The Weirdness
Page 22
In the wreckage, Elisa is beginning to change back as well. Billy doesn’t like watching her twist, doesn’t like the disturbing way her form surges, so he looks back at Ollard, at the sobering sight of Ollard’s wounds. Billy wonders what new conception of himself he’ll need to come up with in order to manage the knowledge that those wounds were a thing that he himself caused.
You saved the world, he tells himself. You should feel happy. Ollard was a bad dude. He wanted to die anyway. You did him a favor.
And maybe you’ll even get your book published.
None of these thoughts seem to make it okay to have made the mess that he’s looking at. He begins to run through them a second time, but before he completes the litany Elisa shouts “Billy, look out!”
And Billy turns, and sees Anton Cirrus, standing there with a small duffel bag in one hand, and a gun in the other.
“Hands up, fucker,” says Anton. Billy complies. He wishes he had his orange jumpsuit: it can’t stop a bullet, but being naked in front of the barrel of a gun doesn’t exactly make him feel less vulnerable.
“Everybody just hold still for a second,” Anton says.
These are clear instructions, and even though Anton’s voice is choked with rage and maybe even something like sorrow, he nevertheless says them loudly enough for all to hear, and if everyone in the room was human everyone in the room might even be willing to obey. But Jørgen is still a massive hell-wolf, and massive hell-wolves don’t particularly care for human instructions or for the nuances of hostage situations. He gathers himself up and prepares to spring.
Anton, for his part, is smart enough to perceive that shooting Billy won’t protect him, so he turns the gun onto Jørgen.
He fires twice.
The first shot misses. The other shot hits Jørgen in the joint of his right shoulder, causes him to lose his footing for a second, although he still looks like he might leap.
Anton fires two more times.
Both hit Jørgen in around the same area, which is enough to cause his front legs to crumple. His eyes flash angrily: it looks like he’s trying to muster the hate-stare, but Anton has taken advantage of the moment, has sprinted through the vestibule and is already out into the streets of Chelsea.
Jørgen’s wolf body leaks blood, shudders, begins to undergo the weird flesh-morph that changes it back into a human body.
Elisa finds a dish towel in the rubble and tries to maintain pressure on the wound while Jørgen’s body shifts shape. She looks up at Billy. “Call an ambulance,” she says.
Billy looks around, finds the phone mounted to the wall. He lifts it and is a little surprised to find that it has a dial tone. He dials 911 and gives the dispatcher the address of the tower, hopes the EMTs will be able to find the door now that Ollard is dead and the cloak has, presumably, fallen.
“How is he?” he asks, once he hangs up.
“Hard to say,” Elisa says.
“Okay,” Billy says. He feels worried for Jørgen, but the sensation is distant somehow, abstract; it is as though some mechanism in his psyche has lost a pin during the long battering of the day’s events. He tries slowly to assemble an argument for doing something—anything—and it’s then he remembers that his obligations to Lucifer are not yet concluded.
“The Neko,” he says, wearily. “I know where it is. I’m going to go get it.”
Elisa gives one short, curt nod.
Billy remembers the route: the long avocado corridor, the brick stairwell, the room with the file boxes. But when he gets to the room where the Neko should be, and opens the door, he sees that it is gone. The sawhorses are there, the chalk marks on the floor, but the Neko itself? MIA, or AWOL, or something.
He makes himself undergo the effort of thinking. He stands there, naked and bloody, and thinks.
He remembers Anton Cirrus’s duffel bag.
He stands in the dark, chalky room, breathing hard, and thinks about where Anton Cirrus might have gone. He considers where he, himself, ended up choosing to go when he was in the portal, with the opportunity to go anywhere. He went to work. Because that’s where you go when it feels like your whole life has been upended. At least there you know what’s expected of you. And work, for Anton Cirrus, is Bladed Hyacinth.
Billy doesn’t know where the Bladed Hyacinth office is, but he has a pretty good idea of how to find out.
