The Weirdness (19 page)

Ollard smiles slightly, places the macchiato on the table, wipes one palm with the other, then rises. He does not advance, a fact for which Billy is incredibly grateful.

“Billy
Ridgeway
,” Ollard says, rocking back on his heels. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“How is that possible?” Billy blurts, dismayed that he doesn’t even have whatever questionable advantage might be conferred by the element of surprise. “Have you been reading my mind? ’Cause at this point I’d kind of prefer for people to just stay out of there, thank you very much.”

Ollard surveys Billy’s perturbed demeanor. “Billy,” he says. “One thing you should have learned by now. You don’t need to reach for a complicated answer when a simple one will do.” He reaches into the breast pocket of the suit and pulls out a phone, activates it with a finger-swipe. “I got a text,” he says. “FYI,” he reads from the screen, “Ridgeway is here.”

Billy remembers Anton Cirrus, outside, fiddling with his phone while they argued.

“So,” Billy says, trying to add it all up in his mind. “Cirrus.”

“Yes,” Ollard says.

“You and Cirrus.”

“Yes.”

“You’re … in cahoots?”

“Cahoots?” Ollard says, amusement ringing faintly in his voice. Billy feels fury swell within him; language is supposed to be the thing he’s good at. He almost pulls out the spray to give Ollard a good blast of it just on principle. “Not
cahoots
,” Ollard says,
finally. “Think of him as an
independent contractor
. You could say a
gun for hire
if you wanted something with a little more
pizzazz
. With the Right-Hand Path setting up their little literary production it’s useful to know someone like Anton, who can knock it right back down again.”

“Why would he help you?”

“I sought him out. I showed him that partnering with me would provide him with certain advantages. Men like Cirrus enjoy advantages. Maybe to a fault.”

“Does he know,” Billy says, “that you’re planning to burn up the world?”

“He knows that I have the Neko,” Ollard says, showing no surprise that Billy is familiar with his plan. “He knows that it is a source of plentiful energy. He knows it’s unique and valuable and that important people are interested in it, and I think that represents a line beyond which Cirrus cannot see very clearly. The crest of the hill, in a way. See, that’s the thing about men like Cirrus—”

“Look,” Billy says, “I don’t really care about men like Cirrus.” He says this, although if he were being totally honest he would have to admit that something in him seizes greedily at the prospect that Cirrus’s takedown of him on Bladed Hyacinth was maybe less about the merits of his writing, or lack thereof, and more about some kind of chess move against the Right-Hand Path. “I’m here for the Neko. Where is it?”

Ollard looks flatly at Billy for a long moment. “Why don’t you get yourself a drink?” he asks.

“I don’t want a drink.”

“Billy,” says Ollard. “I’ve only just met you, but I can tell that this hard-ass routine doesn’t suit you. It’s fake.”

Billy feels a bit stung by this, and Ollard must notice, because
he holds up a finger in a wait-one-moment-before-you-react gesture. “Hard-asses,” he says, “are boring. They see one route toward what they want, and barrel straight at it. It’s embarrassing. They’re easy to sidestep, easy to trip up. They don’t make satisfying opponents. If you’re not a hard-ass it means that there’s some small hope that you’ll be intelligent. And an intelligent opponent gives me at least something to savor.”

“Maybe the most intelligent thing an opponent could do, though,” Billy says, “is to
pretend
that they’re a hard-ass, to … 
lull
you … into … a false sense of security.”

“You’re not doing a very good job of pretending, if that’s your strategy.”

“Maybe my
strategy
 … is to
pretend
to be doing a bad job of pretending, so that you’ll
think
I’m pretending, when in
reality
I’m actually … 
smarter
than that.”

“Well,” Ollard says, a little wearily, “yes, that would be one strategy. But if you’re such a master strategist, you can sit with me, and drink some coffee, and we can talk. Intelligently.”

Billy considers this. He takes a step backward toward the counter and waits a second to see if Ollard takes this opportunity to spring across the space separating them. He sort of half expects Ollard to sprout giant razored talons or something. But all Ollard does is wave Billy toward the counter with his fingertips, settle back into the armchair, and sip from his macchiato.

