The Weirdness Read online

  “Thank you, Anil, I heard you the first time. And Denver and I will sort it out. I just—I just want to give her a couple of days to cool off.”

  “Right, right. ’Cause that’s what everyone loves when they’re upset. To be left alone.”

  “I haven’t exactly been leaving her alone. I’ve called her, like, six times. If I left her alone any less I’d be stalking her. And no one wants that.”

  “No one wants that,” Anil agrees. He holds his shot up to one of the exposed halogen bulbs above the bar, contemplates the play of light in the alcohol for a moment, then throws it back. “It’s too bad,” he says, once it’s gone. “I liked Denver.”

  “Don’t say it in the past tense like that,” Billy says.

  Anil shrugs.

  “I liked Denver, too,” Billy says. He did. Or he does. Fuck the past tense. He thinks back to June, the night they met, on the rooftop of some art space in the Bronx, a program of experimental video screenings. One of the videos was hers, a work in progress called Varieties of Water. Twenty-five minutes of river foam, swirling drains, trash floating in city gutters, lake surfaces. Backyard pools thrust into abstraction by the activity of children’s play.

  Watching it, Billy had been mesmerized. By the end of it he felt like he had learned things about pattern and light, about perception, about nature, about humans, about himself. She’d been sitting in a metal folding chair just past the edge of the screen and every once in a while he’d look away from the film and his attention would settle on her. She reminded him a little bit of the ballet students he’d sometimes see hanging around Lincoln Center: tiny, wiry arms jutting oddly out of her loose sweatshirt, her face a little severe. During the entire duration of the video she’d kept her eyes shut.

  Once the screenings had wound up and the crowd began to separate into clusters of conversation he made his way over to the very outer rim of her orbit. She thanked a few people quietly and then popped some kind of multi-tool out of a pouch on her belt and went to disassemble the stand for the projection screen, efficiently breaking it down into components that fit into a single black nylon bag. He edged up to her and looked at all the shit clipped to her belt. Some kind of folding blade, a stubby flashlight, a green iPod Nano, a few photography-oriented gizmos, a ring of keys larger than he’d ever seen on someone who wasn’t a janitor. She’s like—a female Batman, Billy thought. Batwoman? He had no idea whether there was such a character or not. Whether there was such a character was not the point. The point was that Billy was fast figuring out that she was talented, pragmatic, and competent: pretty much exactly the kind of woman who he typically felt terrified about approaching. But the video had filled him with a sense of spirited determination, and so he took his best shot.

  “I liked your video,” he mumbled.

  “Thanks,” she replied automatically, without really pausing in the process of packing things into the bag.

  Billy, determined to nurture the exchange until it became a conversation, went on: “It was like—it was like being on a very benign drug.”

  She did not treat him as though he’d said something stupid.

  What happened instead: she stood, wiped her hands on her jeans, and asked him, somewhat tersely, to imagine a film that operated like a malignant drug and describe it to her, which is exactly the kind of left-field question that Billy is actually kind of good at imagining answers to.

  Conversation went to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (Billy had seen it; Denver hadn’t) and then to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (Denver had seen it; Billy hadn’t) and then to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (which they’d both seen). Billy started talking about the recommendations that Netflix had started giving him after he’d watched the Riefenstahl, and he’d gotten Denver laughing, and in the first moment that she laughed he felt insanely grateful that she’d taken the stupid shit that he was saying and made it into a decent conversation. Made something wonderful out of the common flow of gutter water.

  “All right,” Anil says, fishing a bill out of his wallet. “We gotta work tomorrow.”

  “True,” Billy says, depositing his own bill on the bar. “You headed home?”

  “Yes,” says Anil. “But first I am going to go out back and get high.”

  “That sounds excellent,” Billy says, either forgetting or deliberately refusing to recall the knowledge that getting high on top of getting drunk almost always gives him a horrible case of the veering spins. By the time he and Anil part ways he literally can’t walk in a straight line. Instead he has to lurch from lamppost to lamppost like the world is some kind of fantastically disorienting carnival attraction. Like the world is a ride. Complete with swallowing back the need to vomit.

