The Weirdness (13 page)

“I wanted to apologize,” he says. “About the—the thing.”

“The thing?” Billy says.

“You know,” Laurent says. “The unpleasantness.”

“The Bladed—”

“Yes. Don’t even say it. I can’t even stand the name of the thing.”

“Don’t worry about it. It doesn’t matter,” Billy lies. “It’s just one write-up; it doesn’t define the evening. It seems like we got a good crowd anyway.”

“True, true,” says Laurent. His hands are still on Billy’s shoulders. “It’s just—
Thanks for the invite
, Ingot,
but we find ourselves in a position where we must decline
. It’s galling.”

“Whatever,” says Billy, eager to end this. “I wouldn’t really have wanted him here anyway. If he steers clear then so be it.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” says Laurent. “He
didn’t
steer clear. That’s him, right over there.”

He releases Billy’s shoulders at last and points. Everyone’s eyes follow. Sure enough, standing alone, with his back against the deep purple wall of the bar, a tall figure with a slate-gray shirt and a mandarin collar, idly reviewing items in a steno notebook. Billy looks at the bony face; the heavy brow; the thick, bookish
eyeglasses made out of some kind of horn; the expression of faint boredom; and he thinks one word:
enemy
.

“I’m not sure why he came,” Laurent says, “but I know you’re going to prove him wrong.”

“Uhhh,” Billy says. “Yes. Yes, I will prove him wrong.”

“I want you to know,” Laurent says, “that here at
The Ingot
we really appreciate and believe in your work.”

“Um, okay,” Billy says. It actually does still mean something to hear somebody say that. He takes the words and mentally fashions them into a tiny badge of honor, which he fastens invisibly over his heart.

“Five minutes,” Laurent says. He checks his watch. “Well, three. Okay?”

“Okay,” Billy says.

“So that’s Anton Cirrus,” Anil says, as Laurent heads off toward the stage.

“Yes,” Billy says, with contempt. “I’ve seen his photo before. On Gawker.”

“You should go over there and punch him in the face.”

For a long moment Billy actually considers this as a viable direction in which the evening could go.

“I think you could take him,” says the Ghoul.

“It would be in the tradition of great literary brawls,” Anil says. “You know: Hemingway vs. Stevens?”

“Mailer vs. Vidal,” adds the Ghoul.

“Ridgeway vs. Cirrus!” Anil exclaims. “Think about it.”

“No,” Billy says.

“You could impress your woman.”

Denver rolls her eyes.

“No,” Billy says.

“You could make your reputation.”

“The only thing that is going to
make my reputation
tonight is if I read something
good
. Something that will get fucking
Anton Cirrus
to print something about how awesome I am, which will involve getting fucking Anton Cirrus to change his fucking
mind
. To say,
Oh, actually, I was wrong
. How often can you remember that happening?”

None of them can come up with even a single time.

“So,” Denver says, to break the deathly silence that has settled over the table. “What
are
you going to read?”

“I had this idea, actually,” Billy says. “That I wasn’t going to read anything? I was going to get up there and just—improvise something? To tell a story, you know, from within? From the unconscious?”

Everyone stares at him.

“You know,” he says. “Like oral storytelling?”

Everyone keeps staring.

“That’s what storytellers do?” Billy tries.

“Do something else,” Denver says, finally.

“Do anything else,” Anil adds.

“This is a horrible idea, isn’t it?” Billy says.

No one confirms this, but no one denies it either.

“Shit,” Billy says. “All right. I’ll just pull something out of the file. But there’s nothing in there that’s good. Not good enough.”

He looks around at the base of the table but can’t find his backpack. It occurs to him that he left it behind, at the other bar, down the block. He calculates how long it would take him to run down there, get it, and get back. At least seven to ten minutes. Which he doesn’t have. Laurent is already on stage, gleaming white in the spotlight, fiddling with the microphone.

“I don’t have the file,” Billy says.

“Why not?” Anil says.

“Why not isn’t important. What’s important is that I need a story. I need a story in the next thirty seconds.”

