by Chris Adrian
“It’s a party!” said Oak, jumping from seat to seat.
“But not the one it should have been,” said Fell, who had taken a seat at the head of the table in a chair that was too big for him, and sat balancing a bottle between his legs. “It’s not a very great night. Or maybe it is great, in the way that last things are great. Just don’t think,” he said, waving a hand around to indicate the empty seats and the empty hall, “that it’s usually like this.”
“If you eat the food,” Henry said, “then you have to live here forever.” He was holding the cupcake a lot closer to his face.
“A myth! A myth!” said Oak, bouncing by him and shoving the cupcake in Henry’s face. “It’s a lie. You stay as long as we like you, no longer!”
“Or as long as the world lasts,” said Fell, “whichever is shorter.”
“Or until the way out is clear,” said Lyon, sitting down. Henry was spitting icing out of his mouth and trying to wipe the cupcake from his eyes. Oak pushed him down into the chair, and for once Henry didn’t say not to touch him. Will sat down next to Molly, listened carefully for the banging on those other doors, wherever they were, and heard nothing. He poured himself some wine but didn’t drink it yet. He told himself he shouldn’t be sitting down. There was too much to do: finding a way out of the hill, finding a sapling, finding a way out of the park, deciding how to break the crazy, wonderful news to Carolina. There wasn’t time, really, even for a snack, but the food all smelled really quite nice—overwhelmingly delightful, in fact. As he turned his head he caught different scents. Something smelled like cardomom; something else like baked eggs. Any delay was ill-advised, but a snack seemed in keeping with what he was coming to think of as his very sensible reaction to the night’s turn toward wonder and horror: he was taking things as they came and trying not to let fear or bewilderment compromise his appreciation of the extraordinary things all around him. He needed to pay attention, after all, to give a proper report to Carolina, because she might ask him anything. What color pants was the boy with the tail wearing? What sort of buttons did the little old man’s suit have? Was Henry circumcised? Did the strawberries taste like strawberries? If he was going to tell her a coherent story, he needed to pay careful sustained attention and not skip over things in a headlong rush to the door. Thinking of the door, he thought again about their pursuer, but there was no noise in this hall except for the voices of his companions and the quiet rustle of paper on paper as the lanterns swayed in a gentle breeze that came, never twice from exactly the same direction, with the rhythm of breath. He took a sip of the wine, which tasted like whisky.
“Is that really my ultimate terror?” Molly asked, “a little black boy with limited opportunities?” She was slouching now, and he found his anger at her had dissipated with the first sip of wine, which seemed a little quick for it to be an effect of drunkenness. He was most certainly not going to get drunk at this table. It would make no sense at all to report back to Carolina that he had seen some wonders and then gotten supernaturally drunk, and have the story end prematurely in a blackout. It was more, he thought, that he could appreciate how drunk she was, and that made him better disposed to her. She seemed more sad than angry now, and more confused than belligerent. She looked like she was getting ready to cry, and that was a look he was used to running from, yet now it only engaged his sympathy, which was … swelling. There wasn’t really a better word for what he experienced as he looked more closely at her, a feeling like someone who cared about her was standing up inside of him and stretching.
She held up both her hands, curling in her right thumb, then her pinky, then putting the thumb out again. She peered at her fingers, seeming to be fascinated by them.
“Maybe you should eat something,” Will said, and proceeded to fix her a little plate, thinking it would help to make her less drunk. It was part of his sympathetic feeling toward her, that he didn’t want her to make a spectacle of herself, and he sensed that was where she was headed—sentimental reminiscence would lead to more maudlin reflection, and shortly she would be crying.
“Stop!” Henry said. “Everybody stop eating!” His mouth was full, and even as he yelled at people to stop eating he took another bite of turkey. Will ignored him, and took up the plate in front of him, topmost and smallest of three stacked on top of one another. It was so light and thin he was almost afraid to burden it with anything heavier than pastry, but it held up under a brick of chocolate and a dense piece of something that looked like meat loaf but smelled like licorice.