  He gets back to the apartment, lets himself in: no Jørgen, still. That fucker. Billy drops the bruised banana into the fruit bowl, then opens the nice bottle of wine which he and Denver will now never drink and uses it to fill a Boddingtons pint glass. He collapses onto the sofa, hauls his laptop up to his chest and navigates clumsily to the website for Argentium Astrum, this online-only supernatural police procedural he’s been watching. There’s a new episode available but he can’t get it to stream properly: the opening credits load all right but then the images devolve into glitches and optical noise, as if the video compression algorithm has grown overzealous, opting to cheerfully crush the visual data into unparsable blocks. He watches fields of color shift for a minute and then slaps the laptop shut, drains the pint glass in three great gulps, and stumbles into the bathroom, where he stares at the toilet, trying determinedly to make it stop drifting around in his field of vision. He never quite manages it, but he doesn’t throw up either. He calls this a partial win and stumbles up to bed.

  He wakes to the smell of coffee and the sound of his phone buzzing away. It’s Denver, he thinks, and he experiences a brief feeling of hope, which is promptly demolished by the realization of exactly how hungover he is. He feels like a corpse being reanimated by means of savage jolts, one fresh burst of current direct into his rotten nervous system each time the phone vibrates. His limbs jerk uncoordinatedly. He flings an arm onto the bedside table, where it crashes onto the edge of a saucer covered in coins, flipping it into the air. Pennies rain down onto him. He groans and curses and pulls his head to the level of the bedside table, forces himself to open his eyes, winces. The phone’s not there. It’s on the floor. Each time it rings it scurries further away from the bed. Fuck it, he thinks. He pulls his pillow over his head. At long last the phone goes silent.

  He plants a hand on the floor and anchors his stomach to the mattress, stretching his torso into space, sending his other hand way out, all the way out to the phone. Gets it, reels it back into the bed. When he checks the screen he sees that it’s not Denver who called him at all. It’s his dad.

  He pulls the pillow back down over his face for a long minute. What could his dad want? Nearly every conversation they’ve had since Billy dropped out of school involves Dad urging Billy to read this or that esoteric book or article: something Maleficarium, something Lycanthropia, something Carcieri Infernus, whatever, whatever, whatever. Billy always says that he will do it, even though they both know by now that he won’t do it. Well-meaning, Billy supposes, and in his more charitable moments Billy is even a little touched by the continuity of his father’s faith in him, but that is not the kind of conversation he wants to have right now, or today, or maybe not this month at all, so Dad is going to have to wait. It is decided.

  His head pounds. His stomach clenches.

  Okay, he thinks. Okay. We can survive this.

  He checks the time on the clock. It’s just past nine. He needs to be at work at eleven thirty. That maybe gives him a little time to look over some of his writing; he’s been invited to perform tomorrow night at a reading put together by this new lit mag, The Ingot, which is allegedly going to publish some of his stuff. But most of the stuff he’s been writing lately isn’t exactly what he would call well-adapted to the r
eading format, so he’d intended to spend the morning digging up something older, taking an hour or two to give it a little polish. He has an hour, maybe, but he can barely open his eyes against the oppressive daylight; looking at words on a computer screen might just finish him.

  No, he thinks. You can do this. He sniffs the air. At least there’s coffee.

  Wait. Why is there coffee?

  He sits up. He looks over the railing, down into the living room. There’s a guy sitting on the couch, looking up at him. It’s not Jørgen. It’s not anybody Billy recognizes.

  “Uhhh,” says Billy. He pinches the bridge of his nose, blinks hard. Maybe the guy will disappear. But no. There’s definitely a guy down there. He’s wearing a suit, a pretty nice-looking olive suit. He’s got a shaved head, looks a bit like he might have once been a bike messenger. “Hi?” Billy tries. He gets out of bed, feeling a bit exposed, just standing there in his boxers. He hurries to get his legs into a pair of jeans.

  “Take your time,” says the man.

  “Uhhh,” Billy says again. “You must be … a friend of Jørgen’s? He’s away.”

