by Chris Adrian
“What did I miss?” he asked, looking around at the food on the table and the balloons on the banisters and the ribbons in the tree, and Molly burst into tears.
14
Will was starting to enjoy being lost, or at least he was starting to get so used to it that it didn’t really bother him. He found that he could enjoy the continuous surprises more than he worried about them. The farther he ran, the less he felt pursued, and at last it was more the pressure of his mission to find a sapling for Carolina’s garden that drove him forward than fear of the monster who was chasing him, and as he penetrated into the deeper chambers of wonder beneath the hill, be began to take time to look around. His drunkenness served both to insulate him from the strangeness and to sharpen his appreciation of it. And the drunkenness brought tears of concern for his lost erstwhile comrades, lovely Molly and handsome Henry and the three dear horrible little elves, but the tears were intermittent, and sometimes he wept with awe instead of sadness.
He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he’d flung open a door at the far end and plunged through—the Sparkling Gullet and the Panda Market and the Jade Toilet and the Mushroom Cathedral, he paused in each one only long enough to verify that they were empty of trees of any size or age, and then his mission pushed him onward. But at the Warm Frozen Waterfall he slowed, and in the Hall of a Hundred Little Windmills he paused, and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves. He thought they were translations of the same book into countless languages—none of which he recognized—until he found seven in a row in English, but none of them had the same first sentence. He half expected to read then Will picked up a book in the curious library and began to read or Make a wish, Bastien! but they were ordinary sentences about animals setting off on an adventure, a mole in one and a badger in another and in yet another a girl-pig named Davida. He kept that one, a souvenir for Molly to add to the others he had gathered for her. Molly! he thought. That wasn’t who he meant at all, and it seemed a worse crime than kissing her to imagine, even if only fleetingly and mistakenly, giving her the gifts that were meant for Carolina. He paused to imagine, firmly and concretely, Carolina’s face when he came to her with a little box containing the little tree.
He had found the door on the other side of the library and was reaching for it when it opened forcefully, as if kicked, knocking books to the floor when it slammed against the shelves. Before he was quite aware of what he was doing, Will found himself trying to hide behind the book he was carrying, his terror of the pursuing monster suddenly as fresh as when he had first seen her in the park. He recovered his dignity enough to lower the book even before he heard the voice. “Are you?” it began, and then the little man to whom it belonged snorted. “No, I don’t even have to taste you to know. Another mortal! Who let you all in?”
“A boy,” Will said, and then, “A little man,” which seemed like the wrong thing to say because of the bristling anger this little man radiated and the outsized knife he carried. “A tree person.”
“Well, it’s a fine night for tourists!” the little man said, punctuating the statement with a vigorous thrust of the knife toward Will’s face. He was a good ten feet away, and five feet down, but Will still flinched.
“Would you like a drink?” Will asked him, holding out his bottle of wine and thinking it might help him be less angry and antagonistic.
“There’s no time for that,” he said. “Is that how you’re making yourself useful in this crisis? Where is that killjoy high-handed mortal seriousness when it might actually be appropriate? Eh? Eh?” He poked again with the knife, and Will said, “Hey, there. Settle down, little man. I’m on your side!” That made the tiny fellow howl and do a spastic dagger dance, swiping and stabbing at the air all around him. “Sorry! Sorry!” Will said, backing away.
“Oh, but you will be sorry, you ridiculous delay, if I don’t get this knife to my Lady in time. Now out of my way!”
“I didn’t mean—” Will began, but the little man was already running by him, swiping at Will’s feet as he passed. Will did a skip and a jump, and called after him, “Sorry!” and “I’m actually looking for the nursery!” but the angry creature was already gone. “A tree nursery,” he added softly, “not a baby nursery.” He cracked the door and peaked outside before he walked through it.
Will stayed longer at the Marble Pool (an Olympic-sized pool filled with marbles instead of water) and with the Singing Ferns, and then the fun part was over. He came to mildewed chambers that felt like they must be at the very bottom of the hill, because all the time he had been fleeing alone Will felt like he had been going down, and now there were no more carved pillars or mirrored ceilings or floors carpeted in tiny flowers but just rough wet stone and moss and coarse grass and danger, at first no more seriously threatening than the little mannikin with the wooden knife, but deeper down, more significant. They were a totally different category of danger than the thing he was running from, more ordinary sorts of extraordinary that called to the brave parts of him instead of commanding the craven parts, and made him want to stand up and face them instead of shitting in his pants and crying and lying down and giving up on everything. He started to get the definite feeling that the way out of the hill was guarded by challenges, that a person needed to demonstrate some kind of fortitude in order to find it. He imagined, as he fought his way through the snake vines and then pushed past the mud people and waited patiently (finishing his wine) for the three-eyed watcher to take a nap, that he was blazing a trail for the others and making it easier for them by his effort. And he imagined, of course, that he was fighting his way back to Carolina, since the way out was the way back to her, and there was something in the attack of a mud person and the bite of a snake vine and the stinging, sleeping slap of a three-eyed watcher that felt like it imparted an earned virtue to him that he felt sure would be apparent to anyone who saw him when he eventually emerged, battered and bruised, from under the hill. Certainly Carolina would see it, and it did not boggle belief to think there might be, at the end of this winding, challenge-strewn path, which he ran with an intermittently waving sense of terror at his back, a little golden tree whose roots were carefully bound inside a burlap sack, waiting for him to take it back to the place that could be his home again.
