Billy, determined to nurture the exchange until it became a conversation, went on: “It was like—it was like being on a very benign drug.”
She did not treat him as though he’d said something stupid.
What happened instead: she stood, wiped her hands on her jeans, and asked him, somewhat tersely, to imagine a film that operated like a malignant drug and describe it to her, which is exactly the kind of left-field question that Billy is actually kind of good at imagining answers to.
Conversation went to David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (Billy had seen it; Denver hadn’t) and then to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (Denver had seen it; Billy hadn’t) and then to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (which they’d both seen). Billy started talking about the recommendations that Netflix had started giving him after he’d watched the Riefenstahl, and he’d gotten Denver laughing, and in the first moment that she laughed he felt insanely grateful that she’d taken the stupid shit that he was saying and made it into a decent conversation. Made something wonderful out of the common flow of gutter water.
“All right,” Anil says, fishing a bill out of his wallet. “We gotta work tomorrow.”
“True,” Billy says, depositing his own bill on the bar. “You headed home?”
“Yes,” says Anil. “But first I am going to go out back and get high.”
“That sounds excellent,” Billy says, either forgetting or deliberately refusing to recall the knowledge that getting high on top of getting drunk almost always gives him a horrible case of the veering spins. By the time he and Anil part ways he literally can’t walk in a straight line. Instead he has to lurch from lamppost to lamppost like the world is some kind of fantastically disorienting carnival attraction. Like the world is a ride. Complete with swallowing back the need to vomit.
He gets back to the apartment, lets himself in: no Jørgen, still. That fucker. Billy drops the bruised banana into the fruit bowl, then opens the nice bottle of wine which he and Denver will now never drink and uses it to fill a Boddingtons pint glass. He collapses onto the sofa, hauls his laptop up to his chest and navigates clumsily to the website for Argentium Astrum, this online-only supernatural police procedural he’s been watching. There’s a new episode available but he can’t get it to stream properly: the opening credits load all right but then the images devolve into glitches and optical noise, as if the video compression algorithm has grown overzealous, opting to cheerfully crush the visual data into unparsable blocks. He watches fields of color shift for a minute and then slaps the laptop shut, drains the pint glass in three great gulps, and stumbles into the bathroom, where he stares at the toilet, trying determinedly to make it stop drifting around in his field of vision. He never quite manages it, but he doesn’t throw up either. He calls this a partial win and stumbles up to bed.
He wakes to the smell of coffee and the sound of his phone buzzing away. It’s Denver, he thinks, and he experiences a brief feeling of hope, which is promptly demolished by the realization of exactly how hungover he is. He feels like a corpse being reanimated by means of savage jolts, one fresh burst of current direct into his rotten nervous system each time the phone vibrates. His limbs jerk uncoordinatedly. He flings an arm onto the bedside table, where it crashes onto the edge of a saucer covered in coins, flipping it into the air. Pennies rain down onto him. He groans and curses and pulls his head to the level of the bedside table, forces himself to open his eyes, winces. The phone’s not there. It’s on the floor. Each time it rings it scurries further away from the bed. Fuck it, he thinks. He pulls his pillow over his head. At long last the phone goes silent.
He plants a hand on the floor and anchors his stomach to the mattress, stretching his torso into space, sending his other hand way out, all the way out to the phone. Gets it, reels it back into the bed. When he checks the screen he sees that it’s not Denver who called him at all. It’s his dad.
He pulls the pillow back down over his face for a long minute. What could his dad want? Nearly every conversation they’ve had since Billy dropped out of school involves Dad urging Billy to read this or that esoteric book or article: something Maleficarium, something Lycanthropia, something Carcieri Infernus, whatever, whatever, whatever. Billy always says that he will do it, even though they both know by now that he won’t do it. Well-meaning, Billy supposes, and in his more charitable moments Billy is even a little touched by the continuity of his father’s faith in him, but that is not the kind of conversation he wants to have right now, or today, or maybe not this month at all, so Dad is going to have to wait. It is decided.