The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  When she saw him standing at the foot of her bed, her first thought was that it was strange to be dreaming about him, since he was interesting but not fascinating, and sad but not troubling. She stared at him for a while before she realized that she was actually awake. She sat up. “What are you doing here?” she asked him. In response he did an explosive move, throwing his arms up and out three times, slapping his heel, and spinning in place. She flinched but didn’t cry out; he did it again, and then something more complicated and harder to follow, and yet she did follow it, and preserved every move, the pointing and the spinning, the way he made double guns of his hands and fired them all around her room and then blew the imaginary smoke from the tips of his finger-pistols, the splits in the air and the brief air-guitar solo and every blocky motion of the robot dance. He smiled at her when he was done. She stared back at him, not smiling, with the covers drawn up to her chin, and watched as he danced out of her room, doing a perfect curving moonwalk right out the door, which he left open. She stared at the open door for a while, considering it as evidence that he had actually been there since she made a point of closing it every night before she got into bed, and trying to think of what she should say to herself about what she had just seen. She didn’t know what to say, so she waited, instead, for the snarky, dissatisfied voice in her to say something, fully expecting it to be something more cruel and more vile than anything it had yet dared to say. But the words, when they came, were Nice moves.

  She considered those moves as she sat the next day with her mother and the other girls sewing the costumes for the new video. They were in the garage, the only place in the house with enough empty floor space to lay out the fabric, though today they were just sewing spangles on the jumpsuits, each of them sitting cross-legged on cushions nipped from the livingroom sectional. She had wondered until she finally fell asleep if she should tell on him. It was probably her duty, after all, to get him whatever help he needed to keep him from entering relative strangers’ rooms uninvited at night. And maybe she ought to tell on him for her own sake, since any variety of bad behavior might be dormant in him, and the little dance only a fluid, grooving prelude to a lifetime of deviance.

  And yet it had only been a little dance. That was all he had done. There were Christian households where that was a crime, but this wasn’t one of them. There had been some kind of infraction; she was certain of that. But what exactly it might be was not clear at all. Whatever it was, ejection from the household on only the second day of his tenure seemed a little too severe a punishment, but that was what would probably happen, since she knew her father would regard the situation with considerably less sophistication than she was currently bringing to bear. She found that she cared whether or not he stuck around, because it had been nice to hear something from the voice that she could actually agree with. Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

  “Pay attention, honey,” her mother said, because she was about to sew a spangle fish on backward to the sea-blue one-piece, zip-up-the-back pants suit. The girls had lost an argument with their father about how the fishes should be placed. “The fishes all swim the same way,” he said. “Up, toward Jesus.” It would have been more pleasing, Molly thought, to have them going every which way.

  “Sorry,” Molly said. Her mother handed her the seam ripper, and Molly began to undo the stitches, but she was imagining Peabo dancing in a suit of haphazardly swimming fish. Her mother was still staring at her when she handed back the seam ripper.

  “Well?” her mother said.

  “What?”

  “You’re the only one who hasn’t shared yet,” she said. “Cat got your tongue?”

  “Huh?”

  “What do you think about the latest addition to our family?”

  Molly shrugged. “He seems nice,” she said.

  “And?”

  Molly shrugged again.

  “And she’s too fancy to share her opinions,” said Malinda. Their mother shushed her with a wave of her hand. “Mary,” she said. “Tell your sister what sort of family she’s living in.”

  “A Christian Democratic Union,” Mary said, not looking up from her work.

  “And what does a Christian Democratic Union rely upon?” She looked at Malinda now, but it was the voice that Molly heard answering first: Every citizen being perfectly ugly and perfectly boring.

  “The open and honest loving communication of information equally shared among all participants,” Malinda said. Molly sighed, and Malinda glared at her, but she was sighing at the voice, not at her sister.

  “So,” their mother said to Molly. “Once more, with feelings!”

  “Did something bad happen to him?” Molly asked.

  “Bad things happen to all of us,” her mother said.

  “Something especially bad,” Molly said. “Something tragic?” She hadn’t read any farther than the first page of the file on her father’s desk, and didn’t know anyway if they put that sort of thing in it, the list of his lifetime of problems: dead mother, dead father, beaten by auntie, contracted out to a sweatshop, punished with burns …

  “Not everybody can be lucky like you,” said Malinda.

  “Or like you,” said their mother. “Or you or you or you or you.” She pointed to all of them, then to Malinda one more time, and then she suggested that they take this as an opportunity to express their love for each other, so Molly turned to Mary and Melissa and said it, and finally suffered Malinda’s stiff hug.

  “I love you,” Malinda said, and leaned close to whisper, “Even though you totally suck.”

  “I love you, too,” said Molly, and she tried hard to mean it.

  Later, during the afternoon rehearsal, she kept expecting Peabo to do the dance again. But today he was copying her exactly, doing the one-two, one-two shuffle in perfect time with her, and singing in tune on the signature piece of the new album, which was the reason they were rehearsing every day, and sewing costumes, and blocking out a video. They would start a tour in two weeks.

