Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“One down!” said Huff, to everybody, and then to the lady, “but there are three more, and I need three more helpers. Who else do you trust?”

“I trust them all,” she said. “They will all obey me unto death.”

“Well, that’s an extreme arrangement,” Huff said. “How about you pick us a few who are obedient just about up to death? Let them hesitate, and wonder if the cause is just, before they do anything drastic.” She cocked her head, and signaled without looking to three more to come forward, a puffball and the bee and the librarian. “Names, please,” said Huff.

“Nemnaut,” said the puffball.

“Kusaka,” said the bee.

“Nilo,” said the librarian.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “Here are your assignments. Bob: about so high, he frowns a lot and he’s wearing a plaid shirt. Hogg: nothing like a pig, long brown hair, big shoes. Mary: sometimes contrary, more often quite agreeable, her bottom is huge. Have you got them?” They all sniffed at him, and bowed, and then they were gone. “Away you go!” he called after them. “Now what?” he said to the ones who remained. He took the lady’s hands — they were much larger than his, but much softer, though her nails, he noticed, were serrated like the edges of steak knives. “Now comes the hard part. I’m sorry everyone, but I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of work to do, if we’re going to turn things around. I know it seems like the Mayor has us right where he wants us, trapped with him in his own private Disneyland, but in fact he’s the one who’s trapped. Well, not yet — but soon!” He made the round of eyes again, smiling at them all in turn, even at the mouthless ones who couldn’t smile back, and though he felt a little dispirited, he didn’t show it. Such a motley crew, and probably none of them had ever acted before, or even seen the movie, and they hardly had the time or the resources now for a screening. The seconds were ticking away. Huff knew from experience that you could distract yourself with a pair of underwear for only so many hours, and they had weeks of work to cram into this night — the shortest one, as it happened, of the whole year. He sighed expansively but made himself smile wider at them, though the effort hurt his face. “We are going to trap him, you see”—he had turned his strained smile to the lady, and her face distracted him—“with his own conscience …” She was staring at him both lovingly and blankly, a combination Huff had never seen in any of his previous wives or girlfriends. “With music.” He started suddenly, realizing that he was holding her hands. “Soylent Green, you see, is — were you going to say something, Ma’am?”

“I love you,” she said. “My liege, my own mortal joy.”

Will didn’t notice the lady until she had moved almost to the head of the line. He was piling up a sundae for one of his classmates, a fat boy with diabetes who was enormously popular despite his two social hits of obesity and disease. Craning her head around his classmate’s bulk, the lady peered at Will impatiently, and looked at the fat boy like he had no right to be ahead of her in line and no right to eat ice cream. Will tried to ignore her. People stared all the time, as if that would make you serve them faster, though more than half the time the ones that glared the hardest at you still had no idea what they wanted when they made it to the head of the line. As he scooped Butter Cookie on top of Oscar’s Wilde on top of Deadly Chocolate Orgasm for his classmate, he caught glimpses of her as she stared at him, and noticed her orange lipstick and too-smooth forehead and very soft-looking hair. These were elements common to a particular type of lady in his town, a wealthy, spiritless suburb of Orlando, and when his classmate shambled off and Will turned to take her order he was expecting her to be nothing special, the sort of facelift on top of a Talbot’s dress that he and his coworker Lauren made fun of in the back all the time.

“Crepuscular Rays,” she said. “Really?”

“Pardon?” Will said.

“That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“Our owner is a latter-day Willy Wonka, “Will said, because that was what they were supposed to say anytime anyone remarked on the names of the ice cream, though Thom, the owner, had in mind when he trained his employees that people would be saying that the names were creative and fascinating instead of stupid or pretentious or twee, which they were.

“This town,” the lady said, shaking her head and setting her earrings to jangling. Will had her pegged for Deadly Chocolate Orgasm because that was what all the middle-aged ladies ordered, but she settled on plain strawberry after tasting Crepuscular Rays and making a face. When she took the ice cream she made a point of touching him, which a lot of the middleaged ladies did, laying her fingers on the inside of his wrist before she drew her hand back to capture the cone and bring it immediately to her lips. With ice cream on her face, she handed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. Then she walked away, out of the store and onto the street, not looking back at all, though the middle-aged ladies usually did that too when they came in alone for ice cream, throwing a glance over the shoulder to see if he was watching them leave.

Lauren scrutinized the bill after they closed, holding it up with both hands to the fluorescent light and even touching a corner of it to her tongue before pronouncing it real.

“She only tipped you like that because she wants to fuck you,” she said, when he proposed that they split it. “I don’t want any part of that. Fuck money is bad luck.”

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “She didn’t want to sleep with me.”

“They all want to fuck you,” Lauren said, explaining as they cleaned up that she meant not just the poor little rich ladies of Winter Park but the whole adult world. She wasn’t any older than Will, and was almost as friendless at school, and her prospects weren’t any brighter than his — like him she was a junior with middling SAT scores and grades barely good enough to get into college at Gainesville — but she liked to lecture him at closing time. She thought he was naïve, and said all the time that he would come to a bad end if he didn’t do something about his optimism and trust in strangers.

“I hate everybody,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” she said. “ I hate everybody. You’re just a poseur.” She didn’t protest anymore, though, when he offered again to split the tip. With the rest of what was in the jar they each had seventy-eight dollars.

He stole a pint of Cookie Galore for his mother before he locked the store. He might have paid for it if Lauren hadn’t talked her shit; he wanted to show her that he hated Thom and the way he strove for excellence in his ice cream and the way he took sprinkles as seriously as the plague. If there were a way to craft them individually, millimeter by millimeter, Will was sure Thom would do it. As it was he ran them through a colander several times a day to eliminate the clumps, saying every time, “No one wants their sprinkles to look like cat litter.”

“I waited up for you,” Will’s mother said when he got home. It was hardly after ten, but she never finished drinking until after midnight. His father was flying a trip to San Diego and would be gone for two days because of the layover. She hadn’t eaten, so Will made her a sandwich and sat with her while she failed to eat it. “What do you suppose he’s up to?” she asked, because his father hadn’t answered when she called the hotel.

“Probably out having a sandwich,” Will said, pushing her sandwich closer to her. “It’s dinnertime in San Diego.” His mother always accused his father of having all sorts of wild fun on his layovers: erotic massage from small-footed Asian ladies in San Francisco, Donkey Shows in Tijuana, and naked hottubbing with the stewardesses in Chicago. His father denied it all, and had confided to Will that he didn’t dare even go out to dinner with the crew most nights for fear of raising his mother’s jealous mistrust.