The Weirdness (2 page)

He had sat down with Billy one morning, two weeks ago, over breakfast—eating half a box of Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch out of his mixing bowl, while Billy picked at two pieces of toast—and he’d explained to Billy that he was going to be attending some kind of electronic music producers’ conference, so he’d be away for a little while.

“Cool,” Billy had said, breaking off the corner of a piece of toast, blasting crumbs into his pajamas and the recesses of the couch. In retrospect, Billy probably should have gotten more information, but he assumed he’d hear more details before Jørgen left. But Billy hasn’t seen him since that morning. Two weeks now.
Maybe producers of electronic music have these epic conferences that Billy doesn’t know about? That go on for, like, a month? He tries to picture what a hotel might look like after two weeks of being inhabited by dudes like Jørgen and all he can picture is the scorched landscape of some heavy metal album cover, littered with chunks of rubble that look like fragments of a blasted monolith.

Two weeks with no sign of Jørgen: maybe Billy should have been more worried. But he’d been enjoying having the tiny apartment to himself for a while. It had given him an opportunity to finally attempt to have a private sex life with Denver.

Denver, a filmmaker, lives in Queens. She shares her co-op house with eleven other people. She sleeps in a hammock in the attic; somebody else sleeps in a hammock at the other end of the attic. Her place is not a viable site for sexual activity. Not that Billy’s place is any better. He sleeps in a loft above the apartment kitchen, and the loft doesn’t have a door. In fact, it only has three walls. Basically if you’re standing in the living room you can see directly into the loft. Especially if you’re six foot four, like Jørgen.

To make matters worse, Jørgen stays up late, sitting in the living room till one or two a.m., smoking weed and listening to drone metal albums on his (admittedly awesome) Bang & Olufsen unit. Thank God he uses (admittedly awesome) wireless headphones; this at least gives Billy and Denver a chance. But adults shouldn’t have to fuck like that, trying desperately to finish before some third party decides to turn around. And the whole experience of rushing it? The clenched teeth, the film of flop sweat emerging on his forehead, the near-total uncertainty as to whether Denver is deriving any joy or pleasure or comic relief from the experience? It all cancels out whatever pleasure he gets from the grudging orgasm his body eventually spits out.

He’d return to having sex in the backseats of cars except neither he nor Denver owns a car. He has considered, on more than one occasion, signing up for a Zipcar account just to have a place to furtively fuck, but he never gets far enough in this plan to actually propose it out loud. Something about imagining that hundreds of other people around the city had also come up with this idea, and that he might end up fucking Denver in some car that somebody else had just used as their own roving fuckatorium … he envisions clenching buttocks, or a woman’s greasy footprint stamped on the window, and queasily dumps the whole idea.

So he was excited when he knew that Jørgen would be away. He’d used money that he didn’t really have to buy a nice bottle of wine, the start of a plan for a good evening. He’d told Denver that they’d be able to have some time alone. She’d been excited and pleased. Which was good. They were approaching the six-month mark in their relationship. A tricky point in a relationship, that six-month mark. Half a year in. Assessments get made when you’re half a year in. Half a year in is a good moment to instill excitement and pleasure, Billy thought. He thought it would maybe be the right time to say
I love you
, a task he had not yet accomplished.

Except then somehow he’d blown it. He’d gotten nervous about the exact scheduling of what he had come to think of as “The Event.” He’d been surprised that Jørgen had left as soon as he had after the conversation, and then had gotten confused about not knowing when exactly Jørgen was destined to return. So he began to hedge on inviting Denver over. Part of him thought that he should just call her over as soon as possible—immediately—but for the first couple of days he wasn’t entirely sure that Jørgen had, in fact, actually left. And then after that it seemed probable that he could return at any moment.

Billy sent a series of texts. He sent two e-mails of inquiry to the address that he thought was current for Jørgen. He even sent an e-mail to the address that he was pretty sure Jørgen wasn’t using anymore (
Hotmail? That can’t be right
, he thought, even as he was sending it). None of these efforts yielded any response. And a couple of days ago, with Jørgen already gone for twice as long as had ever seemed probable, he had to face up to the fact that he’d blown it. There would be no Nice Evening, no Event.

When he explained this over the phone, Denver had pointed out that if the Nice Evening had been truly important to him he would have been more careful to get a more detailed explanation of Jørgen’s plans.

“It
is
important to me,” he’d said. “I mean, it
was
important to me, I guess. I’m just—I’ve just never been good with details. That’s just part of the way I am.”