  “No,” says the man, while Billy’s head is stuck inside a T-shirt.

  “It is you, William Harrison Ridgeway, with whom I intend to speak.”

  It is you with whom I intend to speak? Billy thinks. Who the fuck talks like that?

  “Call me Billy,” Billy says reflexively, heading down the stairs, wondering, not entirely idly, whether he should be looking for something that might constitute a weapon. “So—okay? Hi? Are you—with the landlord?”

  “I am not,” says the man. He hasn’t moved from the couch, and he continues to watch Billy with evident interest, which freaks Billy out a little bit, but on another level he feels surprisingly relaxed about the whole thing. The guy doesn’t match Billy’s image of a psychotic murderer. He’s clean. He’s got probably a day’s worth of stubble but it’s clearly part of the overall look. Billy doesn’t like the steady gaze, that’s freaky, but it’s also a calm gaze, the dude isn’t wild-eyed or anything. He’s not sitting there twitching. He’s just, like, hanging out. His suit has clearly been tailored, which suggests money. So the guy probably isn’t here to rob him either. It must just be a misunderstanding, something that can be resolved with ease.

  “There’s coffee,” says the man.

  “Thanks,” says Billy, heading into the kitchen, while still trying to maintain a kind of half-cautious watch over his shoulder. He’s prepared to be miffed that the guy broke into his coffee reserves without permission but he looks at the counter and sees that the guy actually brought his own beans. A bag of something called Fazenda Santa Terezinha, which smells pretty goddamn good. He fixes himself a cup.

  “Okay,” Billy says, holding the cup in both hands, up close to his face. “So you said you wanted to talk to me?”

  “Have a seat,” says the guy, gesturing at the armchair across from the couch.

  “Um, yeah, no,” says Billy. “I’m doing fine over here.” You’re being ridiculous, he tells himself. But, fuck it, so what? There’s a steel counter between him and the guy and he’s got bunch of knives within arm’s reach. From that perspective he’s got the best space in the house.

  “As you wish,” says the guy.

  Billy sips the coffee. It’s really good.

  “This is really good,” he says. It’s really fucking good.

  “I am glad,” says the guy, “that you are enjoying it. But now. Let us get properly introduced.”

  “You already know my name,” says Billy. “So why don’t you tell me yours?”

  “I shall,” says the guy. He produces a business card, seemingly from nowhere, and places it carefully on the coffee table, among the messy piles of CDs, drug paraphernalia, and magazines. Billy makes no effort to approach to retrieve it, staying exactly where he is, in the kitchen, near the knives, drinking this really fucking good coffee.

  “My name is Lucifer Morningstar,” says the guy.

  Billy sighs with annoyance because it turns out this motherfucker is crazy after all. He’d really hoped he was going to make it through the day without having to stab a dude.

  CHAPTER TWO

  TOUCHED IN THE HEAD

  THE SAFETY MANAGER • CULTURAL NORMS AND WHEN TO IGNORE THEM • IMAGINARY COPS • THE CONCEPT OF A LIGHT SWITCH • INTIMACY AND CONSENT • LUCIFER’S PREFERRED MEDIUM • NOVELS VS. SHORT STORIES • EARNING IT • A LEAK AND TWO ASPIRIN

  But he doesn’t reach for the knives, not actually just quite yet thanks, even though his optimism about the situation has just sustained a major hit. There’s still got to be a route to resolution here. A plausible reason why this guy is in this room, saying these things.

  “Lucifer Morningstar?” Billy asks. “What is that, your World of Warcraft name?”

  “William,” Lucifer says, and then he gives up a small, patient smile, the kind of patient smile that primarily communicates just how tolerant its bearer is being.

  “Just Billy,” Billy says. “Please.”

  “Billy, then. No, Billy, Lucifer Morningstar is my true and given name.”

  “That’s rough,” Billy says. “Hippie parents?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Billy picks up his cup of coffee and begins to step around the counter, heading closer to the guy. What are you doing? says the cautious part of his brain, the part Billy thinks of as the Safety Manager. Don’t get closer to this guy. He’s a nutjob.

