by Chris Adrian
Bobby was furious after they left, unreasonably so, Henry thought, since he had warned him he was likely to fail at this and he had tried, in his way, to appear normal. “I’ll just go out if you have a party,” Henry said, very reasonably, “and mop when I come back.” Bobby could not even reply to that until he had finished washing the dishes, at which point he started in on a familiar course, saying very carefully before he offered any criticism how much he loved Henry, how he thought Henry was the best thing that ever happened to him, and how the vision he had for them, with which Henry consistently refused to cooperate, was a vision of happiness for both of them, not just for himself. There followed a discourse about guests and friends and the recipe from an African cookbook and orphan children who might one day be adopted by them as a couple, children who would roll on the floor and put shoes in their mouths and probably run to give the postman a hug regardless of whether he was delivering bad news or good. You and me and a bottle of ammonia, he said. It’s fine for now. It’s fine for now, but what about the children?
“Maybe I’m too crazy to be in a relationship,” Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby’s familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it’s not enough for you or even Why can’t my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.
Henry swabbed the living room floor in broad strokes with feelings of piratey good cheer. He stopped and crossed to the kitchen, then worked back from there to the foot of the stairs up to the third floor. Bobby had seen the place already—he’d helped him pick it out—but Henry had an ascending sense of excitement, as he mopped and mounted the stairs, over having Bobby here when it was properly clean. He had been living for weeks at Bobby’s, and it was going to be lovely to have him as a guest in his house and his bed. The long sojourn at his apartment had made Henry feel like he was a guest in Bobby’s life, when they should really be taking turns visiting each other’s lives. He had tried to explain the notion to Bobby, but he didn’t really get it. “But we’re not just visiting,” he said.
“Of course not!” Henry said, but when Bobby asked him what he meant exactly, he’d changed the subject. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. Taking a trip was something Bobby had been asking about. Henry had already consented to going camping, though it meant sleeping on the ground, because postmen didn’t go into the wilderness, and if he was careful about his packing, and if they were both careful about where they stepped on the way to the car, they might actually leave the larger part of the contamination in Cambridge, and Henry would be relatively normal for the trip. Bobby wanted to go out to Yellowstone, but that was too close by far to San Francisco. He pushed a finger across the map that Bobby had spread out on the table, but try as he might it would go no farther than Nevada. So they settled on Zion, and Henry, demurring and delaying, postponed the trip for months, and Bobby stopped asking about it until Henry brought it up again that day.
They were on their way within a week, Bobby having finalized the travel arrangements before Henry could change his mind or think of a convincing reason to delay. They changed their shoes in an airport bathroom, Henry wrapping away the Cambridge shoes in layers of insulating plastic, then stowing them in their own special bag. That feat of enabling accommodation put Bobby in a foul mood for the long drive out to the park, but he was soon cheered by the abundance of natural wonder and by Henry’s increasing ease. San Francisco seemed far enough away, and all the old filth of his life seemed adequately contained and controlled, so Henry took a vacation from his compulsions. He still didn’t like the floor, and there were some rituals to be observed in their little cabin, but walking up the Narrows with Bobby, hand in hand on the empty stretches, it bothered him not at all to be wading in river water that flowed over other people’s shoes, in which they walked through lives that might or might not have taken them through the Cambridge post office, or even through San Francisco. Some of the unseen upstream hikers might even be postmen, but he declined to even think about that and was able to appreciate instead how nice it was to go step by uncertain step over the slippery underwater rocks, and push against the current, and come through a tight canyon, the sides of which they could touch with their outstretched arms, into a clear sunstruck pool under an expanse of limitless blue sky.
Henry swabbed the third floor, from the bathroom (the tub had been incubating in straight bleach all morning) in the back, to the bedroom in the front, wiping the windows again and contemplating the high view, church spires sticking up here and there above the full trees, and all the leaves looking very shiny and full in the late-afternoon heat. He mopped carefully around and under the bed, suddenly afraid that he was missing places, spots that might border on microscopic and yet still be big enough to contain a leaven of taint sufficient to ruin the whole apartment again. He briefly considered going downstairs and starting again, watching carefully this time to make sure the mop was always heavy and always wrote wide, confluent lines of solvent across the floor, but with an effort he smothered the worry. That was what he meant when he told Bobby he was getting better, that he didn’t have to do this twice, and that he understood, even if understanding did nothing to set him free, that all the ritual and care were for nothing and did nothing to address or ameliorate what was actually wrong with him. In a few more passes—stylish, now, but careful—he had mopped himself into the enormous walk-in closet and finally into a half-moon of dry floor in the corner. He unslung a pair of brand-new house shoes from around his neck and stepped into them carefully on the clean part of his floor, then picked up the old shoes with one hand and finished the mopping with the other. Something settled in him as the last bit of floor was covered. He took a deep breath, and meant to sigh, but the fumes made him cough instead.
