Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

He waits for his vision to clear. Waits for the world to come back. But nothing. Everything stays white.

Oh shit , he thinks. I’ve gone blind .

Except he hasn’t gone blind. He looks down and he sees his hands, his torso, his legs. But there’s nothing beneath his feet. No Ohio mud. Nothing. Whiteness. He suddenly has to fight back the sense that he’s not standing, but falling, plummeting through empty space. He looks around, helplessly hoping to find a point he can use to orient himself, but there’s nothing.

He clenches his eyes shut and waits there in self-imposed darkness for a second, until the wave of rising nausea passes. A vast silence roars around him.

Eyes still closed, he drops into a crouch, reaches down, touches whatever it is that is supporting his feet, reaffirms the presence of resistance. So, okay, there’s that at least.

He slowly rises to standing again, opens his eyes, lets the whiteness rush in. He turns a full circle, hoping to find something behind him, but there’s just more nothing. He would have thought, when he woke up this morning, that nothingness was not really a thing that could be meaningfully modified with terms like more or less , but there behind him is definitely more nothingness , definitely, in fact, too much nothingness . It’s like he’s mainlining pure oppression directly into his eyeballs. It’s like all his senses are being smothered to death under a pillow.

And it is then that Billy thinks, with a sickening jolt: Oh, shit. I’m not blind. I’m dead .

No , he tells himself. No. I can’t be dead .

Why not? You could die. People do die. Why not you? This could be Hell. The Devil killed you and sent you to Hell .

Is this Hell? This combination: consciousness plus nothingness? It’s not what he imagined but he feels certain that remaining in this place, alone, will cause him to suffer, as surely as if he were writhing within a lake of fire.

He pats down his pockets, finds the loose change from the Americano, and throws it out into the void, hoping that just seeing something, anything, will help to quell the panic. The coins fall in the arc dictated by Newtonian physics, bounce, scatter out, help to define a plane that Billy can think of as the ground . It’s not much but it helps to orient him a little bit.

He sits and thinks. There has to be a way out of this.

After a few moments pass, his thoughts turn instead to Denver. He allows himself to regret the fact that he died with Denver thinking that he was a flake. A cheating flake. An asshole. A cheating flake asshole. He wishes he could have proven to her that he could be a person who was, what was it, fully present . He won’t be getting any more present now, that’s for sure.

He takes a moment to try to envision what his funeral will be like, tries to work up a gratifying image of his friends, griefstricken at his graveside, rending their garments and such. But all he can envision is them at the table at Barometer last night, all together, laughing, having a good time, without him.

Fuck.

He wonders how long it will be before he goes insane. He gives himself maybe an hour.

No , he thinks, closing his eyes again to block out the nothingness. It doesn’t make sense. The Devil double-crossed you for some reason. And that reason wasn’t to kill you. He talked about a plan. He talked about a Phase Two .

A Phase Two is at least something, not nothing, and as such Billy clutches at it with hope.

A Phase Two might not, of course, be anything good.

He recounts the one thing he knows. The older ward — wherever it came from, whoever put it on him — protected him against the Devil, and now it’s gone. The Devil expended some effort — some trickery —to get it dispelled. That must mean the Devil intends to harm him. To modify him. To modify him without consent . That just sounds bad. He wonders whether he’s just going to have his free will sluiced away, be turned into some kind of foot soldier for Satan.

So, okay, he doesn’t want to get modified, he can pretty much take that as a given. The solution is: run away. Get to safety. But he really has no idea where safety might be, or if any spot in the blank expanse is different from any other. Does it even make sense to run?

It may not make sense, he decides, but at least it’s a course of action. He’s trying to think of himself as a Man of Action today.

He wonders if there’s still any chance that he’s going to get a book published at the end of all this.

He opens his eyes. Whiteness, check. He climbs to his feet. He takes a tentative step forward. And then another.

He turns around to see if the coins are still there. If the coins are still there he can at least feel confident that he can find his way back to where he started, if for some reason he needs to.

The coins are still there. There’s also a door there. It’s an ordinary-looking door, beige, free of adornment, set in a frame. It wasn’t there a minute ago.

Well , he thinks. He’s pretty sure that the implicit suggestion here is for him to go ahead and go through the door. He’s also pretty sure that doing that will mean that he is playing right into Lucifer’s, whatever, clutches.

This is what Lucifer does , he thinks, turning away from the door. He tempts people. And when you have nothing, what’s more tempting than something?

He chooses a random direction and marches off, into the void. He goes for less than a minute before being seized with a certainty that the door is no longer behind him, that by spurning it he’s lost his chance. He whirls to look, terror clawing at the base of his brain. The door, mercifully, is still there.

Fine , he thinks. Let’s get this over with . He advances to the door, puts his hand on the knob, and finds it cool to the touch — this goes a little way toward allaying his unvoiced suspicion that on the other side of the door he’ll find nothing but hellfire.

He turns the knob and the door opens onto a corridor, a corridor within what appears to be a moderately-priced chain hotel.

He steps through, scopes out the scene. The walls are some noncolor, some color positioned midway between peach and beige, a color chosen by a decorator for whom the choice of either peach or beige would have been just too bold. There are doors on both sides, with the usual numerical placards. Room 2001 on the left and 2002 on the right. So Billy’s either on the second floor or the twentieth floor or maybe the two hundredth, for all he knows.

Well , he thinks, it could be worse .

He closes the door behind him, leaving his loose change in the void. All he has to do is find an elevator or one of those fire plan signs and he can beat it out of here. He sees no reason not to go, so he goes, off down the hall. It comes to a T end and he looks to the left and the right. More corridor. No elevator, no helpful signage. He notes that to his left the corridor terminates in some sort of open nook — a lobby, maybe? — so he heads that way. As he gets closer he sees that it’s not a lobby but rather a little institutional lounge, with a few bistro-style tables and chairs, a few sad-looking plants, and a little kitchen station: a coffee service, a Plexiglas case containing an array of baked goods.

He also notices that there’s a woman sitting at one of the tables, her back to him. Maybe she knows the way out of here.

“Hey,” Billy says, hurrying toward her. “Excuse me!”

She turns, and Billy stops where he stands. It’s Elisa Mastic, author of Sanguinities , MIA since last night’s reading. She’s not wearing makeup, and she’s in yoga pants and a Duran Duran Rio T-shirt instead of the skirt and coat that Billy remembers her in, but it’s definitely her. He also takes the time to notice that she’s not wearing a bra.