The Weirdness (15 page)

“You did!” Billy says. “You fucking Tased me!”

“Yes,” Laurent says, looking up with an expression of pity. “I Tased you. If it’s any consolation, I did it with great reservation, a really strong, profound reservation. But the important point is not that. That’s behind us. That’s in the past. The important point is that you’re with us now.”

“It really fucking hurt, you know,” Billy says. “It’s not
in the past
until I stop fucking
hurting
.”

Billy glares at Laurent while Laurent maintains a hopeful smile.

“Did you say you had to do
cleanup
on my friends?” Billy says, eventually.

“Yes.”

“What exactly does that mean?”

“Well,” Laurent says, “surely you understand that we can’t have people running around talking about having witnessed the
dispersal of an Adversarial Manifestation. The results would be—a mess. Just a mess. So we had our team psychic—Gloria, we’ll introduce you to her in a bit—we had Gloria go in and make a couple of tweaks to their memories of the event.”

“Tweaks?”

“Yep,” Laurent says, proudly. “Just a couple of tweaks.”

“Without their consent?” Billy says.

A tiny line creases Laurent’s brow. “It’s not the kind of thing for which one typically asks consent,” he says.

“I dunno,” Billy says. “Lucifer asked for my consent before he started messing with my brain.”

“That may be,” Laurent says. “But—”

“So wait a second,” Billy says. “What exactly do my friends think went down last night?”

Laurent gives him a look, as though this entire line of conversation is somewhat distasteful. “You remember you told a joke? About shoes?”

“Who could forget that,” Billy says, in a low and rueful voice.

“Well,” Laurent continues, “in their recollection, you finish the joke, thank the audience, and head backstage. And then the reading ends and everyone heads home.”

Billy’s ears begin to burn with shame. “Elisa doesn’t read?”

“We lost track of her,” Laurent says.

“I don’t return to hanging out with my friends?” Billy says. “I freaking disappear?”

“It’s just a tweak,” Laurent says, a little defensively. “Our aim is minimal effective alteration: M.E.A. It’s not our aim to, you know,
write fiction
in which you emerge as the star. We’re the good guys.”

“So I hear,” Billy says. He tries to think about how it might
have appeared to everyone. He gets up there, he bombs in front of his small band of supporters. In front of Anton Cirrus. He winces to think of it. After bombing, he disappears backstage, doesn’t return. Elisa Mastic, the poet who he conspicuously arrived with, disappears. It’s not hard to imagine how this might have appeared to Denver. By now she either thinks he’s dead, or she thinks he’s an asshole, or she thinks he’s fucking someone else. He winces again: really at this stage it turns into a full-blown grimace.

“I need my phone,” Billy says. “I gotta sort this shit out right now.”

“Oh, no,” Laurent says. “That’s not possible. We had to dispose of your phone.”

“Yeah but—what?” Billy says, dismayed.

“Your phone, your wallet, your keys—anything connected to your former identity—all of it, for our purposes, has to be treated as compromised.”

“
Former
identity?” Billy repeats.

“Forgive me,” Laurent says, spreading his hands apologetically. “I fear that I haven’t done the best job in this conversation of explaining the exact details of the protocol we follow in cases like yours. You know how it is, when you’re so involved with something, you kind of forget that people on the outside might not intuitively
grasp
all the
nuance
of a situation?”

“Look,” Billy says. “I’m starting not to give so much of a fuck about the
nuance
of the
situation
. You say you’re the good guys, and I want to believe you. I really do. But so far what I know about you is that you wiped my friends’ brains, you got me in trouble with my girlfriend, you trashed my stuff, and you’re keeping me
in a cage
against my will. You don’t seem like the good guys. Frankly, you seem like a bunch of douchebags.”

Laurent steeples his fingers and brings them to his lips, and appears to be considering this.

“If I let you out of the cell,” he says. “You have to promise that you’ll hear me out. You’re right that we can’t hold you here against your will—”

“Because it would be wrong,” Billy says.

