The Weirdness (14 page)

Some little part of Billy’s consciousness wakes up, probes around tentatively, and learns that it hurts. Head, face, arms, legs, hands, feet: every part reports in with the same message:
This sucks
.

Some higher-order function comes back on board and tries to figure out why he hurts.

Someone Tased me
, he thinks.

All at once he’s not certain he’s safe. He yanks himself the rest of the way awake and lifts his head to get a look around. Inflamed muscles seize in protest and Billy lets out a low moan.

He’s in a jail cell.

Well
, Billy thinks,
this can’t be good
, although actually? He can think of ways in which it could be worse.

He lets his head drop back to the plastic pillow. The crinkling vinyl sounds incredibly loud, painful. He stares up into the dull fluorescent disk set in the ceiling for a long time, letting his body throb. Maybe if he waits long enough somebody will come along to give him some instruction, let him know exactly what he’s supposed to do next. Isn’t that supposed to be the silver lining to being in prison? You don’t have to make your own decisions?

He pulls himself to a sitting position and he resists the impulse to just drop his head into his hands and leave it there for maybe the rest of his life. Instead he does a quick survey of the cell. Not really much to see. The bunk that he’s sitting on. At the opposite end of the cell is an apparatus consisting of two metal bowls attached to a single central column; he guesses that one bowl is a sink and the other a toilet. He has to take a piss but right now getting up and walking three feet exceeds the range of his ambition. There’s also a lightweight chair stamped out of one contiguous piece of plastic and a slab extruding from the wall which could maybe be used as a desk.

The other wall has a door set into it, prison bars in the classic style. Beyond them is darkness. Billy wonders briefly why the cell is lit but not the hallway, but, with no answer forthcoming, he lets the question go.

Aside from his shoes, which are missing, he’s still in the clothes he wore to the reading. A quick pat-down, however, reveals that everything in his pockets is gone. Phone, wallet, keys.
Fuck
, he thinks. He realizes, distantly, that he was supposed to be at work this morning. He’s not sure what time it is or if he still has a chance to save his job, but if he’s late, he can’t call in with some excuse. He can’t call Anil to get him to cover for him.

Anil. It occurs to Billy suddenly that he doesn’t know where Anil is or whether he’s safe. Billy knows nothing about anything that happened after the Tasing. For all he knows, Anil, the Ghoul, Denver, Elisa, they could all be trampled to death.

Okay
, Billy thinks.
That kind of thinking? Not helpful
.

It’s your fault if it’s true
, he thinks.
Everyone was there because of you
.

One thing at a time. He looks under the bunk and finds his
shoes there. They still have laces in them, interesting. So he could at least still kill himself. Not really his number one choice at the moment but it feels good to at least have an option, any option. He looks around, briefly, for a beam he could hang himself from, finds nothing. But still. He feels certain he could make his laces into some kind of noose if he tried hard enough. He looks at the shoes in his lap, mentally unlaces them, tries out patterns of knots in his head, and eventually realizes he has absolutely no idea how he’d go about using his shoelaces to kill himself. He wishes, for a moment, that he had access to the Internet.

He puts his shoes on.

He tries standing. It hurts, but he can do it. Something in his pelvis seems banged out of alignment; he feels like if he twists at the waist something will pop and accord a degree of relief. He attempts a few test pivots but they don’t help.

He looks around. Something about the whole cell feels familiar. He can’t quite place it. He looks at the combination sink/toilet unit. It’s ingeniously designed, in a kind of depressing way, but he has a foggy memory of having marveled at this precise ingenious design at some point in the past. Maybe just from some stock photo of a prison cell, accompanying some article he read once upon a time? He looks back at the sink/toilet unit, and he thinks
I’ve been here before
.

That can’t be right. He’s never been in jail. The closest he came was one time that he had to run from the cops: that was also, he remembers, the first night he met Jørgen, three years ago this past summer.

