The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  She fell asleep, finally wondering if she should explain that she didn’t ordinarily do this sort of thing on a first date, let alone before dinner, and dreamed of her mother, who often made predictable visits whenever Molly had particular sorts of fun. They were having a girls-only session of home schooling, and she was quizzing them. “Who can tell me what a pussy face is?” she asked, and Malinda’s hand shot up. “A pussy face,” she said confidently, “is the face a weak man makes when he’s crying.”

  “Exactly … wrong!” their mother said, and gave Malinda a smack with the back of her hand. “A pussy face,” she said, “is the convergence of a face and a pussy.” She went on to ask what you got when a pussy and a face converged, and Melissa answered, incorrectly, “A baby! A baby!” Honesty was the answer, and honesty was the subject of their lesson. It was like her mother’s real-world lessons for there to be a little mystery, at first, about what the subject was, and for the posters and learning aids to be covered up initially, though it was never with such a fantastic multicolored cloth as what her mother swept away in the dream. The heart of the lesson, which seemed to go on for hours and involve an endless show of orgasmic faces, was that men were only honest when they were having sex, and that there was an ancient witch’s art, to which she and her sisters were heir, of discerning a man’s intentions by gazing into his eyes as he ate you out. Those squinting Kilroy-Was-Here portraits were a whole other set of faces to examine, and Molly asked a question in the middle of the show. “But what does it mean,” she asked, because she remembered very clearly how in her darkening room Ryan’s eyes had shed light upon her naked belly, “if his eyes are all glowy?” She woke up before her mother could answer, when the N Judah went rumbling past her building and made her apartment shake, and lay a moment in bed thinking of her mother’s actual and eternal lesson about sex, which was that sex didn’t matter, because when you met your true love and the Jesus in you married the Jesus in him, things happened on a higher level where penises and vaginas became irrelevant. For a few moments she pictured two blank-crotched Jesuses scissoring away in heavenly ecstasy, and then she realized that Ryan was gone from her bed.

  He was sitting on her balcony in his underwear, perched on the railing. It was forty feet to the sidewalk, but he was slouched, seemingly without a care about his balance. She had a nice view east—past the hospital and the big hill of Buena Vista Park you could see all the way downtown to the Transamerica Building, a tiny and distinct little triangle. A bank of fog was spilling hurriedly down the hill behind the hospital and breaking in the distance against the park, lit up by a giant moon.

  “Hello there,” he said.

  8

  Titania sat alone for a while on her bier, listening to the shrieks of her subjects as they hithered and thithered all over the park. She was also afraid, but all her long life she had only run screaming toward things, and not away from them. She was not quite sure if it had been a mistake to release Puck, but she was entertaining the possibility. It had not really made her feel better to do it, but she did feel different. She still missed and loved her husband and her Boy, and she was still extraordinarily sad, but this seemed to weigh a little less heavily. She realized all of a sudden that even her clothes felt less heavy where they hung on her. She raised her arms, and shrugged her shoulders, and opened her mouth as if to laugh, but didn’t laugh. The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.

  She went back under the hill, not to hide but to get ready. She was about to have the fight of her life and wasn’t going to do it in a dress made of moss, rosebuds, and butterfly wings. There was an alcove in her grotto, darker and colder than it should naturally have been, where two ebony chests, each the size of a beefy ape, stood side by side. She opened hers and found a brownie inside. She lifted him out. “He’ll find you here, too, Doorknob,” she said.

  “I’m not hiding,” he said. “I’m looking for the knife.”

  “It will take more than a knife to slay the Beast,” she said.

  “Not a knife. The knife. As it is sung: With a knife of rowan wood they spilled his blood and bound him fast.”

  “Ah,” she said. “One can’t do such things twice,” which wasn’t entirely true. She didn’t actually remember the particulars of how Puck had been bound the first time. The knife had been involved somehow, but the song had come long after the fact and had almost nothing to do with the actual history.

  “Poodle!” he said. “Poodle! Damn you, Milady. Damn you! I’ll find your knife, wherever you hid it, and then you’ll fix this!” He ran out into the long halls beyond the grotto. Titania listened a while as his tiny footsteps faded, then turned back to the chest, lifting out the contents and putting them on. First there was a thick white underdress of muslin and a veil of cobwebs, and a dress of mail, the links forged of abused silver, so hardened with magical insults by faerie smiths that it was harder than steel. Then there were stiff gloves of rhinoceros hide, and a fitted breastplate studded with afflicted pearls. Her silver ax was at the bottom of the chest. She lifted it and cradled it in her arms and whispered its name, always known only to her, feeling it stir. She smiled at it, thinking of all the creatures, inhuman and human, monsters and jealous wives, she had beheaded. The heads tumbled through her memory, lit softly by a nostalgia as tender as what she might reserve for old lovers. She swung the ax around her head, dancing away from the dark little alcove, and in seven strokes reduced the bed to kindling and feather fluff.

