The Weirdness

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

  Wow, he thinks, as if realizing it for the first time. I had sex with her. He goes up a notch in his own estimation of himself. He knows he shouldn’t really feel good about it, given the fact that he’s technically still involved with Denver, sort of, maybe, maybe not—but, fuck it, after the day he’s had he feels like he wants just one moment to bask in the sensation of pure self-congratulation. The way things are going, it may be the last time he ever has the experience.

  The only problem is, Billy’s not really very good at the self-congratulatory mode. He’s just not capable of looking at an attractive woman and thinking that’s right, she digs me. He’s just not that particular kind of dude. He can always find some way to doubt it.

  In this case, of course, it’s easy. The sex he had with Elisa doesn’t really fit with the kind of sex he usually has. The lead-up was all wrong. He and Elisa did not enjoy a meaningful gaze across a heap of half-consumed tapas dishes, no furtive hand-holding at the IFC theater, no lingering kiss at the steps of someone’s brownstone. It was just straight to the fucking. Hardcore animal fucking, in point of fact, which makes it all the easier to believe that he didn’t actually have sex with her. Not, like, her, For Real Her. You had sex with some kind of hell-wolf thing that she was stuck inside, he tells himself.

  He notes that she hasn’t really spoken to him since.

  He leans forward, sticking his head over the back of her seat.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey.”

  “What,” she says. She does not turn around.

  “Are we cool?”

  “Are we cool?” Elisa repeats, soiling it somewhat with a note of incredulity. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy says. “We kind of—had a moment back there, and I was—”

  “A moment?” Elisa says, the note of incredulity becoming more pronounced. “We didn’t have a moment. We fucked.”

  Jørgen turns up the radio incrementally.

  “Yeah, I know, I was there,” Billy says. “I just—I just wanted to make sure that—that it was okay.”

  Elisa cranes around in her seat to look at him finally.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Of course it’s okay. I told you before we changed that I was going to want to fuck you. And then we changed, and we fucked. End of story.”

  Billy frowns. “But—” he says. He lowers his voice to a hush.

  “How did you know you were going to want to fuck me?”

  “Because that’s the way it is, when you change,” she says. “You changed, you remember what it was like. It gets you turned on. It makes you feel like fucking is goddamn Job One. Now imagine having that experience every month for two years, every time the moon gets full, and not ever having another hell-wolf around. You climb the damn walls. Pretty much literally. I can show you claw marks in my apartment. So I knew that if you were going to change I was going to want to fuck you. It’s not because you’re you or anything. I mean, you’re fine and all, but that’s not why I let you fuck me. I let you fuck me because you were the first other wolf to come along.”

  This stings Billy, lacerates his attempt at self-congratulation pretty much completely.

  “That seems wrong,” he says.

  “Wrong.” Elisa pronounces the word like it’s only vaguely familiar. “Come on, Billy. That’s the thing about being a wolf, or a hell-wolf, or whatever the fuck it is that we are. You don’t give a shit about what’s right or what’s wrong. You just do what you want. You’ve been there. You know it.”

  “I only changed once,” Billy says. “I don’t know what it’s like or what it’s not like. I don’t know shit.”

  Something in Elisa’s face relaxes a little, and she gives a half laugh. “Okay,” she says. “I keep forgetting you’re new to this. So you want to know what it’s like? What it’s really like? I’ll tell you a story. I owe it to you anyway.”

  She gets up, clambers over the seat into the back. Jørgen seems to breathe a sigh of relief, focuses again on the road.

