Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

It reminds Billy of watching Denver edit video on her Mac, trying to decide where to make a cut. Things on the monitor happen at the normal speed until she adjusts some slider which slows everything down at some rate which exponentially curves very pleasingly until finally she gets to full stop, the point at which flowing experience has become a single soundless image, a thing to reflect upon, a moment about which to make a decision. It’s just like that. Anil frozen in space, his hand a good eight inches from the extinguisher; the unflickering flames silent on his back, still, looking delicate yet tangible, like an array of frozen orchids, a thing that could be lifted safely away from him and crumbled to dust.

“So,” says Lucifer. “This is an interesting moment.” He has his hand held up in the air, two fingers together against his thumb, as though he were holding something tiny and valuable, a diamond, a precious mote, some invisible speck. He’s also still wearing the tuxedo shirt he had on earlier, bloody and tattered.

“Help him,” Billy says, for it turns out that Billy can still speak, somehow, through the stasis. He isn’t entirely sure whether his lips are moving. “You can help him, can’t you?”

“I could,” Lucifer says. He looks at Anil with a look that seems, to Billy, to be inappropriately dispassionate, given the circumstances.

“Look, you asshole,” Billy says. “He’s my friend. He has nothing to do with any of this, and you set him on fire .”

“Yes, well, that was an accident,” Lucifer says.

“Then you apologize , and you fix it ,” Billy says.

“It was an accident,” Lucifer says, “but the situation as it now stands provides me with a certain degree of leverage . Leverage in its crudest form — a regrettable form, it must be acknowledged — but leverage nonetheless. We are short on time, Billy Ridgeway, and this requires me to use perhaps more direct means of impelling you than I have in the past.”

Billy sputters. “What—” he says, “what is it that you want?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted, Billy,” Lucifer says. “I want us to be allies against a common enemy.”

“But we are.”

“Are we?” Lucifer says. He uses his free hand to gesture down at his bloody shirt. “We were all together, all together again after so long, making a plan that would make the best use of the short time this entire planet has remaining, and then some distasteful people intruded upon our conversation and gunned me down. Like an animal. And then you left with those people. You left with those people and hid, leaving me to waste valuable time and resources in order to find you yet again. You’ll forgive me, Billy, if this leads me to cast some aspersions upon where your allegiances truly lie.”

“Okay,” says Billy. “I admit that it looks bad when you put it that way. But honestly? Those people? I was arguing with them. I argued with my own dad that we should work with you.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me for not noticing that,” Lucifer says. “I was, as you’ll recall, dead at the time.”

“So, look,” Billy says, beginning to panic at the thought that he may not be able to convince Lucifer that they’re on the same side. At the thought that Lucifer may burn Anil alive as a way of demonstrating the extent of his leverage. “You want to get this thing with Ollard done? Let’s do it. I’m ready. I’ll help.”

“I’m afraid I can’t trust you on that point any longer, Billy,” Lucifer says. “You’ve proven to be very reluctant, and I’ve come to believe that it would be in your character to lie, now, to protect your friend, only to change your mind and abandon our mission at some later point if you thought that it would confer you some more immediate advantage.”

“Yeah, but, I wouldn’t,” Billy says.

“I think you would,” Lucifer says. “And we no longer have the time it would require for me to chase you down again. I need to understand that you are fully committed to our task. I can no longer enjoy the luxury of doubt on this front.”

“It’s not like I can trust you,” Billy says. “You fucking double-crossed me!”

“Billy,” says Lucifer. “I never lied to you.”

“You didn’t tell me things,” Billy says. “You left things out. Important things! You made — lies of omission.”

“Those aren’t really lies, though, are they?” Lucifer says. “I mean, lie of omission , you hear the phrase. But they’re not really real, are they?”

“Real enough,” Billy says.

“Regardless,” Lucifer says.

“Okay, fine. You want full commitment from me, you got it. Just tell me — tell me what I have to do to get you to believe me. There has to be something.”

“Actually,” Lucifer says. “There is.”

“Tell me.”

“You can kneel before me,” Lucifer says.

“Uhhh, yeah?” Billy says, wrinkling up his nose involuntarily.

“Yes. You can kneel before me and swear your undying fealty.”

“Fealty?” Billy says. The word just sounds bad. Not the kind of word that sounds like he’s agreeing to do one little thing for the Devil, one little thing and then it’s over, he walks away in the morning. It sounds particularly bad when you pair it with that other word, undying. Undying fealty makes it pretty much sound like if he swears this oath he’s going to spend the rest of his life floating in the void, or pacing an endless circuit in the infernal hotel, or something else equally bad. Billy’s smart enough to know that this sucks way worse than the deal the Devil originally offered him — and he never formally accepted even that deal, so he sure as shit doesn’t plan to accept this one. In fact, his first instinct is to look Lucifer straight in the face and say Go fuck yourself .

Lucifer, perhaps anticipating this, continues: “If you kneel before me and swear your undying fealty, we can get back to the work that awaits us, and I will remove your friend from the hellfire that imperils him. Or you can refuse me. If you refuse me, I will depart, leaving you and your friend to cope with the flame on your own. He’s close to that extinguisher. Reasonably close. He’ll be fine. Probably he will be fine.”

Billy remembers the guy at the Fairlane, the guy who burned his face off. The brother of the owner. He didn’t die. One of the prep cooks hit him with a blast from the extinguisher within maybe five seconds after the explosion but a lot of damage had already been done. Billy remembers what the guy’s lips looked like as the EMTs loaded him onto the stretcher. What the guy’s eyelids looked like. He remembers the guy screaming.

And he remembers that the owner didn’t come back to work for a long time after that; his wife and her sister took over the day-to-day operations of the place instead. Billy wonders what it must have been like for him, the owner, to know that he was at fault — at least partially at fault — for the accident. For putting his brother in the accident’s path. Billy wonders how you would live with that.

He looks at Anil, frozen in time. They have ten long years of friendship between them. Billy remembers the long month when he was trying to not get drunk every day; he doesn’t really remember it all that well but he does remember it, and what he remembers, mostly, is Anil being there, endlessly being there, bearing huge cartons of greasy Szechuan takeout which Billy would eat like it was the only thing to live for, reading Billy interminable segments of the Mahabharata , sitting with Billy at the tiny kitchen table and playing round after round of canasta. Canasta to 50,000 points, to 500,000 points. Epic games that did not ever need to end because the point was not really who was winning. The point, Billy knows, was to get Billy to look away from the void, the sucking void that he had been skirting the edge of for a year, watching in terror as more and more of his life got dragged down into its maw. If he could just look away, it seemed, he could be yanked out of the range of the void’s inexorable pull. And he did, and he was, and in his heart he knows that Anil was responsible. Sometimes, in his rare moments of focus and quiet reflection, he thinks Anil saved my life . Sometimes he has a feeling that he is maybe obliged to do something with the extra life that he was gifted. You get one life for free, to do with what you will. Waste it if you want. But when someone goes to the trouble of helping you get a second life you kind of have an obligation to that person to do something good with it.