Chris Adrian - The Great Night

He could never properly recall what exactly he was thinking once he got home and was actively preparing to kill himself. He had gotten a gun during one of the deeper downs over Bobby, but it had stayed in his closet the whole time, sending forth invisible rays of comfort. He hadn’t seriously thought he would ever use it, since the most attractive thing about it, aside from the dark burnish of the metal, was how nice it was to think that he could use it, and though it was calming to think sometimes about blowing off his head — even down to particulars of bullet trajectories and splatter patterns and mysteries like whether or not he would hear the gun go off — he shied away from any considered or sustained reflection on being dead. Now, all of a sudden, suicide was all he could think about. He wept and snotted himself into a flash of insight, a whole string of thoughts coming together at once and weaving together effortlessly into a stark truth: Whatever death was, he belonged to it, and wherever it was, he belonged there; now that he had finally really noticed how much it hurt that Bobby was never going to come back, it became a very sensible thing to do; the entirely unbearable world in which countless little children died from cancer and countless ruined parents died to happiness was no place to live, and the unbearable world in which Bobby didn’t love him anymore was no place to live. And running through the center of this weave like a shining silver wire was the sudden unbreakable conviction that there was someplace better, where such things simply never happened, and though death was probably not the way to get there, suicide would express his solidarity with that place.

Even without having practiced, he was quick to assemble and load the gun. He knelt by the window in a crooked rectangle of moonlight. Through his window he could see the park and the hospital, and he stared at them, unblinking and unthinking, as he put the barrel in his mouth, shoving roughly against his palate and pulling the trigger. It only made a sudden tickle in his mouth, which quickly grew frantic. He spit a bug onto the floor, an enormous beetle that shone as if it were made of ink as it crawled leisurely away. Henry threw away the gun — it seemed as disgusting all of a sudden as the bug. He spent the next hour throwing up in the bathroom, too miserable to spare much thought for how strange it was that a beetle had taken up residence in his gun.

Still feeling like he was moving without moving, he slid gratefully past that night, to other terrible nights and days; they went by in such a quick and comprehensive succession that he wondered if he was about to die and asked himself why the agency in charge of such things was declining to show him any of the happy times in his life. The backward way became more and more slippery, and he moved faster and faster, falling toward the misery that was the most spectacular of his life, even if the terrible things that had happened to him in it were all presumed. He risked a look back at last and saw the city rushing toward him, and then the park. He started in his chair as if he had just fallen into it from a height, and spilled his wine. There was a far-off crash, barely discernible.

“Why are you just sitting here?” someone asked him, breaking his reverie. There was a little man standing on his plate.

“Where did you come from?” Henry asked him. “Are you dessert?” The little man poked at his face with a knife, and Henry flinched and ducked. “Don’t touch me,” he said, not very forcefully.

“What are you even doing here in the first place? Who let you in? Never mind!” he said, when Henry started to answer. “I already know. Are you waiting here to die?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said. “Why are you yelling at me?”

“Mortals!” the little man said. “Mortals everywhere. Isn’t it enough that the world is ending tonight? Did you have to come in and pollute everything with your smell?” He drew back his knife and sniffed aggressively at Henry, making a disgusted face that was shortly mitigated by curiosity. “What have you been eating?” the little man asked, sniffing all up and down Henry’s arm.

“Chicken,” Henry said. “I think.”

“Liar!” the little man said. “Liar! Why am I standing here listening to your lies when my Lady is waiting for her knife? Why are you trying to distract me?”

“Why are you so angry?” Henry asked, shying away sideways from the swiping knife.

“Because everything is so horrible !” the little man said, and ran off down the table and out of the opposite end of the room.

“You’re going the wrong way!” Henry called after him, but there was no answer except for another far-off crash and a faint roar. Henry picked up another bottle of wine and left his chair. He examined the abundance of doorways leading from the room, some just arches over darkness, some rude holes, and some closed with heavy curtains or richly carved doors. He picked a door, dark oak carved with a pair of faces, one laughing and one crying, like theater masks but exceptionally detailed and lovely faces, a man and a woman. The door mirrored his state of mind, since he felt very much like he contained opposites, and yet he thought there could be no illustration of the dissociation in which those opposite emotions were suspended in him. He didn’t really know what that face would look like.

The door opened directly on the lushly appointed wreck of a bedroom. The room was the size of a small house, the boatsized bed floating in pieces in the middle of a giant sea-blue rug. It was more of a cave than the other rooms he’d seen — the walls were hewn stone and the floor, where not covered by rugs, was mossy — yet it was grander than all the other rooms, despite the fact that the paintings and hangings were slashed and trampled. The single occupant wasn’t grand at all, though. Molly, the girl who kept saying nothing was real, was sitting slouched on the foot of the bed, her face veiled by her hair, crying into her lap. Across the room, from a hole that looked hardly big enough for a dachsund to wriggle through, Will the handsome pudge came slithering out to collapse in a pile on the floor.

Henry knew what was going to happen before it happened. He saw what was coming, and chose not to stop it. Before he sat down on the bed on Molly’s left and Will sat down on her right, before Will looked at him and then lifted the crying girl’s chin with his hand, before he kissed her and then turned her face to Henry so he could kiss her too, he saw it all happen, and knew — or rather remembered —that it was the faerie wine and the faerie bed, in addition to whatever regular drunken horniness they might each contain, that was responsible, though how he remembered that about wine he’d never drunk before, and a bed he’d never snuck into before, he was still just barely choosing not to know. In a twirling flash of images the montage of fucking came and went, before anybody removed their clothes, or tasted skin, or pushed with their hips, or came. And yet it all happened just as he saw it, because of magic or because these two lovers were bound to his will or because of luck, but it was for a different reason that he knew how it would end, because he could feel the monster moving in time with his heart, getting ever closer though the sympathetic hill tried to thwart it with mazes and dead ends and chambers of carnivorous toads. So when they were done, and when they had all woken from a brief nap, it was no surprise but no less of a terror to see the black dog standing at the foot of the bed.

“There you are,” it said, and leaped at them.

The boy walked out of Buena Vista Park not knowing his name or where he was from or why he was crying. He didn’t know if he had forgotten this information or if he had simply never known it at all. Standing on the steps into the park, it felt like the first time he had thought about such things, and it was hard to keep such questions— Who am I? Where am I going? — in his head. His thoughts were crowded with the image of a weeping dog, a black Lab puppy with enormous brown eyes crying giant, perfectly formed tears. He knew dogs didn’t cry, just as he knew that a boy should know his name, yet what bothered him was not how strange it was that a dog should cry but that the dog was sad. Somebody ought to be cuddling it to make it feel better. Maybe that was why he was sad, he thought: because the dog was sad. But whose dog was it?