  “It’s kind of a long story,” she says. “But we have some time, it looks like. There was this guy, Joseph. I met Joseph when I still lived in Philly. Six years ago now. I was at Penn at that time, and I was burning out. Just like done. I wasn’t even sure I was going to graduate. And then along came Joseph. We met on this post-punk forum. He’d dropped out of Princeton, was working as a shift supervisor at some record shop over in Jersey. And he was funny and smart but like totally decoupled from the whole academic treadmill—he just didn’t give a shit about it and that was so refreshing to me, at that time, like I was really hungry to hear that you could have a pretty cool life without being academically successful. So my final year at Penn I’m driving out to Jersey every weekend, hanging out with Joseph in his shitbox apartment which is crammed with records and lunchboxes and whatever else, and we’re getting high and listening to German punk reissues and reading our god-awful poetry to one another. And then I sleep on the couch. Because, I don’t know, Joseph is cool, I really did think he was cool, but at the same time he’s like super skinny and has this kind of dorky haircut and bad glasses and is just, like, not a guy who gives off much in the way of sexual confidence. And I start to feel guilty, actually guilty, about not fucking him, ’cause I can pretty much tell that he wants it to happen, and I even start telling myself that I want it to happen, like during the week, I’m at Penn, telling myself, all week, this weekend, you have to do it, you have to fuck Joseph. But then I get out there and I think about doing it and I’m just like Ugh. No.

  “So then eventually there’s this one night, and he’s got some good news, he just got promoted at the store, he’s now assistant manager, something like that, and in addition to getting high we drink like an entire bottle of vodka, and I’m thinking This is it, this is the time that I’ll fuck him, but I still don’t want to, and eventually I stumble over to my normal spot on the sofa and I crash out. And when I wake up in the morning he’s on the couch with me, kind of crammed in behind me, and our clothes are all still on but he has his hands up my shirt and on my tits. And I kinda pull myself out of there and am just like Goddamn it. It’s like, it was a shitty thing for him to do, but I don’t want to make too big a deal out of it, because I still want to like Joseph, I still want things to go on as they’ve been going on, so he wakes up, a couple minutes later, and we kind of share this look, the look that says that we agree not to talk about it, that we agree to pretend that it never happened.

  “And around then it kind of fizzles out. Maybe because of that and maybe not. I double down on my schoolwork, get more serious about my writing, start liking my Penn friends again, I graduate, I get the job that I want at the Philly Museum of Art, and then, poof, that’s it, Joseph is gone. End of story.

  “Except then, a couple years later, bam, my parents die, and then, double bam, a month later I turn into a wolf for the first time. And it fucked me up. So, yeah, I screw up a big grant, lose my job, and my boyfriend dumps me. Basically I’m losing my mind. So, whatever: I just start spending days sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, drinking herbal tea and fucking meditating or something until I come to terms with the way my life is now and figure out what the fuck to do next. And Joseph finds me. On Facebook. He sends me this long, kinda heartfelt message about having missed me, all that shit. He doesn’t mention the thing where he put his hands on my tits. And at this point I’m desperate for a friendly face from the past, and maybe I’ve even convinced myself that the incident or whatever never really happened, or it didn’t happen the way I remember it, or …” She shrugs.

  “So I friend him, and I write him back, tell him it’s good to hear from him and all that, and I kinda confess that things are fucked up for me—I tell him about my parents, and my job, and my boyfriend. I don’t mention the wolf thing. And that’s when shit gets uncomfortable. Turns out that the record store Joseph worked at has gone out of business, and he starts talking about moving to Philly. And the second I hear that I’m like Uh oh. He promptly
comes up with this idea that because we’re both out of work we should be roommates, to defray the cost of living is how he puts it. And we end up talking on the phone a bunch, and I get caught up in this stupid dance where I keep making up reasons why I can’t room with him, and he keeps kind of disassembling them, which he can do because they’re flimsy, because I don’t want to say the real reason, which is I don’t want to live with you because actually you skeeve me out, and the fact that you appear to not be getting that is skeeving me out even worse.

  “In the end, Joseph does move to Philly, living on his own, and we hang out a couple of times, public places only thank you very much, and it’s—it’s odd. Something’s changed in him. It’s like his intelligence has curdled, turned into meanness. I can kind of see it in his eyes; that he either really loves me or he really hates me, and that maybe he can’t exactly tell the difference anymore. So I start making all these excuses to not hang out with him, which isn’t too hard, ’cause by this point I have a new job, waiting tables at this shitty fake Irish pub, and I can always beg off by telling him I picked up an extra shift or whatever. But a shitty Irish pub is a public place, right? And so at some point Joseph figures out that he can just show up there, and sit at the end of the bar while I’m trying to work, and he’ll get drunker and drunker and try to get me to come home with him at closing time.

