The Great Night by Chris Adrian

Author:Chris Adrian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2012-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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