Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Sure,” she said.

“That’s not the moon,” he said. “There’s another moon — a better moon — behind that one.” It was bloodred and pumped up grotesquely, just coming up over the bay, so she thought he meant there was a regular moon, calmer and prettier and looking less like it should shine over a battlefield, but that wasn’t what he meant. “It shines on a whole different world, where you can do things you can’t do here.” They were both pretty drunk — or at least she was; no matter how much Ryan drank he never slurred or stumbled — but their conversations often got weirder after he had been drinking. So she was content not to know what he was talking about and just guess at his meaning. Whenever this happened, whenever he talked in a way that only appeared to invite a reply from her, she thought how nice it was still to be with him, how handsome he looked when he was wistful, or how his eyes sparkled when he looked like he was about to cry, though he never did cry. It was easy to distract herself that way when she was drunk, and when she was sober she never dwelled on these conversations until it was too late to extract a useful lesson from them about the character of her boyfriend. “Do you know what I mean?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He sighed. “The other moon shines on the better world.”

“And on the better people?” she asked.

“Exactly,” he said. She tried to imagine that better world, that better stretch of the Embarcadero and the better Ryan and Molly who inhabited it. Ryan was not so different, but she imagined herself as someone who didn’t have to flee her profession, and imagined the different, better past that had shaped her.

Then there was the physical evidence, less what he said and more what he made or did. It didn’t always substantiate her theory that she was somehow not enough ; more often it was only evidence that he was kind of weird, but sometimes the weirdness was part of a general tendency to lay his attention in strange places, and this was a process in which she never could participate, because he did it secretly, or at least he thought that he did. She found notes scattered around the house, pieces of paper torn from notebooks or scraps torn from cereal boxes, the blank side covered with a list of flowers and fruit: Buttercup, Radish, Acorn . There was a door in the cluttered basement that he told her led to a room where he kept his “art projects,” but when she looked inside one day when he was gone she only found one picture, drawn in chalk on the stone floor, of a round wooden door, meticulously detailed down to the shining highlights on its brass doorknob, the whole thing stamped on and smeared as if he’d been angry at it. She woke sometimes to find him missing from the bed, and looking out the window she watched him standing naked in the garden, staring up at the moon, or peeing on the plants, and once leaning with one arm against the gold and silver tree while he used his free hand to masturbate. He had a tendency to hop every now and then as they walked, even in the absence of any obstacle, and she never totally understood what he was doing until she saw him one night in the garden doing the same thing, step-step-hopping from one end of the garden to the other, throwing up his arms with the hop and arching his back, and — recognizing the motion from her own dreams — she realized he was trying to fly.

This was all okay with her. Eventually, she came to think it had been too okay. She ought to have called down to ask him what he was doing when he appeared to be having sex with his tree. She ought to have asked where he was trying to get to through the door in the floor, and asked what was so special about the word Doorknob that he should feel compelled to write it down a hundred times on the blank side of a torn-up cereal box. But it didn’t seem like her business yet, to pry out all his secrets when he wasn’t yet inclined to volunteer them to her, especially since he had secrets that were as hidden to him as they were to her. Never mind that she already felt like she had volunteered all of hers. She didn’t imagine that such confidences, beyond the easy ones, were currency to trade with each other in achieving intimacy. And anyway, mysterious drawings and list-making and even semi-public nocturnal emissions were all clues that pointed someplace strange but not disgusting, weird but not illegal. She hadn’t found a limb in the basement, or a pair of bloody panties under the mattress, or even stray traces of lipstick on his collar.

And she hoped, anyway, that he would come to find what she had found, and feel what she felt, which was that there were always going to be intimations from the world that there was more to be had, something different and something better, beyond what they were sharing together. It was his loveliest gift to her, and one she was trying as hard as she could to give back to him, the special and certain knowledge that those intimations were just life trying to fake you out again, when in fact it didn’t get any better than this. It didn’t get any better than the two of them.

Waiting to surprise him, she thought, This is going to be the first day of the rest of your life , and that was the real surprise, not the fact that your sister and Salome and a few friends and a few more acquaintances were lurking in your garden waiting to shout at you. Surprise! Everything is actually okay. Surprise! You can stop looking for more. Surprise! I love you so much. That was the biggest surprise of all, the depth of inexhaustible feeling for him that she had in her, and when he walked in the door and she looked at him she would have that feeling she had every day, of being perpetually startled by it.

“Maybe you should give him a call,” Salome said, but he didn’t answer when she called, then or in the seven times she called in the following hour, and he didn’t come home until after the last guest was long gone, even his sister and the unexpectedly faithful Salome, who stayed and worried with her after Carolina took her casual leave from them, saying, “He’s a flake, and birthdays aren’t important in our family. Don’t take it personal.” Salome drank so much white wine that she departed at last as well, curling up beneath the picnic table Molly had rented for the party and placed underneath the golden oak. Molly sat with her head in her hands, eventually not worrying anymore about whether or not Ryan was safe, and not caring anymore about all the wasted expense of food and alcohol and premium confetti, and feeling almost, by the time Ryan finally came home, walking through the gate wheeling his bicycle at his side, like she didn’t care about anything at all, like if he had been just five minutes later, she would never have cared about him, or be hurt by what he did or didn’t do, again.

“What did I miss?” he asked, looking around at the food on the table and the balloons on the banisters and the ribbons in the tree, and Molly burst into tears.

W ill was starting to enjoy being lost, or at least he was starting to get so used to it that it didn’t really bother him. He found that he could enjoy the continuous surprises more than he worried about them. The farther he ran, the less he felt pursued, and at last it was more the pressure of his mission to find a sapling for Carolina’s garden that drove him forward than fear of the monster who was chasing him, and as he penetrated into the deeper chambers of wonder beneath the hill, be began to take time to look around. His drunkenness served both to insulate him from the strangeness and to sharpen his appreciation of it. And the drunkenness brought tears of concern for his lost erstwhile comrades, lovely Molly and handsome Henry and the three dear horrible little elves, but the tears were intermittent, and sometimes he wept with awe instead of sadness.