  “The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies” was the most complicated song her father had ever written. It didn’t involve any more than the usual four chords, but it was seven minutes long, and the lyrics told an actual story, which her father had borrowed from a children’s book of hippie ethics. Her father didn’t like hippies, but had sent a note to California to the author of the children’ book, thanking him for the inspiration and encouraging him to put Jesus in his heart instead of Charles Manson. The tale of the Warm Fuzzies and their battle with the Cold Pricklies unfolded in twelve verses, with half the family squaring off against the other in song. Peabo, along with Molly, was among the Pricklies.

  All day, Molly had watched him as closely as she dared, given how closely she was being watched by Malinda for evidence of snootiness or lack of charity toward the boy. Her mother had told them that Jesus would help them along to a place where they couldn’t even see that he was black, that with perfect love would come perfect color blindness, but every time Molly saw him standing next to one of her brothers or sisters it was all she noticed about him, how different he looked. Black is beautiful, the voice kept saying, which made her shake her head.

  He talked to her in the same way that he talked to all the girls, politely and never for very long. He joshed and roughhoused with the boys and seemed to settle immediately into companionship with them in a way that belied the remote gaze he had trained on everyone during the first rehearsal and dinner. She watched him at play with her brothers. It was as if there were two boys, who didn’t jibe with each other. There was the boy who had sneaked into her room to offer up the little dance for her interpretation, and then there was the boy who arm-wrestled with Craig and did algebra equations for fun with Colin. She could understand if there were two boys in him, since she had felt like there were two girls in her, one for the regular voice that said regular things about people and one for the other voice that spoke a language made up only of c
ruel insults. If she stared in the bathroom mirror long enough, she thought she could catch that other girl’s features superimposed in brief flashes upon hers: her eyes were small, and her nose turned up like a pig’s, and her mouth was a colorless gash in her face. Malinda caught her staring at herself like that once and said, “You think you’re so pretty, don’t you?”

  Molly tripped up on the beat and came late to the chorus. At first, it seemed that no one had noticed that she’d messed up the rhythm—Chris was the only one who usually cared, anyway—until Peabo did the same thing, just one beat off, but didn’t look at her. He did it again: another missed beat.

  She missed one back, and then threw in an extra one at the end of the next verse, and then for the rest of the song they were trading omissions and additions, having a conversation above and below and around the song that no one else, not even the snarky voice in her, could understand, and it occurred to her, just before the song ended, that they were speaking tambourine.

  “Off the charts!” their father said, because they all stopped playing at exactly the same time for once, and everyone had been on key and no one had forgotten any verses; even Melissa’s flailing dance had been more graceful than usual. “He is risen! He is risen! Off the charts!” he shouted. Peabo was nodding soberly as they all put down their instruments and began to exchange hugs, something they usually did at the end of the rehearsal, though they were only half done now. It was one of those moments that Molly would really have appreciated a couple of months before. Everyone was hugging with breathless abandon, entirely caught up in how much they loved the music, one another, this day, and Jesus, of course. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Molly said to herself, but the voice said Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey, which lent a new emergent sense of alarm to her effort really to feel what they were feeling, and with her eyes shut tight she tried to feel it by sheer force of will. She strained, and there was a sensation in her like a bubble popping, and clear as day she had a picture in her head all of a sudden: a lizard sunning itself on a rock, staring rapt and remote into the distance.

  They went to church that evening. Molly sat there, looking around without moving her head. It was worse here, surrounded not just by her family but by the whole congregation, hairy Mrs. Louque in the row in front of her and ancient Mr. Landry behind her. The church, which was as big as a warehouse because it had once been a warehouse, was full of good, normal people who put her to shame by their example. Up on the stage, Reverend Duff was a lightning rod for the voice. There once was a reverend named Fudd, it sang, and she tried to do the mental equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and singing la la la.

  It was a different sort of Jesus time than the one they had that day at home, but Molly was failing at it just as badly. Her mother was trembling and ululating and her father was shaking and barking and her brothers were yipping and her sisters were mewling, and beyond them the whole congregation was similarly taken up, and Molly would have to listen, later, as they all talked about how wonderful it was for them when they spoke the spirit that way. She closed both eyes, then opened one to a slit to watch Peabo, who was standing quietly next to her. The limerick about Reverend Duff faltered and was silenced as she watched him. He doesn’t look stupid like the rest of them, the voice said, at the same time that she thought, He doesn’t look stupid like me. Molly looked forward at the back of Mrs. Louque’s head. The lady was dancing in place like a little girl.

