The Great Night by Chris Adrian Page B

wondered very briefly what she did, and did so well, that she could afford a place like this, even in its partially ruined state, and then he got distracted watching her walk and nearly ran into her when she stopped suddenly. They had proceeded through the foyer and the dining room and living room and the kitchen, and a couple of rooms whose purpose Will could not divine, and finally come into a sunroom empty except for five large pillows uncarefully arranged on the floor. To Will’s left a whole wall was covered with photos of a man, a little younger than him, another Monchhichi-like creature with a fuzzy brown head and big brown eyes.
    â€œMy brother Ryan,” Carolina said. “He’s dead.” Then she picked her way swiftly through the pillows and went outside. Will followed, wondering briefly if people came to kneel on the pillows and worship the pictures. Any other arborist might have dismissed her as crazy, but Will was in a position to sympathize with someone who had plastered a wall with pictures of her dead brother, and who paused conspicuously to draw the attention of strangers to them. He had a dead brother of his own and had thrown up his own sort of worshipping wall over the years since Sean’s death.
    â€œCome along,” Carolina said, standing in the door to the garden. She went right to the tree, the oak that looked even worse in real life than it had in the picture, but Will’s attention was captured by the sorry state of its neighbors, a peppermint
willow and a carob tree and a Grecian laurel, all suffering some variety of rot, a tristania overgrown to the point of strangling itself as well as an adjacent pear tree, and a slimy koi pond, which wasn’t even his responsibility, yet he longed to clean it as soon as he saw it.
    â€œWhat do you think?” she asked. “Can you help?” She was standing next to her tree, one arm around the trunk. She looked like she was about to cry, and Will thought, dismissively and uncharitably, She thinks the tree is her brother. She thinks he came back as that tree or went into that tree. He shook his head at himself and considered that maybe she just wasn’t ready for anything else in her life to die just yet.
    â€œYou can’t?” she asked. “But you haven’t even looked at him yet. Can you really tell from over there?”
    Will realized he was still shaking his head. “No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I can help. Probably. Maybe. Do you know what kind of tree this is, exactly?” He asked because, as he got closer, he saw that it was not an ordinary specimen. The bark was a silver color that the photograph had not properly represented, as it had not represented the heaping tarry excrescences that dotted it on every limb. The parts of the leaves that in the picture appeared discolored and diseased were in fact the healthy parts—he could only tell when he touched them that the silver and gold portions had the texture of health, while the green parts were rubbery or brittle.
    â€œNo,” Carolina said. “It came with the house. It was planted a long time ago. It’s an oak, isn’t it?”
    â€œOr something,” Will said. He walked around the tree once, staring up into the branches and listening to the odd rustle of the leaves; there was something metallic just at the edges of the noise. “This whole place is a mess,” Will said, not looking away from the odd oak. “Do you want me to fix them all up or just this one?” He turned to look at her and wished he had phrased
the question differently, because her wounded posture and the sad expectant look on her face made him feel churlish and rude. “Please,” he said, unthinkingly, and then, “Sorry. This garden could be magnificent. But there are a lot of sick plants.”
    She straightened her back and frowned at him. “I don’t really care about the rest of it,” she said, “but you