that was an accident,” Lucifer says.

  “Then you apologize, and you fix it,” Billy says.

  “It was an accident,” Lucifer says, “but the situation as it now stands provides me with a certain degree of leverage. Leverage in its crudest form—a regrettable form, it must be acknowledged—but leverage nonetheless. We are short on time, Billy Ridgeway, and this requires me to use perhaps more direct means of impelling you than I have in the past.”

  Billy sputters. “What—” he says, “what is it that you want?”

  “The same thing I’ve always wanted, Billy,” Lucifer says. “I want us to be allies against a common enemy.”

  “But we are.”

  “Are we?” Lucifer says. He uses his free hand to gesture down at his bloody shirt. “We were all together, all together again after so long, making a plan that would make the best use of the short time this entire planet has remaining, and then some distasteful people intruded upon our conversation and gunned me down. Like an animal. And then you left with those people. You left with those people and hid, leaving me to waste valuable time and resources in order to find you yet again. You’ll forgive me, Billy, if this leads me to cast some aspersions upon where your allegiances truly lie.”

  “Okay,” says Billy. “I admit that it looks bad when you put it that way. But honestly? Those people? I was arguing with them. I argued with my own dad that we should work with you.”

  “Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not noticing that,” Lucifer says. “I was, as you’ll recall, dead at the time.”

  “So, look,” Billy says, beginning to panic at the thought that he may not be able to convince Lucifer that they’re on the same side. At the thought that Lucifer may burn Anil alive as a way of demonstrating the extent of his leverage. “You want to get this thing with Ollard done? Let’s do it. I’m ready. I’ll help.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t trust you on that point any longer, Billy,” Lucifer says. “You’ve proven to be very reluctant, and I’ve come to believe that it would be in your character to lie, now, to protect your friend, only to change your mind and abandon our mission at some later point if you thought that it would confer you some more immediate advantage.”

  “Yeah, but, I wouldn’t,” Billy says.

  “I think you would,” Lucifer says. “And we no longer have the time it would require for me to chase you down again. I need to understand that you are fully committed to our task. I can no longer enjoy the luxury of doubt on this front.”

  “It’s not like I can trust you,” Billy says. “You fucking double-crossed me!”

  “Billy,” says Lucifer. “I never lied to you.”

  “You didn’t tell me things,” Billy says. “You left things out. Important things! You made—lies of omission.”

  “Those aren’t really lies, though, are they?” Lucifer says. “I mean, lie of omission, you hear the phrase. But they’re not really real, are they?”

  “Real enough,” Billy says.

  “Regardless,” Lucifer says.

  “Okay, fine. You want full commitment from me, you got it. Just tell me—tell me what I have to do to get you to believe me. There has to be something.”

  “Actually,” Lucifer says. “There is.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You can kneel before me,” Lucifer says.

  “Uhhh, yeah?” Billy says, wrinkling up his nose involuntarily.

  “Yes. You can kneel before me and swear your undying fealty.”

  “Fealty?” Billy says. The word just sounds bad. Not the kind of word that sounds like he’s agreeing to do one little thing for the Devil, one little thing and then it’s over, he walks away in the morning. It sounds particularly bad when you pair it with that other word, undying. Undying fealty makes it pretty much sound like if he swears this oath he’s going to spend the rest of his life floating in the void, or pacing an endless circuit in the infernal hotel, or something else equally bad. Billy’s smart enough to know that this sucks way worse than the deal the Devil originally offered him—and he never formally accepted even that deal, so he sure as shit doesn’t plan to accept this one. In fact, his first instinct is to look Lucifer straight in the face and say Go fuck yourself.

  Lucifer, perhaps anticipating this, continues: “If you kneel before me and swear your undying fealty, we can get back to the work that awaits us, and I will remove your friend from the hellfire that imperils him. Or you can refuse me. If you refuse me, I will depart, leaving you and your friend to cope with the flame on your own. He’s close to that extinguisher. Reasonably close. He’ll be fine. Probably he will be fine.”

  Billy remembers the guy at the Fairlane, the guy who burned his face off. The brother of the owner. He didn’t die. One of the prep cooks hit him with a blast from the extinguisher within maybe five seconds after the explosion but a lot of damage had already been done. Billy remembers what the guy’s lips looked like as the EMTs loaded him onto the stretcher. What the guy’s eyelids looked like. He remembers the guy screaming.

  And he remembers that the owner didn’t come back to work for a long time after that; his wife and her sister took over the day-to-day operations of the place instead. Billy wonders what it must have been like for him, the owner, to know that he was at fault—at least partially at fault—for the accident. For putting his brother in the accident’s path. Billy wonders how you would live with that.

