The Weirdness(54)

“Starbucks every day, huh?” Billy says.

“For hours. Hours every day.”

“That’s a lot of thinking.”

“It is. That’s the thing I’m good at. Thinking. That’s all there is left to do, really.”

“Yeah, um.” Billy’s still trying to find his grounding in this conversation. He feels a bit like he’s on an awkward date. He has begun to detect an odor, like meat left out in the sun, which he assumes is coming from Ollard, and he notices that the corduroy suit, which looked so sharp from a distance, is actually quite dirty, filthy even, going nearly translucent in spots from grease and wear.

“So,” Billy tries. “What do you think about?”

Ollard makes a sucking sound with his mouth before he answers. “What do I think about,” he says. “I think about the world. The world and all that is in it.”

“Okay,” Billy says. “That’s cool.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t think so,” Ollard says. “I don’t think the world is cool.”

“No?”

“No. I think—and I have considered the problem at some length—that the world, ultimately, is repulsive.”

“Okay,” Billy says.

“It’s not okay,” Ollard says. “I am grateful to this place, though. To Starbucks. It helped me to think, during this time. It helped me to focus. It reminded me. Every day. Of the world. Of just how little the world has to offer.”

His expression suddenly cracks. His eyes clench shut; a network of deep lines emerges across his forehead; his mouth tenses, widening into a distorted black hole, rimmed with bad teeth. You’d think if you were an all-powerful magician who’d been alive for a century you’d at least be able to take the time to fix your terrible teeth.

“Hey,” Billy says, in a voice that he hopes is therapeutic. He momentarily considers reaching out, putting a hand on Ollard’s shoulder, although the idea creeps him out too much for him to get far with it.

“Ollard,” Billy says, expending enormous effort to sound very calm. At this point he’s past thinking that this conversation is like an awkward date; he’s instead realized that it’s more like a hostage negotiation. He tries to remember anything he knows about hostage negotiation, any movie where a hostage negotiation situation was handled effectively. He gets a vision of Denzel Washington, stern and commanding, but he can’t come up with any immediate way to put it to use.

“Timothy,” he tries, with his soothing voice still on. “Where is the Neko?”

“I’m so tired,” Ollard says. He presses the heels of his hands into his face, as though he’s stuffing thoughts back into his head. “I’m tired,” he says again.

“We’re all tired,” Billy says. “Take me to the Neko.”

Ollard draws a long, shuddering breath, and then looks back at Billy, his face having regained some of its composure. “You want to see the Neko?” he says.

“Well, yeah,” Billy says. “I mean. Eventually. We can keep talking for a bit if you want.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ollard says, rising. “We can talk on the way.”

“All right then. Let’s go.” Billy claps his hands on his thighs and gets out of the chair, leaving the creepy Americano on the little round table, untouched. They walk behind the counter, weaving between the three workers, who are involved in polishing nonexistent spots off the machines at the bar. Ollard hooks around into the supply room, and just past the big industrial refrigerator and the sinks, right in the spot where labor practices posters should be hanging in mandatory display, the Starbucks abruptly opens into a long corridor, grim and dingy, its walls a sort of dulled avocado, gone rippled from layers upon layers of paint. It has a dusty whiff about it, like a rarely visited back wing of an underfunded natural history museum, like a stuffed bison slowly rotting in an alcove.

“I’ve been alive for a long time,” Ollard says, as the two of them enter the corridor. His voice wavers.

“I’d heard that,” Billy says. They’re passing doors on either side; Billy wonders what he’d find if he opened them. “Lucifer said you’d been alive for like eighty years or something?”

“Oh, longer than that,” Ollard says. “Before that I was just off the radar, I guess. I was … very subtle.”

“It’s a good trick,” Billy says, encouragingly. He looks over his shoulder, back down the hallway, making sure that he can still see the Starbucks supply room. If he can make it back there he can make it back to the door that leads out to the street, and for some reason he believes that if he makes it back out to the street, he’ll be safe.