Read The Great Night Online

Authors: Chris Adrian

The Great Night (35 page)

BOOK: The Great Night
7.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Take me home, my friend,
I want to go home, my friend,
It's no good here, anymore, my friend.
All the good things have gone away, even strawberries:
Strawberries and peaches and apricots,
Compassion and empathy and fellow feeling, where did they go?
Take me home, my friend,
O thin sharp pokey needly friend, take me home!
Listening, he realized that he had understood the form but not the substance of Sol's nostalgia, and now here Bob was singing it back to him in explicit detail, while the shapes of sunflowers and peach trees and buffalo and tall stately giraffe stretched and leaped and pranced upon the sheet, first in stark black and white and then in shimmering color. They all started to sing along with Bob, even though it was supposed to be a solo number, and Huff swayed in time with the music, which came from everywhere and sounded very full, though the string section played on crickets' legs and the horn section blew blades of grass between their thumbs and the largest of the tympani was a paper cup. Huff swayed too far and unbalanced his lady, who fell to the right. She turned in midair and landed on her feet, but Huff fell on his side, transported by the images and the song. “Cover my eyes!” he said, and she threw a veil over his neck and face and led him away once more behind the circling bushes.
Now they fucked in earnest, which seemed like the right thing to do. The glorious success of Bob's rehearsal seemed like permission somehow. He hadn't said
Take five, everybody
, but he beamed it at them now, wishing they could all find as refreshing a pastime as he and his lady had. “No more tears, love,” she said as he blubbered on her, but he couldn't stop, not
even at the thought of mistakenly impregnating her with his sadness, and not even at the thought of what fruit such a union might bear.
A child constitutionally incapable of being happy
, he thought, and part of him watched it, as he sniffed and licked and thrust, as his cock darted and bucked, as he rolled himself on her and off her and poked her now from the front and now from the back and now from the side. It wailed in its cradle and pouted in its high chair and frowned in Santa's lap, and everyone and everything disappointed it because it had been born sad to live sad. Tears were its nature and formed its lot, and though it never asked for any of the terrible things that befell it, it luxuriated in them just the same, mistaking cynicism for bravery and despair for reason. “I'm crying because it's all so
beautiful
,” he said to it, but it didn't listen; it thought deafness was a virtue.
“No more words, my love,” his lady said, so Huff didn't speak to it anymore but tried to show by gestures what he meant, and it felt like he was discovering what he meant by and through this marvelous fucking, like he had never, in all his days of being wise, sometimes pretending and sometimes not, actually understood anything about suffering or joy until this very moment, which encapsulated and recapitulated the named and nameless struggles of his whole life, the outcome of which he was both breathlessly creating and breathlessly waiting for, not actually knowing if it would be triumph or defeat until he came, standing, with both hands thrown up high over his head and his lady lifted to the stars on his impossibly stiff, impossibly eloquent cock. He came and came and came and fell backward, as if through a mile of air or a lifetime, to land on the soft grass with a noise like his name, feeling like he was saying his name properly for the first time because for the first time he knew who he was and what he was all about and what he really wanted, which was precisely this.
He had nothing left, not will or energy or expertise, with which to venture from the bush and offer to his friends and co-conspirators, though he heard them rehearsing the last song ensemble and unsupervised:
People
, they sang.
People who eat people are the loneliest people in the world!
“Bravo!” he called out, the words muffled by his lady's breast. “Bravo, everybody. Well done!”
 
 
I'm going to die
, Titania thought
, in the grip of this delusion of love.
It wasn't the real thing, but it numbed and distracted just like the real thing. As she promenaded through the dell with her new husband, inspecting the rehearsal scenes and improving them with her magic, she considered how this false love was a lot like what she had once felt for Oberon—intense and consuming and passionate but still light as air, compared to what she felt, then and now, for her Boy. There had been no real suffering in her passion for Oberon until after she drove him away, she realized suddenly, gazing at the candy jewel on her wedding ring. That's what made it feel like a cousin to this false love.
Now she had suffering galore, of course. She suffered for her husband, and for her Boy, and for her subjects, and for herself. Death, about which she knew so little, even after becoming familiar with it in the hospital, was coming for her at dawn, and underneath the fatuous devotion to her new husband, she was more frightened now than relieved. Yet when she thought about it, what she feared more than anything was that her own death would evoke her Boy's death. She had heard mortals say that they lived their whole lives again in the instant before they died, a consolation, as they described it, though it sounded dreadful to her even before she realized that it meant they relived every death that ever befell them. She
didn't want to go back into that hospital room, or listen to her Boy's labored, rattling last breath, or feel his skin cooling under her hand to the temperature of a graveyard stone. Once was more than enough for all that.
