by Chris Adrian
All this to say she knew right away what was happening when Puck mastered her effortlessly and gave her over to the absurd mortal in the long green coat. The lesson of the peanut-butter-footed man was that it was everything and nothing about him that put her misery in abeyance. By dumb wild luck, Oak had found her someone whom it was possible to love, though that possibility was so remote there existed no measure sufficiently broad to describe it. She’d never again find a mortal lover to destroy in spirit of callous fun. Her realization was ridiculous and obscene, and she ought to have punished her date, not sent him a blow-job faerie magically equipped to suck out some small portion of his loneliness, but she was fond of him even in her despair and found that she couldn’t hurt him. She considered, in her long silence, while her courtiers nibbled agitatedly at their chocolate cocks, that it ought to have pleased her to know she could feel fondness for any creature after the disastrous departures of her husband and her Boy, but the possibility only felt like a looming, destroying threat.
Puck defeated her with startling ease, and then he punished her with startling intuition, creating a hell for her out of material at hand. When he shoved the candy ring upon her finger, she felt it right away, that same fondness she had felt for her lonely little date, but this was only the beginning. Shortly the rest of it came crashing over her, leaving her not enough of herself even to scream. She smiled and put herself hand in hand with this ridiculous—ingenious, alluring—man and said, “What is your will, my love?”
Huff flexed his finger, which was sore, and considered the situation. The Mayor had departed, running away at top speed waving a pair of underwear in his hands, which seemed like an extraordinary stroke of good luck. And he had married Huff to the lovely woman before he left, which was extraordinary, certainly, though it remained to be determined whether it was lucky or not. Huff had been married before, the first time when he was only seven years old. That had been an informal but not unserious arrangement with an older neighbor girl named Julia. He had decided to show her his penis and when he asked her if she wanted to have a look she said she could only do that if they were married. So he got down on one knee and asked her to be his wife. She squinted at him a moment, and flattened her lips together, and finally said, “I suppose so.” He was going to get his five-year-old brother to come be the preacher, but she said, “Stupid. That’s not how you do it.”
She’d fetched a broom and they each jumped over it three times. “That’s how the slaves used to do it,” she said proudly. She liked to remind people that her family had owned them as recently as one hundred years before. Huff could remember her pale face very well, a lingering effect, he supposed, of their marriage, fleeting as it was. She had a wide nose and full lips that she seemed always to be trying to eat, chewing at them with her snaggle teeth or folding them up like she did when she was thinking hard about something. They honeymooned out behind her toolshed, where he showed her his stuff. “It’s nice, isn’t it?” he asked her, because he had just that morning noticed how nice it was, and that was why he suddenly wanted to show it around. She said, “It’s okay.” They divorced later that afternoon after she brought him the certificate she’d drawn up. Hereby, it said, I do divorce you. There was something to be savored, he thought much later, about how brief and entirely to the point it had been, and the near-total absence of rancor in their relationship was its own sort of pleasure. There had been rancor galore in all the subsequent marriages, to Sylvia and Natalie and Carla and Allison and D’Artania.
All that to say he had been married extensively enough to know what it was like, and to know how a person could seem magical and intriguing, like the answers to your prayers and your problems, and then later, twenty minutes or two weeks or three months or a year, have become, while you looked away for a moment, something or someone else entirely. The magic went away, they became bored and boring, and all they cared to notice about you anymore were your many flaws. “You,” D’Artania had told him, for example, in her valedictory address, “are the most selfish person I have ever met.”
If anyone was going to be different, though, it would probably be this lady, who came somewhat refreshingly to her wedding dressed in armor and carrying an ax. Most ladies didn’t bring the ax out until well after the honeymoon. He thought this must mean she was holding her tenderness in reserve, which seemed like a better arrangement overall than to use it all up at the beginning of the relationship—he had always been a person who liked to get the hard part over first. And yet she was looking at him very tenderly already, from beneath her helmet, and her ax was discarded in a tree.
“Well,” he said. “He didn’t ask us, did he, if we would take this woman or this man? And yet I think it was lawful, him being the Mayor and all. He has always liked to marry people, and now he’s done it to us.”
“What is your will, my love?” she asked him again, and looked at him expectantly. The whole population of the field was looking at him expectantly, the big people and the little people, the ones shaped like trees and the ones shaped like furniture; even the very abstract-looking ones, whose eyes were not immediately to be identified, leaned forward and bent their forms at him expectantly. Huff drew in a breath, but he didn’t know right away what to say. It was a complicated matter, after all, to ask someone what he wanted, and an even more complicated matter to ask it and sound, as she did, like you really wanted to know the answer. He might say I don’t know, which would be true, because it was his deepest, truest, and hardest-won piece of wisdom, that he didn’t really know what he wanted, that he was driven by an inchoate desire, and that the secret to becoming a serene person was not, as some people advised, to give up desire but to realize you could stop there and just accept that what you really wanted could never actually be described. So he might turn to her and say, I want—and demonstrate the object of his desire with a little dance or a gesture or a good fucking, which was really the closest approximation he had to express what he meant, since all his grunting and groaning and especially his ejaculation articulated it just the way it should be articulated, without words and sincerely. His copious, forceful ejaculations were the most sincere thing about him.
