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Authors: Chris Adrian

BOOK: The Great Night
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The boy grew, and changed, and became ever more delightful to her, and she imagined that they could go on forever like that, that he would always be her favorite thing. It would have been perfect, and maybe it would have been better if he had stayed her favorite thing—a toy and not a son—because now he would just be a broken toy. She ought to have had the foresight to make him dumb, or Oberon ought to have, since the boy was his terrible gift to her. But one evening the boy ran back to her, and climbed upon her throne, and giggled at the dancing faerie bodies leaping and jumping all around them, and put his face to her breast, and sighed a word at her,
molly
or
moony
or
middlebury
—she still didn't know what it was exactly. But it was close enough to
mommy
to ruin everything.
 
 
They poisoned the boy exquisitely. Beadle and Blork had reviewed it all with them, the names and the actions and the toxicities of the variety of agents they were going to use to cure him, but of that whole long conversation only a single phrase of Blork's had really stuck. “We'll poison him well again,” he'd said, rather too cheerily, and he had explained that the chemotherapy was harder on the cancer than on the healthy boy parts, but that it was still hard, and that for the next many months he would act like a boy who had been poisoned. “Sometimes we'll poison him a little,” he said, while Beadle frowned more and more vigorously at him, “and sometimes we'll poison him a lot.” And indeed in that first week it seemed to Titania that they were poisoning him as vigorously and enthusiastically as anyone ever poisoned anybody, for or against their own good. The chemotherapy came in colors—straw yellow and a red somewhere between the flesh of a watermelon and a cherry—but did not fume or smoke the way some of her own most dramatic poisons had. There was nothing in them she could comprehend, though she peered at the bags and sniffed at the tubes, since there was no magic in them. She was only reluctantly interested in the particulars of the medications, but Oberon wanted to know all about them and talked incessantly about what he learned, parroting what Beadle and Blork said or reading aloud from the packets of information the nurses gave them. He proclaimed that he would taste the red liquid himself, to share the experience with the boy, but in the end he made a much lesser faerie do it, a little brownie named Doorknob, who smacked his lips and proclaimed that it tasted rusty in the same way that blood smelled rusty, and went on to say he
thought he liked the taste of it and was about to sample it again when he went suddenly mad, tearing at his hair and clawing at his face and telling everyone his bowels had become wild voles, and perhaps they had, since there was an obvious churning in his hairy little belly. Oberon knocked him over the head with his fist, which brought him sleep if not peace, and though he had previously been one of the meekest spirits over the hill, every day after that he was angry and abrasive, and more than anything else he liked to pick a fight.
The boy had a very different response. Right away the poisons settled him down in a way that even the morphine did not. That put him to sleep, but in between doses he woke and cried again, saying that a gator had his leg or a bear was hugging him to death or a snake had wound itself around the long part of his arm and was crushing it. Within a few days the poisons had made him peaceful again. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog. Oberon had voiced a fear that the boy was sick for human things, that the cancer in his blood was only a symptom of a greater ill, that he was homesick unto death. So she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy.
Then he seemed to thrive on it. If she hadn't been so distracted by relief it might have saddened her, or brought to mind how different in kind he was from her, that a decoction of grief should restore him. His whole body seemed to suck it up, bag after bag, and then his fever broke, and the spots on his skin began to fade like ordinary bruises, and the pain in his bones went away. She watched him for hours, finally restored to untroubled sleep, and when he woke he said, “I
want a cheese sandwich,” and the dozen little faeries hidden around the room gave a cheer.
“You heard him,” she said, and ordered them with a sweep of her arm out the door and the windows. The laziest went only to the hospital cafeteria, but the more industrious ventured out to the fancy cheese shops of Cole Valley and the Castro and even the Marina and returned with loaves under their arms and wheels and blocks of stolen cheeses balanced on their heads and stuffed down their pants, Manchego and Nisa and Tomme Vaudoise, proclaiming the names to the boy as if they were announcing the names of visiting kings and queens. The room filled rapidly with cheese and then with sandwiches, as the bread and cheese was cut and assembled. The boy chose something from the cafeteria, a plastic-looking cheese on toast. Oberon, asleep on the narrow couch beneath the window, was awakened by the variety of odors and started to thank the faeries for his breakfast, until a pixie named Radish pointed and said in her thin high voice, “He mounches! He mounches!” Oberon began to cry, of course. He was always crying these days, and it seemed rather showy to Titania, who thought she suffered more deeply in her silence than he did in his sobs. He gathered the boy in his arms, and the boy said, “Papa, you are getting my sandwich wet,” which caused some tittering among the faeries, some of whom were crying too now, or laughing, or kissing one another with mouths full of rare cheese. Titania sat down on the bed and put a hand on the boy and another on her husband, and forgave Oberon his showy tears and the boy the scare he'd given her.
Just then Dr. Blork entered the room, giving the barest hint of a knock on the door before he barged in. The faeries vanished before his eye could even register them, but the cheeses stayed behind, stacked in sandwiches on the dresser and the windowsill, wedged in the light fixtures and stuck to the bulletin board
with pins, piled in the sink and scattered on the floor. He stared all around the room and then at the three of them, looking so pale and panicked that Titania had to wonder if he was afraid of cheese.
“He was hungry,” Titania said, though the glamour would obviate any need for an excuse. “He's hungry. He's eating.”
“You have poisoned him masterfully!” said Oberon, and Titania asked if they could take him home now.
 
