by Chris Adrian
Instead she heard a voice. “What are you doing?” There was someone in the small space underneath the bier.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Are you the Beast, come in a fair form to lure me out? I command you to answer truthfully.”
“I’m not,” Molly said. “Who are you? Are you stuck?” She didn’t particularly care if he was.
“Poodle! Poodle! There’s still some power in that word, and I command you with it! Are you he? Are you my enemy, come to eat me? Answer!”
“I’m just a girl,” Molly said, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Though she did. It made a certain sense that everyone in her breakdown dream would be afraid of the same thing. Dreams and lunatic minds were spendthrift in their creativity, and yet their economies dictated only one villain per drama. “Okay,” she said. “I know who you’re talking about. The black boy.”
A foot emerged from under the bier, stepping out of the darkness, followed, somewhat hesitantly, by a second foot, and then a little limboing body, shoulders and head dragging on the ground. When he stood up the little man only came halfway up her shin. “Black boy? I suppose, if that’s how you see him. He’s anything and everything, as long as it terrifies you. Myself, I generally see him as a large brown boot, except when he’s trying to trick me.” He reached under the bier and removed a wooden knife. It was long as he was tall, but he hefted it easily onto his shoulder.
“Don’t give yourself a splinter,” Molly said, wondering who he was supposed to be or what he was supposed to represent, what message she had packed away for herself in the form of this little man with a big knife. As if to answer her, he jumped up and touched his tongue to the skin of her knee.
“Just making sure,” he said, licking his lips. “Just a girl! What are you doing here, Just a Girl?”
“I got lost in my dream,” Molly said, because that seemed like the best way to describe the whole adventure. “What are you going to do with that knife?”
“It’s for my Lady,” he said, “so she can bind the Beast in blood once again. She didn’t think I would find it, but it was obvious where it would be. She hides everything important here. Lost in a dream?”
“Exactly,” she said. “I’m stuck in a dream, or something like that. Or I’m crazy. Locked up somewhere. Dreaming. Deluded. Drugged up. You’re just a figment of my imagination, but you mean something.” It made perfect sense when she heard herself explaining it to him. “What do you mean? Is it cheating, if I just ask you to tell me?” She laughed and took another sip from the bottle. At the taste of the wine, she thought of her dinner companions again, Henry and Will. She missed them suddenly. Such companionable figments, she thought. Such handsome delusions. The tiny man was squinting at her.
“Lean close,” he said, “and I’ll tell you, for I’ll not shout a secret.” She bent at the waist, halfway to the floor, but he said, “Closer,” so she knelt, but he said, “Closer still,” so she lay down on her stomach and put her face close to his face. His ears were covered in soft golden fur, and his breath smelled like rosemary. “Now close your eyes, the better to listen,” he said, so she did that; she almost felt like she ought to purse her lips. Finally, she thought, this dream is starting to cooperate! He didn’t keep her waiting long, but with a thin little shriek cut her cheek with a swipe of the knife. She rose swiftly to her knees, raising one hand to her face and knocking him sprawling with the other.
“You could have put my eye out!” she shouted, the first thing to come into her head.
“The better you would see, then!” he shouted back. He was already on his feet again, making a wobbly threat with the big knife. “Mortals! Always it’s a dream. Maybe you’re the dream. Away! Away! I’ve got more important things to do than babbling with a fool!” He ran off down the long hall with the knife clasped against his chest. Molly thought of a few different things that she could have called after him: You little shit! or I’ll cut you too! or You’re supposed to help me get out! or That’s even more dangerous than running with scissors! But she couldn’t quite find her voice. She stood looking at the blood on her hand, touching her face again, then looking at the blood again. The blood made her feel unbalanced all of a sudden, as if she were about to slip and fall within herself. She clung tighter to the bottle for support and leaned against the stone bier and the sculpture of the boy.
“And who are you?” she asked him, meaning What do you represent and What is your name and What are you doing here, but it was so hard, looking at him, to think he represented anything but a dead child. It’s so lifelike, she thought, though that seemed like the wrong word for a piece of art that perfectly represented the state of human death. She looked a little closer—the lights in the room seemed to brighten as she did—and understood why he was deathlike, that he was not a triumph of some sculptor’s art, but some undertaker’s. A voice in her head shouted, Don’t touch him! Of course it was the very same sort of voice that used to say such terrible things about her family—she heard it in the very same way—but now it sounded solicitous and panicked instead of snarky and sarcastic and she wondered if it had always meant to look out for her. I won’t, she told it, but she did, and then she ran away too, bouncing against the walls in her unsteady haste. There was a door beyond the bier, after all.
