by Chris Adrian
Henry had a complicated relationship with his mother, who was a complicated individual: her habitual mask of depression hid aspects of her that were more terrible and more delightful than anyone might presume, even after knowing her for years. Her problem, grossly oversimplified, was that she was constitutionally incapable of looking on the bright side of life and wouldn’t tolerate anyone around her doing so, though you sensed, if you really knew her, that she wanted as much as anyone, and maybe more than most, to be happy. Henry was her declared favorite, but only because he carried in him (he supposed that she supposed) the greatest potential for unhappiness, having had a greatly terrible thing happen to him as a child. His dramatic disappearance and reappearance, the empty years in memory reconstructed out of police reports, the presumed sexual abuse, had anointed him in his mother’s eyes. There were tragedies in her own life, to her mind equivalently insurmountable if not equivalently newsworthy, upon which she frequently reflected. “They ruined you,” she would tell him, when some bizarre cousin of nostalgia prompted her to break out the abduction scrapbook and review it with him at the kitchen table, while his father slept and his sister slipped out her bedroom window to visit her current boyfriend. Henry’s mother would marvel at the strange details: the whole houseful of boys kept imprisoned in the Mission, the pet bear, the basement full of sex toys. “They ruined you,” she’d say, though she was pointing at a picture of just one man, a portrait-in-death of the man who’d abducted them, dead on a dirty mattress after the police shot him when they raided the house. “Just like they ruined me.”
Henry went back to California from Boston with Bobby filling up a little bit of space in his head, and they continued their conversation while Henry’s mother languished in the hospital, two resident pediatricians discussing the bewildering world of adult medicine into which Henry had been unwillingly thrust, and two sons discussing the deeper downs of filial obligation. Henry remembered practically nothing of these conversations and wished, in his post-breakup nostalgia, that he had saved the e-mails.
His mother looked like an Incan mummy when Henry first laid eyes on her in the ICU, but with someone to make her eat and a new, forcibly administered antidepressant in her every morning, she became the better part of her old self, a mean, witty old lady. Henry was out there for nearly a month, visiting his mother during the day, and sitting at night on his mother’s patio with her strange little dog at his feet, stealing the neighbor’s wireless signal and talking to Bobby online. He found her old scrapbook and paged through it at her kitchen table, hearing her old narration in his head as he flipped past the newspaper clippings and the police reports and the notes from the therapists who could never get him to remember anything. After he closed the book, he spent a while at the sink washing dust and old ink off his hands.
When Henry kissed his mother goodbye and left the house, he felt perfectly fine. But two hours later, in the airport, he felt like his hands were still dirty, still covered with dust and ink even though they were clean enough to look at. He washed them in the airport and then three more times on the plane. It wasn’t the first time he found something to be unaccountably dirty or scary. Certain things had always been scary since he was thirteen: clowns, beavers, public parks, public bathrooms, bicycles, the numbers 14 and 28 and 40, magicians, dragonflies, black dogs. But none of these things had made him feel dirty or contaminated or potentially ruined, which was how he felt by the time he had gotten back home to Cambridge. He had the admittedly ridiculous sense that an almost irreversible process of cootification was under way.
He bought a new pair of shoes in the airport, being careful after he put them on in the bathroom not to step in the same place in the new shoes on the way out as he had in the old ones on the way in. Outside his apartment, he abandoned his bag underneath the deck and put his clothes in the trash by the door, then walked directly to the shower. He washed off once with soap, which was somehow not enough, so he did it again, and felt only slightly less dirty. He had been cleaning the shower before he left, so there was a tall bottle of powdered bleach on the side of the tub. He took a head-to-toe bleach bath, which stung his eyes and made him reek of chlorine and made him tremendously itchy, but it worked. He felt clean again.
