The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  “Enough for tonight!” said Hogg, and ran for the gate to the tennis court.

  “Get back here!” Huff shouted after him. “We haven’t even started yet!” The screaming got louder, and in another moment the others were gone as well, all of them scattering in the direction of the street, though none of them would find it in the thickening dark. Huff stayed where he was, more angry than afraid. He was sure it was going to be the Mayor making the noise. He’d come riding up in a tiny open car, so small his knees would be touching his chest, and there would be a tumbling red light and a set of shrieking siren horns on the hood. “You are under arrest,” he would say, “for conspiracy to disrespect me.” Huff planted his feet and lowered his chin and squared his shoulders, feeling ready for what was coming, though it was true that there was something about the sound that made him feel sure he was going to throw up and shit in his pants at the same time. He wasn’t ready for what he saw, though. A tiny person, no higher than his shin, came running by. He had an extraordinarily big nose and curly brown hair and blue eyes as big as tennis balls. He stopped in an odd way, as if he managed to go from running to being perfectly still without having to bother to slow down, and stared at Huff. “Better run,” he said after he stopped his screaming. “The Beast is coming.”

  Part Two

  5

  Henry was lost. He had been walking for half an hour and had not only failed to exit the park again, he hadn’t even found the top of the hill. He had been getting lost in all sorts of benign places ever since he was a child, when a trip to the supermarket inevitably involved an agony of separation from his mother, and he routinely lost his way in the hospital where he had been working for a year. It was hard to get lost in the boutique wilderness of Buena Vista Park, but he was not particularly surprised to have done it tonight. Since coming to the understanding that he had willfully, if not consciously, driven away the one person in the world who had loved him without any taint of sadness or rage or resentment, he had developed a whole new wary relationship with his subconscious, and though he had decided that going to Jordan Sasscock’s party would be good for him, and even that cutting through the park would add another sort of correction, he knew some part of him still thought it would be better to stay home for another night of weeping and doughnut-feasting and masturbation.

  It felt like he had been walking in a circle, always uphill. He had passed some landmarks that he recognized from the miserable outing with Bobby: the tennis courts, where some homeless people seemed to be settling in for an early bedtime; a willow whose droopy branches hung low enough to scrape the path. He passed the shin-high stone wall, made with old pieces of headstone, that wound along the path to the steep stairs that rose to the bald little crown of the park. He’d started up those stairs but never arrived at the top of the hill. Every hundred steps or so he paused, and looked around, and saw the same thing: a darkening vista of pale eucalyptus trees in the steep ravines, and through them a glimpse of the city below the hill and, beyond that, the bay and the bridges. But glimpse by glimpse, the city was obscured. It hadn’t been particularly foggy when Henry had left his house, but it rolled in precipitously while he walked the steps, and soon he could only see a wall of fog beyond the trees, roiling and heaving as if it were breaking upon an invisible barrier.

  The steps led to still more steps. He thought he must have taken some detour without noticing, because soon he was going straight across the hill and then down before he went up again, and then he was deposited in a little clearing, a flat field cut into the side of the hill and ringed by trees. There was a rock with a flat seat and a high back that looked, to someone who had been walking uphill for twenty minutes, a lot like a chair.

  Henry sat down and kicked off his shoes and put his feet in the soft grass. This was a pretty ordinary gesture, but for him it was still something of an extraordinary accomplishment. Once he had a terror of the ground, because it was dirty in the ordinary sense of dirty, and because it was dirty in all the new, miserable ways he had learned things could be dirty since the threat of true love had turned him into a younger, poorer sort of Howard Hughes. He wanted to say, Bobby, this is nice! because it was nice. The grass was soft and cool and dry, and though he thought he could properly appreciate it through his socks, he took those off, too, and dug his toes into the tight spaces between the blades until he could feel the deeper cool and softness of the soil underneath. In the first days of his recovery, he had done things like this demonstratively, always showing off for his absent, rejecting ex-boyfriend, but soon he was doing all the formerly forbidden things for the joy of them, because it was lovely and interesting and sustaining to put one’s feet in the grass, or to shake the paw of a strange dog, or even marvel over some pornographic vagina, formerly the abomination of abominations and the anathema of anathemas. Now, beyond any hope of reunion with old stay-the-fuck-away-from-me Bobby, Henry had nothing left to prove, and for the first time in forever he did things for no other reason than because it made him happy to do them.

  He sat for a while appreciating his feet on the grass, and appreciating the feeling of his bottom and his back against the stone, and wondered if this could reasonably be considered the end of the night. He had already socialized more in twelve hours than he had done in a typical month of days in the past year, even though he hadn’t made it to the party and the only interactions he’d had so far were smiling at some friendly men on Eighteenth Street and a short talk about the possibility of fog with a pierced-up fellow in a café on Haight and Scott, where he’d stopped just before heading up the hill. There were nights back when he lived in Boston when he would never venture out of his apartment, because it was too much effort to get out of bed, or put on his shoes, or navigate the gauntlet of contamination that the mailman, who might have touched a letter that touched a letter that touched a letter that his mother wrote, left around the front door and the stoop and the sidewalk. He had gone days without talking to anyone, and when he did talk to anyone it was usually Bobby, who happened to live next door for the whole first year after they broke up, and who, from Henry’s kitchen window, could be observed talking on the phone, or eating cereal, or frolicking with his new dog. Some nights he closed every shutter in his house and left Henry to speculate miserably about what might be going on behind them.

