Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

Something else , he tells himself. Think about something else .

Back to the computer. He Googles Elisa Mastic, tomorrow night’s poet, reads one of her poems online. It might be good, but it’s poetry, so he can’t really tell. He kind of likes the line about the “deleted world,” but that gets him thinking once again about fire destroying everything.

He looks at some porn. He must be depressed, because tits don’t seem sexy. He considers for a moment the horrible prospect that whether he likes tits is contingent upon some light switch in his head that could be flipped off.

Okay, if not porn, then narrative. Maybe he can catch up on Argentium Astrum , although he’s not entirely sure he’s going to enjoy its particular brand of supernatural mystery now that there’s so much goddamn supernatural mystery jammed into his everyday life.

He loads the page; there are three episodes he hasn’t seen. He clicks one and the opening sequence begins to stream as normal — the familiar sheriff’s badge rises, gleaming, from inky, mist-shrouded depths — but then the stream glitches again. First there are a bunch of jittering bars, then a quick flash of what looks like a block of random numerals, then the bars again, and then the little video window just crashes into a block of solid blue. Then it changes to red. Then blue again. Then green. Then a black field with six white dots in it. Then back to blue. The effect is kind of mesmerizing and calming and he watches it for almost four minutes before he snaps out of it.

Okay. If not porn, if not narrative, then bed. And if not bed, then the couch.

And as he lies there on the couch, twisting uncomfortably, he thinks back, remembering the kitchen accident all those years ago, the guy he saw who was on fire. It happened back when he was dishwashing at a crappy family restaurant called the Fairlane, back in Ohio. Something had gone wrong with the Fairlane’s rangetops and the owner had tried to save a couple of bucks by calling his uncertified handyman brother in to fix the thing. Billy remembers that guy on his back, visible only as a belly and legs while the rest of his body banged around clumsily inside the half-disassembled stove with a ball-peen hammer in his hand.

Billy can’t remember the guy’s name but he remembers the fireball that suddenly erupted from under the thing, ignited by an errant spark or by the pilot light from the neighboring rangetop, and he remembers the brother yanking himself out of the blast with his whole head on fire. He remembers what that looked like. What it smelled like. And he thinks about something like that happening to everything in the world. All the people. All the books. All the Brazillian cockroaches, and all the bananas; all the dogs, all the wolves. And then he’s asleep.

A PHONE IS NOT LIKE A BANANA LEADING THE BACKLASH • TRAVELING BOOK HUNTERS • THE WHOLE POINT OF A CLOAK • SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING • LOOKING HOMELESS • COWARD = ICE • FLAUBERT • CAFFEINE, MEAT, AND REVENGE • WHAT STORYTELLERS DO • TO THOUGHTLESSNESS

He wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. It’s Denver , he thinks. Hope muscles him around, pulls him up into action. He slept on the couch last night, though, and so he opens his eyes expecting Loft and instead sees Living Room. There’s a disorienting second during which he can’t quite figure out which way his head is pointing. Maybe it’s just leftover fug from last night’s high, but for that second, the apartment seems like some Escher structure he can’t orient himself within. God only knows where the phone is.

It buzzes again. Billy makes a valiant go of getting to his feet, but he’s slept with one leg jammed underneath himself, and that leg has gone completely numb, useless, transformed from trusty appendage to strange tube packed full of cast-off meats, like a long sack of dog food stuck to his body. He tries to stand and instead he crumples down to the floor, banging his knee on the coffee table’s remorseless edge. “Son of a bitch,” he says.

The phone buzzes again. Billy kneads his fist vigorously into his inert calf while using his other hand to grope around on the coffee table, knocking a pile of mail onto the floor but not coming upon anything that resembles the phone’s familiar shape.

“Damn it,” Billy cries. He’s blowing his chance. He feels like if he talked to Denver, even just for a second, he’d be able to say the right thing: the thing that would be convincing, that would show her that he can be the man that he presumes she wants him to be. Caring, compassionate, competent, whatever.

He finally finds the phone nine minutes later. It’s in the fruit bowl in the kitchen, nestled in the curvature of the bruised banana he brought home two nights ago. Present Moment Billy looks back at Past Billy with bafflement and contempt. Past Billy, thus roused, offers a thin explanation as to why it was a good idea to stick the phone there last night, something about the vaguely satisfying correspondence between the shape of the banana and the shape of the phone. And Present Moment Billy experiences a sudden, acute awareness regarding how he must appear to other people. His puzzlement, his dreaminess, his hapless wonder: How fucking contemptible. It’s no wonder Denver is done with him. He’d be done with him, too.

The phone’s tiny screen, upon inspection, reveals that it wasn’t even Denver who called. It was his dad again. Billy frowns at this: twice in one week is a little odd. It’s not in Keith Ridgeway’s character to press a book on Billy twice. That’s not the way it works between them. Usually when he mentions a book in a voice mail that seems to be enough for him to be able to pretend that Billy will track it down and read it, which means that the book simply never comes up again between them. So a second call from his dad means either that he’s pushing two separate books or that something else is going on. I should call him , Billy thinks. But not today. Today he has shit to do.

He looks out the window, checks that Brooklyn is not on fire. It seems no more in danger of being on fire than it did yesterday, or the day before that. Some tension he’s carried since last night, located somewhere behind his sternum, releases. Someone else is solving the problem. He feels certain of it.

Having freed himself from obligation, he makes some more of the Devil’s coffee and eats the spotted banana. He pulls out the big accordion file which contains his recent fiction and starts looking for something that he could read tonight at Barometer. Something good. Something epiphany-level good : something that will make the audience sit up and say Hey, this doesn’t come from the ravaged storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Maybe Anton Cirrus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s not so smart after all. Maybe he’s just an asshole . People are getting weary of the controlling grip that Bladed Hyacinth has on the literary scene, Billy tells himself, surely they are. Every two-bit tastemaker is eventually felled by a backlash. Billy could be the one to lead that backlash. That could be his Role in the Scene. All he needs to do is find the piece in the file that is so good that it will eliminate all doubt about his talent.

Except there’s nothing like that in the file. He flips through five years of recent output and all he can think is I have wasted my life . Moving to Brooklyn, with this intention of making his way as a writer: how stupid. He could have done something else. Sometimes he thinks he would have been happiest as a parking lot attendant or a night watchman, something where he would have spent most of his time alone, in a chair, quietly slacking, reading on the job. That might not have been so terrible.