  He looks at Anil, frozen in time. They have ten long years of friendship between them. Billy remembers the long month when he was trying to not get drunk every day; he doesn’t really remember it all that well but he does remember it, and what he remembers, mostly, is Anil being there, endlessly being there, bearing huge cartons of greasy Szechuan takeout which Billy would eat like it was the only thing to live for, reading Billy intermin
able segments of the Mahabharata, sitting with Billy at the tiny kitchen table and playing round after round of canasta. Canasta to 50,000 points, to 500,000 points. Epic games that did not ever need to end because the point was not really who was winning. The point, Billy knows, was to get Billy to look away from the void, the sucking void that he had been skirting the edge of for a year, watching in terror as more and more of his life got dragged down into its maw. If he could just look away, it seemed, he could be yanked out of the range of the void’s inexorable pull. And he did, and he was, and in his heart he knows that Anil was responsible. Sometimes, in his rare moments of focus and quiet reflection, he thinks Anil saved my life. Sometimes he has a feeling that he is maybe obliged to do something with the extra life that he was gifted. You get one life for free, to do with what you will. Waste it if you want. But when someone goes to the trouble of helping you get a second life you kind of have an obligation to that person to do something good with it.

  This, maybe, is as good a thing to do as anything. Someone saves your life, you save his. It seems fair.

  And so he says to Lucifer: “Yeah. Sure.”

  Lucifer nods the tiniest nod, indicating satisfaction at Billy’s choice, maybe even the faintest glimmer of something bordering on respect.

  And without further preamble, Billy kneels. It’s sort of an astral kneel, or something, because he can’t move, because Lucifer is doing his thing with time, but Billy wills himself to kneel and can feel himself psychically go down in submissive prostration.

  “Like this?” Billy says.

  “That’s good,” Lucifer says. “Now, repeat after me. I, William Harrison Ridgeway—”

  “I prefer Billy,” says Billy.

  “I know,” Lucifer says. “But just this once. It’s important.”

  Billy considers this. Sure. Why the fuck not. “I, William Harrison Ridgeway—”

  “Do solemnly swear fealty to Lucifer Morningstar, Lord of Hell—”

  “Do solemnly swear fealty to Lucifer Morningstar, Lord of Hell—”

  “To whom I cede agency over my will and my being—”

  “To whom I cede agency over my will and my being—”

  “And whom I agree to serve as my master, and, in doing so, return to the purpose for which I was bred and born.”

  “And whom I agree to serve as my master, and, in doing so, return to the purpose for which I was bred and born.”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  And when Billy says that—that satanic amen—he feels something happen in him. There have been times in the past when he’s said I just died a little inside but he’s never actually felt it happen, not for real, not like this: he’s never actually felt a whole wing of his spirit—in this case, the entire part of him that wants to kick and fight and resist—just crumble and expire without so much as a gasp. He wants to feel sadness for it but he can’t even find the way to that anymore, as it would be in violation of his vow. He has returned to the purpose for which he was bred and born. He serves the Devil. Period. There is no reason to be sad about it. It is simply a valueless fact, like 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans.

  “So,” Lucifer says. “Let’s get back to it, shall we?”

  He releases the invisible mote of time he’d been holding onto and everything speeds up again. Anil, still ablaze, crashes into the wall. Lucifer slowly closes his open hand into a fist, and completion of the gesture utterly snuffs the hellfire, leaving nothing behind but a heavy pall of sulfuric reek. Anil keeps grappling with the extinguisher in its bracket for a second, not quite realizing that he’s safe.

  “Anil,” Billy says. “It’s okay. The fire. It’s gone.”

  Anil pauses, looks back over his shoulder, trying to get a look at the extent of the scorching. His work shirt is ruined, but his undershirt only has a few quarter-sized holes in it, and the skin underneath seems fine. Still, it was close, and Anil’s face loses some of its color.

  “Motherfucker,” he says, softly, sinking down into a crouch, resting his wrists on his knees. He looks like he might vomit.

  “Anil,” Billy says, “this is Lucifer Morningstar, the Judeo-Christian Devil.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Lucifer says.

  Billy interposes himself between the two of them, crouches down to look Anil in the face. “Anil,” he says. “I have to go. I hope you could do me one last favor, though.”

  Anil’s eyes are wide, lambent with the gleam of fear. Billy assesses that it will pass. He rummages in the pocket of his jumpsuit and finds Laurent’s card. He presses it into Anil’s slack hand.

  “I need you,” he says, “to call the number on this card. Go to the address if you can’t get through. My dad should be there. Tell him I went with Lucifer. Tell him not to look for me.”

  Anil gives one jerking nod.

  Billy thinks for a moment. “I guess I have one other favor to ask as well. Sorry to keep adding them on. I’m still an asshole, I guess.”

  Anil blinks out of his shock long enough to crack a smile. “You are,” he says. “But what? What is it?”

