Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Will was thinking of Carolina as the action unfolded in front of him in the amphitheater. He could almost convince himself that the musical was being staged for him, because of the way it seemed to be staged at him, with the singers and dancers and the parts of the set that were made of living bodies darting so close, and curving around him. Yet they were all looking just past him, at the thing in the back, the terrible lady who contained such a density of terror, who looked like his ice-cream-loving divorcée, until she touched you, and then you knew she was somebody else, somebody worse. Even without seeing her, Will still felt a pressure on his back that made him want to run, the force that made the buggy go. The only thing stronger than that force was the lady’s admonition to stop, so Will stayed stopped, and felt like he would stand there forever if the lady didn’t ever tell him he could move again.

As he watched the musical, Will thought of the last time he’d seen Soylent Green . He thought he should feel guiltier than he did, since he had once again gone to a sex party of sorts, something he had sworn never to do, and the fact that it was an entirely impromptu sex party, one he had stumbled into accidentally in the course of the strangest night of his life, seemed like no excuse. But he felt quite at peace with the sex party and found he did not regret one poke or thrust or jiggle; there was nothing he regretted having put in his mouth or touched or tasted, and he felt quite pleasantly disposed toward weird, weeping Henry and toward Molly, though she had said nothing to him to make her seem any less anxious or bitchy. None of them had said much of anything together, the potentially awkward postcoital conversation having been abbreviated by the arrival of the monster who now held them all in thrall. He should feel horrible about what he had done, and feel revulsion toward the people he had done it with, and yet that thought was as remote somehow as the nostalgia he felt for that other night in that other park when he’d watched the other version of this despairing futuristic cannibalism with Carolina. It seemed very far away, and she seemed very far away, and though he was worried about what was going to happen next — he was chained, after all, around the neck, and something or someone whose awfulness he could only barely understand was holding his reins — he was quite content to stand and watch this wonderful, ridiculous show until the action started to change.

A tree was growing in the dell. My sapling! he thought at first, but in moments it was too big to carry without a truck. The stage had been full of people moments before, singing what had to be the closing number — Ty Thorn had found out the secret of Soylent Green and announced it to the world — but though Will still heard the voices, people were nowhere to be seen until a single figure, dumpy and awkward-looking but dancing very gracefully with a silver ax in her hands, came spinning into the dell and danced around the tree, her wild spasms contrasting with the irenic strains of the music. Though he couldn’t understand the words of the song anymore the message was perfectly clear: everyone deserves to be loved and everything is going to be okay, and it was all plucking harps and deeply reassuring overtones even as the dumpy lady sank the ax in the tree, and chopped wildly, bloody sap spraying her hair and dress and skin, so she looked just as crazed and scary as Carolina had when she had done the same thing, nonmusically, after showing him the pictures Mrs. Perkins had sent along to the house, and telling him they had never really dated anyway, and she had never loved him. All this time it had been their dead brothers who were dating, and they had just been along for the ride. Don’t do it! Will shouted in his head, crying as if the ax were falling on him instead of on the tree, but she chopped and danced and howled until the tree fell, striking the earth in a shower of sparks that leaped furiously to the sky.

Though he had never seen the movie before, Henry knew when the end was coming. Enough people had died, and the not-so-surprising secret had ripened sufficiently to be revealed, and the music was increasingly becoming dominated by strains of the overture, and, most importantly, he knew it was almost time for him to do something. That knowledge had come as certainly as had the lost memories of who he was and what had been done to him, and though he didn’t totally comprehend the plans his terrible childhood friend had for the two of them, he knew he bore some responsibility to stop them. He stood very stiffly next to his friend, who was now a large handsome black Lab, and now Bobby’s spitting image, and now a thin wild-eyed man whom Henry knew was Ryan twenty years later. Henry could tell he was amused by the musical even though his face was impassive.

It was very strange — much stranger than being lost in the park, or discovering that it had once been his home, and stranger even than remembering there was such a thing as magic, and that he had lived with it and used it and been good at it and suffered for the lack of it, and even stranger yet than the strangest and most wonderful discovery of the night, that it was something as lovely as it was terrible that he had been so afraid of — to feel so powerful and so helpless. He knew how to turn a tree into a house, and bacon into a pig, or a pig into a cop, or cop into a penny — and yet he didn’t know what to do to stop his friend and make things better.

The answer came from the musical — or, rather, one of the players, the tall lady with cobwebs in her hair, whom Henry recognized from his time under the hill, and for whom he still felt a twinge of hatred, though it was very small and very much overpowered by the pity he felt for her, since her glamour fell away now in his memory, and he knew her from the hospital as well. She was brandishing a silver knife and threatening to kill herself for love, and throwing herself on the dirty homeless-looking man who played the lead, who told her over and over that there was no room for love anymore in a world that contained the horror of Soylent Green. The rest of the cast — all the population of the hill, it seemed — came walking in procession onto the stage to sing about people who ate people, how lonely they were, and how sad, but they had so much more to say about them than just that. Henry strained to listen, but the words escaped him, not because the music and voices weren’t loud, but because new voices had jumped in to confuse the lyrics. At the same time he saw Bobby weeping as he broke up with him, while Henry patted him dumbly and numbly on the back. He saw the boys of Fourteenth Street scattering in the police raid, ocelots and raccoons and fleet foxes sailing over the wall and between the legs of the policemen to run free in the city, only to wake within days like Henry, remembering less and less of who they really were and where they had been until there was nothing left at all. He saw Mike raging in the form of a bear, then fleeing to his room under a barrage of bullets, and dying there in his bed in his own form, and Ryan, wearing the form of an angry boy, punching a policewoman in the face. And he saw a black Lab puppy, sitting still but not quiet in the middle of the stage, weeping and howling.

It was Ryan but not Ryan, an actor who wore Ryan’s face upon his own as if it were projected there, and every scene was excruciatingly clear, though they were laid on top of each other and within each other. “Why are you doing this to me?” Henry asked the lady with the cobwebs in her hair, because it was obvious to him that this was her magic. He spoke very quietly, but he was sure she heard him. She shook her head, singing and dancing and smiling faintly. A little brownie came running up to her, and bowed, and exchanged her silver knife for a wooden one. “Why are you doing this?” he asked again. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty? I didn’t ask for any of this!”