Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Henry swabbed the third floor, from the bathroom (the tub had been incubating in straight bleach all morning) in the back, to the bedroom in the front, wiping the windows again and contemplating the high view, church spires sticking up here and there above the full trees, and all the leaves looking very shiny and full in the late-afternoon heat. He mopped carefully around and under the bed, suddenly afraid that he was missing places, spots that might border on microscopic and yet still be big enough to contain a leaven of taint sufficient to ruin the whole apartment again. He briefly considered going downstairs and starting again, watching carefully this time to make sure the mop was always heavy and always wrote wide, confluent lines of solvent across the floor, but with an effort he smothered the worry. That was what he meant when he told Bobby he was getting better, that he didn’t have to do this twice, and that he understood, even if understanding did nothing to set him free, that all the ritual and care were for nothing and did nothing to address or ameliorate what was actually wrong with him. In a few more passes — stylish, now, but careful — he had mopped himself into the enormous walk-in closet and finally into a half-moon of dry floor in the corner. He unslung a pair of brand-new house shoes from around his neck and stepped into them carefully on the clean part of his floor, then picked up the old shoes with one hand and finished the mopping with the other. Something settled in him as the last bit of floor was covered. He took a deep breath, and meant to sigh, but the fumes made him cough instead.

His mother called just after he had taken a shower, and he slipped and slid on his bleached feet as he hurried to the phone, not to answer it — it would be a terrible idea to talk to her now, just when everything was finally all clean — but to place a bowl over the phone to contain any emanations that might escape from it as she left him one of her long voice mails, enumerating the days that had passed since they talked last and giving an interim account of her life, not always in synopsis, which Henry never deleted without playing, though sometimes he let the message play under a pile of clothes, or from within a cabinet, so he could say with some degree of honesty that he had listened to it.

There were still a few steaming puddles on the floor when Bobby came up the floating staircase and dutifully stepped out of his street shoes into the house shoes, black rubber clogs that Henry had bought new especially for him, Bobby’s eyes were watering despite the open floor-to-ceiling windows. They sat at a new glass dining room table which wasn’t very big, but Henry had set places at its opposite ends, so Bobby felt very far away, and it was a long journey for the soy sauce for their takeout sushi when they passed it back and forth. Bobby slid it across the table to Henry and it toppled and rolled off, not shattering but leaking drops that mixed with a little puddle of aqua regia. “I have another,” Henry said, using his napkin to pick up the bottle and throw it away, but he didn’t actually have more. “It’s bad for you, anyway,” Henry said, and Bobby agreed, but then Henry began to miss the soy sauce more and more, and he only stared at the glistening heap of fish on his plate, from which he’d carefully dissected out the rice, which he’d eat later.

“I have some next door,” Bobby said, and Henry said, “Great. Would you mind terribly?”

“Nope,” Bobby said, and there was nothing aggravated or cranky about the way he folded his napkin and laid his chopsticks down on top of them. He took a little sip of wine and got up, pausing by the head of the stairs to swap out his shoes. But then he turned and looked at Henry again, and Henry always thought that he ought to have noticed something, something to make him panic and pull the save-this-relationship alarm, and say right then that he loved Bobby regardless of whether or not he wore house shoes, and that he loved him more than the aqua regia, and loved him more than the idea of being able to lie in bed at night and feel entirely untouched by all the things that made him feel dirty.

“Are you okay?” he asked Bobby.

“Fine,” Bobby said. “I’ll be right back.” But he left in his house shoes, and he never set foot in that apartment again.

Henry fled much less hastily than the others. Half a moment after Oak said, “Run!” the feasting room was empty and Henry was alone with the chicken bones and the empty glasses and stained napkins. He listened, thinking he could hear a heavy sound of feet falling in time to his own heartbeat, which was loud and quick in his ears. He was terrified and calm in equal measure, which was how he had been feeling all night, but the liquor inflected his feelings a little, so there was something a lot more leisurely about his backsliding breakdown, with the odd taste — foreign and familiar — of faerie wine in his mouth, than there was without it. Something shifted in him, and now he was sliding instead of falling — still backward, though — to old habits of mind and being, but taking with him the regret and the different sort of sadness he had learned as an individual who had been reformed by love and for the sake of love. If he had eyes in the back of his head, he thought, taking another long drink from his glass, he might be able to see where he was going and where this was all going to end up. As it was, he had a feeling that the backslide was going to be epic — maybe it was more of a hope than a feeling — and that his slide would carry him so far backward it would wreck and reshape him even more dramatically than the way forward had, and personal atavism would look even more like progress than progress did.

He flicked the edge of his glass and set it ringing, and a flock of pigeons started from roosts in the walls. They ought to have bumped against the high ceiling, which was painted crudely with stars, but instead they vanished into it, getting smaller and smaller as the stars lit up in groups and the ceiling became an actual sky. Henry looked away, at the multitude of doors all around the table, but he didn’t get up and choose one. Backward and backward , he said to himself, and thought he should catch himself before he slid right into the extraordinary misery of the past year. He held on tight to the arms of his chair but didn’t slow and thought of the long parade of dead children and grieving parents whose awesome sadness he managed to conflate with his own sadness — small and ludicrous by comparison — all year long. Eat up, he said without speaking, imagining them, in reverse order of death, popping into place around the table and falling to, hungry spirits at a bounty. The last was a lovely nineteen-year-old girl who brought coolers of trout with her when she got her chemotherapy, which she caught flycasting in between admissions, to hand out in abundance to the staff, a whole fish for anyone even tangentially involved in her care. The first had been a little trailer-park boy, whose white-trash parents (the mother was called Trudy, a classic trailer-park name, and he could never remember the father’s name) had made Henry perpetually uneasy. They made him want to bleach himself, though he never succumbed to the temptation, even on the day the boy died, when they seemed most dirty and uncanny and unbearable. It had been mere death, he had decided, that had sent him fleeing from the hospital to run all the way home — through this very park — crying the whole way for the death of the boy and the death of his relationship with Bobby. It felt like gross intrusion, to weep like that for the boy — even trailer-park people probably had better manners and minded better boundaries — but he couldn’t stop himself. He came down the hill picturing the boy clearly in his mind, imploring him not to die, but when he blubbered and spoke aloud it was to say, “Please don’t leave me, Bobby.”