Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

Elisa joggles the rickety lever that controls the heat.

“Please do not touch that,” Jørgen says, tersely.

“I’m cold,” Elisa says.

Jørgen works himself out of his heavy leather coat and passes it over to her. She arranges it behind herself, slouches down into it, her head half disappearing into its depths. She sticks one leg out, plants her slippered foot on the windshield. Even from here in the back Billy can see Jørgen kind of tense up with the effort it requires to prevent himself from telling her to sit normally.

“We should have taken the subway,” Billy says.

No one answers him.

“The fate of the world hangs in the balance and we decided the best way to spring into action was to crawl across town at five miles an hour?” he says. “Fucking rookie mistake.”

“It was Lucifer’s idea to drive,” Jørgen says.

“Yeah, well, he’s not exactly a local, is he,” Billy says.

Jørgen sighs and stabs at the radio, going back to Z100 for maybe the fifth time.

Billy slumps back down in his seat, looks out the window at the West Manhattan buildings. He looks at the slate-gray sky, wondering whether it’s about to ignite. Everything looks pretty much normal; no ominous portents. So maybe they have time. They’ll get there when they get there. He fiddles with a puncture wound in the vinyl of his seat, tries to see if he can fit his finger into it. He may have sworn fealty to the Devil, but the act seems to have left much of his personality more or less untouched, which means that he seems to be as free as ever to be distractible, fidgety, restless. He looks up at Elisa’s foot, at her ankle, at her calf. It’s a good calf. He finds himself kind of turned on.

Wow , he thinks, as if realizing it for the first time. I had sex with her . He goes up a notch in his own estimation of himself. He knows he shouldn’t really feel good about it, given the fact that he’s technically still involved with Denver, sort of, maybe, maybe not — but, fuck it, after the day he’s had he feels like he wants just one moment to bask in the sensation of pure self-congratulation. The way things are going, it may be the last time he ever has the experience.

The only problem is, Billy’s not really very good at the self-congratulatory mode. He’s just not capable of looking at an attractive woman and thinking that’s right, she digs me . He’s just not that particular kind of dude. He can always find some way to doubt it.

In this case, of course, it’s easy. The sex he had with Elisa doesn’t really fit with the kind of sex he usually has. The lead-up was all wrong. He and Elisa did not enjoy a meaningful gaze across a heap of half-consumed tapas dishes, no furtive hand-holding at the IFC theater, no lingering kiss at the steps of someone’s brownstone. It was just straight to the fucking. Hardcore animal fucking, in point of fact, which makes it all the easier to believe that he didn’t actually have sex with her. Not, like, her, For Real Her. You had sex with some kind of hell-wolf thing that she was stuck inside , he tells himself.

He notes that she hasn’t really spoken to him since.

He leans forward, sticking his head over the back of her seat.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey.”

“What,” she says. She does not turn around.

“Are we cool?”

“Are we cool?” Elisa repeats, soiling it somewhat with a note of incredulity. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Billy says. “We kind of — had a moment back there, and I was—”

“A moment?” Elisa says, the note of incredulity becoming more pronounced. “We didn’t have a moment . We fucked.”

Jørgen turns up the radio incrementally.

“Yeah, I know, I was there,” Billy says. “I just — I just wanted to make sure that — that it was okay.”

Elisa cranes around in her seat to look at him finally.

“Yeah,” she says. “Of course it’s okay. I told you before we changed that I was going to want to fuck you. And then we changed, and we fucked. End of story.”

Billy frowns. “But—” he says. He lowers his voice to a hush.

“How did you know you were going to want to fuck me?”

“Because that’s the way it is, when you change,” she says. “You changed, you remember what it was like. It gets you turned on. It makes you feel like fucking is goddamn Job One. Now imagine having that experience every month for two years , every time the moon gets full, and not ever having another hell-wolf around. You climb the damn walls. Pretty much literally. I can show you claw marks in my apartment. So I knew that if you were going to change I was going to want to fuck you. It’s not because you’re you or anything. I mean, you’re fine and all, but that’s not why I let you fuck me. I let you fuck me because you were the first other wolf to come along.”

This stings Billy, lacerates his attempt at self-congratulation pretty much completely.

“That seems wrong,” he says.

“ Wrong .” Elisa pronounces the word like it’s only vaguely familiar. “Come on, Billy. That’s the thing about being a wolf, or a hell-wolf, or whatever the fuck it is that we are. You don’t give a shit about what’s right or what’s wrong. You just do what you want . You’ve been there. You know it.”

“I only changed once,” Billy says. “I don’t know what it’s like or what it’s not like . I don’t know shit.”

Something in Elisa’s face relaxes a little, and she gives a half laugh. “Okay,” she says. “I keep forgetting you’re new to this. So you want to know what it’s like? What it’s really like? I’ll tell you a story. I owe it to you anyway.”

She gets up, clambers over the seat into the back. Jørgen seems to breathe a sigh of relief, focuses again on the road.

“It’s kind of a long story,” she says. “But we have some time, it looks like. There was this guy, Joseph. I met Joseph when I still lived in Philly. Six years ago now. I was at Penn at that time, and I was burning out. Just like done . I wasn’t even sure I was going to graduate. And then along came Joseph. We met on this post-punk forum. He’d dropped out of Princeton, was working as a shift supervisor at some record shop over in Jersey. And he was funny and smart but like totally decoupled from the whole academic treadmill — he just didn’t give a shit about it and that was so refreshing to me, at that time, like I was really hungry to hear that you could have a pretty cool life without being academically successful. So my final year at Penn I’m driving out to Jersey every weekend, hanging out with Joseph in his shitbox apartment which is crammed with records and lunchboxes and whatever else, and we’re getting high and listening to German punk reissues and reading our god-awful poetry to one another. And then I sleep on the couch. Because, I don’t know, Joseph is cool, I really did think he was cool, but at the same time he’s like super skinny and has this kind of dorky haircut and bad glasses and is just, like, not a guy who gives off much in the way of sexual confidence. And I start to feel guilty , actually guilty, about not fucking him, ’cause I can pretty much tell that he wants it to happen, and I even start telling myself that I want it to happen, like during the week, I’m at Penn, telling myself, all week, this weekend, you have to do it, you have to fuck Joseph . But then I get out there and I think about doing it and I’m just like Ugh. No .

“So then eventually there’s this one night, and he’s got some good news, he just got promoted at the store, he’s now assistant manager, something like that, and in addition to getting high we drink like an entire bottle of vodka, and I’m thinking This is it, this is the time that I’ll fuck him , but I still don’t want to, and eventually I stumble over to my normal spot on the sofa and I crash out. And when I wake up in the morning he’s on the couch with me, kind of crammed in behind me, and our clothes are all still on but he has his hands up my shirt and on my tits. And I kinda pull myself out of there and am just like Goddamn it . It’s like, it was a shitty thing for him to do, but I don’t want to make too big a deal out of it, because I still want to like Joseph, I still want things to go on as they’ve been going on, so he wakes up, a couple minutes later, and we kind of share this look, the look that says that we agree not to talk about it, that we agree to pretend that it never happened.