That same night he waited outside a bookstore in Harvard Square, wondering if he would recognize Bobby, or if Bobby would know him from his pictures, which he had been considering in the minutes before he left the house, and thinking that he looked much older now than he did then, though the pictures were only a year old. As it turned out, Bobby might have walked right by him if he hadn’t been wearing a vaguely troubled look that Henry recognized from Bobby’s online picture, and the thought broke in Henry’s mind, like a languidly rolling whale, that people who were troubled were more interesting than people who were not.
“You had me at dead father,” Bobby would say later, only half-jokingly, and much later would present it as evidence that they didn’t ever belong together, since they had cleaved to each other initially on the basis of common misfortune instead of shared joy. Within two hours they had discovered just how much misfortune they had in common: dead fathers and complicated addicted siblings and mothers who said really inappropriate things all the time. The only awkward moment of the night came when Bobby asked if Henry smelled an overpowering odor of bleach in the lousy Chinese restaurant where they were having dinner, to which Henry replied, “It’s me. I was swimming.” And at the end of the date, when it was time to say goodbye to Bobby or try to take him home, Henry chose to do the former, suddenly afraid of being perceived as an easy whore. Henry shook the lovely man’s hand. He wandered home, and wondered if perhaps he should have been a whore—maybe Bobby liked whores, or at least liked a person not to pretend not to be a whore for the sake of mere heteronormative propriety. He had convinced himself by the time he got home that he would never hear from Bobby again.
Bobby called the next day, and they arranged another date, and there was another after that, and then another. Dinner, a walk, tea or coffee, and a stiff hug goodbye, Henry careful to keep his hips away from Bobby’s. The awkwardness of the goodbyes increased, until Henry, on goodbye number four, blurted out, just as they were closing on what he sensed might be the valedictory hug of the whole relationship, “Would you like a cookie?”
“What?” Bobby asked, looking like the prospect of a cookie might be troubling.
“A cookie. Chocolate chip. I baked them this afternoon. Want to come up for one?”
“Sure,” Bobby said, but he didn’t smile.
Henry sighed with relief and then tried to pretend he hadn’t done it. He walked in front of Bobby, trying to guide him past the places that had become increasingly contaminated in just the two weeks since he’d been home. Bobby solicitously removed his shoes inside the door and then got the three-minute tour of Henry’s extremely small apartment, which was as fancy as it was small, having recently been renovated by a diminutive little couple with good taste, who had moved out when they had a third, very small, child. “I like small spaces,” Henry said, which was true, though he was afraid of small people.
Bobby took a cookie and some milk and followed Henry the twelve short steps from the fridge to the couch. Henry was thinking that this was how pediatricians were supposed to seduce each other, with cookies and milk and stickers. Sitting there on the couch, cookie in hand, he had the feeling that there was something at stake and that the wrong move, the mistimed grope, the too-hasty blow job, could ruin everything. I like him, he said silently to his cookie. Why do I already like him?
Bobby was eating his own cookie, considering it a moment before taking a bite, then looking around the tiny bedroom/ living room, which was empty except for the bed and the couch and a small bookshelf. He stuffed the last piece of cookie in his mouth and kept his finger in there to suck off some chocolate, and caught Henry looking at him.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Henry, but he slid closer on the couch, so th
eir legs were touching, and reached for another cookie from the plate, but Bobby caught his hand and put it on his belly, and put his own hand around Henry’s neck to draw him in for a kiss.
6
Will had lost a shoe, and couldn’t decide whether this was a disaster or a disguised stroke of luck. He had liked the shoe, but it would be a funny story to tell at the party, and if he were injured, or even appeared injured, that might be reason for Carolina to look his way, and maybe stare at him as he limped around, or maybe come over to examine his blue bruised foot, and maybe even say something to it, or to him, something not angry or wounding, possibly even some neutral utterance like, “Foot, you’ve been hurt,” and maybe (though this was admittedly much less likely) something kind, or kindish, like “Are you all right?” And then he could tell her all the ways in which he was not all right.
