The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  Not necessarily, he thinks. Just walk into the horrible tower and get the stupid cat and give it to Satan and everything could be different. You could get your book published. You could save the world.

  To this, he thinks both Yeah right and No way so closely together that he can’t discern which one comes first.

  So be it. He envisions the Neko, its little paw oscillating. Not beckoning, but waving goodbye. Waving goodbye forever. To him, to the world and all its combustible matter, to everything and everyone.

  Something else, he tells himself. Think about something else.

  Back to the computer. He Googles Elisa Mastic, tomorrow night’s poet, reads one of her poems online. It might be good, but it’s poetry, so he can’t really tell. He kind of likes the line about the “deleted world,” but that gets him thinking once again about fire destroying everything.

  He looks at some porn. He must be depressed, because tits don’t seem sexy. He considers for a moment the horrible prospect that whether he likes tits is contingent upon some light switch in his head that could be flipped off.

  Okay, if not porn, then narrative. Maybe he can catch up on Argentium Astrum, although he’s not entirely sure he’s going to enjoy its particular brand of supernatural mystery now that there’s so much goddamn supernatural mystery jammed into his everyday life.

  He loads the page; there are three episodes he hasn’t seen. He clicks one and the opening sequence begins to stream as normal—the familiar sheriff’s badge rises, gleaming, from inky, mist-shrouded depths—but then the stream glitches again. First there are a bunch of jittering bars, then a quick flash of what looks like a block of random numerals, then the bars again, and then the little video window just crashes into a block of solid blue. Then it changes to red. Then blue again. Then green. Then a black field with six white dots in it. Then back to blue. The effect is kind of mesmerizing and calming and he watches it for almost four minutes before he snaps out of it.

  Okay. If not porn, if not narrative, then bed. And if not bed, then the couch.

  And as he lies there on the couch, twisting uncomfortably, he thinks back, remembering the kitchen accident all those years ago, the guy he saw who was on fire. It happened back when he was dishwashing at a crappy family restaurant called the Fairlane, back in Ohio. Something had gone wrong with the Fairlane’s rangetops and the owner had tried to save a couple of bucks by calling his uncertified handyman brother in to fix the thing. Billy remembers that guy on his back, visible only as a belly and legs while the rest of his body banged around clumsily inside the half-disassembled stove with a ball-peen hammer in his hand.

  Billy can’t remember the guy’s name but he remembers the fireball that suddenly erupted from under the thing, ignited by an errant spark or by the pilot light from the neighboring rangetop, and he remembers the brother yanking himself out of the blast with his whole head on fire. He remembers what that looked like. What it smelled like. And he thinks about something like that happening to everything in the world. All the people. All the books. All the Brazillian cockroaches, and all the bananas; all the dogs, all the wolves. And then he’s asleep.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FAILURE OF IMAGINATION

  A PHONE IS NOT LIKE A BANANA • LEADING THE BACKLASH • TRAVELING BOOK HUNTERS • THE WHOLE POINT OF A CLOAK • SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING • LOOKING HOMELESS • COWARD = ICE • FLAUBERT • CAFFEINE, MEAT, AND REVENGE • WHAT STORYTELLERS DO • TO THOUGHTLESSNESS

  He wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. It’s Denver, he thinks. Hope muscles him around, pulls him up into action. He slept on the couch last night, though, and so he opens his eyes expecting Loft and instead sees Living Room. There’s a disorienting second during which he can’t quite figure out which way his head is pointing. Maybe it’s just leftover fug from last night’s high, but for that second, the apartment seems like some Escher structure he can’t orient himself within. God only knows where the phone is.

  It buzzes again. Billy makes a valiant go of getting to his feet, but he’s slept with one leg jammed underneath himself, and that leg has gone completely numb, useless, transformed from trusty appendage to strange tube packed full of cast-off meats, like a long sack of dog food stuck to his body. He tries to stand and instead he crumples down to the floor, banging his knee on the coffee table’s remorseless edge. “Son of a bitch,” he says.

