by Chris Adrian
“Bubba?” Mike said. He was staring at Henry, but he only blushed again and shook his head.
“It’s all right, Bubba. First one’s free. I’ll do it for you. But you’re going to have to learn to pull your weight.” He cleared his throat and folded his hands in front of his chest and raised his eyes to the ceiling like a choirboy looking to heaven. Pitching his voice high, he said, “We all belong someplace else.”
“Master,” said the dog, “I have fetched myself a gift, just as you permitted. Here he is, a dear friend for me for life.” He bowed and, still bent at the waist, pulled with his mouth at Henry’s shirt to make him bow too. They were in a long hall before a set of stone chairs in which a terribly fancy-looking couple was seated. Stone columns, thick at their tops and bottoms but tapered pencil-thin in the middle, lined the hall, and creatures that were not people were gathered in all the spaces between them, bouncing on their haunches or standing on their hands or clinging to the stone with their claws or hovering in the air. Henry was able to pay them very little mind, not because they weren’t the strangest and most interesting things he had ever seen in his life, besides a talking dog, but because his attention was commanded by the extraordinary majesty of the man and woman on the chairs. Sitting down, they looked about the same size as his parents, but he suspected that when they stood up their heads would scrape the top of the cavernous chamber. When he straightened up they were both staring at him intensely, which made him blush, and he danced from foot to foot because his feet were suddenly itchy.
“Hmm,” said the man. “There’s something wrong with it.”
“It’s mortal,” said the woman.
“More deeply than usual, I mean,” said the man. “There is a deeper sort of darkness in it.” He looked at the dog, who had straightened up as well and was beaming proudly next to Henry. “Old one,” he said, “you chose unwisely.”
“Oh, no,” said the dog. “I chose well! A friend for the ages. There is a sameness in us!”
“It’s rather overripe,” said the woman, and she leaned forward to poke Henry in the belly with a long finger. That gave him a funny feeling, as if he had to pee and poop and laugh all at once. He smiled at her; she frowned back. “I think it will be rotten in a day or two,” she said. “Why didn’t you choose something fresher?”
“Yes,” said the man. “Take it back. Go choose another.”
“A promise is a promise,” said the dog. “I chose my choice, and you must let it stand.”
The man gave him a hard stare, and the dog stared back, and Henry had the sense that the man and the dog were both holding places for other things entirely, things that wouldn’t just stand to the ceiling but would fill up the whole chamber. The man smiled, then the dog grinned, and they were diminished.
“So it is,” said the man. He sighed and stood up and wasn’t any taller, after all, than Henry’s father. The lady followed him, and all the other creatures in the hall flipped off their hands, or rose higher on their haunches, or drifted down to the floor. The man turned to Henry and stared down at him, kind and stern and a little sad. Henry noticed for the first time that his beard was full of flowers. “Human child,” he said, “do you forsake your mortal life, and your mortal cares, your mortal loves, your mortal family, and do you swear to live by our laws, which are few, and obey your Lady and your Lord, and cater to their whims, which are diverse, and not to be comprehended by your like? Do you swear?”
“The answer is yes,” the dog said, when Henry didn’t answer right away. He wanted to say no or to say, Tell me more about what it means to agree to all this, but the man’s face was not a face to which he could say either of these things.
“Yes,” Henry said.
“And do you swear to be my friend,” the dog said, “forever and ever and ever?” He wagged his tail and took Henry’s hand in his mouth.
“The answer is yes,” the man said, shaking his head sadly.
“Yes,” Henry said. The dog was squeezing his hand much too tightly. “You’re hurting me,” he said to the dog.
“Nonsense,” said the dog. “Friends don’t hurt each other.”
“Kayd Meela Falchaa!” said the lady, and raised her hands to the assemblage.
“Kayd Meelah Falchaa!” they said. “Welcome, child of man, no longer a child of man! Welcome! Welcome!” The woman yawned hugely and walked away, and a dozen of the creatures followed after her, worrying at her train and her hair and sweeping the ground before her with their furry, feathery bodies.
