by Chris Adrian
“Oh,” he said. “I think it’s probably this fish stew.”
“It’s a dumb question,” she said. She quietly put her own answer—my family—back inside herself.
“Not dumb,” he said, “just hard to answer.”
“Too hard to pick one?”
“No. I just … don’t remember. I have a hard time holding on to some stuff. It’s probably for the best, right? Something you can’t remember or describe shouldn’t have any bearing on your life now. If it’s already forgotten, it should be let go. Right?”
“Yes,” Molly said, rather hesitantly. “Are you saying something happened to you that was so bad you can’t remember it, or that the bad things were too trivial to remember?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “I’m saying I’d rather pay attention to the good things. What’s the best thing that ever happened to you?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “You, hands down.” Now she was smiling too.
“See?” he said. “You too. Hands up, hands down, hands sideways, hands everywhere.” He reached under the table and groped at her belly and her groin.
“Stop,” she said, not actually wanting him to stop.
She fell asleep on the ferry back to San Francisco, nestled against him to hide from the wind on the outside deck. He kept waking her to look at passing marvels: the hulking dark blob of Angel Island and the lights of Alcatraz and a disturbance in the water that he swore was a whale and finally the approaching city. “Look at that,” he said, again and again. “I love that.”
“Yes,” she said, half-awake, “lovely.” She was half-drunk and half-sad, trying not to imagine a burden of secret sorrow for him but failing intermittently, heaving like the boat in and out of troughs of dispiriting fancy, wishing she could dwell solely on the nice thing he had told her. She slept again, not dreaming but aware in her sleep that she wanted the journey back to take a very long time, so she could stay curled up against him with her head in his lap, and she stayed groggy, rather willfully, as he led her off the boat and into a cab, as they rode along the Embarcadero and up Market Street, and even as he led her inside the house and upstairs to bed. She was sober by then, and not that tired anymore, but she let him undo her skates and take off her shorts and even undo the scrunchie from her hair, never opening her eyes until he kissed them.
“Hello there,” she said.
“Good night,” he said.
“I love you,” she said, never having said it before, and the courage or daring or gall to say it might have seemed to come from nowhere, except that it was the perfect thing to say to his evasion, and to Salome’s dissatisfaction, because that was a lady who would never understand if Molly told her she was saying it as much to what she didn’t know about him as to what she did.
“I love you too,” he said, with no hesitation at all, and then he turned out the light.
10
Henry did not used to be an excitable person. It was a legacy of his old self that it still took a lot to get him worked up. In the past, that had been because nothing potentially upsetting had ever seemed entirely real to him, though he would never have described the situation to himself that way, back in the bad old good old days. Back then he thought he was just being careful not to follow his mother’s example. She had spent the majority of her days in some sort of a tizzy and had developed over the course of her life a tizzy repertoire of abundant variety, from the black depressive tizzy to the anxious weepy tizzy to the more traditional furious tizzy, which almost always involved projectiles. Henry thought he had made a healthy choice not to be like her, in the same way he had chosen not to smoke or dabble in drugs, and it was a very late discovery that he was generally unflappable not because he was better than his mother but because he was his own special sort of monster.
Equanimity was easy, it turned out, when you were insulated from reality by a sustained assurance that nothing that happened could actually matter. His mother would have found it vindicating to hear that whatever had happened to him in the lost years of his abducted youth had in fact nearly ruined the rest of his life, that the still-unremembered trauma had kicked him out of the world to a place where he watched dispassionately as all the subsequent despairs and delights of his life passed by, somehow unfelt even as he experienced them, until Bobby came along, called attention to the arrangement, and disrupted it. The kindly therapist he’d engaged at Bobby’s insistence had pointed out that it wasn’t the unremembered trauma but only his reaction to it that ultimately mattered, and it was not too late, after twenty years, to choose against his mother after all. And that was what Henry thought he had done, long after Bobby dumped him, when he finally realized that he would rather forfeit the hand washing and the bleaching and the constant guarding anxiety—to leave his state of comfortable dissociation, move back to San Francisco, and expose himself to whatever it was exactly that it was keeping at bay—than live without Bobby.
Disoriented and knowing that something was horribly wrong, he opened his eyes, too upset to take things in except in pieces: an iron door, a girl, a handsome man in a plaid shirt, the great space all around them, a hall hung with tapestries he couldn’t bear to look at.
“Don’t touch me!” he said to all of them, standing up and falling down and standing up again. He stood up and realized he wasn’t wearing any pants.
“If you didn’t do it,” said a boy Henry had failed to notice in his first look at the room, “who did?” He looked at Henry. “Did you do it?”
“Don’t touch me!” Henry said, because he especially did not want to be touched by that boy, who should have seemed cute instead of terrifying, with his baby-blue shorts and red suspenders and fake rabbit tail and bunny slippers made to look like bunny feet, not bunnies. Henry hid his cock and his balls with his hands—for no reason at all he was getting a boner—and backed away toward the wall.