  The phone buzzes again. Billy kneads his fist vigorously into his inert calf while using his other hand to grope around on the coffee table, knocking a pile of mail onto the floor but not coming upon anything that resembles the phone’s familiar shape.

  “Damn it,” Billy cries. He’s blowing his chance. He feels like if he talked to Denver, even just for a second, he’d be able to say the right thing: the thing that would be convincing, that would show her that he can be the man that he presumes she wants him to be. Caring, compassionate, competent, whatever.

  He finally finds the phone nine minutes later. It’s in the fruit bowl in the kitchen, nestled in the curvature of the bruised banana he brought home two nights ago. Present Moment Billy looks back at Past Billy with bafflement and contempt. Past Billy, thus roused, offers a thin explanation as to why it was a good idea to stick the phone there last night, something about the vaguely satisfying correspondence between the shape of the banana and the shape of the phone. And Present Moment Billy experiences a sudden, acute awareness regarding how he must appear to other people. His puzzlement, his dreaminess, his hapless wonder: How fucking contemptible. It’s no wonder Denver is done with him. He’d be done with him, too.

  The phone’s tiny screen, upon inspection, reveals that it wasn’t even Denver who called. It was his dad again. Billy frowns at this: twice in one week is a little odd. It’s not in Keith Ridgeway’s character to press a book on Billy twice. That’s not the way it works between them. Usually when he mentions a book in a voice mail that seems to be enough for him to be able to pretend that Billy will track it down and read it, which means that the book simply never comes up again between them. So a second call from his dad means either that he’s pushing two separate books or that something else is going on. I should call him, Billy thinks. But not today. Today he has shit to do.

  He looks out the window, checks that Brooklyn is not on fire. It seems no more in danger of being on fire than it did yesterday, or the day before that. Some tension he’s carried since last night, located somewhere behind his sternum, releases. Someone else is solving the problem. He feels certain of it.

  Having freed himself from obligation, he makes some more of the Devil’s coffee and eats the spotted banana. He pulls out the big accordion file which contains his recent fiction and starts looking for something that he could read tonight at Barometer. Something good. Something epiphany-level good: something that will make the audience sit up and say Hey, this doesn’t come from the ravaged storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Maybe Anton Cirrus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s not so smart after all. Maybe he’s just an asshole. People are getting weary of the controlling grip that Bladed Hyacinth has on the literary scene, Billy tells himself, surely they are. Every two-bit tastemaker is eventually felled by a backlash. Billy could be the one to lead that backlash. That could be his Role in the Scene. All he needs to do is find the piece in the file that is so good that it will eliminate all doubt about his talent.

  Except there’s nothing like that in the file. He flips through five years of recent output and all he can think is I have wasted my life. Moving to Brooklyn, with this intention of making his way as a writer: how stupid. He could have done something else. Sometimes he thinks he would have been happiest as a parking lot attendant or a night watchman, something where he would have spent most of his time alone, in a chair, quietly slacking, reading on the job. That might not have been so terrible.

  Billy remembers the first long year after he’d failed out of school, remembers that at some point in that year his dad invited him on a trip to Italy, wanti
ng them to go off together, spending six months tracking down some scattered cache of sixteenth-century books. At the time, Billy was trying to hold down a job scanning documents for an insurance conglomerate, and trying to stay sober, and trying to get up early in the mornings to work on an impossibly tangled outline for an ambitious novel that he never actually began writing, and the idea of spending half a year with his frosty, difficult dad seemed not particularly tempting, but in retrospect it seems like a blown opportunity. Instead of being a washed-up nobody he could have been … part of a father-son team of traveling book hunters? Right now it seems like it would have been a pretty good way to make a life. Better than this. Better than sifting through half-revised chapters of a weakly conceived novel.