He retraces his steps back to the Starbucks. Elisa is there, still applying pressure to Jørgen’s wound. Jørgen raises his heavy, hairy head and gives Billy a pained grin.
“Hey, buddy,” Billy says.
“Did we win?” Jørgen says.
“Not yet. But I’m gonna take care of it. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jørgen says.
“You hang in there. In a couple of days we’ll be back home, drinking beers and getting high.”
He suspects that this will not, in fact, be the case. They belong to the Devil now, and Billy’s pretty sure that that means they’re going to spend the rest of their lives leashed up in Hell, to be brought out into the world every now and again when someone needs terrorizing. When someone’s throat needs rending. Nevertheless, he carries on, hoping Jørgen will be able to take some solace from the promise of this false future.
“One day we’re going to look back on all this and it’s just going to be a funny story,” Billy says. “You feel me?”
Jørgen winces, nods. “I feel you.” His eyes close again; his head drops slowly back to the floor.
Elisa looks up at Billy. “No luck with the thingamajig?” she says. “The cat?”
“Not really, no,” Billy says. “But I have a guess for where it is. I think I can get it.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Elisa says.
“You okay here?”
“Uh, I guess. I mean, this situation is going to be a bitch to explain to the EMTs and I’m pretty sure the presence of a shot-up dude and a motherfucking corpse means that I’m going to have to be talking to cops for the rest of the night. Now, I can pass myself off as somebody who doesn’t know shit about shit but you know what would really help me out?”
“What?”
“Clothes.”
“Ah,” Billy says. “Right.”
He makes a passable kilt out of a discarded Starbucks apron and he goes out to the van, changes back into the orange jumpsuit, brings everybody else’s clothes inside. They can’t get Jørgen into his clothes without moving him, and although neither of them really knows the first thing about first aid they seem to recall that you aren’t supposed to move people who have suffered grievous injuries, so instead they fold his pants into a kind of pillow and stick them under his head, in the hopes of giving him at least a little relief.
Billy starts to wonder why the fuck the EMTs aren’t here yet, and then he realizes that he’s still half covered in incriminating forensics, so it’d probably be good for him to be gone before they arrive. If he can figure out where to go.
“I have to use the phone,” he says.
His memory hasn’t improved. Out of all the phone numbers he’s ever known, he can still only remember one. Fortunately it’s the one that he needs.
He calls the Ghoul.
“I heard tell that you had emerged,” says the Ghoul, when he hears Billy’s voice.
Billy processes this. “You talked to Anil?”
“Correct. He didn’t sound well, you know. And he made it sound like you were in—something of a bad situation.”
“It’s all right,” Billy says. “I’m just doing my job.”
Silence on the other end of the line. Billy gives it a second, but he can’t really wait. Forward motion. Forward motion is good.
“I need your help,” he says.
“Tell me. What can I do?”
“I need the address of the Bladed Hyacinth office.”
A pause. Billy can hear an unspoken why hovering over the conversation. But the Ghoul has never been able to resist a direct request to look something up on the Internet.
He gives the address to Billy. It’s also in Chelsea, close enough that someone could flee there on foot.
Bingo, Billy thinks.
He looks around for something he can use to write the address down but can’t find anything. Well. He’s sure he’ll remember. This one time he won’t get distracted and forgetful and fuck it up. That’s all I ask, he thinks. Just this one time.
“Well,” Billy says. “Thanks. And it’s good to hear your voice. But I should go.”
“Billy,” says the Ghoul. “One last thing.”
“What’s that.”
“You should call Denver. She’s been really worried about you since the reading last night. I think it would mean a lot to her if you gave her a call.”
“I don’t—I don’t think that’s going to happen,” Billy says. He imagines seeing Denver one final time, saying goodbye. Tries to imagine what function that would serve. For him, for her, for anyone. Comes up with nothing. Total blank. He’d rather she remember him as what he was than as what he is now. He’d rather she remember him as some goofy fuck-up who liked her movies, who found beauty in the movement of water, than as a killing machine.
