“Hey, wait a second,” Billy says, remembering.
Lucifer, half out the door, pauses.
“What about God?” Billy says.
Lucifer frowns.
“I mean, if I believe in you — the Devil — then it reasonably follows that I should believe in God. But I don’t know if I believe in God, not really. So — I don’t know — I just thought I’d ask you, like, is there a God?”
Lucifer looks at Billy.
“Don’t talk to me about God,” he says, and then he’s gone.
Billy stands there, at the doorway, for a long time. He latches the chain. He tries to get back to having the feeling he had this morning, the victorious feeling he had at having turned the Devil away the first time. But it’s not working. He no longer feels like turning the Devil down is proof that he’s not a fuck-up. This time, with the fate of the goddamn world hanging in the balance, he only feels like a coward.
Why me? he wonders. Why put this on me? There are people out there who infiltrate places for a fucking living. Navy SEALs. CIA spooks. Fuck, send a UPS guy; he could at least get Ollard to open the door.
It’s because you’re desperate, he thinks. The only person desperate enough to say yes.
But that can’t be it. There are plenty of desperate people. He lives in New York; he sees buttloads of human desperation every time he goes out to get a coffee. So why him?
Eventually, Billy convinces himself that it doesn’t have to be him at all. I might be desperate, but I’m not a dumbass, he tells himself. Lucifer will ask someone else, someone braver. Someone stupider. Someone more morally corrupt.
Or maybe more morally prepared? Billy tries to picture saintlike people, risking their lives in the scary tower for the good of all humanity. He envisions Martin Luther King Jr., back from the dead, kicking open the door. An Uzi in his hands, spitting out fire.
Okay, he thinks, jarred out of his reverie by this image. Let’s think about something else. And he does. He checks the phone again to make sure Denver hasn’t called. He ravages the cupboards for a dinner, ends up eating two bags of Mixed Berry Fruity Snacks and a half-dozen fistfuls of oyster crackers. He washes each fistful down with a slug of Jørgen’s Scotch.
He gets online. The tab for dog is still open in Wikipedia. For a minute, he stares glassily at this sentence: “The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) is a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), a member of the Canidae family of the mammalian order Carnivora.” Eventually, against his better judgment, he clicks over to Bladed Hyacinth and rereads the pan of his work. His stomach sinks in the exact same way it did when he read it the first time. I’ve wasted my life, he thinks. The world is going to end and all I’m going to be is a guy who sucks.
Not necessarily, he thinks. Just walk into the horrible tower and get the stupid cat and give it to Satan and everything could be different. You could get your book published. You could save the world.
To this, he thinks both Yeah right and No way so closely together that he can’t discern which one comes first.
So be it. He envisions the Neko, its little paw oscillating. Not beckoning, but waving goodbye. Waving goodbye forever. To him, to the world and all its combustible matter, to everything and everyone.
Something else, he tells himself. Think about something else.
Back to the computer. He Googles Elisa Mastic, tomorrow night’s poet, reads one of her poems online. It might be good, but it’s poetry, so he can’t really tell. He kind of likes the line about the “deleted world,” but that gets him thinking once again about fire destroying everything.
He looks at some porn. He must be depressed, because tits don’t seem sexy. He considers for a moment the horrible prospect that whether he likes tits is contingent upon some light switch in his head that could be flipped off.
Okay, if not porn, then narrative. Maybe he can catch up on Argentium Astrum, although he’s not entirely sure he’s going to enjoy its particular brand of supernatural mystery now that there’s so much goddamn supernatural mystery jammed into his everyday life.
He loads the page; there are three episodes he hasn’t seen. He clicks one and the opening sequence begins to stream as normal — the familiar sheriff’s badge rises, gleaming, from inky, mist-shrouded depths — but then the stream glitches again. First there are a bunch of jittering bars, then a quick flash of what looks like a block of random numerals, then the bars again, and then the little video window just crashes into a block of solid blue. Then it changes to red. Then blue again. Then green. Then a black field with six white dots in it. Then back to blue. The effect is kind of mesmerizing and calming and he watches it for almost four minutes before he snaps out of it.
Okay. If not porn, if not narrative, then bed. And if not bed, then the couch.
And as he lies there on the couch, twisting uncomfortably, he thinks back, remembering the kitchen accident all those years ago, the guy he saw who was on fire. It happened back when he was dishwashing at a crappy family restaurant called the Fairlane, back in Ohio. Something had gone wrong with the Fairlane’s rangetops and the owner had tried to save a couple of bucks by calling his uncertified handyman brother in to fix the thing. Billy remembers that guy on his back, visible only as a belly and legs while the rest of his body banged around clumsily inside the half-disassembled stove with a ball-peen hammer in his hand.
Billy can’t remember the guy’s name but he remembers the fireball that suddenly erupted from under the thing, ignited by an errant spark or by the pilot light from the neighboring rangetop, and he remembers the brother yanking himself out of the blast with his whole head on fire. He remembers what that looked like. What it smelled like. And he thinks about something like that happening to everything in the world. All the people. All the books. All the Brazillian cockroaches, and all the bananas; all the dogs, all the wolves. And then he’s asleep.
CHAPTER FIVE. FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
A PHONE IS NOT LIKE A BANANA LEADING THE BACKLASH • TRAVELING BOOK HUNTERS • THE WHOLE POINT OF A CLOAK • SEAFOOD WAREHOUSING • LOOKING HOMELESS • COWARD = ICE • FLAUBERT • CAFFEINE, MEAT, AND REVENGE • WHAT STORYTELLERS DO • TO THOUGHTLESSNESS
He wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. It’s Denver, he thinks. Hope muscles him around, pulls him up into action. He slept on the couch last night, though, and so he opens his eyes expecting Loft and instead sees Living Room. There’s a disorienting second during which he can’t quite figure out which way his head is pointing. Maybe it’s just leftover fug from last night’s high, but for that second, the apartment seems like some Escher structure he can’t orient himself within. God only knows where the phone is.
It buzzes again. Billy makes a valiant go of getting to his feet, but he’s slept with one leg jammed underneath himself, and that leg has gone completely numb, useless, transformed from trusty appendage to strange tube packed full of cast-off meats, like a long sack of dog food stuck to his body. He tries to stand and instead he crumples down to the floor, banging his knee on the coffee table’s remorseless edge. “Son of a bitch,” he says.
The phone buzzes again. Billy kneads his fist vigorously into his inert calf while using his other hand to grope around on the coffee table, knocking a pile of mail onto the floor but not coming upon anything that resembles the phone’s familiar shape.