Chris Adrian - The Great Night

He did not recognize the part of the park he was in. Worse and weirder now, he did not recognize the trees. As tall as poplars, their bark was too smooth to be poplars, and poplars didn’t grow in the park, or in San Francisco for that matter. Will knew trees because they were his living and knew all the weird plants that grew in this weird city, tikotikis that could thrive nowhere else but here, and toothed azaras, one-of-a-kind things that looked like they ate children. These gray poplars reminded him of something, but they were utterly strange, covered with short branches that bore pale green leaves and white flowers whose petals had the thick consistency of mushrooms when Will pinched one. Scattered between the regularly spaced sort-of-poplar trunks were much smaller trees, junior versions of the sort-of-poplars that were as perfectly manicured-looking as bonsai, and it certainly looked as if someone had been caring for them, since some were decorated with tiny bells, thin ribbons, and little wind chimes.

He bent down to touch a bell. It sounded a high vibrating note that tickled his ear. There was something about the tickle in his ear that dispelled the thought that he might be dreaming even as it came to him; the bell sounded a note so irritating he couldn’t imagine ever sleeping through it, and the discomfort from the noise felt real in the way that a sharp, cruel pinch feels real. There was something interesting about these trees that went beyond just how strange-looking they were, or that they were hidden in a secret dell, something so interesting it made him forget all about his party and his lost shoe, and it shamed him, a little, that he could not place what that was exactly until he crushed a bit of leaf and smelled the familiar odor, cinnamon and pepper, on his fingers. “Shit!” he said to the crushed-up leaf, and then “Shit!” again to the trees all around him, and “Shit!” to the worried moon. He started walking into the dell, looking for something now. The tall gray trees began to space out the farther in he went, but the little bonsai started to cluster together more thickly. The bells and chimes sounded louder and more insistent as he loped along in a one-shoe run; his sock was getting long in the front, and it waved around wildly as he went, threatening to trip him, but even before he heard the moaning he was in too much of a hurry to stop to fix it. It was a woman’s voice, or a little girl’s voice, or there was both a woman and a little girl up ahead, experiencing something unpleasant. Will ran faster and soon came into another sort of clearing, though this one was carpeted with the tiny trees instead of grass. They clustered in circles around a giant tree that had the form of an oak, but its bark was shining silver and its leaves, shaped like the hands of little children, were gold. “Carolina!” Will said when the woman moaned again, because this was her tree, and because it made perfect sense that he should be called to rescue her from some affliction, in a dreamy undream, in a park that was not behaving like itself, under a moon that was making faces that it shouldn’t.

It didn’t matter if this was some terminally weird reconciliatory setup engineered by Jordan Sasscock, or a wild kidnap coincidence, or just a really odd bit of fortune. What he should do now was as clear as what he should not have done back when he and Carolina were together. There was a table under the tree, big enough, it occurred to him as he rushed it, for sacrificing a Jesus-lion, and the moaning was coming from a little figure tied down on it. The littleness stopped him short — whatever was there was the size of Carolina’s smallest purse — yet it moaned with a big voice.

“Death!” said the little woman. She was impossibly small; Will was sure she was actually smaller than Carolina’s smallest purse, a hand-sized clutch made of fake pearls. Something unspeakable had been done to her. “O my death! Are you my death?”

“No,” said Will. “I’m going to help you.”

“Death!” she said again. “He said death was his gift to me, and his gift to the whole world. Are you a gift?”

“I’m Will,” he said again, looking around for something — he had no idea what — that would explain this or make it less strange. “I’m going to help you.”

“Radish was my name,” the woman said, more calmly. “You cannot help me. If you are not my death, you should run away. If you are not my death, he’ll not treat you kindly.”

“I’m going to get you to a hospital,” Will said, though he couldn’t imagine what hospital would be able to care for her, given her unusual size and the extraordinary ways in which she was crumpled and twisted. He moved forward to pick her up off the table and felt a wetness all of a sudden on his head, a warm rain. He looked up and saw a naked woman in the tree, hanging from a branch with her legs spread, pissing on him. He wiped stinging urine from his eyes and shouted, “What are you doing?” And then, when he saw her more clearly and examined her face and recognized her, “What are you doing here?”

“What I do,” the lady said, and climbed down the tree, head first like a lizard. She leaped onto the table, took the tiny lady in her hands, and tore her in half. “I am your host,” she said to Will, as blood sprayed around his eyes and his head and against his open lips. It tasted quite strongly of rosemary.

“What …” Will said. “What …” He meant to ask, What are you? because even though it looked like the first woman he’d ever had sex with, popped up inexplicably naked in a park in the middle of the night, it felt like something even stranger and much more terrible.

“Run!” said half of the little lady. “Run, Not-My-Death! I will distract him!” She turned her little head and bit the lady on her thumb, which only caused her to laugh. Will turned and ran, not noticing his floppy sock or his single shoe, not considering that he was running away from the opportunity finally to solve the mystery of Carolina’s tree. He wasn’t thinking of anything except getting away from the horrible monster. He ran back the way he came, the little trees spaced themselves farther on the ground, and the silver trunks flew by. He ran and ran and ran but never came to the edge of the dell or found the slope he’d tumbled down, and though very soon he gave up hope of finding a way out, he didn’t stop running.

Carolina was one of Will’s clients: they met over a sick tree. She contacted him through his website, attaching a picture of her tree, a stately oak. He hadn’t ever gotten a picture through his website before — you weren’t supposed to be able to do that. It was a premium feature, and he could not afford premium features. Her note was short. I love him. Can you help me? It was the sort of note a freak would send, with the telling substitution of him for it . Will had discovered since becoming an arborist that there were crazy tree and shrub ladies out there just like there were crazy cat ladies (and sometimes they were men), people who preferred the company of nonhumans, or even nonanimals. They were perfectly pleasant people, just deeply strange and difficult to work with, since they acted like tree surgery was baby surgery, and acted like you were sawing off the limb of their child when you sawed off the limb of their tree.

So when he arrived at the house on Fourteenth Street, he was expecting a sixty-year-old lady in a housedress and slippers, or a divorcée in a caftan, or even a spritely twenty-year-old dressed in bark. He had actually encountered the twenty-year-old, in the treeless Outer Sunset, of all places, presiding over a secret garden at Thirty-fourth and Judah. She had turned him away even before showing him her problem tree, because of his vibe. It was a surprise to see who finally opened the door, a full five minutes after he started ringing the bell. Something kept him from giving up, though he had other work he could have been doing, other trees to check up on: there was a flax-leaf paperbark in Pacific Heights with cankers, a trident maple in the Castro with gall, a jacaranda in the Marina with chlorosis. But he sat there on his toolbox with his chin in his hand, looking out on the street and not understanding why he was waiting.