His mother called just after he had taken a shower, and he slipped and slid on his bleached feet as he hurried to the phone, not to answer it—it would be a terrible idea to talk to her now, just when everything was finally all clean—but to place a bowl over the phone to contain any emanations that might escape from it as she left him one of her long voice mails, enumerating the days that had passed since they talked last and giving an interim account of her life, not always in synopsis, which Henry never deleted without playing, though sometimes he let the message play under a pile of clothes, or from within a cabinet, so he could say with some degree of honesty that he had listened to it.
There were still a few steaming puddles on the floor when Bobby came up the floating staircase and dutifully stepped out of his street shoes into the house shoes, black rubber clogs that Henry had bought new especially for him, Bobby’s eyes were watering despite the open floor-to-ceiling windows. They sat at a new glass dining room table which wasn’t very big, but Henry had set places at its opposite ends, so Bobby felt very far away, and it was a long journey for the soy sauce for their takeout sushi when they passed it back and forth. Bobby slid it across the table to Henry and it toppled and rolled off, not shattering but leaking drops that mixed with a little puddle of aqua regia. “I have another,” Henry said, using his napkin to pick up the bottle and throw it away, but he didn’t actually have more. “It’s bad for you, anyway,” Henry said, and Bobby agreed, but then Henry began to miss the soy sauce more and more, and he only stared at the glistening heap of fish on his plate, from which he’d carefully dissected out the rice, which he’d eat later.
“I have some next door,” Bobby said, and Henry said, “Great. Would you mind terribly?”
“Nope,” Bobby said, and there was nothing aggravated or cranky about the way he folded his napkin and laid his chopsticks down on top of them. He took a little sip of wine and got up, pausing by the head of the stairs to swap out his shoes. But then he turned and looked at Henry again, and Henry always thought that he ought to have noticed something, something to make h
im panic and pull the save-this-relationship alarm, and say right then that he loved Bobby regardless of whether or not he wore house shoes, and that he loved him more than the aqua regia, and loved him more than the idea of being able to lie in bed at night and feel entirely untouched by all the things that made him feel dirty.
“Are you okay?” he asked Bobby.
“Fine,” Bobby said. “I’ll be right back.” But he left in his house shoes, and he never set foot in that apartment again.
Henry fled much less hastily than the others. Half a moment after Oak said, “Run!” the feasting room was empty and Henry was alone with the chicken bones and the empty glasses and stained napkins. He listened, thinking he could hear a heavy sound of feet falling in time to his own heartbeat, which was loud and quick in his ears. He was terrified and calm in equal measure, which was how he had been feeling all night, but the liquor inflected his feelings a little, so there was something a lot more leisurely about his backsliding breakdown, with the odd taste—foreign and familiar—of faerie wine in his mouth, than there was without it. Something shifted in him, and now he was sliding instead of falling—still backward, though—to old habits of mind and being, but taking with him the regret and the different sort of sadness he had learned as an individual who had been reformed by love and for the sake of love. If he had eyes in the back of his head, he thought, taking another long drink from his glass, he might be able to see where he was going and where this was all going to end up. As it was, he had a feeling that the backslide was going to be epic—maybe it was more of a hope than a feeling—and that his slide would carry him so far backward it would wreck and reshape him even more dramatically than the way forward had, and personal atavism would look even more like progress than progress did.
He flicked the edge of his glass and set it ringing, and a flock of pigeons started from roosts in the walls. They ought to have bumped against the high ceiling, which was painted crudely with stars, but instead they vanished into it, getting smaller and smaller as the stars lit up in groups and the ceiling became an actual sky. Henry looked away, at the multitude of doors all around the table, but he didn’t get up and choose one. Backward and backward, he said to himself, and thought he should catch himself before he slid right into the extraordinary misery of the past year. He held on tight to the arms of his chair but didn’t slow and thought of the long parade of dead children and grieving parents whose awesome sadness he managed to conflate with his own sadness—small and ludicrous by comparison—all year long. Eat up, he said without speaking, imagining them, in reverse order of death, popping into place around the table and falling to, hungry spirits at a bounty. The last was a lovely nineteen-year-old girl who brought coolers of trout with her when she got her chemotherapy, which she caught flycasting in between admissions, to hand out in abundance to the staff, a whole fish for anyone even tangentially involved in her care. The first had been a little trailer-park boy, whose white-trash parents (the mother was called Trudy, a classic trailer-park name, and he could never remember the father’s name) had made Henry perpetually uneasy. They made him want to bleach himself, though he never succumbed to the temptation, even on the day the boy died, when they seemed most dirty and uncanny and unbearable. It had been mere death, he had decided, that had sent him fleeing from the hospital to run all the way home—through this very park—crying the whole way for the death of the boy and the death of his relationship with Bobby. It felt like gross intrusion, to weep like that for the boy—even trailer-park people probably had better manners and minded better boundaries—but he couldn’t stop himself. He came down the hill picturing the boy clearly in his mind, imploring him not to die, but when he blubbered and spoke aloud it was to say, “Please don’t leave me, Bobby.”
