The Weirdness(46)

“Of course they did,” Lucifer says. “My point here, Billy, is not to ask you to relive whatever you suffered at the slings and arrows of the ignorant, but rather to remind you of the reward that awaited you at the end of that summer. Your girlfriend of the time was saving up to take a trip to Zurich and your best friend was saving up to buy his first used car. You were also saving your money, Billy. Do you remember? Do you remember what those long hours on the golf course bought you?”

“Yes,” Billy says, quietly, after a minute of looking down at his battered canvas sneakers.

“What was it?” Lucifer says, his voice almost a whisper now.

“It was an Olivetti Valentine S,” Billy says.

“An Olivetti Valentine S,” Lucifer repeats. “A typewriter. You didn’t need a typewriter. Your family had a computer. So why did you buy an Olivetti?”

“It was—” Billy says, his mood sullen, complexly tangled. “It was a beautiful machine.”

“That’s not why,” Lucifer says. “If you wanted a beautiful machine you could have saved for a Harley-Davidson. You could have saved for a Braun stereo. But instead you saved for an Olivetti typewriter. Tell me why, Billy.”

“Because it’s—”

“Tell me.”

“Because,” Billy says, “because real writers used typewriters.”

“That’s right,” says Lucifer.

Billy remembers the draft of an early first novel that he wrote on that typewriter, his senior year of high school and first year of college, this thing about the murder of a young man in a quiet rural town. He still has it in a box somewhere, terrible, probably, but he finished it, three hundred pages hammered out on that Olivetti, and he remembers the feeling of confidence and authority that came from using that machine to make marks on paper. It’s been a long time since he’s been able to produce those feelings so sustainably.

“You envisioned a future for yourself, then, didn’t you?” Lucifer says.

Billy had. That senior year of high school was when he first started drinking coffee, and he remembers hooking up a Mr. Coffee in his room at home, up on the third floor, and he would wake on cold mornings before the sun was up, before he’d need to trudge to where the school bus would pick him up, and he would sit at his desk, in a ratty plum-colored bathrobe, drinking coffee and smoking his first-ever cigarettes and clacking out pages, and he would feel certain that, in some important way, he was making a template for the rest of his life.

He also remembers selling that typewriter, five years ago, on eBay, a hard month, between jobs, remembers the good feeling of an extra hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, even though it disappeared quickly into a few overdue bills, a new shirt for a job interview, groceries, beer, condoms, smokes, a couple of books.

Lucifer goes on: “You aren’t allowing yourself to feel that hope again, that ambition, Billy. I promise you the kind of future you really want and you throw it away in favor of take me back to three days ago? What did you have three days ago that you won’t have in the future that I’m offering you? A job? Another shitty job? Your wallet? Your keys? These things are all replaceable: a few days’ hassle, nothing more. Your friends? You’re thirty years old, Billy Ridgeway, you don’t get to be thirty years old without passing through times when your friends are mad at you. It’s passed before and it’ll pass now. A girlfriend? Denver? You think she won’t come back to you when your novel gets published?”

“Maybe not,” Billy says.

“Maybe not,” Lucifer says, his voice down to a soft hiss, almost drowned out by the rumbling traffic nearby. “But don’t you think you would be able to find someone better? Do you think you don’t deserve someone better?”

“I like Denver,” Billy says. He does not say love.

“Think, though, Billy, think about other women. Think about the women you didn’t pursue in the past because you thought they were out of your league. Think about being in the league that they’re in.”

“That’s—” Billy says. “That seems creepy and wrong.”

“Wrong? You deserve it, Billy. You deserve to be up a notch by now.”

“I don’t,” Billy says. “I don’t deserve it. I didn’t do the work.” He remembers the speech he gave himself yesterday. “If I want that? The future you’re describing? With the book, and the—the women and stuff? If I want that future, I have to get there on my own.”

“No one gets there on their own, Billy,” Lucifer says, his normal tone of voice returning. He draws back from Billy, hooks his thumbs into the heavy lapels of the peacoat. “That’s not how it works.”