The Great Night

by Chris Adrian

  Somebody should do something! she thought, struggling mightily with her bonds, though to anyone watching it looked like she was just standing there watching the ridiculous musical. She hated musicals. There was no worse waste of time on the whole planet, and though she knew there were worse tortures than to be made to sit through one, it still felt like an exquisite misery to be stuck there with invisible toothpicks holding her eyes open. This is what you missed? she asked Ryan. The lyrics were asinine, and the action was stupid, yet she found herself moved, inexplicably at first, but then it was obvious why she was crying, since the action had suddenly veered from futuristic San Francisco to Ryan’s garden. Don’t go in there! she shouted, not making a peep, to the fat homeless lady who was playing her part, but she went through the gate and walked down the hall and came out in the garden, singing something about how hard it was to get out of bed every morning, and doing a little dance, leaping and twirling on point beneath the tree until a man in a moon costume, whose face shone like white gold, was hoisted on a pole and lit the tree and the garden, revealing Ryan’s body where it had been swinging the whole time, a purple-faced slouch-shouldered dance partner. Homeless-lady Molly dropped to her knees, arching her back and putting her hand in her mouth and staring at her lover with eyes that seemed to leap out of her head on coils, and sang a fist-muffled aria.

  Molly wanted so much to be able to move, to throw something at the players, or rush forward and cut Ryan’s body down from the silver tree, or tear out her hair, or at least speak, but when she found her voice again she could only shriek and weep in conversation with Ryan like she had when she had found him, two years ago and two miles away. But back then she was asking why, why, why? and now she was asking for what for what for what? For this stupid musical, and this unbearable hill, and these monsters? For that lady with the terrible hair? She felt she ought to be able to destroy the whole scene with the noise of her voice. Even when she admitted to herself, really and finally, that there was magic in the park, she was no less angry, she judged no less severely, because she knew, by a process that might have looked as quick and miraculous as magic if she hadn’t suffered for it in the most profoundly slow and mundane way, that what she had been offering Ryan was better than all of it.

  Will was thinking of Carolina as the action unfolded in front of him in the amphitheater. He could almost convince himself that the musical was being staged for him, because of the way it seemed to be staged at him, with the singers and dancers and the parts of the set that were made of living bodies darting so close, and curving around him. Yet they were all looking just past him, at the thing in the back, the terrible lady who contained such a density of terror, who looked like his ice-cream-loving divorcée, until she touched you, and then you knew she was somebody else, somebody worse. Even without seeing her, Will still felt a pressure on his back that made him want to run, the force that made the buggy go. The only thing stronger than that force was the lady’s admonition to stop, so Will stayed stopped, and felt like he would stand there forever if the lady didn’t ever tell him he could move again.

  As he watched the musical, Will thought of the last time he’d seen Soylent Green. He thought he should feel guiltier than he did, since he had once again gone to a sex party of sorts, something he had sworn never to do, and the fact that it was an entirely impromptu sex party, one he had stumbled into accidentally in the course of the strangest night of his life, seemed like no excuse. But he felt quite at peace with the sex party and found he did not regret one poke or thrust or jiggle; there was nothing he regretted having put in his mouth or touched or tasted, and he felt quite pleasantly disposed toward weird, weeping Henry and toward Molly, though she had said nothing to him to make her seem any less anxious or bitchy. None of them had said much of anything together, the potentially awkward postcoital conversation having been abbreviated by the arrival of the monster who now held them all in thrall. He should feel horrible about what he had done, and feel revulsion toward the people he had done it with, and yet that thought was as remote somehow as the nostalgia he felt for that other night in that other park when he’d watched the other version of this despairing futuristic cannibalism with Carolina. It seemed very far away, and she seemed very far away, and though he was worried about what was going to happen next—he was chained, after all, around the neck, and something or someone whose awfulness he could only barely understand was holding his reins—he was quite content to stand and watch this wonderful, ridiculous show until the action started to change.

