Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“So,” Billy says. “You’re still alive.” One fact at a time seems to be the order of the day here.

“I am,” Laurent says, beaming a bit. “That got a little rough last night, there, a little rough.”

“You’re telling me,” Billy says. “Who got hurt? Anybody?”

“Audience members are all okay,” Laurent says. “We had to do a bit of, what would you call it, cleanup on them, but they’re none the worse for wear. As for the readers: well, there’s you: you got a little zap, not too much fun there, but you’re okay, we’ve got you now, and that’s good. Elisa, the poet: less happy story, frankly, we lost tabs on her, but we’re guessing she’ll turn up. It’s not good for her to be off radar right now, though, not good at all. Of course, the one who took the brunt of the damage dealt out last night was the Adversarial Manifestation, can’t say he came out too well at the end of all the excitement.”

“Lucifer?” Billy asks.

“The Manifestation,” Laurent says.

“He’s dead?” Billy feels an unexpected pang of loss.

“It doesn’t exactly work that way,” Laurent says. “The Adversary isn’t alive or dead as you and I think about it. His manifestation was dispelled last night, though. And if you stick with us, he won’t be contacting you again.”

Billy frowns. He’s not sure why, but he feels bummed by this. It’s not exactly like he lost a friend, but more like he embarrassed himself in front of someone he thought might make a good contact.

He looks at Laurent. “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “I thought you were the editor of a literary magazine. But you know about all this stuff and somehow you’re involved with Argentium Astrum and—”

Suddenly it clicks. “You’re a warlock,” he says.

Laurent smiles broadly. “Yes!” he exclaims. Billy, for his part, has to restrain a sigh. He’s starting to get sick of warlocks.

“In fact,” Laurent says, “I serve as the Executive Director of Cultural Production for the Northeast Regional Office of the Right-Hand Path, an international organization of witches and warlocks.”

“Wait,” Billy says. “So — is Ollard one of you?”

“Ollard?”

“Timothy Ollard? Guy who wants to burn up the world?”

“Timothy Ollard,” Laurent says, “is someone who you should not even know about. But, to answer your question: No. He is not one of us. He is — well, he is a problem, a problem we are actively engaged with and working on. Let me put it to you this way, Billy. Ollard is a bad guy. And we’re the good guys.”

“The good guys,” Billy repeats.

“Yes!” Laurent says.

For some reason this puts Billy in mind of the Office of Homeland Security, which he actually always thought of as a group of extralegal thugs. He narrows his eyes.

“Last night,” he asks, “did you Tase me?”

Laurent glances down to the floor and presses a knuckle into his upper lip for a long second, apparently contemplating how to phrase the answer.

“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.”