The Weirdness(24)
He looks at some porn. He must be depressed, because tits don’t seem sexy. He considers for a moment the horrible prospect that whether he likes tits is contingent upon some light switch in his head that could be flipped off.
Okay, if not porn, then narrative. Maybe he can catch up on Argentium Astrum, although he’s not entirely sure he’s going to enjoy its particular brand of supernatural mystery now that there’s so much goddamn supernatural mystery jammed into his everyday life.
He loads the page; there are three episodes he hasn’t seen. He clicks one and the opening sequence begins to stream as normal—the familiar sheriff’s badge rises, gleaming, from inky, mist-shrouded depths—but then the stream glitches again. First there are a bunch of jittering bars, then a quick flash of what looks like a block of random numerals, then the bars again, and then the little video window just crashes into a block of solid blue. Then it changes to red. Then blue again. Then green. Then a black field with six white dots in it. Then back to blue. The effect is kind of mesmerizing and calming and he watches it for almost four minutes before he snaps out of it.
Okay. If not porn, if not narrative, then bed. And if not bed, then the couch.
And as he lies there on the couch, twisting uncomfortably, he thinks back, remembering the kitchen accident all those years ago, the guy he saw who was on fire. It happened back when he was dishwashing at a crappy family restaurant called the Fairlane, back in Ohio. Something had gone wrong with the Fairlane’s rangetops and the owner had tried to save a couple of bucks by calling his uncertified handyman brother in to fix the thing. Billy remembers that guy on his back, visible only as a belly and legs while the rest of his body banged around clumsily inside the half-disassembled stove with a ball-peen hammer in his hand.
Billy can’t remember the guy’s name but he remembers the fireball that suddenly erupted from under the thing, ignited by an errant spark or by the pilot light from the neighboring rangetop, and he remembers the brother yanking himself out of the blast with his whole head on fire. He remembers what that looked like. What it smelled like. And he thinks about something like that happening to everything in the world. All the people. All the books. All the Brazillian cockroaches, and all the bananas; all the dogs, all the wolves. And then he’s asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE
FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
A PHONE IS NOT LIKE A BANANA • LEADING THE BACKLASH • TRAVELING BOOK HUNTERS • THE WHOLE POINT OF A CLOAK • SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING • LOOKING HOMELESS • COWARD = ICE • FLAUBERT • CAFFEINE, MEAT, AND REVENGE • WHAT STORYTELLERS DO • TO THOUGHTLESSNESS
He wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. It’s Denver, he thinks. Hope muscles him around, pulls him up into action. He slept on the couch last night, though, and so he opens his eyes expecting Loft and instead sees Living Room. There’s a disorienting second during which he can’t quite figure out which way his head is pointing. Maybe it’s just leftover fug from last night’s high, but for that second, the apartment seems like some Escher structure he can’t orient himself within. God only knows where the phone is.
It buzzes again. Billy makes a valiant go of getting to his feet, but he’s slept with one leg jammed underneath himself, and that leg has gone completely numb, useless, transformed from trusty appendage to strange tube packed full of cast-off meats, like a long sack of dog food stuck to his body. He tries to stand and instead he crumples down to the floor, banging his knee on the coffee table’s remorseless edge. “Son of a bitch,” he says.
The phone buzzes again. Billy kneads his fist vigorously into his inert calf while using his other hand to grope around on the coffee table, knocking a pile of mail onto the floor but not coming upon anything that resembles the phone’s familiar shape.
“Damn it,” Billy cries. He’s blowing his chance. He feels like if he talked to Denver, even just for a second, he’d be able to say the right thing: the thing that would be convincing, that would show her that he can be the man that he presumes she wants him to be. Caring, compassionate, competent, whatever.
He finally finds the phone nine minutes later. It’s in the fruit bowl in the kitchen, nestled in the curvature of the bruised banana he brought home two nights ago. Present Moment Billy looks back at Past Billy with bafflement and contempt. Past Billy, thus roused, offers a thin explanation as to why it was a good idea to stick the phone there last night, something about the vaguely satisfying correspondence between the shape of the banana and the shape of the phone. And Present Moment Billy experiences a sudden, acute awareness regarding how he must appear to other people. His puzzlement, his dreaminess, his hapless wonder: How fucking contemptible. It’s no wonder Denver is done with him. He’d be done with him, too.