The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  “But I don’t remember,” Henry said, which was mostly true. He had his first name, but not his last, and he had some brief scenes involving the creature who had taken him from his family, but not the whole story of what had happened with him, and when he closed his eyes he could see the faces of his parents and his sister, but he didn’t know their names. He didn’t know where he had lived before he came to San Francisco. He didn’t even remember his birthday. He told that to Mike.

  “It will come. In the meantime you’ll just have to live as if every day is your birthday. Happy birthday, Henry Whoozie. Happy birthday!” He picked him up and carried him around the garden, singing “Happy Birthday” to him. Then he took him inside where the other boys were seated on and at a long table in the kitchen, having cereal and cookies and, here and there, a beer for breakfast. “It’s his birthday, boys!” Mike shouted. “Sing him a song!” They put down their bottles and spoons and joined in enthusiastically, but the bored look in Peaches’s eyes made Henry think they did this for everybody on their second day.

  Ryan took Henry to the basement to pick out a bicycle. He had already split his clothes with him, because of all the boys they were about the same size, and Henry had his own “Mike’s Messengers” T-shirt, which he would wear while he was working. “Everybody works,” Ryan said. “Some harder than others, but we all ride. You and me, we should only be working when school’s out.”

  “We go to school?” Henry asked.

  “Fuck no,” Ryan said. “Or not like you think. But we can’t be out on the street when the cops think we should be in school.”

  The basement was not just full of bicycles. There were piles of newspapers and old magazines, and decaying papier-mâché sculptures of animals attacking each other, and canvases stacked face down up to Henry’s shoulder. Henry lifted one up and could just make out the contents: a painting of the park surrounded by fog. Ryan pushed it down. “Those are Mike’s,” he said. Henry followed him, passing through a room piled up with what Henry thought at first was exercise equipment until he got a closer look: there was a wooden post as thick as he was and twice as tall, with a pair of manacles dangling from it, and a couple of wooden tables, and a toilet seat strung on a wicker chair but not actually attached to a toilet, an iron cage big enough to hold three or four large dogs, and a set of stocks, like the Pilgrims used to have in their town squares. Henry suddenly remembered getting his picture taken in a pair of those, in Williamsburg, and he remembered very clearly that he had only been visiting Williamsburg. That wasn’t where he was from.

  “Do people get punished down here for something?” he asked.

  “Belonged to the previous owner of the house,” Ryan said. “Weirdos. I can get out of that cage in ten seconds, though, and the stocks in thirty. Here you go.” They had come to the bicycles, lined up in a rack as long as the whole wall. There was every sort of bicycle there that Henry could think of, ten-speeds and motocross and beach bikes and even a little purple-framed girls’ bike with a bright yellow banana seat and tassels on the handlebars. A little license plate on that one said, LORRAINE. “Mike says the bike chooses you. You close your eyes and touch them and you know when it’s one that wants you. But it’s not always sized right when you do that.” Henry closed his eyes and ran his hand along the bicycles, touching fenders and tires and seats. He felt nothing the first time he went down the row, but when he had come halfway back there was a feeling like his hand was immersed in flowing water, and the texture of the wheel he was touching felt suddenly different.

  “I think I found it,” he said, and opened his eyes. There was a little pony staring up and breathing softly at him where the bicycle had been. His hand was placed high up on its nose, just between its eyes. It huffed and changed back into a bicycle. Henry stepped back, feeling both alarmed and somehow reassured at the change: it was at the same time one of the strangest and most ordinary things he’d ever seen. He and Ryan both stared at the bike, a little green ten-speed that had seen better days, but it didn’t change again.

  “Well,” Ryan said. “That’s never happened before.”

