Jeremy Bushnell - The Weirdness

But by then it’s too late. He’s sitting in the armchair across from Lucifer. He reaches out to the coffee table, uses the back of his hand to push some garbage aside, making a space for his mug. He still feels pretty certain that he’s not in real physical danger.

“Sorry about the mess,” Billy says, holding both his palms up, beseechingly. “I’ve been busy.”

“That makes perfect sense,” says Lucifer. Billy feels a little flattered by this. Lucifer nods at the business card he placed on the table earlier, wedged between a heap of bills and a tangle of charging cords. The gilded edge catches Billy’s eye, and he picks it up. Sure enough, it says “Lucifer Morningstar” on it, in a nice serif font. Underneath that it says “Comprehensive Consulting.” There’s no number or anything. Billy thinks about pocketing it before remembering that there’s no good reason why he needs to be polite to this guy. Maybe playing it tough is the way to go. He flips the card back onto the table, leans back in the chair, crosses his arms, and puts on a face that’s intended to say something like You ain’t shit to me . Lucifer regards it placidly.

“Billy,” he begins. “I wish to communicate something to you directly. Our time is limited, so it is important for me to be frank here at the outset. I am a supernatural force. I have existed since time immemorial. I am what you would colloquially call the Devil.”

This gives Billy a significant dose of pause. He lifts the coffee and gulps down a strong bolt of it, as if that will help.

“So — wait,” Billy says. “What you’re saying is …” He frowns. He’s not really sure what else Lucifer Morningstar might be saying.

“What I’m saying,” Lucifer says, “is exactly what I have said. There is no misunderstanding.”

Billy, suffering a jolt of alarm, looks this guy straight in the face. Lucifer meets his stare and holds it, which does nothing to help him relax, so he looks away, electing to stare, instead, at the rim of his coffee mug.

“Yeahhhh,” he says eventually. “But … you get that that’s not a normal thing to say, right? I mean — I’m not a, what would you call it, a religious man . I don’t believe in the Devil. So, what I’m saying is that you’re kinda freaking me out here. I mean, if we’re being frank, I’m, like, half a second away from picking up the phone and calling 911, reporting this as a home invasion, and getting on with my day.”

Lucifer nods in a way that confers a certain sad understanding. “You are welcome to do that,” he says, “but I guarantee it will not advance this conversation in a fruitful way.”

For a minute, Billy thinks about doing it. But then he imagines having to deal with the NYPD. His past run-ins with them have never exactly elicited a high level of what you might call customer satisfaction . He imagines having to go through the process of hiding all the drug paraphernalia on the coffee table, imagines the long statement he’d have to give to some asshole force veteran.

And he imagines the whole process making him late for his shift at the sandwich shop, and late is the one thing that he cannot be. Giorgos, his boss, already wrote him up once and at that juncture it was made very clear to him that Giorgos was not in the business of writing up people twice. Billy’s struck with an urge to check the time, but there’s no clock in this room and he thinks it’d be rude to pull out his phone. The point is, he’s really got to be moving this whole experience toward a wrap-up as quickly as possible.

Lucifer speaks again. “Billy,” he says. “We have a limited amount of time.”

“You’re telling me.”

“In order for you to understand what I have to say, it is imperative that you believe that I am who I say I am,” Lucifer says.

“Fine,” Billy says. “But you gotta give me something here, ’cause right now? I’m just not feeling it. You want me to believe that you’re the Devil? Show me something. Show me something you can do that an ordinary guy can’t do. Make it fucking rain blood or something.”

“That would cause more problems than it would solve,” Lucifer says.

“Then — I don’t know,” Billy says. He slaps his hands down on his thighs. “But you better come up with something, ’cause otherwise, it may be time for you to go.”

“There is one technique which might meet your needs,” Lucifer says. “I can simply make you believe me.”

“You can make me,” Billy says. “Tell me how that’s going to work?”

“It’s simple. Imagine a light switch in your brain. A light switch has two positions, on and off.”

“I’m familiar with the concept.”

“Little beliefs in your brain work the same way. Like a vast set of little switches. You prefer chicken. You prefer pork. You like eggplant. You don’t like eggplant.”

“I do like eggplant,” Billy says.

“Wonderful,” Lucifer says, giving Billy a full-on smile which lasts exactly a second, then vanishes. “However, if I reached into your brain and flipped that switch, your liking of eggplant would cease. Whether you treat any individual utterance as true or false is a simple binary belief, a switch. And I can change those.”

“So if you can go into my head and change shit around, why haven’t you done that already? If you can just make me believe you, why didn’t we just start there?” Billy says, annoyed with himself that he’s even dignifying the argument this way.

“It is intimate. People typically do not wish to have an intimate procedure performed on them without permission. The procedure does not strictly require consent, but consent facilitates the experience.”

“You sound like an R-rated hypnotist,” Billy says. “You’re supposed to be the goddamn Devil , and you care about whether you have permission to change people’s minds ?”

Lucifer produces no evident reaction.

“Fine,” Billy says, out of patience. “You have my consent. Go on ahead in there. Touch my brain. Make me believe you.”

“I shall,” Lucifer says.

Great , thinks the Safety Manager. Here we go .

Billy hears something. A tiny pop, like somebody had been shuffling their feet on carpet and then poked him in the back of his head. And something happens in his skull. Something shifts, grinds, as though his brain is a pile of rocks and one, deep in toward the center, has just disappeared. And suddenly something is different. He doesn’t see the guy across from him as just a guy anymore, or even as a potentially-dangerous crazy guy. He sees him as the physical embodiment of a grand architecture of evil. The Devil. The Prince of Darkness.

The first thought Billy’s new brain has is: Holy fucking shit .

The second thought is: Call 911 now .

Billy rears upward in the armchair.

“One moment,” Lucifer says.

Billy’s busy patting down his pockets in search of his phone and he doesn’t quite hear that. He finally wrangles the phone out of his jeans, but his motor control has gone completely wack: instead of opening the phone’s flip-top he manages to flibber the gadget right out of his hands. It caroms off the wall and vanishes entirely from Billy’s perceptual awareness.

Billy turns to Plan B.

Plan B is to get the hell out of here. He considers making a run straight for the window; smashing through it, barefoot; and plummeting two stories to the street below. We can survive it , insists the Safety Manager, who has pretty much gone crazy from overwork at this point. C’mon! Let’s go!

“One moment,” Lucifer says again, rising from the couch and extending his palm toward Billy. “This requires adjustment.” And Billy hears a lot more of those static-electricity pops, less like someone shocking the back of his head and more like someone peeling a synthetic shirt off of a blanket when they’ve both just come out of the dryer. The rock pile in his head grinds some more.