The Weirdness (10 page)

Behind him is a gallery space: through the window he can see eight lacy forms made out of what appear to be lathe-cut blocks of industrial Styrofoam. Billy’s pretty sure that if you were trying to hide something in Manhattan you wouldn’t disguise it as interesting art, although he can hear the Ghoul’s voice in his head, making some crack about how people tune out nothing faster, these days, than an artist asking for attention.

Across the way there’s an unassuming-looking brick building that takes up most of the block. He hasn’t really checked it out that deeply, distracted as he has been by the metal yard and the Styrofoam, but now he gives it a second look. Painted directly on the brick of the building’s western face are the faded words
SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING
.

He reads them for a second time, really tries to think about the business model implied there.

He looks at the map, looks at exactly which corner Lucifer has pinpointed.

He crosses the street.

Tentatively, he puts out his hand and touches the building. It feels like a building. He’s not sure what he expected.

He looks both ways along the building’s front for a window that he can peek into, but there are no windows at street level, just some ornamental concrete buttresses.

There is also no door.

Interesting
, Billy thinks.
So, let’s say I’m a customer
. He turns right, heading for the corner.
Let’s say I have some seafood I need warehoused. I go over here, to the southern side—

He rounds the corner. The southern side is a long expanse of brick. More buttresses. No loading dock. No door.

Okay, then
, Billy thinks, making the long trek along the southern side. The building nearly abuts another one at its southeast corner, so the eastern face is inaccessible. Billy peers into the thin, trash-choked gap between the two buildings: there’s not even enough space to fit his fist in there. So the north side is the only side left. He hurries back the way he came, and it turns out that there’s no north side either; it’s directly up against another giant brick building on that side, without even an alley to look down.

So. Two sides. No windows. No loading dock. No door.

I got you, you bastard
, Billy thinks.

He crosses back over to the gallery so that he can get more of the warehouse in his view. It sits there, impassive.

Billy stands on the sidewalk for a full minute, legs apart, hands balled in fists at his sides, goggling at the building. He is rapt with concentration. He is fully focused; fully focused except the part of him that is remarking on how much he has begun to resemble homeless dudes who he’s seen staring intensely at everyday shit with a stance and demeanor oddly identical to his own. He imagines, briefly, what wonders they have seen.

In the end, it works with something like an autostereogram effect: he loosens the convergence of his eyes a little and the warehouse slowly separates into two warehouses. And there, between those wavering visions, he can see it. The horrible tower. The dread
castle. Spiny bits and tar-black bones. The ornamental buttresses are still there, only they appear to writhe subtly. They heave like lungs. And right in the center of the mess is a single bloodred door, crawling with calligraphic glyphs.

He blinks and the whole thing snaps back into a warehouse again. He makes himself go walleyed and Warlock House wavers back into view.

He wishes his phone had a camera in it, although he kind of doubts that the effect could be captured photographically.

He tries to imagine what it would be like to go up to the door, go into the place, make good on Lucifer’s deal. And he suffers a complete failure of imagination. He can’t see himself going into a building that looks like that. He can’t see himself even taking one step toward the objective. He literally won’t cross the street now, even though the building looks like a warehouse again.

You’d be protected
, Billy reminds himself.
The Devil said you’d be protected, that he’d protect you with a ward or something
.

But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know what a ward is or how it works, but he has absolutely no certainty that a bunch of mystical hand-waving could protect him against whatever would happen to him in there. Better to stay out here. On the safe side of the street. Let somebody else be the hero.

He does something then. He calls himself a coward. Like this:
You fucking coward
.

This could be it. This could be your Moment. All you have to do is one daring thing and you’d get what you want. You could feel like you accomplished what you came out here to do. You could finally rest. All you have to do is just, for once, be brave
.

No
, he tells himself.
I can’t. Besides
—and at this point he’s
begun to work up a little thunderhead of righteousness—
if you really want what you want, if you really want to get your damn book published, you don’t do it this way. You don’t act as the Devil’s stooge. You do the damn work. You sit down. You write. You try to write well. You finish the thing. You—you do what Flaubert said—you live a life that is steady and well-ordered so that you can be fierce and original in the work. You don’t run around busting into magical fortresses and call that bravery and let somebody else do the hard work for you
.

He pauses there, waiting for the retort, and then it comes:
You ain’t exactly Flaubert
.

He turns from the warehouse and walks away.

Billy doesn’t know where he’s headed. The parts of his brain that were engaged in internal debate have ceased their crowing, opting now to simply choke one another to death. He just keeps walking, grateful at least that the city has retained its capacity to absorb a person who has no particular destination in mind, a person who needs an hour or two to be nothing more than a mote, twisting through space.

At the end of his mote-time he finds himself in the Village, which he normally takes strenuous pains to avoid, standing in front of a display of touristy junk, hemmed in by excitable schoolkids. He’s actually physically handling a twenty-dollar hat, a fake fur thing with pointy wolf-ears, trying to decide if it would make an appropriate gift for Denver.
She’d look cute in it
.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. He drops the hat, disgusted at it, at himself. First of all, there is no way in hell that she would ever consent to wear such a thing. And second of all, there aren’t going to
be
any more gifts for Denver, because he and Denver are finished, even
if it turns out that the world isn’t going to end. It’s been, what, eight days since they last spoke? Surely at this point he should be considering himself well and truly dumped.
Pull yourself together
, he tells himself.

You need protein
, some inner voice tells him. And so he hits the nearest diner and devours an enormous burger, ordered rare. He feels a little more stable with some blood in his mouth. He gets his pen and a napkin.
Okay
, he tells himself, with the greatest calm he can muster.
You’re going to make a list. A list of all of your problems. And then, underneath each item on the list, you’re going to list one Action Item that you can do to address that problem
. This seems reasonable.

