“It will keep you alive,” Lucifer says.
And with that, he struggles his way through the rest of the cigar. He doesn’t feel like a billionaire. He doesn’t feel like some badass toughening up before a combat mission. He feels like a kid who got caught smoking a cigarette and was forced to finish the whole pack. The decorative pattern in the rug begins to swim and waver disorientingly. Billy stares through watering eyes behind the TV at a poster that he hadn’t noticed when they first came in, depicting the full roster of the New York Mets. Their faces appear sallow, dead-eyed, cheerless. Billy blinks repeatedly, as though if he exerts enough willpower he can make them resolve instead into happy Yankees. Another long suck on the cigar and some violet form begins to bloom in his head, like ink blossoming in water. He hears a voice, distant, drowned in buzzing, as though reaching him only through a thick curtain of flies: he turns his head and sees Lucifer talking on the phone, saying words, words that sound somehow familiar, that Billy feels like he should be able to parse. After a minute of turning them over in his mind, Billy manages to make the syllables resolve into an address, the address of the tower, in Chelsea.
“I’ve arranged for a cab,” Lucifer says to Billy, placing the phone back in his pocket. The words wind their way through Billy’s consciousness, only slowly, fighting through the thicket of noise. Less flies now. More like the massed baying of wolves.
Before Billy’s head fully clears, Lucifer has marched him out of the tiny room, back through the office and corridor and restaurant, past Hadadj and out onto the street again. The cab arrives and Lucifer pops the door open, steers Billy into the seat.
“Just—wait—just do me one thing,” Billy says groggily. “You can change my mind about stuff, right? You can—what was it you said?—simple binary beliefs? You can change those?”
“I can,” Lucifer says, looking down at him.
“Well—can you—can you just change it so that I think that I’m making the right decision here? I’d really feel a lot better going into this if I knew I wasn’t—fucking up.”
“I don’t think you’re a fuck-up, Billy,” Lucifer says, with what sounds like real sincerity.
“No?” Billy says.
“No,” Lucifer says. “So rather than inscribe more beliefs into your tender brain, I want to simply urge you to stop second-guessing yourself, for once. If you look at your life, you’ll see that it’s never been your decisions that have pointed you in the wrong direction, but rather your resistance to your decisions. Every time. So: Trust yourself. And watch your fingers.”
And with that, Lucifer slams the door, and thumps a palm on the trunk of the cab, and Billy’s off, headed toward Chelsea.
Billy spends the ride looking out the window and mulling over what the Devil said. It’s never been your decisions, but your resistance to your decisions? It had a sort of horoscopy applicability that made it ring true at first, but the more Billy subjects it to careful scrutiny, the less he thinks it actually makes sense.
Stop second-guessing! says the part of him that really wants to latch on to the Devil’s diagnosis.
But that’s just it, says the more rational part of him. Wasn’t your first instinct to just say no to the Devil? So agreeing, today: that would be the part where you’re second-guessing yourself. And that would make this batch of reservations technically third-guessing. The Devil didn’t say don’t third-guess yourself.
Well, he has to admit, that’s true.
“Okay,” says the driver, pulling up on the curb next to the gallery with the Styrofoam shapes in the window. “Here we are.”
Billy peers miserably out at the Seafood Warehousing building, which looks dense and imposing even when it’s not in its Warlock House form. He makes no move to get out of the cab.
“Hey,” he says to the cabbie, suddenly. “That guy I was with: he’s paying for this ride, right?”
“Yep,” says the cabbie.
“So if I wanted to go somewhere else? If I wanted to have you drop me off in Queens, instead?”
“Yeah, whatever, buddy,” says the cabbie. “I’ll take you all the way to Florida, just say the word.”
Florida! thinks Billy, for a second. That could be good! But no. Instead he thinks of Denver. You could go to her. You could go to her, and apologize, and explain. She would understand.
Or you could go through with this plan, says his internal counterpoint. He’s not sure if this counts as second-guessing, or third-guessing, or fifth-guessing. You could save the world. Be a real writer. Have a different life.