The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  It didn’t matter if this was some terminally weird reconciliatory setup engineered by Jordan Sasscock, or a wild kidnap coincidence, or just a really odd bit of fortune. What he should do now was as clear as what he should not have done back when he and Carolina were together. There was a table under the tree, big enough, it occurred to him as he rushed it, for sacrificing a Jesus-lion, and the moaning was coming from a little figure tied down on it. The littleness stopped him short—whatever was there was the size of Carolina’s smallest purse—yet it moaned with a big voice.

  “Death!” said the little woman. She was impossibly small; Will was sure she was actually smaller than Carolina’s smallest purse, a hand-sized clutch made of fake pearls. Something unspeakable had been done to her. “O my death! Are you my death?”

  “No,” said Will. “I’m going to help you.”

  “Death!” she said again. “He said death was his gift to me, and his gift to the whole world. Are you a gift?”

  “I’m Will,” he said again, looking around for something—he had no idea what—that would explain this or make it less strange. “I’m going to help you.”

  “Radish was my name,” the woman said, more calmly. “You cannot help me. If you are not my death, you should run away. If you are not my death, he’ll not treat you kindly.”

  “I’m going to get you to a hospital,” Will said, though he couldn’t imagine what hospital would be able to care for her, given her unusual size and the extraordinary ways in which she was crumpled and twisted. He moved forward to pick her up off the table and felt a wetness all of a sudden on his head, a warm rain. He looked up and saw a naked woman in the tree, hanging from a branch with her legs spread, pissing on him. He wiped stinging urine from his eyes and shouted, “What are you doing?” And then, when he saw her more clearly and examined her face and recognized her, “What are you doing here?”

  “What I do,” the lady said, and climbed down the tree, head first like a lizard. She leaped onto the table, took the tiny lady in her hands, and tore her in half. “I am your host,” she said to Will, as blood sprayed around his eyes and his head and against his open lips. It tasted quite strongly of rosemary.

  “What …” Will said. “What …” He meant to ask, What are you? because even though it looked like the first woman he’d ever had sex with, popped up inexplicably naked in a park in the middle of the night, it felt like something even stranger and much more terrible.

  “Run!” said half of the little lady. “Run, Not-My-Death! I will distract him!” She turned her little head and bit the lady on her thumb, which only caused her to laugh. Will turned and ran, not noticing his floppy sock or his single shoe, not considering that he was running away from the opportunity finally to solve the mystery of Carolina’s tree. He wasn’t thinking of anything except getting away from the horrible monster. He ran back the way he came, the little trees spaced themselves farther on the ground, and the silver trunks flew by. He ran and ran and ran but never came to the edge of the dell or found the slope he’d tumbled down, and though very soon he gave up hope of finding a way out, he didn’t stop running.

  Carolina was one of Will’s clients: they met over a sick tree. She contacted him through his website, attaching a picture of her tree, a stately oak. He hadn’t ever gotten a picture through his website before—you weren’t supposed to be able to do that. It was a premium feature, and he could not afford premium features. Her note was short. I love him. Can you help me? It was the sort of note a freak would send, with the telling substitution of him for it. Will had discovered since becoming an arborist that there were crazy tree and shrub ladies out there just like there were crazy cat ladies (and sometimes they were men), people who preferred the company of nonhumans, or even nonanimals. They were perfectly pleasant people, just deeply strange and difficult to work with, since they acted like tree surgery was baby surgery, and acted like you were sawing off the limb of their child when you sawed off the limb of their tree.

  So when he arrived at the house on Fourteenth Street, he was expecting a sixty-year-old lady in a housedress and slippers, or a divorcée in a caftan, or even a spritely twenty-year-old dressed in bark. He had actually encountered the twenty-year-old, in the treeless Outer Sunset, of all places, presiding over a secret garden at Thirty-fourth and Judah. She had turned him away even before showing him her problem tree, because of his vibe. It was a surprise to see who finally opened the door, a full five minutes after he started ringing the bell. Something kept him from giving up, though he had other work he could have been doing, other trees to check up on: there was a flax-leaf paperbark in Pacific Heights with cankers, a trident maple in the Castro with gall, a jacaranda in the Marina with chlorosis. But he sat there on his toolbox with his chin in his hand, looking out on the street and not understanding why he was waiting.

  She was pretty close to Will’s own age, with short brown hair and very large brown eyes that gave her the appearance of being pleasantly surprised by something, and Will thought perhaps she was favorably surprised by his appearance (though his picture was all over his website). But then she cast the same pleasantly surprised look at his toolbox, then down at the doorknob, and he realized that she looked like that at everything and everyone.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said.

