The Weirdness(2)

It had long been like this.

Blame his father: Keith Ridgeway, a pipe-smoking antiquarian bookseller, who had filled the entire first floor of the family’s gabled three-story Victorian house with books. Billy had spent his formative years wandering among heaped codices, studies and catalogs and compendia, brochures and pamphlets, extended inquiries into every conceivable topic. From the very existence of these books he learned one primary truth: that everything in the world was enveloped in great skeins of mystery into which one could bravely probe but which one could never fully untangle.

Blame his mother: Brigid Ridgeway, a professor of medieval studies at the local university, who tied her red hair in a long braid and kept a collection of a dozen swords in a restored barn at the rear of the property. Billy remembers her standing in the sun-drenched open space of the barn, on Sunday mornings, practicing thrusts and parries, grunting and sweating, her heavy feet thudding on hard wood. Afterward she would spend hours at a workbench making chain mail. For fun. When Billy thinks back on her, he remembers her looking him in the face and telling him that she loved him, that he was special. Special and unique. From this, he learned a lesson that she may not have intended: that his differences were his merits. She loved him, he believes, because he wasn’t normal, he wasn’t a boy who was rambunctious and active and courageous, but rather a boy who was dreamy and inquisitive and delicate.

But now he is thirty, and his mother is dead and his father has drawn back into some sort of isolating crankdom that Billy doesn’t quite understand. And when Billy checks in with his peers, when he looks at pictures of their kids on the computer, he notes that they’ve all begun to amass some share of money or power or career advantage or relationship stability. Then he looks at himself. He’s barely managed to amass a goatee. He’s unmarried. He’s skinny. His mess of strawberry-blond hair is not quite receding, but it is thinning enough that it generates some small anxiety when he checks on it in the mirror. He makes $12.50 an hour at a sandwich shop run by an angry Greek. He’s still writing, yes, but what does he have to show for an entire adult life pursuing his quote-unquote craft? Half a novel, plus some short stories (gathered into an unsellable collection that in a fit of self-abnegation he decided to entitle Juvenilia). These moments of accounting lead him to understand that somehow he is exactly the same as he’s ever been: curious, confused, poking out an existence from which can be derived no clear utility. And in these moments Billy wonders if maybe he wasn’t wrong about believing that his differences constituted his merits. On certain days he wonders if he, in fact, has any merits whatsoever.


“So,” Anil shouts, over the growing roar of the bar. “Denver.”

Billy winces, turns his empty shot glass around in a circle.

“You said you wanted to talk about her,” Anil says.

“I know,” Billy says. “It’s just—things with Denver and I are really, uh, challenging right now.”

“You might as well tell the story.”

“It’s hard to know where to start. I mean, I guess it started when Jørgen disappeared.”

“Wait. Jørgen disappeared?”

“Oh, man. I didn’t tell you this part?”

Anil removes his glasses with one hand so that he can press his other hand slowly into his face.

“I mean,” Billy says, “he hasn’t disappeared disappeared. Like, I don’t need to call Missing Persons or anything. He’s just—not around.”

“Jørgen’s a tough guy to lose,” Anil says.

True. Jørgen, Billy’s roommate, is six foot four, with shoulders that give you the impression that there are certain doors that he can only get through by turning sideways. A big, broad, hairy dude. Basically a Wookiee who has maybe shaved a bit around the facial area. But nonetheless, he is, indeed, somewhat lost.

He had sat down with Billy one morning, two weeks ago, over breakfast—eating half a box of Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch out of his mixing bowl, while Billy picked at two pieces of toast—and he’d explained to Billy that he was going to be attending some kind of electronic music producers’ conference, so he’d be away for a little while.

“Cool,” Billy had said, breaking off the corner of a piece of toast, blasting crumbs into his pajamas and the recesses of the couch. In retrospect, Billy probably should have gotten more information, but he assumed he’d hear more details before Jørgen left. But Billy hasn’t seen him since that morning. Two weeks now. Maybe producers of electronic music have these epic conferences that Billy doesn’t know about? That go on for, like, a month? He tries to picture what a hotel might look like after two weeks of being inhabited by dudes like Jørgen and all he can picture is the scorched landscape of some heavy metal album cover, littered with chunks of rubble that look like fragments of a blasted monolith.