She slammed the door behind her, and stood pressing her back to it to keep it closed, as if the dead boy was going to chase her in here. She looked around. Someone has destroyed Cher’s bedroom, she thought to herself, because the room was in luxurious tatters, and it really looked like the sort of place Cher might sleep, if it weren’t all cut up and smashed. There were jeweled tapestries on the walls, and the furniture was made of lustrous exotic wood, and thick, intricately woven rugs lay three deep on the floor, but the place looked like the lady had erupted in a rage, and wreaked havoc on her luxurious nest with hammer and scissors and ax: the tapestries were in shreds and the furniture was in splinters. Molly walked to the bed, carefully appreciating how white were the sheets and how fluffy were the pillows where they weren’t torn asunder—she had abundant attention to spare for everything but the thing she was trying so hard not to think about. She sat down crooked on the bed—it stood on a single leg, the upper right—and ran her hands along the sheets, marveling at how soft they were, and wondering why they ended abruptly in the middle of the bed. “Oh, no,” she said softly, feeling a shift underneath her, and the remaining leg gave out. The bed crashed to the ground. She kicked her legs out, and bounced once on the mattress. It felt like something shifted and fell inside her at the same time, and she could not ignore any longer how real it felt when her face was cut, and how the little boy’s body had felt hard and dead in a way that nothing, not even her grieving trickster mind, could fake. She cried because that boy was dead, and because children died of neglect and accident and disease and because Ryan had died and because she really had become lost trying to make any sort of enduring sense of why he was dead, and become lost in pursuit of any sort of enduring peace over him, but now she could guess, if the dead boy was real, and the ugly little man was real, and faeries were real and magic was real, and threatening monsters in the size and shape of little boys were real, what Ryan’s picture was doing in that gallery.
Molly threw Ryan a party for his birthday. The planning was slightly complicated by the fact that he seemed to have no friends. She had lost a few herself, in the time that she had been dating him, overly sensitive types who thought silence could only indicate antipathy and who couldn’t understand that when you were in love you were allowed to ignore everyone except for your beloved, at least until the honeymoon was over. And if the honeymoon seemed to go on forever, then they should just be happy for you. She didn’t have enough friends to fill up his gigantic house, but when she included Salome and some Root and Relish co-workers, there were enough to make his garden look full, and even post a person here and there in the first- and second-floor balconies, ready to cast down handfuls of compostable
Norwegian confetti of which Salome, in a spasm of generosity, had made Molly a gift. Ryan’s peculiar sister, who looked and acted like his twin even though she was two years older than him, was there too. Arranging for her to come had felt like a coup, since she always seemed at least mildly disapproving of Molly, getting her to return a call or e-mail had been a challenge, and she had reminded Molly three times during their negotiations that birthdays just weren’t that important for their family. “But they’re important to me,” Molly had replied, and not realized until much later how lame that must have sounded. She had meant they were important to us, though she understood that she was throwing the party as much to make that true as to demonstrate that it was true.
“Where could he be?” Salome asked, when Ryan was only ten minutes late for his surprise. She thought tardiness was rude, and it was especially unforgivable to be late for your own party, even if you didn’t know it was happening.
“I’m sure he’s on his way,” Molly said, though he hadn’t replied to the three texts she’d sent him so far. She had formulated a not-very-sophisticated ruse to get him home on time—dinner with Salome, to whom he had taken an unexpected and persistent shine. He said he liked to listen to her because she made him forget about his own troubles. To Salome’s delight, Molly had finally discovered that he was a troubled person (Now you’re really getting to know him! she said). Part of the reason that it took so long was that he wasn’t troubled in exactly the ordinary sense of the word. He had more money than he seemed to know what to do with, and a large strange and spooky house; he loved his family in what seemed like a very straightforward and uncomplicated way; and, remembering and reviewing her training in psychology, she couldn’t really place him on any spectrum of disorder known to the DSM-IIIR. She had been trained in psychology only enough to recognize drastically maladjusted parishioners and to refer them for help if their problems were beyond her limited scope of impotent pastoral practice, but she certainly knew enough to recognize a lunatic, and Ryan wasn’t a lunatic, for all that he sometimes had unusual things to say about the moon. When she evaluated him through the lens of her former profession, she saw a person unable to find a home in his happiness. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate what he had, or feel lucky to have it—he made it plain to her every few weeks or so how much he appreciated his house and his city and, yes, even his shiftless, mildly overweight girlfriend—but she had the sense that none of this was quite enough.
He never actually said it in so many words, or even indicated it in so many actions, but here and there, month by month, he dropped a hint, and by the end of the year he had given her a lot to reflect on. Some of those hints were a little more concrete than others. “See the moon?” he asked her one night as they walked along the Embarcadero.
“Sure,” she said.
