Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“You could have put my eye out!” she shouted, the first thing to come into her head.

“The better you would see, then!” he shouted back. He was already on his feet again, making a wobbly threat with the big knife. “Mortals! Always it’s a dream. Maybe you’re the dream. Away! Away! I’ve got more important things to do than babbling with a fool!” He ran off down the long hall with the knife clasped against his chest. Molly thought of a few different things that she could have called after him: You little shit! or I’ll cut you too! or You’re supposed to help me get out! or That’s even more dangerous than running with scissors! But she couldn’t quite find her voice. She stood looking at the blood on her hand, touching her face again, then looking at the blood again. The blood made her feel unbalanced all of a sudden, as if she were about to slip and fall within herself. She clung tighter to the bottle for support and leaned against the stone bier and the sculpture of the boy.

“And who are you ?” she asked him, meaning What do you represent and What is your name and What are you doing here , but it was so hard, looking at him, to think he represented anything but a dead child. It’s so lifelike , she thought, though that seemed like the wrong word for a piece of art that perfectly represented the state of human death. She looked a little closer — the lights in the room seemed to brighten as she did — and understood why he was deathlike, that he was not a triumph of some sculptor’s art, but some undertaker’s. A voice in her head shouted, Don’t touch him! Of course it was the very same sort of voice that used to say such terrible things about her family — she heard it in the very same way — but now it sounded solicitous and panicked instead of snarky and sarcastic and she wondered if it had always meant to look out for her. I won’t , she told it, but she did, and then she ran away too, bouncing against the walls in her unsteady haste. There was a door beyond the bier, after all.

She slammed the door behind her, and stood pressing her back to it to keep it closed, as if the dead boy was going to chase her in here. She looked around. Someone has destroyed Cher’s bedroom , she thought to herself, because the room was in luxurious tatters, and it really looked like the sort of place Cher might sleep, if it weren’t all cut up and smashed. There were jeweled tapestries on the walls, and the furniture was made of lustrous exotic wood, and thick, intricately woven rugs lay three deep on the floor, but the place looked like the lady had erupted in a rage, and wreaked havoc on her luxurious nest with hammer and scissors and ax: the tapestries were in shreds and the furniture was in splinters. Molly walked to the bed, carefully appreciating how white were the sheets and how fluffy were the pillows where they weren’t torn asunder — she had abundant attention to spare for everything but the thing she was trying so hard not to think about. She sat down crooked on the bed — it stood on a single leg, the upper right — and ran her hands along the sheets, marveling at how soft they were, and wondering why they ended abruptly in the middle of the bed. “Oh, no,” she said softly, feeling a shift underneath her, and the remaining leg gave out. The bed crashed to the ground. She kicked her legs out, and bounced once on the mattress. It felt like something shifted and fell inside her at the same time, and she could not ignore any longer how real it felt when her face was cut, and how the little boy’s body had felt hard and dead in a way that nothing, not even her grieving trickster mind, could fake. She cried because that boy was dead, and because children died of neglect and accident and disease and because Ryan had died and because she really had become lost trying to make any sort of enduring sense of why he was dead, and become lost in pursuit of any sort of enduring peace over him, but now she could guess, if the dead boy was real, and the ugly little man was real, and faeries were real and magic was real, and threatening monsters in the size and shape of little boys were real, what Ryan’s picture was doing in that gallery.

Molly threw Ryan a party for his birthday. The planning was slightly complicated by the fact that he seemed to have no friends. She had lost a few herself, in the time that she had been dating him, overly sensitive types who thought silence could only indicate antipathy and who couldn’t understand that when you were in love you were allowed to ignore everyone except for your beloved, at least until the honeymoon was over. And if the honeymoon seemed to go on forever, then they should just be happy for you. She didn’t have enough friends to fill up his gigantic house, but when she included Salome and some Root and Relish co-workers, there were enough to make his garden look full, and even post a person here and there in the first- and second-floor balconies, ready to cast down handfuls of compostable Norwegian confetti of which Salome, in a spasm of generosity, had made Molly a gift. Ryan’s peculiar sister, who looked and acted like his twin even though she was two years older than him, was there too. Arranging for her to come had felt like a coup, since she always seemed at least mildly disapproving of Molly, getting her to return a call or e-mail had been a challenge, and she had reminded Molly three times during their negotiations that birthdays just weren’t that important for their family. “But they’re important to me,” Molly had replied, and not realized until much later how lame that must have sounded. She had meant they were important to us , though she understood that she was throwing the party as much to make that true as to demonstrate that it was true.

“Where could he be?” Salome asked, when Ryan was only ten minutes late for his surprise. She thought tardiness was rude, and it was especially unforgivable to be late for your own party, even if you didn’t know it was happening.

“I’m sure he’s on his way,” Molly said, though he hadn’t replied to the three texts she’d sent him so far. She had formulated a not-very-sophisticated ruse to get him home on time — dinner with Salome, to whom he had taken an unexpected and persistent shine. He said he liked to listen to her because she made him forget about his own troubles. To Salome’s delight, Molly had finally discovered that he was a troubled person (Now you’re really getting to know him! she said). Part of the reason that it took so long was that he wasn’t troubled in exactly the ordinary sense of the word. He had more money than he seemed to know what to do with, and a large strange and spooky house; he loved his family in what seemed like a very straightforward and uncomplicated way; and, remembering and reviewing her training in psychology, she couldn’t really place him on any spectrum of disorder known to the DSM-IIIR. She had been trained in psychology only enough to recognize drastically maladjusted parishioners and to refer them for help if their problems were beyond her limited scope of impotent pastoral practice, but she certainly knew enough to recognize a lunatic, and Ryan wasn’t a lunatic, for all that he sometimes had unusual things to say about the moon. When she evaluated him through the lens of her former profession, she saw a person unable to find a home in his happiness. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate what he had, or feel lucky to have it — he made it plain to her every few weeks or so how much he appreciated his house and his city and, yes, even his shiftless, mildly overweight girlfriend — but she had the sense that none of this was quite enough.

He never actually said it in so many words, or even indicated it in so many actions, but here and there, month by month, he dropped a hint, and by the end of the year he had given her a lot to reflect on. Some of those hints were a little more concrete than others. “See the moon?” he asked her one night as they walked along the Embarcadero.