Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Yes,” she said, half-awake, “lovely.” She was half-drunk and half-sad, trying not to imagine a burden of secret sorrow for him but failing intermittently, heaving like the boat in and out of troughs of dispiriting fancy, wishing she could dwell solely on the nice thing he had told her. She slept again, not dreaming but aware in her sleep that she wanted the journey back to take a very long time, so she could stay curled up against him with her head in his lap, and she stayed groggy, rather willfully, as he led her off the boat and into a cab, as they rode along the Embarcadero and up Market Street, and even as he led her inside the house and upstairs to bed. She was sober by then, and not that tired anymore, but she let him undo her skates and take off her shorts and even undo the scrunchie from her hair, never opening her eyes until he kissed them.

“Hello there,” she said.

“Good night,” he said.

“I love you,” she said, never having said it before, and the courage or daring or gall to say it might have seemed to come from nowhere, except that it was the perfect thing to say to his evasion, and to Salome’s dissatisfaction, because that was a lady who would never understand if Molly told her she was saying it as much to what she didn’t know about him as to what she did.

“I love you too,” he said, with no hesitation at all, and then he turned out the light.

H enry did not used to be an excitable person. It was a legacy of his old self that it still took a lot to get him worked up. In the past, that had been because nothing potentially upsetting had ever seemed entirely real to him, though he would never have described the situation to himself that way, back in the bad old good old days. Back then he thought he was just being careful not to follow his mother’s example. She had spent the majority of her days in some sort of a tizzy and had developed over the course of her life a tizzy repertoire of abundant variety, from the black depressive tizzy to the anxious weepy tizzy to the more traditional furious tizzy, which almost always involved projectiles. Henry thought he had made a healthy choice not to be like her, in the same way he had chosen not to smoke or dabble in drugs, and it was a very late discovery that he was generally unflappable not because he was better than his mother but because he was his own special sort of monster.

Equanimity was easy, it turned out, when you were insulated from reality by a sustained assurance that nothing that happened could actually matter. His mother would have found it vindicating to hear that whatever had happened to him in the lost years of his abducted youth had in fact nearly ruined the rest of his life, that the still-unremembered trauma had kicked him out of the world to a place where he watched dispassionately as all the subsequent despairs and delights of his life passed by, somehow unfelt even as he experienced them, until Bobby came along, called attention to the arrangement, and disrupted it. The kindly therapist he’d engaged at Bobby’s insistence had pointed out that it wasn’t the unremembered trauma but only his reaction to it that ultimately mattered, and it was not too late, after twenty years, to choose against his mother after all. And that was what Henry thought he had done, long after Bobby dumped him, when he finally realized that he would rather forfeit the hand washing and the bleaching and the constant guarding anxiety — to leave his state of comfortable dissociation, move back to San Francisco, and expose himself to whatever it was exactly that it was keeping at bay — than live without Bobby.

Disoriented and knowing that something was horribly wrong, he opened his eyes, too upset to take things in except in pieces: an iron door, a girl, a handsome man in a plaid shirt, the great space all around them, a hall hung with tapestries he couldn’t bear to look at.

“Don’t touch me!” he said to all of them, standing up and falling down and standing up again. He stood up and realized he wasn’t wearing any pants.

“If you didn’t do it,” said a boy Henry had failed to notice in his first look at the room, “who did?” He looked at Henry. “Did you do it?”

“Don’t touch me!” Henry said, because he especially did not want to be touched by that boy, who should have seemed cute instead of terrifying, with his baby-blue shorts and red suspenders and fake rabbit tail and bunny slippers made to look like bunny feet, not bunnies. Henry hid his cock and his balls with his hands — for no reason at all he was getting a boner — and backed away toward the wall.

“No one is touching you,” the girl said, and Henry started to cry, because he had promised absent, rejecting Bobby that he would never say those words to anybody ever again. He said them again and again as he backed up against the wall, understanding as he spoke what sort of catastrophic backsliding it represented.

“It’s okay, buddy,” said the handsome man in the plaid shirt. “Nobody’s going to touch you. Just take a breath. Something really fucked up is going on.”

Henry took a longer look around the hall, appreciating just how big it was, and thinking as he looked of all the things that would fit inside it: elephants and cement trucks and hospital lobbies. He squinted at the tapestries and looked away from them again. His eyes fell down to the people who were staring at him. They had all walked forward to surround him in a half ring, the little ones spaced between the big ones. He noticed the girl a little more distinctly, and recognized that she was kind of pretty, and noticed that the handsome man had taken off his shirt for some reason, revealing a beefy, hairy torso and a tattoo on his shoulder of some kind of spring tree in bloom. He got a better look as well at the boy with the fake tail, and the little man who, he realized now, had accosted him in the clearing, and the tall man with uncontrolled psoriasis. That one looked back nervously over his shoulder when the door shook again.

“Are you well?” asked the little man in the suit.

“Don’t—” Henry started to say again, because it seemed to him that the whole half circle was leaning forward, about to get grabby, and this caused his panic to rise and rise until it crested. Then something broke in him, or a circuit tripped; suddenly the five of them seemed very far away, though the handsome man was leaning forward with his shirt held out, and the whole unfamiliar and confused situation, which a moment before had felt like a deadly crisis, didn’t matter so much at all. He knew the feeling: the serene, dead detachment of a mind divorced from its feelings. It made him want to cry, because this was exactly the sort of thing that wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, now that he had proven Bobby wrong and become, at long last, kind of a normal person. “I’m fine,” he said, taking the plaid shirt the beefy guy was holding out to him and wrapping it around his waist.

“Take mine, take mine!” said the boy with the bunny tail, holding out a pair of blue shorts and suspenders identical to the ones he was wearing.

“I’m okay,” said Henry.

“Did you do it?” said the boy.

“Do what?”

“The door, the door! I didn’t do it. Lyon didn’t do it. Who did it?”

“What?” Henry asked.

“Something fucked up is going on,” said the beefy guy. “Maybe someone should start from the beginning. I’m Will.” He pointed to himself, as if Henry was going to have a hard time understanding his introduction. The door shook again, and all of them but Henry shuddered.

“In the beginning,” said the psoriatic, “there was the Beast. My Master bound him and then, in grief, my Mistress set him free. That is the whole story.”