  He built this newest manuscript around a braided pair of narratives: one about a married couple who can’t stay faithful to one another, and one about their drug dealer, who is involved in a Big Deal Gone Wrong. He had some idea that the book as a whole was thematically about betrayal, that the two plotlines would reflect one another somehow. One printed chapter has “MICROCOSM / MACROCOSM” written across the top in his familiar scrawl. That must have meant something at one time.

  The more he reads, the more the very existence of the document perplexes him. He’s never been married. His interactions with drug dealers have always been brief and to the point. He’s not even sure he even has anything to say about betrayal. Why did he write this? What larger point was he hoping to make? Had he just been streaming a lot of TV about narcotics? Right now, he’d be embarrassed to see this thing in print, even if he were willing to take Lucifer up on his deal.

  Even if he were willing. Which he isn’t.

  He puts the accordion file down and picks up the folder of PowerPoint slides that the Devil left. He looks at the picture of Timothy Ollard and fantasizes, for a moment, about punching him in the face.

  “He doesn’t look so tough,” Billy says.

  But then he flips ahead to the picture of the tower. It still looks pants-shittingly scary even in printout form. But what did Lucifer say? The whole thing was a front, designed to terrify people into not seeing it? He flips to the map, scrutinizes the address. He doesn’t get up to Chelsea very often but he’s pretty sure he’s been by this place at least once in the last decade. It’s under a cloak? Last night, while high, Billy was pretty ready to roll with it, but in the glare of day it just sounds like bullshit. Infinite fire? The end of the world? Come on.

  But he wants something to do other than look at this folder full of failure. And it couldn’t hurt, Billy thinks, to shoot over there and see what’s at this address. There’s plenty of time before the reading; he can bring the accordion file and look through stuff on the train. He could just go. Just to take a look. Just to know if cloaks are real.

  And so then he’s in Chelsea, standing at an intersection, peering down at Lucifer’s printout. Cold November wind whips around him, threatens to snap the paper out of his hand. According to the map he’s at the right corner, but he doesn’t see any cloaked building.

  Well of course you don’t see it, he thinks. That’s the whole point of a cloak. Isn’t it? Is it? Maybe he’s been punk’d after all.

  Directly across the street from him is a junk-metal yard, blocked from view by tall walls of corrugated iron, lashed and bolted together. It has a foreboding, ramshackle nature that reminds him of the tower, and warlockish clangs and rumbles emit from its depths. He’s looked at it from twenty different angles now, trying to catch some sort of change in its nature, but so far, nothing.

  Behind him is a gallery space: through the window he can see eight lacy forms made out of what appear to be lathe-cut blocks of industrial Styrofoam. Billy’s pretty sure that if you were trying to hide something in Manhattan you wouldn’t disguise it as interesting art, although he can hear the Ghoul’s voice in his head, making some crack about how people tune out nothing faster, these days, than an artist asking for attention.

  Across the way there’s an unassuming-looking brick building that takes up most of the block. He hasn’t really checked it out that deeply, distracted as he has been by the metal yard and the Styrofoam, but now he gives it a second look. Painted directly on the brick of the building’s western face are the faded words SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING.

  He reads them for a second time, really tries to think about the business model implied there.

  He looks at the map, looks at exactly which corner Lucifer has pinpointed.

  He crosses the street.

  Tentatively, he puts out his hand and touches the building. It feels like a building. He’s not sure what he expected.

  He looks both ways along the building’s front for a window that he can peek into, but there are no windows at street level, just some ornamental concrete buttresses.

  There is also no door.

  Interesting, Billy thinks. So, let’s say I’m a customer. He turns right, heading for the corner. Let’s say I have some seafood I need warehoused. I go over here, to the southern side—

  He rounds the corner. The southern side is a long expanse of brick. More buttresses. No loading dock. No door.

  Okay, then, Billy thinks, making the long trek along the southern side. The building nearly abuts another one at its southeast corner, so the eastern face is inaccessible. Billy peers into the thin, trash-choked gap between the two buildings: there’s not even enough space to fit his fist in there. So the north side is the only side left. He hurries back the way he came, and it turns out that there’s no north side either; it’s directly up against another giant brick building on that side, without even an alley to look down.