  “Tell Denver. Tell her—tell her that I’m sorry.”

  He still doesn’t feel any pity for himself—he still feels like his servitude to the Devil is an immutable fact—but he recognizes that sometimes the facts hurt people. Seventy percent of the earth’s surface is covered by oceans. There’s sadness in that, if someone you love has drowned in them.

  “Billy,” Lucifer says, dropping his hand on Billy’s shoulder. “It’s time.”

  “I know,” Billy says. He rises.

  “Wait,” Anil says. “When are you coming back?”

  But Billy doesn’t answer. He leads Lucifer out through the service entrance and they advance through a greasy back alley lined with rotting produce, making their way magisterially toward the street. Pigeons scatter before them.

  Something occurs to Billy. “What about the others?” he says, helpfully. “They went to the Right-Hand Path headquarters. It’ll be harder to get them. They’re defended against you.”

  “Billy,” Lucifer says. “When the Right-Hand Path catches me by surprise, they may be able to momentarily deter me. But when I come for them? In my full splendor? That is a moment when they stand revealed as the rank novices that they are. You worry about my ability to get the others?”

  They emerge from the alley into the slanting sunlight of a late November afternoon.

  “I got them first.”

  And Billy sees, before him, gleaming golden in the light, double-parked on the sidewalk, hazards blinking, attended by a Traffic Enforcement Agent who is already printing a ticket for it, Jørgen’s Trusty Econoline Van.

  Lucifer pushes the parking agent gently aside with the back of his hand. The agent turns, looking pissed, mouth already forming the first phoneme of what would surely be an impressive string of abuse, but Lucifer fixes him with a stare, a soul-accounting stare, and he is harrowed, shaken into silence. He moves back. He is maybe beginning to cry a little.

  Through the windshield Billy can see Jørgen and Elisa. He can see that somehow Lucifer has gotten them to swear fealty as well. Their faces are expressionless, calm. They have a job to do, and that is all.

  Lucifer slides open the van’s side door. “I will return to you in two hours,” he says, placing both hands on Billy’s shoulders. “In that time, I task you with retrieving the Neko from Ollard’s tower.”

  “I can do that,” Billy says, although he’s not actually sure that he can. But he knows this: He will go into the tower. He will fight Ollard. Maybe he will be tortured. Maybe he will be killed. Maybe he will win. The important thing is that he serve Lucifer, as best as he can.

  “I believe in you, Billy,” Lucifer says. “Now. Go. Jørgen knows the way.”

  Okay, then, Billy thinks, as he climbs in the van and fastens his seat belt. Back to work.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  KILLING MACHINES

  ROOKIE MISTAKES
• HOT HITS • A GOOD CALF • GERMAN PUNK REISSUES • SKEEVED OUT • OPENING A DOOR WITH YOUR EYES • IGNORING THE NUANCE • NOT KNOWING SHIT ABOUT SHIT • FORENSICS • ONE LAST THING

  Traffic is bad, so it takes a while. Everybody and their sister is trying to get to the tunnel. Jørgen sits behind the wheel, plays with the radio, occasionally lets out a judgmental grunt, as though they don’t have traffic in Europe and the very manifestation of it is some kind of New World cultural failing.

  Elisa joggles the rickety lever that controls the heat.

  “Please do not touch that,” Jørgen says, tersely.

  “I’m cold,” Elisa says.

  Jørgen works himself out of his heavy leather coat and passes it over to her. She arranges it behind herself, slouches down into it, her head half disappearing into its depths. She sticks one leg out, plants her slippered foot on the windshield. Even from here in the back Billy can see Jørgen kind of tense up with the effort it requires to prevent himself from telling her to sit normally.

  “We should have taken the subway,” Billy says.

  No one answers him.

  “The fate of the world hangs in the balance and we decided the best way to spring into action was to crawl across town at five miles an hour?” he says. “Fucking rookie mistake.”

  “It was Lucifer’s idea to drive,” Jørgen says.

  “Yeah, well, he’s not exactly a local, is he,” Billy says.

  Jørgen sighs and stabs at the radio, going back to Z100 for maybe the fifth time.

  Billy slumps back down in his seat, looks out the window at the West Manhattan buildings. He looks at the slate-gray sky, wondering whether it’s about to ignite. Everything looks pretty much normal; no ominous portents. So maybe they have time. They’ll get there when they get there. He fiddles with a puncture wound in the vinyl of his seat, tries to see if he can fit his finger into it. He may have sworn fealty to the Devil, but the act seems to have left much of his personality more or less untouched, which means that he seems to be as free as ever to be distractible, fidgety, restless. He looks up at Elisa’s foot, at her ankle, at her calf. It’s a good calf. He finds himself kind of turned on.