Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Well,” he said. “He didn’t ask us, did he, if we would take this woman or this man? And yet I think it was lawful, him being the Mayor and all. He has always liked to marry people, and now he’s done it to us.”

“What is your will, my love?” she asked him again, and looked at him expectantly. The whole population of the field was looking at him expectantly, the big people and the little people, the ones shaped like trees and the ones shaped like furniture; even the very abstract-looking ones, whose eyes were not immediately to be identified, leaned forward and bent their forms at him expectantly. Huff drew in a breath, but he didn’t know right away what to say. It was a complicated matter, after all, to ask someone what he wanted, and an even more complicated matter to ask it and sound, as she did, like you really wanted to know the answer. He might say I don’t know , which would be true, because it was his deepest, truest, and hardest-won piece of wisdom, that he didn’t really know what he wanted, that he was driven by an inchoate desire, and that the secret to becoming a serene person was not, as some people advised, to give up desire but to realize you could stop there and just accept that what you really wanted could never actually be described. So he might turn to her and say, I want —and demonstrate the object of his desire with a little dance or a gesture or a good fucking, which was really the closest approximation he had to express what he meant, since all his grunting and groaning and especially his ejaculation articulated it just the way it should be articulated, without words and sincerely. His copious, forceful ejaculations were the most sincere thing about him.

But it was too early for that degree of sincerity. He had only known her half an hour, and only been married to her for five minutes. It might scare her away, and it would certainly upset the weaker souls in their audience, all of whom were staring more and more intently. Some were stepping closer: the circle of eyes (and eye stalks and empty sockets and waving sensory filaria) had contracted a little. It would be forgivably misleading, he thought, to be specific about what he wanted. Still, there was a whole continuum of things that he might mention, from world peace, on the one hand, to a sandwich, on the (far-flung) other. He wanted nice things for his friends. There were dead people he would like to return to life, and living people whom he’d like to thrust into death. He wanted a home.

“Are we dead yet?” asked one of the dwarves. Huff peered at him and frowned, understanding that he didn’t have all night to answer the lady’s question and suddenly able to prioritize.

“I want to stop the Mayor,” he said.

“The whom?” asked the lady.

“The Mayor,” he said. “That handsome man who just married us.”

“The Puck? The Beast?”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “He is a beast. A beast and a fuck. A great, terrible fuck.”

“I hate him,” she said. “But I am in his power.”

“Well, that’s what everybody thinks,” Huff said, knocking gently with his free hand on her helmet. “Everybody thinks, I am in his power , and everybody says, There’s nothing I can do about how handsome he is or his negligent attitude toward the schools or his policy of enforced cannibalism, because he is too powerful, too intelligent, too ambitious, too mayoral. ” He looked around at the crowd, registering the frightened looks on their faces and pseudo-faces.

“My Lady,” said one, a chair. “While the Beast is distracted, we should flee.”

“To the west,” said a very large bee with the head of a Vietnamese lady.

“Or to the center of the earth!” said another.

“To the moon!” said a round bubble of fur.

“There is no way out,” said a tall one, who looked like a librarian made out of leather. “The walls of air hold us all here, and death is our only escape!”

“Hear, hear!” said Huff, knocking louder on the lady’s helmet. “Order, order! You are all suffering from a delusion! You are thinking just what he wants you to think!”

“Knock softly, my love,” said the woman, catching his hand.

“Excuse me,” said Huff, surveying the nervous creatures again as they gathered closer. He squinted at them, and saw them not as furniture or bee people but as Furniture and stagehands and a chorus. “Do any of them,” he asked the lady, “belong to the Mayor?”

“They are my people,” she said. “And my former husband’s people, but he is gone. Only the beastly are with the Beast, and only those who love death would serve him.”

“So they can all be trusted?”

“They will all serve you,” she said, “because they serve me. What is your will, my love? There is time for us to delight you, before the Beast returns to consummate my defeat.”

“Defeat? Don’t talk like defeat ,” Huff said, stroking her helmet now. “Don’t talk like death . Don’t talk like any of that. Does this come off?” He chucked her on the chinstrap, and she lifted a hand to undo it. The helmet fell softly on the grass and rolled — not like a head, he thought. Like a luscious apple. “I want to bring down the Mayor,” he said, catching a handful of the lady’s hair and cradling the back of her head and zooming in for a kiss. “And I want you to help me.” He kissed her, and the murmuring crowd fell silent. A little man came running forward when Huff did that, waving a sharpened twig, and though he was very small, Huff still cowered from him, raising his arms up over his face. But before the blow could fall, the lady bent swiftly, picked the little man up by his neck, and held him up at eye level. “I thought you said we could trust them,” Huff said.

“He thought you were disrespecting me,” she said, and frowned at the little man, and gave him a shake. His tiny head was turning purple where it poked out of her fist.

“I meant no disrespect,” Huff said.

“I know it, my love. Kiss me again.”

“I’d like to,” Huff said. “But the time for kissing is past. In a little while, I’ll kiss you again, but until then, there’s work to do.” He turned his attention to the purple-headed man. “Listen, you,” he said. “Your loyalties are all confused. You don’t want to be working for the Mayor. He’s bad, through and through, and whatever he promised you, he won’t deliver. Did he say he would make you tall? Was that it? Did he promise you a tiny lady? A hundred tiny ladies? A thousand tiny virgins? My man, he’s just talking. But look, there’s always one more chance to be good. Will you swear him off, and swear us on instead?” The lady squeezed him a little tighter, but still he managed just barely to nod his head. “All right, then,” Huff said. “What’s your name?” The lady put him down, and it took him a few tries to gasp it out.

“Bench,” he said.

“Okay, Bench. I’ve got a job for you. Will you do it?”

“As my Lady wills,” he said.

“That’s the spirit,” Huff said. “And here’s your job. It won’t be easy. The park is very big, and you are very small, but I need you to find somebody for me. I need you to find my friend. If we can’t find her, the Mayor has as good as won. She’s about this high, and her hair is gray and curly, and you’ll probably find her sitting like this.” He dropped to the ground and splayed his legs like Princess did. The lady settled down gently next to him, very softly even in her long coat of mail.

“I smell her on you,” the little man said.

“There you go,” Huff said. “Can you find her? Forgive me, but is it too big a job?”

“Even if the Beast has mauled her, I’ll bring the pieces,” he said. He made a curlicue gesture at Huff, bowed to the lady, and scampered off.