by Chris Adrian
“What a terrible gift you have given me,” she said to her husband. They were sitting at the boy’s bedside, not holding hands, but their knees were touching. There had been bad news, and then worse news, and then the worst news yet. The bad cells were back in his blood, and he had a fever, and there was an infection in the bones of his face. Dr. Blork said a fungus was growing there and had admitted that this news was in fact bad, and he had looked both awkward and grave as he sat with them, twisting his stethoscope around in his hands and apologizing for the turn of events, though not exactly accepting responsibility for the failures of the treatment. Oberon had said that mushrooms were some of the friendliest creatures he knew, and he could not understand how they could possibly represent a threat to anyone, but Dr. Blork shook his head, and said that this fungus was nobody’s friend, and further explained that the presence of the new infection compromised the doctors’ ability to poison him anymore, and that for that reason the leukemia cells were having a sort of holiday.
The boy was sleeping. They had brought back the morphine for his pain, so he was rarely awake and not very happy when he was. Titania moved from her chair to the bed and took his hand. Even asleep he pulled it away. “A terrible gift,” she said.
“Don’t say such things,” Oberon said.
“Terrible,” she said. “Terrible, terrible.” She sat on the bed, taking the boy’s hand over and over again as he pulled it away, and told her husband she was afraid that when the boy died he would take away with him not just all the love she felt for him but all the love she felt for Oberon too, and all the love she had felt for anything or anyone in the world. He would draw it after him, as if by decree of some natural law that magic could not violate, and then she would be left with nothing.
“Do not speak of such things, my love,” her husband said, and he kissed her. She let him do that. And she let him put his hands inside her dress, and let him draw her over to the narrow little couch where they were supposed to sleep at night. She tried to pretend that it was any other night under the hill, when they would roll and wrestle with each other while the boy slept next to them oblivious. They were walked in upon a number of times. But everyone who walked in saw something different, and no one remembered what they had seen after they turned and fled the room. The night nurse, coming in to change some IV fluids, saw two blankets striking and grappling with each other on the couch. A nursing assistant saw a mass of snakes and cats twisting over one another, sighing and hissing. Dr. Beadle actually managed to perceive Oberon’s mighty thrusting bottom and went stumbling back out into the hall, temporarily blinded.
One evening Dr. Beadle came in alone, Blorkless, and sat down on the bed, where the boy was sweating and sleeping, dreaming, Titania could tell, of something unpleasant. “I think it’s time to talk about our goals for Brad,” he said, and put a hand on the Beastie over the boy’s foot, and wiggled the foot back and forth as he talked, asking them whether they were really doing the best thing for the boy, whether they should continue with a treatment that was not making him better.
“What else would we do?” Titania asked him, not understanding what he was saying but suddenly not wanting him in the room, or on the bed, or touching the boy.
“We would make him comfortable,” he said.
“Isn’t he comfortable?” Titania asked. “Isn’t he sleeping?”
“Not … finally,” Dr. Beadle said. “We could be doing more and less. We could stop doing what isn’t helping, and not do anything that would prolong … the suffering.” Then Oberon, who had been eyeing the man warily from the couch, leaped up, shouting, “Smotherer! Smother-doctor! Get back to Hell!”
“You don’t understand,” Dr. Beadle said. “I don’t mean that at all. Not at all!” He looked at Titania with an odd combination of pleading and pity. “Do you understand?” he asked her. In reply she drew herself up, and shook off every drop of the disguising glamour, and stood there entirely revealed to him. He seemed to shrink and fell off the bed, and while he was not kneeling purposefully in front of her, he happened to end up on his knees. She leaned over him and spoke very slowly.
“You will do everything mortally possible to save him,” she said.
The night the boy died there were a number of miraculous recoveries on the ward. They were nothing that Titania did on purpose. She did not care about the other pale bald-headed children in their little red wagons and masks, did not care about the mothers whose grief and worry seemed to elevate their countenances to resemble Titania’s own. Indifference was the key to her magic; she and her husband could do nothing for someone they loved. So all the desperate hope she directed at the boy was made manifest around her in rising blood counts and broken fevers and unlikely remissions. It made for a different sort of day, with so much good news around it seemed hardly anyone noticed that the boy had died.