“I’d like to thank everyone for coming—can you all hear me?” Laurent is saying.

“Tell the one about the Devil,” Anil says.

“I thought of that,” Billy says.

“It’s a good story,” Anil says.

“It needs a third act.”

“It needs a second act. But it’s interesting, at least.”

“Wait,” Denver says. “Which story?”

“The one about the Devil,” Billy says. At the periphery of his attention he can hear his biographical details being declaimed on stage by Laurent.

“What devil?” Denver says.

“The Judeo-Christian Devil,” Billy says.

“You met the Devil?”

“It’s a long story. But you’ll hear it in a second. And then after this we’ll work everything out. I promise.”

And then, fuck it, he goes for the Hail Mary. He looks straight into Denver’s eyes and says, “I love you.”

Denver responds with a tired smile, a smile that expresses a sense of bitter confirmation rather than actual pleasure. Billy’s heart sinks. Laurent, on stage, says, “Please welcome our first reader, Billy Ridgeway.”

Light applause. Billy is up, out of his chair, and he walks toward the stage, still kind of half contemplating bolting across the room and punching Anton Cirrus in the face as a way to get out of having to do this. He turns and he looks back at the table: Denver,
Anil, the Ghoul. They look so happy there, without him. It occurs to him just how easily he could be replaced.

He takes the stage, and the room falls into a dull murmur.

It’s okay
, Billy thinks,
you can do this
. And he speaks: “Hi there,” he says. He coughs. “Thanks for coming out. Really. Thank you. Everybody.”

He shades his eyes and peers into the bar, trying to cast a pointed look at Anton Cirrus. When he can finally pull Cirrus out of the gloam, though, he sees that Cirrus is not paying any attention whatsoever to the weak taunt embedded in Billy’s intro, but rather is looking at his phone, texting something.

Texting
something! Goddamn him!

White rage begins to throttle Billy’s mind, and his mouth begins to wind down as he watches Anton Cirrus type away. “I’m glad you’re all here tonight because I wanted to tell you a story,” he says. “A story about … some things.”

The murmuring audience shifts into hush, but not a good hush, the kind of fixed, uncomfortable hush that people get when they begin to suspect that they’re watching someone who may be about to have a public meltdown. Anton Cirrus is still texting. Billy wrenches his gaze away, lets it fall on the table that’s closest to the stage.

And who should be sitting there but Lucifer, his eyes meeting Billy’s, enacting an emotionless imitation of pleasured recognition. Billy’s entire body breaks into a cold sweat. It’s one thing to talk about the Prince of Darkness behind his back, but it’s another thing entirely to do so when he’s sitting three feet from you, staring into your face, prepared, at least potentially, to pitchfork you in the guts or something the second you make a joke at his expense. Billy needs a new idea.

“Yeah,” he says. “Some … things.” The hush redoubles, grows more acute, progresses ever closer to perfect silence. Billy begins to pat at his pockets, in the hope that one of them will yield some fiction. He finds a folded-up napkin in his back pocket, and he pulls it out, and unfolds it, and reads the slashed words he wrote to himself at lunch:

COWARD
FUCK-UP

He looks at this for a long moment.

“So there’s this guy,” he says, finally, his voice ringing hollowly in the room. “And the guy, he’s lived a good life, okay, a mostly good life. He’s made some bad decisions here and there. Nothing like—he hasn’t killed anybody or anything like that, he’s just—he’s just fucked up here and there. Like—like you do.

“And it turns out that’s okay. When the guy dies, at the end of his long life as a sometimes fuck-up, he doesn’t go to Hell. He goes to Heaven. He meets St. Peter there, at the gates, the whole deal.

“And St. Peter says
Welcome, guy, let me show you around
. And he takes the guy on a quick tour around Heaven. The guy gets to meet Aquinas; it’s great. But after a couple of hours the guy is feeling pretty bushed, and he says to St. Peter,
I’d kind of like to
, you know,
unwind
.

