The Weirdness(12)

Too bad she figured out that he was a fuck-up.

But no, he tells himself. You’re not a fuck-up. You met the Devil and you walked away. That proves something. She’ll see when you tell her.

But how can he tell her?

And then, right as he reaches the subway stop: inspiration.

He has it.

He knows how he can explain his feelings toward her, reassert his competence, and convince her to accept the major epistemological shift he’s experienced today. It all holds together. In his mind it’s an intricate crystal made of pure motherfucking eloquence. He just has to get her on the phone, now, before it all dissolves into slush.

He judders to a halt on the stairs, halfway through his descent into the station. The last possible point where he’ll have a phone signal. A person directly behind him stumbles into his back and emits a few terse syllables of what may be Korean invective. “Sorry,” Billy mutters, but he isn’t, not really. He struggles his cell phone out of his pocket, angles it up the stairs at a chunk of sky, and punches the single numeral that autodials Denver.

And of course it goes straight to voice mail.

“Fuck,” Billy says. He’s never done well with voice mail.

It’s okay, he thinks, you can do this.

And he speaks: “Uhhh, yeah, hi, Denver, I just, I was just thinking, I know we’re—I know things are—I’ve just had a really strange day today, and it got me to thinking about us, about you, and I just would really like to talk to you again, sometime, when you can, I know you probably don’t really want to because, I don’t know, I think you’re still mad at me or something, but I kinda hope that you’ll look past that and call me back and maybe I can explain a couple of things. Okay? Uh, that’s it I guess. Call me!”

He hangs up. Fuck, he thinks, that was horrible. Do yourself a goddamn favor and never speak again.

The taste of failure still rank in his mouth, he hurries down the stairs, swipes his card at the turnstile, and bolts to the platform just in time to see his train close its doors and pull away.


When he finally gets to work he’s ten minutes later than the five minutes late he thinks of as permissible. Fifteen minutes is late enough that he’s inarguably late but still close enough to on time that maybe nobody noticed. Giorgos’s idea of management is to stay in the upstairs office for most of the day, on the computer, possibly looking at whatever kind of porn tiny, angry Greek men indulge in, so he’s not always up-to-date on the precise status of any given employee.

The only person in the kitchen is Anil, who looks up from his station at Billy, looks at the clock, and looks back at Billy, all without pausing in his sandwich assembly. Guy is kind of a machine.

“Late again,” Anil says. “You run into a bunch of bananas that you couldn’t resist?”

“Very funny,” Billy says. “Does Giorgos know?”

“I think you’re safe,” Anil says. “But, come on, man, this job sucks enough even when we’re working together; could you please make a little more effort to not get shitcanned? In the name of some motherfucking solidarity?”

“Yeah,” Billy says, getting his latex food-prep gloves on. “But it wasn’t my fault.”

“Right, it’s never your fault,” Anil says. “That’s some bullshit, though.”

“True,” Billy says, taking his spot at his station and reviewing the three sandwich orders in the queue. “But I gotta tell you, it’s been a weird-ass day today.”

“Ah, yes, Billy and the ten thousand weirdnesses,” Anil says. “Spare me no detail.”

Billy contemplates the prospect. Tell him. Find a way. Anil already knows that shit sometimes goes down in Billy’s life. It was Anil who showed up at Billy’s apartment when Billy failed out of school, made him open his blinds, change his clothes, shave his face, pour the last of the Krakowianka down the drain. And when Billy confessed, in that dark time, to having been too drunk and disordered to have gotten it together to go back home for his own mother’s funeral, it was Anil who volunteered to drive Billy to Ohio—eight hours—so that Billy could look his father, Keith, in the face, and apologize. Anil had slept on a couch that no one had ever found comfortable and then driven Billy back the next day. Ate the cost of the gas and the tolls and the cigarettes without complaint. Billy remembers that trip, the two of them out of their minds on rest stop coffee, listening to Anil’s Minutemen cassette over and over and over again, the only cassette Anil’s crappy stereo hadn’t long ago devoured. After the tenth time they listened through it Billy had memorized the album’s entire collection of gnomic pronouncements; by the time they rolled back into Brooklyn he was bellowing them out the window. Each line seemed like a slogan for the new and better life that he believed Anil had bought for him. Surely you could talk to someone like that about the Devil?