But it was too early for that degree of sincerity. He had only known her half an hour, and only been married to her for five minutes. It might scare her away, and it would certainly upset the weaker souls in their audience, all of whom were staring more and more intently. Some were stepping closer: the circle of eyes (and eye stalks and empty sockets and waving sensory filaria) had contracted a little. It would be forgivably misleading, he thought, to be specific about what he wanted. Still, there was a whole continuum of things that he might mention, from world peace, on the one hand, to a sandwich, on the (far-flung) other. He wanted nice things for his friends. There were dead people he would like to return to life, and living people whom he’d like to thrust into death. He wanted a home.
“Are we dead yet?” asked one of the dwarves. Huff peered at him and frowned, understanding that he didn’t have all night to answer the lady’s question and suddenly able to prioritize.
“I want to stop the Mayor,” he said.
“The whom?” asked the lady.
“The Mayor,” he said. “That handsome man who just married us.”
“The Puck? The Beast?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “He is a beast. A beast and a fuck. A great, terrible fuck.”
“I hate him,” she said. “But I am in his power.”
“Well, that’s what everybody thinks,” Huff said, knocking gently with his free hand on her helmet. “Everybody thinks, I am in his power, and everybody says, There’s nothing I can do about how handsome he is or his negligent attitude toward the schools or his policy of enforced cannibalism, because he is too powerful, too intelligent, too ambitious, too mayoral.” He looked around at the crowd, registering the frightened looks on their faces and pseudo-faces.
“My Lady,” said one, a chair. “While the Beast is distracted, we should flee.
”
“To the west,” said a very large bee with the head of a Vietnamese lady.
“Or to the center of the earth!” said another.
“To the moon!” said a round bubble of fur.
“There is no way out,” said a tall one, who looked like a librarian made out of leather. “The walls of air hold us all here, and death is our only escape!”
“Hear, hear!” said Huff, knocking louder on the lady’s helmet. “Order, order! You are all suffering from a delusion! You are thinking just what he wants you to think!”
“Knock softly, my love,” said the woman, catching his hand.
“Excuse me,” said Huff, surveying the nervous creatures again as they gathered closer. He squinted at them, and saw them not as furniture or bee people but as Furniture and stagehands and a chorus. “Do any of them,” he asked the lady, “belong to the Mayor?”
“They are my people,” she said. “And my former husband’s people, but he is gone. Only the beastly are with the Beast, and only those who love death would serve him.”
“So they can all be trusted?”
“They will all serve you,” she said, “because they serve me. What is your will, my love? There is time for us to delight you, before the Beast returns to consummate my defeat.”
“Defeat? Don’t talk like defeat,” Huff said, stroking her helmet now. “Don’t talk like death. Don’t talk like any of that. Does this come off?” He chucked her on the chinstrap, and she lifted a hand to undo it. The helmet fell softly on the grass and rolled—not like a head, he thought. Like a luscious apple. “I want to bring down the Mayor,” he said, catching a handful of the lady’s hair and cradling the back of her head and zooming in for a kiss. “And I want you to help me.” He kissed her, and the murmuring crowd fell silent. A little man came running forward when Huff did that, waving a sharpened twig, and though he was very small, Huff still cowered from him, raising his arms up over his face. But before the blow could fall, the lady bent swiftly, picked the little man up by his neck, and held him up at eye level. “I thought you said we could trust them,” Huff said.
“He thought you were disrespecting me,” she said, and frowned at the little man, and gave him a shake. His tiny head was turning purple where it poked out of her fist.
“I meant no disrespect,” Huff said.
“I know it, my love. Kiss me again.”
“I’d like to,” Huff said. “But the time for kissing is past. In a little while, I’ll kiss you again, but until then, there’s work to do.” He turned his attention to the purple-headed man. “Listen, you,” he said. “Your loyalties are all confused. You don’t want to be working for the Mayor. He’s bad, through and through, and whatever he promised you, he won’t deliver. Did he say he would make you tall? Was that it? Did he promise you a tiny lady? A hundred tiny ladies? A thousand tiny virgins? My man, he’s just talking. But look, there’s always one more chance to be good. Will you swear him off, and swear us on instead?” The lady squeezed him a little tighter, but still he managed just barely to nod his head. “All right, then,” Huff said. “What’s your name?” The lady put him down, and it took him a few tries to gasp it out.
“Bench,” he said.
“Okay, Bench. I’ve got a job for you. Will you do it?”
“As my Lady wills,” he said.