Oberon sat on the floor in a corner of the room, trying to quiet the brokenhearted wailing of the Beastie but not making a sound himself. Titania sat on the bed with the boy. A nurse had been in to strip him of his tubes and wires and had drawn a sheet up to just under his chin. His eyes were closed, and his face looked oddly less pale than it had in life and illness. The glamour was in tatters; Oberon was supposed to be maintaining it, and now Titania found she didn’t really care enough to take up the work. No nurse had been in for hours, and the last to come had lain down upon the clover-covered floor and giggled obtrusively until some thoughtful faerie had put an egg in her mouth to shut her up. Before she had gone drunk, the nurse had mentioned something about funeral arrangements, and Titania was thinking of those now. “We should take him home,” she said aloud, and no one stirred, but she said it again every few minutes, and by twos and threes the faeries crowding the room began to say it too, and then they started to build a bier for him, tearing out the cabinets and bending the IV pole and ripping the sheets and blankets. When they were done the walls were stripped and the furniture was wrecked. Twelve faeries of more or less equal size bore the bier, and they waited while another dozen brownies hammered at the doorway to widen the exit. When they were ready they all looked to Titania, who nodded her permission. Oberon was the last to leave, standing only when Doorknob tugged at his arm after the room had emptied.
There was no disguise left to cover them. People saw them for what they were, a hundred and two faeries and a dead boy proceeding down the hall with harps and flutes, crowded in the service elevator with fiddles and lutes, marching out of the hospital with drums. Mortals gaped. Dogs barked. Cats danced on their hind feet, and birds followed them by the dozen, hopping along and cocking their heads from side to side. It was early afternoon. The fog was breaking against the side of the hill and Buena Vista Park was brilliantly sunny. They passed through the ordinary trees of the park, and then into the extraordinary trees of their own realm, and came to the door in the hill and passed through that as well.
They marched into the great hall and put down the bier. The music played on for a while, then faltered little by little, and the players came to feel unsure of why they were playing. Then the hall was quiet, because they didn’t know what to do next. They had never celebrated or mourned a death before. They were all looking to Titania to speak, but it was Oberon who finally broke the silence, announcing from the back of the room that the Beastie had died of its grief.
4
Besides Henry, Will, and Molly, there were five other people present in the park at the moment that Puck gained his freedom. None of these others were particularly brokenhearted, though neither were any of them entirely whole of heart or, for that matter, whole of mind. None of them were invited to Jordan Sasscock’s party, or even knew him, though Jordan had scolded one of them once for scaring some toddler’s mother in the ER on Parnassus Avenue. Bob had been trying to play with the little boy, the sight of whom transported him into ecstasies of sadness for no reason he could fathom, but his patty-cake made the mother shriek and drew a lecture from Jordan on the responsibilities of the drun
ken and the smelly. You were supposed to lie quietly on the gurney and leave the kids the fuck alone.
Huff, Bob, Mary, Princess, and Hogg: they were in the park to rehearse a musical, far away from curious ears and prying eyes, because the musical was a weapon whose potency depended on secrecy. People were disappearing from the streets of San Francisco, and the players knew why. It was not a very complex mystery, but because the disappearing people were homeless, no one was trying very hard to solve it, and in the halls of the homed people had barely noticed the problem at all. Each of them could count two different people who had disappeared: sometimes it was a friend, sometimes just an acquaintance, and sometimes it was someone they all knew, but every week there was always someone else who was suddenly not where he or she ought to be.
The disappearing was not the reason to perform. People disappeared all the time; everyone knew that. People passed through, or moved away, and, yes, people died—there were a lot of reasons a friend or a companion or a sister might not be on the accustomed corner. But it so happened that the disappearances coincided with a mysterious beneficence from the office of the Mayor: suddenly there was food everywhere, kitchens open in formerly abandoned buildings or in the corners of churches that had been closed for months or years for lack of funds. More sinister than the mysterious plenty was the change in people’s attitudes. The ladlers and the carvers and even the lady who always wanted to test you for syphilis had become inexplicably cheery, as if the weight of their work had suddenly been lifted from them. A bounty of food was not a problem by itself, but a bounty and a sudden change in people such that they acted as if the homeless problem had been solved—and indeed both Huff and Princess had overheard conversations to that effect, in which one party congratulated the other on all their fine work and commented that at this rate the problem would be solved before the wildflowers bloomed again at Point Reyes—these pointed most obviously toward a gruesome plot. San Francisco was feeding the homeless to the homeless.
Putting on the musical was Huff’s idea. He had seen the movie years ago and almost entirely forgot it, but then he saw it again at the beginning of the summer, projected on a giant inflatable screen in the middle of Dolores Park. He had fallen into a troubled sleep there, dreaming of his disappearing friends, and opened his eyes to find the sunny afternoon had been replaced by a foggy evening, and his isolated spot on the slope of the hill had become crowded with young folks, a sea of fuzzy fleece flowing down the hill to the giant screen. He lay unmoving and watched Charlton Heston have his dystopian near-future adventure, and when he proclaimed that Soylent Green was people, Huff knew what he had to do. He already suspected what was happening to his friends and colleagues; Charlton’s message only confirmed it, and Huff lay stunned while the young folk rose and shuffled off in a soft herd. He considered the implications of what he had seen and suddenly conceived of the project by which he would bring down the coalition between the Mayor’s office and whatever latter-day Soylent corporation was helping him turn people into food.