He could never properly recall what exactly he was thinking once he got home and was actively preparing to kill himself. He had gotten a gun during one of the deeper downs over Bobby, but it had stayed in his closet the whole time, sending forth invisible rays of comfort. He hadn’t seriously thought he would ever use it, since the most attractive thing about it, aside from the dark burnish of the metal, was how nice it was to think that he could use it, and though it was calming to think sometimes about blowing off his head—even down to particulars of bullet trajectories and splatter patterns and mysteries like whether or not he would hear the gun go off—he shied away from any considered or sustained reflection on being dead. Now, all of a sudden, suicide was all he could think about. He wept and snotted himself into a flash of insight, a whole string of thoughts coming together at once and weaving together effortlessly into a stark truth: Whatever death was, he belonged to it, and wherever it was, he belonged there; now that he had finally really noticed how much it hurt that Bobby was never going to come back, it became a very sensible thing to do; the entirely unbearable world in which countless little children died from cancer and countless ruined parents died to happiness was no place to live, and the unbearable world in which Bobby didn’t love him anymore was no place to live. And running through the center of this weave like a shining silver wire was the sudden unbreakable conviction that there was someplace better, where such things simply never happened, and though death was probably not the way to get there, suicide would express his solidarity with that place.
Even without having practiced, he was quick to assemble and load the gun. He knelt by the window in a crooked rectangle of moonlight. Through his window he could see the park and the hospital, and he stared at them, unblinking and unthinking, as he put the barrel in his mouth, shoving roughly against his palate and pulling the trigger. It only made a sudden tickle in his mouth, which quickly grew frantic. He spit a bug onto the floor, an enormous beetle that shone as if it were made of ink as it crawled leisurely away. Henry threw away the gun—it seemed as disgusting all of a sudden as the bug. He spent the next hour throwing up in the bathroom, too miserable to spare much thought for how strange it was that a beetle had taken up residence in his gun.
Still feeling like he was moving without moving, he slid gratefully past that night, to other terrible nights and days; they went by in such a quick and comprehensive succession that he wondered if he was about to die and asked himself why the agency in charge of such things was declining to show him any of the happy times in his life. The backward way became more and more slippery, and he moved faster and faster, falling toward the misery that was the most spectacular of his life, even if the terrible things that had happened to him in it were all presumed. He risked a look back at last and saw the city rushing toward him, and then the park. He started in his chair as if he had just fallen into it from a height, and spilled his wine. There was a far-off crash, barely discernible.
“Why are you just sitting here?” someone asked him, breaking his reverie. There was a little man standing on his plate.
“Where did you come from?” Henry asked him. “Are you dessert?” The little man poked at his face with a knife, and Henry flinched and ducked. “Don’t touch me,” he said, not very forcefully.
“What are you even doing here in the first place? Who let you in? Never mind!” he said, when Henry started to answer. “I already know. Are you waiting here to die?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Why are you yelling at me?”
“Mortals!” the little man said. “Mortals everywhere. Isn’t it enough that the world is ending tonight? Did you have to come in and pollute everything with your smell?” He drew back his knife and sniffed aggressively at Henry, making a disgusted face that was shortly mitigated by curiosity. “What have you been eating?” the little man asked, sniffing all up and down Henry’s arm.
“Chicken,” Henry said. “I think.”
“Liar!” the little man said. “Liar! Why am I standing here listening to your lies when my Lady is waiting for her knife? Why are you trying to distract me?”
“Why are you so angry?” Henry asked, shying away sideways from the swiping knife.
“Because everything is
so horrible!” the little man said, and ran off down the table and out of the opposite end of the room.
“You’re going the wrong way!” Henry called after him, but there was no answer except for another far-off crash and a faint roar. Henry picked up another bottle of wine and left his chair. He examined the abundance of doorways leading from the room, some just arches over darkness, some rude holes, and some closed with heavy curtains or richly carved doors. He picked a door, dark oak carved with a pair of faces, one laughing and one crying, like theater masks but exceptionally detailed and lovely faces, a man and a woman. The door mirrored his state of mind, since he felt very much like he contained opposites, and yet he thought there could be no illustration of the dissociation in which those opposite emotions were suspended in him. He didn’t really know what that face would look like.
The door opened directly on the lushly appointed wreck of a bedroom. The room was the size of a small house, the boatsized bed floating in pieces in the middle of a giant sea-blue rug. It was more of a cave than the other rooms he’d seen—the walls were hewn stone and the floor, where not covered by rugs, was mossy—yet it was grander than all the other rooms, despite the fact that the paintings and hangings were slashed and trampled. The single occupant wasn’t grand at all, though. Molly, the girl who kept saying nothing was real, was sitting slouched on the foot of the bed, her face veiled by her hair, crying into her lap. Across the room, from a hole that looked hardly big enough for a dachsund to wriggle through, Will the handsome pudge came slithering out to collapse in a pile on the floor.
