Free The Great Night by Chris Adrian

park would add another sort of correction, he knew some part of him still thought it would be better to stay home for another night of weeping and doughnut-feasting and masturbation.
    It felt like he had been walking in a circle, always uphill.
He had passed some landmarks that he recognized from the miserable outing with Bobby: the tennis courts, where some homeless people seemed to be settling in for an early bedtime; a willow whose droopy branches hung low enough to scrape the path. He passed the shin-high stone wall, made with old pieces of headstone, that wound along the path to the steep stairs that rose to the bald little crown of the park. He’d started up those stairs but never arrived at the top of the hill. Every hundred steps or so he paused, and looked around, and saw the same thing: a darkening vista of pale eucalyptus trees in the steep ravines, and through them a glimpse of the city below the hill and, beyond that, the bay and the bridges. But glimpse by glimpse, the city was obscured. It hadn’t been particularly foggy when Henry had left his house, but it rolled in precipitously while he walked the steps, and soon he could only see a wall of fog beyond the trees, roiling and heaving as if it were breaking upon an invisible barrier.
    The steps led to still more steps. He thought he must have taken some detour without noticing, because soon he was going straight across the hill and then down before he went up again, and then he was deposited in a little clearing, a flat field cut into the side of the hill and ringed by trees. There was a rock with a flat seat and a high back that looked, to someone who had been walking uphill for twenty minutes, a lot like a chair.
    Henry sat down and kicked off his shoes and put his feet in the soft grass. This was a pretty ordinary gesture, but for him it was still something of an extraordinary accomplishment. Once he had a terror of the ground, because it was dirty in the ordinary sense of dirty, and because it was dirty in all the new, miserable ways he had learned things could be dirty since the threat of true love had turned him into a younger, poorer sort of Howard Hughes. He wanted to say, Bobby, this is nice!
because it was nice. The grass was soft and cool and dry, and though he thought he could properly appreciate it through his socks, he took those off, too, and dug his toes into the tight spaces between the blades until he could feel the deeper cool and softness of the soil underneath. In the first days of his recovery, he had done things like this demonstratively, always showing off for his absent, rejecting ex-boyfriend, but soon he was doing all the formerly forbidden things for the joy of them, because it was lovely and interesting and sustaining to put one’s feet in the grass, or to shake the paw of a strange dog, or even marvel over some pornographic vagina, formerly the abomination of abominations and the anathema of anathemas. Now, beyond any hope of reunion with old stay-the-fuck-away-from-me Bobby, Henry had nothing left to prove, and for the first time in forever he did things for no other reason than because it made him happy to do them.
    He sat for a while appreciating his feet on the grass, and appreciating the feeling of his bottom and his back against the stone, and wondered if this could reasonably be considered the end of the night. He had already socialized more in twelve hours than he had done in a typical month of days in the past year, even though he hadn’t made it to the party and the only interactions he’d had so far were smiling at some friendly men on Eighteenth Street and a short talk about the possibility of fog with a pierced-up fellow in a café on Haight and Scott, where he’d stopped just before heading up the hill. There were nights back when he lived in Boston when he would never venture out of his apartment, because it was too much effort to get out of bed, or put on his shoes, or navigate the