The Weirdness(27)

You’d be protected, Billy reminds himself. The Devil said you’d be protected, that he’d protect you with a ward or something.

But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t know what a ward is or how it works, but he has absolutely no certainty that a bunch of mystical hand-waving could protect him against whatever would happen to him in there. Better to stay out here. On the safe side of the street. Let somebody else be the hero.

He does something then. He calls himself a coward. Like this: You fucking coward.

This could be it. This could be your Moment. All you have to do is one daring thing and you’d get what you want. You could feel like you accomplished what you came out here to do. You could finally rest. All you have to do is just, for once, be brave.

No, he tells himself. I can’t. Besides—and at this point he’s begun to work up a little thunderhead of righteousness—if you really want what you want, if you really want to get your damn book published, you don’t do it this way. You don’t act as the Devil’s stooge. You do the damn work. You sit down. You write. You try to write well. You finish the thing. You—you do what Flaubert said—you live a life that is steady and well-ordered so that you can be fierce and original in the work. You don’t run around busting into magical fortresses and call that bravery and let somebody else do the hard work for you.

He pauses there, waiting for the retort, and then it comes: You ain’t exactly Flaubert.

He turns from the warehouse and walks away.


Billy doesn’t know where he’s headed. The parts of his brain that were engaged in internal debate have ceased their crowing, opting now to simply choke one another to death. He just keeps walking, grateful at least that the city has retained its capacity to absorb a person who has no particular destination in mind, a person who needs an hour or two to be nothing more than a mote, twisting through space.

At the end of his mote-time he finds himself in the Village, which he normally takes strenuous pains to avoid, standing in front of a display of touristy junk, hemmed in by excitable schoolkids. He’s actually physically handling a twenty-dollar hat, a fake fur thing with pointy wolf-ears, trying to decide if it would make an appropriate gift for Denver. She’d look cute in it.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. He drops the hat, disgusted at it, at himself. First of all, there is no way in hell that she would ever consent to wear such a thing. And second of all, there aren’t going to be any more gifts for Denver, because he and Denver are finished, even if it turns out that the world isn’t going to end. It’s been, what, eight days since they last spoke? Surely at this point he should be considering himself well and truly dumped. Pull yourself together, he tells himself.

You need protein, some inner voice tells him. And so he hits the nearest diner and devours an enormous burger, ordered rare. He feels a little more stable with some blood in his mouth. He gets his pen and a napkin. Okay, he tells himself, with the greatest calm he can muster. You’re going to make a list. A list of all of your problems. And then, underneath each item on the list, you’re going to list one Action Item that you can do to address that problem. This seems reasonable.

Your first problem, he thinks, is that you’re a coward.

And dutifully, he writes down:

COWARD

Then, on something of a roll, he writes:

FUCK-UP

“No,” he says. This is not going to work. He draws an X through each word. Even then the thing is a little depressing to look at: he looks around for a garbage can. Finding none, he folds the note into quarters and sticks it in his pocket.

Action Items. He has a goddamn Action Item: Flaubert’s advice. Be fierce and original. He pulls the accordion file out of his backpack and starts spreading possible reading pieces out on the table. If he can just find some piece in there that demonstrates his ferocity and originality—that would show everyone. The desire for revenge rises within him, resplendent and gauche, like the phoenix on the hood of a Trans Am. He just needs to find the right piece. If not the novel then maybe the short stories?

After two minutes of reading what he thought was his best shot—a story with no characters at all, told from the point of view of various apartments that had been inhabited by characters—he’s back to the problem he was having this morning. There is no right piece. Nothing he has written in the last decade is good enough to justify the personality flaws that he’d been justifying by telling everyone that he was a writer.

Fuck it. He downs a third cup of coffee. He sweeps everything back into the file. He has an idea. He’s going to wing it. He’s going to get up there on stage and ad-lib. He can tell a story that way, just by getting up there and opening up the fecund little grotto that houses his creative unconscious. He knows he can do it. He’s a fucking storyteller and that’s the kind of shit that storytellers do: they tell goddamn stories. He will be bold and daring; he will confirm that he is not a coward and not a fuck-up; he will be epiphany-level good. And maybe the world won’t end.