He recalls the story. The Ghoul had somehow fallen in with this group of bored German pyrotechnicians, three guys in town to engineer special effects for an alien invasion movie that was
annoying everyone by shutting down streets all over Manhattan. These guys—young, severe-looking guys from Berlin—were really only needed to orchestrate a few big explosions, which had gotten delayed, so they had a lot of time during which they were basically expected to wait around and do nothing. They quickly grew weary of fucking around in their hotel, the Ghoul explained to Billy, so they had begun hanging out in this art space in the Bronx, taking suggestions for things around the city that could be exploded, and then actually going ahead and exploding them, as little under-the-radar art events, or something. Their next event involved plans to detonate a row of chemical toilets at the edge of a torn-up lot down in Brighton. Billy and the Ghoul had been feeling pretty bored themselves that summer, and so when the night came, they went.

They gathered with others in the pleasant early dusk, watching the German guys drill holes and run wires mirthlessly at the row of toilets, trying to make sense of the badly-translated Situationist pamphlets that had been passed out to the crowd, drinking wide-mouths. And this guy Jørgen had come over and engaged Billy in conversation. They got to arguing about the merits of Olde English 800 versus Colt 45, something like that, and by the time the German dudes shrilled upon their whistles to indicate that they were ready, Billy had thought
Hey, maybe I’m making a friend
.

One more whistle blast. Billy, Jørgen, and the Ghoul huddled together behind an army-green plastic tarp. And then the lead German threw a switch and the toilets blew.

It remains a sight that comes to Billy’s mind whenever he’s trying to define beauty.

He remembers a string of tiny but deafening bangs crisscrossing the base of the toilets, opening a rift through which sluiced out a marvelously disgusting blue-green tide of chemicals and sewage,
the sight of which elicited a tremendous collective groan from the audience, who had suddenly become concerned about their footwear, which they hadn’t been, just a moment before. One second later the plastic shells of the toilets were sundered by ribbons of terrifying white fire, a fire so hot and bright that it clearly indicated the presence of fantastic military-grade combustibles, the kind of thing that ordinary citizens just should not have. At the heart of the inferno, the toilets held for a second and then simply liquefied, becoming a pool of molten slime, still burning, producing a towering, fetid black cloud. And that’s when two cop cars screeched into the lot, their whirling lights suffusing the great, persistent pillar of smoke with color: red and blue, playing together to produce the most lovely range of violets. It seemed maybe like it had been intended as a final touch, and the audience broke into confused applause as the cops began barking imperatives through a megaphone.

“We should go,” said Jørgen, as a third cop car arrived. This one parked itself lengthwise, blocking the lot’s wide gate, and Billy had been about to panic when Jørgen touched him on the shoulder and said “This way,” and hustled them back through a hole in the perimeter fence that was hidden by a heaped pile of pallets. On the other side of the fence was a van, what Billy would soon come to forever think of as Jørgen’s Trusty Econoline Van, and they piled in and peeled out, and Billy didn’t have to go to jail, and his friendship with Jørgen was pretty much locked at that point.

He wonders where Jørgen is, anyway, and he feels a sudden, sharp regret at not having been more concerned at Jørgen’s long disappearance. Not that there’s anything he can do about that now, not from jail.

He can’t really do anything about anything. He can maybe,
at best, take a piss. He looks again at the combination sink/toilet thing.

He has his pants unbuttoned and is about to get down to it when he feels a sudden concern about privacy. He looks back at the bars and the darkness beyond. Can people see into his cell? When he’s facing the toilet his back is to the door, so it’s not exactly like people can see his junk straight-on, but what is going to happen when he has to take a shit? He tries to imagine sitting there, trying to
do his business
while some Aryan Nations dude is staring him in the face. He knew prison was supposed to be tough but he didn’t quite realize that every crap he’d take would be within view of prying eyes.

He approaches the bars and peers into the darkness. It’s hard to tell what’s going on out there. He doesn’t see another cell or even a hallway. All he can sense behind the bars is a large, open space of undefined dimensions. He can see shapes and forms but he can’t quite make out what they are. When he moves his head he catches something gleaming glassily. Where the fuck is he?

He presses his face up to the bars, shields his eyes with cupped hands, willing them to adjust to the darkness. Eventually he begins to make out the shapes with greater distinction. He sees cameras. Not surveillance-style cameras but movie cameras, on big dollies.

