Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

Lucifer downs the last of his coffee, and then reaches into the inside pocket of his peacoat and draws out a cigar tube.

“Here,” Lucifer says, unscrewing the end of the tube. He draws out the cigar and steers it firmly into Billy’s mouth. Billy sputters a bit around it, pulls it out and weighs it in his hand. It’s hefty, like something a billionaire might light with a bundle of money. It has no band or other identifying mark.

“You’ll want to smoke that,” Lucifer says, rising, using the edge of his hand to smooth the front of his shirt.

“What, why?” Billy says, looking from the cigar to Lucifer and back again.

“The ward requires a variety of herbs and other assorted components to be transmuted by fire, the ceremonial smoke entering the body of the individual to be warded. The traditional swinging thurible is a little conspicuous, as I’m sure you’d agree.”

“A giant cigar is conspicuous. It’s illegal for me to smoke that in a restaurant; maybe you didn’t get the memo.”

“This place has a back room we can use,” Lucifer says. “That’s part of why I wanted to come here.” He drops some bills on the table and calls to the proprietor: “Hadadj! Back room?”

“For you,” the lean man replies drily from the front counter, “anything.” He is punching numbers into a calculator. He does not look up.

“Follow me,” Lucifer says to Billy. Billy pushes himself off the ottoman clumsily and follows Lucifer through a beaded curtain. They pass the restrooms and open a door bearing an EMPLOYEES ONLY placard. Behind it is a small, harshly-lit office almost entirely taken up by a steel desk and a filing cabinet, both of which are obscured under the burden of slumping piles of three-ringed notebooks. A portly man wearing a gold chain and white earbuds sits at the desk, leafing through what appears to be a catalog of men’s shoes. He looks up at Lucifer and glares with contempt and distaste. Lucifer ignores him, doesn’t even spare him a look, and instead crosses the room and opens another door.

Billy follows briskly. The back room is a cramped, dim space, smelling strongly of lentils. Two overstuffed recliners marred with what Billy hopes are soup spillages squat on a dingy Persian rug, with an elaborate brass hookah placed between them. The chairs face a flat-screen TV, which has a stack of Algerian-market VHS cassettes and Xbox games heaped in front of it like an offering. Lucifer takes up one of the hoses from the hookah, sniffs it, makes an assessing face, and then replaces it.

“Sit,” Lucifer says. Billy sits, the cigar still in his hand. Lucifer takes the cigar, lops one end off it with a handheld cutter that he’s produced from somewhere, and directs it back into Billy’s mouth, whereupon Billy promptly takes it out again.

“I still haven’t said that I’m doing this,” Billy says.

“I understand,” Lucifer says. “Nonetheless, I see no reason to postpone your preparation. It is my sincerest belief that once the pieces are all in place you will act with no further hesitation. Regardless, it is probably a good idea for you to receive the ward: now that more people know that you and I are … affiliated, word may get to Ollard before too long, which will put you at risk, risk that this ward will mitigate.”

“Affiliated?” Billy says. “We’re not affiliated.”

“Shall we commence?” Lucifer says.

He points at the cigar with a tiny, steel lighter which has somehow surreptitiously replaced his handheld cutter, and then he points the lighter at his own face, encouraging Billy to mirror the gesture by lifting the cigar to his mouth. Which he does.

“Very good,” says Lucifer, in a tone one might use to speak to a dog. He leans in and presses a button on the lighter, which emits a blue flame with no perceptible sound. Billy awkwardly angles the cigar into the flame, and takes a long pull, which immediately dispels whatever goodwill toward the world the lamb crepes and coffee had helped him to muster.

“Oh,” Billy says, a huge cloud of rank smoke rolling out of his mouth. “That’s bad.”

“My apologies,” says Lucifer.

“It’s like smoking compost.”

Lucifer regards him.

“It’s like smoking compost through a raccoon,” Billy says. He sticks out his tongue, scrapes it against his upper row of teeth in an attempt to scour off the dank, fungal taste. “It’s like you put a fur-lined shit in my mouth.”

“It will keep you alive,” Lucifer says.

And with that, he struggles his way through the rest of the cigar. He doesn’t feel like a billionaire. He doesn’t feel like some badass toughening up before a combat mission. He feels like a kid who got caught smoking a cigarette and was forced to finish the whole pack. The decorative pattern in the rug begins to swim and waver disorientingly. Billy stares through watering eyes behind the TV at a poster that he hadn’t noticed when they first came in, depicting the full roster of the New York Mets. Their faces appear sallow, dead-eyed, cheerless. Billy blinks repeatedly, as though if he exerts enough willpower he can make them resolve instead into happy Yankees. Another long suck on the cigar and some violet form begins to bloom in his head, like ink blossoming in water. He hears a voice, distant, drowned in buzzing, as though reaching him only through a thick curtain of flies: he turns his head and sees Lucifer talking on the phone, saying words, words that sound somehow familiar, that Billy feels like he should be able to parse. After a minute of turning them over in his mind, Billy manages to make the syllables resolve into an address, the address of the tower, in Chelsea.

“I’ve arranged for a cab,” Lucifer says to Billy, placing the phone back in his pocket. The words wind their way through Billy’s consciousness, only slowly, fighting through the thicket of noise. Less flies now. More like the massed baying of wolves.

Before Billy’s head fully clears, Lucifer has marched him out of the tiny room, back through the office and corridor and restaurant, past Hadadj and out onto the street again. The cab arrives and Lucifer pops the door open, steers Billy into the seat.

“Just — wait — just do me one thing,” Billy says groggily. “You can change my mind about stuff, right? You can — what was it you said? — simple binary beliefs? You can change those?”

“I can,” Lucifer says, looking down at him.

“Well — can you — can you just change it so that I think that I’m making the right decision here? I’d really feel a lot better going into this if I knew I wasn’t — fucking up.”

“I don’t think you’re a fuck-up, Billy,” Lucifer says, with what sounds like real sincerity.

“No?” Billy says.

“No,” Lucifer says. “So rather than inscribe more beliefs into your tender brain, I want to simply urge you to stop second-guessing yourself, for once. If you look at your life, you’ll see that it’s never been your decisions that have pointed you in the wrong direction, but rather your resistance to your decisions. Every time. So: Trust yourself. And watch your fingers.”

And with that, Lucifer slams the door, and thumps a palm on the trunk of the cab, and Billy’s off, headed toward Chelsea.

Billy spends the ride looking out the window and mulling over what the Devil said. It’s never been your decisions, but your resistance to your decisions? It had a sort of horoscopy applicability that made it ring true at first, but the more Billy subjects it to careful scrutiny, the less he thinks it actually makes sense.

Stop second-guessing! says the part of him that really wants to latch on to the Devil’s diagnosis.

But that’s just it , says the more rational part of him. Wasn’t your first instinct to just say no to the Devil? So agreeing, today : that would be the part where you’re second-guessing yourself. And that would make this batch of reservations technically third-guessing. The Devil didn’t say don’t third-guess yourself .