The Great Night by Chris Adrian Page A

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.
    â€œThere you go,” the little man said. “I’ve got you.”
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    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.
    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