  Huff was trying unsuccessfully to gather his players together. They had scattered to all corners of the park, if a round park can have corners, and now he was striding confidently along the slanting paths, trying to set the example by his bearing and his walk, that there was nothing to be afraid of, since the man who ran into their midst saying such alarming things had been very strange but also very small.

  “Soylent Green is people!” he cried. “Soylent Green is people!” He had only just now decided that this ought to be their rallying cry. It was perfect, and it ought to have been all along the phrase by which they might distinguish each other from the Mayor’s agents. He was thinking of such things as passwords, and the need for secrecy, because he could only conceive of deliberate reasons for the disruption that had been visited upon them. The little man had been an agent of the Mayor, and his unusual size had merely been a disguise. You were supposed to think he was from the circus, but really he was from City Hall.

  It complicated things, to say the least, if the Mayor was on to them. It changed the whole purpose of the play, Huff thought, because it required the element of surprise, to prick a person’s conscience. Without the element of surprise, it would only be a scolding on a hardened heart—it wouldn’t change him or cause him to reverse all his cannibalistic social policies in an agony of regret. But it might still expose him. When he came down on them with his curious two-foot-high storm troopers and sent them all to jail for their activist presumption, people would ask, “What’s so threatening, what’s so illegal, about Soylent Green?” And those questions would lead to other questions, which would lead to others until, brick by brick, the Mayor’s little flesh-eating bungalow would be disassembled, and he would be exposed sitting inside at a table with somebody else’s foot in his mouth.

  “Soylent Green is people!” Huff shouted again, and he thought he heard a faint reply: “People!” It was like an echo, except it was a women’s voice. He was not familiar with the part of the park he was in—he had run up when everyone else had run down. He generally never penetrated up into the higher parts if he could help it, not being a fan of steep hills and not caring much for views. He was on a wide path now, flanked by tall white eucalyptus on either side, and some thoughtful person had put colored lanterns high in the branches. There were thick wisps of fog blowing amon
g the trees, and these combined pleasingly with the lanterns, so the reds and greens and blues and purples were softly muted. It was something to admire. Views made him dizzy and seasick, but he was not indifferent to beauty.

  The woman’s voice sounded again. “People!”

  “Soylent Green!” he called back.

  “People,” came the voice again. Huff ran, as much as he could run, down the lighted road, which seemed to go on and on and on. He ran for a full minute, and still the scene ahead of him didn’t change. He looked back, and the road stretched serenely into the dark. But when he turned around, there was a little something different up ahead after all: something was swinging over the road. He half ran—it was a sort of unwhimisical skip—calling out his coded greeting again, and the swinging package called back.

  “Princess!” he said. “Is it you?” When he ran up closer, he got a better idea of what exactly was going on with her. She was tied by a long rope to a tree branch that arched over the path, swinging in a wide arc and gently striking the trunks on either side of the road, cursing each time she hit. Someone had wrapped her in a shroud, as if to bury her.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “How did you get up there?”

  “Shrug,” she said.

  “Shrug?”

  “Shrug. I’m saying it, since I can’t do it.”

  “Was it the Mayor’s men?”

  “Shrug. I was just walking, trying to get the fuck out of here.”

  “I’ll get you down. This is all getting very serious, I think. Little people! Traps!” Perhaps it was ill-advised to say traps. Or maybe he was talking too loud. In a moment he was swinging off-tandem with Princess, wishing he had been more sneaky.

  “Like that!” Princess said, and laughed.

  “It’s not funny,” he said. “We are defeated, and we haven’t even gotten through a full rehearsal yet.”

  “I have gotten where I am in life by learning to enjoy everything that happens to me,” she said, but she didn’t laugh again.

  “I suppose they’ll come get us down and then take us to jail. I don’t want to go to jail. And we didn’t even do anything. Not yet. But maybe it will generate some outrage, when they put us in jail for no other reason than daring to speak truth to power.”

  “I am really marveling at this technology,” Princess said, stretching in her shroud. “I never saw it coming. Not even when I saw it happening to you.”

  “Well, this is San Francisco, isn’t it? Who knows what sort of devices that man has at his disposal? He’s probably watching us right now.” He looked around for a camera, but of course it wouldn’t be the kind that you could see. They swung there for a while, not unpleasantly, Huff thought. He liked spending time with Princess, when she was in the right mood—or right moods, since she often seemed to hold on to more than one of them at once, and combine them in sometimes sophisticated flavors that could be pleasant or unpleasant, depending, Huff believed, on the measure of tension in the combination. Sad envy made for a gentle Princess, while raging joy made her too much to handle, and anxious tristesse left her quiet and bemused. She almost sustained his interest sometimes, with her ever-changing personality, but he had never met a woman who sustained his interest, and indeed he had had a dream on the eve of his sexual debut in which an old hag had stood over his crib and declared that he would never meet a woman who could sustain his interest; there was something so awful and so great in him that he would never find a partner who could tolerate his potential. He was grateful to that old lady for bringing him that information. A lifetime of failed relationships might otherwise have been even more dispiriting. But predestination was a relief in this case, and he had always made a habit, in his foreknowledge, of enjoying the ladies while they lasted.

