Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

“And around then it kind of fizzles out. Maybe because of that and maybe not. I double down on my schoolwork, get more serious about my writing, start liking my Penn friends again, I graduate, I get the job that I want at the Philly Museum of Art, and then, poof, that’s it, Joseph is gone. End of story.

“Except then, a couple years later, bam , my parents die, and then, double bam , a month later I turn into a wolf for the first time. And it fucked me up. So, yeah, I screw up a big grant, lose my job, and my boyfriend dumps me. Basically I’m losing my mind. So, whatever: I just start spending days sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, drinking herbal tea and fucking meditating or something until I come to terms with the way my life is now and figure out what the fuck to do next. And Joseph finds me. On Facebook. He sends me this long, kinda heartfelt message about having missed me, all that shit. He doesn’t mention the thing where he put his hands on my tits. And at this point I’m desperate for a friendly face from the past, and maybe I’ve even convinced myself that the incident or whatever never really happened, or it didn’t happen the way I remember it, or …” She shrugs.

“So I friend him, and I write him back, tell him it’s good to hear from him and all that, and I kinda confess that things are fucked up for me — I tell him about my parents, and my job, and my boyfriend. I don’t mention the wolf thing. And that’s when shit gets uncomfortable. Turns out that the record store Joseph worked at has gone out of business, and he starts talking about moving to Philly. And the second I hear that I’m like Uh oh . He promptly comes up with this idea that because we’re both out of work we should be roommates, to defray the cost of living is how he puts it. And we end up talking on the phone a bunch, and I get caught up in this stupid dance where I keep making up reasons why I can’t room with him, and he keeps kind of disassembling them, which he can do because they’re flimsy, because I don’t want to say the real reason, which is I don’t want to live with you because actually you skeeve me out, and the fact that you appear to not be getting that is skeeving me out even worse .

“In the end, Joseph does move to Philly, living on his own, and we hang out a couple of times, public places only thank you very much, and it’s — it’s odd. Something’s changed in him. It’s like his intelligence has curdled, turned into meanness. I can kind of see it in his eyes; that he either really loves me or he really hates me, and that maybe he can’t exactly tell the difference anymore. So I start making all these excuses to not hang out with him, which isn’t too hard, ’cause by this point I have a new job, waiting tables at this shitty fake Irish pub, and I can always beg off by telling him I picked up an extra shift or whatever. But a shitty Irish pub is a public place, right? And so at some point Joseph figures out that he can just show up there, and sit at the end of the bar while I’m trying to work, and he’ll get drunker and drunker and try to get me to come home with him at closing time.

“To top it all off, I get involved with someone, one of the dishwashers. It’s nothing serious. She’s twenty-one years old. It’s just service-industry after-hours fucking around, the two of us going out on the loading dock for cigarettes at one in the morning and making out and groping one another, trying to see how much we can work each other up. It is what it is. It’s nice.

“So one night I’m out there, making out with Vicki, and who’s out there by the Dumpsters and the fucking waste oil bins but Joseph. He’s drunk, and his stupid hair is pushed up at like a ninety-degree angle from his head, like he’s been leaning up against a wall for a while. But also he’s pissed. It’s like the valve in his head that holds all his shit back has finally burst. He’s cursing at me, cursing at Vicki, Fuck you you cunts , all that. And he starts trying to climb up onto the loading dock, which he can’t really do, ’cause he’s stupid drunk, but it’s still scary. I mean, he’s a skinny dork, but he’s bigger than me, and he’s stronger than me, and in that second I really understand that he could kill me.”

Billy remembers her, last night, asking him whether he was bigger than Denver, stronger than Denver. But he doesn’t interrupt.

“And I realize,” she continues, “that I could do something else, too. At this point I’ve turned into a wolf maybe six times, once a month, ’cause it’s like that? But at this moment I understand that I could force the change, that I could just will myself into that form. I’d never done that before, but I could suddenly feel it in me. The wolf. I could feel it wanting to get out. It wanted to get out and take Joseph Meisner apart.”

“But you don’t do that,” Billy says, quietly. “You don’t just kill people.”

“No,” Elisa says. “I don’t just kill people. But in this particular moment I wanted to kill this guy . Just for a second. But that was enough. ’Cause that’s the thing about being a sex-demon wolf thing. You do what you want. And so I tore through my clothes and leapt down on him and crushed his throat in my jaws while Vicki stood there and screamed. I killed this guy, left his body mutilated in an alley, and just as a side effect I basically put the torch to my entire life in Philly. But you know what? It felt good. I liked it. Am I proud of it, sitting here now, talking to you? No. Was it the worst thing I ever did? Yes. But I wanted to do it, and then I did it. So you want to know what it’s like? That’s what it’s like.”

She climbs back into the front seat and they drive on for some more minutes, all of them silent.

Finally the van rounds the final corner of its route. Jørgen visors his eyes with his hand and peers through the windshield. “That’s it, isn’t it?” he asks. “I think I can see it.”

“Yeah,” Billy says. “That’s it.” The cloak no longer works on him, for some reason. He sees the tower, as menacing as it’s ever looked, maybe more so. It seems to be palpably crackling with import, as though it is siphoning relevance and meaning from the surrounding city, which has begun to seem fake somehow, a generic urban setting from a film set in New York but shot in Toronto. The gallery with the Styrofoam art-shapes is now displaying prints of Instagrammed photos of food.

Jørgen yanks the steering wheel to the right and pulls two tires up onto the sidewalk. He cuts the engine and gets out of the van, and right then everything seems to go dim for a second, to waver slightly, and Billy feels a variant of nausea stir in his guts. He stifles a burp. It tastes like roast beef.

“This is what it feels like, isn’t it?” Billy says. “When it happens?”

“Absolutely,” says Elisa, wriggling out of Jørgen’s leather coat.

Jørgen opens the van’s side door. “Clothes,” he says to Billy, pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it into the back. “Off.”

“Okay,” Billy says. He kicks off his shoes and begins to work the zipper on the jumpsuit, while he still has hands.

He cracks and extends.

This time, the change isn’t as bad: breaking the bounds of his body seems easier now that he’s already done it once; it’s as though he has permanently limbered himself somehow. He does not vomit.

He hops out of the van and lands on all fours.

The others have changed, too. The three of them stand there for a moment, hell-wolves, bristling on the sidewalk in the Chelsea dusk, wind-borne trash whirling around them. Two pedestrians at the far end of the street pause in their stride, turn and go the other way.