“Wait,” Billy says. “So — is Ollard one of you?”
“Ollard?”
“Timothy Ollard? Guy who wants to burn up the world?”
“Timothy Ollard,” Laurent says, “is someone who you should not even know about. But, to answer your question: No. He is not one of us. He is — well, he is a problem, a problem we are actively engaged with and working on. Let me put it to you this way, Billy. Ollard is a bad guy. And we’re the good guys.”
“The good guys,” Billy repeats.
“Yes!” Laurent says.
For some reason this puts Billy in mind of the Office of Homeland Security, which he actually always thought of as a group of extralegal thugs. He narrows his eyes.
“Last night,” he asks, “did you Tase me?”
Laurent glances down to the floor and presses a knuckle into his upper lip for a long second, apparently contemplating how to phrase the answer.
“You did!” Billy says. “You fucking Tased me!”
“Yes,” Laurent says, looking up with an expression of pity. “I Tased you. If it’s any consolation, I did it with great reservation, a really strong, profound reservation. But the important point is not that. That’s behind us. That’s in the past. The important point is that you’re with us now.”
“It really fucking hurt, you know,” Billy says. “It’s not in the past until I stop fucking hurting.”
Billy glares at Laurent while Laurent maintains a hopeful smile.
“Did you say you had to do cleanup on my friends?” Billy says, eventually.
“Yes.”
“What exactly does that mean?”
“Well,” Laurent says, “surely you understand that we can’t have people running around talking about having witnessed the dispersal of an Adversarial Manifestation. The results would be — a mess. Just a mess. So we had our team psychic — Gloria, we’ll introduce you to her in a bit — we had Gloria go in and make a couple of tweaks to their memories of the event.”
“Tweaks?”
“Yep,” Laurent says, proudly. “Just a couple of tweaks.”
“Without their consent?” Billy says.
A tiny line creases Laurent’s brow. “It’s not the kind of thing for which one typically asks consent,” he says.
“I dunno,” Billy says. “Lucifer asked for my consent before he started messing with my brain.”
“That may be,” Laurent says. “But—”
“So wait a second,” Billy says. “What exactly do my friends think went down last night?”
Laurent gives him a look, as though this entire line of conversation is somewhat distasteful. “You remember you told a joke? About shoes?”
“Who could forget that,” Billy says, in a low and rueful voice.
“Well,” Laurent continues, “in their recollection, you finish the joke, thank the audience, and head backstage. And then the reading ends and everyone heads home.”
Billy’s ears begin to burn with shame. “Elisa doesn’t read?”
“We lost track of her,” Laurent says.
“I don’t return to hanging out with my friends?” Billy says. “I freaking disappear?”
“It’s just a tweak,” Laurent says, a little defensively. “Our aim is minimal effective alteration: M.E.A. It’s not our aim to, you know, write fiction in which you emerge as the star. We’re the good guys.”
“So I hear,” Billy says. He tries to think about how it might have appeared to everyone. He gets up there, he bombs in front of his small band of supporters. In front of Anton Cirrus. He winces to think of it. After bombing, he disappears backstage, doesn’t return. Elisa Mastic, the poet who he conspicuously arrived with, disappears. It’s not hard to imagine how this might have appeared to Denver. By now she either thinks he’s dead, or she thinks he’s an asshole, or she thinks he’s fucking someone else. He winces again: really at this stage it turns into a full-blown grimace.
“I need my phone,” Billy says. “I gotta sort this shit out right now.”
“Oh, no,” Laurent says. “That’s not possible. We had to dispose of your phone.”
“Yeah but — what?” Billy says, dismayed.
“Your phone, your wallet, your keys — anything connected to your former identity — all of it, for our purposes, has to be treated as compromised.”
“Former identity?” Billy repeats.
“Forgive me,” Laurent says, spreading his hands apologetically. “I fear that I haven’t done the best job in this conversation of explaining the exact details of the protocol we follow in cases like yours. You know how it is, when you’re so involved with something, you kind of forget that people on the outside might not intuitively grasp all the nuance of a situation?”
“Look,” Billy says. “I’m starting not to give so much of a fuck about the nuance of the situation. You say you’re the good guys, and I want to believe you. I really do. But so far what I know about you is that you wiped my friends’ brains, you got me in trouble with my girlfriend, you trashed my stuff, and you’re keeping me in a cage against my will. You don’t seem like the good guys. Frankly, you seem like a bunch of douchebags.”
Laurent steeples his fingers and brings them to his lips, and appears to be considering this.
“If I let you out of the cell,” he says. “You have to promise that you’ll hear me out. You’re right that we can’t hold you here against your will—”
“Because it would be wrong,” Billy says.
“Absolutely!” Laurent says. “One hundred percent wrong. But if I let you out, you must give me your word that you will hear what I have to say. We believe that you are in great danger, and we believe that the Right-Hand Path is the organization that can best protect you from that danger.”
“Check,” Billy says. “You got my word.”
“Okay,” Laurent says. He turns and hollers into the darkness: “Barry! Keys!”
Billy can hear the shuffle of someone’s approach, and the janitorial clinking of keys. He squints into the darkness, then starts back when he lays eyes on the massive lumbering form of Gorbok the Mad. Hulking, broad, heavy-browed: a scary square ton of man. On the show he wears a kind of elaborate leather diaper and has a terrifying serpent tattooed across his face. In real life, Billy sees now, he’s wearing a broad violet button-down shirt and a rather stylish porkpie hat. He still has the serpent facial tattoo though. Maybe this is what happens to you, if you get a tattoo on your face, Billy thinks. Once you’ve pushed yourself out of polite society, beyond the point where you could still get a job at, say, Whole Foods. You end up having to work for the occult underground. “Hi,” says Barry, his voice high-pitched and soft. “I’m Barry.”
“I’m Billy,” says Billy. He wonders for a second whether Barry was someone else, once upon a time, someone whose former identity got compromised. Note to self, Billy thinks, don’t let identity get compromised. Or is it already too late?
“I know who you are,” says Barry, and he opens the door.
“Let’s walk,” says Laurent, clasping his hands behind him. “Could you hit the lights, Barry?”
“Sure,” says Barry, slouching off into the darkness again.
Billy steps out of the cage, enjoys a brief shiver of relief, and then instantly remembers that he never took a piss. He looks lingeringly back at the sink/toilet combination unit until he’s interrupted by the loud chung of an industrial breaker being thrown. Banks of heavy overhead lights begin to stutter on. Billy marvels briefly at the size of the space. It’s only about half the size of a suburban supermarket, but to someone like Billy, who spends most of his time in a cramped kitchen with Anil, anything larger than a squash court qualifies as cavernous.