“This is really good china,” Molly said when she took the plate.
“I think it’s edible,” Will said, which made her roll her eyes.
“We are all in terrible danger,” said Henry, holding up a spare rib and looking at it as if it might attack him. The three faeries—Will decided he was just going to call them that, and stop thinking about whether or not they were something else, occult species of man or aliens or something else for which there was no proper name—had huddled around Oak’s chair and were muttering together. Then they were quiet for a moment, and they each threw out a hand into the center of their circle in a way that made it look like they were playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. They made three throws, and Fell gave a little cheer. Lyon boosted him up on the table.
“Listen, listen!” Fell said, stepping among the apples and the pork. “Listen, mortals! One thousand years ago our Master bound the Beast, and every year since we mark the day and night with a feast.”
“Our Lady helped!” said Oak. “Our Lady helped to bind him too!”
“She helped some,” said Lyon.
“Every year some honored faerie gets to sing the tale, already known to all, of that battle, to remind us of the struggle, and of what was almost lost, and remind us to cherish what’s left to us, even if our kingdom is circumscribed by boredom, even if we are grown small in ways that have nothing to do with our size.” He took a deep breath and stood straighter on the table and started to sing in a language that was not English.
“Is that French?” Molly asked. She had opened her new bottle without Will noticing; her lips were wet with wine. “I don’t even know French. How can it be French?”
“I don’t think that’s French,” Will said. It was musical and nasal and lispy and lilting. He would have recognized French, or Dutch, or even Chinese. This was something else. Every few verses it seemed that the man stopped singing, but his mouth still moved, and Will knew the singing was beyond the range of his hearing. Henry was covering his ears and singing “La! La! La!” to himself. Molly drank more wine and closed her eyes and seemed to sing along, except Will could swear she was singing “Jesus Jesus Jesus.” He seemed to remember from his childhood, which was relatively impoverished of stories, someone—maybe a nun—telling him about Irish peasants who scared faeries away from their mischief by shouting out the names of saints, but she didn’t seem to be frightening any of these faeries. Lyon and Oak had begun to eat in earnest. It seemed rude to the singer, to eat so voraciously and noisily, but Fell did not seem to mind, or even notice, how the others were stuffing. Molly was eating and shaking her head. Henry was eating in a weird, hesitating frenzy, pulling egg noodles hand over hand and shoving them in his mouth, and yet he took long pauses in between mouthfuls. Will was more reserved. He took the wine in sips, and the meat in carefully cut morsels, took time to appreciate what he was tasting, and took a few things for Carolina, a handful of nuts and a petit four filled with what he could only describe as intensely flavored air, a tiny saltshaker in the form of a sparrow, and a knife, the hilt of which was shaped like a woman with three breasts, which he put in his remaining shoe.
The song continued through Will’s first glass of wine, and he became better disposed toward it as he finished the glass. In fact, he became better disposed toward the singer, too, and to the rest of his company at the table, and to the whole situation. “It’s all going to be all right,” he said, mostly to himself, because he suddenly believed that t
hey were going to find the nether door and outrun or outsmart that lady (and the wine made Will think he had mistaken her identity; it couldn’t be that lady after all) and escape the park, and they would all—it occurred to him as he looked first at Molly and then at Henry through the glass he had just refilled and sipped from again—become good friends. They would meet for lunch once a month down the street at Café Flore and reminisce about this strange night, about the wonders already come and gone and the wonders they had yet to experience. “Everything is going to be all right,” he said, to Molly this time. And then he turned and shouted it at Henry. “It’s all going to be fine!” It was strange, he thought, that he hadn’t noticed already how nice-looking the man was. He looked back at Molly and was a little surprised by how pretty she was. And catching a glimpse of himself in a silver pitcher, he noticed that even his warped reflection was pretty good-looking, and with his shirt off he felt handsome, not fat. Without at all understanding why he was doing it, he raised his arms and flexed his biceps, watching in the pitcher while his distorted twin did the same thing. He smiled at Henry, who was staring at him, still with a fearful expression on his face. “Don’t worry, buddy,” Will said, and then something hit him in the side of the head. Fell had pelted him with a piece of rare beef.
