by Chris Adrian
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.
18
“A-one,” Huff shouted, “and-a-two!’ He remembered to sing just as the Mayor arrived, so Huff was singing “A-three!” as he pulled up in his obscene royal wagon. He wasn’t alone: there was a man at his side, whose hand the Mayor was holding very tightly, and his cart was pulled by another man and a woman, both naked and dazed-looking. Three more creatures—Huff had ideas for three more characters when he laid eyes upon them, a Soylent Bunny and a tall barren tree to dance with Mother Nature and a little man to physically represent Thorn’s atrophied ambition—came behind, dragged along by chains attached haphazardly to their ankles and wrists. It was too late to add them in, and too late to add in the naked man and the naked woman, who would have made a handsome Soylent thug and a lovely piece of Furniture. He could do nothing for them now but sing, so that’s what he did.
It felt like magic, to wave his arms and wink and wiggle his nose, subtly conducting the music as he danced and sang. It would have been no more startling to point at a tree and have it erupt in flames as it was to point at Princess and have her erupt in beautiful heartbreaking song. Everything was so much worse than he had ever imagined: the state of San Francisco in 2022, the plight of a woman whose body was bought and sold with the apartment she lived in, the debilitating nostalgia for jam, the pain of hunger and the memory of how far the world had fallen and had yet to fall. And it was all—the music and the words and the enraptured faces of his cast, and even the nostalgia and the hunger and the secret ingredient in Soylent Green—lovelier than he could bear. He wanted to say to his lady, “Look! Look! It’s a miracle!” But he was afraid to break his concentration even for a moment.
They came to the final number, the revelation that Soylent Green was people, and Huff put it in his singing, though it wasn’t in the words, that the secret was out and could never again be put back in. The lovely last few bars (where half the cast sang “Up with people!” while the other half sang “Soylent Green is people!”) rang softly over the clearing. It was a tactical decision to end on a gentle, plaintive note instead of an abrasive, accusing, and militaristic one—Huff decided, at the very end, that he would take the great risk of appealing to the mummified little portion of humanity in the Mayor’s heart, rather than trying to bully him into doing the right thing. He kept his focus almost all the way through, but lost it in the last bars of that last number. Tears obscured his vision and he lost sight of his cast members. Still singing, their stationary forms melted into something else altogether. He waved his arms, trying to make it stop, but if he had ever had any control over the play, he had none now. The pretend smokestacks blew real smoke and the lovely singing gave way to a high continuous whine of machinery and the odor of grass and sweat and eucalyptus and rosemary was replaced with something else, sharp and brittle and sickly sweet all at once. It was the odor of Soylent Green. Something had gone horribly wrong: singing about a thing had made it so; now they would all be meat, and it was just as terrible, after all, as it was delightful, to want something and to get it. He covered his hands, and wept, and failed to notice that the Mayor was weeping too.
It was curious, Molly thought, during the little orgy, how she didn’t begin to behave like she was dreaming until she became convinced she wasn’t dreaming. She had conducted herself with a pretty respectable sort of propriety, aside from drinking very freely from that wine bottle, when she was sure that she had diverged in the woods of the park from the real world, and that everything happening that night was a drama enacted as a by-product of the meltdown of her tortured subconscious. Now she knew she actually had diverged from reality somewhere in those woods, but not in a way that impugned her sanity, and now she knew that everything she did in this unreal world would have real-world consequences, and yet here she was trying to get two dicks in her mouth at the same time, something she never would have tried even in her dreams.
This was what it was like, she supposed, to reach the end of your rope and then let go. It would be no surprise to her mother, she was sure, that saying no to Jesus would eventually mean saying yes to two dicks in your mouth in a topsy-turvy kingdom of little people under the ground. You say that like it’s a bad thing, she said to her mother, not meaning that this double fellatio was exactly a virtue. What she meant, and what she wanted to tell her mother, was that everything was suddenly a lot more complicated. The two dicks were merely representatives of the fact that she felt suddenly like she could do anything, and her free fall had more in common, she thought, with what happened when you let go of the rope swing than what happened just before you hit the bottom of the well.
She didn’t have much of a clue as to why this should be, why everything shouldn’t have gotten even more confusing or horrifying when it all turned out not to be made up, until Peabo showed up at the foot of the bed. Her first reaction, beyond surprise at how suddenly he appeared and horror at the menace that seemed to radiate from him, was relief. He really was black, but he wasn’t really Peabo. And in the instant that she understood this, she understood as well that she hated him, and she wanted to do him a terrible harm. Anger overcame her horror, and she leaped to intercept him as he was reaching for one of her boys, thinking, in midair, You did it to him. It’s not my fault, it’s yours!
What that meant exactly remained to be puzzled out (though it wasn’t really much of a puzzle) during her subsequent captivity. Peabo plucked her out of the air like a balloon, or he popped her like a floating bubble, or he batted her aside like a shuttlecock—it felt like all those things. She did what he told her and watched mutely with Will at her side as he had his tender, horrible reunion with Henry. That, she would have said, as she watched Henry shrink against the head of the bed, trying to avoid the reaching touch of the boy. If she could have spoken, she would have said, That’s what you did! You made his whole life like that! Because Henry’s weeping gyrations had the character, she thought, of Ryan’s whole life with her. She watched as the sheets rose up and attacked the boy, as the a
ir over the bed became a wall of mist and then a wall of wood and then a wall of iron, as black birds detached out of the darkness above them to swoop down at him. The sheets burst into flame when they touched his skin; he walked through mist and wood and iron alike, and he ate all the birds in one bite. Then he had Henry, still weeping, in his arms, and he was saying, “There, there. I’ve got you now. My own dear friend, I’ve got you forever.”
Let him go! Molly kept thinking, though she knew she should be thinking Let me go! But, though she was shortly bridled like a horse and he was sitting on a golden pillow, Henry’s captivity felt more onerous than hers or Will’s. Let him go! she shouted again inside herself, not just at Peabo and Henry but at whatever spirits of the air had tortured and confined Ryan, and she wept bitterly, even before the horrible musical began. She wanted someone to do something, and couldn’t understand at all, when they ran into their former supposed guides and guardians, why none of them tried harder to overcome Peabo, or, when they encountered the whole otherly population of the park, why they chose to sing and dance instead of scream and fight.