  A tree was growing in the dell. My sapling! he thought at first, but in moments it was too big to carry without a truck. The stage had been full of people moments before, singing what had to be the closing number—Ty Thorn had found out the secret of Soylent Green and announced it to the world—but though Will still heard the voices, people were nowhere to be seen until a single figure, dumpy and awkward-looking but dancing very gracefully with a silver ax in her hands, came spinning into the dell and danced around the tree, her wild spasms contrasting with the irenic strains of the music. Though he couldn’t understand the words of the song anymore the message was perfectly clear: everyone deserves to be loved and everything is going to be okay, and it was all plucking harps and deeply reassuring overtones even as the dumpy lady sank the ax in the tree, and chopped wildly, bloody sap spraying her hair and dress and skin, so she looked just as crazed and scary as Carolina had when she had done the same thing, nonmusically, after showing him the pictures Mrs. Perkins had sent along to the house, and telling him they had never really dated anyway, and she had never loved him. All this time it had been their dead brothers who were dating, and they had just been along for the ride. Don’t do it! Will shouted in his head, crying as if the ax were falling on him instead of on the tree, but she chopped and danced and howled until the tree fell, striking the earth in a shower of sparks that leaped furiously to the sky.

  Though he had never seen the movie before, Henry knew when the end was coming. Enough people had died, and the not-so-surprising secret had ripened sufficiently to be revealed, and the music was increasingly becoming dominated by strains of the overture, and, most importantly, he knew it was almost time for him to do something. That knowledge had come as certainly as had the lost memories of who he was and what had been done to him, and though he didn’t totally comprehend the plans his terrible childhood friend had for the two of them, he knew he bore some responsibility to stop them. He stood very stiffly next to his friend, who was now a large handsome black Lab, and now Bobby’s spitting image, and now a thin wild-eyed man whom Henry knew was Ryan twenty years later. Henry could tell he was amused by the musical even though his face was impassive.

  It was very strange—much stranger than being lost in the park, or discovering that it had once been his home, and stranger even than remembering there was such a thing as magic, and that he had lived with it and used it and been good at it and suffered for the lack of it, and even stranger yet than the strangest and most wonderful discovery of the night, that it was something as lovely as it was terrible that he had been so afraid of—to feel so powerful and so helpless. He knew how to turn a tree into a house, and bacon into a pig, or a pig into a cop, or cop into a penny—and yet he didn’t know what to do to stop his friend and make things better.

  The answer came from the musical—or, rather, one of the players, the tall lady with cobwebs in her hair, whom Henry recognized from his time under the hill, and for whom he still felt a twinge of hatred, though it was very small and very much overpowered by the pity he felt for her, since her glamour fell away now in his memory, and he knew her from the hospital as well. She was brandishing a silver knife and threatening to kill herself for love, and throwing herself on the dirty homeless-looking man who played the lead, who told her over and over that there was no room for love anymore in a world that contained the horror of Soylent Green. The rest of the cast—all the population of the hill, it seemed—came walking in procession onto the stage to
sing about people who ate people, how lonely they were, and how sad, but they had so much more to say about them than just that. Henry strained to listen, but the words escaped him, not because the music and voices weren’t loud, but because new voices had jumped in to confuse the lyrics. At the same time he saw Bobby weeping as he broke up with him, while Henry patted him dumbly and numbly on the back. He saw the boys of Fourteenth Street scattering in the police raid, ocelots and raccoons and fleet foxes sailing over the wall and between the legs of the policemen to run free in the city, only to wake within days like Henry, remembering less and less of who they really were and where they had been until there was nothing left at all. He saw Mike raging in the form of a bear, then fleeing to his room under a barrage of bullets, and dying there in his bed in his own form, and Ryan, wearing the form of an angry boy, punching a policewoman in the face. And he saw a black Lab puppy, sitting still but not quiet in the middle of the stage, weeping and howling.