He had to find the party first, though, before he could present his pathetic, hilarious foot and tell the story of his fall off the path when a crazy homeless lady came tearing along behind him and knocked him aside. He rolled down a ravine, ass over hips over head, sliding on his back and then somehow on his belly, and ending up face down on a shallow carpet of eucalyptus leaves. He wiggled his feet to make sure he had not broken his neck, and realized that his shoe was missing. He knelt, then sat, then stood, looking up the ravine at how far and deep he had fallen, and was suddenly grateful he hadn’t busted his head open on one of the white rocks glowing softly in the moonlight where they poked out of the hillside ivy.
He had searched awhile for his shoe. That same bright moon that lit the stones in the ravine lit up the little hollow where he’d landed, but the fog was behaving oddly, streaming through the trees in thick discrete sheets that left him hardly able to see his hand in front of his face. Hunched over and feeling blindly under the carpet of leaves, he found an old plate, a seat cushion, and something that looked and felt very much like an old cabbage, which he dropped right away. And he found a shoe, though not his shoe—a tiny lady’s shoe, a sparkly sequined pump that seemed a magical discovery when he held it up in the light. He found an empty condom wrapper after that, and took it as a signal to stop looking, since he was sure that the gooey condom would be the next thing his fingers wandered across. By then it had occurred to him that showing up cold, shoeless, and battered at the party could grant him a temporary celebrity that might get him a gram or two of favor from Carolina.
He started back up the hill, without his shoe and without any path to follow, though he wandered the length of the hollow looking for a stair or a little clearing. He pulled himself up hand over hand, grasping clumps of ivy, and pushed himself up from tree to tree. After ten minutes of this, he felt sure he’d climbed as far as he’d fallen, but there was no sign of that path the crazy homeless lady had knocked him from. He kept climbing, thinking it ever more miraculous, the higher he climbed, that he hadn’t been seriously injured in the fall. Then, soon, it began to seem stranger and stranger that he hadn’t found the path, and he wondered if he might be climbing sideways instead of upways, and wondered also if some part of him was deliberately missing the path as it cut across the hill, because as much as he wanted to see Carolina again, he was terrified of her, too. He was terrified of her righteous anger, and her ferocious woundedness, and terrified of being rejected by her again, or rather by her continuing process of rejection, by the emanations of rejection that proceeded from out of her, which he could always feel, and by which he thought he could sometimes tell where she was in the city, in the same way you could tell which way the wind was blowing by sticking out your wet finger to feel the pressure. He imagined those emanations pouring down the hill from Jordan’s house, and imagined that he was climbing directly into them, and that it was her rejection and not just gravity that made it such a weary chore to get up the hill.
Will had no easy days anymore, but threw himself off the morning and into the afternoon and evening the way he pushed from tree to tree, or clawed his way through the day the way he clawed through the ivy on the hill, head and shoulders always set into the steady stream of her eternally rejecting emanations. His whole world had become populated and dominated by metaphors of rejection and reconciliation; he could not eat a cream puff without considering how it was filled to bursting with cream the way he was filled to bursting with love for her. Meta-pastries like these were obvious, and even pathetic, and generated by the worst part of him, not the best. But he was generating something artful for her too, stealing time from his day job as a tree doctor to write her a story that had nothing and everything to do with them, with what she had suffered and with what he had done. It was a long apology, and an argument meant to convince her that, gross despicable appearances aside, he had loved her as truly and deeply and consumingly as anyone had ever loved another person. Most days he worried that it was only going to be as useful or affective as a pastry, and that it would ultimately only be about as artful as a pastry, but other days he was sure it was the closest thing to a miracle he would ever wreak and when she read it she would understand him—and understand them—in a way that might just possibly allow her to forgive him.
