Chris Adrian - The Great Night

It was only awkward again at the end, when he tried to pull out. She held on to his hips and said, “Don’t.” He kept pulling back and said, “But it’s rude ,” and she said it again, “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” and amid the pulling and the pushing he suddenly couldn’t tell if she meant don’t cum in me or don’t not cum in me, and so he ended up doing it half in and half out of her, and between the two of them, and with all that and the spilt beer and the way the churning motion of their hips had flattened and torn up the grass, they made a lot of mud. “Holy shit,” Carolina said, but Will couldn’t speak.

The next day the tree was in bloom.

T he animals, Molly noticed, were behaving strangely. You weren’t supposed to see animals at all in nighttime city parks. She had learned that on a nature program once, some special on the secrets of the urban wilderness, full of infrared footage of normally invisible creatures bustling in the semicultivated hedgerows of Golden Gate Park. And she was sure that most of the animals she’d seen so far tonight should have been asleep anyway. Owls and raccoons were one thing, but normal squirrels did not leap about on their hind legs in the dark, and she was reasonably sure that the birds lined up in unusually precise rows of four and seven on the ground and in the trees, singing their hearts out, were not nightingales.

She had been wandering for almost an hour, amazed at just how lost she was. She had been in the park before, always with Ryan. She had sat on a bench near the top of the hill, not reading the book in her lap, staring out at the northwest part of the city while Ryan sprinted vigorously up and down the narrow wooden stairs and the dirt paths below. It was a pretty extraordinary view. Ryan seemed a little obsessed with the park, but he loved every pretty place in the city and was always stopping with her in various places around town, standing behind her with his chin against her ear, lining up their heads so he could be sure that they were seeing the same thing. “We are so lucky to live here ,” he would say, and she couldn’t disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn’t all fallen apart yet in a geological catastrophe. But she felt more lucky to get to share it with him — standing with him in Duboce Park, a whole variety of dogs hurtling around their shins, she could look at the daytime moon rising over the Oakland Hills, and appreciate how lovely that was, and then turn and look at his face, and appreciate how lovely that was, and she mostly felt lucky just to be with him.

Those times she waited for Ryan while he vaulted himself all over this park she had gotten a sense for how big it was. Most of the time she thought she could hear his heavy steps or catch his scent, and it never felt like he was very far away, even when she couldn’t see him. For all its contained wilderness, this park was really just a big backyard, but tonight it seemed different, bigger and deeper and darker, and full of animals, who were all having crises of identity. Here and there, over the past two years, Molly had had little episodes of unreality, echoes or flashbacks to the way she had felt when she found Ryan dead. That had been the most unreal moment of her life, or else the most real — his dead body was either the most densely real thing she had ever encountered, and so everything else in the world seemed unreal in comparison, or else it was the most unreal thing she had ever beheld, and it sent out warping rays of unreality into the world, past and future, making everything feel fake. For weeks after he died she had felt detached and uncertain whether anything she was experiencing was actually happening. That got better, but the feeling came back now and then, at completely random and inopportune times, when she was arranging flowers at the shop, or trying to chose a loaf of bread, or struggling with the BART ticket machine at the airport. The flowers never wept, the bread never talked, the BART machine never handed her a ticket that said, Who are you, that he did that? But it would not have surprised her if they did, because in those thankfully brief moments, she felt suspended in a place where absolutely anything could happen. So the dancing squirrels and the insomniac budgies (or whatever they were) made her wonder if she was on her way into a more final sort of breakdown, precipitated by an effort to get to a party she didn’t want to go to, for a date with a man in whom she had no interest.

But just as she was getting ready to see a little Volkswagen full of clowned-up raccoons trundling down the path, she came across a very familiar-looking stairway. She climbed it, thinking how Ryan used to take the stairs two and three at a time. There were four and seven frogs lined up on the top two stairs — they stared at her unblinkingly as she stepped over them — but beyond them was the bench where she used to sit waiting for Ryan to finish his run. She ran for it and sat down.

That’s better , she thought, and, as if on cue, the fog parted, and the city opened up before her. She recognized St. Ignatius, lit up brilliantly, and that made her feel nicely settled. Her eyes wandered to the blinking lights on the bridge and the sleeping-elephant silhouettes of the Marin Hills, then east to the Lower Haight and Alamo Square, and she imagined Ryan standing behind her and saying it again. We are so lucky to live here .

Reminiscing was not the way to get over him, and it was exactly at odds with the mission of the evening to sit there on the bench and imagine herself in another day, holding her book unread in her lap and listening to her boyfriend throw himself all over the hill. She closed her eyes and imagined that when she opened them she would be in that day, that he would come up behind her and press his chin against her ear, that he would lean around to kiss her after she agreed that they were lucky to be together in this city, and then she would proceed to keep him from killing himself.

Molly opened her eyes. The fog had closed in again. She couldn’t see anything beyond the eucalyptus trees just below her, and those seemed oddly to have gotten a bit taller while her eyes had been shut.

“I’m the luckiest girl in the world,” she said.

Molly met Ryan in the shop. He came in one day, just like Jordan Sasscock did a million years later. She had only recently quit school and had not been working very long at Root and Relish. Her reiteration as a shopgirl was a lucky break, which came thanks to her friends Gus and Tyler, who knew the owner, Salome, a woman entirely at odds with her name, since she was a blocky lesbian unlikely ever to do the dance of the seven veils, unless the veils were named Anxiety, Insecurity, Depression, Petulance, Micromanagement, Persnickitiness, and Need. She was actually a pretty good person, underneath her cloud of neurotic exhaust, and that came through often enough to make her just exactly bearable.

Arranging flowers and selling fancy knickknacks to the wellheeled felt like just the right thing to be doing, for now. She had dropped out of divinity school in Berkeley, after finally figuring out she never should have gone in the first place, the whole enterprise having been mostly a way to both please and enrage her parents, since she was studying to become a pastor but doing it in a Unitarian school where some people thought Jesus was a gay role model. She discovered during her first Field Education placement how terrible she was at pastoral care, though the idea of it — helping people with their problems by praying to gay Jesus and the Great Spirit and maybe a voodoo saint here or there — was most of what drew her to the profession. But she wasn’t good with death, and that was all she saw in her ill-starred chaplaincy internship. She had no experience with it. Her many brothers and sisters were all alive and in good health, as were her parents, though it was years since they had spoken to her, and her grandparents and great-grandparents were lasting into extreme old age. She had never lost a childhood friend, had never owned a hamster or a fish, and her childhood cat was twenty-five years old. She had no experience with death and had discovered, on that horrible job, that she wanted none. She had nothing remotely useful to say to people who were afraid of dying, and nothing that she’d read or learned in school seemed to matter in those close, stifling rooms in Oakland where some dessicated old person whispered small talk at her. “Why am I trying so hard to believe any of this?” she’d asked her advisor, a red-haired lady with an ageless face who relied heavily on literature to answer just that sort of hard question, and who’d countered Molly’s previous crises of faith with skillfully deployed Mary Oliver poems. But chaplaincy pushed Molly to such an extreme of nervous exhaustion and sadness that her advisor had no poem that could help her and finally suggested, when Molly failed to ask for one, that a break might be good for her. Molly was twenty-six years old, and it seemed to her that she could spend an eternity as a shopgirl at Root and Relish, where Salome suffered and shared her daily inconsequential agonies, but no one ever died and no one ever grieved except over the prices.