  “I like you, Princess. I thought you should know that, here at the end.”

  “You’re all right,” she said, and spat at a squirrel that came out on a nearby branch to stare at them. “Shoo!” she said, but that only seemed to invite another squirrel onto the branch. It was joined shortly by a third and a fourth, and in very little time that branch, and all the branches, and the ground below them, were crowded with raccoons and owls and even bluejays and wrens, creatures that really ought to have been asleep. They all stared, much too quietly, and Huff stared back, totally unsure of what to say. One or two or three of them he might have confronted as agents of the Mayor, sophisticated animatronic squirrel-bots, but a whole silent Snow White symphony of woodland creatures was something else entirely. He liked to think that he tolerated more strangeness than most people, because he knew from experience that life was generally much stranger than most folks could imagine. But this suddenly seemed of a different order. This was all much stranger than anything else he’d ever lived through, and yet it didn’t feel at all unreal. “My dear,” he said, “we are not dreaming.”

  “Pinch,” said Princess. The silent animals continued to stare, but now the ones on the ground, who had been crowding the path, started to shuffle to either side, making an aisle. A moment later a figure came walking down the path. Huff could tell right away that it was a lady, though she wasn’t dressed like a lady. Something ladylike went before her, figuratively speaking, to which he was sensitive. Two of the Mayor’s dwarves walked beside her, stepping very carefully—perhaps even timidly—down the path in a way that contrasted sharply with the lady’s confident stride.

  “My Lady,” the two said in unison. They were both the size of schnauzers, and one had an old man’s face while the other had an old woman’s face. “It is not the Beast that we have captured.”

  “Are you with the Mayor’s office?” Huff called down to the lady, who was close enough for him to examine in a little more detail. She was very tall, and her face was harsh, and the battle-ax resting in her arms, while it brought to mind certain ladies he had known, was decidedly unladylike.

  “I am with the office of eternity,” she said. “And the office of regret, and the office of love renounced, but of the Mayor I know nothing at all.”

  “It’s just two mortals,” said the dwarf with the old man’s face.

  “And not pretty ones, even,” said the other one. Princess spat on her, but she didn’t seem to notice.

  “Still, they may come,” said the lovely lady. “It wouldn’t do, to leave them unattended on the hill. And the Beast is their enemy, as much as ours. Get them down.” The little man and woman clapped their hands, then did a little do-si-do with each other, slapped each other on the cheek, and finally whistled, high and clear for a few seconds, but then the tone descended. Huff and Princess descended with it, not too fast, but still they landed on their heads and lay crumpled and bound among the animals and the goons.

  “You had no right—” Huff began, but the animals and the little people and the tall lady were already starting to move down the path. The white ribbon that bound Huff’s arms and legs was already unraveling, and the same thing was happening to Princess; they freed themselves and stood up at the same time. They took each other’s hands and then each tried to lead the other in the opposite direction. Huff pulled Princess after the remarkable lady. Princess pulled him away from her.

  “Where are you going?” they both asked.

  “The fuck out of here,” Princess said, and Huff said, “Where she’s going.” They pulled each other again, and then Huff let go.

  “Fucked-up crazy shit!” Princess said. Huff thought there was something poignant in her tone, as if she were saying, I want to go with you, but—she hurried down the path, which actually ran deeper, that way, into the park. Huff turned and followed the last of the little animals, telling himself that he had to see what the Mayor was up to, but also understanding that there was something very special about that lady besides her ax. He was slower than the squirrels but faster than the raccoons, who ambled and sniffed on their way. The lady’s armored head was shining under the moon; she was easy to follow even when the path twisted and turned and became overgrown with dark
ferns.

  It was a pleasant walk. Huff got used to things pretty quickly—it was a special talent, related to his tolerance for strangeness. It was good to be able to sleep anywhere, when you slept everywhere, and good to be an easily contented person (though not a person accepting of injustice), when your luck was bad and your life was hard. So Huff enjoyed the bright low-hanging moon and the wisps of fog and the noise and proximity of the animals as they went, and even the collapsing-pumpkin faces of the Mayor’s little old man and woman. But most of all he enjoyed the sight of the lady, who was lovely and rather awesome even from behind, and he enjoyed her odor, something he had not appreciated from on high.