Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“Four?” Billy says. His stoned brain tries to calculate a percentage. “That’s a lot,” is what he ends up with.

“The remaining two are — challenging,” Lucifer says. “They may thwart him. They will, at the very least, slow him down.”

“Slow him down?” Billy says. “Can’t you — stop him?” A pleading note that he isn’t entirely fond of has entered his voice.

“I intend to stop him.”

Billy feels a surge of hope. “You’re going to save the world,” he says.

“There are challenges involved. Ollard knows that I seek the return of the Neko, and he has prepared accordingly. He has thrice-warded the tower against me. I can’t enter it. I can’t get within five hundred feet of it.”

“So—” Billy says. And then he stops. He does not plan to be the one who completes this thought.

“So that’s where I need you,” says Lucifer. He clicks again and a picture of Billy comes up. It’s from earlier that night: Billy standing on the subway platform, with Lucifer’s business card in his hand. Billy jumps a little in his chair, seeing this.

“William Harrison Ridgeway,” Lucifer intones. “I task you with this objective. Enter Timothy Ollard’s tower, retrieve the Neko, and return it to me. At the completion of this objective you will be rewarded. The challenges involved will be minimal.”

“Minimal?” Billy says. “The most powerful warlock in the eastern United States, and the challenges will be minimal ? He’s powerful enough to make an ugly tower invisible to eight million New Yorkers? Powerful enough to steal some dealie from out of Hell and do the thrice-ward thing you were talking about? If he can fuck with you then what’s going to stop him from hitting me with a lightning bolt or — you know,” he churns the air with his hands, “killing me in some other wizardly way?”

“Well, he’s not a wizard,” Lucifer says. “He’s a warlock.”

“Yeah,” Billy says, “but the important part is the Me Getting Killed part.”

“He won’t kill you. Ollard has warding powers, but I have ones of my own. I can ward you against him.”

“That would work?”

“It will work,” Lucifer says.

This is crazy , Billy thinks. He does not think about what it would be like to get his book published. He does not think about reconciling with Denver. He thinks This is a good way to die .

“Billy,” Lucifer says. “I care about this world. I do not wish to see it come to harm. I need your help.”

“Man,” Billy says. “Aren’t you supposed to be evil ? Why aren’t you asking me to do some evil shit that I could say no to? Why do you care about the world anyway?”

Lucifer looks at Billy for a long second.

“You know what I do?” he says, finally. “I tempt people. I’ve done it for a long time. I like it. I’m good at it. And if the world goes away there will be no people left to tempt. There will be cinders and there will be ash. And looking at cinders and ash for the rest of eternity strikes me, frankly, as no fun at all.”

“I have to think about it,” Billy says.

Lucifer looks at his watch. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. How long do we have?”

“Maybe a week,” Lucifer says, after taking a moment to pause for some kind of calculation.

“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I had a long day. I’m tired and I’m high and even if I weren’t it’d still be a good idea to sleep on it.”

Lucifer watches Billy’s face, reading something in it, then says, “As you wish.”

“Let me do the reading, get that over with, and then after the reading I’ll have a decision for you.”

“After the reading,” Lucifer says.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “But I don’t necessarily mean the second I step down off the stage . I mean, like, a while after.”

“I am reasonable,” says Lucifer. “I agree to these terms.” He closes the laptop and stuffs it back in his messenger bag, swaps it for a manila folder. “I’ll leave you with these for your review.”

Billy takes the folder. Inside is a printout of all the PowerPoint slides. “Uh, thanks,” says Billy.

“Until after the reading,” Lucifer says. As he turns to go, something nags at Billy, some question that Anil raised.

“Hey, wait a second,” Billy says, remembering.

Lucifer, half out the door, pauses.

“What about God?” Billy says.

Lucifer frowns.

“I mean, if I believe in you — the Devil — then it reasonably follows that I should believe in God. But I don’t know if I believe in God, not really. So — I don’t know — I just thought I’d ask you, like, is there a God? ”

Lucifer looks at Billy.

“Don’t talk to me about God,” he says, and then he’s gone.

Billy stands there, at the doorway, for a long time. He latches the chain. He tries to get back to having the feeling he had this morning, the victorious feeling he had at having turned the Devil away the first time. But it’s not working. He no longer feels like turning the Devil down is proof that he’s not a fuck-up. This time, with the fate of the goddamn world hanging in the balance, he only feels like a coward.

Why me? he wonders. Why put this on me? There are people out there who infiltrate places for a fucking living. Navy SEALs. CIA spooks. Fuck, send a UPS guy; he could at least get Ollard to open the door .

It’s because you’re desperate , he thinks. The only person desperate enough to say yes .

But that can’t be it. There are plenty of desperate people. He lives in New York; he sees buttloads of human desperation every time he goes out to get a coffee. So why him?

Eventually, Billy convinces himself that it doesn’t have to be him at all. I might be desperate, but I’m not a dumbass , he tells himself. Lucifer will ask someone else, someone braver. Someone stupider. Someone more morally corrupt .

Or maybe more morally prepared? Billy tries to picture saintlike people, risking their lives in the scary tower for the good of all humanity. He envisions Martin Luther King Jr., back from the dead, kicking open the door. An Uzi in his hands, spitting out fire.

Okay , he thinks, jarred out of his reverie by this image. Let’s think about something else . And he does. He checks the phone again to make sure Denver hasn’t called. He ravages the cupboards for a dinner, ends up eating two bags of Mixed Berry Fruity Snacks and a half-dozen fistfuls of oyster crackers. He washes each fistful down with a slug of Jørgen’s Scotch.

He gets online. The tab for dog is still open in Wikipedia. For a minute, he stares glassily at this sentence: “The domestic dog ( Canis lupus familiaris ) is a subspecies of the gray wolf ( Canis lupus ), a member of the Canidae family of the mammalian order Carnivora.” Eventually, against his better judgment, he clicks over to Bladed Hyacinth and rereads the pan of his work. His stomach sinks in the exact same way it did when he read it the first time. I’ve wasted my life , he thinks. The world is going to end and all I’m going to be is a guy who sucks .

Not necessarily , he thinks. Just walk into the horrible tower and get the stupid cat and give it to Satan and everything could be different. You could get your book published. You could save the world .

To this, he thinks both Yeah right and No way so closely together that he can’t discern which one comes first.

So be it. He envisions the Neko, its little paw oscillating. Not beckoning, but waving goodbye. Waving goodbye forever. To him, to the world and all its combustible matter, to everything and everyone.