He had the sense, too, as the challenges intensified, that he was getting closer to the exit, and when he came to the last rock chamber, and his internal bathymeter told him he had gone as low as he could go, he felt ready to face a dragon, though he was armed only with a salt shaker and a book and an empty bottle and a very small knife. But what he saw in the chamber looked like a waving sea of thick flesh-colored anemones, until they got close enough—as soon as he entered the chamber they started hobbling toward him—for him to see it was a sea of disembodied penises, softly shambling toward him on variously sized testicle feet. He was drunk enough and not drunk enough to be afraid of them; they were less uncanny than they would have been if he was sober, and yet he was sober enough to remember how awful the thing chasing him was, and realize that they were comparatively innocuous. They nuzzled around his ankles, and he waited apprehensively for them to become erect and monstrous as they rubbed against him and each other, but they were as harmless as a roiling basket of puppies. He didn’t know what the challenge in them might be, unless it was to avoid stepping on one, and he was thinking that the hill was giving him an odd sort of goodbye present. He wondered if he might dare put one in his pocket for Carolina, since despite the awkwardness involved in making her a present of a detached penis the gift would prove beyond any doubt the truth of his story, when he heard a rustling far above his head, followed by a noise that put him in mind of a yawning cat, a stretched-out mewling that faded to a breathy sigh. He looked up to see a swarm of bats that were not bats. He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a
swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck. He ran then, heedless of the gentle sluglike cocks that he squashed, and felt blindly along the opposite end of the cave for the way out. It was there: a tunnel only a little taller than him, that narrowed as he went, so he had to stoop and then crawl, a flapping vagina harassing his bottom until the passage became so narrow that he had to crawl on his belly and it could only bump at his feet. His panic was rising again when he felt a little air move on his face, and he started to slither in champion haste when he caught sight of a light at the end of his tunnel. He wondered if it could be dawn already, and then he was sliding the last few feet and tumbling out into the lushly appointed wreck of a room. Molly sat weeping on a ruined bed not twenty feet away.
Mrs. Perkins lived in a big pink house in Russian Hill with a garden out back. She was a familiar type among Will’s clients, though not a common one: a lady whose great wealth made her eccentric instead of crazy. She became interested in her garden for a period of a few weeks once or twice a year and kept Will occupied moving plants and trees to make room for a pond or a little temple to her first husband that had to go just here or there. In the intervening months Will would make his regular visits, but only see her from a window, and it was her current husband, much younger but still a little pickled-looking, who brought Will his check. But when she was interested she was very interested, so it wasn’t unusual when she came out while Will was working. Usually she stood around with her hands over her eyes or pressed against her forehead, her two poses of active imagination in which she made rearrangements in her head before she commanded Will to execute them, but that day—which Will marked later as the beginning of the end of his relationship with Carolina—she sat down near him in a redwood chaise, flipping languidly through a book with a joint hanging out of her mouth.
“Mmm?” she said, which he knew from experience meant she was offering him a drag off the joint.
“No, thanks,” he said. “Might make me water something too much.” She threw back her head and laughed. She was wearing a fancy muumuu and a turban, with a crystal dangling above her eyes. The crystal sparkled when she tossed her head and then bonked on her forehead in a way that looked quite painful, though her smile didn’t falter at all. Will had never hated her before—she was a harmless lady who took good care of her plants and whose only crime was being obscenely wealthy—but just then there was something about her laugh and the way she tossed her head and the ridiculous turban that made him want to hit her in the face with his shovel. He leaned on it instead, and sighed, deciding he was a bad person for thinking such a thing, and considered that there must be something wrong with him, a thought that had been occurring and recurring to him, in yards and gardens all over the city, for the past few months. He might not actually be a terrible person, but there was certainly something wrong with him. He thought he ought to be able to describe it to himself better, but when he tried all he could do was make lists in his head of episodes of real and imaginary bad behavior: he wanted to hit harmless Mrs. Perkins in the face with a shovel; he was cruel to his clients’ plants and actually hurt a lemon tree in Bernal Heights, pruning at it furiously and unnecessarily until it was reduced to such a violated nubbin that he moved a fern in front of it to hide it from the owner. And just that morning he had looked up at Carolina at breakfast and found her not very attractive.