Furthermore, oblivion had lost its allure. She had thought for a while that that was death's great magic: it ruined everything and then made it all better; it took away the pain it gave you, because even though she didn't want to die it was already a relief to be dead. But then it had become obvious to her, in the quiet bubble in her mind within which she reflected on things even as she pranced around the dell, that when she died her memory of her Boy would die as well, and that seemed unbearable, because she realized that eventually everyone who ever remembered him, faerie or mortal, would die as well, and then even the memory of him would be dead. What her dead mind might do, she couldn't know, though somehow she felt sure it would do nothing at all, that death would be such a total state of being that it would leave no room for the exercise of memory or longing or love.
These thoughts would have inspired her to rage, if she hadn't been bound by Puck's spell and powerless to lift it. The candy ring throbbed on her finger, but she couldn't remove it, and she likewise could do nothing but smile and fawn on the mortal fool, and waste her last few hours, and her people's, catering to his folly. She might have spent her remaining time chopping away at the earth and the trees, and reduced the whole hill to a scarred lump, but instead of destruction she wreaked a particular sort of creation for her new husband's sake. There was something mildly interesting about that, she thought within her bubble, and something mildly appealing about rehearsing a nonsensical play while extinction loomed. Some of her people seemed to have entered into the enterprise in that spirit; they danced and sang and capered in a way that
seemed insane and carefree compared to the ones who were doing it only because she told them to. And scene by scene, she tried to sympathize with them more, and to sympathize with her carefree self, the Titania outside of the solemn, angry little bubble. But it seemed too much like something Puck would approve of, for them all to mutter nonsense and do handstands until he came to kill them, and she decided she wanted no part of nonsense right now, no matter what her mouth might be saying or her body might be doing. It was a distinctly mortal attitude, which she understood a lot better, now that she was herself convincingly threatened with death; she wanted it all—her life, her losses, her death—to mean something.
She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it. Just thinking about it made something—the body within the bubble—ache, and made her want to lie down and sleep. So she did magic instead, scene by scene, working a sort of dual cosmesis upon the players and the play, so the mortals sang more sweetly and their voices and feet were linked to the faeries in such a way that the song and dance became ugly vessels containing real beauty, and she made it so the play would show whoever saw it not just the dancing backhoes and prostitutes and singing corpses and dwarves juggling wafers of green plankton, but also whatever was most frightening, exultant, and pathetic about their own lives. It was a crude and subtle piece of magic, and the more deliriously the exterior Titania giggled and fucked, the more industriously the interior one worked it out, even though she knew what she would have caused herself to see, when the music was over and the play was done.
A
fter her Boy died, Titania stayed in bed for weeks. It seemed like the right place to be, since she deserved a rest, and since her employment as a mother had come to an end. She vaguely remembered what she had done with her days, before the boy had come and before he had fallen ill, and she had no interest in any of it. She had a dawning sense of what her new occupation was going to be, and she was in no hurry to take up the post. Better to stay in bed, even if she couldn't exactly sleep.
Oberon stayed with her, at first. He seemed to know better than to say anything, but he pursued her around the bed, always seeking to hold her, which was fine when she was sleeping but annoyed her when she was awake, as did his tears, which thankfully came in smaller and smaller daily volumes as time passed. “It's all right,” he said at last, when a week had gone by. “You don't have to get up. You don't have to do anything. You can dwell here, in his memory, for as long as you wish.” She didn't snort out loud, and her face was hidden in her pillow when she rolled her eyes. It wasn't his memory she
was seeking there; in the first few days after he died, her mind recoiled from images of his as if they burned. She wasn't seeking anything. She was doing just what it looked like she was doing, lying about, half-awake and half-asleep, passing the time and waiting for something to change. Because it seemed very clear to her, in those first few days, that what she felt was so intolerable that it couldn't possibly last, and if she did nothing to distract herself from it, she'd use it up, and then she'd be able to get up, and move about, and care once again about her duties to her people, about her constitutional obligations to dancing and singing and feasting and praising the movements of the stars. She didn't consider at all—she didn't dare to consider—that the sources of grief inside her might be inexhaustible.