“And St. Peter says,
Oh, sure, we have your quarters all ready
, and they go to this room which is like, it’s like this lavish hotel suite. And the guy is really impressed. He’s checking everything out. And he opens the closet and he’s stunned! ’Cause in there is every pair of shoes the guy has ever owned. All there like
waiting for him
. From, like, his tiny baby shoes, to the shoes he was buried
in at his funeral, all there in a row. So many memories! But the guy turns to St. Peter and says, you know, like
What’s the deal? I get to heaven and all my shoes are here?

“And St. Peter is like,
Yeah, didn’t you know? Shoes have souls
.”

He can hear Lucifer give a single great
haw
, but other than that, the room is silent.

I suck
, Billy thinks.
Everyone knows that I suck
. Denver, Anton Cirrus, Elisa, Laurent, the fucking bartender, everyone. He tries to come up with something else to say. He can only think of one other joke, about two people who get frozen to death outside of a whorehouse, and he’s not telling that one.

Okay
, he thinks.
You may be a fuck-up, but you don’t have to be a coward. You can tell the story. Don’t be scared of the Devil. He can’t hurt you
.

He has no idea how he reaches that conclusion, but he’s surprised to find that it feels true.

“But seriously,” he says. “I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you the one about the Devil. It just started yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write it down. In fact, it’s still going on, right now.”

He takes a step toward the edge of the stage and points down at Lucifer. Lucifer regards him. His face still holds a laugh formation, left over from the joke, but his eyes are mirthless, flat.

“You see this guy?” Billy says. “Yesterday morning, I woke up, and this guy was in my apartment.”

“Adversarial Manifestation!” someone in the audience shouts. Billy and Lucifer turn toward the source. A bearded dude, somebody Billy’s never seen before, a few tables away. “Adversarial Manifestation!” dude shouts again, rising from his chair, pointing.

Billy’s a little dismayed to be interrupted by what appears to
be a crazy person, but at least some of the room’s attention is off of him. There’s a commotion back at the bar, and someone—a heavyset guy in a tight black T-shirt, probably the bouncer—begins parting the crowd and moving toward the front. Billy assumes the plan is to eject the crazy guy, who is now shouting “Adversarial Manifestation” a third time, practically frothing, but the bouncer moves past that guy and instead stands across from Lucifer, staring him down.

“What?” Lucifer says. He raises his stout. “I’m just here to have a drink and to catch some contemporary fiction and poetry.”

The bouncer raises something, aims it at Lucifer, and fires. Lucifer jolts, loses his drink, flails wildly out of his seat, hits the floor. The audience rears back from this. Billy suddenly fears that he’s about to witness a stampede. That people could be killed. It would, he realizes, be his fault.

“Lock it down,” bellows someone nearby. “We have a Category Six situation here. Repeat: Category Six.”

Category Six? Billy doesn’t know what that is, but the words have no immediate effect on the crowd, which is surging away from Lucifer’s convulsing form. He peers out, tries to catch sight of Denver, but she’s lost in the tumult. He looks down at the microphone, still in his hand. He still has the potential to speak to the crowd, to calm them, to direct them usefully. All he needs is to apply his kick-ass rhetorical skills. Does he actually have those?

He holds the mic close to his mouth.

“Audience,” he says. “Listen, audience.”

And then there’s a twinge in his back, and suddenly everything in his body goes rigid as something horrible rips through his nervous system. Like some barbed white demon coming alive within him. He would think
Oh my God I’m dying
except he can’t
think anything at all; his mind is like a jagged pattern of flashing triangles. It lasts only for a second. A very, very long second. And then he’s on the floor.

He blurts out a syllable that is not kick-ass rhetoric. It is not even recognizable language. It is the kind of sound you might make if you were shitting your pants, which Billy is thankfully not doing. He doesn’t have the mic anymore. Someone is screaming. He hopes it isn’t anyone he loves. Before he has time to figure anything out someone clamps something foul-smelling over his mouth and nose and the world blurs.
It’s all going away
, Billy thinks as everything swims into darkness,
someone please help
. But no one does.

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