“Old enemy,” said the man, “you must only promise me one thing: Do not teach this one any magic.”
“Oh, yes,” said the dog. “I promise.”
The tree got bigger every day. In two weeks it was a gangly sapling as tall as Henry; in four it reached as high as the third-floor porches; in six it had started to fill out. The trunk was as thick as Henry’s leg, and though it grew in the exact center of the garden you could stand on the porches and almost touch the golden leaves. Mike said he thought it would bloom before the middle of summer. It looked like it had been in the garden for years, which seemed right somehow to Henry, since he felt as if he had lived for years at the big green house. It felt like he had been sleeping for years in the big bed, and eating dinner every night at the big table, and listening for years as Mike reminded them every night that they all belonged someplace else, and feeling every night despite that that there could be no place else he belonged. The memories he had of his mother and father and sister seemed infinitely remote. He wondered sometimes if they had ever even existed; they were more unlikely, somehow, than the faeries who had kidnapped him, and there was no proof beyond his memories, while the faeries’ gift transformed every day.
They had a picnic around the tree one Sunday, which was their day off, since people generally stayed in their houses that day. They covered the grass with half a dozen quilts and bedspreads. Ryan and Henry sat on a Star Wars quilt, and because of the picture it displayed Henry could not keep himself from picturing Peaches with his hair done up in double Danishes clinging to Mike’s leg as Mike held a turkey leg aloft. He told Ryan about it in a whisper and they laughed.
“What’s funny?” asked Mike, seated cross-legged on a Ziggy blanket.
“Everything,” Ryan said.
“Nothing,” said Henry.
“There are no secrets in this house,” Mike said. It was a rare hot summer day, and he had been drinking in the heat for an hour, so he sweated and slurred.
“This house is made of secrets,” Ryan said. “Have you looked in the basement lately?”
“There is a difference,” Mike said, “between what is not known and what is not shared.” He frowned and belched. Henry, afraid that an argument was brewing, reached over to Mike’s blanket and turned a can into a bottle. “For instance,” Mike said, sticking a finger in the bottle and lifting it to point at Henry. “For instance. How did you do that, Bubba?”
“I don’t know,” Henry said, which was almost true, so he added, “A dog taught me.” He knew there must be more to it than that, but much as he wanted to tell them why he could do something the rest of them couldn’t, he didn’t know how; they could all change themselves, but changing something else was beyond them. It seemed like a comparatively boring trick to Henry—he could only do it with small things, and whatever he changed never strayed out of its type, so a can could become a bottle and a bike could become a pony but a knife could not become a pen, and the changes were never permanent. But Mike was wonderstruck and some of the boys were jealous.
“That,” said Peaches, “is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” It was what he always said when Henry talked about the dog.
“It’s all I remember,” Henry said. “A dog. A black dog.”
“I remember your gay lover,” said Peaches. “That’s who taught you.”
“Hey,” said Ryan. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you right back, fag,” Peaches said, and Mike stood up, stepping on plates and kick
ing bottles and wobbling a little before he settled his back against the tree. He looked down at them with his face flushed and sweat shining in the roots of his beard.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Don’t you understand what you’ve got to do? Haven’t I taught you a thing? You’ve got to be good to each other, because nobody else is ever going to understand.” He turned to Peaches. “One of them took a shine to him in there, and you think that means he’s lucky now? That just makes it harder. I keep telling you. I keep telling you. The tricks are wonderful, but listen, they’re not enough. That other thing—I can’t even think of the name for it!—is more horrible than the tricks are wonderful, and you know what that means!” He didn’t ask it like a question, so none of them tried to answer. “It means you have to be good to each other forever. It means you have to be good to each other or else you won’t have anybody to remind you what happened and tell you what’s the matter with you, and nobody to keep you from getting—all stretchy, you see?” He turned and bent, wobbling, and put his face close to Peaches’s face. “You get all stretchy, you see? Like a rubber band. Tighter and tighter until—” He raised a finger and a thumb to his temple—“Blam!” They all jumped. “Anyway,” Mike said, “you have to be good to each other. That’s all I’m saying.” He slid down the tree, sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, and started to cry. The noise of his weeping mixed with the strange ululating call of Peaches’s rare bird, which had taken up residence at the top of the tree as soon as he let it out of the cage, but the boys were all quiet until Ryan moved forward on his knees and gave Mike a hug. “Cheer up, boss,” he said, and the others all did the same, not one after the other but all at once, so they made a heap.
