The Weirdness Page 4

  He knows how he can explain his feelings toward her, reassert his competence, and convince her to accept the major epistemological shift he’s experienced today. It all holds together. In his mind it’s an intricate crystal made of pure motherfucking eloquence. He just has to get her on the phone, now, before it all dissolves into slush.

  He judders to a halt on the stairs, halfway through his descent into the station. The last possible point where he’ll have a phone signal. A person directly behind him stumbles into his back and emits a few terse syllables of what may be Korean invective. “Sorry,” Billy mutters, but he isn’t, not really. He struggles his cell phone out of his pocket, angles it up the stairs at a chunk of sky, and punches the single numeral that autodials Denver.

  And of course it goes straight to voice mail.

  “Fuck,” Billy says. He’s never done well with voice mail.

  It’s okay, he thinks, you can do this.

  And he speaks: “Uhhh, yeah, hi, Denver, I just, I was just thinking, I know we’re—I know things are—I’ve just had a really strange day today, and it got me to thinking about us, about you, and I just would really like to talk to you again, sometime, when you can, I know you probably don’t really want to because, I don’t know, I think you’re still mad at me or something, but I kinda hope that you’ll look past that and call me back and maybe I can explain a couple of things. Okay? Uh, that’s it I guess. Call me!”

  He hangs up. Fuck, he thinks, that was horrible. Do yourself a goddamn favor and never speak again.

  The taste of failure still rank in his mouth, he hurries down the stairs, swipes his card at the turnstile, and bolts to the platform just in time to see his train close its doors and pull away.

  When he finally gets to work he’s ten minutes later than the five minutes late he thinks of as permissible. Fifteen minutes is late enough that he’s inarguably late but still close enough to on time that maybe nobody noticed. Giorgos’s idea of management is to stay in the upstairs office for most of the day, on the computer, possibly looking at whatever kind of porn tiny, angry Greek men indulge in, so he’s not always up-to-date on the precise status of any given employee.

  The only person in the kitchen is Anil, who looks up from his station at Billy, looks at the clock, and looks back at Billy, all without pausing in his sandwich assembly. Guy is kind of a machine.

  “Late again,” Anil says. “You run into a bunch of bananas that you couldn’t resist?”

  “Very funny,” Billy says. “Does Giorgos know?”

  “I think you’re safe,” Anil says. “But, come on, man, this job sucks enough even when we’re working together; could you please make a little more effort to not get shitcanned? In the name of some motherfucking solidarity?”

  “Yeah,” Billy says, getting his latex food-prep gloves on. “But it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Right, it’s never your fault,” Anil says. “That’s some bullshit, though.”

  “True,” Billy says, taking his spot at his station and reviewing the three sandwich orders in the queue. “But I gotta tell you, it’s been a weird-ass day today.”

  “Ah, yes, Billy and the ten thousand weirdnesses,” Anil says. “Spare me no detail.”

  Billy contemplates the prospect. Tell him. Find a way. Anil already knows that shit sometimes goes down in Billy’s life. It was Anil who showed up at Billy’s apartment when Billy failed out of school, made him open his blinds, change his clothes, shave his face, pour the last of the Krakowianka down the drain. And when Billy confessed, in that dark time, to having been too drunk and disordered to have gotten it together to go back home for his own mother’s funeral, it was Anil who volunteered to drive Billy to Ohio—eight hours—so that Billy could look his father, Keith, in the face, and apologize. Anil had slept on a couch that no one had ever found comfortable and then driven Billy back the next day. Ate the cost of the gas and the tolls and the cigarettes without complaint. Billy remembers that trip, the two of them out of their minds on rest stop coffee, listening to Anil’s Minutemen cassette over and over and over again, the only cassette Anil’s crappy stereo hadn’t long ago devoured. After the tenth time they listened through it Billy had memorized the album’s entire collection of gnomic pronouncements; by the time they rolled back into Brooklyn he was bellowing them out the window. Each line seemed like a slogan for the new and better life that he believed Anil had bought for him. Surely you could talk to someone like that about the Devil?

  Except you can’t, not really.

  “Forget it,” Billy says, finally, not without a little sadness. “You would just—you would think I was a real nutjob.”

  “Instead of just a fuck-up?” Anil says.

  “I’m not a fuck-up.”

  “Whatever you gotta tell yourself, man.”

  Fuck-up or not, Billy fulfills his duties well as the day wends along: he reduces heads of lettuce to ribbons with some deft knife-work, he folds sliced turkey artfully atop ciabatta bread, he musters a passable level of cheer when Giorgos passes through. All the while, though, he’s thinking of how he could tell Anil about what happened this morning. Telling Anil would be a good trial run for telling Denver, and if he can tell Denver, he feels like his life will fall back into some kind of recognizable order.

  “Hey,” says Anil, at one point when they have a breather. “After work I’m meeting the Ghoul down at that vegetarian place he likes. Gonna talk some shop for a little while. You want to join us?”

  The Ghoul: his real name is Charles but to them he’s always been the Ghoul. What else can you call someone with that particular waxy complexion, that long, bony face, those deep-set eyes set loosely in crumpled bags of empurpled flesh? No other nickname seems available: nobody is going to mistake this guy for a Charlie or a Chuck or a Chazz. Put a pair of fingerless gloves on him and he could be somebody who died of consumption in a garret somewhere near the end of the nineteenth century.