He tries to come up with some way to explain this to the Ghoul, who has fallen into a pensive silence, but after a few seconds of trying out wordings in his head he just gives up and puts the phone back in its mount. It’s time to go.
He shakes a set of keys out of Jørgen’s pants. “I’m taking the van,” he says. Jørgen seems to have slipped out of consciousness and he doesn’t say anything.
“You’ll tell him?” Billy asks Elisa.
“I’ll tell him,” Elisa responds.
“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I guess it’s time to hunt a motherfucker down.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RIDGEWAY VS. CIRRUS
GESTURES OF OPTIMISM • FANCY CHAIRS • FIST-FORMATION OPTIONS • REALLY GOOD FOOTAGE • BACKSEAT KISSES • THE THING WITH FEATHERS • UNO • THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING GOOD • APOLOGIES AND PRAYERS
Billy remembers the address.
He’s not the best at urban driving, and he gets turned around in traffic and heads the wrong way for a few minutes, eventually needing to correct with an astonishingly brazen U-turn. But finally he gets to the right block. He double-parks and punches on the hazard lights, the universal sign for I’ll be back in a minute. Wresting a satanic world-destroying doodad from the clutches of a gun-wielding maniac does not seem like an errand that will conclude as tidily as, say, delivering a pizza, but he thinks it’s important to make the occasional gesture in the direction of optimism.
The building that houses Bladed Hyacinth is a three-story thing, squat and ugly. From the label on the intercom, Billy gleans that the offices are on the second floor, up a flight of stairs that he can perceive dimly through the smoked glass of the street entrance. He tries the door; it’s locked.
He glares at it, wondering if he can blow it to pieces. But nothing. He remembers Elisa saying that she could will herself into the wolf form; she just needed to really want to kill someone. And so Billy thinks of all the reasons why he wants to kill Anton Cirrus. He thinks of Anton Cirrus firing bullets into Jørgen, leaving him to bleed to death on the floor of a Starbucks. He thinks of Anton Cirrus’s stupid write-up. The storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Billy grimaces.
Come on, Lucifer, he thinks. Make me a goddamn monster.
Nothing. He stands there with his fists clenched for a long second. He releases them.
He contemplates just using the intercom and seeing if someone will buzz him in.
And then he thinks: Fuck this. He returns to the van and pops open the back.
He rummages until he finds a tire iron.
The glass in the door is treated with some kind of safety film, so the first blow just spiderwebs it, albeit with a satisfying crunch. Nobody’s around to see this except a few Honduran guys pushing a wheeled cart stacked with a half-dozen Igloo coolers. They give Billy a look for all of about half a second before they write him off as part of the scenery: just another insane white dude. It’s a classification that Billy can live with.
He takes four more swings and the sheet of pulverized glass begins to crumple, detaching from the doorframe along one side. Enough that Billy can get a shoulder into the gap and push his way through.
He climbs the stairs, the tire iron dangling at his side, and as he climbs he imagines taking that piece of reassuringly weighty metal and swinging it at Cirrus’s skull, imagines the shudder it would make when it connects.
But you don’t do that, he thinks. You don’t just kill people.
Shut up, he tells himself. You can kill these people.
And that ends the debate for the moment, because he’s on the second floor landing and he’s kicking the door open, and right behind it is Anton Cirrus with a gun, pointed directly at Billy’s face.
“You’re trespassing,” Anton says.
“Call the fucking cops,” Billy says.
“I could,” Anton says, looking Billy up and down. “You’d go to jail. You killed a man. You’re covered in blood.”
“Like you’re so clean,” Billy says. “You shot my fucking roommate. I have a witness. You want to call the cops? Go ahead. I would love to see what happens.” Given the lack of subtlety of his entrance, he’s a little surprised that the cops aren’t here already.
“Drop the tire iron,” Anton says.
When someone has a gun in your face, you feel compelled to do what they say. And so he does it.
“Get inside,” Anton says.