  “Sure,” Will said, and followed her into the house, which was both grander and more decrepit than he could have guessed, just by looking at it from the outside. It was enormous, but the rooms were alternately fancy and dilapidated; lovely murals alternated with cracked plaster and bare lath, and though the kitchen was done up as snobbishly as any he’d seen in Seacliff, there was a hole in the floor. Big expensive rooms made him both a little anxious and a little bored. He had enough rich clients that any wonder at the dizzying extremes of wealth in this city had worn off a while ago, but it made him unsettled in some small way to see what he didn’t have, and would never have, with his combination career of tree surgeon and ultra-obscure short-story writer. He wondered very briefly what she did, and did so well, that she could afford a place like this, even in its partially ruined state, and then he got distracted watching her walk and nearly ran into her when she stopped suddenly. They had proceeded through the foyer and the dining room and living room and the kitchen, and a couple of rooms whose purpose Will could not divine, and finally come into a sunroom empty except for five large pillows uncarefully arranged on the floor. To Will’s left a whole wall was covered with photos of a man, a little younger than him, another Monchhichi-like creature with a fuzzy brown head and big brown eyes.

  “My brother Ryan,” Carolina said. “He’s dead.” Then she picked her way swiftly through the pillows and went outside. Will followed, wondering briefly if people came to kneel on the pillows and worship the pictures. Any other arborist might have dismissed her as crazy, but Will was in a position to sympathize with someone who had plastered a wall with pictures of her dead brother, and who paused conspicuously to draw the attention of strangers to them. He had a dead brother of his own and had thrown up his own sort of worshipping wall over the years since Sean’s death.

  “Come along,” Carolina said, standing in the door to the garden. She went right to the tree, the oak that looked even worse in real life than it had in the picture, but Will’s attention was captured by the sorry state of its neighbors, a peppermint willow and a carob tree and a Grecian laurel, all suffering some variety of rot, a tristania overgrown to the point of strangling itself as well as an adjacent pear tree, and a slimy koi pond, which wasn’t even his responsibility, yet he longed to clean it as soon as he saw it.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Can you help?” She was standing next to her tree, one arm around the trunk. She looked like she was about to cry, and Will thought, dismissively and uncharitably, She thinks the tree is her brother. She thinks he came back as that tree or went into that tree. He shook his head at himself and considered that maybe she just wasn’t ready for anything else in her lif
e to die just yet.

  “You can’t?” she asked. “But you haven’t even looked at him yet. Can you really tell from over there?”

  Will realized he was still shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I can help. Probably. Maybe. Do you know what kind of tree this is, exactly?” He asked because, as he got closer, he saw that it was not an ordinary specimen. The bark was a silver color that the photograph had not properly represented, as it had not represented the heaping tarry excrescences that dotted it on every limb. The parts of the leaves that in the picture appeared discolored and diseased were in fact the healthy parts—he could only tell when he touched them that the silver and gold portions had the texture of health, while the green parts were rubbery or brittle.

  “No,” Carolina said. “It came with the house. It was planted a long time ago. It’s an oak, isn’t it?”

  “Or something,” Will said. He walked around the tree once, staring up into the branches and listening to the odd rustle of the leaves; there was something metallic just at the edges of the noise. “This whole place is a mess,” Will said, not looking away from the odd oak. “Do you want me to fix them all up or just this one?” He turned to look at her and wished he had phrased the question differently, because her wounded posture and the sad expectant look on her face made him feel churlish and rude. “Please,” he said, unthinkingly, and then, “Sorry. This garden could be magnificent. But there are a lot of sick plants.”

  She straightened her back and frowned at him. “I don’t really care about the rest of it,” she said, “but you can do whatever you want. Just save this tree.” Will stood there a moment, careful to be nodding instead of shaking his head, and then, trying to sound as solicitous as possible, offered to show her around her own garden.

  As he expected, she didn’t know a quarter of what was growing in her own yard. It turned out that she had only been in the house a few months; before that her brother had lived there for years. Will showed her the tristania and the pear tree and the laurel, crushing some leaves for her, but she acted like she had never smelled a bay leaf before. She nodded politely at everything he showed her. He was not exactly puzzled. He’d passed behind walls all over the city into gardens that were as sumptuously ignored as this one.

  In the next few weeks he put a lot of work into that garden and that tree, eventually neglecting his other clients. That neglect was initially on account of the peculiar oak and the professional challenge of figuring it out and restoring it to health, but more and more, as the weeks passed, he went back for the peculiar lady. Initially, Will perceived her as a challenge as well—a challenge to figure out and a challenge to get to know and a challenge to befriend—and he didn’t quite know why he should want to do that right away. He had other clients who were as pretty and as strange, whose gardens were as ramshackle, and yet he was only as interested in them as he was in their money. He supposed it must just be her wonderful tree that set her apart, the tree whose leaves appeared in none of his reference books and which were recognized by none of the experts he contacted.

  Back then he was relatively celibate. He masturbated all the time, like everybody else in his neighborhood, it seemed—he had accidentally left his shades up one night as he sat reclining at his desk and whacking away to sensuous Playgirl porn, which was the only sort that didn’t make him feel as guilty as it made him feel aroused, since the portion of his imagination that was always at work to spoil his boner inevitably pictured the women in the more patriarchal porn in poses of unsexy victimhood, black-eyed, methed-up, and crying every time they had off-camera sex. The soft light and misty lenses of the Playgirl porn left him imagining a lady with a monocle and a cigarette holder behind the camera, who arranged gift bags for all her starlets and provided day care. He didn’t need the porn to get off, but every now and then it was fun, and he might spend hours at his desk, at the same place he wrote, shooting seven times in the course of a two-hour film. The seventh time was always a little difficult to manage: he had been working away vigorously for an hour before he realized that night had fallen and his neighbors were watching from across the courtyard, four men and a woman, each in their own window, arranged like a bunch of masturbating Hollywood Squares. Will laughed when he saw them, and thought, What a fucked-up city I live in. But he didn’t close the curtains.

