Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“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.

B esides 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 drunken 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.