Your first problem
, he thinks,
is that you’re a coward
.

And dutifully, he writes down:

COWARD

Then, on something of a roll, he writes:

FUCK-UP

“No,” he says. This is not going to work. He draws an X through each word. Even then the thing is a little depressing to look at: he looks around for a garbage can. Finding none, he folds the note into quarters and sticks it in his pocket.

Action Items. He has a goddamn Action Item: Flaubert’s advice.
Be fierce and original
. He pulls the accordion file out of his backpack and starts spreading possible reading pieces out on the table. If he can just find some piece in there that demonstrates his ferocity and originality—that would show everyone. The desire for
revenge rises within him, resplendent and gauche, like the phoenix on the hood of a Trans Am. He just needs to find the right piece. If not the novel then maybe the short stories?

After two minutes of reading what he thought was his best shot—a story with no characters at all, told from the point of view of various apartments that had been inhabited
by
characters—he’s back to the problem he was having this morning. There
is
no right piece. Nothing he has written in the last decade is good enough to justify the personality flaws that he’d been justifying by telling everyone that he was a writer.

Fuck it. He downs a third cup of coffee. He sweeps everything back into the file. He has an idea. He’s going to wing it. He’s going to get up there on stage and ad-lib. He can tell a story that way, just by getting up there and opening up the fecund little grotto that houses his creative unconscious. He knows he can do it. He’s a fucking storyteller and that’s the kind of shit that storytellers do: they tell goddamn stories. He will be bold and daring; he will confirm that he is not a coward and not a fuck-up; he will be epiphany-level good. And maybe the world won’t end.

Billy pays the bill and heads north toward Union Square, and jumps on the L, heading toward Williamsburg.

The reading’s not supposed to happen until seven, and the train will put him at Bedford just before five. From there it’s like a ten-minute walk to Barometer, so he’ll be early. But that’s okay. He figures he’ll sit at the bar, have a shot or two to keep the courage going, center himself, and do a little more preliminary thinking on his plan. Like: Will he tell a real-life anecdote or try to make up something fictional?

He surfaces at Bedford. It’s not yet five but it’s cold and dark already: fucking November. He pulls his army jacket tighter around him, but it’s too thin to do much.

He hurries to the bar, and when he gets there he is greeted by an impassive rolling gate, corrugated metal, pulled all the way down.

“You gotta be kidding me,” he says, out loud.

“I think they open at six,” says a young woman who is standing off to the side. Billy looks over but can’t really see her face, as it is hidden by wild coils of long black hair springing out from under the constraint of a fur-lined aviator hat.

“Six?” Billy says. “What about people who want a drink right after they get off from work?”

“I think this place makes their money more off the nightlife kind of crowd,” says the woman. She taps a cigarette out of her pack and lights it off of one that she’s already got going.

“Nightlife!” Billy says, mock-contemptuous. “What about people who need a drink in the middle of the day? Someone needs to think about the high-functioning alcoholics.”

The woman releases breath in a way that’s almost a laugh. He gives another look over as she leans her head back to take another drag. It’s the lips that grab him: they’re full without being cartoonish, and she’s got a little rhinestone punched right where a beauty spot might normally be. A piece of flash, designed to draw attention—in his heart, Billy knows this, but he’s never seen the harm in letting himself be drawn wherever women want to lead him. She catches him looking, though, and shoots him an impatient glare. He admires her sleepy eyes, smearily made up, before he looks away, flustered. He stares at his shoes for a second and then something clicks. He actually snaps his fingers.

“You’re the poet,” he says. “Mastic. Elisa Mastic.”

She looks at him again, less impatient this time. Takes a three-second drag on her cigarette, holds it, exhales. “Oh my God,” she says, a little drily. “I just got street-recognized. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me.”

“Yeah, I saw—” Billy begins. He wants to say
your author site
but then he realizes it might sound a little stalkery. He doesn’t want her to know that he looked her up online, even if he could pass it off as being in a strictly professional capacity. “I’m Billy Ridgeway,” he says, extending his hand. “I’m the, uh, the fiction writer of the evening.”

“Well,” she says, “okay.” She gives his hand a squeeze, meets his eyes, and smiles. Something stirs in Billy for a second, and then she lets go and it’s gone.

“I
like
being street-recognized,” she says. “It feels good! As a poet, you know, you’re not sure that you’re ever going to get that.”

“You know what they say,” Billy says, absently, still spinning a bit. “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.”

“That’s good,” Elisa says. “I like that. Anyway, you made me feel better about the—the thing.” She turns her hand in the air.

“The thing?”

“You know,” Elisa says. “The fuckwit.”

“The Bladed Hyacinth—”

“Yes,” she says. “Don’t even say it. I can’t even stand the name of the thing.”

“So you saw it.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I saw it. I didn’t feel great about it—”

“No,” Billy says. “Me either.”
Neither?

“Well, anyway,” she says. “Point is: you helped me to feel better.”

“Glad to be of service,” Billy says, and for a minute they stand there in the cold, wind snapping around them, neither one of them looking at the other or saying anything. Billy doesn’t want to let the conversation die, though. He wants to be daring and bold. By this point, conveniently, he’s forgotten that Flaubert was talking about the work.

“I read one of your poems, you know,” he hazards. “On—your author site.”

“Which poem?” Elisa asks. Her eyes are on him, suspicion awakened in them.

“Uh,” Billy says. “The first one? I can’t remember the name? But there was a line in it that I liked. About the
deleted world
.”

“Oh please,” Elisa says. “That one—ugh, it’s the worst one. I keep begging my press to put
any
other poem up there.”

“Pshaw,” Billy says, and then realizes with horror that he’s saying stuff like
pshaw
. He forges on, though: “I liked it.”