Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Right,” Bobby said, though he wasn’t, really, or at least he was getting better in such infinitesimal increments that he appeared to be standing more or less frozen on the road to recovery. He made the occasional visit to his psychiatrist, separated sometimes by weeks or months, and all they had really worked out in a year and a half was that Henry had a complicated relationship with his mother, and the unmemory of his lost childhood was ruining his life in exactly the way she foretold that it would. They never got to the part where they decided what to do about it; Henry’s truancy generated a lot of false starts, though it felt to him that just showing up was brave effort, and talking repeatedly about things he already knew was progress.

He went up the stairs, sloshing the mop back and forth as he vacated each step, and washing the banisters as he went. When he got to the second floor he pushed the bucket in steps with his feet to the windows, where he paused to sponge the glass and the sills, picking up real filth now in addition to the imaginary kind, watching children at play in the playground across the street. It was late in July, and a series of holes in the ground spewed water into the air in rhythmic intervals, the noise of the water and the delighted screaming of the children sounding like a conversation. It was cheery work, for all that he was laboring in the service of his miserable obsession; cleaning made him happy and having someplace that could be made clean made him happy. He thought he understood how Snow White could have gone so cheerfully about her work, though her situation, when you gave it any amount of thought, was terribly grim.

“Let’s have a party,” Bobby said, and Henry said, assuming it would be a party of two, “That’s a great idea. What are we celebrating?”

“Nothing,” Bobby said. “Our friends.”

“Maybe we should wait for an occasion,” Henry said, thinking of all the people crowding into Bobby’s small apartment, the hands everywhere that might have been touching the ground or the mail. And their friends were all Bobby’s friends; it might make more sense for him to celebrate them by himself, someplace else, one of their houses or perhaps even in a rented hall. “My birthday,” Henry said, “is only a few months away.” At which time he could, if he wanted, ask for a cancellation as a present.

“That’s a terrible idea,” Bobby said.

“No, it’s not,” Henry said. “People have been having birthday parties forever.”

“I mean the waiting,” Bobby said. Henry shrugged, and they continued to negotiate, but a few weeks later they had a dinner party. It was just a few people, and Henry won the right to ask them all to take off their shoes and leave them in the hall when they arrived, a precaution that turned out not to be enough, since some of them trod on the porch in their socks and then walked inside, and anyhow who knew what they did in their socks at home? Henry did a bad job with the minuscule portion of hosting that was allotted to him, and he was sullen though he didn’t mean to be sullen. But there was such a high pitch of anxiety abuzz in his brain that it was hard to listen to what people were saying, and hard to care if they had recently become engaged or gone to Morocco or treated a sassy child for diabetes or found a lovely purse at a garage sale. He only had attention for their feet.

Bobby was furious after they left, unreasonably so, Henry thought, since he had warned him he was likely to fail at this and he had tried, in his way, to appear normal. “I’ll just go out if you have a party,” Henry said, very reasonably, “and mop when I come back.” Bobby could not even reply to that until he had finished washing the dishes, at which point he started in on a familiar course, saying very carefully before he offered any criticism how much he loved Henry, how he thought Henry was the best thing that ever happened to him, and how the vision he had for them, with which Henry consistently refused to cooperate, was a vision of happiness for both of them, not just for himself. There followed a discourse about guests and friends and the recipe from an African cookbook and orphan children who might one day be adopted by them as a couple, children who would roll on the floor and put shoes in their mouths and probably run to give the postman a hug regardless of whether he was delivering bad news or good. You and me and a bottle of ammonia, he said. It’s fine for now. It’s fine for now, but what about the children?

“Maybe I’m too crazy to be in a relationship,” Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby’s familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it’s not enough for you or even Why can’t my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.

Henry swabbed the living room floor in broad strokes with feelings of piratey good cheer. He stopped and crossed to the kitchen, then worked back from there to the foot of the stairs up to the third floor. Bobby had seen the place already — he’d helped him pick it out — but Henry had an ascending sense of excitement, as he mopped and mounted the stairs, over having Bobby here when it was properly clean. He had been living for weeks at Bobby’s, and it was going to be lovely to have him as a guest in his house and his bed. The long sojourn at his apartment had made Henry feel like he was a guest in Bobby’s life, when they should really be taking turns visiting each other’s lives. He had tried to explain the notion to Bobby, but he didn’t really get it. “But we’re not just visiting ,” he said.

“Of course not!” Henry said, but when Bobby asked him what he meant exactly, he’d changed the subject. “Let’s go somewhere,” he said. Taking a trip was something Bobby had been asking about. Henry had already consented to going camping, though it meant sleeping on the ground, because postmen didn’t go into the wilderness, and if he was careful about his packing, and if they were both careful about where they stepped on the way to the car, they might actually leave the larger part of the contamination in Cambridge, and Henry would be relatively normal for the trip. Bobby wanted to go out to Yellowstone, but that was too close by far to San Francisco. He pushed a finger across the map that Bobby had spread out on the table, but try as he might it would go no farther than Nevada. So they settled on Zion, and Henry, demurring and delaying, postponed the trip for months, and Bobby stopped asking about it until Henry brought it up again that day.

They were on their way within a week, Bobby having finalized the travel arrangements before Henry could change his mind or think of a convincing reason to delay. They changed their shoes in an airport bathroom, Henry wrapping away the Cambridge shoes in layers of insulating plastic, then stowing them in their own special bag. That feat of enabling accommodation put Bobby in a foul mood for the long drive out to the park, but he was soon cheered by the abundance of natural wonder and by Henry’s increasing ease. San Francisco seemed far enough away, and all the old filth of his life seemed adequately contained and controlled, so Henry took a vacation from his compulsions. He still didn’t like the floor, and there were some rituals to be observed in their little cabin, but walking up the Narrows with Bobby, hand in hand on the empty stretches, it bothered him not at all to be wading in river water that flowed over other people’s shoes, in which they walked through lives that might or might not have taken them through the Cambridge post office, or even through San Francisco. Some of the unseen upstream hikers might even be postmen, but he declined to even think about that and was able to appreciate instead how nice it was to go step by uncertain step over the slippery underwater rocks, and push against the current, and come through a tight canyon, the sides of which they could touch with their outstretched arms, into a clear sunstruck pool under an expanse of limitless blue sky.