The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  It was getting dark by the time they came to the beach, and they wondered to each other if they were going to be in trouble for skipping out on the work of decorating; there were whole floors of the house where no ribbons or crepe or flower chains had been hung, and whole hallways that Mike had said must be carpeted in sod, and now with night falling they had barely twenty-four hours until the celebration would begin. They hurried back but still stopped at the hill, which could be construed to be on the way home, and dug. Henry tried a new trick every time they came, but nothing was really any more helpful than digging with a spoon: if he made a door it only opened on more damp earth. They had made a lot of progress, but Henry went back to undo their work every day they did it, because now he was afraid of how disappointed Ryan would be when they dug clear through to the other side of the hill, as he thought they must. And he didn’t want the digging to end.

  The tunnel was wide enough now that they could dig side by side, and high enough that they could kneel next to each other as they worked, but it was still cramped. Henry could feel Ryan’s shoulder working against his shoulder as he scraped at the dirt.

  “I think it’s getting late,” Henry said. “Maybe we should go.”

  “In a minute,” Ryan said. “I’ve got a good feeling all of a sudden.”

  “Okay,” Henry said. And after a few more strokes with his spoon he said, “This is nice.”

  “Huh?”

  “This is nice,” he said again. “The digging.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “And necessary.” Henry turned his head and tried to kiss him. Ryan pushed him away, but in the cramped space he didn’t go far. “What was that?” Ryan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Henry said. Ryan was flushed. In the light from the flashlight he looked orange.

  “What was that?”

  “I don’t know!” Henry said, because there wasn’t any way he could put it into words, and then he became something that wouldn’t have to answer the question because it couldn’t talk. A black rat fled away down the tunnel.

  “Bring me a peach,” the lady said.

  Henry kept walking through the hall, hoping she was talking to somebody else. He tried to stay away from her, because she scared him. She was around all the time, but she wasn’t hard to avoid; you heard about her or saw her somewhere every day, but it was like seeing the president on television or hearing about what he was saying or doing, and most days talking to her was a similarly remote possibility. He was beneath notice.

  “Boy,” she said, just before Henry made it to the door out of the hall, “are you deaf? I want a peach.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Henry said. The peaches, large and round and soft, were piled on a table much closer to her than to him, but he didn’t complain. He selected one from the top and took it to her, staring at his feet as he approached. She was sitting in her high-backed chair. He saw her bare white feet, and noticed how different they looked from his, which were filthy, and how nice her toenails were, perfectly rounded on the edges and painted with mother-of-pearl. She grabbed his face when he was close and raised it to hers, but he did not look her in the eye.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “A peach,” he said. “Like you asked for.”

  “Not that,” she said. “This.” She slid her fingers down his chin and drew them to a point just beneath his chin, catching something there and then plucking it out. She showed him the hair.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A hair.”

  “I said you were ripe,” she said. “And now you’re spoiled. Puck can choose another slave.”

  “I’m not his slave,” Henry said. “I’m his friend.”

  “You are a slave. Puck has no tender feelings. It’s time to throw you back, little fish.”

  “What?” Henry said.

  “I don’t repeat myself,” she said. “Ask the stones, if they listen better than you do.” She got up and swept away, her bare feet sounding very loud in Henry’s ears as they fell on the stone floor.

  “What?” Henry said. “What?” He threw the peach at her, not staying to see if it found its mark, and ran away calling the name of his friend.

  Henry was the guest of honor at the Great Night celebration. “Guest is the wrong word, of course,” Mike said. “This is your home. But tonight you are the most special boy—tonight you matter more than anyone else.” It was because he was the youngest and the freshest, the most recent of the exiles in the house on Fourteenth Street. That meant everyone was supposed to be especially nice to him, and hug him every time they saw him, and contribute a present to a pile that had formerly sat on the feasting table but now, in a brand-new tradition, sat under the tree. But when Ryan saw him that morning, he didn’t even talk to him, let alone give him a hug, and the other boys avoided him too. Only Mike embraced him, and he did it so often and so vigorously that it started to feel oppressive. Henry spent the whole afternoon out of the house, walking around in the Castro, playing a game with himself of stealing various items from stores and then returning them to the shelves an hour later. It was something he thought Ryan would enjoy.

  He came home barely in time for dinner. That was rude, since it excused him from all the final preparations, but then again, as guest of honor, he wasn’t actually obligated to help today. No one seemed to mind that he had been gone; they smiled and wished him a happy day, and Peaches told him he could hardly wait to give him his present. Ryan didn’t talk to him, but he didn’t scold him either. Still, Henry found he couldn’t enjoy his seat of honor at the banquet, and he wasn’t hungry enough to do more than poke at the jelly beans and toast and popcorn on his plate. He watched Ryan, who was the only person, besides himself, who didn’t look like he was having a wonderful time, but Ryan, clear down at the other end of the table, never looked back at him.

