The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  He was thinking about what that would be like—his thoughts falling into familiar rutted tracks as he imagined a leisurely fade into suffocating oblivion—when he realized he was moving, and opened his eyes. He was being carried in the chair, moving backward toward the shadow at the end of the hall. Will and Lyon were ahead of him, Oak was hopping along behind, and Fell was nowhere to be seen until Henry peered over the side of the chair and saw he was carrying it on his back and shoulders. “We just couldn’t allow it,” Fell said. “It would have displeased our Master severely to leave you to die, even though you’re just going to die later. But that’s better than dying now! Mostly. It is! No, you don’t!” He felt Henry standing, about to jump out of the chair, and called to Oak, who jumped up in Henry’s lap, much heavier than his size suggested he would be and too heavy to budge.

  “I told you not to touch me,” Henry said.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” Oak said, and gave Henry a hug.

  Henry followed Bobby across the breakwater. They’d come to Provincetown early in April. It was windy and cold, and it rained briefly upon them during the long way across the harbor. Henry walked carefully on the big flat rock slabs strewn in a jumble. It was not his first New England spring, but it was his first time in Provincetown, though he’d recently watched some porn set here, in which the protagonist made this same journey over the breakwater and then got a blow job and a fucking in the shadow of the Woods End lighthouse. Henry watched Bobby placing his feet on the upward- and downward-slanting faces of the stone slabs, thinking of how he had trod infelicitously, back in Cambridge, on a place in Henry’s driveway, marked with an oil stain in the shape of a bird, where a letter from Henry’s mother had fallen to the ground. Cambridge was far away, separated from them by a huge expanse of cleansing water, and yet Bobby still had a taint upon his shoe. Henry deliberately failed to avoid stepping where Bobby stepped, which seemed like progress. He had measured progress against his obsessions and compulsions in much smaller increments back then.

  “Look at that!” Bobby said, pointing out a half-sunken rowboat in the tidal flats, where a little crab was standing with its claws thrust upward. “I did it!” Bobby said, throwing his hands and arms up spastically, aping the crab’s gesture. Henry had a patient, a little girl with Down syndrome, who said those words and made that gesture at every opportunity, celebrating every triumph and mistake of her day, whether it was winning a bingo game or wetting her bed. Doctors in general and pediatricians in particular were not supposed to make fun of retarded children, but making fun of them, and deformed children and dying children and especially dead babies, was actually a staple of the training. Henry had trouble trusting pediatricians who couldn’t laugh at a nice dead-baby joke; it suggested to him somehow that they weren’t sufficiently traumatized by their common experience. He laughed, and threw up his hands too, in ridicule of that little girl but also in solidarity with her, because all his own triumphs seemed comparably admirable and pathetic.

  He caught up to Bobby and lost his balance jumping over a gap in the slabs. Bobby caught his hand and kept hold of it. Provincetown was still largely abandoned. Three-quarters of it was closed down, and there was hardly a homosexual in sight, except for their ancient innkeeper and his rubber-panted gimp, but even in its most remote reaches the town felt like a place where it was okay for two men to hold hands. Bobby had worried a lot in his youth about God striking him down for being gay, and Henry had had a corresponding worry—not restricted to his youth, and never really abandoned—that nature, abhorring him, would do the same thing. Provincetown countered with a more pleasant delusion: all the gayness that had loitered there had rubbed off on the rocks and water and sand, so nature smiled on you when you held hands with your boyfriend on the breakwater, or made out with him on the moors, or even if you made a pornographic video on the beach. “I like it here,” he said to Bobby.

  “Me too,” Bobby said.

  “I mean, really,” Henry said, meaning that he liked being there with Bobby.

  “Me too. Really. A lot.” Bobby didn’t smile, but he was wearing his happy face, which was a different sort of troubled look from the one he habitually wore. That was so much easier to accept, and to believe, Henry found, than a big Donny Osmond smile would have been. Who could trust Donny Osmond, with his perfect teeth and his perpetually sunny outlook, fermented in a wish-fulfilling Mormon cosmogony that knew absolutely nothing of the terrible real world? Bobby had just come back from a difficult rotation in Lesotho, and that made his relative absence of frown more reassuring and uplifting than any ignorant smile would have been.

  He had been gone for a month, which gave Henry a long time to miss him and to admit how much he liked him. He had been storing up affection for Bobby somewhat in secret, not just from Bobby but from himself. He was in the habit of ignoring alarming developments for as long as he could, and so he ignored the fact that he was falling in love with Bobby until he started to pine for him. Bobby took up residence in Henry’s imagination, and Henry followed him through his African day, making up details to supplement the ones Bobby supplied over the phone: identical cowboy-print short-sleeved shirts for the twin orphan boys unofficially adopted by the expatriate staff at the hospital where Bobby was working, who were a mix of smarty-pants do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells hiding out from the stateside consequences of their laziness and incompetence; a collar made of paper clips for the skinny dog that followed Bobby every morning on the short walk from his dormitory to the hospital; bright red nails on the woman brought to the emergency room in seizures, poisoned by her husband. The absence of the real-world Bobby made it possible for him to date an imaginary Bobby and to fall in love with him; much later, post-breakup and post-breakdown, he would wonder if he would ever have fallen in love with the real-world Bobby without falling in love with the imaginary version first. It was something he would figure out only after Bobby dumped him: that his imagination was what made the real world, and real people, only barely palatable for him.