  The black dog led Henry out of the hotel and up the street to catch a streetcar. It stopped for them, but nobody looked at them when they got on board, and the driver didn’t ask them for a fare. The dog sat quietly as the train trundled up Market Street, so Henry did the same. He wasn’t inclined at all to ask lots of questions about where they were going or ask the homeless person sitting in front of them for help or to run away. All he could think of was how nice it was to ride on the streetcar and how pretty the rain was against the windows and how lovely the neon looked reflected in puddles outside the run-down theaters they passed. The homeless woman in front of them had bugs in her hair, flat gray lice the size of pencil tips that crawled in loops all over her head. Henry imagined that they were in a circus, doing tricks on and under the lady’s big filthy top. He leaned forward to watch more closely. The dog stood up. They had come to the last stop, near the corner of Market and Castro streets.

  It was one-thirty in the morning, but Castro Street was pretty crowded: there were men holding hands, men in pants but no shirts, or shirts and no pants, men dressed like women or space aliens, and men dressed like men but carrying dainty parasols instead of umbrellas. Henry stared at them, but none of them stared back.

  They crossed Market Street and climbed up the hill, away from the crowd. Henry looked back as they went, then stopped altogether. “Say goodbye,” the dog said.

  “Huh?” Henry said, but the dog only pulled on his hand with his mouth and led him on, higher up the hill, which grew so steep eventually that there were steps cut into the sidewalk. Henry wanted to go up them on all fours like the dog. They climbed past houses that got fancier and fancier as they went higher. The wind shifted and Henry could smell the trees just before they came into view over the crest of the hill. “They smell like soap,” he said, because his sister kept eucalyptus shampoo in the bathroom they shared at home. It occurred to him that his sister was going to wonder where he was. “Wait a minute,” he said, as the dog tried to pull him up the stairs into the park. “What’s your name?”

  “I have many names,” the dog replied. “You can call me whatever you want.” Henry was standing in the streetlight, but the dog was standing in shadow, and Henry could hardly see him at all. His own arm seemed to disappear where it entered the shadow.

  “I think I want to go home,” Henry said.

  “But you are home,” the dog replied, and pulled him along up the stairs. Henry did not exactly resist, because he wanted to follow the dog into the darkness under the trees as much as he didn’t want to follow him. The part of him that didn’t want to follow was just starting to pull away, and he was thinking of how much his parents would worry when they woke and found him missing, when he heard a lovely noise of bells. They were walking on a winding path, not entirely alone; Henry could see the glowing tips of cigarettes gliding through the dark on other paths to his left and to his right.

  “What’s that noise?” Henry asked.

  “Music. Come along. Come away. We are so much the same, you and I!” He walked faster now, dragging Henry along the path, which ended suddenly at a flat stretch of grass, soft and oddly warm under Henry’s feet. The grass ran up to a dark expanse of rock, where even as they looked at it a door was opening in the side of the hill. Light spilled out onto the grass, along with a louder noise of bells and laugher.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Henry said.

  “Yes, you do,” the dog said. “You have always wanted to go in there.” Henry looked back again, but there was nothing to be seen of the city, just grass and trees and flickering lights in the darkness that he didn’t think were cigarettes anymore. He was already forgetting what he was supposed to be getting back to beyond the trees, but he still pulled one more time. The dog led him into the light and the music and Henry went along, experiencing the curious sensation that he himself was a bell and that he was sta
rting to ring in sympathy with the music he heard. The light became brighter and brighter, until he couldn’t see anything anymore, but he could hear, amid the laughter and the bells, a rising cheer.

  Henry said he didn’t need anybody to teach him how to ride a bike or deliver a message or a package, but Mike made him Ryan’s student anyway. “You listen up, Bubba,” Mike said, putting a “Mike’s Messengers” hat on Henry’s head and turning it around on his head a few times before he settled on a position, cocked a few degrees west of Henry’s nose. “You’ve got talent, but baby boy here has got skills.” He waved goodbye to them from the tall stoop of the house on Fourteenth Street, standing there until the last of the boys had pedaled away with a roomy messenger bag slung around his shoulders and neck, empty except for one of the sandwiches that he made the night before, carefully folding lettuce and cutting away crust, and wrapping each one lovingly in wax paper, upon which he wrote the day’s motto, a different one for everybody. “Are we taking these somewhere?” Henry asked, reading his sandwich: You are just as special as you think you are. Ryan said, “Just try to keep up.”