  So. Two sides. No windows. No loading dock. No door.

  I got you, you bastard, Billy thinks.

  He crosses back over to the gallery so that he can get more of the warehouse in his view. It sits there, impassive.

  Billy stands on the sidewalk for a full minute, legs apart, hands balled in fists at his sides, goggling at the building. He is rapt with concentration. He is fully focused; fully focused except the part of him that is remarking on how much he has begun to resemble homeless dudes who he’s seen staring intensely at everyday shit with a stance and demeanor oddly identical to his own. He imagines, briefly, what wonders they have seen.

  In the end, it works with something like an autostereogram effect: he loosens the convergence of his eyes a little and the warehouse slowly separates into two warehouses. And there, between those wavering visions, he can see it. The horrible tower. The dread castle. Spiny bits and tar-black bones. The ornamental buttresses are still there, only they appear to writhe subtly. They heave like lungs. And right in the center of the mess is a single bloodred door, crawling with calligraphic glyphs.

  He blinks and the whole thing snaps back into a warehouse again. He makes himself go walleyed and Warlock House wavers back into view.

  He wishes his phone had a camera in it, although he kind of doubts that the effect could be captured photographically.

  He tries to imagine what it would be like to go up to the door, go into the place, make good on Lucifer’s deal. And he suffers a complete failure of imagination. He can’t see himself going into a building that looks like that. He can’t see himself even taking one step toward the objective. He literally won’t cross the street now, even though the building looks like a warehouse again.

  You’d be protected, Billy reminds himself. The Devil said you’d be protected, that he’d protect you with a ward or something.

  But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know what a ward is or how it works, but he has absolutely no certainty that a bunch of mystical hand-waving could protect him against whatever would happen to him in there. Better to stay out here. On the safe side of the street. Let somebody else be the hero.

  He does something then. He calls himself a coward. Like this: You fucking coward.

  This could be it. This could be your Moment. All you have to do is one daring thing and you’d get what you want. You could feel l
ike you accomplished what you came out here to do. You could finally rest. All you have to do is just, for once, be brave.

  No, he tells himself. I can’t. Besides—and at this point he’s begun to work up a little thunderhead of righteousness—if you really want what you want, if you really want to get your damn book published, you don’t do it this way. You don’t act as the Devil’s stooge. You do the damn work. You sit down. You write. You try to write well. You finish the thing. You—you do what Flaubert said—you live a life that is steady and well-ordered so that you can be fierce and original in the work. You don’t run around busting into magical fortresses and call that bravery and let somebody else do the hard work for you.

  He pauses there, waiting for the retort, and then it comes: You ain’t exactly Flaubert.

  He turns from the warehouse and walks away.

  Billy doesn’t know where he’s headed. The parts of his brain that were engaged in internal debate have ceased their crowing, opting now to simply choke one another to death. He just keeps walking, grateful at least that the city has retained its capacity to absorb a person who has no particular destination in mind, a person who needs an hour or two to be nothing more than a mote, twisting through space.

  At the end of his mote-time he finds himself in the Village, which he normally takes strenuous pains to avoid, standing in front of a display of touristy junk, hemmed in by excitable schoolkids. He’s actually physically handling a twenty-dollar hat, a fake fur thing with pointy wolf-ears, trying to decide if it would make an appropriate gift for Denver. She’d look cute in it.

  Oh, for fuck’s sake. He drops the hat, disgusted at it, at himself. First of all, there is no way in hell that she would ever consent to wear such a thing. And second of all, there aren’t going to be any more gifts for Denver, because he and Denver are finished, even if it turns out that the world isn’t going to end. It’s been, what, eight days since they last spoke? Surely at this point he should be considering himself well and truly dumped. Pull yourself together, he tells himself.