“That’s not the moon,” he said. “There’s another moon—a better moon—behind that one.” It was bloodred and pumped up grotesquely, just coming up over the bay, so she thought he meant there was a regular moon, calmer and prettier and looking less like it should shine over a battlefield, but that wasn’t what he meant. “It shines on a whole different world, where you can do things you can’t do here.” They were both pretty drunk—or at least she was; no matter how much Ryan drank he never slurred or stumbled—but their conversations often got weirder after he had been drinking. So she was content not to know what he was talking about and just guess at his meaning. Whenever this happened, whenever he talked in a way that only appeared to invite a reply from her, she thought how nice it was still to be with him, how handsome he looked when he was wistful, or how his eyes sparkled when he looked like he was about to cry, though he never did cry. It was easy to distract herself that way when she was drunk, and when she was sober she never dwelled on these conversations until it was too late to extract a useful lesson from them about the character of her boyfriend. “Do you know what I mean?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
He sighed. “The other moon shines on the better world.”
“And on the better people?” she asked.
“Exactly,” he said. She tried to imagine that better world, that better stretch of the Embarcadero and the better Ryan and Molly who inhabited it. Ryan was not so different, but she imagined herself as someone who didn’t have to flee her profession, and imagined the different, better past that had shaped her.
Then there was the physical evidence, less what he said and more what he made or did. It didn’t always substantiate her theory that she was somehow not enough; more often it was only evidence that he was kind of weird, but sometimes the weirdness was part of a general tendency to lay his attention in strange places, and this was a process in which she never could participate, because he did it secretly, or at least he thought that he did. She found notes scattered around the house, pieces of paper torn from notebooks or scraps torn from cereal boxes, the blank side covered with a list of flowers and fruit: Buttercup, Radish, Acorn. There was a door in the cluttered basement that he told her led to a room where he kept his “art projects,” but when she looked inside one day when he was gone she only found one picture, drawn in chalk on the stone floor, of a round wooden door, meticulously detailed down to the shining highlights on its brass doorknob, the whole thing stamped on and smeared as if he’d been angry at it. She woke sometimes to find him missing from the bed, and looking out the window she watched him standing naked in the garden, staring up at the moon, or peeing on the plants, and once leaning with one arm against the gold and silver tree while he used his free hand to masturbate. He had a tendency to hop every now and then as they walked, even in the absence of any obstacle, and she never totally understood what he was doing until she saw him one night in the garden doing the same thing, step-step-hopping from one end of the garden to the other, throwing up his arms with the hop and arching his back, and—recognizing the motion from her own dreams—she realized he was trying to fly.
This was all okay with her. Eventually, she came to think it had been too okay. She ought to have called down to ask him what he was doing when he appeared to be having sex with his tree. She ought to have asked where he was trying to get to through the door in the floor, and asked what was so special about the word Doorknob that he should feel compelled to write it down a hundred times on the blank side of a torn-up cereal box. But it didn’t seem like her business yet, to pry out all his secrets when he wasn’t yet inclined to volunteer them to her, especially since he had secrets that were as hidden to him as they were to her. Never mind that she already felt like she had volunteered all of hers. She didn’t imagine that such confidences, beyond the easy ones, were currency to trade with each other in achieving intimacy. And anyway, mysterious drawings and list-making and even semi-public nocturnal emissions were all clues that pointed someplace strange but not disgusting, weird but not illegal. She hadn’t found a limb in the basement, or a pair of bloody panties under the mattress, or even stray traces of lipstick on his collar.
And she hoped, anyway, that he would come to find what she had found, and feel what she felt, which was that there were always going to be intimations from the world that there was more to be had, something different and something better, beyond what they were sharing together. It was his loveliest gift to her, and one she was trying as hard as she could to give back to him, the special and certain knowledge that those intimations were just life trying to fake you out again, when in fact it didn’t get any better than this. It didn’t get any better than the two of them.
Waiting to surprise him, she thought, This is going to be the first day of the rest of your life, and that was the real surprise, not the fact that your sister and Salome and a few friends and a few more acquaintances were lurking in your garden waiting to shout at you. Surprise! Everything is actually okay. Surprise! You can stop looking for more. Surprise! I love you so much. That was the biggest surprise of all, the depth of inexhaustible feeling for him that she had in her, and when he walked in the door
and she looked at him she would have that feeling she had every day, of being perpetually startled by it.
“Maybe you should give him a call,” Salome said, but he didn’t answer when she called, then or in the seven times she called in the following hour, and he didn’t come home until after the last guest was long gone, even his sister and the unexpectedly faithful Salome, who stayed and worried with her after Carolina took her casual leave from them, saying, “He’s a flake, and birthdays aren’t important in our family. Don’t take it personal.” Salome drank so much white wine that she departed at last as well, curling up beneath the picnic table Molly had rented for the party and placed underneath the golden oak. Molly sat with her head in her hands, eventually not worrying anymore about whether or not Ryan was safe, and not caring anymore about all the wasted expense of food and alcohol and premium confetti, and feeling almost, by the time Ryan finally came home, walking through the gate wheeling his bicycle at his side, like she didn’t care about anything at all, like if he had been just five minutes later, she would never have cared about him, or be hurt by what he did or didn’t do, again.
