The Weirdness (6 page)

“So what about God?” Anil says, finally.

Billy opens his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“If you believe in the Devil now, you should believe in God,” Anil says. He points upward, by way of illustration.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “That would make sense. But remember the part where I said things don’t make sense any more?”

“I’m going to say a word and I want you to tell me if you have any special feeling about it, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“The word is: Jesus.”

Billy throws out his hands, exasperated. “Really, dude? Really?”

“What?”

“
Jesus
?
Jesus
isn’t exactly an
emotionally neutral
word for
anybody raised in the goddamn Western world
. It’s maybe one of the top ten words that we have
special feelings
about? ‘Jesus,’ ‘taxes,’ ‘pedophile,’ and I’m sure there are seven others? But if you’re asking me if I have any special feeling about that word that I didn’t have yesterday, then the answer is no.”

“Okay,” Anil says. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah, asshole, I know. That’s where we came in, remember? Give me a cigarette.”

“I thought you quit.”

“I reserve the right to be un-quit in a
mental health emergency
such as the one we clearly have before us today.”

“Fair enough.” They huddle together to get Billy lit, and then they separate, standing there for a minute, eyeing one another somewhat suspiciously.

“I dunno, man, you seem normal to me,” Anil says, finally.

“I
feel
normal,” Billy says. “Except there’s like this one
belief
in my head that I just can’t make fit.”

“You know what I think?” Anil says. “I think you got pranked.”

Billy, dragging on his cigarette, shakes his head with a vigorous no, but Anil carries on: “I think Jørgen and some buddy of his got the best of you. You said he was out of town, right?”

“I guess,” Billy admits. “At the electronic music dude convention.”

“He probably had some buddy who was coming into the city and needed a place to crash. He probably got in touch—
Hey, buddy, can I stay with you?
—and Jørgen was like
Perfect, I’m not even there, you can crash in my bed. I’ll send you the key. I got this
roommate though
 … One thing led to another and they got into their heads that it’d be a good idea to freak you out. I mean, did he know
anything
about you that Jørgen doesn’t know?”

Billy considers this. “No.”

“This whole
devil
thing sounds like something one of his friends would come up with. You remember he spent like all of last year palling around with those death metal dudes? Guys with a kinda Jotunheim look about them? Dudes in druid robes who maybe had a White Power background?”

“Yeah, but this guy didn’t look like
that
,” Billy says. “He just looked kind of normal.”

“I don’t know,” Anil says. “Maybe somebody who grew out of that stage?”

Billy considers Lucifer’s shaved head and stubble. “Could be,” he concludes. “But what about the part where, you know, where he reached in and like
touched
my
brain
?”

“Tricky,” Anil says. “But someone who has maybe some stage magic experience? Somebody who had done some hypnotism?”

“Yes! He sounded like an R-rated hypnotist!”

“Coupled perhaps with an unusually receptive, naïve subject … it’s not ironclad, but it makes loads more sense than the alternative. I’ll bet they got the whole thing on video. It’s probably up on YouTube right now. You’d better hope you comported yourself with your usual dignity throughout the experience.”

Billy remembers cowering in the corner, and he winces. “Is that legal?” he asks. “To put me on YouTube without my permission? With an … intention to humiliate?”

“Dude,” Anil says. “You’re not going to
sue your roommate
just because he punk’d you.”

“Don’t say
punk’d
,” Billy says. “That is not a word.”

“Don’t worry, buddy. If they did something like that, it’s cool, they’ll take it down as soon as they know you figured it out. Look, we’re going to go see the Ghoul, right? We should have left ten minutes ago, I’m just saying. If you’re online somewhere, looking like an idiot, the Ghoul will be able to find it. Fuck, he’s probably already seen it. So you call Jørgen, you admit that he punk’d you, you guys’ll have a laugh, he’ll take it down. That’ll be it. You’ll go home tonight, the quote-unquote Devil will be there, you’ll get to meet him a second time and you’ll see that everything’s cool, tomorrow you’ll be all like
He actually turned out to be a really funny guy
.”

Put that way it doesn’t sound so bad. Billy’s been meaning to call Jørgen anyway. And as they head out, he can almost make Anil’s version of events seem plausible. There is only one problem with it. The switch in Billy’s head, the one that tells him that this guy was actually the Devil? It’s still stuck, determinedly, in the ON position.

“Gentlemen,” says the Ghoul, his heavy-lidded eyes rising from his phone to regard them as they tramp in and shake off the chilly November as best they can.

“Hey, G.,” says Anil. “How’s the poetry biz?”

“Predictable,” says the Ghoul. He’s already gotten started on his meal, having worked halfway through his usual, an enormous platter of vegetarian chili nachos. The waitress proffers menus before Anil and Billy are fully settled in; they wave them off, putting in orders for their own respective usuals.

“So,” Anil begins. “It’s been an interesting day.”

“Uncovering new horizons in sandwich-making?” says the Ghoul.

“As ever. But no. The interesting part involves our buddy Billy here.” He claps Billy on the shoulder. “Billy had, I don’t know, you might call it an unusual epistemological occurrence? Maybe a brush with the divine?”

The Ghoul slowly arches an eyebrow.

Anil turns to Billy. “Do you want to tell it?” he asks.

“Why don’t you tell it,” says Billy. He wants to hear whether it sounds crazy coming out of someone else’s mouth.

“Let me lead with a question,” Anil says to the Ghoul. “Did you see anything online today that might have embarrassed Billy?”

The Ghoul’s face contorts into a grimace of sympathy, revealing an answer. Billy crumples a little, mortified, but there’s some relief in it: he understands that he can maybe begin to relax into knowing that the whole thing was just a joke.