That was a surprise every time it happened, though it happened more frequently all the time. It felt like a crime to find her unattractive, or at least like some sort of aberration—he was aware, even as he looked at her, that other men would find her quite attractive, in that moment when he could take her or leave her. Something always snapped back into place and then she was as lovely as ever, and his return to his senses was usually marked by the special boner he had only ever gotten for her, an entity he wasn’t sure he had ever actually convinced her was real, but it was true that there was a different quality about it when he was with her, which went beyond ordinary stiffness. “A hard-on is a hard-on is a hard-on,” she’d said to him when he first told her about it, though she said later, not entirely jokingly, that it was the first time she had ever been touched emotionally by a penis. He wanted to ask her what was wrong with him now, but she was the last person in the world he could talk to about it.
Mrs. Perkins toked ostentatiously and made satisfied noises while Will worked, and neglected to offer any opinions about the garden. Will was waiting for her to say something, and was getting preemptively angry at her uninformed opinions and her inability to make up her mind, but she remained quiet. He continued working, escalating his imaginary argument with her until he couldn’t stand the silence he would ordinarily have appreciated. He turned toward her chaise and saw that she was reading a book.
“Have you read this one?” she asked, showing him the cover. It was his collection of short stories.
“I heard it wasn’t very good,” he said.
“It’s written to a particular taste,” she said. “But I wouldn’t say it’s bad.” She closed the book and rubbed it against her cheek, a weird gesture, and one that Will always thought should have inspired him to flee from the garden and Mrs. Perkins’s orbit and influence. But he only leaned on his shovel and stared at her. “I had no idea you were an artist,” she said. “You ought to come to my salon.”
“I’m really more of a gardener,” Will said, which was what he always said when people asked him what he did for a living, because nobody knew what an arborist was, and the one time he had told some girl he was a landscape architect she had asked him where he went to school to be one and then caught him when he lied about it. If he was still a writer he was the kind that didn’t really write anymore, and to say that was his profession would have been like saying he was a kindergartener or a virgin. When he sat on a pillow in Carolina’s sunroom, ostensibly working on a story while she worked on a painting, he usually ended up just describing what she was doing in a dozen different ways—she mixed her paints languidly or anxiously or she attacked or stroked her canvas or the light made a triangle on her back—but nothing he wrote about her painting or her life or his life or the life they shared ever added up to a story.
Mrs. Perkins made as if to throw the book at him, and he flinched. “Oh, please,” she said. “It’s every Wednesday afternoon at three. I’ll set a place for you.”
“Is it lunch?” he asked.
“Of a sort,” she said.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll bring my girlfriend. She’s the real artist.”
“No guests,” she said. “Until you are a senior member of the salon. But promotions are easy and I have a feeling you’ll go far and fast.” She lay back on the chaise with the book on her chest, face down and open to the place she’d stopped reading. She closed her eyes and adjusted her turban before she folded her hands over the book. “Such dispiriting stuff,” she said. “I need to take a little break.”
He ignored her for the rest of his stay in her garden that afternoon and didn’t say goodbye or even ask to be paid. It bothered him that Carolina wasn’t invited, and it bothered him when people said his stories were dispiriting—he thought they were as hopeful as anybody could reasonably expect from a collection of stories about dead brothers—and he was thinking all the way home about how the salon, which he imagined to be a circle of dried-up pretentious people stuffing Fabergé eggs up one another’s asses all afternoon, could go fuck itself. He almost told Carolina about it, but she was in a sad mood when he got home, and he didn’t want to make her any sadder with news of a rejection, no matter how inconsequential. At first he considered the invitation strictly as a rejection of Carolina, and he couldn’t understand how anybody could fail to invite her to anything.
But he got a little more curious about it as the week passed, and when Carolina scolded him for peeing all over the bathroom he had a moment of small resentment in which he very privately cherished the invitation that
had excluded her. It passed in an instant but came again and again; she happened to be particularly scoldy that week. The anniversary of her brother’s death was approaching, and she seemed to get angry at everything during that time. At first it seemed a fascinating contrast to the way he got sad and retarded around the anniversary of Sean’s death—everything seemed to slow down and he felt like he wanted to sleep for the whole week that preceded and followed the eighteenth of April—but now she was starting to seem shrewish. It had to be its own special sort of crime, he thought, to withhold sympathy from the person with whom, of everybody in the world, he ought to sympathize the most, and when he tried to hide his annoyance from her he ended up acting sullen, which only angered her more. He started to dread breakfast, because again and again her beauty seemed to fall away over a plate of scrambled eggs or pancakes or the grapefruit he had prepared for her, carefully cutting out the triangles of flesh so she could lift them out with her spoon. He had put half a maraschino cherry in the center of the grapefruit and was waiting for her to say it made it look like a boob, but she only picked it up, squishing it with her thumb and forefinger, and put it aside. It was an unlovely gesture, and she looked particularly unlovely doing it. “What?” she asked, because she saw him shaking his head. “I don’t like cherries.”