When Oberon rose and left her it felt like a betrayal, but it also gave her hope that her tactics were sound. It had already happened for him (of course, because he had always, after all, felt less for their Boy than she did), which meant it might happen for her. He retreated in degrees, keeping a vigil at first on the edge of the bed, and then in a chair, and then lounging about the room, and finally just poking his head in now and then to check on her, so she felt the pressure of his eyes and pulled the blankets over her head. One evening she looked out from the blankets and saw a creature in the chair her husband had vacated.
“Good morning, Lady,” said Radish.
“It is nighttime, pixie,” she said.
“Whenever you wake and whenever you rise, that is morning. Then we'll count the days and months and years again, a whole other eternity beginning in that very moment. Shall I fetch your slippers?”
“Where is my husband?”
“Reigning and raining,” said Radish, standing on one leg
on the chair and miming her meaning by placing an invisible crown on her own head and tracing tear tracks down her cheeks. “Over half his—” Without sitting up, Titania backhanded her and sent her bouncing off a far wall, then turned on her side and drew the covers over her head again.
There were other visitors, faeries tall and small and round and narrow, who came to sing to her or bring her treats or weep at her bedside, as if it were she who was dead. She stole their voices and ignored the food and threatened to tear them to pieces if they didn't stop singing, and yet they still came, sent in one by one, she suspected, by Oberon, who came himself, now and then, to sit silently in the chair, or put his bare foot under the covers to touch her, which she tolerated, though she wouldn't take his hand when he offered it, for fear he would draw her from the bed. “I'm not done yet,” she said, though he never asked her for an explanation.
“I wish
I
could sleep all day,” said Puck. He was her last visitor. She lifted the covers for a glimpse of him, then wished she hadn't. He was wearing her Boy's form, naked and thin with a heavy silver chain around his neck.
“Take off that face,” she said.
“I put nothing on,” he said, “and can take nothing off. I've only come as commanded, to tell you a feast has been prepared. I forget what the occasion is.”
“Come closer,” Titania said. “I'll pluck off your nipples, and put out your eyes.” That made him laugh, and when he saw the damp spots blooming on the thin blanket that lay over her face, he laughed harder.
“I remember crying once,” he said. “Did I look so funny to
you
?”
“I'll kill you,” she said, a threat they both knew was empty, but he was gone. She wondered when he had ever cried, and wondered if he was lying about a feast, and wondered what the
occasion could be, though there was no vigor in her wonder. None of it mattered. She wasn't done yet, and she couldn't leave her bed. She had a new notion, not completely formed, that the bed was carrying her somewhere, and sometimes in the dark she peeked over the edge of the bed, imagining dark heaving seas. It was as naïve and useless a notion as thinking she could exhaust her sadness with continuous grieving; there was nowhere any vessel could take her where she would feel any different. She got up not very long after Puck's visit, though not because she had mastered her feelings or become wise to a way to make them bearable. She began to wonder if the face Puck had worn had been her Boy's real face. In the space of an hour she became terrified that she had forgotten what he looked like, which seemed like a terrible insult to him, one he wouldn't forgive her and one she could never forgive herself. When she became convinced that she
had
forgotten, she sprang from bed, nimble and fleet despite the weeks of indolence, and hurried to him, running through her changeable kingdom under the hill, which showed her the way to the dining hall before it showed her the way to his bier. Countless faeries cheered when she appeared at the door, and Oberon lifted a glass to her, but she raced by and brooked no more detours from the hill. She tore the door to the crypt from its hinges and raced to him as if he were in danger she could save him from. He lay where they had left him, surrounded by the portraits of his foster brothers and sisters, uncorrupted and unchanged, the very picture of her memory of him.
 
 
She checked on him after that not because she ever thought again that she had forgotten what he looked like, but because a notion hatched in her mind that he had come back to life. It started quite suddenly. At a joyless meal with Oberon, she felt
her heart skip a beat and knew with absolute certainty that he was alive again, and she went running off once again to the crypt and threw open the door to find him as dead as ever. Next she was sure he had come back to life and died again waiting for her to come to him, so she brought a chair to sit in and wait for him. “What?” she asked Oberon, when he came to stand by her and scold her silently. “What do we know of death? Can you really say he might not come back? What do you know?”
“They do not come back,” Oberon said.
“What do you know?” she asked again. “What do you
know
?” He left her alone to wait, and she waited and waited, until she became distracted by another plan. Another idea hatched in her mind: she would go back and have vengeance on the hospital that had killed him. She put on her armor and took out her ax, and gathered up a hundred bellicose faeries to march with her. But little Radish tattled to Oberon, who commanded Puck to steal her ax.
