The Great Night by Chris Adrian Page B

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.
    â€œYou 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