  It was Ryan but not Ryan, an actor who wore Ryan’s face upon his own as if it were projected there, and every scene was excruciatingly clear, though they were laid on top of each other and within each other. “Why are you doing this to me?” Henry asked the lady with the cobwebs in her hair, because it was obvious to him that this was her magic. He spoke very quietly, but he was sure she heard him. She shook her head, singing and dancing and smiling faintly. A little brownie came running up to her, and bowed, and exchanged her silver knife for a wooden one. “Why are you doing this?” he asked again. “Are you trying to make me feel guilty? I didn’t ask for any of this!”

  “Hush,” said the black dog next to Henry. “Here comes the good part.” The lady knelt before the dog on the stage. Her eyes met Henry’s a few times before he understood that she was trying to tell him something, before he saw that the way she was swinging her knife was an invitation to him to fight alongside her, and her eyes, which remained open, and dulled so convincingly after she fell on her knife that he worried she might actually be dead, stayed locked on his as she lay on the ground. So he stood very quietly as the show ended, as the last animal ran into the woods, and Bobby closed his door on him, and the puppy lay down on its belly and put its paws over its muzzle.

  “What, Titania?” said Henry’s friend. “Did you want to remind me of something I never forgot?” He was crying, but smiling fiercely. He took away his hand, releasing his hold on Henry, and wiped his eye. Henry jumped as a rabbit, and sailed through the air as a slim black ferret, and landed as a dog before he stood before her as man.

  “I’m ready,” he said to her.

  19

  Titania’s attention wandered as she danced and sang. It was supposed to all be on Puck, focused there by the terms of the spell she was under, since her new mortal husband had commanded her to sing her heart out at him, and she would have done that, anyway, since the crude and complicated spell that she had woven into the song and substance of the play required her voice to come to fruition. He stood, at first impassive and unaffected next to his companion, who commanded more and more of her attention until he had all of it.

  “How is he today?” he’d asked, just barely inside the door of their room, looking at the floor instead of at the child.

  “How does he look?” she would always reply, and he would mutter something and wander out. “You are the worst doctor in the world,” she had told him at one point, in answer to some inane question when the boy was in his last days. She had noticed how he had a boy’s face in his face but had not remarked that it was one she knew. Is that what this is all about? she wanted to ask Puck, but her words were all taken up in song. You have forgotten why we quarreled a thousand years ago, but you want to kill us all because we took away your toy in 1988? She wanted to laugh, but then she let out a sob that stopped the music briefly: she weaved it into the spell, sadness and chagrin and a dawning glee, which she tried to squelch.

  Dr. Blork had haunted her grief the whole past year, and she had come to hate him for failing to save her child, in ways it had never occurred to her to hate him before her Boy had died. She did not wonder how she could have failed to recognize him as someone who had lived under the hill: recognizing former changelings was the farthest thing from her mind in the hospital, and this one, like so many of them, used the magic that was left to them to hide what they were from themselves. She remembered how disdainful she had been of him, and what a poor choice he had seemed, though nobody had expected Puck to pick a changeling for his beauty or sweetness. What had been so distasteful about him, she understood, as she watched him weeping with ghosts in his eyes, was not that he was ugly or mischievous or smelled bad, but the huge capacity for suffering that had been so appallingly evident in him. Now that she really saw him, she thought she could remember the vast empty chambers she had seen in him when he stood forth with Puck, chambers that could be filled with only one thing. How odd, she thought, and how horrible to see them still there, slosh full of tears and regret, but no more capacitous, and perhaps not as full, as her own.

  Oh my, she thought, watching Puck cry next to Dr. Blork, and understanding what she had to do when Doorknob came running up furiously, looking certain to stab her with the rowan knife until he knelt and presented it to her, taking her silver knife in exchange. She took a moment to regret her decision, but not very long. As certainly as she knew what to do to save her people, she knew her husband wasn’t coming back anymore than her Boy was coming back, that she had waited as long as she could for both of them. She knew those facts would never be anything easier than a great gnawing sadness, and she knew it would always be true, even as she lived day after day into eternity, that she couldn’t live without them.