  He was celibate but not asexual. He didn’t get out much and had not, since college, met anyone who sustained his interest enough to date. If his literary imagination had been as active as his sexual imagination, he would have written a dozen novels by the time he was thirty, instead of just one little book of short stories. And yet it took a long time for Carolina to work herself into his solitary sex life. Again, he thought it must be the tree, because for a while she was the tree: he couldn’t think of one without the other, and he wasn’t one of those arborists who had sexual thoughts about trees, though he knew those men and women existed, people who discovered in preadolescence that it felt nice to sit on a tree branch and move your hips just so and then never recovered from the pleasure.

  When she did make an appearance, it was a bit of a shock. He was fully immersed in Pirate’s Passion, having adopted the role of the cabin boy, and was thrusting away when he opened his dreaming eyes and saw Carolina’s face under him. They were at sea: there wasn’t a tree in sight. She smiled at him, a carefree smile of the sort he had never seen on her actual face. He had stopped his vigorous pirate thrusting in the fantasy, and stopped stroking his cock in the real world, but he came anyway, a small but debilitating ejaculation that actually made him groan. He sat there with cum on his face, feeling immensely embarrassed. A neighbor across the courtyard gave him two thumbs-up.

  By that time, he and Carolina had gotten to know each other fairly well. He was making visits to the garden two and three times a week. For the first week she had only watched him from the multiple doorways and windows that faced on the courtyard, but then one afternoon he turned around to find her standing behind him with a cup of water.

  “Hi,” she said. She hurried away as soon as he had taken the cup, but in the following days she brought other cups, filled with water, then tea, then blended juices and complicated smoothies that he could see her at work on through the kitchen window. The last time she brought him one of those, she had bits of fruit in her hair, and she stayed and talked to him while he drank it. The day after that, she brought out two bottles of beer and sat down with her back against the tree as soon as he had taken one. She patted a space to her left, between two roots. Will sat down, not too close, suddenly aware of how sweaty and smelly he was.

  “How’s it coming?” she asked, though it wasn’t really necessary to ask. She could have just looked around to see how things were different. The tristania and the pear tree had been neatened up considerably, and the laurel was starting to recover from its blight. He had planted, here and there, in the places he had cleared, a new fern pine and a mayten and a bottlebrush that stretched over the pond. He had learned not to consult with her about any of it, because the first few times he had asked for her opinion about something she had shrugged her shoulders and said, “Do what you want. I trust you.”

  “Pretty good,” Will said, “except for Mr. Peepers there.” He jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the oak, which was a bit neater-looking but not really any healthier. He had pruned it, marveling at the bright silver sap, and patched up a crack in the north side of the trunk, but none of the pastes he’d applied seemed to make any difference in the progression of its disease. The silver leaves were still turning brown and green, and even the leaves that retained their color were getting the rubbery quality that felt so ugly compared to their natural unnatural texture. “But I’m trying,” Will said. “I have a couple of ideas. I’ll do my best, anyway.”

  “Funny how that’s never enough,” Carolina said, and then she startled him by dropping her head onto his shoulder. She let it fall heavily. It hurt a little, and made him think of falling coconuts. He sat very st
ill, clutching his beer bottle, suddenly feeling like it would be a bad idea to breathe. “Ryan loved that tree so much,” she said, and went on to talk about him for half an hour, not taking her head off of Will’s shoulder even to sip her beer.

  It became customary, over the next two weeks, for her to bring out the two beers and to sit next to him and to put her head on his shoulder. She didn’t only talk about Ryan, and he didn’t always talk about Sean, but the conversation always seemed to come back to them, since they touched on everything and had to do with everything, something she seemed to have come to understand without his having to write a book about it. After the incident aboard the captured HMS Pussywillow, it became a different experience for Will to sit next to her with their shoulders and hips and legs touching, aware of the way his sweat was getting on her skin. Her head was a very particular weight on his shoulder, and he turned intermittently to talk into her hair.

  The tree, in the meantime, began to do a little better. Will wasn’t sure why. He had a new malathion spray, which he was putting down twice a week. And he had tried a fungicide from Davis, but that seemed actually to be killing an ironwood under his care in Laurel Heights, so he stopped using it. Still, one whole side of the tree, the one they sat against when they talked, was taking on the appearance of something like health. Will spent a number of hours walking around and around the trunk, or standing at the border of healthy and unhealthy, his hands clasped behind his head, whistling tunelessly and trying to figure out what he was missing. He had finally started to consider bringing in someone else to look at the thing, to see if someone could recognize it in person though no one had been able to recognize it in pictures, and to see what sort of ideas others might come up with since he had nearly run out of them himself. But for a while he had been feeling possessive of the oak, and of the whole garden, which by this time he had officially transformed. He didn’t want to share it, or its owner, with anyone.