  “To top it all off, I get involved with someone, one of the dishwashers. It’s nothing serious. She’s twenty-one years old. It’s just service-industry after-hours fucking around, the two of us going out on the loading dock for cigarettes at one in the morning and making out and groping one another, trying to see how much we can work each other up. It is what it is. It’s nice.

  “So one night I’m out there, making out with Vicki, and who’s out there by the Dumpsters and the fucking waste oil bins but Joseph. He’s drunk, and his stupid hair is pushed up at like a ninety-degree angle from his head, like he’s been leaning up against a wall for a while. But also he’s pissed. It’s like the valve in his head that holds all his shit back has finally burst. He’s cursing at me, cursing at Vicki, Fuck you you cunts, all that. And he starts trying to climb up onto the loading dock, which he can’t really do, ’cause he’s stupid drunk, but it’s still scary. I mean, he’s a skinny dork, but he’s bigger than me, and he’s stronger than me, and in that second I really understand that he could kill me.”

  Billy remembers her, last night, asking him whether he was bigger than Denver, stronger than Denver. But he doesn’t interrupt.

  “And I realize,” she continues, “that I could do something else, too. At this point I’ve turned into a wolf maybe six times, once a month, ’cause it’s like that? But at this moment I understand that I could force the change, that I could just will myself into that form. I’d never done that before, but I could suddenly feel it in me. The wolf. I could feel it wanting to get out. It wanted to get out and take Joseph Meisner apart.”

  “But you don’t do that,” Billy says, quietly. “You don’t just kill people.”

  “No,” Elisa says. “I don’t just kill people. But in this particular moment I wanted to kill this guy. Just for a second. But that was enough. ’Cause that’s the thing about being a sex-demon wolf thing. You do what you want. And so I tore through my clothes and leapt down on him and crushed his throat in my jaws while Vicki stood there and screamed. I killed this guy, left his body mutilated in an alley, and just as a side effect I basically put the torch to my entire life in Philly. But you know what? It felt good. I liked it. Am I proud of it, sitting here now, talking to you? No. Was it the worst thing I ever did? Yes. But I wanted to do it, and then I did it. So you want to know what it’s like? That’s what it’s like.”

  She climbs back into the front seat and they drive on for some more minutes, all of them silent.

  Finally the van rounds the final corner of its route. Jørgen visors his eyes with his hand and peers through the windshield. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asks. “I think I can see it.”

  “Yeah,” Billy says. “That’s it.” The cloak no longer works on him, for some reason. He sees the tower, as menacing as it’s ever looked, maybe more so. It seems to be palpably crackling with import, as though it is siphoning relevance and meaning from the surrounding city, which has begun to seem fake somehow, a generic urban setting from a film set in New York but shot in Toronto. The gallery with the Styrofoam art-shapes is now displaying prints of Instagrammed photos of food.

  Jørgen yanks the steering wheel to the right and pulls two tires up onto the sidewalk. He cuts the engine and gets out of the van, and right then everything seems to go dim for a second, to waver slightly, and Billy feels a variant of nausea stir in his guts. He stifles a burp. It tastes like roast beef.

  “This is what it feels like, isn’t it?” Billy says. “When it happens?”

  “Absolutely,” says Elisa, wriggling out of Jørgen’s leather coat.

  Jørgen opens the van’s side door. “Clothes,” he says to Billy, pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it into the back. “Off.”

  “Okay,” Billy says. He kicks off his shoes and begins to work the zipper on the jumpsuit, while he still has hands.

  He cracks and extends.

  This time, the change isn’t as bad: breaking the bounds of his body seems easier now that he’s already done it once; it’s as though he has permanently limbered himself somehow. He does not vomit.

  He hops out of the van and lands on all fours.

  The others have changed, too. The three of them stand there for a moment, hell-wolves, bristling on the sidewalk in the Chelsea dusk, wind-borne trash whirling around them. Two pedestrians at the far end of the street pause in their stride, turn and go the other way.