“I wasn’t sure that I was going to bring that up,” says the Ghoul, not unkindly. “I didn’t want to cast a pall over the evening unnecessarily. But you’ve seen it?”

“I haven’t seen it,” Billy says. “But Anil guessed that it was probably out there.”

“He guessed?” the Ghoul says.

“I’m just an unusually perceptive motherfucker,” Anil says. He leans back, seemingly satisfied that his role in this drama is complete.

“Interesting,” says the Ghoul.

“I want to see it,” says Billy. “Can you get it up on your phone?”

“I can. You’re not going to love it, though.”

“I can take it,” says Billy.

“A brave mind is an impregnable thing,” says the Ghoul, using his long fingers to complete a design on the glossy surface of his phone. Moments later, Billy is peering into its depths. It’s not YouTube he’s looking at. But he recognizes it, the pink of its banner is an instant giveaway. It’s Bladed Hyacinth.

Why is he looking at Bladed Hyacinth?

Bladed Hyacinth is a blog. It’s a literary gossip blog that they all read, a blog that they all are influenced by, even though none of them, no one they know, in fact, ever really wants to admit to being influenced by it, because then you would have to admit to being the kind of person who is influenced by Bladed Hyacinth, which none of them want to be. But the bottom line is that once Bladed Hyacinth says you’re cool then everyone kind of tacitly admits that you’re cool, and if Bladed Hyacinth says you’re over, then you’re over.

“Why are you showing me this?” Billy asks. It isn’t really a question. The Ghoul has directed him to a Bladed Hyacinth posting entitled “Tomorrow’s
Ingot
Reading a Nonevent.”

“Oh no,” Billy says. Horrified, he looks at the byline. His heart sinks to see the name of Anton Cirrus, the founder and editor in chief of Bladed Hyacinth, the most notoriously mordant member of the loose gang that runs the site. They all want to believe that Anton Cirrus is a guy who feels vengeful toward all writers because he can’t write, but word is that he has the talent to back up his acerbic nature. The latest gossip reports that he’s just signed a six-figure deal with Knopf, for a memoir. Nobody seems to know anything about Cirrus’s early life but somehow the memoir is already rumored to be “explosive.” No one knows what exactly stands to be exploded, or why, but the book already has an aura around it, whispers about how it’s going to change everything. “Asshole Writes
Incredibly Good Book, Dismaying Observers” is not exactly stop-the-presses-type news for anybody sitting at this table. But seeing said asshole mention the
Ingot
reading gets Billy on full alert.

He reads:

And, with that, Billy thinks
Anton Cirrus thinks I suck
.

“What does it say?” says Anil, craning in to get a look. Billy lets the phone go out of his slack, defeated hands.

“The ravaged storehouse of tired forms and stale devices?” Billy says, from memory. He seems to have memorized the entire thing with only a single read, as though it has been branded into his mind. “It basically says that I suck. Am I wrong here?”

“You’re not wrong,” Anil says, staring numbly into the screen.

“Anton Cirrus,” Billy says, “just said that I suck.”

And he’s right
, Billy thinks.
All that time, all those hours spent in front of the computer, practicing, doing the work, and in the end all it will ever mean is that I just suck more and more profoundly
.

“This could be one of those things,” the Ghoul says.

“What things?” Billy says, hollowly.

“Any publicity is good publicity?”

“No,” Billy says. “This isn’t good publicity. This is bad publicity.”

“As long as they spell your name right …” Anil says.

“Are you kidding?” Billy says. “Anton Cirrus just told, what, twenty thousand of the most influential readers in the country that I suck. Is this—is this the first thing that comes up when you Google my name now?”

“I don’t know,” Anil says, fumbling with the phone.

“Google it,” Billy demands.

“Don’t Google it,” says the Ghoul. “Just leave it alone.”

“Give me the phone,” Billy says.

A brief scuffle ensues, ending with the Ghoul’s phone firmly in the Ghoul’s bony grip.

“Just let it go,” says the Ghoul.

“I don’t believe it,” Billy says, although he clearly does. “I suck.”

No one seems to be in the mood to correct him. They all stare awkwardly off in different directions for a minute and then the food hits the table. Billy gazes dispiritedly at his eggplant Parmesan sandwich. He doesn’t want it.

“You should eat,” says Anil, after a minute.

“I don’t want to,” Billy says.

“Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” Anil hazards.

“Fuck you,” Billy says, but he takes the point. He lifts the sandwich to his mouth, and bites in. Something is wrong, though. It tastes disgusting.

“Eccch,” he says, around the bolus of food in his mouth. “This is wrong.”

“The sandwich is wrong?” says the Ghoul.

“It’s disgusting,” Billy says. He thrusts it toward Anil. “Taste this.”

“I don’t know why you persist in thinking of me as the kind of person who would taste something prefaced with
It’s disgusting
,” Anil says.

“It’s just—I dunno,” Billy says. “It just tastes
off
. Will you just try it? I’m having the kind of day where I need a second opinion to make sure I’m not going crazy.”

Anil shrugs, leans over and gives it a bite. Chews, swallows, makes a thoughtful face. “I don’t know,” he says. “It tastes normal to me. What’s
off
about it?”

“I don’t know,” Billy says. “The eggplant just tastes disgusting somehow.” And then he realizes what has happened.

“That fucker,” he says, rearing to his feet. “That soulless, blackhearted motherfucker.”

They assume he’s still talking about Anton Cirrus, and they try to calm him, but by this point Billy is inconsolable. He throws some money down on the table and storms out, leaving his sandwich uneaten, making a beeline for the subway. He wants to go home. He wants to go home, throw himself down onto his bed, and cry. Or at the very least smoke some of Jørgen’s weed and watch some online video, disappear into
Argentium Astrum
if he can get it to stream right.