by Chris Adrian
“You are a very nimble mortal!” the man said, running next to her. “But you can slow down now. We’re almost there!” That seemed true to Molly. She was almost there. She had almost reached a place where everything would seem different, a place where her life would change again, in measure with the change that came with Ryan’s death, and so what if that change came at the cost of her sanity? So what, really, if it was a change for the worse? She would be happy just to have a change. She sped up, hurrying toward it even though the man told her again to slow down, and shortly exhausted the trees. A clearing opened up in front of a flat face of rock in the side of the hill. She stopped running and stood there, too much out of breath to talk to any of the other people standing around. She leaned over with her hands on her thighs and craned her neck to look at them, a man and a boy.
“Welcome, brother!” said the boy, who was wearing a partial bunny costume, just the furry bottom and the tail and the feet, and was dressed in pair of baggy shorts held up with suspenders. “You found one too! I had two, but one got away. I win! I win!”
“I had three,” said the man who had brought Molly. “But two declined to come with me. And no one wins.”
“You look normal,” said the other man in the clearing, who was not dressed in a costume and looked to be made of ordinary flesh, and was in fact quite normal-looking if you excused how obviously terrified he was, a tall pudgy dude in a plaid shirt. He wasn’t bad-looking, and Molly could not think why her unhinged mind would have conjured him. He was missing a shoe.
“I’m not,” Molly said.
“Did you see that thing?” he asked.
“Is this all we’ve collected?” asked Molly’s escort. “Two mortals? There are more on the hill—I heard their voices. Our Lord will be sad with us.”
“What thing?” Molly asked.
“Our Lord will be sad,” said the boy, “as our Lady is sad. And sadness repels sadness. But shouldn’t it attract?” He ran up and pulled on Molly’s skirt. “Does like not cleave to like?”
“That thing,” said the dude. “That lady. Except she wasn’t a lady.”
“You mean she was a trannie?” Molly asked. The dude shook his head and gave her a look—he seemed scared and solicitous at the same time, and Molly thought for sure that if he had not been standing ten feet away he would have taken her hand.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I know exactly what’s going on.” Before she could give him the details—bad career choice, dead boyfriend, persistent failure of psychological recovery, and final florid breakdown—they were interrupted by the arrival of two more men. An old man, small beyond any reasonable shrinkage of age, came huffing and puffing into the clearing, dragging another, normal-sized man by the legs. The dragger was dressed in a perfectly pressed linen suit; the draggee wore nothing from the waist down. “Look,” she said to the man in the plaid shirt. “Now it’s getting interesting.” And she tried to decide which was a more extravagant effort on the part of her demented imagination, a man with no pants or a tiny grandpa in a nice suit or a boy with a bunny tail—as he pulled on her skirt and jumped up and down beside her, she decided that his tail was not a costume.
“Look what I found!” said the tiny grandpa, who seemed to get smaller instead of bigger as he got closer. “I win. Smell him. He’s special. I win!”
“I had two,” said Bunny Boy. “I win!”
“I had three,” said the Tree. “But …”
“Smell him! There’s something special. Something awful. It’s more points, when they’re special.”
“It’s not!” said Bunny Boy. “Whoever gets two and loses one is the winner. Those are the rules.”
“There are no rules!” said the Tree. “This is not a game. This is an emergency!”
“It’s a game!” said Bunny Boy. “If we’re all going to die anyway, I want it to be a game!”
“Will you please just smell him!” Tiny Grandpa shouted. The three of them glared at one another, but the other two went over and sniffed grudgingly at the man with no pants, who stirred a little at the pressure of the Bunny Boy’s nose.
“I thought he was dead,” said the dude in the plaid shirt.
“Why would he be dead?” Molly asked, really talking to herself, asking not just why would she present herself with a pantless dead man, but why the little grandpa and the bunny boy and why a talking tree? I had the strangest dream, she said to herself. And you were there, and you were there, and you were there, too. There were already midgets—über-midgets, actually, or under-midgets. She wondered if there would be flying monkeys, and if she would kill a witch and wake up whole of mind.
