Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Bobby was eating his own cookie, considering it a moment before taking a bite, then looking around the tiny bedroom/ living room, which was empty except for the bed and the couch and a small bookshelf. He stuffed the last piece of cookie in his mouth and kept his finger in there to suck off some chocolate, and caught Henry looking at him.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” said Henry, but he slid closer on the couch, so their legs were touching, and reached for another cookie from the plate, but Bobby caught his hand and put it on his belly, and put his own hand around Henry’s neck to draw him in for a kiss.

W ill had lost a shoe, and couldn’t decide whether this was a disaster or a disguised stroke of luck. He had liked the shoe, but it would be a funny story to tell at the party, and if he were injured, or even appeared injured, that might be reason for Carolina to look his way, and maybe stare at him as he limped around, or maybe come over to examine his blue bruised foot, and maybe even say something to it, or to him, something not angry or wounding, possibly even some neutral utterance like, “Foot, you’ve been hurt,” and maybe (though this was admittedly much less likely) something kind, or kindish, like “Are you all right?” And then he could tell her all the ways in which he was not all right.

He had to find the party first, though, before he could present his pathetic, hilarious foot and tell the story of his fall off the path when a crazy homeless lady came tearing along behind him and knocked him aside. He rolled down a ravine, ass over hips over head, sliding on his back and then somehow on his belly, and ending up face down on a shallow carpet of eucalyptus leaves. He wiggled his feet to make sure he had not broken his neck, and realized that his shoe was missing. He knelt, then sat, then stood, looking up the ravine at how far and deep he had fallen, and was suddenly grateful he hadn’t busted his head open on one of the white rocks glowing softly in the moonlight where they poked out of the hillside ivy.

He had searched awhile for his shoe. That same bright moon that lit the stones in the ravine lit up the little hollow where he’d landed, but the fog was behaving oddly, streaming through the trees in thick discrete sheets that left him hardly able to see his hand in front of his face. Hunched over and feeling blindly under the carpet of leaves, he found an old plate, a seat cushion, and something that looked and felt very much like an old cabbage, which he dropped right away. And he found a shoe, though not his shoe — a tiny lady’s shoe, a sparkly sequined pump that seemed a magical discovery when he held it up in the light. He found an empty condom wrapper after that, and took it as a signal to stop looking, since he was sure that the gooey condom would be the next thing his fingers wandered across. By then it had occurred to him that showing up cold, shoeless, and battered at the party could grant him a temporary celebrity that might get him a gram or two of favor from Carolina.

He started back up the hill, without his shoe and without any path to follow, though he wandered the length of the hollow looking for a stair or a little clearing. He pulled himself up hand over hand, grasping clumps of ivy, and pushed himself up from tree to tree. After ten minutes of this, he felt sure he’d climbed as far as he’d fallen, but there was no sign of that path the crazy homeless lady had knocked him from. He kept climbing, thinking it ever more miraculous, the higher he climbed, that he hadn’t been seriously injured in the fall. Then, soon, it began to seem stranger and stranger that he hadn’t found the path, and he wondered if he might be climbing sideways instead of upways, and wondered also if some part of him was deliberately missing the path as it cut across the hill, because as much as he wanted to see Carolina again, he was terrified of her, too. He was terrified of her righteous anger, and her ferocious woundedness, and terrified of being rejected by her again, or rather by her continuing process of rejection, by the emanations of rejection that proceeded from out of her, which he could always feel, and by which he thought he could sometimes tell where she was in the city, in the same way you could tell which way the wind was blowing by sticking out your wet finger to feel the pressure. He imagined those emanations pouring down the hill from Jordan’s house, and imagined that he was climbing directly into them, and that it was her rejection and not just gravity that made it such a weary chore to get up the hill.

Will had no easy days anymore, but threw himself off the morning and into the afternoon and evening the way he pushed from tree to tree, or clawed his way through the day the way he clawed through the ivy on the hill, head and shoulders always set into the steady stream of her eternally rejecting emanations. His whole world had become populated and dominated by metaphors of rejection and reconciliation; he could not eat a cream puff without considering how it was filled to bursting with cream the way he was filled to bursting with love for her. Meta-pastries like these were obvious, and even pathetic, and generated by the worst part of him, not the best. But he was generating something artful for her too, stealing time from his day job as a tree doctor to write her a story that had nothing and everything to do with them, with what she had suffered and with what he had done. It was a long apology, and an argument meant to convince her that, gross despicable appearances aside, he had loved her as truly and deeply and consumingly as anyone had ever loved another person. Most days he worried that it was only going to be as useful or affective as a pastry, and that it would ultimately only be about as artful as a pastry, but other days he was sure it was the closest thing to a miracle he would ever wreak and when she read it she would understand him — and understand them — in a way that might just possibly allow her to forgive him.

It would be a miracle if he could satisfactorily express, both to her and to himself, why he did what he did. “Why did you do that?” she had asked him, in the moment of calm that preceded her berserker frenzy. He might as well have squawked like a bird or moaned like a retard as said something like “I forgot how much I love you.” But a novel could say such things, in between its lines and underneath what the silly wounded people said and did within its pages, in a way that made perfect sense and avoided the curse of squawking retardation because what was said was never actually said. He wondered if he shouldn’t maybe give up on the elusive party and go home to work on the damned thing. But just then he pushed off a tree toward a trunk shape in the intermittent fog, went past it, and took a much gentler tumble, onto soft grass.

He rolled forward this time, for a slow stately while, each rotation somehow more pleasant and less alarming than the one before. The ground was not just soft but warm, and the grade not too steep, and though the fall felt like it lasted so long he thought he might roll out onto Haight Street before it was done, he found himself unworried, and when he finally stopped he just lay there a moment, feeling very peaceful, even though he was thinking that a person could overcome one fall on the way to a party but a second fall was a sign that you ought to go home. He did another twitching check of his extremities and then stood up and surprised himself with a long, luxurious stretch, throwing his head back and reaching toward the sky. The moon was so big it looked like it was about to land on him, and though the sky above the park was still clear above the fog-shrouded trees, there was something in the air that distorted the crater face, making it look very worried. He blinked and rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the moon still looked worried. That dispelled his peaceful feeling, and he remembered just how late and how lost he was.