Chris Adrian - The Great Night

People , he sang, people who eat people … That was all he had so far. If he followed the song from which he’d taken the melody, the rest of it would say that they were the luckiest people in the world, but that was not what he wanted to say. Still, he knew right away that this was going to be the signature theme of the whole musical, and it would be sung by all sides, both the people who believed that eating people was a sin and a crime, and those who believed that you ate people and you had to.

What about them? Mary sang back. She had a lovely voice, which was something Huff had not known about her, and discovering it seemed to be a sort of blessing upon the enterprise.

“I don’t know yet,” he said, “but it’s coming.”

And it did come. Over the next few weeks the music came in little snatches of melody, and lyrics came in pieces, blazing letters he would see across the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes, and the choreography came in stretches of involuntary movement that would steal over him as he was walking down the street.

Mary was his first recruit. She brought in Princess, who happened to know that Hogg played the guitar and the cello and had perfect pitch. Bob showed up one day uninvited in the little room at the library where they gathered to watch a videotape of the movie over and over again. He was unobtrusive and easy to work with, and while he didn’t talk much, when he did it was usually to say something very useful. It was he who suggested the park when they were ready to start rehearsing.

This was already their second night of rehearsal. The first had been particularly profitable despite some disagreement over the best place to do the work, with Hogg and Princess inclined toward the clearing at the top of the hill, while Mary and Huff pointed out that it was too dark to see anything at the top of the hill and too far to walk every night anyway. They preferred the tennis court, a nice flat surface. Bob offered no opinion except to say that the tennis court was nice footing for dancing. And he did a little dance, as if to prove his point, a rather complicated five-step maneuver, repeated five times. “That’s brilliant!” Princess had said, and they had all learned it, more or less, right then, on the sidewalk outside the Duboce Street entrance to the park. They were all so pleased with how easy it was to get started rehearsing that they all went very merrily to the tennis courts and blocked out the first half of the first act in two hours.

On the second night they came back to the tennis court with no disagreements, but then an argument began, after they had briefly recapitulated the blocking they’d done the night before, about what should be done next. Princess happened to have come upon a set of jai alai baskets and was wielding them with both hands and demanding that they proceed immediately to choreograph the scoop dance.

“But that’s three-fourths of the way to the end,” said Mary. “Maybe even closer. It’s the penultimate scene. The penultimate! If you know what that means, you’ll know it’s far too early to hash it out now.”

“Here comes the scoop!” Princess shouted in reply, and proceeded to try to maul Mary with her jai alai baskets. Huff shouted, “Order!” and Hogg shouted, “Cut! Cut!” and someone else shouted, “Poodle!” Bob seemed not to be noticing that anything was happening but had cocked his head to the side and was staring into the dark beyond the tennis courts. Just then the tennis court lights went out. Princess stopped her swinging.

“That happened later last night,” she said.

“We’re out of time already,” said Mary, “and you wasted it all.”

“Do you hear that?” Bob asked them.

“Hear what?”

“Screaming,” he said, and then the streetlights just outside the park did something odd. Without exactly going out, they became considerably dimmer, as if a not entirely opaque veil had been thrown over them.

“I don’t hear it,” said Mary, shaking her head. “But what’s happening to the lights?”

“An eclipse!” said Princess.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Mary. “Those don’t happen at night.”

“But look at the moon,” said Princess. “It’s all fucked up.” That was one way to describe it, Huff thought. It was not discolored or misshapen, but the man in it had an unpleasant look on his face. He looked horrified.

“It looks fine to me,” said Hogg.

“No, it’s a sign,” said Princess. “Go home. Scoop another night!”

“Never mind the moon,” said Mary. “You’re the one who’s fucked up.” But Huff was still staring up at the sky, and now the face was looking even more horrified and worried, and even as he watched the expression grew more distinct, and the face grew brighter. He realized in a moment that this was because the streetlights were now nowhere to be seen.

“What horrible shit,” Huff asked all of them, “is the Mayor up to now?”

“Now do you hear it?” Bob asked them, and they did, very faint initially, sounding at first like a tiny siren wailing at a distance, then as it grew closer and louder it seemed a noise a cat might make if you did something truly horrible to it, and then as it got very close it seemed unmistakably human: something was afraid, and it was coming their way.

“Enough for tonight!” said Hogg, and ran for the gate to the tennis court.

“Get back here!” Huff shouted after him. “We haven’t even started yet!” The screaming got louder, and in another moment the others were gone as well, all of them scattering in the direction of the street, though none of them would find it in the thickening dark. Huff stayed where he was, more angry than afraid. He was sure it was going to be the Mayor making the noise. He’d come riding up in a tiny open car, so small his knees would be touching his chest, and there would be a tumbling red light and a set of shrieking siren horns on the hood. “You are under arrest,” he would say, “for conspiracy to disrespect me.” Huff planted his feet and lowered his chin and squared his shoulders, feeling ready for what was coming, though it was true that there was something about the sound that made him feel sure he was going to throw up and shit in his pants at the same time. He wasn’t ready for what he saw, though. A tiny person, no higher than his shin, came running by. He had an extraordinarily big nose and curly brown hair and blue eyes as big as tennis balls. He stopped in an odd way, as if he managed to go from running to being perfectly still without having to bother to slow down, and stared at Huff. “Better run,” he said after he stopped his screaming. “The Beast is coming.”

H enry was lost. He had been walking for half an hour and had not only failed to exit the park again, he hadn’t even found the top of the hill. He had been getting lost in all sorts of benign places ever since he was a child, when a trip to the supermarket inevitably involved an agony of separation from his mother, and he routinely lost his way in the hospital where he had been working for a year. It was hard to get lost in the boutique wilderness of Buena Vista Park, but he was not particularly surprised to have done it tonight. Since coming to the understanding that he had willfully, if not consciously, driven away the one person in the world who had loved him without any taint of sadness or rage or resentment, he had developed a whole new wary relationship with his subconscious, and though he had decided that going to Jordan Sasscock’s party would be good for him, and even that cutting through the park would add another sort of correction, he knew some part of him still thought it would be better to stay home for another night of weeping and doughnut-feasting and masturbation.