  It was almost enough, to have tried to go to the party and to have made an honest effort to be sociable. Giving up and going home, when the party was simply not to be found, did not make him a depressive recluse, did not make him what he was before losing Bobby had caused him to come to his senses. He could not be blamed for going home, and yet, when he really considered it, he decided that he didn’t want to go home. Other people had become a whole lot more interesting since he had been freed from the labyrinthine solipsism of his self-enforced misery. He could not previously have imagined a more boring waste of time than to go and drink in the company of strangers and quasi-strangers, but now there was something decidedly intriguing about it, even if he was enough of his old self to feel that sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the park in the late evening was its own sort of good time. Rather slowly, he decided that the night had only just begun, and he was in no hurry to get home, and he would get to the party eventually. For now, he continued to sit on the rock.

  It was pleasant to sit still, in part because there was a lot more to experience and feel, even sitting and doing nothing, than there had been when he was his old self, and also because he was chronically exhausted, both from the relentless succession of twelve-hour workdays he was suffering under in his new job and the relentless procession of doomed cancerous children who crossed his path. He had started thinking that he had picked his profession because it was guaranteed to provide an inexhaustible source of profound sadness, for how wonderful that must have seemed to the old Henry Blork, who thought sadness was his lot, and for whom it was a simultaneously sustaining and debilitating atmosphere. Any rest was to be cherished, though it left him open, like s
leep did, to affectionate but utterly useless thoughts about Bobby. It did no good anymore, here beyond any hope of a reconciliation, to think of him, and yet Bobby was all Henry could think of when he wasn’t forcefully distracted. There were other things to think about: dying teenagers on the Oncology Service at the hospital; whether or not his drug-addled ex-con sister was going to make it on her own now that their mother was dead; what kind of dog he would get when he got a dog. But he hardly touched his mind to any of these subjects when thoughts of Bobby intruded on them. He wondered if the teenagers would die without ever being in love, and any thought of love led back to Bobby. Thoughts of his sister led to thoughts of Bobby’s brother, an analogously drug-addled beautiful soul who had died hardly two years before Henry and Bobby had met. And any thoughts of a dog led in prancing leaps to thoughts of Bobby’s dog, a black Lab named Hobart whom Henry had come to love almost as much as he loved his master.

  It ought to be possible, he thought, to will himself not to think about him. Back when he would still return his calls, Bobby had described, rather too proudly, a process like that, by which he had forcibly lifted himself out of love with Henry, into a place where Henry didn’t cross his mind at all hours of the day, and distract him from every task, and invade his dreams, and loiter in his masturbatory fantasies. “It was a lot of hard work,” he told Henry, implying that Henry had a lot of hard work himself to get to this loveless place. “That’s the most horrible thing I ever heard,” Henry had said, and Bobby had replied, “You say that now, but just wait.” Henry had done just the opposite thing, it seemed to him, falling every day more deeply into love while Bobby lifted himself ever higher out of it, until they could not possibly have been farther away from each other. Henry sighed and closed his eyes, suddenly feeling lost and trapped, in the park, in his feelings, and in the world at large. He began to think about how strange and stupid it was that his love for Bobby had, too late, displaced a combination of guilt and shame and sorrow as the organizing principle of his life, and he considered how wonderful it would be to live under that organizing principle of love if Bobby could return it again.

  He sighed again, more of a guttural huff of the sort that Hobart was inclined to let out every now and then when he met the rare thing that displeased him. This was not what he ought to be thinking about. There might not be any hurry to get to the party, but the night was going nowhere except in nostalgic spirals around Bobby. Even if he was never going to move on, it was time, for tonight, to get moving. He would have gotten up and started walking again right then, except that he knew his thoughts would be no different, while he finally made his way out of the park, while he knocked on Jordan’s door, and even while he talked to the now-interesting strangers behind the door, even while making out with one of them, though that was an admittedly unlikely prospect. Bobby would still be everywhere all night long, a living ghost. There was really only one thing that seemed to banish him. Masturbation, Henry’s regular companion since the age of thirteen, had used to extend and reinforce the depressive self-loathing under which he had labored on account of being gay, leaving him feeling simultaneously ashamed and wanting more of it right away, the way that sex had for most of his life. But lately it had become what he thought it ought to have become a long time ago, an innocent distraction that harmed no one, least of all himself. And it had become a way, even though the act issued imperious invitations to thoughts of Bobby, of forgetting about him. It blew the Bobby fuse, and it could be hours or days before the yearning brimmed again.