  That wasn’t hard. Henry’s legs were not as strong as Ryan’s, but his bike was light and fast, and though it never turned into a pony again, he didn’t always have to pedal it to make it go uphill, and Ryan took him up some big ones. They went up Steiner and passed within view of Buena Vista Park. “Don’t look at it,” Ryan called back, but he stared too at the pile of trees at the top of the hill, and barely missed wrecking when a man opened his car door in front of him. “Asshole!” Ryan said, and pedaled away furiously up the steepening hill. He spared no attention for Alamo Square Park, though Henry almost paused to admire the giant cypresses and galloping dogs. When he stopped at last in front of a huge house on the corner of Broadway and Steiner, Henry couldn’t tell if Ryan was pleased or displeased at how well he kept up. He seemed to be both smiling and scowling. “Wait here,” he said, and left Henry on the front walk with the bikes while he hopped over a garden wall and disappeared around the side of the house. Henry wondered if he was supposed to ring the bell, and if Ryan had something in his bag to deliver here. He looked around. A sparrow rose from the garden and flew into an open window on the side of the house.

  Shortly after that Ryan opened the front door. “Come on,” he said, after he had put the bikes behind a bush. “Nobody’s home,” he said. “I’ve been watching to know when they come and go. You’ll learn how to do that.”

  “How’d you get in?” Henry asked, looking around at the marble foyer and the fancy chandelier.

  “You know how,” Ryan said, and started up the stairs. “You can do it too. You just have to remember.”

  “Remember what?” Henry said. But Ryan was gone; a gray cat was racing silently up the stairs. “Remember what?” Henry said again, running up the stairs and stopping at the top. A long carpeted hallway went left and right. Henry walked to an open door at the end into a cavernous bedroom. Ryan was rifling through the drawers. “I’ve been in this house before,” Henry said.

  “No, you haven’t,” Ryan said. “That’s just you trying to remember the wrong thing.” He shook his bag at Henry. “Come on,” he said. “Fill ’er up.” Henry went farther into the room, into an alcove off the bathroom, and sat on a plump velvet stool in front of a gold and white table. He looked through the drawers. They were full of makeup and jewelry. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a heavy diamond necklace.

  “Too fancy,” Ryan said. “It needs to be stuff Mike can sell at the shop.”

  “Shop?”

  “I’ll show you. Keep looking.” Henry put the necklace on and looked at himself in the mirror. A wave seemed to pass over the glass, and he looked away, down at the surface of the table, and picked up a brush and smelled it. That made him think of his mother, and how she always said she was going to put on her face when she did her makeup. It made Henry believe when he was very small that her face was detachable, and he had always hoped and feared she might take it off for him. Without Ryan telling him so, he knew he was remembering the wrong thing, and he looked up again at his face. This time he saw the wave move across it, though he didn’t feel a thing. The mirror cracked.

  “You’re useless!” Ryan said. “We’re not here to break stuff.” He came over and started emptying the drawers of their jewelry and told Henry to take off the necklace. But he only hid it beneath his shirt.

  Henry’s bag was only half-filled when Ryan said it was time to go. He told Henry to stuff underwear around the watches and bracelets and earrings to keep them from jingling and then criticized him for using too much packing. “We’re not here to steal underwear,” he said. They left through the front door and rode away on the bicycles.

  The stealing didn’t particularly bother Henry. He had stolen things before; he remembered putting candy and paperback books down his pants once at a drugstore on a shopping trip with his mother. He hadn’t really been hungry for candy, and the book, an overheated romance novel, had been interesting only because the man on the cover was wearing a kilt and no shirt. He had taken the things just for the sake of taking them, to see if he could do it. He couldn’t remember if he stole often or never again after that, and either way it didn’t matter now. The whole day had collapsed into this pedaling moment; the morning and the evening felt so far away he was sure they had never happened and would never happen. And his priorities had collapsed so that only a few things mattered: his bicycle, his new friend, and one other thing he could not quite name. He was smiling as they coasted down into the Marina, crossing Lombard Street just as the light was changing and swerving through the traffic. “What are you so happy about?” Ryan called back, and Henry said he didn’t know.

