Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Oh, yes,” said the dog. “I promise.”

The tree got bigger every day. In two weeks it was a gangly sapling as tall as Henry; in four it reached as high as the third-floor porches; in six it had started to fill out. The trunk was as thick as Henry’s leg, and though it grew in the exact center of the garden you could stand on the porches and almost touch the golden leaves. Mike said he thought it would bloom before the middle of summer. It looked like it had been in the garden for years, which seemed right somehow to Henry, since he felt as if he had lived for years at the big green house. It felt like he had been sleeping for years in the big bed, and eating dinner every night at the big table, and listening for years as Mike reminded them every night that they all belonged someplace else, and feeling every night despite that that there could be no place else he belonged. The memories he had of his mother and father and sister seemed infinitely remote. He wondered sometimes if they had ever even existed; they were more unlikely, somehow, than the faeries who had kidnapped him, and there was no proof beyond his memories, while the faeries’ gift transformed every day.

They had a picnic around the tree one Sunday, which was their day off, since people generally stayed in their houses that day. They covered the grass with half a dozen quilts and bedspreads. Ryan and Henry sat on a Star Wars quilt, and because of the picture it displayed Henry could not keep himself from picturing Peaches with his hair done up in double Danishes clinging to Mike’s leg as Mike held a turkey leg aloft. He told Ryan about it in a whisper and they laughed.

“What’s funny?” asked Mike, seated cross-legged on a Ziggy blanket.

“Everything,” Ryan said.

“Nothing,” said Henry.

“There are no secrets in this house,” Mike said. It was a rare hot summer day, and he had been drinking in the heat for an hour, so he sweated and slurred.

“This house is made of secrets,” Ryan said. “Have you looked in the basement lately?”

“There is a difference,” Mike said, “between what is not known and what is not shared.” He frowned and belched. Henry, afraid that an argument was brewing, reached over to Mike’s blanket and turned a can into a bottle. “For instance,” Mike said, sticking a finger in the bottle and lifting it to point at Henry. “For instance . How did you do that, Bubba?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said, which was almost true, so he added, “A dog taught me.” He knew there must be more to it than that, but much as he wanted to tell them why he could do something the rest of them couldn’t, he didn’t know how; they could all change themselves, but changing something else was beyond them. It seemed like a comparatively boring trick to Henry — he could only do it with small things, and whatever he changed never strayed out of its type, so a can could become a bottle and a bike could become a pony but a knife could not become a pen, and the changes were never permanent. But Mike was wonderstruck and some of the boys were jealous.

“That,” said Peaches, “is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” It was what he always said when Henry talked about the dog.

“It’s all I remember,” Henry said. “A dog. A black dog.”

“I remember your gay lover,” said Peaches. “That’s who taught you.”

“Hey,” said Ryan. “Fuck you.”

“Fuck you right back, fag,” Peaches said, and Mike stood up, stepping on plates and kicking bottles and wobbling a little before he settled his back against the tree. He looked down at them with his face flushed and sweat shining in the roots of his beard.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Don’t you understand what you’ve got to do? Haven’t I taught you a thing? You’ve got to be good to each other, because nobody else is ever going to understand.” He turned to Peaches. “One of them took a shine to him in there, and you think that means he’s lucky now? That just makes it harder. I keep telling you. I keep telling you. The tricks are wonderful, but listen, they’re not enough. That other thing — I can’t even think of the name for it! — is more horrible than the tricks are wonderful, and you know what that means!” He didn’t ask it like a question, so none of them tried to answer. “It means you have to be good to each other forever. It means you have to be good to each other or else you won’t have anybody to remind you what happened and tell you what’s the matter with you, and nobody to keep you from getting — all stretchy, you see?” He turned and bent, wobbling, and put his face close to Peaches’s face. “You get all stretchy, you see? Like a rubber band. Tighter and tighter until—” He raised a finger and a thumb to his temple—“Blam!” They all jumped. “Anyway,” Mike said, “you have to be good to each other. That’s all I’m saying.” He slid down the tree, sat with his knees drawn up to his chest, and started to cry. The noise of his weeping mixed with the strange ululating call of Peaches’s rare bird, which had taken up residence at the top of the tree as soon as he let it out of the cage, but the boys were all quiet until Ryan moved forward on his knees and gave Mike a hug. “Cheer up, boss,” he said, and the others all did the same, not one after the other but all at once, so they made a heap.

Much later, after Mike had sobered up and directed them in a set of games where gerbils and hamsters raced the perimeter of the garden while he played the theme from Chariots of Fire on the kazoo, and a little herd of cats swarmed in the tree, trying to touch Peaches’s bird with a paw but not hurt it, after another meal and other games inside, after Mike had become drunk again, not just on beer it seemed to Henry but on their good behavior toward one another, and after they had all fallen asleep in the big bed, Ryan woke Henry up.

He put a hand over Henry’s mouth, and led him by gestures into the basement for their bikes and then out of the house, and didn’t speak until they were out on the street. “You can’t tell where we’re going,” he said. “We’d get in so much trouble with Mike. You have to promise.” Henry promised, and followed him as he pedaled up Seventeenth Street, not slowing until after it crossed Castro, and then only because the hill was so steep. He turned off at Roosevelt, where Henry was distracted by the spectacular view as they rode along the edge of the hill. He had figured out where they were going by then, but instead of thinking about it he added the view to all the other views of the city he’d stored up in his head. As they rode around for work, Ryan was always stopping them to take in some vista of the city, from the top of Alamo Square or Twin Peaks or just as they were about to plunge down into the Marina, and he’d say the same thing every time: “This whole city is ours!” He meant there was nowhere they couldn’t go and nothing they couldn’t take, but half the time, in half of the incredible sweeping views, Buena Vista was the obtrusive exception.

They walked their bikes up the last part of the hill, which got so steep that Henry thought his bike was about to turn upside down. There was no wind coming down the Duboce Steps, but they walked by them. Henry closed his eyes, trying to pick up another scent beneath the eucalyptus and cypress, but he couldn’t. Ryan left his bike in the bushes a few hundred yards past the steps and then started up the hill on foot. Henry followed him without being told, sometimes hauling himself up hand over hand and thinking that four legs would be better than two but not making the change. After five minutes of climbing, Ryan stopped at a flat rock in the shape of an arrow and pushed it aside. He slipped into the tunnel it was hiding, but this time he had to call twice before Henry followed him. It wasn’t very long, but it was wide. At the end of it they could almost lie shoulder to shoulder. Ryan had a flashlight, which he waved around, now on the earth or a root and now on his face or Henry’s face. “I’ve been working on it for a year,” he said. “You’re the only one I ever showed, but I figured you could make it easier. I know I’m headed the right way, but who knows how deep I’ll have to go. It could be forever deep, you know? But I thought you could make it easier. You know what I mean?”