The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  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.

  His leukemia went away, which was good news, but not very quickly, which was bad news. His white blood cells would not grow back, which was bad news, and yet it would have been worse news if he had had too many of them. He had no fever, which was good news, until he got one, and that was very bad, though Blork seemed to intimate, in his stuttering way, that there were worse things that might happen. It meant they could not go home, though Beadle and Blork were always promising that a trip home was just around the corner. On the third week the fever went away and the white blood cells began to come back, but then Dr. Blork came to them with a droopy slip of paper documenting that the white blood cells were the evil, cancerous sort, and Titania could tell that there was not much worse he could think of to be telling them. They shuffled the boy’s poisons, and brought him shots of thick white liquid that they shoved into his thighs. The shots made him scream like nothing else had, and she could not bear to be in the room when it happened, because she could not bear the look the boy gave her, which asked so clearly, Shouldn’t you kill them for hurting me like this? The new poison turned him around again; the evil cells began to retire from his blood and his bones. But then his innards became irritated, and they decided, though he was always ravenous, that he couldn’t eat.

  “It’s a crime,” Oberon said. “Damn the triglycerides, the boy is hungry!” The nurses had hung up a bag of food for him, honey-colored liquid that went directly into his veins. Oberon slapped at the bag, and said it didn’t look very satisfying. He fed the boy a bun, and a steak, and a crumpled cream puff, pulling each piece of food from his pocket with a flourish. Titania protested and threatened to get the nurse and even held the call button in her hand, almost pressing it while Oberon laughed and the boy shoved steak in his face. He threw it all up in an hour, the steak looking practically unchanged when it came back up, and became listless and squash-colored for three days. When they were asked if the boy had eaten anything, Oberon only shrugged.

  But as soon as he had recovered, he was crying again for food, pleading with them all the time no matter how the nurses fiddled with the bag that was supposed to keep him sated. One morning the whole team showed up: Beadle and Blork and the junior-junior doctors whose names Titania could never remember and Alice and the nurse and another two or three mortals whose function, if it was something besides just skulking about, she never did discover. When Dr. Blork asked him how he was doing, he pleaded with them, too.

  “Can’t I have one tiny little feast?” he asked, and they laughed at him. They chucked his chin and tousled the place where his hair had been, and then they went out, leaving her with this dissatisfied, suffering creature. “Mama, please,” he said all day, “just one little feast. I won’t ask again, I promise.” Oberon was silent and left the room eventually, once again crying his useless tears, and Titania told the boy he would only become sick if he ate, that even one feast might mean another week before he could eat again. “Don’t think of eating,” she said, “think of this bird, instead.” And she pulled a parrot out from within the folds of her robe. But the boy only asked if he could eat it.

  He wore her down toward evening. Oberon had still not returned, and when she sent Radish to fetch him she said only, “He’s still weeping. See?” And she held a thimble up, brimming with tears. Titania sighed, wanting to run from the boy and his anxious, unhappy hunger, which had seemed to her as the day dragged on to represent, and then to become, a hunger for something else besides food. He didn’t want food. He wanted to be well, to run on the hill under the starlight, to ride on the paths in the park in a little cart pulled by six raccoons. He wanted to spend a day not immersed in hope and hopelessness. She could not give him any of that right now.

  “All right, love,” she said, “just one bite.” And she brought out a chocolate from her bag, but before she could give it to him Oberon returned, calling for her to stop because he had something better. He cleared a space on the bed and put down a little sack there, and very delicately, pinching with his thumb and his forefinger, removed all the ingredients of a tiny feast and laid them on the bed.

  “It will be faster if you help,” he told her, as he squinted to chop up a mote-sized carrot. So she picked up a bag the size of her thumb, emptied out the beans from them, and began to snap. The boy kept trying to eat things raw at first, but Oberon slapped his hand away and told him to be patient, and eventually he helped as well, twisting the heads off the little chickens when Oberon handed them to him, and laughing when they danced a few seconds in his palm. It took a long time to prepare the feast, though they had more and more help, as more faeries popped up in the room, some of whom were sized better for the work. Still more of them gathered round in an audience, stuck to the walls, crowding the shelves, perched on the lintel, all of them muttering opinions as the preparation went on, that they would have baked the fish, not seared it, and salted the cabbage but not the asparagus, and chosen caramel over fudge for the cake.

  When it was done the boy ate the whole thing and did not share a morsel, which was exactly as it was supposed to be. Aside from the size of it, there was nothing magical about the food. It shouldn’t have sated him any more than half a dozen peanuts, but even the aroma calmed him down
as they were cooking, and by the time he had finished off the last tack-sized pastry and dime-sized cake, he was very quiet again. He looked around the bed and around the room, as if for more food, so when he opened his mouth wide Titania thought he was going to shout or cry. But he burped instead, a tiny little noise, commensurate with what he had eaten.

  She had lost him once, just for a little while. He liked to hide but didn’t do it very well, too giggly ever to make his location a secret. But she woke one morning to find him gone from his customary place underneath her arm, and she couldn’t find him in the usual places, in a lump under the covers at the foot of the bed, or on the floor next to the bed, or even under the bed. “Is this a game?” she asked her husband, shaking him awake, and she demanded, “Where have you hidden the boy?”

  He had not hidden him anywhere, and no faerie had made off with him or used his parts in a spell or put him in a pie to eat. But all through the early part of the evening he was nowhere to be found, though she commanded the whole host to search for him under the hill. She began to suspect that his mortal mother had stolen him back and not even done her the courtesy of returning the little hobgoblin that had been left in his place. Oberon could not convince her of how extremely unlikely this would be, so she strapped on her armor, greave by greave. For a while Oberon was able to get it off her as fast as she could put it on, nuzzling her and speaking ever so soothingly about how the boy would be found, but eventually she outstripped him. She placed her helm on her head and called the host to war, and all the peace-loving faeries of Buena Vista Park reluctantly put on their silver mail and took up their ruby-tipped spears and made ready to stream out into the Mission to slay the woman who had stolen their Mistress’s child. But Doorknob found him before they could march out of the woods. He was under a cupboard, sound asleep, and one had only to sniff at him to understand that he had wandered thirsty from bed to the kitchen, drunk at length from the wine bowl instead of the water bowl, and perhaps had had a solitary toddling drunken party all his own before hiding himself away to sleep. Titania wanted to kiss him and hold him, of course, but it occurred to her that there were other things she could do right then as well, shrink him down enough to carry him around in her mouth, or make him a hump on her back, or chain him to her, foot to foot. He woke as she was considering these things, and blinked at her and then at the faeries all attired for war, and turned on his side, and went back to sleep.