“Because something horrible is happening.”
“I see what you mean,” said the Tree. “Distinctive.” He prodded the man with a foot. “Are you sure he’s a mortal?”
“He is too ugly to be anything else,” said Bunny Boy. “But special, I agree. In the worst way.” He craned his neck down to sniff at the man’s bottom. “There’s something awful in there!”
“I think it would help me,” said the dude in the plaid shirt, “if I knew somebody’s name.” He stuck out his hand to Molly and said, “I’m Will.”
“I’m Eleanor Roosevelt,” Molly said, not taking his hand, but two things happened before he could reply. Raccoons and squirrels started zipping through the clearing, all coming from the side Molly had entered on and then vanishing up the hill, and the weirder three of the six people now in the clearing all turned their heads at once to look back into the trees.
“Oh, no!” said Bunny Boy.
“We are not safe here!” said Tiny Grandpa.
“He’s coming,” said the Tree.
“That … thing?” said the dude in the plaid shirt.
“Inside! Inside!” said the Tree. “We can bar the door against him! Quickly! Quickly!” He was shouting at Molly while the other two dragged the unconscious man toward the cave. They had him by both legs and a hand, but their heights were too uneven to carry him smoothly, and he bounced on the grass. Molly sat down.
“I can’t wait to see what’s next,” she said.
“Lady!’ said the Tree. “Fly!” But Molly crossed her legs and looked to the trees. The Tree jumped up and down, looking like he had to pee. She started to laugh at him, until she saw what was coming out of the woods. It was just a black boy waving underpants over his head and shouting, which should not have been a terrifying sight, but she was terrified of him and was running before she had even decided to stand up. She was sure, in the portion of a second that it seemed to take to get into the cave, that this was the fastest she had ever run in her life. She registered the size of the cave—not actually a cave but a hall as big as a church—but had no attention to spare to marvel at it.
“Shut the door!” she said. “Shut the door!” They were already doing that, the man named Will helping to draw shut two giant wooden doors. She was positioned deep inside the room, but she could still see the boy, in the space between the closing doors, getting nearer and nearer. The man with no pants was just behind her; when she stepped back she stepped on him.
“Don’t touch me!” he cried out, standing up as the doors slammed shut. They dropped a wooden bar down across them, but still the Tree was shouting, “The bar! The bar!”
“I’ve got it!” said Bunny Boy, holding up a large black button. The doors shook as if something considerably more massive than a little boy had hurled itself on them. Bunny Boy dropped the button, the doors shook again, and the left door cracked near its lower hinge. Tiny Grandpa picked up the button and stuck it on the door. The noise of the assault was curiously muffled, but two strikes later it was loud again and the right-hand door started to crack.
“Don’t touch me!” said the man with no pants. He was fully awake now, backing away from Molly.
“We are going to die,” said Bunny Boy. “We are not supposed to die!”
“Don’t touch me!” the
man with no pants said again, and tripped over a long bench. Molly reached for him, too far away to help. Something turned in her stomach as he fell; she almost threw up and had to sit down for dizziness. There was another noise at the doors, just a little thump this time, and when Molly looked back at them she saw the wood had become iron.
“Hooray!” said Bunny Boy, bouncing over to give Molly a hug. “Did you do that?”
“No,” she said, sinking down to the floor and putting her hands over her ears to try to drown out the noise of Peabo knocking to come in.
“I’m flying!” Molly said.
“No, you’re not!” Ryan called back.
“I feel like I’m flying,” she said.
