Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

She recognizes him, too: he watches the surprise flood into her face, matched, he’s certain, by the surprise that’s flooding into his own.

“What are you doing here?” Billy says.

“I could ask you the same thing,” Elisa says. A pissed-off look wipes away the surprised expression. “Are you friends with that guy?”

“What guy?”

“That guy from the reading last night.”

“Wait a second — you remember that guy?”

“ Remember him? Are you kidding? He’s been stalking me for two weeks now. When you pointed him out in the audience last night I was like Oh shit, he’s here and then I went outside to figure out what the fuck I was going to do, like whether I was going to go through with the reading or just take off or — I don’t know what. And then I could hear shit just start to go crazy in there, like a brawl going down or something, and I was like Fuck this, I’m out of here . You said you knew him. That guy’s not your friend , is he?”

“No,” Billy says. “I don’t think so.”

“Good,” Elisa says, “because that guy fucking abducted me.”

His brain gives up on trying to make sense of Elisa’s appearance here, opts instead to crumple into a dull headache. He eyes the coffee station warily: he has his doubts about exactly how good this coffee will be, but he feels like his mind would benefit from some sharpening right now, so he pours himself a cup, sits down across from Elisa.

“He abducted you?” Billy repeats. He blows across the top of the coffee hopefully.

“Yeah,” Elisa says. “But I first met him like two weeks ago when he showed up in my apartment . I woke up in bed and he’s there in my bedroom . Said he had a proposition for me, wanted me to look at something on his computer or some shit.”

“What did you do?” Billy asks.

“What the fuck do you think I did?” Elisa says. “I told him to get out, and I called 911.”

“Oh,” Billy says. “Yeah. That would have been smart.”

Elisa goes on: “It scared him off. I thought. But the guy wouldn’t leave me alone. He’d disappear for a couple of days, then I’d be walking down the street on my way to pick up my mother-fucking laundry and he’d pull up alongside me in this stranger-danger van, leaning out the window, trying to convince me to get in. He kept saying that he could — that he could explain something that was going on with me. I’m like, Yeah, no thanks, I know what happens to women who get into vans with random guys . It was freaking me out — but every time I’d tell him to fuck off he’d always leave, and he’d always be like superpolite about it — which actually almost freaked me out more; I mean, if the guy is a raving psycho I at least know how to deal with that. It was almost as if he thought that I might come around eventually, decide on my own to get in the van, which I found — creepy. Like pro foundly so.”

Billy takes a sip of the coffee, swallows, and immediately hisses with reflexive, lizard-brain distaste. He notes that the longer this adventure of his goes on, the worse the coffee seems to get. That bodes poorly. He wishes he’d drunk the Americano of Evil back when he had it.

Elisa continues: “But then today — I don’t know, I can’t really explain what happened today. I was doing my yoga DVD and there’s a knock at the door — I remember looking through the peephole and seeing him — I know I didn’t open the door, I wouldn’t, there’s just no way — but then somehow he was talking to me — he must have drugged me, I guess, ’cause the next thing I know I was here? And, I gotta tell you, this place is awfully weird, ’cause I’ve been wandering around for like two hours and I can’t find the way out.”

“I have something to tell you,” Billy says.

He takes another sip of the wretched, brackish coffee, grimaces again, wonders if the powdered whitener would improve it in any demonstrable way. “This is going to sound crazy but — fuck it — I’m just going to put all of the cards on the table. I think that guy is the Devil. Like, I really believe that. I know how that sounds, but—”

To his surprise, Elisa is looking at him straight-facedly, as though she does not find what he has said to be even the slightest bit absurd.

Emboldened, Billy continues: “I think that guy is the Devil, and I think you and I are in Hell. And I think — I think something is going to happen to us. Something maybe — something bad.”

“Let’s figure this shit out,” Elisa says. “You want all the cards on the table? I have a question for you. Is there anything unique about you? Anything that you’ve never told anybody before? Anything that if you said out loud everybody would think you were crazy?”

“I don’t know?” says Billy. “I have a ward on me? Or had? I guess? A — magical thing?”

Elisa peers at him, frowns, and then lets out a little, exasperated laugh, shaking her head. “Okay, Ridgeway, I gotta hand it to you, that was not what I expected that you were going to say.”

“Well,” Billy says, “what about you? Do you have something that you never told anybody before? That makes you unique in some kind of crazy way?”

“Yeah, no, we’re not going there,” says Elisa.

“Come on,” Billy says. “You said you wanted all the cards on the table.”

“ You said that.”

“Look, are we going to help one another or not?”

“Okay,” Elisa says, “yes. But I need a little more from you. I’m angry and scared and pissed off and all I really know is that I’m somewhere I don’t want to be, and the guy who put me there is somebody you know. So go ahead, Billy, illuminate me. Tell me a story. Tell me the one about the Devil.”

It’s right then that the lights dim for a moment, as though some leviathan-sized appliance in a subbasement has just kicked on, sucking down a massive allotment of juice. A faint hum he wasn’t aware of before clicks off for a moment and then seems to click back on, its frequency adjusted minutely.

Elisa sighs. “Or not,” she says.

Billy begins to feel strange. He feels dizzy. Some fluish wave passes across him and he starts to feel sweaty at the same time that his body spasms with chills.

“Something’s happening,” Billy says.

“No shit, Sherlock,” says Elisa. For some reason she steps out of her slippers. “Tell me honestly: has this ever happened to you before?”

“I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been sick before—”

“This isn’t being sick,” Elisa says. “This is something different.”

He tries to take his final sip of coffee but his hands seem wired all wrong: the cup falls to the floor and the coffee spills out into the carpet’s unholy design.

He looks at his hands. His hands don’t look right. He remembers the first time he took acid, with Anil, remembers Anil saying Whatever you do, don’t look at your hands; I can’t stress that enough . And of course as soon as he started peaking Billy couldn’t resist looking at his hands, and sure enough they looked really strange, and then he thought too much about the connection between his hands and his brain and promptly had a panic attack, and Anil had to swaddle him in up to his neck in blankets and give him a stuffed raccoon to cuddle until he calmed back down. This is worse than that. He needs a stuffed raccoon and one is not available.

“Okay,” Elisa says. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“We don’t have time for questions,” Elisa says. “You just have to trust me. You’re going to want to take off your clothes.”

As she says this, she slides her yoga pants down over her hips, steps out of them. She has nice legs but Billy’s not really in a position to enjoy looking right now.