“I am singing,” he said, and then nimbly ducked a saucer-shaped pastry, which Molly threw.
“Who cares?” she said. “You’re not even real! You’re that time my mother said I was a slut!” She stood up and pointed at Lyon. “And you’re the time my parents forgot my birthday.” Swiveling in place, arm and finger still outstretched, she turned to Oak. “And you … what are you?”
“Hey,” Will said. “Calm down. It’s okay.” He leaned toward her chair and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged him off.
“You think that just because you look normal you’re any more real than those freaks? You’re just a little piece of neurosis. That’s all. That’s all!” She had risen from her chair, the bottle of wine clutched in one hand and a pastry crushed in the other. Will rose too, then leaned forward and kissed her. It was necessary to kiss her, because she was so pretty, and because she was angry, and because it made sense, in that moment, that he might pass along a little of the hopeful peace the magic wine was causing him to feel. It was cheating, he thought—the first time he had cheated on Carolina since she broke up with him—and yet he didn’t stop.
“Maybe we should skip right to the toast,” said Oak. Without taking his lips away from Molly’s, Will peered to his right and saw Oak climb on his chair and raise his glass. Molly was not kissing Will back, but she wasn’t pushing him away, either. “To kisses!” said Oak.
“To death!” said Lyon.
“To the Great Night!” said Fell, standing on the table with two glasses raised. He kicked food at Molly and Will, and though an éclair hit them in their joined face, neither of them pulled away until Henry, with a resonant groan, threw his chair over the table. It fell on the grassy floor with a muted thud. Will was almost afraid again when he saw the look on Henry’s face—it was such a despairing face. But still he thought, How handsome and He needs a hug.
“What sort of toast is that?” asked Fell. “You mortals are all so rude!” In answer, Henry put his hands over his face and crouched down on the floor, looking like someone was about to hit him.
“It’s okay, dude,” Molly said. She was pale, and her face had begun to sweat. “None of this is real.”
“Yes, it is,” Henry said from underneath his hands. “Yes, it is!”
“Don’t you all understand?” Will said, practically shouting it. “Everything is going to be fine!” But as soon as he said it they all heard a giant noise: a gong and a clang and a thud. Will didn’t ask what it was: the noise put into his head a perfect little movie of the iron doors toppling from their hinges.
“Uh oh!” said Oak.
“Oh, my!” said Fell.
And Lyon shouted, “Run!”
Will and Carolina went to movie night at Dolores Park. It was Will’s idea. Carolina said she preferred books to movies, and she didn’t even have a television, but she liked the idea of being outside, and Dolores was one of her favorite parks. Will didn’t usually like people who didn’t like movies, though he agreed that there were lots of stupid movies (though not necessarily fewer stupid movies than stupid books), and he tended especially not to like people who made a fuss about liking books better than movies. But it was ostensibly true as well that he didn’t like girls with short hair, or broody women, and people who didn’t have to work for a living, and Carolina was all of those. These were all separate issues that had no impact at all on how much he loved her, which was a surprise; he never would have guessed how little he ever could have anticipated of the shape and the character of the person he had fallen in love with. But then again the whole experience of her had been a giant surprise.
The surprise was more lovely than not, but sometimes it was terrible, or at least terrifying—every now and then he was seized with a panicked what am I doing? feeling, but whenever that happened, when he was disturbed by thoughts of Carolina while he was at work in someone else’s garden, or waiting in line for a sandwich, or laboriously pedaling his bike up a steep hill, it was thoughts of Carolina that soothed him again. It was all very weird and very wonderful and felt ill-deserved somehow, which he told her repeatedly. “I don’t deserve you,” he’d say, long before he had started doing things to make that a true statement, and she would reply, “Sure you do. Everybody deserves to be in love.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” he asked her during a picnic conversation under the tree, and she looked at him like he was from the moon.