  He wasn’t thinking at all in those terms, that day on the breakwater, but he did notice how solid everything looked and felt, the water sloshing heavily against the rocks and the heavy pressure of Bobby’s hand in his. He didn’t think about whether or not he was afraid of the real world, or worry if he was ever going to find a way to live in it, but he did appreciate how far away California and his mother seemed, and he appreciated how being with Bobby felt like something he didn’t deserve to have and wasn’t supposed to have which had come to him anyway, by oversight or charity or blind dumb luck.

  “I like it here,” he said to Bobby again. “I mean, I like it here with—” He stopped walking and listed toward the left, though the slab they were on was quite flat. The odd solidity of things intensified, and he felt a little nauseated all of a sudden. He wanted to shield his face from the water and the sky, from the moss and the mussels on the stones, and he wanted to shield his face from Bobby’s face, but he didn’t. “I really like it,” he started again. “With you, here. I—”

  Bobby stared at him, letting him fumble for a few moments before he cut him off. “I love you too,” he said.

  11

  It finally occurred to Will to wonder about his sanity when the girl ran away in a bitter huff. He supposed it was possible that he had suffered a psychotic break on the way to Jordan Sasscock’s party, that the prospect of seeing Carolina was too much to bear, and that now he was lying on his belly somewhere in the real Buena Vista Park, gnawing on tree roots and eating dirt, or else locked up in the ER at CPMC down at the foot of the hill, drooling and babbling while some social worker tried to get him to tell her his name. It was possible, but hardly seemed worth thinking about—the heft of the little bunny boy when he had leaped into Will’s arms, the texture of the golden leaves on the cousin of Carolina’s tree, and the chill bite of the air in his nose were enough to make everything seem undeniably real, and he was secure enough in his sanity to think that when something seemingly
fantastical appeared his first assumption should be that the problem was with the world and not with his mind. And he considered, walking after a man who looked like a tree into the secret darkness under the hill, that this catastrophe, if that’s what it was, got him off the hook, in a way, with Carolina, and maybe that was ultimately why he didn’t care to question whether or not it was real. As much as the lady in the tree had terrified him, and as much as he was frightened by the talk about being killed, he was in some sense as relieved as he was agitated by the crisis, because his first thought was how it would change things with Carolina. He had all sorts of reasons now to break their silence. Faeries and monsters and a tree that looked just like hers: one had to talk about such things, and the other had to listen, no matter how vile a history of transgression lay between them. And while the existence of faeries and monsters was no reason for him to be forgiven, it had the potential to distract her enormously from the memory of his crimes, and the existence of magic, monsters, and faeries brooked other impossibilities—getting back together with her seemed much less impossible than what he’d seen this evening. So thank goodness there existed in San Francisco a boy with a real bunny tail (Will had pulled it shortly after Oak had intercepted him in the park and led him to the door in the hill) growing out of his bottom, and thank goodness a monster in the shape of a middle-aged divorcée with a bad face-lift was threatening to do something atrocious to the faeries and to Will and that girl and Henry, who had lost his pants. Thank God Henry had lost his pants, however it had happened, and thank God the girl was such an anxious bitch. It had all happened just as it had to for Will to find Carolina in the morning and say, “You’re not going to believe this!” And maybe, he thought, somewhere under this hill there was a sapling, a baby golden oak that he could bring back to her, evidence of the impossible and proof that they could start over.

  “Where are we going, exactly?” he asked Lyon. They had passed from the brightly lit hall into shadow, and walked until the room narrowed around them into a dimly lit corridor. There was a brighter light in the back behind them, and another up ahead, and Lyon raised an arm and hand to point toward one.

  “Down, and deeper,” he said. Will looked at his arm, resisting the urge to pluck off one of the little threads that were sticking up off his rough skin.

  “And there’s a way out, farther down and deeper in?”

  “Eventually,” Lyon said, and sighed. “Probably.”

  “Probably?” Will said.

  “There is a general trend toward a door being at the bottom of the hill as well as at the top of the hill. More than that, I can’t really say.”

  Will stopped and put a hand on Lyon’s shoulder. “I’d really like a straight answer about this,” he said.

  “Of course you would,” Lyon said. “Mortals always do.” Henry yelled just then, and when Will turned to look he saw him heave himself to the side. The chair tumbled off Fell’s back, and Henry tumbled from the chair, and Oak tumbled out of his lap.

  “I told you not to touch me!” Henry said. When he got up he started walking back the way they had come.

  “Hey,” Will said. “Hey, don’t do that, man!” Fell and Oak and Lyon watched him walking away and then calmly followed after him. “What are you doing?” Will asked. “That’s the wrong way.”

  “It’s become less wrong,” said Lyon, “in the interim.”

  “I’m about to give up on you making sense,” Will said. “And it’s pissing me off.”