“So,” she’d said, after a pause. “What you’re saying is that you’re a fuck-up.”

“Not—not a
chronic
fuck-up.”

She’d pointed out that she could come over
right now
and they could still have a Nice Evening. The odds that Jørgen would choose this specific night to return—didn’t it seem unlikely? And it
did
seem unlikely. But Billy had gotten it into his head that the Evening was now impossible, and somehow he was unable to disabuse himself of this notion.

“Why don’t you just call him?” Denver had said. “Instead of sending e-mails and texts?”

Billy had responded with a kind of
tsk
ing sound. “That wouldn’t do any good. Jørgen’s one of those guys who never actually uses his phone to, like,
receive a phone call
. If you can’t reach him by text you might as well just hang it up.”

“You could try,” Denver said, an uncharacteristic pleading note entering her voice.

“I don’t know how to put this without it sounding bad?” Billy said. “But that idea has just basically no value.”

The conversation began to go downhill from there.

“Look,” Anil says, after Billy has explained enough of this. “Just cut to the chase.”

“The chase,” Billy says. He knocks back the new shot that the bartender has set up for him. He wipes his chin with the back of his hand. “
The chase
is that at the end of it she said she just wanted me to say one thing. She just wanted me to tell her that everything was going to be okay and that things were going to get easier from here on out.”

“Okay, yeah,” says Anil. “And you responded by saying—?”

“I responded by saying that it would be ethically unsound for me to make a claim, for the purposes of comfort, that I couldn’t be certain was true under the present circumstances.”

Anil opens his mouth and then shuts it again. Finally he offers this: “No offense, man, but you’re a fucking idiot.”

“I’m aware.”

“Fucking,” Anil says, ticking it off on his thumb. “Idiot,” he concludes, ticking this one off on his pointer finger.

“Thank you, Anil, I heard you the first time. And Denver and I will sort it out. I just—I just want to give her a couple of days to cool off.”

“Right, right. ’Cause that’s what everyone loves when they’re upset. To be left
alone
.”

“I haven’t exactly been leaving her
alone
. I’ve called her, like, six times. If I
left her alone
any
less
I’d be stalking her. And no one wants that.”

“No one wants that,” Anil agrees. He holds his shot up to one of the exposed halogen bulbs above the bar, contemplates the play of light in the alcohol for a moment, then throws it back. “It’s too bad,” he says, once it’s gone. “I liked Denver.”

“Don’t say it in the past tense like that,” Billy says.

Anil shrugs.

“I liked Denver, too,” Billy says. He did. Or he does. Fuck the past tense. He thinks back to June, the night they met, on the rooftop of some art space in the Bronx, a program of experimental video screenings. One of the videos was hers, a work in progress called
Varieties of Water
. Twenty-five minutes of river foam, swirling drains, trash floating in city gutters, lake surfaces. Backyard pools thrust into abstraction by the activity of children’s play.

Watching it, Billy had been mesmerized. By the end of it he felt like he had learned things about pattern and light, about perception, about nature, about humans, about himself. She’d been sitting in a metal folding chair just past the edge of the screen and every once in a while he’d look away from the film and his attention would settle on her. She reminded him a little bit of the ballet students he’d sometimes see hanging around Lincoln Center: tiny, wiry arms jutting oddly out of her loose sweatshirt, her face a little severe. During the entire duration of the video she’d kept her eyes shut.

Once the screenings had wound up and the crowd began to separate into clusters of conversation he made his way over to the very outer rim of her orbit. She thanked a few people quietly and then popped some kind of multi-tool out of a pouch on her belt and went to disassemble the stand for the projection screen, efficiently breaking it down into components that fit into a single black nylon bag. He edged up to her and looked at all the shit
clipped to her belt. Some kind of folding blade, a stubby flashlight, a green iPod Nano, a few photography-oriented gizmos, a ring of keys larger than he’d ever seen on someone who wasn’t a janitor.
She’s like—a female Batman
, Billy thought.
Batwoman?
He had no idea whether there was such a character or not. Whether there was such a character was not the point. The point was that Billy was fast figuring out that she was talented, pragmatic, and competent: pretty much exactly the kind of woman who he typically felt terrified about approaching. But the video had filled him with a sense of spirited determination, and so he took his best shot.

“I liked your video,” he mumbled.

“Thanks,” she replied automatically, without really pausing in the process of packing things into the bag.

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.