“No one is touching you,” the girl said, and Henry started to cry, because he had promised absent, rejecting Bobby that he would never say those words to anybody ever again. He said them again and again as he backed up against the wall, understanding as he spoke what sort of catastrophic backsliding it represented.
“It’s okay, buddy,” said the handsome man in the plaid shirt. “Nobody’s going to touch you. Just take a breath. Something really fucked up is going on.”
Henry took a longer look around the hall, appreciating just how big it was, and thinking as he looked of all the things that would fit inside it: elephants and cement trucks and hospital lobbies. He squinted at the tapestries and looked away from them again. His eyes fell down to the people who were staring at him. They had all walked forward to surround him in a half ring, the little ones spaced between the big ones. He noticed the girl a little more distinctly, and recognized that she was kind of pretty, and noticed that the handsome man had taken off his shirt for some reason, revealing a beefy, hairy torso and a tattoo on his shoulder of some kind of spring tree in bloom. He got a better look as well at the boy with the fake tail, and the little man who, he realized now, had accosted him in the clearing, and the tall man with uncontrolled psoriasis. That one looked back nervously over his shoulder when the door shook again.
“Are you well?” asked the little man in the suit.
“Don’t—” Henry started to say again, because it seemed to him that the whole half circle was leaning forward, about to get grabby, and this caused his panic to rise and rise until it crested. Then something broke in him, or a circuit tripped; suddenly the five of them seemed very far away, though the handsome man was leaning forward with his shirt held out, and the whole unfamiliar and confused situation, which a moment before had felt like a deadly crisis, didn’t matter so much at all. He knew the feeling: the serene, dead detachment of a mind divorced from its feelings. It made him want to cry, because this was exactly the sort of thing that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, now that he had proven Bobby wrong and become, at long last, kind of a normal person. “I’m fine,” he said,
taking the plaid shirt the beefy guy was holding out to him and wrapping it around his waist.
“Take mine, take mine!” said the boy with the bunny tail, holding out a pair of blue shorts and suspenders identical to the ones he was wearing.
“I’m okay,” said Henry.
“Did you do it?” said the boy.
“Do what?”
“The door, the door! I didn’t do it. Lyon didn’t do it. Who did it?”
“What?” Henry asked.
“Something fucked up is going on,” said the beefy guy. “Maybe someone should start from the beginning. I’m Will.” He pointed to himself, as if Henry was going to have a hard time understanding his introduction. The door shook again, and all of them but Henry shuddered.
“In the beginning,” said the psoriatic, “there was the Beast. My Master bound him and then, in grief, my Mistress set him free. That is the whole story.”
“Well,” said the little man in the suit, “it’s a little more complicated than that.”
“I’m Will,” said the handsome fatty, sticking his hand out to everyone in turn. “Will’s my name.” The boy with the tail took his hand and shook it enthusiastically but didn’t say what his name was.
“My name is Lyon,” said the psoriatic. “That is Oak.” He pointed at Bunny Boy and reached out a hand to touch the little man in the suit. “This is Fell. We are all good servants of our Master, and therefore of our Mistress, and for these reasons we are trying to help you. You were in danger outside, so we brought you in. Our Master always bade us to escort mortals off the hill, if they wandered in. But there’s no way off the hill tonight.”
“I wouldn’t normally be helping you at all,” said Oak.
“Oh, I would have helped you,” said Fell, speaking directly to Henry. “I don’t quite know why, but I like you, my boy. I like you just fine!”
“What’s your name?” Will asked Henry. He snapped his fingers right under Henry’s nose, but they still seemed very far away. Henry felt like his head was floating up near the ceiling, and like watching everyone from above should give him not just a high perspective but a long one, and it should all make sense somehow.
“Henry,” he said. “I’m Henry.” He was floating but not floating, calling his name out from the ceiling and speaking it softly on the ground. He was there but not there, and that allowed him to act very calm. Funny, he thought, how often he had described his old self, to Bobby and his therapist, to coworkers and dates and even random tricks, as a dissociated creature, when he hadn’t fully understood what that word meant until just now. He was in his body but above and around it too, and it felt not like he could do anything but like anything could be done to him without his much minding or noticing, which seemed its own sort of superpower.
“This is …” Will said, indicating the girl with his thumb. “What did you say your name was?”
“Tallulah Marie Jingleheimer Schmidt,” she said. Henry tilted his head and frowned at her. “What are you looking at?” she asked him, which made him frown more. On closer inspection, she wasn’t that pretty after all, but there was something pleasing about her to look at. He thought it might just be that she was troubled looking.
“What’s wrong with you?” asked Will. “Why won’t you tell us your name? And why are you being so hostile?”
“Why am I being so hostile?” She waved her arms around, indicating everything around them.
“Well, we’re all in this together,” Will said.
“Not really,” she said. The door shook again, and they all looked at it. Will and the girl both shuddered again, and the three others all made a gesture, touching their thumbs and index fingers together to make a sign that looked to Henry like okay! but he could tell it was meant to ward something away.