It would be a miracle if he could satisfactorily express, both to her and to himself, why he did what he did. “Why did you do that?” she had asked him, in the moment of calm that preceded her berserker frenzy. He might as well have squawked like a bird or moaned like a retard as said something like “I forgot how much I love you.” But a novel could say such things, in between its lines and underneath what the silly wounded people said and did within its pages, in a way that made perfect sense and avoided the curse of squawking retardation because what was said was never actually said. He wondered if he shouldn’t maybe give up on the elusive party and go home to work on the damned thing. But just then he pushed off a tree toward a trunk shape in the intermittent fog, went past it, and took a much gentler tumble, onto soft grass.
He rolled forward this time, for a slow stately while, each rotation somehow more pleasant and less alarming than the one before. The ground was not just soft but warm, and the grade not too steep, and though the fall felt like it lasted so long he thought he might roll out onto Haight Street before it was done, he found himself unworried, and when he finally stopped he just lay there a moment, feeling very peaceful, even though he was thinking that a person could overcome one fall on the way to a party but a second fall was a sign that you ought to go home. He did another twitching check of his extremities and then stood up and surprised himself with a long, luxurious stretch, throwing his head back and reaching toward the sky. The moon was so big it looked like it was about to land on him, and though the sky above the park was still clear above the fog-shrouded trees, there was something in the air that distorted the crater face, making it look very worried. He blinked and rubbed his eyes and looked again, but the moon still looked worried. That dispelled his peaceful feeling, and he remembered just how late and how lost he was.
He did not recognize the part of the park he was in. Worse and weirder now, he did not recognize the trees. As tall as poplars, their bark was too smooth to be poplars, and poplars didn’t grow in the park, or in San Francisco for that matter. Will knew trees because they were his living and knew all the weird plants that grew in this weird city, tikotikis that could thrive nowhere else but here, and toothed azaras, one-of-a-kind things that looked like they ate children. These gray poplars reminded him of something, but they were utterly strange, covered with short branches that bore pale green leaves and white flowers whose petals had the thick consistency of mushrooms when Will pinched one. Scattered between the regularly spaced sort-of-poplar trunks were much smaller trees, junior versions of the sort-of-poplars that were as perfectly manicured-looking as bonsai, and it certainly looked as if someone had been caring for them, since some were decorated with tiny bells, thin ribbons, and little wind chimes.
He bent down to touch a bell. It sounded a high vibrating note that tickled his ear. There was something about the tickle i
n his ear that dispelled the thought that he might be dreaming even as it came to him; the bell sounded a note so irritating he couldn’t imagine ever sleeping through it, and the discomfort from the noise felt real in the way that a sharp, cruel pinch feels real. There was something interesting about these trees that went beyond just how strange-looking they were, or that they were hidden in a secret dell, something so interesting it made him forget all about his party and his lost shoe, and it shamed him, a little, that he could not place what that was exactly until he crushed a bit of leaf and smelled the familiar odor, cinnamon and pepper, on his fingers. “Shit!” he said to the crushed-up leaf, and then “Shit!” again to the trees all around him, and “Shit!” to the worried moon. He started walking into the dell, looking for something now. The tall gray trees began to space out the farther in he went, but the little bonsai started to cluster together more thickly. The bells and chimes sounded louder and more insistent as he loped along in a one-shoe run; his sock was getting long in the front, and it waved around wildly as he went, threatening to trip him, but even before he heard the moaning he was in too much of a hurry to stop to fix it. It was a woman’s voice, or a little girl’s voice, or there was both a woman and a little girl up ahead, experiencing something unpleasant. Will ran faster and soon came into another sort of clearing, though this one was carpeted with the tiny trees instead of grass. They clustered in circles around a giant tree that had the form of an oak, but its bark was shining silver and its leaves, shaped like the hands of little children, were gold. “Carolina!” Will said when the woman moaned again, because this was her tree, and because it made perfect sense that he should be called to rescue her from some affliction, in a dreamy undream, in a park that was not behaving like itself, under a moon that was making faces that it shouldn’t.