And Billy enters the Bladed Hyacinth offices, basically a single room, dark at this hour, lit only by the light of Macintosh Thunderbolt displays running Cupertino-bred screen savers. The room contains six fancy Aeron chairs, each one stationed at a desk with a MacBook and a surprising amount of jumbled paper. On one desk, Billy notes, is also Anton’s duffel bag.
“Face the wall,” Anton says. “Hands up.” The wall that faces the door is all bookshelves, loaded with literary magazines and proof copies of novels, and Billy dutifully reaches out and gets a grip on the edge of a shelf at eye level.
“So, what, you’re just going to shoot me now?”
“Maybe,” Anton says, pressing the barrel of the gun behind Billy’s ear.
“Anton,” Billy says. “That’s not going to help you. You can kill me. You can kill my friends. But you can’t kill Lucifer. You can’t kill him, you can’t hide from him, and you can’t stop him. You already lost. All you should be thinking about is how to minimize your losses.”
“And how do you recommend I do that?”
“Give me the Neko,” Billy says. “Give me the Neko and I walk out of here. You never see me again. You shot my friend, but you know what? Give me the Neko and I’ll just look past that. We’ll call it even. I won’t tell the cops. You get to keep your shitty little literary empire; you get to keep your book contract; you get to basically go on being yourself, which seems to be something you enjoy. All you have to do is hand over the Neko.”
“Do you know what the Neko is?” Anton says.
“Some piece of bullshit,” Billy says. “Why do you want it, anyway? You can’t get the sixth seal off it and even if you could—”
“Billy, it’s a perpetual motion machine. Get your mind around that for a second. What that would mean for the people who discover it. How much people would pay for it.”
“Look,” Billy says. “I don’t give a shit about the thing. I just want it to go away. Deep down, you want the same thing. I mean, honestly, do you really have some fantasy where you’re the guy who breaks the laws of physics once and for all?”
“Deep down inside?” Anton says. “You know what I believe deep down inside? I believe I’m intended for great things.”
“Yeah, you know what? I believed that, too.
But you know what? All our ambition? It made us do goddamn stupid shit. We each picked a side. We picked sides because we came across people who we thought could help us, who could provide us with some advantage. And now, we both committed felonies tonight and are both pretty much ready to commit another one, which should be an indication to both of us that we were pretty goddamn stupid to have picked the side that we picked. Look, Anton, we’re in the same damn boat. Just two fucking writers who are trying to figure it out and maybe made some bad choices along the way. We shouldn’t be fighting. We should be friends.”
“But Billy,” Anton says. “I can’t be your friend.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a terrible writer.”
Billy sighs. He may or may not be a terrible writer, but he still doesn’t seem to have kick-ass rhetorical skills. Time for a different strategy. “Okay,” he says. “You want to fight? Let’s fight.”
“It’s hardly fair,” Anton says. “You can turn into a wolf.”
“A hell-wolf,” Billy clarifies. “You have a gun to my head, though, which I think kinda evens the odds. But let’s do this differently. Let’s do this old-school. Old-school literary fistfight. Hemingway vs. Stevens.”
Anton pauses. “Mailer vs. Vidal,” he says finally. He lowers the gun. Billy tentatively turns around, looks into Anton’s face.
“Ridgeway vs. Cirrus,” Billy says. “That’s what I’m talking about. You make me cry uncle and I leave here empty-handed. I’ll tell Lucifer that I couldn’t beat you, and you, you get a head start. But if I win—”
“You won’t win,” Anton says. He sticks the gun down into the waistband at the back of his pants and shoves Billy in the chest.
Billy takes the impact hard, stumbles back against the bookshelves. Anton’s hands come up, get a grip on Billy’s head. He presses his thumbs into Billy’s face, as though he were violently shaping a wet lump of clay. Billy snaps his teeth, hoping that flashing his canines might send a message: keep your fingers out of my orifices. But to no real avail: Anton carries on with his attempt to use his heavy hands to smear Billy’s features down to nothingness.