Except you can’t, not really.
“Forget it,” Billy says, finally, not without a little sadness. “You would just—you would think I was a real nutjob.”
“Instead of just a fuck-up?” Anil says.
“I’m not a fuck-up.”
“Whatever you gotta tell yourself, man.”
Fuck-up or not, Billy fulfills his duties well as the day wends along: he reduces heads of lettuce to ribbons with some deft knife-work, he folds sliced turkey artfully atop ciabatta bread, he musters a passable level of cheer when Giorgos passes through. All the while, though, he’s thinking of how he could tell Anil about what happened this morning. Telling Anil would be a good trial run for telling Denver, and if he can tell Denver, he feels like his life will fall back into some kind of recognizable order.
“Hey,” says Anil, at one point when they have a breather. “After work I’m meeting the Ghoul down at that vegetarian place he likes. Gonna talk some shop for a little while. You want to join us?”
The Ghoul: his real name is Charles but to them he’s always been the Ghoul. What else can you call someone with that particular waxy complexion, that long, bony face, those deep-set eyes set loosely in crumpled bags of empurpled flesh? No other nickname seems available: nobody is going to mistake this guy for a Charlie or a Chuck or a Chazz. Put a pair of fingerless gloves on him and he could be somebody who died of consumption in a garret somewhere near the end of the nineteenth century.
It doesn’t help that he’s a poet. Anil and Billy are both fiction writers and they view poets with definite suspicion: they treat them the way you’d treat someone who claimed to have descended from elves. Poets seem to have collectively learned a particular type of intonation to deploy at readings: Anil calls it “Poet Voice.” It’s a cousin of what he calls “NPR Voice.” On more than one occasion Anil has cracked Billy up by reading random things around the kitchen in Poet Voice: recipes, auto circulars, credit card offers, personal ads. He once stood on a stool and made Billy nearly herniate himself with laughter by using Poet Voice to recite a crass rhyme that Billy remembered from childhood (“Milk / milk / lemonade / round the corner / fudge is made”).
But in spite of themselves they like the Ghoul. For all his anachronistic look-and-feel, he’s actually the most twenty-first century guy they know. He has this phone that he never seems to put away. It’s all tricked out in some ultra-complicated fashion that involves RSS feeds or Google Alerts or some shit. Billy doesn’t claim to have a grip on the particulars but he knows that the Ghoul’s phone is like a gleaming portal opening onto the entire New York literary scene. Every five minutes it trembles or coos and the Ghoul fusses with it and then, miraculously, he is in possession of some detail that seems, suddenly, crucial to what they think of as their careers: “Three senior editors from HarperCollins are getting drunk on Dark and Stormys two blocks from here.” And they’re off on some adventure.
Furthermore, he’s on Twitter, active on Twitter, like dozens-of-tweets-a-day active, and what’s more, he’s funny on Twitter. If he ever wanted to give up poetry he could make a decent go at stand-up. He could get up there, looking exactly like he does, and read tweets nonstop for twenty minutes. Anil and Billy still kinda struggle just to get their minds around why Twitter even exists.
So, yeah, Billy likes the Ghoul. And even though he should be taking the evening to select pieces for tomorrow night’s reading, he agrees to go out, not just because he wants to see the Ghoul but because he won’t quite give up on the idea of talking to Anil about the Devil.
So then it’s after work and he and Anil are standing in the alleyway among the Dumpsters and hot pizza exhaust from the parlor next door, and Anil’s having one cigarette before they head to the vegetarian place, and Billy decides to just plunge in.
“Hey Anil. Remember when I said I’d had a weird-ass day?”
Anil gives a perfunctory nod. His face is pressed into his cupped hands, where he’s shielding his lighter from the wind. Once he gets his cigarette going he returns to full height—five seven or thereabouts—drags, exhales, and says, “Bet it seems less weird now that you’ve made sandwiches for eight hours straight.”
“Yeah, but shut up a second,” says Billy. “This is actually important.”
Anil draws and exhales again. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me.”
“It’s hard to know how to start,” Billy says. “Things are a little mixed up in my head—that’s part of it, actually—so I’m not a hundred percent sure how it’ll sound to somebody who hasn’t had the same experience I’ve had.”