Free The Weirdness by Jeremy P. Bushnell Page B

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