  “How is this night different from all other nights?” Mike asked, and the answers started to roll from around the table. Ryan had told Henry that no one really knew: the celebration was something that Mike had remembered from his time under the hill, but he never could remember what it was about, only that there had been a great feast, and music, and the exchange of gifts. “It’s fucking stupid,” he had said. Henry had taken him to mean the curse of forgetting, and not the holiday they aped in ignorance, but now, watching Ryan frown and pout over his plate, he thought the celebration disappointed Ryan, so he let it disappoint him too. The talk of why the night was special became once again talk of why the boys were special, and Henry wanted to raise his hand and ask if he could have a holiday from being special, because that night he didn’t feel lucky at all to be that way.

  “The rest is a mystery,” he said, when his turn came to speak. It was what Mike had told him to say.

  “But not forever!” the others all said in chorus, and they raised their beers in a toast to Henry and the Great Night. Then they marched out to the tree and danced around it once in a ring before Mike said it was time for Henry to open his presents, which were really, he reminded them, everybody’s presents.

  “Best for last!” said Peaches, holding his back from the rest. The others gave him a black feather, a shirt made out of tiny flowers, a stick stripped of its bark, and a variety of other natural curiosities that were more or less interesting. Henry sat on the ground to open them, and placed them carefully to his left or right. Ryan hung back, and while the other boys shouted out in turn to identify their gifts, he was silent. Finally only Peaches’s gift was left. Henry opened the box and lifted out some fruit, a banana and two oranges glued together; it took him a moment to understand what it was supposed to look like, but the other boys were already laughing.

  “We thought you would enjoy peeling that banana!” Peaches said, in between guffaws. Mike stared about, confused. Ryan was laughing too. He wasn’t laughing very hard, and he was doing it without smiling, but he was still laughing.

  “What? What? What?” Mike said, as Henry ran away into the house. Mike chased after him but Henry was faster,
and he made use of the fireman’s pole to get to the basement and his bicycle and then to the street. Mike was in the upstairs doorway flanked by boys and shouting something at Peaches. Henry pedaled away, but found before he had even crossed Valencia Street that he couldn’t go fast enough, so he left the bicycle in the road and ran as a rat, a dog, a rabbit, and a pony all the way up to Market Street. When he got there he was a boy again, and he looked like any other messy child sitting on the sidewalk crying into his sleeve, unusual only in that kids like him rarely wandered out of the Haight. He was thinking of them all dancing around the tree without him, as dogs and cats, as mice and chickens and voles, as alligators and crocodiles, as otters and bears and wolves, the colored streamers dragging on their fur. He wanted to turn them all to stone, or cheese, or air, to make them all go away, but though he pictured his furious will arching over the neighborhoods between here and there he knew he couldn’t touch them. He hardly thought of Ryan at all in his anger, though that wasn’t because he was spared, in the dozen plans of violent revenge he conceived and dismissed as he sat crying on the corner. A voice intruded on a vision of the tree in flames.

  “Hey, kid,” it said. “What’s going on?” It was a lady cop, short and wiry and fast, even though she was old, from whom Henry had run a few times before when he’d been stealing in the Castro.

  “Nothing,” Henry said, wiping his nose on his sleeve. But he told her everything.

  They all said goodbye to him together, just as they had all said hello to him together. Henry was too upset to register all the faces and almost-faces that stared at him, but he caught sight of a few as he was marched down the aisle toward the door out of the hill, faces with whiskers around the eyes or tentacles around the mouth, or noses that looked like they were made of broccoli, or eyebrows that looked like a child had drawn them with crayon. The dog walked next to him, pulling at a chain that was fastened to his silver collar. The lady’s husband had put it on him after he complained about Henry having to go—complained wasn’t actually strong enough a word for what he did. The conversation had started out civilly enough but quickly escalated into a shouting match, everyone in the hall covering their ears and closing their eyes, though nobody ran away or chose not to listen. Henry thought his friend would have won; he was getting bigger and bigger as he shouted louder and louder, and his argument—that a promise to him was being broken—seemed rock solid to Henry, but just when he thought his friend would fall on the lady’s husband and cover him and his objections up forever, the lady produced the chain from under her skirt and clipped it on him. That made him shrink.

  “Goodbye,” the lady said to him, on the grass outside the door.

  “Goodbye!” said all the rest of the host.

  “I want to stay,” Henry said. “Why can’t I stay?”

  “You were never here,” the lady said.

  “You were never here!” said the host.

  “I want to stay!” Henry said, and only realized, when he started crying again, that he had stopped for a little while.

  “It’s not allowed,” the lady’s husband said, and Henry’s friend rose up snapping at him, jumping at his throat. But the lady pulled his chain tight, and he fell on his back.

  “Down, dog,” she said, and he rolled on his belly, a puppy now, crying fat tears, and Henry thought how dogs cry not just when they’re sad but when they’re angry.

  “There is no magic,” the lady said. “There never was. There is only mortal life and mortal cares and death to take them both away. You were never here!” She waved goodbye at him, and everyone else waved goodbye, and the dog howled. They were waving him away, some of them vigorously, some of them halfheartedly; a few, like the lady’s husband, just held up a hand. But the waving hands put a pressure on him; he was going away.