“Everybody deserves to be happy,” she said, like she was walking him through a math problem. “Everybody needs to be in love to be happy. Therefore, everybody deserves to be in love.”
“Maybe not everybody needs to be in love to be happy. And does everybody really deserve to be happy?”
“Absolutely,” she said. She lay on her back with her feet on the tree, her hips bent almost at ninety degrees. Will sat crosslegged at her head, staring down at her face.
“Everybody? Genghis Khan? Dracula?”
She sat up and took the knife from her plate. “Everybody,” she said. “For a little while, anyway. I’ll write it down, so you won’t forget.” She started carving letters into the silver bark with a knife, but Will stopped her. “That’s bad for the tree,” he said.
The movie was Soylent Green, which Will had never seen before, even though a drunk girl had run naked through his dorm one night in college screaming that Soylent Green was people, so his interest was piqued and he always meant to rent it. But the best thing that could be said about it, he decided, was that it was enormously dispiriting, and they both decided they would have been better off never having seen it. “That was a bad movie,” he said to Carolina later, “but not a badly made movie.” That led them to a discussion about whether a movie could be bad for a person or generate ill in the world. Will said he didn’t like it when art did nothing but make you feel bad, and Carolina replied that she thought that was weird, considering how relentlessly depressing his stories were.
“That’s different,” he said, though it was hard for him to articulate exactly how. “I didn’t write those stories on purpose,” he added. “I mean, I did, but they’re not designed to make people sad. They’re not supposed to increase the total sadness in the world. They’re supposed to do the opposite of that.” Though that wasn’t exactly true either. He thought it would be most accurate to say that they were supposed to make him feel better and worse at the same time, and that he couldn’t really speak for anything they might do to someone else. But he didn’t say that. Carolina kissed him and said again how much she thought Ryan and Sean would have liked each other. Sometimes she talked about how much they had in common, anxiety and dissatisfaction and a troubled relationship with their parents and even being dead, in a way that made it
sound like they belonged together even more than she and Will did.
It was a dispiriting movie but not a dispiriting evening. The weather was not traditionally lovely, but it was the kind of evening, cold and just foggy enough to put golden halos around the streetlights, that Will really liked, and the whole enterprise of giggling at an earnest depiction of dystopia, snuggling in public while vendors sold popcorn and hash cookies and mushroom cordials, seemed like something that would only happen there. He felt very lucky to be lounging in this city and in this park and with this woman, which was part, he supposed, of feeling like he didn’t deserve any of it.
“This movie is making me hungry,” she said. Will got her some popcorn, and when the lady came walking along the slanted edge of the hill, stepping carefully between blankets and towels and softly calling out, “Special cookies! Special cookies!” he ordered two. That made him a lot better disposed toward the movie, and it seemed okay, after the cookies and three beers from Carolina’s backpack, that Soylent Green was people, that women were treated like furniture and old people were euthanized, that they put down Edward G. Robinson as gently and ruthlessly as a dog.
There was a feeling in him that misogyny and food riots and cannibalism and Charlton Heston’s despair did not preclude the existence of justice and beauty in the world. Mr. Heston might run off the screen and, seconds after the movie ended, run into a girl with a Monchhichi hairdo who could demonstrate that it didn’t matter at all to your happiness what was happening five minutes ago, or five years ago, or fifteen. In fact, she might be running from the opposite direction, having just discovered, in another factory, the terrible truth about Soylent Green (which he was suddenly drunk and stoned enough to realize was the truth about life, the horrible open secret that everyone thought they had to ignore to be able to plod through one more day), which was to say it was people, it’s hard to be good, and brothers die. She knew this as well as he did, and she was running from the truth as spastically as Mr. Heston, and yet when they ran into each other she would tell him, very sincerely, that despite all that, despite everything, everybody still deserved to be in love.