The cell is a set.

And then he realizes why it seems familiar. It’s a set from
Argentium Astrum
, the supernatural police procedural. It’s the cell of Gorbok the Mad, the tongueless cultist that the team brings into custody in the first episode, hoping to get him to spill his terrible secrets!

Okay, he wasn’t expecting that.

He tries the door. The lock is real enough.
Verisimilitude
, he
notes, vaguely impressed. But this has to be an improvement. It’s better to be locked into a film set than into a prison; he doesn’t know what’s going on, but he finds that he can at least believe that. He looks at the walls, wondering if he could break them down if he shouldered them hard enough.

Instead he just calls to the darkness: “Hello?”

He hears a voice, somewhere out in the dark studio space, say “He’s up,” followed by an electronic
bleep
that he recognizes as being the sign-off call of a walkie-talkie.

Interesting
, Billy thinks. But not interesting in a good way. He has a sudden feeling that he’s going to be interrogated before the morning is out, aggressively interrogated. His testicles shrink a little.

Before long, he sees a figure walking briskly toward him, through the gloom. He recognizes the spray of curly hair. It’s Laurent, the editor in chief of
The Ingot
.

Okay, he wasn’t expecting that, either.

“Billy,” Laurent says, warmly. “Good to see you. Good to have you on board.” He sticks his hand through the bars of the cell for Billy to shake. Billy shakes it, a little uncertainly.

“So,” Billy says. “You’re still alive.” One fact at a time seems to be the order of the day here.

“I am,” Laurent says, beaming a bit. “That got a little rough last night, there, a little rough.”

“You’re telling me,” Billy says. “Who got hurt? Anybody?”

“Audience members are all okay,” Laurent says. “We had to do a bit of, what would you call it,
cleanup
on them, but they’re none the worse for wear. As for the readers: well, there’s you: you got a little zap, not too much fun there, but you’re okay, we’ve got you now, and that’s good. Elisa, the poet: less happy story, frankly, we
lost tabs on her, but we’re guessing she’ll turn up. It’s not good for her to be off radar right now, though, not good at all. Of course, the one who took the brunt of the damage dealt out last night was the Adversarial Manifestation, can’t say he came out too well at the end of all the excitement.”

“Lucifer?” Billy asks.

“The Manifestation,” Laurent says.

“He’s dead?” Billy feels an unexpected pang of loss.

“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Laurent says. “The Adversary isn’t
alive
or
dead
as you and I think about it. His manifestation was dispelled last night, though. And if you stick with us, he won’t be contacting you again.”

Billy frowns. He’s not sure why, but he feels bummed by this. It’s not exactly like he lost a friend, but more like he embarrassed himself in front of someone he thought might make a good contact.

He looks at Laurent. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “I thought you were the editor of a literary magazine. But you know about all this stuff and somehow you’re involved with
Argentium Astrum
and—”

Suddenly it clicks. “You’re a warlock,” he says.

Laurent smiles broadly. “Yes!” he exclaims. Billy, for his part, has to restrain a sigh. He’s starting to get sick of warlocks.

“In fact,” Laurent says, “I serve as the Executive Director of Cultural Production for the Northeast Regional Office of the Right-Hand Path, an international organization of witches and warlocks.”

“Wait,” Billy says. “So—is Ollard one of you?”

“Ollard?”

“Timothy Ollard? Guy who wants to burn up the world?”

“Timothy Ollard,” Laurent says, “is someone who you should not even know about. But, to answer your question: No. He is not one of us. He is—well, he is a problem, a problem we are actively engaged with and working on. Let me put it to you this way, Billy. Ollard is a bad guy. And we’re the good guys.”

“The good guys,” Billy repeats.

“Yes!” Laurent says.

For some reason this puts Billy in mind of the Office of Homeland Security, which he actually always thought of as a group of extralegal thugs. He narrows his eyes.

“Last night,” he asks, “did you Tase me?”

Laurent glances down to the floor and presses a knuckle into his upper lip for a long second, apparently contemplating how to phrase the answer.