“Absolutely!” Laurent says. “One hundred percent wrong. But if I let you out, you must give me your word that you will hear what I have to say. We believe that you are in great danger, and we believe that the Right-Hand Path is the organization that can best protect you from that danger.”

“Check,” Billy says. “You got my word.”

“Okay,” Laurent says. He turns and hollers into the darkness: “Barry! Keys!”

Billy can hear the shuffle of someone’s approach, and the janitorial clinking of keys. He squints into the darkness, then starts back when he lays eyes on the massive lumbering form of Gorbok the Mad. Hulking, broad, heavy-browed: a scary square ton of man. On the show he wears a kind of elaborate leather diaper and has a terrifying serpent tattooed across his face. In real life, Billy sees now, he’s wearing a broad violet button-down shirt and a rather stylish porkpie hat. He still has the serpent facial tattoo though.
Maybe this is what happens to you, if you get a tattoo on your face
, Billy thinks. Once you’ve pushed yourself out of polite society, beyond the point where you could still get a job at, say, Whole Foods. You end up having to work for the occult underground. “Hi,” says Barry, his voice high-pitched and soft. “I’m Barry.”

“I’m Billy,” says Billy. He wonders for a second whether Barry was someone else, once upon a time, someone whose former
identity got compromised.
Note to self
, Billy thinks,
don’t let identity get compromised
. Or is it already too late?

“I know who you are,” says Barry, and he opens the door.

“Let’s walk,” says Laurent, clasping his hands behind him. “Could you hit the lights, Barry?”

“Sure,” says Barry, slouching off into the darkness again.

Billy steps out of the cage, enjoys a brief shiver of relief, and then instantly remembers that he never took a piss. He looks lingeringly back at the sink/toilet combination unit until he’s interrupted by the loud
chung
of an industrial breaker being thrown. Banks of heavy overhead lights begin to stutter on. Billy marvels briefly at the size of the space. It’s only about half the size of a suburban supermarket, but to someone like Billy, who spends most of his time in a cramped kitchen with Anil, anything larger than a squash court qualifies as cavernous.

Laurent starts off, and Billy hurries to catch up. The two of them move through a gangway lined densely on both sides with film production equipment: cameras on dollies, complicated rigs of theatrical lighting. Billy has to be careful to not snare his ankles on the big bundles of cables that run through the gangway like fat river snakes.

Laurent is talking. “As you correctly discerned, this is where we produce
Argentium Astrum
. It’s our first foray into televisual cultural production, and we’re very pleased with the results, very pleased.”

“It’s a … good show?” Billy says. He’s a little at sea in this conversation, but he means the praise honestly. “I gotta tell you, though, the last couple of times I tried to watch it, it just kind of degenerated into, like, weird symbols and blocks of color and stuff.”

“Yes!” Laurent says. They’re crossing in front of the main set now, a hemispherical mock-up of an open-plan police station. Billy recognizes all the different desks in their familiar arrangement; he enjoys a little fanboyish frisson which distracts him, for a moment, from the oddity of Laurent’s answer.

“Yes?” Billy says, finally.

“Yes,” Laurent confirms. He turns and grips Billy’s deltoid muscle in a way that is probably designed to generate a pleasant fellow feeling, although in actuality all it does is make Billy want to squirm free. “See, Billy, one of the things we do here is we maintain a device we call the Board. The Board provides us with a very large, very thorough listing of people who have some degree of supernatural
attention
circulating around them. Persons who are, for one reason or another,
of interest
to figures in the occult community.”

“So, what, it’s like a magical No Fly List?”

“Ha ha!” Laurent barks. “Very good, Billy, very good.” He wipes at the corner of his eye with a finger. “But, no, not like that. Our use of the Board is benign. Our intentions are not to
interfere
but rather simply to monitor, to observe. A sort of process of
keeping tabs on
.”

“Okay,” Billy says, tentatively.

“Needless to say,” Laurent continues, “you are on the Board.”

“I am?”

“You are. You have been on the Board for some time now. Many years.”

“But why?” Billy says.

The tiny crease in Laurent’s forehead appears again. “I don’t know,” he says. “The Board only indicates that someone with some degree of magical power has taken an interest in you. It doesn’t indicate who, or why.”