  Dr. Blork held her eye and nodded at her and even seemed to wink once: he came to her in one fluid changing leap. And he told her, as if in benediction, when he landed: “I’m ready.”

  “So am I,” she said, and as gracefully as he had flown to her she stood and stabbed him in the heart with her wooden knife.

  20

  Henry already knew that it took forever and no time at all to die. He had watched children die over weeks and months; some died over years, dying from the moment they were diagnosed with the incurable diseases that he and his colleagues handed out. And yet at the same time they were, eventually, alive one moment, and dead the next. But it was still a surprise how much time seemed to pass between the moment he was stabbed and the moment he hit the ground, and from that moment until the sun came up and darkened his sight forever. In that time he had the opportunity for all sorts of reflection, and a variety of action, and in a flash he considered everything he might do before he died, because he felt sure he could do anything in that short eternity. Except not die, of course—that was as solidly unavoidable as the wooden knife in his chest. But there was time, he felt, to undo his old forgotten friend, and he felt just about magical and mighty enough to do it, as capable as he had been incapable a few moments before. He had the certain sense that death would grant him that wish. It’s too bad I have to die, he thought, but it’s probably worth it. With a particularly clarified vision he saw what his friend would do if he was left unrestrained, and then his death seemed like a small price to pay. Clever lady! He thought of Titania, whose hundred thousand names he suddenly knew as well, and he pitied her and he hated her.

  But his friend was already vastly diminished, and swarms of faeries were molesting him cruelly, clawing at him with their nails and biting him with their teeth, hacking with little axes and swords, gouging black gobbets of flesh from him and swallowing them without chewing. He fought back, but his sadness dominated his rage and made him weak. In no time—or was it forever?—they had bound him with a necklace of bones, and the snarling black dog was a black Lab puppy with a mouth full of milk teeth. They might have been the bones of their fallen comrades, plucked from Puck’s gullet, or they might have been Henry’s friends’ own bones, or they might have been Henry’s bones. At the end he sat meekly at Titania’s feet amid a pi
le of faeries, some dead and some mangled, and a fog of golden blood hung in the air, and there was dancing and song and a noise of bells.

  A number of things happened next, though Henry paid only partial attention to them. Titania began to call out names and issue orders; she named every faerie still living, and told them to fetch what was precious to them because they were leaving, abandoning the hill and moving farther west. “Wake the horses,” she said. “We will ride on the sea until we come to a new home.” How interesting! Henry thought. I want to see what their new home is like. But he didn’t, really. There was something more important he should be thinking about, and yet, ridiculously, for another eternal moment what it was escaped him. At some point, before this or after this, Titania told Molly and Will and all but one of the other mortal cast members to go home, and they all did, turning and marching, naked or clothed, down the hill and through the morning fog, out of the park and back into the world. How interesting! Henry thought. I hope Molly and Will start dating! And yet he didn’t hope that, or else there was something he wanted more, and it seemed like a betrayal that they passed by without saying goodbye to him, though he knew—in fact, he could literally see—how they were bound by Titania’s words to do just as she said, and he knew they might forget everything that had happened that night and might invent other reasons to explain how they met or why they fell in love. To her remaining mortal cast mate, the male lead, whose name was Whoosh or Puff or Snuff, Titania said, “Goodbye.” Those words represented something terribly important, Henry knew—it came with knowing all her names that he knew her heartbreak as well, though he had known it anyway, when she was poor Mrs. Trudy Doolittle, whose son had died like everyone else ever born into the world—and yet he suddenly cared least of all about that. It was the thought of Molly and Will walking home naked together and then falling in love—real love, not the lust and obsessions borne of faerie wine—that made him remember.