“This isn’t what flying feels like,” he said. It had been his idea to roller-skate across the Golden Gate Bridge. At first Molly had been pretty lukewarm about it. It was a long way from his house in the Mission to the Presidio, and there were some really enormous hills in between the two neighborhoods. Ryan rushed along without seeming to make any actual effort to go, and rolled down the hills with abandon, while Molly managed to trudge both up and down the hills, reduced to walking sideways down the steepest parts because she was afraid of the speed. She worried even more about Ryan, as he raced through the stop signs on the way down out of Pacific Heights, and had to swerve around a car coming through the intersection of Scott Street and Broadway. He was so fast, and he looked very much like he knew what he was doing, but that didn’t stop her from picturing him with his head broken open and his brains glistening in the lovely golden afternoon light he was always admiring. She would berate herself later for never putting together habits of speeding and dashing through stop signs, or pausing when they passed over the bridge to stare at long length over the rail at the water churning violently around the caissons, that time and every time, with a tendency toward suicide. The lesbian said the third key to surviving a suicide was understanding totally that there was nothing you could have done to prevent it, but Molly didn’t believe that at all.
She had shown up at Ryan’s house on Fourteenth Street on a pair of Rollerblades, which had made him laugh. “Rollerblades are for homos,” he said, and rooted with her in his huge basement, which was full of bicycles and newspapers and empty suitcases, acres of detritus from the hoarding previous owner. There was a whole shelf full of skates, some so old they needed keys. She picked a seventies-vintage pair, red and white, slightly too big but possessed of lovely soft pompoms. She held her breath, looking around while Ryan beat the dust out of them. She liked his basement, though she found the house in general a little overwhelming. It wasn’t the first surprising thing she had learned about him, that he lived alone in a five-story house with seven bedrooms and a fireman’s pole that dropped into the basement from the third floor and a luxuriously overgrown courtyard garden in whose center grew a strange oak tree with golden leaves and silver bark that smelled like cinnamon. But it felt like the representative surprise, that he lived in a dilapidated mansion filled with a lot of garbage, some boring, some disturbing, and some delightful, that he would probably never sort through. She had spent time alone down there—taking the stairs, not the pole—while he was out or sleeping or distracted with work; she still didn’t entirely understand what he did for a living, which was some kind of consulting work that involved the occasional business trip and frenetic periods of computer activity that punctuated his usual idleness at intervals of two or three weeks. He had bought the house when he came to San Francisco three years before. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, when she asked why he had chosen it. “It just seemed like the right place. Sort of like where I belonged.” When he told her it had been boarded up for fifteen years, it explained some of the time-capsule feel of the place, and when he told her what he had paid for it, she asked him why he hadn’t gotten someplace nicer. That seemed to wound him a little.
“It is nice,” he said. “It’s interesting. It’s full of history.”
“I like it,” Molly said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to sound like I didn’t like it.” That made him shrug and smile. He hadn’t touched a thing since he moved in, though he allowed Molly very slowly to start making over a room or two. At first this only involved adding things, not taking anything away. “That has sentimental value,” he’d said, when she tried to take away a lamp shaped like a tuna or an ashtray that neither of them ever used.
“But it’s not even yours,” she’d replied. “It came with the house.”
“I know,” he said. “But still.” Eventually he relented a little and let her start to exchange things out of other parts of the house, or the basement, and she funneled the tackiest elements into two rooms on the second floor, concentrating the tastelessness there. Bigger than her whole apartment, the basement was mysterious and a little scary. She had a running game of trying to count all the bicycles when she was down there, and she never seemed to get the same number twice. There were walls filled with bottled preserves, with some pickled creatures set here and there among them, as if to trick the unwary into spreading fetal pig on their English muffin, and jars stuffed with leaves and herbs and roots. Molly had sniffed randomly at them. There was pot and hash mixed in randomly with sage and rosemary, and herbs she’d never encountered before, with smells she recognized but couldn’t associate with any plant: old couch, cheesy feet, blood, warm television. He only shrugged when she asked him anything about the old owners, about why the house sat abandoned for so long, or why they needed dozens of bicycles, or why they bottled hamsters in their basement, or kept a cage and a spanking post and a pair of stocks. “It’s San Francisco,” was all he would ever say in speculation. “People do all sorts of things here.”