  “Giving up on that would be best,” Lyon said, not breaking his stride as he turned his head around one hundred and eighty degrees to give Will a look that seemed both pitying and dismissive. “Piss away, mortal. Piss on me, if you please. Just because I’m saving your life doesn’t mean I care about you, or care about your narrow little discomfitures, or have ever had the time, even in an eternity of ageless life, to explain things to you. Will you see the Redcap or the Bloody Falls before Under-the-Hill shows you a door? Who knows? I am not King under this hill, I only serve him, and I cannot straighten the paths you make crooked with your dreams. You mock me with your questions and should be careful, or I shall piss on you.”

  “I wasn’t trying to …” Will began, meaning to tell him that he wasn’t trying to mock him, and he didn’t see how his perfectly sensible questions added up to a mockery, but then Lyon swiveled his head back around, and that was so disconcerting that Will fell silent. It would probably be perceived as a mockery, he supposed, to ask him how he did that, or to ask to examine his neck a little more closely, or to ask for a bit of the moss growing under his arms to look at later under a microscope. Will hurried up, passing Lyon, meaning to catch up with Henry and talk to him instead. The hallway was brightening, and the walls were opening up. By the time Will caught up with Henry he was standing by a set of doors other than the ones through which they had come in. Henry was standing before one of two statues on either side of the doors, a seven-foot-tall naked woman. A male statue stood on the other side of the doors, which were ajar. Will looked back, then forward, then all around, not bothering to say that he didn’t understand what was happening. Oak ran forward and fell to his knees in front of the male statue.

  “Master!” he said. “Put forth your hand. Save us!” The other two made flourishing bows to the statue but did not speak to it. Henry was cocking his head back and forth at the lady and the man.

  “She’s pretty,” Will said, which was a serious understatement. He reached out and touched her belly, wondering too late if it might offend some part of the crowd in front of the other statue.

  “It’s our Lady,” Lyon said, “and our Lord.”

  “I figured,” Will said. “Are they going to talk?”

  “No,” Lyon replied. “They’re only statues.” But Oak had to be pried away from the feet of the male, and Fell climbed up the side of the statue and whispered something in its ear. “Onward,” said Lyon, and gave Will a little push toward the doors. There was another, grander room beyond them, a cozier hall than the last, only about half as big, with grass on the floors and flowers on the walls, and a ceiling hung with hundreds of little colored lanterns. It was empty of furniture except for a table the size of a flatbed truck piled with food and surrounded by chairs of every conceivable size, and empty of people except for the girl, who had called herself Eleanor Roosevelt. She was sprawled in a chair with a bottle of wine in her hand.

  “You all again,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” Will called out to her, not understanding why it made him so angry to see her sitting there appearing to enjoy herself.

  “Puddin …” she said, frowning at the bottle. She took a swig out of it, and said, “Molly.”

  “Well,” he said, “Okay then. I’m Will.”

  “I know. But I don’t know why your name is Will. Do you think that means something, that I named you Will?”

  “I don’t think you should drink that,” said Henry. “Or eat the food.” The three others—Lyon, Oak, and Fell—had fallen to the food on the table and were stuffing themselves.

  “O sad feast!” said Oak.

  “O Great Night!” said Fell. “O Last Night!”

  “The wine is a little strong for mortal tastes,” said Lyon, who had taken the leg of something that looked fancier than a chicken but was too small to be a turkey, and was licking it like a popsicle. “But eat up. This feast only happens once a year, and great care has gone into the preparation. Everyone is scattered on the hill, and most of them are too upset to eat now. It’s all going to waste, which is not so terrible, since the Beast will put the whole world to waste come dawn, but it will lessen the shame of it all if you taste and enjoy. And how nice, anyhow, that the hill has chosen to feed you.”

  “I don’t know if I would eat any of this,” Henry said, but he was sniffing at a delicate-looking cupcake.

  “Food,” said Molly. “The apples mean something, and the dates mean something, and the pig means something, and wine means something else, an
d your names all mean something and Peabo means something. How am I supposed to figure all that out?” Will recognized a drunk girl when he saw one, but he didn’t know how she could have gotten this drunk since they’d seen her in the hall. Her eyes were half-lidded, and she slurred when she said figure and supposed.

  “Shouldn’t we be moving along?” Will said. “I thought we were headed for the exit.”

  “That’s all fine,” said Molly, taking another swig of wine. “That’s all perfectly fine, but I think I can’t leave before I’ve figured anything out. I just figured that out right now. I’m crazy with a purpose, and when I figure it all out I’ll be all better, and you will all be somebody else entirely.”

  “I think you’ve had enough of that,” Will said, and took the bottle from her. She hardly had to stretch to reach another, which she took up and cradled to her chest but didn’t open.

  “I told you,” said Lyon. “This feast is on the way and of the way. The hill would feed you, and the Great Night would have its feast.” He threw a piece of the bird to Will, who caught it, then dropped it, and batted it to the table. It was piping hot. “You’ll never taste the like again,” Lyon added, “even if you’re not murdered by dawn, even if my Master rouses from his slumber and saves us all, even if you live a fat span of bored and boring mortal years.”