“That’s the spirit,” Huff said. “And here’s your job. It won’t be easy. The park is very big, and you are very small, but I need you to find somebody for me. I need you to find my friend. If we can’t find her, the Mayor has as good as won. She’s about this high, and her hair is gray and curly, and you’ll probably find her sitting like this.” He dropped to the ground and splayed his legs like Princess did. The lady settled down gently next to him, very softly even in her long coat of mail.
“I smell her on you,” the little man said.
“There you go,” Huff said. “Can you find her? Forgive me, but is it too big a job?”
“Even if the Beast has mauled her, I’ll bring the pieces,” he said. He made a curlicue gesture at Huff, bowed to the lady, and scampered off.
“One down!” said Huff, to everybody, and then to the lady, “but there are three more, and I need three more helpers. Who else do you trust?”
“I trust them all,” she said. “They will all obey me unto death.”
“Well, that’s an extreme arrangement,” Huff said. “How about you pick us a few who are obedient just about up to death? Let them hesitate, and wonder if the cause is just, before they do anything drastic.” She cocked her head, and signaled without looking to three more to come forward, a puffball and the bee and the librarian. “Names, please,” said Huff.
“Nemnaut,” said the puffball.
“Kusaka,” said the bee.
“Nilo,” said the librarian.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “Here are your assignments. Bob: about so high, he frowns a lot and he’s wearing a plaid shirt. Hogg: nothing like a pig, long brown hair, big shoes. Mary: sometimes contrary, more often quite agreeable, her bottom is huge. Have you got them?” They all sniffed at him, and bowed, and then they were gone. “Away you go!” he called after them. “Now what?” he said to the ones who remained. He took the lady’s hands—they were much larger than his, but much softer, though her nails, he noticed, were serrated like the edges of steak knives. “Now comes the hard part. I’m sorry everyone, but I’m afraid we’ve got a lot of work to do, if we’re going to turn things around. I know it seems like the Mayor has us right where he wants us, trapped with him in his own private Disneyland, but in fact he’s the one who’s trapped. Well, not yet—but soon!” He made the round of eyes again, smiling at them all in turn, even at the mouthless ones who couldn’t smile back, and though he felt a little dispirited, he didn’t show it. Such a motley crew, and probably none of them had ever acted before, or even seen the movie, and they hardly had the time or the resources now for a screening. The seconds were ticking away. Huff knew from experience that you could distract yourself with a pair of underwear for only so many hours, and they had weeks of work to cram into this night—the shortest one, as it happened, of the whole year. He sighed expansively but made himself smile wider at them, though the effort hurt his face. “We are going to trap him, you see”—he had turned his strained smile to the lady, and her face distracted him—“with his own conscience …” She was staring at him both lovingly and blankly, a combination Huff had never seen in any of his previous wives or girlfriends. “With music.” He started suddenly, realizing that he was holding her hands. “Soylent Green, you see, is—were you going to say something, Ma’am?”
“I love you,” she said. “My liege, my own mortal joy.”
Will didn’t notice the lady until she had moved almost to the head of the line. He was piling up a sundae for one of his classmates, a fat boy with diabetes who was enormously popular despite his two social hits of obesity and disease. Craning her head around his classmate’s bulk, the lady peered at Will impatiently, and looked at the fat boy like he had no right to be ahead of her in line and no right to eat ice cream. Will tried to ignore her. People stared all the time, as if that would make you serve them faster, though more than half the time the ones that glared the hardest at you still had no idea what they wanted when they made it to the head of the line. As he scooped Butter Cookie on top of Oscar’s Wilde on top of Deadly Chocolate Orgasm for his classmate, he caught glimpses of her as she stared at him, and noticed her orange lipstick and too-smooth forehead and very soft-looking hair. These were elements common to a particular type of lady in his town, a wealthy, spiritless suburb of Orlando, and when his classmate shambled off and Will turned to take her order he was expecting her to be nothing special, the sort of facelift on top of a Talbot’s dress that he and his coworker Lauren made fun of in the back all the time.
“Crepuscular Rays,” she said. “Really?”
“Pardon?” Will said.
“That’s the gayest thing I’ve ever hea
rd,” she said.
“Our owner is a latter-day Willy Wonka, “Will said, because that was what they were supposed to say anytime anyone remarked on the names of the ice cream, though Thom, the owner, had in mind when he trained his employees that people would be saying that the names were creative and fascinating instead of stupid or pretentious or twee, which they were.
“This town,” the lady said, shaking her head and setting her earrings to jangling. Will had her pegged for Deadly Chocolate Orgasm because that was what all the middle-aged ladies ordered, but she settled on plain strawberry after tasting Crepuscular Rays and making a face. When she took the ice cream she made a point of touching him, which a lot of the middleaged ladies did, laying her fingers on the inside of his wrist before she drew her hand back to capture the cone and bring it immediately to her lips. With ice cream on her face, she handed him a hundred-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. Then she walked away, out of the store and onto the street, not looking back at all, though the middle-aged ladies usually did that too when they came in alone for ice cream, throwing a glance over the shoulder to see if he was watching them leave.
