Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“I don’t know,” Henry said. Ryan was flushed. In the light from the flashlight he looked orange.

“What was that ?”

“I don’t know!” Henry said, because there wasn’t any way he could put it into words, and then he became something that wouldn’t have to answer the question because it couldn’t talk. A black rat fled away down the tunnel.

“Bring me a peach,” the lady said.

Henry kept walking through the hall, hoping she was talking to somebody else. He tried to stay away from her, because she scared him. She was around all the time, but she wasn’t hard to avoid; you heard about her or saw her somewhere every day, but it was like seeing the president on television or hearing about what he was saying or doing, and most days talking to her was a similarly remote possibility. He was beneath notice.

“Boy,” she said, just before Henry made it to the door out of the hall, “are you deaf? I want a peach.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Henry said. The peaches, large and round and soft, were piled on a table much closer to her than to him, but he didn’t complain. He selected one from the top and took it to her, staring at his feet as he approached. She was sitting in her high-backed chair. He saw her bare white feet, and noticed how different they looked from his, which were filthy, and how nice her toenails were, perfectly rounded on the edges and painted with mother-of-pearl. She grabbed his face when he was close and raised it to hers, but he did not look her in the eye.

“What’s this?” she said.

“A peach,” he said. “Like you asked for.”

“Not that,” she said. “This.” She slid her fingers down his chin and drew them to a point just beneath his chin, catching something there and then plucking it out. She showed him the hair.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A hair.”

“I said you were ripe,” she said. “And now you’re spoiled. Puck can choose another slave.”

“I’m not his slave,” Henry said. “I’m his friend.”

“You are a slave. Puck has no tender feelings. It’s time to throw you back, little fish.”

“What?” Henry said.

“I don’t repeat myself,” she said. “Ask the stones, if they listen better than you do.” She got up and swept away, her bare feet sounding very loud in Henry’s ears as they fell on the stone floor.

“What?” Henry said. “What?” He threw the peach at her, not staying to see if it found its mark, and ran away calling the name of his friend.

Henry was the guest of honor at the Great Night celebration. “ Guest is the wrong word, of course,” Mike said. “This is your home. But tonight you are the most special boy — tonight you matter more than anyone else.” It was because he was the youngest and the freshest, the most recent of the exiles in the house on Fourteenth Street. That meant everyone was supposed to be especially nice to him, and hug him every time they saw him, and contribute a present to a pile that had formerly sat on the feasting table but now, in a brand-new tradition, sat under the tree. But when Ryan saw him that morning, he didn’t even talk to him, let alone give him a hug, and the other boys avoided him too. Only Mike embraced him, and he did it so often and so vigorously that it started to feel oppressive. Henry spent the whole afternoon out of the house, walking around in the Castro, playing a game with himself of stealing various items from stores and then returning them to the shelves an hour later. It was something he thought Ryan would enjoy.

He came home barely in time for dinner. That was rude, since it excused him from all the final preparations, but then again, as guest of honor, he wasn’t actually obligated to help today. No one seemed to mind that he had been gone; they smiled and wished him a happy day, and Peaches told him he could hardly wait to give him his present. Ryan didn’t talk to him, but he didn’t scold him either. Still, Henry found he couldn’t enjoy his seat of honor at the banquet, and he wasn’t hungry enough to do more than poke at the jelly beans and toast and popcorn on his plate. He watched Ryan, who was the only person, besides himself, who didn’t look like he was having a wonderful time, but Ryan, clear down at the other end of the table, never looked back at him.

“How is this night different from all other nights?” Mike asked, and the answers started to roll from around the table. Ryan had told Henry that no one really knew: the celebration was something that Mike had remembered from his time under the hill, but he never could remember what it was about, only that there had been a great feast, and music, and the exchange of gifts. “It’s fucking stupid,” he had said. Henry had taken him to mean the curse of forgetting, and not the holiday they aped in ignorance, but now, watching Ryan frown and pout over his plate, he thought the celebration disappointed Ryan, so he let it disappoint him too. The talk of why the night was special became once again talk of why the boys were special, and Henry wanted to raise his hand and ask if he could have a holiday from being special, because that night he didn’t feel lucky at all to be that way.

“The rest is a mystery,” he said, when his turn came to speak. It was what Mike had told him to say.

“But not forever!” the others all said in chorus, and they raised their beers in a toast to Henry and the Great Night. Then they marched out to the tree and danced around it once in a ring before Mike said it was time for Henry to open his presents, which were really, he reminded them, everybody’s presents.

“Best for last!” said Peaches, holding his back from the rest. The others gave him a black feather, a shirt made out of tiny flowers, a stick stripped of its bark, and a variety of other natural curiosities that were more or less interesting. Henry sat on the ground to open them, and placed them carefully to his left or right. Ryan hung back, and while the other boys shouted out in turn to identify their gifts, he was silent. Finally only Peaches’s gift was left. Henry opened the box and lifted out some fruit, a banana and two oranges glued together; it took him a moment to understand what it was supposed to look like, but the other boys were already laughing.

“We thought you would enjoy peeling that banana!” Peaches said, in between guffaws. Mike stared about, confused. Ryan was laughing too. He wasn’t laughing very hard, and he was doing it without smiling, but he was still laughing.

“What? What? What?” Mike said, as Henry ran away into the house. Mike chased after him but Henry was faster, and he made use of the fireman’s pole to get to the basement and his bicycle and then to the street. Mike was in the upstairs doorway flanked by boys and shouting something at Peaches. Henry pedaled away, but found before he had even crossed Valencia Street that he couldn’t go fast enough, so he left the bicycle in the road and ran as a rat, a dog, a rabbit, and a pony all the way up to Market Street. When he got there he was a boy again, and he looked like any other messy child sitting on the sidewalk crying into his sleeve, unusual only in that kids like him rarely wandered out of the Haight. He was thinking of them all dancing around the tree without him, as dogs and cats, as mice and chickens and voles, as alligators and crocodiles, as otters and bears and wolves, the colored streamers dragging on their fur. He wanted to turn them all to stone, or cheese, or air, to make them all go away, but though he pictured his furious will arching over the neighborhoods between here and there he knew he couldn’t touch them. He hardly thought of Ryan at all in his anger, though that wasn’t because he was spared, in the dozen plans of violent revenge he conceived and dismissed as he sat crying on the corner. A voice intruded on a vision of the tree in flames.