“You have robbed me of my satisfaction,” she said to Puck.
He shrugged. “I'd ruin all your happiness, if I could,” he said.
“Oberon sent you on an errand. Now I'll send you on one too.” She told him what she wanted, and he laughed. “What fun,” he said, and yawned. But within an hour he'd been to the hospital and fetched Alice the social worker back to the hill.
“Trudy,” she said. “Trudy Trudy Trudy.” Her eyes were glazed and her heart, when she pressed herself against Titania and clutched at her back and her neck, was racing. “How are you all holding up?”
“Not very well,” she said hesitantly.
“Of course not,” Alice said. “That's normal. That's normal! Are you taking care of yourself? Are you being good to yourself?”
“What's that got to do with anything?” Titania asked.
“Everything, honey. Everything! It's your time now, don't you see? Nobody else matters now. You worked so hard—it's time for a rest.”
“She slept for a month,” said Puck.
“Of course she slept for a month! A month?”
“Tell her how it gets better,” Puck said. “You have a friend. You have, say, a love of your life, and then they go away, and you forget about them, and everyone else forgets about them. Completely.”
“Oh, no, Grandpa. No, you don't. You don't forget. You never forget. How could you forget? But it gets better, honey. You can't imagine that it ever will, but trust me, it does. I've seen it happen again and again, and it's never okay. How could it ever be okay? But it gets better.”
“See?” Puck said. “It gets better!” And he laughed and laughed. Titania stepped close to Alice, and put a hand behind her neck to draw her in close enough for a kiss, and whispered, cheek to cheek, “Tell me the truth.” She wanted Alice to tell her it would never get better, that she herself was as dead as her Boy, and what was left for her to live now seemed hopelessly estranged from a real life because it was. “You've just got to give up, honey,” Alice said. “Nothing could ever happen to make this any better. Why would you ever pretend otherwise?' She was weeping, not in awe this time but because of all the baseless rumors of hope she'd spread in her time.
Oberon found them weeping together while Puck grinned and played a fiddle. He didn't scold her this time for overwhelming a mortal but just said it was time for Alice to go home.
 
 
“You are not suited to sadness,” Oberon told her, and that was as close as he ever came to criticizing her for grieving too exorbitantly
for the child or ignoring the burden of sadness that he carried. She was waiting for him to do that. She had plans of battle prepared more intricate and more violent than anything she had drawn up when she was prepared to invade and destroy the hospital. She was sure he'd lose the last protecting shred of her love, if he had criticized her forcefully, or complained that she was ignoring him, or asked, What about my grief?
But he expressed his impatience by courting her, instead. He came to their room in a wagon, drawn by Puck, a giant dog. “Let's go for a ride,” he said, but it was twelve visits before she consented, and he didn't talk for the first three times they went out. “I got you something,” he said eventually. They were always small gifts, dark baubles to suit her new mood, a raven or a piece of shale or a bag of beetles. She tolerated the courtship and made herself alone on her side of the bed, examining her insides every night to determine what portion of love the boy had drawn after him into death and always deciding that he hadn't taken everything, after all, just most of it, the best part.
At last—she had no idea at all of how much time it took him—her husband brought her a sunflower.
“What's this?” she asked.
“Marry me,” he said.
“We are already married.”
“Marry me again,” he said. “Marry into our new life. We'll be diminished from our former selves, I promise you that. We'll not forget what we lost, but not neglect our future joys. Can you imagine it?”
She looked at his flower but not at his face. “No,” she said.
“Ah,” he said. “Come along with me, Titania.” He held his hand out to her, as if there were someplace else to go, except where they were. It summed up in a sentence how wonderful he was, and how furiously she wished to destroy him and
destroy his love for her just then. Even a month later, she'd wish she'd said,
I do not understand how to love you now
, or
I do not wish to love you anymore
or
What can it possibly mean to love you now?
but instead she said, “I do not love you. I never loved you.” My husband, my friend, my life, I do not love you. I never did.
BOOK: The Great Night
7.63Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Undead and Unwary by MaryJanice Davidson
Wild Nights by Karen Erickson
Randall Wedding by Judy Christenberry
No Strings Attached by Randi Reisfeld
Make-A-Mix by Karine Eliason
Forgive and Forget by Margaret Dickinson