He darted ahead of her on his skates and went around her in circles as she made her plodding way across the seemingly endless expanse of Crissy Field. There was a strong headwind coming through the Golden Gate; Ryan acted like he didn’t feel it at all. It was something she wouldn’t ordinarily have liked to do, skate-plodding into another county, but doing it with him made it a delightful use of her time. There were all sorts of these things she would ordinarily have found incredibly boring if not actually unpleasant, but which became fun in his company, and sometimes, looking back on what things were like before she met him, it seemed that her whole life had been an unpleasant use of her time and he had changed that. She had tried to tell him as much, but the closest she had come was saying to him, as they sat among the remains of a picnic lunch underneath the golden oak, was, “I’m having a really good time just sitting here with you.” He was lying on his back with one arm around her; she was curled against his side; he was staring up at the leaves. He didn’t answer in words but gave her a squeeze, which she took to mean what she wanted it to, that he was as happy as she was, though he seemed in that moment, and sometimes in others, to be more distracted than happy or sad.
Sausalito, it turned out, was rather a long way away, even with wheels on your shoes. She got tired, though Ryan pulled her along, or pushed her from behind, and they stopped half a mile or so from the bridge, trespassing in somebody’s horse pasture. “Doing nothing with you is my favorite thing in the world,” she said to him, and they lay about silently in the warm, scented grass, in a variety of positions, his head on her chest, her head on his arm, her heavy skated feet on his belly. After half an hour or so of rolling and sprawling, he suggested that they move along, and she said, “In a minute.” Her head was very near his crotch—she only needed to turn her head to roll her face into his dick, which was not particularly obscured by his short shorts. It had been a long time since she had wondered, as she fucked somebody, what her father or her mother would think about it, but there was something about doing it in the open, and underneath the gigantic blue bowl of sky, which her father had once described to her as Jesus’ big blue eyeball, that brought them to mind. It didn’t bother her at all to think, as she suddenly did, that Jesus was going to run tattling to her father, or even to think, as she did next, of
her parents gathered round to watch with solemn, disapproving faces. She even gave an extra little thrust here for her father, and dedicated a tickle of Ryan’s balls to her mother, and said to herself and to them, This is what it’s like to be really happy.
“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?” she asked him at dinner. He was picking at a bowl of gray seafood stew. It was a limited choice of restaurants that would let them in on roller skates, and this place at least had a lovely view of the city, which was lit up behind him, so if she squinted it looked as if he was wearing the architecture of the higher hills like a hat.
“What sort of question is that?” he asked, looking up and frowning.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just thinking I don’t know that about you.” Actually, it was Salome who had thought it up. She had her own ongoing one-sided relationship with Ryan, conducted through the occasional conversation when he came to the shop and, much more significantly, through serial interrogations of Molly as she worked, exercises that always made Molly feel a little defensive, since they seemed intended as much to criticize her fund of knowledge about her beloved as to actually learn about him. “You don’t know where he was born?” Salome had asked, managing to sound innocent and arch at the same time, and she was similarly surprised by Molly’s ignorance of his sister’s age, his grandparents’ countries of origin, and the particulars of his job. “But darling,” she’d said, “you’ve been dating for six months and you don’t know him at all,” to which Molly had replied that she knew what was important about him, he was a genuinely good person, and she’d known as much after only a few hours. Salome had made a face like Molly had a host of beetles crawling in her hair, and shaken her head solemnly, and said, “No, no, no, no, no.” She’d retreated to the back room without another word, and returned an hour later with her desk-sized calendar, marked through the next month with questions of increasing significance for Molly to ask Ryan, in a four-week program. “How can you know if you love him,” Salome asked, “if you don’t really know him?” Molly didn’t see what one thing had to do with the other, but it wasn’t something she was going to argue about with lonely, neurotic old Salome, who was all theory and no practice. She took the calendar pages and used them to line her cat box. Still, the questions rattled around in her head, and she asked one every now and then, telling herself it didn’t actually matter if Ryan answered them or not.
