Chris Adrian: The Great Night

People and faeries, animals and spirits — any observing entity — each saw Puck a little differently. What you saw depended on how you were feeling; he was often the image of one’s worst fear or most troubling anxiety. To some of the faeries he looked like a naked boy with a luxurious Afro, and only the height of the boy or the width of the Afro changed from eye to eye. But some saw him as a sliver of flame, or a blackness heavier and darker than the black air, or a fluttering pair of dark wings, and some saw him as an image of their Queen only even more depressed, disheveled, and defeated-looking. In every form he wore a chain, sometimes made of tiny silver acorns or leaves of twisted silver grass. Sometimes the chain was made of thick links of silver manacle, and sometimes it was just silver glints upon the air or the fire. The chain had been placed there by Oberon a very long time ago, so long ago that no one but the Queen remembered the true particulars of the binding, though the battle was a story they all had once sung under the hill and one they celebrated every Midsummer’s Eve.

“Where is your Master?” Titania asked him.

“Still hidden,” he said.

“But the last report was so … promising,” she said. She had been trying to discover the King by reports of unusual events in the city, because she was sure he had not quit the world but only sunk himself in it, putting on a mortal face and a mortal life because she had wounded him when his heart was already broken, like hers, over the death of their son. She never went out to look for him herself anymore, even though she was sure she would have recognized him no matter how expert his disguise; as lost as he might be to himself right now, he would never be lost to her if she could only stand before him. And she only barely trusted Puck, even under his world-heavy bonds, because all love of his Master was forced on him, and what did he care, really, if her King and husband and lover never returned? But lately she could not abide the sight of mortal boys; everyone looked like their Boy, and so she, Queen of the Night and Empress of the Air and Suzeraine of the Autumn Moon and the bearer of a hundred thousand other lofty titles, some of which could only be expressed in hours of music, ran sweating and shaking from blue-socked babies in their strollers and baseball-capped toddlers and little hoodlums on skateboards, and cried for days under the hill after each time she ventured out. Once, a few dim but well-meaning sprites had scouted out a poor replica of her Boy and called him up to the hill, singing him out of the Mission, warding him as he crossed the street, turning buses and bicycles out of his path as he walked in a daze, not quite awake but compelled toward the park, held fast by the certainty that every good thing he ever had wanted was waiting for him there. When he presented himself in a stupor at the bald top of the hill, mouth agape at the faeries, who were only partially hidden from him, it roused the Queen from her own stupor. In an instant she understood the nature of the spell and knew who had cast it. In another she had punished them, as swift in her vengeance as she ever was in the good old days when every night was great, when the host spent the hours on the hill from dusk to dawn consumed in masques of jealousy and violent, elevating, rejuvenating lust. With a mere gesture, she tore the wings from the do-gooders and forced them to bear the boy upon their wounded backs, crawling under him in the dirt as he dozed and drooled until they deposited him on the Haight Street sidewalk.

Often, but not always, when her subjects assumed she was lost in sad reverie, she was actually listening to the city where her husband had hidden himself, though it wasn’t any ordinary sense of hearing that she deployed. As she lay on her litter or her bier, startling little flashes of wonder would flare up beyond the hill, sometimes so intensely that she could feel them like a warmth against her face. These showed her where to direct her attention, and it was not much longer before she could discern the particulars of the event: a child floats away with his kite; a dog suddenly grows flowers in its coat; a hideous transvestite stumbling down Eighteenth Street at 2 a.m. actually becomes, for twenty paces, a beautiful woman. This was magic, and it must indicate the presence of her lost love, because for a long time now magic had been absent from the city and the country beyond the hill. In his hidden state, unknown to himself and unaware of his power, the magic would seep from Oberon and temporarily change the world around him, at random or according to the changeable and petty wishes of the mortals with whom he slummed. The latest report had been the most promising: A white bull, cock a-swagger and head held high, had paraded through a coffee shop in Noe Valley and then strolled down Twenty-fourth Street toward Diamond Heights.

This was a sign like none other. The white bull was one of his aspects; a form to wear in battle or in passion but also one he liked to wear after a bitter quarrel with her, because she could never stay angry at him when he was a creature so warm and breathy, and she could never detect any duplicity in Oberon’s apologies in those giant brown eyes. So it was a sign and a signal. He had become his most distinctive beast because he was ready to put back on his power and become her King again, and because he was so sorry for leaving her, for hurting her more than he’d ever done before in all the years of their marriage.

“I never saw the bull,” Puck said, “though the wonder of him was written still on the faces of all the mortals who beheld him. I followed his scent for a quarter mile and found a bush wet with his piss. See? I brought you a flower from it.” From somewhere on his naked person he produced a small blue flower with thick hairy petals that glistened as if they were still wet. He took a deep whiff and presented it to her with another bow and flourish. “It is his stink!’ he said with a wide smile. A light came off his teeth too bright for most of them to look at long, though Titania was never cowed by it. She snatched the flower from him and brought it hesitantly to her face. Puck had frozen it in time, but his spell came apart in her hand. The petals softened and felt moist instead of glassy, and when she shook the flower a few drops fell onto her dress as the salt and iron odor rose up and transported her into a rapture of nostalgia. It was pathetic, she knew, to weep over the scent of her lost lover’s piss, but it was the first time in a year she had been able to partake of his odor, since all his clothes had disappeared on the same day he did, and the sheets on his side of their bed, too. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, though she would have cherished it even if it were. It smelled powerful and ancient and sad, and she thought she could apprehend in it some trace, a compacted seed, of the extraordinary love he bore her.

Her courtiers yawned, and here and there they muttered “There she goes again” and “I thought tonight would be different” and “Some Great Night this is going to be!” A few of them wandered off in small companies down the hill, more faithful to their holiday than to the Queen who didn’t have the heart to celebrate it. Most were too timid to spurn her presence, but bold enough to sit without leave and complain to one another loudly and at length. But the three who had been nearest to her husband, and who now were nearest to her, closed on her, taking liberties with her person, stroking her hair and kissing her hands and her feet, uselessly attempting to comfort her. Puck, still smiling, remained where he was.

“Wicked thing,” the Queen said to him. “You are failing on purpose to find him.”

“You know I cannot willingly fail at anything you set me to. Your word is his word, and I am bound to obey.” He shook his silver chain, and the tinkle and rattle and chime stilled a few complaining conversations. It made the host nervous when Puck rattled his chain, and none of them were really comfortable having him around now that the King was gone. “He outmatches me. But perhaps if I were unbound?” He fell to his knees and slid closer to the Queen, offering her the back of his neck, where a thumb-sized block of rough silver bound the ends of the chain. They had this conversation every night, after every report of failure, Puck always bolder in his requests for freedom.