  Let’s just see, says some other part of him, the part that Billy sometimes, in retrospect, calls the Well-Meaning Idiot. It’s stupid, this part says, to maintain, like, a twenty-foot distance between you and someone you’re talking to.

  That’s a cultural norm! says the Safety Manager. You get to ignore cultural norms when some stranger shows up in your apartment! They’re already violated!

  But by then it’s too late. He’s sitting in the armchair across from Lucifer. He reaches out to the coffee table, uses the back of his hand to push some garbage aside, making a space for his mug. He still feels pretty certain that he’s not in real physical danger.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Billy says, holding both his palms up, beseechingly. “I’ve been busy.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” says Lucifer. Billy feels a little flattered by this. Lucifer nods at the business card he placed on the table earlier, wedged between a heap of bills and a tangle of charging cords. The gilded edge catches Billy’s eye, and he picks it up. Sure enough, it says “Lucifer Morningstar” on it, in a nice serif font. Underneath that it says “Comprehensive Consulting.” There’s no number or anything. Billy thinks about pocketing it before remembering that there’s no good reason why he needs to be polite to this guy. Maybe playing it tough is the way to go. He flips the card back onto the table, leans back in the chair, crosses his arms, and puts on a face that’s intended to say something like You ain’t shit to me. Lucifer regards it placidly.

  “Billy,” he begins. “I wish to communicate something to you directly. Our time is limited, so it is important for me to be frank here at the outset. I am a supernatural force. I have existed since time immemorial. I am what you would colloquially call the Devil.”

  This gives Billy a significant dose of pause. He lifts the coffee and gulps down a strong bolt of it, as if that will help.

  “So—wait,” Billy says. “What you’re saying is …” He frowns. He’s not really sure what else Lucifer Morningstar might be saying.

  “What I’m saying,” Lucifer says, “is exactly what I have said. There is no misunderstanding.”

  Billy, suffering a jolt of alarm, looks this guy straight in the face. Lucifer meets his stare and holds it, which does nothing to help him relax, so he looks away, electing to stare, instead, at the rim of his coffee mug.

  “Yeahhhh,” he says eventually. “But … you get that that’s not a normal thing to say, right? I mean—I’m not a, what would you call it, a religious man. I don’t believe in the Devil. So, what I�
��m saying is that you’re kinda freaking me out here. I mean, if we’re being frank, I’m, like, half a second away from picking up the phone and calling 911, reporting this as a home invasion, and getting on with my day.”

  Lucifer nods in a way that confers a certain sad understanding. “You are welcome to do that,” he says, “but I guarantee it will not advance this conversation in a fruitful way.”

  For a minute, Billy thinks about doing it. But then he imagines having to deal with the NYPD. His past run-ins with them have never exactly elicited a high level of what you might call customer satisfaction. He imagines having to go through the process of hiding all the drug paraphernalia on the coffee table, imagines the long statement he’d have to give to some asshole force veteran.

  And he imagines the whole process making him late for his shift at the sandwich shop, and late is the one thing that he cannot be. Giorgos, his boss, already wrote him up once and at that juncture it was made very clear to him that Giorgos was not in the business of writing up people twice. Billy’s struck with an urge to check the time, but there’s no clock in this room and he thinks it’d be rude to pull out his phone. The point is, he’s really got to be moving this whole experience toward a wrap-up as quickly as possible.

  Lucifer speaks again. “Billy,” he says. “We have a limited amount of time.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “In order for you to understand what I have to say, it is imperative that you believe that I am who I say I am,” Lucifer says.

  “Fine,” Billy says. “But you gotta give me something here, ’cause right now? I’m just not feeling it. You want me to believe that you’re the Devil? Show me something. Show me something you can do that an ordinary guy can’t do. Make it fucking rain blood or something.”

  “That would cause more problems than it would solve,” Lucifer says.

  “Then—I don’t know,” Billy says. He slaps his hands down on his thighs. “But you better come up with something, ’cause otherwise, it may be time for you to go.”