Well
, Billy thinks,
okay
. If there’s been one good thing that’s come out of this week it’s been all the coffee. He approaches the counter.

“Welcome to Starbucks,” says the young man stationed there. “May I take your order?” The man’s voice is cheerful but there’s something strangulated in it that startles Billy, gets him to pay a
little more attention. He looks the Starbucks Guy in the face. The guy—a blond kid, can’t be a day over twenty-one, wispy hints of a starter goatee around his mouth—is smiling at him expectantly, but something in the smile looks fixed, knocking Billy from
alert
to
on edge
.

“Uh, sure,” says Billy, suspiciously. “Can I get a … Grande Americano?”

“Grande Americano!” the kid hollers to one of the other workers back there, a woman, who jerks into motion with the gracelessness of a dusty animatronic figure, a robotic Abe Lincoln in a forgotten Hall of Presidents.

Billy looks into the kid’s puffy, red-rimmed eyes and spots the raw terror in them. They come so close to screaming
Call the police
that Billy reflexively pats his pockets, looking for his phone, which of course is still in a Dumpster somewhere.

The guy rattles off how much Billy owes, and Billy looks over his shoulder to see if Ollard is going to offer to pick up the tab on this. Billy figures that if you have your own personal Starbucks with the employees held in some kind of terrifying mystic bondage then you might as well make all the coffee complimentary. After all, you can’t exactly be expecting the place to meet a quarterly profit projection. But Ollard is paying no attention: he’s gazing out the windows.
Out
is perhaps the wrong way to put it: it’s really more
at
, because the windows are great panes of solid blackness.

Billy pulls the three dollars out of his pocket, unfolds them, and hands them off to the terrorized-looking kid, who returns him a handful of change. Billy considers dropping the coins in the tip jar but he has the sense that no one working here is going to get around to spending their tips anytime soon. He makes eye contact with the cashier for a second in which both of them understand
that their transaction has concluded, that there is nothing more that Billy can or will do for this kid right now. Billy’s the one to break the glance, and as he pockets his change he’s scorched by a rising shame.

“Grande Americano at the bar,” shouts the young woman at the other end of the counter, with that same fracturing cheer. Billy makes the mistake of looking in her eyes as she slides his drink across to him, checking in the hope that maybe the kid was a one-off, but no: she has the exact same
please-help-me
look, the exact same fake frozen smile.

Billy wonders for a moment whether his ward protects him against this kind of enslavement. Tries to remember exactly what Lucifer said. Ollard is unable to harm him—what was it—through magical means or otherwise? The Starbucks workers don’t seem
harmed
, exactly, but it certainly looks like their experience is sucking. Maybe he should just get out of here while he can?

But when Billy turns to face Ollard again all he sees is a guy, just sitting there in his corduroy suit. He looks placid, really, almost bland. Pasty. Wan. It’s hard for Billy to feel like he’s actually in danger. So Billy goes and sits in the other overstuffed chair, which leaves him positioned at about a forty-five degree angle to Ollard. He puts his Americano on a little round table. Knowing that it was served to him by zomboid slaves makes it seem a little creepy. So instead of drinking it, he just sits there, looking at the black panes, waiting for Ollard to speak. The two of them sit side by side, staring. At blackness. This lasts for about a second before Billy begins to find it disturbing.

“So,” Billy says, groping around for a way to kick-start the conversation. “You must really … like Starbucks, I guess?”

Ollard shows no signs of having heard the question, for a long
minute. The song by the British soul singer ends, and then it begins again, a second time.

“I think better when I’m in here,” Ollard says, finally. “I’ve spent most of the last year in one Starbucks or another, thinking. They’re all over the city, now, did you know that?”

“Um,” Billy says. “Yes, I guess I did.”

“I used to alternate between seven different Starbucks,” Ollard says. “A different one for each day of the week. Of course, now that I have the Neko, I haven’t been able to get out. It’s not … safe for me outside any longer. So I decided to set one up here.” He turns toward Billy and smiles weakly.

“Starbucks every day, huh?” Billy says.

“For hours. Hours every day.”

“That’s a lot of thinking.”

