The Weirdness(25)

The phone’s tiny screen, upon inspection, reveals that it wasn’t even Denver who called. It was his dad again. Billy frowns at this: twice in one week is a little odd. It’s not in Keith Ridgeway’s character to press a book on Billy twice. That’s not the way it works between them. Usually when he mentions a book in a voice mail that seems to be enough for him to be able to pretend that Billy will track it down and read it, which means that the book simply never comes up again between them. So a second call from his dad means either that he’s pushing two separate books or that something else is going on. I should call him, Billy thinks. But not today. Today he has shit to do.

He looks out the window, checks that Brooklyn is not on fire. It seems no more in danger of being on fire than it did yesterday, or the day before that. Some tension he’s carried since last night, located somewhere behind his sternum, releases. Someone else is solving the problem. He feels certain of it.

Having freed himself from obligation, he makes some more of the Devil’s coffee and eats the spotted banana. He pulls out the big accordion file which contains his recent fiction and starts looking for something that he could read tonight at Barometer. Something good. Something epiphany-level good: something that will make the audience sit up and say Hey, this doesn’t come from the ravaged storehouse of tired forms and stale devices. Maybe Anton Cirrus doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe he’s not so smart after all. Maybe he’s just an asshole. People are getting weary of the controlling grip that Bladed Hyacinth has on the literary scene, Billy tells himself, surely they are. Every two-bit tastemaker is eventually felled by a backlash. Billy could be the one to lead that backlash. That could be his Role in the Scene. All he needs to do is find the piece in the file that is so good that it will eliminate all doubt about his talent.

Except there’s nothing like that in the file. He flips through five years of recent output and all he can think is I have wasted my life. Moving to Brooklyn, with this intention of making his way as a writer: how stupid. He could have done something else. Sometimes he thinks he would have been happiest as a parking lot attendant or a night watchman, something where he would have spent most of his time alone, in a chair, quietly slacking, reading on the job. That might not have been so terrible.

Billy remembers the first long year after he’d failed out of school, remembers that at some point in that year his dad invited him on a trip to Italy, wanting them to go off together, spending six months tracking down some scattered cache of sixteenth-century books. At the time, Billy was trying to hold down a job scanning documents for an insurance conglomerate, and trying to stay sober, and trying to get up early in the mornings to work on an impossibly tangled outline for an ambitious novel that he never actually began writing, and the idea of spending half a year with his frosty, difficult dad seemed not particularly tempting, but in retrospect it seems like a blown opportunity. Instead of being a washed-up nobody he could have been … part of a father-son team of traveling book hunters? Right now it seems like it would have been a pretty good way to make a life. Better than this. Better than sifting through half-revised chapters of a weakly conceived novel.

He built this newest manuscript around a braided pair of narratives: one about a married couple who can’t stay faithful to one another, and one about their drug dealer, who is involved in a Big Deal Gone Wrong. He had some idea that the book as a whole was thematically about betrayal, that the two plotlines would reflect one another somehow. One printed chapter has “MICROCOSM / MACROCOSM” written across the top in his familiar scrawl. That must have meant something at one time.

The more he reads, the more the very existence of the document perplexes him. He’s never been married. His interactions with drug dealers have always been brief and to the point. He’s not even sure he even has anything to say about betrayal. Why did he write this? What larger point was he hoping to make? Had he just been streaming a lot of TV about narcotics? Right now, he’d be embarrassed to see this thing in print, even if he were willing to take Lucifer up on his deal.

Even if he were willing. Which he isn’t.

He puts the accordion file down and picks up the folder of PowerPoint slides that the Devil left. He looks at the picture of Timothy Ollard and fantasizes, for a moment, about punching him in the face.

“He doesn’t look so tough,” Billy says.

But then he flips ahead to the picture of the tower. It still looks pants-shittingly scary even in printout form. But what did Lucifer say? The whole thing was a front, designed to terrify people into not seeing it? He flips to the map, scrutinizes the address. He doesn’t get up to Chelsea very often but he’s pretty sure he’s been by this place at least once in the last decade. It’s under a cloak? Last night, while high, Billy was pretty ready to roll with it, but in the glare of day it just sounds like bullshit. Infinite fire? The end of the world? Come on.