The first song came to him immediately. It was just a fragment, but it was lovely, and just having that one little bit come so easily made the enormity of the project less intimidating. He sang it in his head as he walked down the street, and then sang it to Mary when he found her in her customary spot at Noe and Seventeenth Streets.
People, he sang, people who eat people … That was all he had so far. If he followed the song from which he’d taken the melody, the rest of it would say that they were the luckiest people in the world, but that was not what he wanted to say. Still, he knew right away that this was going to be the signature theme of the whole musical, and it would be sung by all sides, both the people who believed that eating people was a sin and a crime, and those who believed that you ate people and you had to.
What about them? Mary sang back. She had a lovely voice, which was something Huff had not known about her, and discovering it seemed to be a sort of blessing upon the enterprise.
“I don’t know yet,” he said, “but it’s coming.”
And it did come. Over the next few weeks the music came in little snatches of melody, and lyrics came in pieces, blazing letters he would see across the back of his eyelids when he closed his eyes, and the choreography came in stretches of involuntary movement that would steal over him as he was walking down the street.
Mary was his first recruit. She brought in Princess, who happened to know that Hogg played the guitar and the cello and had perfect pitch. Bob showed up one day uninvited in the little room at the library where they gathered to watch a videotape of the movie over and over again. He was unobtrusive and easy to work with, and while he didn’t talk much, when he did it was usually to say something very useful. It was he who suggested the park when they were ready to start rehearsing.
This was already their second night of rehearsal. The first had been particularly profitable despite some disagreement over the best place to do the work, with Hogg and Princess inclined toward the clearing at the top of the hill, while Mary and Huff pointed out that it was too dark to see anything at the top of the hill and too far to walk every night anyway. They preferred the tennis court, a nice flat surface. Bob offered no opinion except to say that the tennis court was nice footing for dancing. And he did a little dance, as if to prove his point, a rather complicated five-step maneuver, repeated five times. “That’s brilliant!” Princess had said, and they had all learned it, more or less, right then, on the sidewalk outside the Duboce Street entrance to the park. They were all so pleased with how easy it was to get started rehearsing that they all went very merrily to the tennis courts and blocked out the first half of the first act in two hours.
On the second night they came back to the tennis court with no disagreements, but then an argument began, after they had briefly recapitulated the blocking they’d done the night before, about what should be done next. Princess happened to have come upon a set of jai alai baskets and was wielding them with both hands and demanding that they proceed immediately to choreograph the scoop dance.
“But that’s three-fourths of the way to the end,” said Mary. “Maybe even closer. It’s the penultimate scene. The penultimate! If you know what that means, you’ll know it’s far too early to hash it out now.”
“Here comes the scoop!” Princess shouted in reply, and proceeded to try to maul Mary with her jai alai baskets. Huff shouted, “Order!” and Hogg shouted, “Cut! Cut!” and someone else shouted, “Poodle!” Bob seemed not to be noticing that anything was happening but had cocked his head to the side and was staring into the dark beyond the tennis courts. Just then the tennis court lights went out. Princess stopped her swinging.
“That happened later last night,” she said.
“We’re out of time already,” said Mary, “and you wasted it all.”
“Do you hear that?” Bob asked them.
“Hear what?”
“Screaming,” he said, and then the streetlights just outside the park did something odd. Without exactly going out, they became considerably dimmer, as if a not entirely opaque veil had been thrown over them.
“I don’t hear it,” said Mary, shaking her head. “But what’s happening to the lights?”
“An eclipse!” said Princess.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Mary. “Those don’t happen at night.”
“But look at the moon,” said Princess. “It’s all fucked up.” That was one way to describe it, Huff thought. It was not discolored or misshapen, but the man in it had an unpleasant look on his face. He looked horrified.
“It looks fine to me,” said Hogg.
“No, it’s a sign,” said Princess. “Go home. Scoop another night!”
“Never mind the moon,” said Mary. “You’re the one who’s fucked up.” But Huff was still staring up at the sky, and now the face was looking even more horrified and worried, and even as he watched the expression grew more distinct, and the face grew brighter. He realized in a moment that this was because t
he streetlights were now nowhere to be seen.
“What horrible shit,” Huff asked all of them, “is the Mayor up to now?”
“Now do you hear it?” Bob asked them, and they did, very faint initially, sounding at first like a tiny siren wailing at a distance, then as it grew closer and louder it seemed a noise a cat might make if you did something truly horrible to it, and then as it got very close it seemed unmistakably human: something was afraid, and it was coming their way.