Much later, after Mike had sobered up and directed them in a set of games where gerbils and hamsters raced the perimeter of the garden while he played the theme from Chariots of Fire on the kazoo, and a little herd of cats swarmed in the tree, trying to touch Peaches’s bird with a paw but not hurt it, after another meal and other games inside, after Mike had become drunk again, not just on beer it seemed to Henry but on their good behavior toward one another, and after they had all fallen asleep in the big bed, Ryan woke Henry up.
He put a hand over Henry’s mouth, and led him by gestures into the basement for their bikes and then out of the house, and didn’t speak until they were out on the street. “You can’t tell where we’re going,” he said. “We’d get in so much trouble with Mike. You have to promise.” Henry promised, and followed him as he pedaled up Seventeenth Street, not slowing until after it crossed Castro, and then only because the hill was so steep. He turned off at Roosevelt, where Henry was distracted by the spectacular view as they rode along the edge of the hill. He had figured out where they were going by then, but instead of thinking about it he added the view to all the other views of the city he’d stored up in his head. As they rode around for work, Ryan was always stopping them to take in some vista of the city, from the top of Alamo Square or Twin Peaks or just as they were about to plunge down into the Marina, and he’d say the same thing every time: “This whole city is ours!” He meant there was nowhere they couldn’t go and nothing they couldn’t take, but half the time, in half of the incredible sweeping views, Buena Vista was the obtrusive exception.
They walked their bikes up the last part of the hill, which got so steep that Henry thought his bike was about to turn upside down. There was no wind coming down the Duboce Steps, but they walked by them. Henry closed his eyes, trying to pick up another scent beneath the eucalyptus and cypress, but he couldn’t. Ryan left his bike in the bushes a few hundred yards past the steps and then started up the hill on foot. Henry followed him without being told, sometimes hauling himself up hand over hand and thinking that four legs would be better than two but not making the change. After five minutes of climbing, Ryan stopped at a flat rock in the shape of an arrow and pushed it aside. He slipped into the tunnel it was hiding, but this time he had to call twice before Henry followed him. It wasn’t very long, but it was wide. At the end of it they could almost lie shoulder to shoulder. Ryan had a flashlight, which he waved around, now on the earth or a root and now on his face or Henry’s face. “I’ve been working on it for a year,” he said. “You’re the only one I ever showed, but I figured you could make it easier. I know I’m headed the right way, but who knows how deep I’ll have to go. It could be forever deep, you know? But I thought you could make it easier. You know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Henry said, because he could picture himself touching the earth to make it sand, or even making a door at the end of the tunnel that would open onto the place that Ryan could go.
“When we’re done,” Ryan said, “we could go back for the others and let them know. If we wanted to.”
“Okay,” Henry said, but at first he didn’t want to because he was scared, and he thought that might be why he failed. Mike said it was okay to be afraid of what was under the hill, and Henry was afraid, but much more than he was afraid of the place he wanted to go back to it. There was suddenly no way to measure how much he wanted to go back. He remembered a noise of bells, so clearly that he looked to Ryan to see if he had heard them too, but he was still just staring at him with the flashlight under his chin, looking spooky and expectant and hopeful.
“Magic is change,” the dog said. “Do you understand?”
“No,” Henry said.
“Observe,” the dog said. He leaned close to a teapot in the center of the room, an isolated chamber they’ d come to only after an hour of walking under the hill, and barked at it. It became a vase full of flowers. He barked again, and it was a swarm of bees, hovering in a globe that shaped itself now as a dog and now as the image of Henry’s face. He barked again and it was a baby elephant. He barked again and it was a rough piece of stone. “Now do you understand?”
