The Weirdness(23)

“I have to think about it,” Billy says.

Lucifer looks at his watch. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. How long do we have?”

“Maybe a week,” Lucifer says, after taking a moment to pause for some kind of calculation.

“Okay, then,” Billy says. “I had a long day. I’m tired and I’m high and even if I weren’t it’d still be a good idea to sleep on it.”

Lucifer watches Billy’s face, reading something in it, then says, “As you wish.”

“Let me do the reading, get that over with, and then after the reading I’ll have a decision for you.”

“After the reading,” Lucifer says.

“Yeah,” Billy says. “But I don’t necessarily mean the second I step down off the stage. I mean, like, a while after.”

“I am reasonable,” says Lucifer. “I agree to these terms.” He closes the laptop and stuffs it back in his messenger bag, swaps it for a manila folder. “I’ll leave you with these for your review.”

Billy takes the folder. Inside is a printout of all the PowerPoint slides. “Uh, thanks,” says Billy.

“Until after the reading,” Lucifer says. As he turns to go, something nags at Billy, some question that Anil raised.

“Hey, wait a second,” Billy says, remembering.

Lucifer, half out the door, pauses.

“What about God?” Billy says.

Lucifer frowns.

“I mean, if I believe in you—the Devil—then it reasonably follows that I should believe in God. But I don’t know if I believe in God, not really. So—I don’t know—I just thought I’d ask you, like, is there a God?”

Lucifer looks at Billy.

“Don’t talk to me about God,” he says, and then he’s gone.


Billy stands there, at the doorway, for a long time. He latches the chain. He tries to get back to having the feeling he had this morning, the victorious feeling he had at having turned the Devil away the first time. But it’s not working. He no longer feels like turning the Devil down is proof that he’s not a fuck-up. This time, with the fate of the goddamn world hanging in the balance, he only feels like a coward.

Why me? he wonders. Why put this on me? There are people out there who infiltrate places for a fucking living. Navy SEALs. CIA spooks. Fuck, send a UPS guy; he could at least get Ollard to open the door.

It’s because you’re desperate, he thinks. The only person desperate enough to say yes.

But that can’t be it. There are plenty of desperate people. He lives in New York; he sees buttloads of human desperation every time he goes out to get a coffee. So why him?

Eventually, Billy convinces himself that it doesn’t have to be him at all. I might be desperate, but I’m not a dumbass, he tells himself. Lucifer will ask someone else, someone braver. Someone stupider. Someone more morally corrupt.

Or maybe more morally prepared? Billy tries to picture saintlike people, risking their lives in the scary tower for the good of all humanity. He envisions Martin Luther King Jr., back from the dead, kicking open the door. An Uzi in his hands, spitting out fire.

Okay, he thinks, jarred out of his reverie by this image. Let’s think about something else. And he does. He checks the phone again to make sure Denver hasn’t called. He ravages the cupboards for a dinner, ends up eating two bags of Mixed Berry Fruity Snacks and a half-dozen fistfuls of oyster crackers. He washes each fistful down with a slug of Jørgen’s Scotch.

He gets online. The tab for dog is still open in Wikipedia. For a minute, he stares glassily at this sentence: “The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), a member of the Canidae family of the mammalian order Carnivora.” Eventually, against his better judgment, he clicks over to Bladed Hyacinth and rereads the pan of his work. His stomach sinks in the exact same way it did when he read it the first time. I’ve wasted my life, he thinks. The world is going to end and all I’m going to be is a guy who sucks.

Not necessarily, he thinks. Just walk into the horrible tower and get the stupid cat and give it to Satan and everything could be different. You could get your book published. You could save the world.

To this, he thinks both Yeah right and No way so closely together that he can’t discern which one comes first.

So be it. He envisions the Neko, its little paw oscillating. Not beckoning, but waving goodbye. Waving goodbye forever. To him, to the world and all its combustible matter, to everything and everyone.

Something else, he tells himself. Think about something else.

Back to the computer. He Googles Elisa Mastic, tomorrow night’s poet, reads one of her poems online. It might be good, but it’s poetry, so he can’t really tell. He kind of likes the line about the “deleted world,” but that gets him thinking once again about fire destroying everything.