Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Yes,” Henry said, because he could picture himself touching the earth to make it sand, or even making a door at the end of the tunnel that would open onto the place that Ryan could go.

“When we’re done,” Ryan said, “we could go back for the others and let them know. If we wanted to.”

“Okay,” Henry said, but at first he didn’t want to because he was scared, and he thought that might be why he failed. Mike said it was okay to be afraid of what was under the hill, and Henry was afraid, but much more than he was afraid of the place he wanted to go back to it. There was suddenly no way to measure how much he wanted to go back. He remembered a noise of bells, so clearly that he looked to Ryan to see if he had heard them too, but he was still just staring at him with the flashlight under his chin, looking spooky and expectant and hopeful.

“Magic is change,” the dog said. “Do you understand?”

“No,” Henry said.

“Observe,” the dog said. He leaned close to a teapot in the center of the room, an isolated chamber they’ d come to only after an hour of walking under the hill, and barked at it. It became a vase full of flowers. He barked again, and it was a swarm of bees, hovering in a globe that shaped itself now as a dog and now as the image of Henry’s face. He barked again and it was a baby elephant. He barked again and it was a rough piece of stone. “Now do you understand?”

“No,” Henry said again.

“Well,” the dog said, leaping over the stone and jumping up to lick Henry’s face, “you will. I’m an excellent teacher, and we have all the time in the world for you to learn.”

In the middle of the summer they all celebrated the Great Night. The boys talked about it for weeks before it happened. “It’s like Christmas but better than Christmas,” Ryan said, and Peaches said, “Christmas is so fucking lame.” Mike seemed continually overjoyed in the days leading up to the feast. “Forget everything you know about holidays,” he told Henry, which wasn’t that hard to do.

It felt most different from the holidays that Henry remembered because nobody else celebrated it. The windows in the shops on Castro Street looked the same way they always did, and nothing special hung from the streetlamps on Market Street, and no one Henry saw on the street exhibited any holiday cheer. More than ever, coming home to the house on Fourteenth Street felt like walking into a different world, because the whole house was hung with decorations, braided flowers and glass beads and birds in little cages that Mike kept catching in the garden. The garden was the last part of the house to get decorated. Henry helped Ryan hang ribbons on the tree. Henry passed ribbons to Ryan, who stood on a ladder to reach the highest silver branches. Warm days made the tree smell, which tended to attract them all to it, and an 85-degree afternoon might find them all standing around it taking deep, low, sniffing breaths through their noses. Henry rested his head against the trunk, breathing in the odor of the tree. He could smell Ryan, too — something like pickle juice and the warm inside of a car.

“Want to go for a bike ride?” Henry asked.

“Later,” Ryan said, a little harshly. He was up in the tree, tying long silk ribbons to the branches. They had gone to the hill the night before, and aside from a little mundane digging, Henry had failed once again to help Ryan with his tunnel. Henry frowned.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

“Don’t be stupid,” Ryan said, and asked him to hand up more ribbon. Henry climbed up with it instead, and they decorated together, tying ribbons as carefully as you would into a little girl’s hair. They went high in the tree, and the leaves were thick enough now that you could hardly see through them to the house. Henry pretended that he and Ryan were not just the only people in the tree but the only people in the house, that they lived there together with nothing but the garden and the furniture and each other for company.

There was more work to do even after every branch was done, but they snuck away instead of helping Mateo where he was coloring the water of the hot tub or Greg where he was carefully wrapping a chain of flowers around the gazebo posts. They took their bikes and rode for a while in widening circles around the house, a few pacing laps before Ryan broke away and sprinted up Fifteenth Street. On the other side of Market they took Sanchez to Steiner, and then went up Fell to the Panhandle, riding against the traffic and ignoring people when they honked and cursed. They stopped a few times on the way to the park for random robberies. They all had the whole week off, to get ready for the holiday, so what they stole from one house they left in the next, and they took what was interesting or pretty without any thought for its value or whether Mike could sell it: they took a stuffed owl from a tall narrow Victorian near the corner of Lyon and Fell and left it perched on a toilet in the house next door, and they transferred all the linens in that house to a condominium down the street.

Despite its size and the variety of diversions it contained, Golden Gate was an inferior park. It was boring for the obvious reason, and also because it wasn’t off limits. Henry liked passing through it better than anything else, taking his bike off the paved roads and bumping over roots and rocks that would have popped the tires of any other boy on any other bike, and he liked ending a ride at the sea because it felt like they had raced to the end of the world. They met the incoming fog halfway through the park. It was high, and looked as solid as a wall, and Henry wondered if he could make it be a wall. He restrained himself but made Ryan stop to be buffalo, because of the way they looked in the fog, and they shuffled about for a while and mingled with the other gray shapes. I’m looming , Henry thought, leaning forward and sideways and forward again. Ryan, quickly bored, was a boy in the center of the herd, staring down a shaggy bull. Henry knocked him over with his enormous head.

It was getting dark by the time they came to the beach, and they wondered to each other if they were going to be in trouble for skipping out on the work of decorating; there were whole floors of the house where no ribbons or crepe or flower chains had been hung, and whole hallways that Mike had said must be carpeted in sod, and now with night falling they had barely twenty-four hours until the celebration would begin. They hurried back but still stopped at the hill, which could be construed to be on the way home, and dug. Henry tried a new trick every time they came, but nothing was really any more helpful than digging with a spoon: if he made a door it only opened on more damp earth. They had made a lot of progress, but Henry went back to undo their work every day they did it, because now he was afraid of how disappointed Ryan would be when they dug clear through to the other side of the hill, as he thought they must. And he didn’t want the digging to end.

The tunnel was wide enough now that they could dig side by side, and high enough that they could kneel next to each other as they worked, but it was still cramped. Henry could feel Ryan’s shoulder working against his shoulder as he scraped at the dirt.

“I think it’s getting late,” Henry said. “Maybe we should go.”

“In a minute,” Ryan said. “I’ve got a good feeling all of a sudden.”

“Okay,” Henry said. And after a few more strokes with his spoon he said, “This is nice.”

“Huh?”

“This is nice,” he said again. “The digging.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And necessary.” Henry turned his head and tried to kiss him. Ryan pushed him away, but in the cramped space he didn’t go far. “What was that?” Ryan asked.