“Somebody’s knocking,” Henry said.
“Can she … Can it get in?” Will asked.
“Maybe,” said the three creatures. Looking at them a little more closely, Henry could not figure out a better word for them. They became more abnormal the closer he examined them. He noticed little details—string for skin, purple eyes, a knee that was jointed backward—which made it increasingly clear that they weren’t actually human. Of course they’re not human, he said to himself, and he could not understand why that was both a relief and a terror, or why he could accept it with a calm that was equal, in his new binary state, to the shrieking panic he was also feeling.
“Iron was a good choice,” said Lyon. “I think perhaps it was my Master, watching over us in spirit. Who else would choose so wisely, and what other faerie is mighty enough to summon so much iron?”
“Master!” said Oak, running up to the front of the room and falling on his knees to prostrate himself before an empty high-backed chair set there on a dais. “Master, show your face!”
“Faeries,” said Will, looking at each of the three in turn and walking backward away from Lyon, who was standing close to him.
“There’s no such thing,” Henry said.
“Of course not!” Molly said, shoving Will away violently when he backed into her. “They’re not real. I made them up. I made you up. Do you know who that is out there?” She glared at him and then at Henry. “Stop looking at me!” she said, and started crying before she ran away down the long hall, her footsteps echoing off the stone walls.
“Wait!” said Will, and she called back, “Shut up shut up shut up!”
“Mortals,” said Oak. “They always think they’re dreaming.”
“Maybe we are,” Henry said, though what was happening felt unreal in a completely different way from a dream.
“I don’t think so,” said Will. “But I’m still waiting to hear what’s happening. And shouldn’t we go get her? Something might be dangerous in there.” He pointed toward the darkness at the far end of the hall.
“Many things are dangerous there,” said Lyon, “but nothing as dangerous as what lies in the opposite direction. We should all go her way. There’s another door, down at the bottom of the hill, known only to my Lord’s most trusted servants.”
“Everyone knows that door,” said Fell. “And who cares if we’re eaten over the hill or under the hill? Eaten is eaten. Dead is dead. We may as well stay right here.”
“Our Lord is coming!” said Oak, still prostrate before the empty throne. “He’ll save us all,” he added, very quietly. Henry had been wondering if the boy was capable of talking without shouting. He walked across the hall and up on the dais, and laid his hand upon the wood. It felt like an infraction to touch it, he didn’t know why. He gave it a kick for no reason at all. “A great ass rested there!” said Oak, shouting again, and Henry shrugged. “But maybe …” Oak said. “Maybe you should sit.” He leaped up and sniffed at Henry’s bottom. “Is that what I smell?” He pushed Henry back into the chair, saying, “Look, the King is reclaimed by his throne!” and watched expectantly as nothing happened. It felt like a worse infraction to be sitting there, and there wasn’t any naughty joy in it. Henry stood up. “You didn’t change, my Lord,” said Oak, and started to cry.
“Yes I did,” Henry said. Oak had already run to get Will. He dragged him over to the chair and sat him down.
“This is really uncomfortable,” Will said.
“A mortal is a mortal,” said Lyon. “These ones are no different from any others.”
“Alas! Alas!” said Oak. The door shook again, and they all cringed, but Henry didn’t cringe. He was protected, he supposed, from whatever regular capacity for feeling made them sensitive to the thing that was trying to get them. He tried and failed to imagine what it looked like.
“What does it look like?” he asked. “This beastie.”
“Not a beastie,” said Oak. “Haven’t you been listening at all?”
“The Beast looks different to everyone who sees it,” said Lyon.
“But is uniformly terrible to behold,” said Fell.
“Can we get moving?” asked Will. “I think I just saw a bolt jiggle.”
“You can’t,” said Will. “Look, we should stick together. We’re all in this together.”
“You keep saying that,” Henry said. “But it isn’t really true. I don’t even know you. Or you, or you, or you.”
“But we are all caught up in my Lady’s mistake,” said Lyon.
“Maybe she has a plan!” said Oak.
“And we are all going to die together,” said Fell.
“I wish you would stop saying that,” said Will.
“See you later,” Henry said. He sat down and closed his eyes and decided not to open them again until they had left and the great room was quiet except for the periodic ringing of the doors. Then he would open up his eyes, and he would decide what to do. He understood the girl a little better now. A person needed a little solitude to know what to do in a situation like this. He could imagine following after them, when they were gone, deciding they had not been so annoying after all and that getting out from this place was worth the probable unpleasantness involved in penetrating deeper into it. But he could imagine, too, getting up after they left to see who was knocking so insistently on the door. He didn’t know whether that was because he didn’t believe these unbelievable creatures when they told him that a death-dealing monster was waiting on the other side of the door, or because he did believe them. He suspected they were all worked up for nothing—that they were trying to trick him—and if he opened the door it would be Holly Hobby on the other side, offering up a plate of cookies. And he suspected as well that there really was a monster out there, something that would rip him to pieces or crush his head or strangle him to death.