  It is time.

  Billy leads the charge. Loping again, straight toward the red door. Somewhere in the back of his mind the part of him that is Billy wonders how, exactly, they’re going to open the door: it would be his typical luck for them to get this far, this close to saving the world, only to be undone because none of them could work a doorknob.

  But the wolf knows what to do. The wolf stares at the door, focuses on its surface, and something demonic rises in it. Something with powers.

  His vision goes tunnely at the edges.

  He intensifies his glare and channels hellish force out of the holes in his skull. It is as though his vision is a blade. It is as though his vision is a cold steel push knife being punched into the door again and again. The thought that a door could stop him seems ludicrous. It’s just wood. It’s just base matter, crude, destructible. The door trembles and warps and creaks and splinters. The red paint pulverizes; flakes of it now coat his shaggy muzzle. The brass knob smokes slightly, deforms, pops free. It takes all of ten seconds for the door’s hinges to give way.

  The second door is made of metal but it yields even easier. And then Billy’s in the Starbucks. His jaws are open. It is fair to say he is slavering. Billy watches alarm crack through the blank look of the entranced employees. They scatter, their aprons billowing, the spell broken, apparently. But Billy doesn’t care about them. He’s here for Ollard.

  And Ollard arrives, emerging from the back corridor, swollen with fury, eyes wild, teeth gnashing, shrouded in wreaths of crackling black energy. Billy turns the hate-stare on Ollard at the same time that Ollard directs a sheet of deadly-looking violet light toward Billy. The counter, caught between them, detonates. Broken glass and scones spray everywhere. Even though he has all four feet on the ground, the force of the blast still skids Billy away, into the floor plan, tables and chairs catching him painfully in his ribs.

  He prepares to leap but Ollard is too fast; he strides from the wreckage first, his left hand held in the gang-sign configuration that freezes Billy, gets him aloft in the air. It’s the same trick Ollard used the first time he met Billy. But it takes more effort now; Billy flexes against the spell with all the wolf-might at his disposal and can feel Ollard struggle to maintain.


  And then the dark wolf that is Elisa comes out of the vestibule, leaps at Ollard from the side.

  Ollard gets his right hand up, freezes her also. Billy rears his body again and nearly gets free, the force around him beginning to flicker and fail. He watches Ollard’s face contort with the effort of holding them both, scans it for a sign of when the grip will finally give. Veins bulge in Ollard’s forehead; both his nostrils have begun to leak blood. Yet his facial expression is a grin, the grin of a man who still has the advantage.

  And then the white wolf that is Jørgen enters the room and leaps at Ollard, jaws snapping, and it is then that Ollard’s grin goes away. He drops his left hand, throws it up again, freezes Jørgen in place.

  But Ollard only has two hands.

  And so Billy is free.

  In a second he’s on Ollard, knocking him down to the floor. Ollard’s head bounces off the broken concrete and his throat slides into Billy’s jaws like it was the final piece of a puzzle, designed to slot there.

  And all Billy needs to do is exert a particular amount of force.

  Which he does.

  Ollard gets no final words. Instead his throat gives one horrible throb and then bursts in Billy’s mouth, gushing fluids. Billy’s teeth sunder the entire network of crucial vessels and tubes in there. He crushes vertebrae. He takes a human neck and reduces it to rupture and spillage.

  He’s larger. He’s stronger. He’s more powerful.

  He doesn’t give a good goddamn about anything else.

  He drinks like a quart of Ollard’s blood. He drinks it until Ollard’s heart stops pumping it.

  That’s it, then, he thinks. It’s over.

  And then he thinks, Oh my God, you killed a man.

  If he’s having these thoughts, if they’re at the forefront of his brain, then he must be changing back, and sure enough he is. His tail retracts and his skull shortens; his thumbs come back; he loses his fur. And then he’s there, naked, hunched over Ollard’s mutilated corpse, a quart of hot human blood swimming in his stomach. He moans, rises to his feet, turns away.