Chris Adrian - The Great Night

More than that, Benchy seemed to be saying, in his utterly sympathetic and nonoverwhelming way, that there was work to be done, here by herself, equivalent to what would have been done if she trudged out of the park and found her way to the party, if she knocked on the door and drew attention to herself as the most late arrival, if she restrained the urge to talk to everyone except Jordan Sasscock and managed to sustain a conversation with him throughout the various great rooms of his fancy house on the hill, and even if by unspoken signals communicated to him that it would be all right with her, should they find themselves alone in the library or the summer kitchen or the sunroom, if they made out a little. Jordan, Benchy said somewhat righteously, didn’t really matter at all. He was just the handsome tricycle the world meant her to pedal a few yards down the road to recovery, and once she saw that she could see he wasn’t actually necessary to the work. She could just lie here and transport herself, by force of will, those same few yards. Anyway, she wasn’t at home, and not being home alone was as important as being at the party.

Benchy agreed, not exactly speaking in a recurrence of the voice that had talked to her as a kid. It was more that the habit of listening to such voices had recurred after Ryan died, though she had a very different relationship to them as a woman than she did as a girl. The purple lesbian spoke in soothing tones, but she accused more than she comforted. Getting over it, as she stressed in her last chapters, was hard work, and hard work looked a lot more like forcing a smile at Jordan Sasscock and his friends than it looked like lying on a bench with your fingers dragging in the grass. Her friends were even more accusatory, and went so far as to suggest that any activity that did not somehow aerobically denounce her attachment to Ryan was a wallow. “A wallow by any other name,” said Gus, and Tyler added, more gently, that genuine recovery, whether it was from failed romance or grief or both, was always complicated, but a party would be good for her. “No Jesus, no peace,” said her mother, and Molly reacted like she always did when her mother brought her intrusive thoughts of Jesus, and briefly imagined giving Him a blow job. The mother in her head kept in touch much more aggressively than her actual mother did and had to be managed differently, with shocking images that frightened her away into some stale gray heaven where everyone loved one another with a perfect absence of feeling, though Molly had once in a latter teenage rage actually said, to her actual mother, that Jesus could suck her dick.

“It’s not safe here,” said another voice, which Molly didn’t recognize. She opened her eyes and sat up. It wasn’t beyond her imagination and her irrational mind to gang up on her and introduce a voice before there was a face to go along with it — that had happened with Ms. Grimace, the goofy baritone preceding the big purple lesbian’s entrance onto her mind’s stage, though only by a few moments — but this voice had sounded real. Molly looked around, but she was alone with the trees.

“Hello?” she said.

“It’s not safe here,” the voice said again. “You must come with me.” She looked up in the branches, expecting to see a park ranger or a homeless person there, but they were empty. “I’m over here,” the voice said, and then it was obvious that it was coming from one of the trees, not because there was someone lounging in the branches but because she had mistaken the speaker for a tree. He — it was a man’s voice, though the person did not look particularly male or female — was at least seven feet tall, was dressed in leaves and twigs, and looked like he was made out of string. Molly had seen any number of unusual skin conditions in her brief foray into hospital chaplaincy, so she did not initially categorize him as an impossible creature. There were children that looked like gnomes and hobbits and goblins, and seeing them and talking to them was no slur upon a person’s sanity, so he didn’t, on first glance, make her worry about hers.

“Huh?” she said.

“It’s not safe here. The Beast is loose on the hill, and we are trapped with him inside the walls of air which my Lord, in his lamentable absence and considerable wisdom, has thrown up on the borders. The Beast can’t get out, and neither can we, and oh, he is very upset!”

“Actually, I was just leaving,” Molly said.

“You cannot leave ,” the man said. “My Lord has thrown up impassable walls of air. We’re all trapped. Trapped!” Molly peered at him. He was wringing his hands together and, looking closely at his arms, she could see how little stringy bits were coming off his forearms and elbows; he looked quite literally to be coming unspooled.

“It’ll be all right,” she said cautiously, because it seemed like the right thing to tell him, but also because it seemed like a good thing to tell herself. A closer look at him had made her afraid, not of whatever beast he was talking about, but of her own mind. She had spent the last two years waiting for a breakdown that never properly came: a perpetual sneaky feeling that sandwiches were going to start talking to her never matured into an actual conviction that she could talk to sandwiches; the feeling that Ryan was still around, no less a part of her life than when he was alive, never became a feeling that he really was still around; and she was always only convinced that dead was dead. He wasn’t watching her from some shining spirit abode. He wasn’t in Heaven and he wasn’t in Hell, and though she talked to him all the time she knew he wasn’t listening. And while she very actively imagined scoldings from her mother and the big lesbian and even from Jesus himself, she never actually saw those people talking to her, and when they spoke she only heard them with her mind’s ear.

On closer inspection, the thin man was a lot stranger-looking than she had taken him for initially. His eyes had a moldy glow about them, and she was reasonably sure he didn’t have any ears, and his joints seemed all out of place — his waist was too low and his elbows were too high and his neck was much too long. As unreal as he looked, though, nothing about him suggested to her that she was dreaming. Still, when she stood up she did a little jump, trying to fly, because that was the way she always tested her sleeping dreams. She’d interrupted more than one unpleasant dinner with her family, or naked classroom presentation, or uncanny and terrifying reunion with Ryan by putting down her fork or her laser pointer or her doughnut and saying, “Excuse me, but I think I can fly.” Then she’d leap up and fly away into wakefulness. She didn’t excuse herself to the man now but made a little leap, which took her nowhere.

“The walls are round on top,” he said. “They make a dome. Up is also no escape. But were you trying to fly? I’ve never met a mortal who could fly.” He said this as if trying to fly were the most natural thing in the world.

“I wasn’t …” Molly said. “I’m going to go now.”

“Exactly!” he said. “Come along.” He held a hand out to her. She didn’t really look at it. “You might not be safe with me, either. But at least you won’t be alone.”

“Maybe we could just walk together for a while,” Molly said, because she wanted to get moving but she didn’t want to make him angry. She was afraid, all of a sudden, of what she had in store for herself. She had thought it might be a relief, when her break finally arrived, because the waiting would finally be over and she would be delivered from anxious anticipation into careless fancy-free psychosis. But this wasn’t a relief.

“Very well,” he said, “as long as it is this way and not that way.” He pointed in opposite directions, crossing his arms across his chest. She started walking, across the hill to her left, and he followed beside her. “Pardon me for staring,” he said as they went, “but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a mortal up close like this. You have very nice skin.”