  It doesn’t help that he’s a poet. Anil and Billy are both fiction writers and they view poets with definite suspicion: they treat them the way you’d treat someone who claimed to have descended from elves. Poets seem to have collectively learned a particular type of intonation to deploy at readings: Anil calls it “Poet Voice.” It’s a cousin of what he calls “NPR Voice.” On more than one occasion Anil has cracked Billy up by reading random things around the kitchen in Poet Voice: recipes, auto circulars, credit card offers, personal ads. He once stood on a stool and made Billy nearly herniate himself with laughter by using Poet Voice to recite a crass rhyme that Billy remembered from childhood (“Milk / milk / lemonade / round the corner / fudge is made”).

  But in spite of themselves they like the Ghoul. For all his anachronistic look-and-feel, he’s actually the most twenty-first century guy they know. He has this phone that he never seems to put away. It’s all tricked out in some ultra-complicated fashion that involves RSS feeds or Google Alerts or some shit. Billy doesn’t claim to have a grip on the particulars but he knows that the Ghoul’s phone is like a gleaming portal opening onto the entire New York literary scene. Every five minutes it trembles or coos and the Ghoul fusses with it and then, miraculously, he is in possession of some detail that seems, suddenly, crucial to what they think of as their careers: “Three senior editors from HarperCollins are getting drunk on Dark and Stormys two blocks from here.” And they’re off on some adventure.

  Furthermore, he’s on Twitter, active on Twitter, like dozens-of-tweets-a-day active, and what’s more, he’s funny on Twitter. If he ever wanted to give up poetry he could make a decent go at stand-up. He could get up there, looking exactly like he does, and read tweets nonstop for twenty minutes. Anil and Billy still kinda struggle just to get their minds around why Twitter even exists.

  So, yeah, Billy likes the Ghoul. And even though he should be taking the evening to select pieces for tomorrow night’s reading, he agrees to go out, not just because he wants to see the Ghoul but because he won’t quite give up on the idea of tal
king to Anil about the Devil.

  So then it’s after work and he and Anil are standing in the alleyway among the Dumpsters and hot pizza exhaust from the parlor next door, and Anil’s having one cigarette before they head to the vegetarian place, and Billy decides to just plunge in.

  “Hey Anil. Remember when I said I’d had a weird-ass day?”

  Anil gives a perfunctory nod. His face is pressed into his cupped hands, where he’s shielding his lighter from the wind. Once he gets his cigarette going he returns to full height—five seven or thereabouts—drags, exhales, and says, “Bet it seems less weird now that you’ve made sandwiches for eight hours straight.”

  “Yeah, but shut up a second,” says Billy. “This is actually important.”

  Anil draws and exhales again. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me.”

  “It’s hard to know how to start,” Billy says. “Things are a little mixed up in my head—that’s part of it, actually—so I’m not a hundred percent sure how it’ll sound to somebody who hasn’t had the same experience I’ve had.”

  “This is why I don’t write memoir,” Anil says. “There’s an inherent intransmissibility to experience that memoir purports to be able to breach? You know, thus grounding itself, as a very genre, in a lie?”

  “Yeah, no,” Billy says. “Not like that. Well, maybe like that.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?” Anil says.

  “I met the Devil today,” Billy says.

  Anil contemplates this, drags on his cigarette again.

  “The Devil,” he repeats.

  “Yeah, the Devil.”

  “Which one?” Anil says.

  This throws Billy for a second. “Which one? You know, Anil, the Devil.”

  “My family is Hindu, man. We don’t have just one devil.”

  “Oh, shit,” Billy says. “I didn’t think of that.”

  “So, I don’t know, if you’re really telling me that you met the Devil—and I’m still kind of hoping that you mean ‘the Devil’ as some kind of metaphor, like maybe you faced your own personal demon, or you smoked heroin or something—but if you’re really telling me that you met the Judeo-Christian Devil, with the embedded implication there being that Judeo-Christianity is somehow ontologically more real than the Hindu beliefs of my own tradition—I mean, shit, Billy, I’m not the best example of a devout practicing Hindu, but don’t take that to mean that there aren’t a fuck-ton of them out there. And I’m not saying that a billion Hindus can’t all be wrong—I’m pretty sure they all are, in fact—but if they’re all wrong, I guarantee you that the motherfucking Christians aren’t right.”

  “I don’t mean to be offensive,” Billy says, cringing. “Is this offensive?”

  “Yes,” Anil says. “You’re basically a racist.”

  “I’m sorry,” Billy blurts.

  “No, man, would you relax?” Anil says. “We’ve been friends for like ten years and you still don’t know when I’m fucking with you?”

  “He did something to my brain,” Billy says, morosely. “He did something to my brain and nothing makes sense any more.”

  Anil gives him a long look.

  “Okay, see, now you sound like a crazy person,” Anil says. “This seems like an actual step down from when you were just going on about the Devil. Maybe you’d better start over.”

  “I woke up this morning,” Billy says, “and there was this guy in the apartment.” That seems like a workable way in. He continues from there. Anil finishes his cigarette and starts a second one and doesn’t interrupt. When Billy finishes he closes his eyes, waiting for judgment.

  “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 a
dmit 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.