  Their hymnbooks were touching and their elbows were touching and their knees were touching. But Peabo didn’t look at her, and he sang the hymns without any extra notes or extra syllables that could be put together into a message. When it came time to exchange the peace, he turned to her mother and hugged Colin and Chris and Clay and her father, and he reached past her to hug Mary, but he didn’t even look at Molly. That would have been too obvious, she told herself, and she tried to think of some clever way of communicating with him. All she could think was to tear a piece from one of the hymnals and fold it into the shape of a snake, which would signify something, though she wasn’t sure what. Her failure to imagine just what that was made everything feel useless and dumb, and she was sure, all of a sudden, that she had imagined his unique advance. She closed her eyes and shook her head and found herself wanting to scream.

  It would have been fine to scream. You were supposed to express the spirit however it came. This usually took the foster children by surprise, even though they were briefed about it before they came to church for the first time. But he seemed to take it all in stride. Molly did her usual thing, swaying back and forth with her eyes on the ceiling and muttering times tables in pig Latin to herself. She tried to distinguish the voices of her brothers and sisters from the cacophony. She heard Malinda saying something like “Edelweiss!” She heard her father saying “Omalaya!” and her mother saying “Paw-paw!” and then, finally, she heard Peabo, right next to her, saying something that sounded like “I love you I love you I love you I love you.” There was an altered, electric quality to his voice. She did not open her eyes or look at him, but she slipped the words into her times tables: “I-ay ove-lay oooh-yay.” She kept on with the oooh-yays until the very end, when folks were passing out and the last hymn was starting up slowly, rising from various places around the hall from those who had recovered enough to sing. When she opened her eyes, she saw Peabo standing straight and tall next to her, mouth agape with the hymn, shouting it as much as singing it.

  She went to his room that night, after she was sure everyone else had fallen asleep. It was the little room they put all the foster kids in, not even really a bedroom, since it didn’t have a closet, just a wardrobe. There was a dresser and a small chair, but no space for anything else except the single bed. The drapes were open, and by the light of the streetlamps Molly could see Peabo stretched out in bed, on top of the covers in his pajamas. She stared from the doorway for what felt like five minutes, but she couldn’t tell whether his eyes were open or not.

  She didn’t say anything because he hadn’t said anything, and it seemed like it would be cheating to use words. She didn’t know what words she would have used anyway, though it was clear what she wanted to say. She did the message: reach, reach, dip, kick, leap, leap, leap, every time a little higher, though not too high, since his room was right above her parents’ room. But she went high enough to kick her feet—one, two, three times—and when she landed softly she dropped into a squat and then exploded upward. This was a move from the video for “Jesus Loves You More.” Her hands were supposed to stretch out and then fall, fingers fluttering, to her sides. But the same not–part of her that spoke with the voice that was not a voice took control of them just as she was stretching, and her hands opened up at the top of her reach into two perfect Fuck You birdies, aimed not at Peabo but at the whole world.

  He didn’t stir at all the whole time she danced, which wasn’t very long. Her dance was shorter than his had been, and she regular-walked, not moonwalked, out the door. Back in her bed, she wondered if he had been awake at all, not sure if it would be disappointing to actually talk to him at length, now that they were communicating at a higher level. She imagined going on forever this way, through his successful fosterhood and eventual adoption, through weddings and family reunions and funerals, proceeding in parallel past family milestone after family milestone. She imagined them at Malinda’s funeral, softly jangling their tambourines at each other, communicating shades of irony and grief not contained in the mundane verbal condolences of the others. She had nearly fallen asleep, and was sure she was about to enter a dream in which, knowing it was a dream, she could enjoy Malinda’s death, and say things like “No, I don’t miss her at all,” when she felt a pressure on her mattress and awoke with a start. He was sitting on her bed. “Do you want to see my Jesus?” he asked her.

  “Darkness,” said Aunt Jean. “And light! Light … and darkness!” She was doing Molly’s makeup for the video, painting half of her face black and half of it white for the co
ncept portion of the shoot, which involved the family taking turns presenting their black faces and their white faces to the camera as they sang in a black-and-white checkered “dreamspace.” (That was a sheet Jean had colored herself with a reeking marker.) Melissa, who had insisted on having her face done first, kept sniffing at it curiously. Jean had paused in front of Peabo, a tub of makeup in either hand, and said, “Why, the dark is built right in, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and gave her a neutral stare. In the end, she painted him just like the rest of them, but his black side was darker and his white side more startling than everyone else’s.

  “Cold,” Jean said, throwing her head back and raising her hand to make mouthy little singing motions with it as she showed them her black profile. “Warm!” She pivoted sharply on her heel to show them her white face. Molly felt sure that the total effect, with the checkered background and their swiveling Kabuki faces, would make people dizzy or possibly give them a seizure, but she didn’t say so. And the voice didn’t say so, either. It had been quiet all day. She didn’t really care anyway if someone had a seizure. She didn’t really care if she was playing well, during the fish-spangled band-shot portions of the video, when Jean roller-skated around the garage with the video camera to her eye. She didn’t care if she kept the beat or not, and she didn’t care if Peabo did, either. If he was throwing her grace beats, she ignored them.