  Opening one eye, he scanned the clearing. There wasn’t anybody there, though at this time of night it would not have mattered much if there had been. People came into the park for such things, after all, though it hadn’t really been Henry’s style since he was in college to engage in furtive public park sex. Yet it was somehow of a piece with the pleasantness of his seat on the rock, and of the feeling of his feet in the grass, to reach down his pants and begin to grope himself a bit. At first his head was empty of anything except for the obvious sensations and a mild anxiety about getting caught, but he was very soon in the place that brought memories of Bobby swooping into his mind. And they weren’t entirely the sort of memories one would expect, given what Henry was doing with his hand, and given that Bobby had come to dominate his sexual imagination such that he could barely imagine having sex with someone else, even when he actually was having sex with someone else. There had been enough hot sex, back in the good old bad old good old days, to fuel whole seasons of masturbation. Thoughts of the sex flitted, swift as darting birds, in and out of his head, too quick to properly consider them. It was weirder, and sadder, to beat off while submersed in more innocent nostalgia, in distinct memories of waking up in the middle of the night with Bobby in his arms and realizing that he could hear it snowing outside, or of Bobby offering him a Benadryl when he was poisoned by bad sushi, or of puzzling together over a hysterical middle-aged lady with syncope, randomly encountered in a vacation hotel. It was strange and pathetic enough to do it in his own bedroom, and seemed stranger and more pathetic here, outside and quite close to the geographic center of the city, but it was what worked.

  He had hardly properly gotten going with it when he was suddenly aware, even though his eyes were still closed, that he was being watched. He opened his eyes and saw a little man—a very little man, not more than two and a half feet at his shoulder—standing about three yards off. The man was panting and his face was shining with sweat in the moonlight, which was falling down into the clearing from an open sky even though the park was surrounded by fog. Henry stared, cock in hand, feeling a unique combination of revulsion and surprise. It wasn’t actually so surprising that there might be homosexual midgets in the park; the lonely and the desperate came in every shape and age and size and color. But there was something stranger about this man than diminutive boogly trolldom.

  “That won’t keep him away,” the little man said. “He’s not afraid of your little weenaloo.”

  Henry let go of his cock and pulled up his pants at the same time that he pushed himself back and over the rock. He fell over the back of it, got up, and started running, not at all sure about why he had to get away so quickly from this admittedly harmless-looking little man. There was an etiquette to this sort of interaction, a way to indicate that you didn’t want to be watched, let alone touched, during your public escapade, without necessarily hurting anyone’s feelings, which didn’t involve running away in such a hurry that you forgot to put your shoes back on or failed to pull up your pants and your underwear all the way, so they tripped you. He kicked them off and left them behind and ran again. It made less sense than was immediately apparent, to flee as he was doing, and he realized as he was running that what he was feeling had a lot of the character of his old reasonless fears, and then he stopped. He had run into a stand of white trees, whose peeling bark gave them something in common with eucalyptus, but the grove reeked of cinnamon. He didn’t know the park very well, but this looked like nowhere he had ever been.

  “You’re running the wrong way,” said an already familiar voice behind him. “You should be running off the hill. You should go hide in a church. He doesn’t like those. But there’s no way out anyway, except maybe by going under. My Lord has warded the hill, to keep the Beast inside, and there’s no way out, just bruises. See?”

  He pointed at his own nose, and Henry could see that it was darker than the rest of his face. The man made a beavery sort of noise with his lips. Henry stepped back. “Don’t touch me,” he said, which was the first thing that sprang into his mind.

  “I wasn’t going to touch you,” the man said. “I was just saying. I shouldn’t bother at all with you, except my Master bade me be a guide and a keeper to lost travelers. He is gone, but his wards and his work remain, and my love for him remains. The world is doomed tonight, but my love for him remains. I will die before the dawn, but my love for him remains. So I would keep you, if I can, from running into the Maw instead of away
from the Maw, since it is better to struggle against the Beast than to lie down for him, though best of all these things is to run away. I know your odor, though. Have I ever fixed your shoes?” He turned his head from side to side, taking a deep sniff from each of Henry’s shoes, and then he smiled. His teeth were as pointy and black and wet as the spines of a sea urchin.

  “Don’t touch me,” Henry said. He ran again but didn’t get far. Feeling he should turn to watch and make sure the man didn’t follow, and tell him again not to touch him, he had barely sprinted up to full speed when he collided with one of the slender white trunks, which felt a lot like running into a flagpole, and his head made it ring metallically like a flagpole. He fell backward, listening to the funny bell tone, and realized before he lost consciousness that the little man had caught him.

  “There you go,” the little man said. “I’ve got you.”

  Henry and Bobby talked for months online before they met, in part because they were afraid to meet each other, Bobby being relatively new to dating men, if not to having sex with them, and Henry already sensing, after a string of failed dating ventures, that this was something nice he would only fuck up if he let it go too far. And just as they were beginning to talk seriously about meeting, Henry got called away to his mother’s house in Carmel, because she had tried to starve herself to death. This was something she had tried to do before, with considerably less success, but on those occasions Henry’s father, who had squired her through her depression after Henry left home, had still been alive. Now he was nearly six months dead from lung cancer, after a swift decline that Henry had tried, most inexpertly, to manage. Henry’s older sister, to whom the role of caretaker might also have devolved, was in jail for a drug offense.