  “Something horrible should happen to you!” Henry said, not sure whether he was talking to all of them or just the terrible lady.

  “You were never here,” she said again. From very far away he saw her turn her back on him, and all the others followed suit except his friend the black dog, who watched him mournfully over his shoulder as he was dragged along, and then they were gone, and Henry was standing at the entrance to the park, not sure why he was crying.

  16

  “A-one,” said Huff, “and a-two!” A tiny man, dressed in a paper bag and a monocle, was still running to hit his mark. “Don’t make me count to a-three!” Rehearsals were under way, and though time was short (there had already been two false alarms about the Mayor’s return), the players were all industrious, and the addition of the Mayor’s ever more numerous defectors was a piece of edifying good fortune. They did whatever the lovely lady told them to, but Huff wondered whether the grand necessity of the project didn’t also command their loyalty. It had seemed grander by the hour: the additional players made it possible to perform a much more complicated entertainment. Now there were more songs, and more scenes, and more things happening in every scene, and Huff felt like a hundred little tentacles had erupted from his head, each one topped with an eyeball and equipped with a clever little satellite brain, because it felt like he was doing a hundred different things at once, writing dialogue or lyrics or humming out a theme or choreographing a new step, and yet the whole time he was sure as well that he could never take his eyes off the lady.

  Princess had her jai-alai baskets back, and the industrious defectors had copied a dozen more pairs and added to them hulking costumes of straw and grass to turn the largest among them into fair semblances of backhoes and bulldozers. Now they danced in blocky mechanical steps and leaps, squaring off in a musical confrontation that the fleshly were destined to lose. It was a sad scene in a sad play, but Huff explained, carefully, when the little man he called Mr. Peanut (because of his size and the brown color of his bag and his monocle) said he was accustomed to singing happy songs and didn’t see why there couldn’t be one or two in this production. Happy songs, Huff said, were not going to move the Mayor to vulnerable, regret-stricken tears.

  “You may as well try to wring tears from a stone as from the Beast,” said Mr. Peanut.

  “Faith! Faith!” Huff shouted at him. He shouted it a lot, all through rehearsal, because, impossible as their task seemed, he was feeling better and better about it and had confidence in the power of artfully executed musical theater to change a person’s soul. Six hours ago, before he had met his lovely lady friend, before the world (and the musical) had become peopled with strange creatures, little and big, before his crew had been gathered and become outfitted with a new enthusiasm, before things had suddenly started to fall into place, he had been more of a doubter. He hadn’t liked to admit it, but he knew it was possible that they might be arrested or killed or turned into stew before the first transfiguring bar was sung, and that the Mayor might be deaf to their effort and unchanged by it—they might all be wasting their time, just distracting themselves before they became burritos. “But you might say that about anything,” he said to the lady. “You might say that about life in general, that we are all just distracting ourselves before we become burritos.”

  “I don’t care for burritos,” she said.

  “I don’t like them either, those burritos of futility and despair,” he said. “Though I have eaten them, over and over, down to the last bean and stale tortilla nubbin. But people who believe that it’s all for nothing deserve to have it all turn out for nothing.”

  “But it is all for nothing, my love,” she said. “We’ve already lost, and there’s nothing left but this lovely delusion. I am reduced, and you are dead already.”

  “Enough of that talk,” he said, and stopped her mouth with a kiss. They retreated behind a bush to make out more discreetly, though not for very long. The clock was ticking the seconds away to the Mayor’s return, and there was barely time to properly rehearse, let alone make out, and yet it was necessary to explore the boundaries of her mouth with his tongue, since they might be in prison or worse when morning came. “Come aw
ay, my love,” she said, pulling at his belt and beckoning him behind deeper bushes.

  “Duty calls, my lady,” he said, and led her out to the next scene. Short on time but long on players, they were rehearsing multiple scenes at once, five cells scattered around the field waiting for Huff to come inspect them or participate, since he had taken the part of Ty Thorn for himself. So when they had walked a few yards down from where the scoops were dancing aggressively around the food rioters, he joined Princess (who’d put down her baskets and put a rose in her hair) for their pas de deux around a corpse, Hogg in a suit stained with bloody berry juice. “Excuse me, my lovely loon,” he said to his lady, and fancy-stepped over to Princess. They joined hands over the body and released, each of them turning away and kicking a heel up backward just as they brought hand to mouth to bite the knuckle, then they each threw up their hands at the sky and threw back their heads as they stepped lightly on the balls of their feet, circling the body and singing.

  There’s been a murder here, a murder!

  Mr. Fancy Feast is dead.

  Murder most foul; murder most fancy;

  Who killed him?

  Was it you or you or you?

  Huff blinked at the sky, open above the walls of fog and full of stars, and then brought his head forward to point with his eyes as well as his fingers. You or you or you—that was just a preliminary motion, meant to tenderize the listener a little before the sharper jabs came later. He and Princess pointed accusatory disco fingers, now at the crowd and now at each other, and Hogg rose up to join them for a dramatic three-person tango, sternly (and somewhat sexily) charging them both to solve the mystery of his death.