Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“And St. Peter is like, Yeah, didn’t you know? Shoes have souls .”

He can hear Lucifer give a single great haw , but other than that, the room is silent.

I suck , Billy thinks. Everyone knows that I suck . Denver, Anton Cirrus, Elisa, Laurent, the fucking bartender, everyone. He tries to come up with something else to say. He can only think of one other joke, about two people who get frozen to death outside of a whorehouse, and he’s not telling that one.

Okay , he thinks. You may be a fuck-up, but you don’t have to be a coward. You can tell the story. Don’t be scared of the Devil. He can’t hurt you .

He has no idea how he reaches that conclusion, but he’s surprised to find that it feels true.

“But seriously,” he says. “I want to tell you a different story. I want to tell you the one about the Devil. It just started yesterday, so I didn’t have time to write it down. In fact, it’s still going on, right now.”

He takes a step toward the edge of the stage and points down at Lucifer. Lucifer regards him. His face still holds a laugh formation, left over from the joke, but his eyes are mirthless, flat.

“You see this guy?” Billy says. “Yesterday morning, I woke up, and this guy was in my apartment.”

“Adversarial Manifestation!” someone in the audience shouts. Billy and Lucifer turn toward the source. A bearded dude, somebody Billy’s never seen before, a few tables away. “Adversarial Manifestation!” dude shouts again, rising from his chair, pointing.

Billy’s a little dismayed to be interrupted by what appears to be a crazy person, but at least some of the room’s attention is off of him. There’s a commotion back at the bar, and someone — a heavyset guy in a tight black T-shirt, probably the bouncer — begins parting the crowd and moving toward the front. Billy assumes the plan is to eject the crazy guy, who is now shouting “Adversarial Manifestation” a third time, practically frothing, but the bouncer moves past that guy and instead stands across from Lucifer, staring him down.

“What?” Lucifer says. He raises his stout. “I’m just here to have a drink and to catch some contemporary fiction and poetry.”

The bouncer raises something, aims it at Lucifer, and fires. Lucifer jolts, loses his drink, flails wildly out of his seat, hits the floor. The audience rears back from this. Billy suddenly fears that he’s about to witness a stampede. That people could be killed. It would, he realizes, be his fault.

“Lock it down,” bellows someone nearby. “We have a Category Six situation here. Repeat: Category Six.”

Category Six? Billy doesn’t know what that is, but the words have no immediate effect on the crowd, which is surging away from Lucifer’s convulsing form. He peers out, tries to catch sight of Denver, but she’s lost in the tumult. He looks down at the microphone, still in his hand. He still has the potential to speak to the crowd, to calm them, to direct them usefully. All he needs is to apply his kick-ass rhetorical skills. Does he actually have those?

He holds the mic close to his mouth.

“Audience,” he says. “Listen, audience.”

And then there’s a twinge in his back, and suddenly everything in his body goes rigid as something horrible rips through his nervous system. Like some barbed white demon coming alive within him. He would think Oh my God I’m dying except he can’t think anything at all; his mind is like a jagged pattern of flashing triangles. It lasts only for a second. A very, very long second. And then he’s on the floor.

He blurts out a syllable that is not kick-ass rhetoric. It is not even recognizable language. It is the kind of sound you might make if you were shitting your pants, which Billy is thankfully not doing. He doesn’t have the mic anymore. Someone is screaming. He hopes it isn’t anyone he loves. Before he has time to figure anything out someone clamps something foul-smelling over his mouth and nose and the world blurs. It’s all going away , Billy thinks as everything swims into darkness, someone please help . But no one does.

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Some little part of Billy’s consciousness wakes up, probes around tentatively, and learns that it hurts. Head, face, arms, legs, hands, feet: every part reports in with the same message: This sucks .

Some higher-order function comes back on board and tries to figure out why he hurts.

Someone Tased me , he thinks.

All at once he’s not certain he’s safe. He yanks himself the rest of the way awake and lifts his head to get a look around. Inflamed muscles seize in protest and Billy lets out a low moan.

He’s in a jail cell.

Well , Billy thinks, this can’t be good , although actually? He can think of ways in which it could be worse.

He lets his head drop back to the plastic pillow. The crinkling vinyl sounds incredibly loud, painful. He stares up into the dull fluorescent disk set in the ceiling for a long time, letting his body throb. Maybe if he waits long enough somebody will come along to give him some instruction, let him know exactly what he’s supposed to do next. Isn’t that supposed to be the silver lining to being in prison? You don’t have to make your own decisions?

He pulls himself to a sitting position and he resists the impulse to just drop his head into his hands and leave it there for maybe the rest of his life. Instead he does a quick survey of the cell. Not really much to see. The bunk that he’s sitting on. At the opposite end of the cell is an apparatus consisting of two metal bowls attached to a single central column; he guesses that one bowl is a sink and the other a toilet. He has to take a piss but right now getting up and walking three feet exceeds the range of his ambition. There’s also a lightweight chair stamped out of one contiguous piece of plastic and a slab extruding from the wall which could maybe be used as a desk.

The other wall has a door set into it, prison bars in the classic style. Beyond them is darkness. Billy wonders briefly why the cell is lit but not the hallway, but, with no answer forthcoming, he lets the question go.

Aside from his shoes, which are missing, he’s still in the clothes he wore to the reading. A quick pat-down, however, reveals that everything in his pockets is gone. Phone, wallet, keys. Fuck , he thinks. He realizes, distantly, that he was supposed to be at work this morning. He’s not sure what time it is or if he still has a chance to save his job, but if he’s late, he can’t call in with some excuse. He can’t call Anil to get him to cover for him.

Anil. It occurs to Billy suddenly that he doesn’t know where Anil is or whether he’s safe. Billy knows nothing about anything that happened after the Tasing. For all he knows, Anil, the Ghoul, Denver, Elisa, they could all be trampled to death.

Okay , Billy thinks. That kind of thinking? Not helpful .

It’s your fault if it’s true , he thinks. Everyone was there because of you .

One thing at a time. He looks under the bunk and finds his shoes there. They still have laces in them, interesting. So he could at least still kill himself. Not really his number one choice at the moment but it feels good to at least have an option, any option. He looks around, briefly, for a beam he could hang himself from, finds nothing. But still. He feels certain he could make his laces into some kind of noose if he tried hard enough. He looks at the shoes in his lap, mentally unlaces them, tries out patterns of knots in his head, and eventually realizes he has absolutely no idea how he’d go about using his shoelaces to kill himself. He wishes, for a moment, that he had access to the Internet.