 
He was never a very useful changeling. Previously Oberon had trained them as pages or attendants for her, and they learned, even as young children, to brush her hair just in the way she liked. Or they were instructed to sing to her, or dance a masque, or wrestle young wolves in a ring for the entertainment of the host. But the boy only hit her when she presented him with the brush, and instead she found herself brushing
his
hair.
And she sang for him, ancient dirges at first, and eldritch hymns to the moon, but he didn't like those, and Oberon suggested that she learn some music more familiar to him. So she sent Doorknob into the Haight to fetch a human musician, but he brought her back an album instead, because it had a beautiful woman on it, a lovely human mama. She looked at the woman on the cover of
Carly Simon's Greatest Hits
, golden-skinned and honey-haired with a fetching gap in her smile, and put on her aspect, and spun the record on her finger while Radish sat upon it, the stinger in her bottom protruding to scratch in the grooves, and Titania leaned close to listen to the songs. Then she sang to the boy about his own vanity and felt a peaceful pleasure.
Oberon said she was spoiling him, she had ruined him, and he had no hope of ever becoming a functional changeling, and in a fit of enthusiastic discipline he scolded the boy, ordered
him to pick up some toys he had left scattered in the hall, and threatened to feed him to a bear if he did not. Weepingly, the boy complied, but he had gathered up only a few blocks before he came to a little blue bucket on the floor. “I'm a puppy!” he said, and bent down to take the handle in his mouth. Then he began to prance around the hall with his head high, the bucket slapping against his chest.
“That's not what you're supposed to be doing at all!” Oberon shouted at him, but by the time Titania entered the room, warned by Radish that Oberon was about to beat the changeling, Oberon had joined him in the game with a toy shovel in his teeth. Titania laughed, and it seemed to her in that moment that she had two hearts in her, each pouring out an equivalent feeling toward the prancing figures, and she thought,
My men
.
 
 
They were not allowed to go home. It was hardly time for that, Dr. Beadle told them. The boy was barely better at all. This was going to be a three-year journey, and they were not even a week into it. They were going to have to learn patience if they were going to get through this. They were going to have to learn to take things one day at a time.
“I like to take the long view of things,” Titania said in response, which had been true as a rule all through her long, long life. But lately her long view had contracted, and yet it was no comfort to take things, as Dr. Beadle suggested, as they came. Even without looking ahead into the uncertain future, there was always something to worry about. Oberon suggested she look to the boy and model her behavior after his, which was what he was doing, to which she replied that a child in crisis needed parents, not playmates, to which he said that wasn't what he meant at all, and they proceeded to quarrel about it, very softly, since the boy was sleeping.
Still, she gave it a try, proceeding with the boy on one of his daily migrations through the ward. Ever since he had been feeling better he went for multiple daily promenades, sometimes walking and sometimes in a little red buggy that he drove by making skibbling motions against the ground. He had to wear a mask, and his IV pole usually accompanied him, but these seemed not to bother him at all, so Titania tried not to let them bother her either, though she was pushing the pole and had to stoop now and then to adjust his mask when it slid over his chin.
The ward was almost the ugliest place she had ever seen, and certainly the ugliest place she had ever lived. Someone had tried, some time ago, to make it pretty, so there were big photographs in the hall of children at various sorts of play, and some of these were diverting, she supposed. But the pictures were few. In other places on the wall, someone had thought to put up bas-relief cartoon faces, about the size of a child's face, but the faces looked deformed to her eye—goblin faces—and they seemed uniformly to be in pain.
The boy was not allowed to wander beyond the filtered confines of the ward, so they went around and around, passing the posse of doctors on their rounds and the nurses at their stations and the other parents and children making their own circumnavigations. The boy called out hello and beeped his horn at everyone they met. They called back “Hello, Brad!” or “Hello, Brian!” or “Hello, Billy!” since he answered to all those names. Everyone heard something different when they asked his name and Titania replied, “Boy.”
She walked, step by step, not thinking of anything but the ugliness of the hall or the homeliness of Dr. Blork or the coarseness of Dr. Beadle's hair or the redness of the buggy.
There is no past and no future
, she told herself.
We have been here forever, and we will be here forever
. These thoughts were
not exactly a comfort. She considered the other parents, staring at them as she passed, remembering to smile at them only when they smiled at her. It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless. A feeling like that ought to be able to move mountains, she thought, and then she wondered how she had come to such a sad place in her thoughts, when she meant to live entirely in the blank present. They went back to the room where Oberon was playing a video game with a brownie perched on his head.
“I hate this place,” she told him.
 
 
They always called the good news good news, but for the bad news they always found another name. Dr. Blork would say they had taken a little detour on the way to recovery or had encountered a minor disappointment. Occasionally, when things really took a turn for the worse, he'd admit that something was, if not bad news, not very good news. It was an unusual experience, to wait anxiously every morning for the day's news and to read it—in the slips of paper they gave her that detailed the results of the previous day's tests and in the faces of the people who brought the news, in the pitch of their voices and in the absences they embraced, the words they did not use, and the things they did not say.
Oberon said the way that good news followed bad news, which followed good news on the tail of bad news, made him feel as if he were sailing in a ship on dangerous swells or riding
an angry pony. Titania was the only one among them ever to have ridden on a roller coaster, but she didn't offer up the experience as an analogy, because it seemed insufficient to describe a process that to her felt less like a violent unpredictable ride and more like someone ripping out your heart on one day and then stuffing it back in your chest on the next. There was very little about it that she found unpredictable, and it was as much a comfort to know that the bad news would be followed by good as it was a slumping misery to know that the good news was not final. She was starting to believe that, more than anything, they had only lucky days and unlucky, that some cruel arbiter, mightier than either she or her husband, was presiding over this illness, and she wasn't always convinced, when Beadle or Blork told them something was working, that something they did was making the boy better.

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