Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“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.