“Huh,” says Billy.

“What the Board
does
indicate is when attention begins to shift,” Laurent continues. “When someone begins to attract a lot more attention than they’d attracted in the past, they kind of light up on the Board. And two weeks ago you started to light up, quite dramatically.”

Laurent releases Billy’s shoulder. Billy rubs at it, absently.

“We were fortunate,” Laurent says, “in that, at that time, we already knew a few things about you. We knew, for instance, that you were already a consumer of some of our programming, specifically
Argentium Astrum
here.”

Laurent gestures around the set. He concludes the gesture by clamping both hands on the back of one of the fancy office chairs and kind of inspecting the mesh with his fingers.

“Why don’t you have a seat?” he asks Billy. “Take a load off, as they say?”

“Uh, sure,” Billy says. He’s a little disturbed that Laurent somehow knew that he was watching the show. He wonders what else from his search history is known to these dudes. He remembers looking at porn the other night, remembers the names of the sites he visited: ultimately they are not units of language that he would prefer to be publicly associated with. He settles into the chair that on the show belongs to Detective Greco, the pallid cop with the haunted look, the one whose wife is lost in some kind of shadowy nether dimension. Billy notices that Laurent has his hands on the chair that belongs to Chief Boudreaux, the show’s gruff but lovable patriarch.

“So,” Laurent says, his fingers digging rhythmically into mesh, “we waited for you to log in and watch the show, and when you did, you opened an attention conduit, which we were able to use to probe you.”

“You probed me?” Billy says.

“Yes,” Laurent says.

“You probed me with the Internet?” Billy says.

“No,” Laurent says. “We used magic. The Internet isn’t the important part, you see, Billy. The important part is that we had your attention. That’s what Cultural Production—my department!—is all about. People who are on the Board tend to have somewhat … predictable tastes. We generate content that strives to appeal to those tastes. When
your
attention is on
our
content it opens up a conduit that we can use for certain ends. Including, well, probing.”

“Wait, though, you
probed
me?”

“Think of it as a diagnostic. We were able to run some checks on you, basic, very basic. We were able to establish that we weren’t dealing with a possession scenario or a black curse. Once we ruled those things out we decided that it was important to meet you in person, see if we could figure out exactly what was going on with your position on the Board. You presented us with quite an opportunity, Billy, quite an opportunity. We needed to—branch out. To diversify! To create something, or at least the appearance of something, with a little bit more literary flair. Think of it as our way of trying to get to know you a little better.”

“
The Ingot
. The reading,” Billy says.

“Correct,” Laurent says. He taps his nose once, mirthfully. Something begins to curdle within Billy.

“So
The Ingot
doesn’t exist?”

Laurent shrugs. “It exists as much as any literary magazine that hasn’t brought an issue to press can be said to exist. You could approach it as a philosophical question, very philosophical.”

“So the reading? You set that up to—lure me in?”

“To observe you,” Laurent says. “We didn’t realize, though, that the supernatural attention around you was approaching a
major spike. A Category Six Adversarial Manifestation? That’s just … that’s just off the charts, really.”

“So you didn’t invite me because you thought I was a good writer? Because you were … a believer? In my work?”

“Billy,” Laurent says. “I’m sure your work is fine. But clearly there are more important things operating at the moment than your respective level of talent or lack thereof.”

“So, wait,” Billy says. He clenches his eyes shut and presses on them with his fingers. “You’re telling me you didn’t even
read
my work?”

“Not read as such,” Laurent says. “No.”

Billy can feel the little badge of honor, the one he affixed over his heart last night, being pried away. It hurts. Even on top of everything else, that still manages to hurt.

“Well,” he says, “at least you’re honest.”
Only not really very honest
, he thinks to himself, and at that moment he makes up his mind to go. He has a life that needs fixing.

“I want my stuff,” he says.

“I can’t do that,” Laurent says.

“You can.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We threw it away.”

“You threw it—? Where? Here?”

“Not here,” Laurent says. “You have to understand that it would be foolish to retain those materials here, on-site. Their presence would—”