  They went to the beach, leaving their bikes at the edge of a cliff in the Presidio and scrambling down a crumbling path that wound through small groves of eucalyptus and patches of waist-high purple flowers. Henry slid the last fifty feet and ended up on his back in the sand. Ryan skated over the same fall of rock and sand, throwing his arms out like a ballerina and landing lightly at Henry’s feet. He dropped his bag and told Henry to do the same thing. Henry asked if they wouldn’t be stolen, though they were in an isolated cove and the stretch of beach was empty except for them.

  “Come on,” Ryan shouted. “This is important!” He took off running. Henry chased him down to the water. “Come on!” Ryan shouted again, not turning around to say it, but Henry heard him very clearly. “Come on!” Henry almost had him—he reached to grab the edge of his shirt and pull him down into the water—and then he was gone. A sleek tan greyhound was running in his place. When Henry tripped, he thought at first it was out of surprise, but he understood as he fell that what felt like surprise—swift, sudden, and shocking—was actually delight, and he was glad he had tripped, because the little accident seemed to provide the momentum he couldn’t provide for himself. He fell forward and felt at last that he had caught up with his friend. A wish was a change: a boy fell and rolled in the shallow heaving surf, but a dog straightened himself out. A black Lab in a diamond necklace shook out its fur and took off after the greyhound.

  “How are we different?” Mike asked. He was seated at the head of the long table in the dining room. Henry was staring at the hole in the floor. A fireman’s pole dropped through two bedrooms upstairs and a downstairs parlor before it stopped in the basement. The former owners, Ryan explained again, when Henry asked. He had slid down it already, over and over until it was boring, and now he wanted to slide down it as something other than a boy. But no one could leave the table before Mike excused them, and changing wasn’t allowed during dinner anyway.

  “How are we different?” Mike asked again. His eyes met Henry’s eyes, and Henry worried that he was supposed to answer the question. He blushed, and didn’t know what he would say, but Mike looked away, down the table to where Peaches sat at the other end. That seat was a rotating place of honor, but Henry didn’t know how it was earned. The table was heaped wi
th food and heaped with loot, which they would sort after they ate, cash and jewelry and small electronics and here and there wallets standing up on their edges so they looked like tents and in the center of these a bird in a golden cage, brought back by Peaches from a mansion on Russian Hill. He said it was a macaw.

  “We’re smarter than anybody,” Peaches said. Mike gave him a thumb-up, then pointed with his other hand at Mateo, seated on Peaches’s right.

  “We’ve seen magic and we can do magic,” he said.

  “One man, one reason, Bubba. But you’re right to suggest a difference between the lesser magic we do and the greater magic we’ve seen. If that’s what you were doing.” He pointed at Eli next, and the answers proceeded clockwise around the table. Henry wasn’t sure if they were bragging to one another or saying grace, but it turned out that Mike required a moment of serious collective reflection every night before dinner. “At least he didn’t make us all hold hands tonight,” Ryan said later. Henry tried hard to think of a reason of his own, but Mateo had taken the obvious one, and then every other reason he could think of—we are fast or we are a team or we watch each other’s backs—got used up as his turn came closer and closer. He thought about the beach, of running on all fours in the surf with Ryan and sitting on a rock with him with waves pounding all around them. There was no way to describe what he felt, but it had to do with the way Ryan teased him about the necklace, and snatched it from his neck, then stood up with it shining in his fist, the heaving waves around his feet making it look like he was standing on the water. He threw the necklace into the ocean. Henry almost dove after it, but Ryan caught him with a hand on his arm and an arm around his bare chest. “There are a hundred more where that came from!” he shouted. “And we can take them whenever we want!”