“No,” Henry said again.
“Well,” the dog said, leaping over the stone and jumping up to lick Henry’s face, “you will. I’m an excellent teacher, and we have all the time in the world for you to learn.”
In the middle of the summer they all celebrated the Great Night. The boys talked about it for weeks before it happened. “It’s like Christmas but better than Christmas,” Ryan said, and Peaches said, “Christmas is so fucking lame.” Mike seemed continually overjoyed in the days leading up to the feast. “Forget everything you know about holidays,” he told Henry, which wasn’t that hard to do.
It felt most different from the holidays that Henry remembered because nobody else celebrated it. The windows in the shops on Castro Street looked the same way they always did, and nothing special hung from the streetlamps on Market Street, and no one Henry saw on the street exhibited any holiday cheer. More than ever, coming home to the house on Fourteenth Street felt like walking into a different world, because the whole house was hung with decorations, braided flowers and glass beads and birds in little cages that Mike kept catching in the garden. The garden was the last part of the house to get decorated. Henry helped Ryan hang ribbons on the tree. Henry passed ribbons to Ryan, who stood on a ladder to reach the highest silver branches. Warm days made the tree smell, which tended to attract them all to it, and an 85-degree afternoon might find them all standing around it taking deep, low, sniffing breaths through their noses. Henry rested his head against the trunk, breathing in the odor of the tree. He could smell Ryan, too—something like pickle juice and the warm inside of a car.
“Want to go for a bike ride?” Henry asked.
“Later,” Ryan said, a little harshly. He was up in the tree, tying long silk ribbons to the branches. They had gone to the hill the night before, and aside from a little mundane digging, Henry had failed once again to help Ryan with his tunnel. Henry frowned.
“Are you mad at me?” he asked.
“Don’t be stupid,” Ryan said, and asked him to hand up more ribbon. Henry climbed up with it instead, and they decorated together, tying ribbons as carefully as you would into a little girl’s
hair. They went high in the tree, and the leaves were thick enough now that you could hardly see through them to the house. Henry pretended that he and Ryan were not just the only people in the tree but the only people in the house, that they lived there together with nothing but the garden and the furniture and each other for company.
There was more work to do even after every branch was done, but they snuck away instead of helping Mateo where he was coloring the water of the hot tub or Greg where he was carefully wrapping a chain of flowers around the gazebo posts. They took their bikes and rode for a while in widening circles around the house, a few pacing laps before Ryan broke away and sprinted up Fifteenth Street. On the other side of Market they took Sanchez to Steiner, and then went up Fell to the Panhandle, riding against the traffic and ignoring people when they honked and cursed. They stopped a few times on the way to the park for random robberies. They all had the whole week off, to get ready for the holiday, so what they stole from one house they left in the next, and they took what was interesting or pretty without any thought for its value or whether Mike could sell it: they took a stuffed owl from a tall narrow Victorian near the corner of Lyon and Fell and left it perched on a toilet in the house next door, and they transferred all the linens in that house to a condominium down the street.
Despite its size and the variety of diversions it contained, Golden Gate was an inferior park. It was boring for the obvious reason, and also because it wasn’t off limits. Henry liked passing through it better than anything else, taking his bike off the paved roads and bumping over roots and rocks that would have popped the tires of any other boy on any other bike, and he liked ending a ride at the sea because it felt like they had raced to the end of the world. They met the incoming fog halfway through the park. It was high, and looked as solid as a wall, and Henry wondered if he could make it be a wall. He restrained himself but made Ryan stop to be buffalo, because of the way they looked in the fog, and they shuffled about for a while and mingled with the other gray shapes. I’m looming, Henry thought, leaning forward and sideways and forward again. Ryan, quickly bored, was a boy in the center of the herd, staring down a shaggy bull. Henry knocked him over with his enormous head.
