by Chris Adrian
Before the day is gone, baby,
Before the play is done, honey,
Find the truth!
Find the truth!
Then he lay down again on his back and put his arms and legs in the air and shook them vigorously before he let them drop with a thud. “Don’t shake like that,” Huff said. “You look like a bug. But turn your head to your side, and make your eyes bug out, and put out your tongue. A little more to the side. Precisely!”
“A lovely dance, my love,” said the lady. “Such grace! How can it be tolerated, on the hill or under it?”
“I dance in my head all the time,” Huff said. “When I’m trying to fall asleep. As a bit of flame, or a tampon on the wind, or a pony. And tonight it’s as easy to do it as to dream it.”
“Well,” she said. They retreated to the bushes once again, to nibble each other’s nipples for a while. His were brown and fat, but she praised them sincerely. “Such beautiful buttons, my love,” she said. Hers were so perfectly formed and such a lovely shade of rose he could hardly believe his eyes when she parted her dress. He brought out a penlight, the better to see them with, and stuck it under her breast, looking to see if it was real. “Do you wish for them to glow?” she asked, and then they both did, with a light that was so warm he could feel it on his face.
“Forgive my doubting, lovely lady!” he said. He put his face between them to make a joyful little speedboat sound. He had almost been arrested, once, for lurking in a Laundromat to press his face into the piles of warm laundry, and now he knew what he had been seeking when he did that, the ideal experience of which that, pleasant as it was, was only a degraded iteration.
“Do pinch them,” he said muffledly, of his own nipples, raising his hands up on either side of her and snapping his fingers like a pair of castanets. He looked up to see her smiling down benevolently on him. “Perfect!” he said, because she was pinching just hard enough and no harder, and who can ever do that at first pinch? But even through the perfect pleasure he heard strains of music and voices arguing. “Duty calls us,” he said, and bowed three times, once to the left breast, once to the right breast, and once to her face. “Shall we have a part two?” he asked her.
“And three and four,” she said. “We would have endless days and nights, my love, if this weren’t the last night. But pleasure has a way of lengthening the hours.”
“I’ve always found it shortens them,” said Huff. “And cold nights are longer than warm ones.” He closed her dress, and took her hand, and led her from behind the bushes in a dance, so everyone would think they were merely rehearsing back there.
Mary and Princess were arguing nearby. “Feather step, feather step, feather step!” Mary said.
“Do-si-do!” said Princess, and did just that, circling Mary but keeping her eyes on Huff the whole time. “Right, boss?” A small crowd, drooping streamers in their hands, surrounded them. Bob and Hogg, dressed respectively as a chair and a couch, were sitting on the ground quietly talking.
“You can’t just make it up as you go along,” said Mary. “That’s not choreography.”
“You’re just jealous of my moves,” said Princess, and struck Mary with her hip. It was obvious that she meant it in a friendly way, but Mary pushed her. Huff sighed, and thought of all the things he could say, that this dance was very important, that its intricate geometries were meant to hypnotize the Mayor and make him more receptive to the subtle lessons that would come later in the play, that the delightful irony of Furniture dancing with furniture would cause him to let down his guard so the more serious ironies yet to come could strike home. He shook his head, and drew in a breath to scold them with, but caught sight of his lady’s face before he spoke and had a different idea. He held out his hand and she took it. Without speaking, they started to dance, and with their feet and their hips and their jiggly necks showed the quarreling girls and the lazy boys and the crowd of limp-ribboned extras exactly what he meant. They all fell into step, the furniture and the Furniture, following him through the steps he had created, the high-grass kick and the lawnmower and the jackin-the-box and the yoga-master-taffy spin. It wasn’t effortless, but it was so easy he started to cry.
“Why tears, my love?” asked his lady, spinning her hand round and round above her head, so all the little people danced in a ring and waved their ribbons.
“For happiness, of course,” he said, which wasn’t exactly why, so he tried to dance it out, instead, how wonderful and overwhelming it was to want something and to get it.
“Happy or sad,” she said, wiping his tears away, “I cannot bear them.” She drew him away from the crowd, now a self-sustaining choreography, and they went behind another bush.
“What rank delight,” she said, before she blew him.
“Your mouth,” he replied, “is like …” But he could think of nothing to compare it to, and then it seemed rude or ungrateful to try. The lesson of the dance, that words were not necessary, or not enough, was still with him, so he answered her with a moan and a giggle and a deep gurgling sigh, and then went nosing under her skirts, to give her a reciprocating thank-you, but the way seemed very long, from her ankle to her crotch. Her skirts were white and transparent, layer by layer—initially he could see her white leg aglow with a special mixture of moonlight and starlight and torchlight—but the world beneath them darkened as he nosed upward, until he was navigating only by touch and smell. Even the way up became notional; he wasn’t entirely sure where his arms and hands had gone, and his head seemed to be floating sideways and down as much as up. Then there was a faint light in the dark, and a soft wind blowing a scent against his face—something like rosemary and gourmet cat food—and then he had arrived. He gorged himself on her, eating with his lips and tongue but also somehow just as much with his cheek and nose and eye, and pressing his eye to her as if to a keyhole he thought he saw the source of the light, flashes of lightning deep inside her.
When they emerged again from the bushes she was riding on his shoulders, having ascended there somewhat accidentally. Without her armor, she was very light, and he pranced merrily to that portion of the field where Bob lay on a bier of sticks and stones while the wonders of the lost world were projected, shadows on a white sheet held up by taller defectors, for his sad, dying, benefit. There was disagreement about how the images should be sequenced, and Mary was complaining that there was no color in them, and Princess was calling her a snob and a colorist.
“Black and white was good enough for everybody for hundreds of years,” she said. “Hundreds of years!”
“Is it time for me to sing?” Bob asked, staring at the screen with his head cocked to the side and an empty glass in his hand.
“Garçon!” said Huff, snapping his fingers at one of the little people walking about with a bottle on his head. He took the bottle and poured for Bob, then took a swig for himself, careful to balance his lady by holding more tightly to her leg with his other hand. “It’s time,” he said to Bob, not bothering to hush Mary or Princess.
“I don’t know if I’ve had too much or not enough,” Bob said, sniffing at his glass.
“Drink up,” said Huff. “It’s good for your voice.” When they tried the song earlier it had not been plaintive or sad enough. Bob had sounded like James Cagney singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and Huff had told him to take a break, and a few more drinks, and to reflect on sad things. Now he just looked confused, and Huff thought of pinching him again a few times to get him in the right frame of mind. The scene and the song was meant to convey Sol’s great weariness—he felt constantly afflicted, Huff had explained, pinching. He just wants to get away from it all. “I get it!” Bob had said, slapping away Huff’s fingers, but now Huff realized he had forgotten something. With his lady on his shoulders, it was almost as if he could borrow a little of her being to think with, and now it was stunningly obvious that Sol was as nostalgic as he was despairing and believed death would somehow bring him back to the good old days. He wanted to
explain that, but Bob was already singing:
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 someth
ing—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.
Part Five
17
After 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.
