Chris Adrian - The Great Night

He sighed again, more of a guttural huff of the sort that Hobart was inclined to let out every now and then when he met the rare thing that displeased him. This was not what he ought to be thinking about. There might not be any hurry to get to the party, but the night was going nowhere except in nostalgic spirals around Bobby. Even if he was never going to move on, it was time, for tonight, to get moving. He would have gotten up and started walking again right then, except that he knew his thoughts would be no different, while he finally made his way out of the park, while he knocked on Jordan’s door, and even while he talked to the now-interesting strangers behind the door, even while making out with one of them, though that was an admittedly unlikely prospect. Bobby would still be everywhere all night long, a living ghost. There was really only one thing that seemed to banish him. Masturbation, Henry’s regular companion since the age of thirteen, had used to extend and reinforce the depressive self-loathing under which he had labored on account of being gay, leaving him feeling simultaneously ashamed and wanting more of it right away, the way that sex had for most of his life. But lately it had become what he thought it ought to have become a long time ago, an innocent distraction that harmed no one, least of all himself. And it had become a way, even though the act issued imperious invitations to thoughts of Bobby, of forgetting about him. It blew the Bobby fuse, and it could be hours or days before the yearning brimmed again.

Opening one eye, he scanned the clearing. There wasn’t anybody there, though at this time of night it would not have mattered much if there had been. People came into the park for such things, after all, though it hadn’t really been Henry’s style since he was in college to engage in furtive public park sex. Yet it was somehow of a piece with the pleasantness of his seat on the rock, and of the feeling of his feet in the grass, to reach down his pants and begin to grope himself a bit. At first his head was empty of anything except for the obvious sensations and a mild anxiety about getting caught, but he was very soon in the place that brought memories of Bobby swooping into his mind. And they weren’t entirely the sort of memories one would expect, given what Henry was doing with his hand, and given that Bobby had come to dominate his sexual imagination such that he could barely imagine having sex with someone else, even when he actually was having sex with someone else. There had been enough hot sex, back in the good old bad old good old days, to fuel whole seasons of masturbation. Thoughts of the sex flitted, swift as darting birds, in and out of his head, too quick to properly consider them. It was weirder, and sadder, to beat off while submersed in more innocent nostalgia, in distinct memories of waking up in the middle of the night with Bobby in his arms and realizing that he could hear it snowing outside, or of Bobby offering him a Benadryl when he was poisoned by bad sushi, or of puzzling together over a hysterical middle-aged lady with syncope, randomly encountered in a vacation hotel. It was strange and pathetic enough to do it in his own bedroom, and seemed stranger and more pathetic here, outside and quite close to the geographic center of the city, but it was what worked.

He had hardly properly gotten going with it when he was suddenly aware, even though his eyes were still closed, that he was being watched. He opened his eyes and saw a little man — a very little man, not more than two and a half feet at his shoulder — standing about three yards off. The man was panting and his face was shining with sweat in the moonlight, which was falling down into the clearing from an open sky even though the park was surrounded by fog. Henry stared, cock in hand, feeling a unique combination of revulsion and surprise. It wasn’t actually so surprising that there might be homosexual midgets in the park; the lonely and the desperate came in every shape and age and size and color. But there was something stranger about this man than diminutive boogly trolldom.

“That won’t keep him away,” the little man said. “He’s not afraid of your little weenaloo.”

Henry let go of his cock and pulled up his pants at the same time that he pushed himself back and over the rock. He fell over the back of it, got up, and started running, not at all sure about why he had to get away so quickly from this admittedly harmless-looking little man. There was an etiquette to this sort of interaction, a way to indicate that you didn’t want to be watched, let alone touched, during your public escapade, without necessarily hurting anyone’s feelings, which didn’t involve running away in such a hurry that you forgot to put your shoes back on or failed to pull up your pants and your underwear all the way, so they tripped you. He kicked them off and left them behind and ran again. It made less sense than was immediately apparent, to flee as he was doing, and he realized as he was running that what he was feeling had a lot of the character of his old reasonless fears, and then he stopped. He had run into a stand of white trees, whose peeling bark gave them something in common with eucalyptus, but the grove reeked of cinnamon. He didn’t know the park very well, but this looked like nowhere he had ever been.

“You’re running the wrong way,” said an already familiar voice behind him. “You should be running off the hill. You should go hide in a church. He doesn’t like those. But there’s no way out anyway, except maybe by going under. My Lord has warded the hill, to keep the Beast inside, and there’s no way out, just bruises. See?”

He pointed at his own nose, and Henry could see that it was darker than the rest of his face. The man made a beavery sort of noise with his lips. Henry stepped back. “Don’t touch me,” he said, which was the first thing that sprang into his mind.

“I wasn’t going to touch you,” the man said. “I was just saying. I shouldn’t bother at all with you, except my Master bade me be a guide and a keeper to lost travelers. He is gone, but his wards and his work remain, and my love for him remains. The world is doomed tonight, but my love for him remains. I will die before the dawn, but my love for him remains. So I would keep you, if I can, from running into the Maw instead of away from the Maw, since it is better to struggle against the Beast than to lie down for him, though best of all these things is to run away. I know your odor, though. Have I ever fixed your shoes?” He turned his head from side to side, taking a deep sniff from each of Henry’s shoes, and then he smiled. His teeth were as pointy and black and wet as the spines of a sea urchin.

“Don’t touch me,” Henry said. He ran again but didn’t get far. Feeling he should turn to watch and make sure the man didn’t follow, and tell him again not to touch him, he had barely sprinted up to full speed when he collided with one of the slender white trunks, which felt a lot like running into a flagpole, and his head made it ring metallically like a flagpole. He fell backward, listening to the funny bell tone, and realized before he lost consciousness that the little man had caught him.

“There you go,” the little man said. “I’ve got you.”

Henry and Bobby talked for months online before they met, in part because they were afraid to meet each other, Bobby being relatively new to dating men, if not to having sex with them, and Henry already sensing, after a string of failed dating ventures, that this was something nice he would only fuck up if he let it go too far. And just as they were beginning to talk seriously about meeting, Henry got called away to his mother’s house in Carmel, because she had tried to starve herself to death. This was something she had tried to do before, with considerably less success, but on those occasions Henry’s father, who had squired her through her depression after Henry left home, had still been alive. Now he was nearly six months dead from lung cancer, after a swift decline that Henry had tried, most inexpertly, to manage. Henry’s older sister, to whom the role of caretaker might also have devolved, was in jail for a drug offense.