“It is. That’s the thing I’m good at. Thinking. That’s all there is left to do, really.”

“Yeah, um.” Billy’s still trying to find his grounding in this conversation. He feels a bit like he’s on an awkward date. He has begun to detect an odor, like meat left out in the sun, which he assumes is coming from Ollard, and he notices that the corduroy suit, which looked so sharp from a distance, is actually quite dirty, filthy even, going nearly translucent in spots from grease and wear.

“So,” Billy tries. “What do you think about?”

Ollard makes a sucking sound with his mouth before he answers. “What do I think about,” he says. “I think about the world. The world and all that is in it.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “That’s cool.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t think so,” Ollard says. “I don’t think the world is cool.”

“No?”

“No. I think—and I have considered the problem at some length—that the world, ultimately, is repulsive.”

“Okay,” Billy says.

“It’s not okay,” Ollard says. “I am grateful to this place, though. To Starbucks. It helped me to think, during this time. It helped me to
focus
. It
reminded
me. Every day. Of the world. Of just how little the world has to offer.”

His expression suddenly cracks. His eyes clench shut; a network of deep lines emerges across his forehead; his mouth tenses, widening into a distorted black hole, rimmed with bad teeth. You’d think if you were an all-powerful magician who’d been alive for a century you’d at least be able to take the time to fix your terrible teeth.

“Hey,” Billy says, in a voice that he hopes is therapeutic. He momentarily considers reaching out, putting a hand on Ollard’s shoulder, although the idea creeps him out too much for him to get far with it.

“Ollard,” Billy says, expending enormous effort to sound very calm. At this point he’s past thinking that this conversation is like an awkward date; he’s instead realized that it’s more like a hostage negotiation. He tries to remember anything he knows about hostage negotiation, any movie where a hostage negotiation situation was handled effectively. He gets a vision of Denzel Washington, stern and commanding, but he can’t come up with any immediate way to put it to use.

“Timothy,” he tries, with his soothing voice still on. “Where is the Neko?”

“I’m so tired,” Ollard says. He presses the heels of his hands into his face, as though he’s stuffing thoughts back into his head. “I’m tired,” he says again.

“We’re all tired,” Billy says. “Take me to the Neko.”

Ollard draws a long, shuddering breath, and then looks back at Billy, his face having regained some of its composure. “You want to see the Neko?” he says.

“Well, yeah,” Billy says. “I mean. Eventually. We can keep talking for a bit if you want.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ollard says, rising. “We can talk on the way.”

“All right then. Let’s go.” Billy claps his hands on his thighs and gets out of the chair, leaving the creepy Americano on the little round table, untouched. They walk behind the counter, weaving between the three workers, who are involved in polishing nonexistent spots off the machines at the bar. Ollard hooks around into the supply room, and just past the big industrial refrigerator and the sinks, right in the spot where labor practices posters should be hanging in mandatory display, the Starbucks abruptly opens into a long corridor, grim and dingy, its walls a sort of dulled avocado, gone rippled from layers upon layers of paint. It has a dusty whiff about it, like a rarely visited back wing of an underfunded natural history museum, like a stuffed bison slowly rotting in an alcove.

“I’ve been alive for a long time,” Ollard says, as the two of them enter the corridor. His voice wavers.

“I’d heard that,” Billy says. They’re passing doors on either side; Billy wonders what he’d find if he opened them. “Lucifer said you’d been alive for like eighty years or something?”

“Oh, longer than that,” Ollard says. “Before that I was just off the radar, I guess. I was … very subtle.”

“It’s a good trick,” Billy says, encouragingly. He looks over his shoulder, back down the hallway, making sure that he can still see the Starbucks supply room. If he can make it back there he can make it back to the door that leads out to the street, and for some
reason he believes that if he makes it back out to the street, he’ll be safe.

“A good trick,” Ollard says. “Is it?”

“Sure,” Billy says. “Staying young? You could make a million bucks if you figured out a way to teach people how to do it.”

“I’ll tell you how to do it,” Ollard says.

“Okay,” Billy says. Against his better judgment his interest is piqued.

“You learn how to take,” Ollard says. “That’s all there is to it, really.”

“Uh,” Billy says.