Chris Adrian - The Great Night

There’s been a murder here, a murder!

Mr. Fancy Feast is dead.

Murder most foul; murder most fancy;

Who killed him?

Was it you or you or you ?

Huff blinked at the sky, open above the walls of fog and full of stars, and then brought his head forward to point with his eyes as well as his fingers. You or you or you —that was just a preliminary motion, meant to tenderize the listener a little before the sharper jabs came later. He and Princess pointed accusatory disco fingers, now at the crowd and now at each other, and Hogg rose up to join them for a dramatic three-person tango, sternly (and somewhat sexily) charging them both to solve the mystery of his death.

Before the day is gone, baby,

Before the play is done, honey,

Find the truth!

Find the truth!

Then he lay down again on his back and put his arms and legs in the air and shook them vigorously before he let them drop with a thud. “Don’t shake like that,” Huff said. “You look like a bug. But turn your head to your side, and make your eyes bug out, and put out your tongue. A little more to the side. Precisely!”

“A lovely dance, my love,” said the lady. “Such grace! How can it be tolerated, on the hill or under it?”

“I dance in my head all the time,” Huff said. “When I’m trying to fall asleep. As a bit of flame, or a tampon on the wind, or a pony. And tonight it’s as easy to do it as to dream it.”

“Well,” she said. They retreated to the bushes once again, to nibble each other’s nipples for a while. His were brown and fat, but she praised them sincerely. “Such beautiful buttons, my love,” she said. Hers were so perfectly formed and such a lovely shade of rose he could hardly believe his eyes when she parted her dress. He brought out a penlight, the better to see them with, and stuck it under her breast, looking to see if it was real. “Do you wish for them to glow?” she asked, and then they both did, with a light that was so warm he could feel it on his face.

“Forgive my doubting, lovely lady!” he said. He put his face between them to make a joyful little speedboat sound. He had almost been arrested, once, for lurking in a Laundromat to press his face into the piles of warm laundry, and now he knew what he had been seeking when he did that, the ideal experience of which that, pleasant as it was, was only a degraded iteration.

“Do pinch them,” he said muffledly, of his own nipples, raising his hands up on either side of her and snapping his fingers like a pair of castanets. He looked up to see her smiling down benevolently on him. “Perfect!” he said, because she was pinching just hard enough and no harder, and who can ever do that at first pinch? But even through the perfect pleasure he heard strains of music and voices arguing. “Duty calls us,” he said, and bowed three times, once to the left breast, once to the right breast, and once to her face. “Shall we have a part two?” he asked her.

“And three and four,” she said. “We would have endless days and nights, my love, if this weren’t the last night. But pleasure has a way of lengthening the hours.”

“I’ve always found it shortens them,” said Huff. “And cold nights are longer than warm ones.” He closed her dress, and took her hand, and led her from behind the bushes in a dance, so everyone would think they were merely rehearsing back there.

Mary and Princess were arguing nearby. “Feather step, feather step, feather step!” Mary said.

“Do-si-do!” said Princess, and did just that, circling Mary but keeping her eyes on Huff the whole time. “Right, boss?” A small crowd, drooping streamers in their hands, surrounded them. Bob and Hogg, dressed respectively as a chair and a couch, were sitting on the ground quietly talking.

“You can’t just make it up as you go along,” said Mary. “That’s not choreography. ”

“You’re just jealous of my moves,” said Princess, and struck Mary with her hip. It was obvious that she meant it in a friendly way, but Mary pushed her. Huff sighed, and thought of all the things he could say, that this dance was very important, that its intricate geometries were meant to hypnotize the Mayor and make him more receptive to the subtle lessons that would come later in the play, that the delightful irony of Furniture dancing with furniture would cause him to let down his guard so the more serious ironies yet to come could strike home. He shook his head, and drew in a breath to scold them with, but caught sight of his lady’s face before he spoke and had a different idea. He held out his hand and she took it. Without speaking, they started to dance, and with their feet and their hips and their jiggly necks showed the quarreling girls and the lazy boys and the crowd of limp-ribboned extras exactly what he meant. They all fell into step, the furniture and the Furniture, following him through the steps he had created, the high-grass kick and the lawnmower and the jackin-the-box and the yoga-master-taffy spin. It wasn’t effortless, but it was so easy he started to cry.

“Why tears, my love?” asked his lady, spinning her hand round and round above her head, so all the little people danced in a ring and waved their ribbons.

“For happiness, of course,” he said, which wasn’t exactly why, so he tried to dance it out, instead, how wonderful and overwhelming it was to want something and to get it.

“Happy or sad,” she said, wiping his tears away, “I cannot bear them.” She drew him away from the crowd, now a self-sustaining choreography, and they went behind another bush.

“What rank delight,” she said, before she blew him.

“Your mouth,” he replied, “is like …” But he could think of nothing to compare it to, and then it seemed rude or ungrateful to try. The lesson of the dance, that words were not necessary, or not enough, was still with him, so he answered her with a moan and a giggle and a deep gurgling sigh, and then went nosing under her skirts, to give her a reciprocating thank-you, but the way seemed very long, from her ankle to her crotch. Her skirts were white and transparent, layer by layer — initially he could see her white leg aglow with a special mixture of moonlight and starlight and torchlight — but the world beneath them darkened as he nosed upward, until he was navigating only by touch and smell. Even the way up became notional; he wasn’t entirely sure where his arms and hands had gone, and his head seemed to be floating sideways and down as much as up. Then there was a faint light in the dark, and a soft wind blowing a scent against his face — something like rosemary and gourmet cat food — and then he had arrived. He gorged himself on her, eating with his lips and tongue but also somehow just as much with his cheek and nose and eye, and pressing his eye to her as if to a keyhole he thought he saw the source of the light, flashes of lightning deep inside her.

When they emerged again from the bushes she was riding on his shoulders, having ascended there somewhat accidentally. Without her armor, she was very light, and he pranced merrily to that portion of the field where Bob lay on a bier of sticks and stones while the wonders of the lost world were projected, shadows on a white sheet held up by taller defectors, for his sad, dying, benefit. There was disagreement about how the images should be sequenced, and Mary was complaining that there was no color in them, and Princess was calling her a snob and a colorist.

“Black and white was good enough for everybody for hundreds of years,” she said. “Hundreds of years!”

“Is it time for me to sing?” Bob asked, staring at the screen with his head cocked to the side and an empty glass in his hand.

“Garçon!” said Huff, snapping his fingers at one of the little people walking about with a bottle on his head. He took the bottle and poured for Bob, then took a swig for himself, careful to balance his lady by holding more tightly to her leg with his other hand. “It’s time,” he said to Bob, not bothering to hush Mary or Princess.