Chris Adrian: The Great Night

Neither of them had any experience with illness. They had each taken many mortal lovers but had cast them off before they could become old or infirm, and all their previous changelings had stayed healthy until they were returned to the mortal world. “There was no way you could have known,” said Dr. Blork, the junior partner in the two-person team that oversaw the boy’s care, on their very first visit with him. “Every parent feels they ought to have caught it earlier, but really it’s the same for everyone, and you couldn’t have done any better than you did. In fact, you did great. You did perfect.” He was trying to make them feel better, to assuage a perceived guilt, but at that point neither Titania nor her husband really knew what guilt was, not ever having felt it in all their long days.

They were in the hospital, not far from the park on the hill under which they made their home, in the middle of the night — early for them, since they slept all day under the hill and had taught the boy to do the same — but the doctors, Beadle and Blork, were obviously fatigued. The four of them were sitting at a table in a small windowless conference room, the doctors on one side, the parents on the other. The boy was back in his room, drugged with morphine, sleeping peacefully for the first time in days. The doctors were explaining things, earnestly and patiently, but Titania was having trouble following along and found herself distracted by the notion that she should be delighted by the newness of this experience, for she and her husband had always been seekers after novelty, and yet already she did not like this at all.

“A boy should not be sick,” she said suddenly to Dr. Blork, cutting him off as he was beginning to describe some of the side effects of the treatment they were proposing. “A boy should play … that is his whole purpose.”

“It’s hard to see him like this,” Dr. Blork said, after a glance at his superior, “and I’m so sorry that your beautiful boy is so sick. It’s going to be a long haul, and he may be sicker before he’s better, but we’ll get him through it.” He started talking again about specifics, the drugs they would use — the names seemed rather demonic to her — and the timing of the treatments, which parts could be done at home and which parts must be done in the hospital. This was suddenly very boring. She waved her hand at them, a gesture practiced over centuries, and even though there was no magic in it, Blork was instantly silent.

“You will do your mortal thing,” she said sadly. “I know all I need to know.”

“Pardon me?” said Dr. Blork.

“Leukemia!” said Oberon, breaking the silence he’d kept all through the meeting. “Leukemia!” he said again, and it sounded as if he were somehow trying out the idea behind the word. He was smiling and crying into his beautiful beard. “Can you cure it?”

“Yes!” said Dr. Blork. But Dr. Beadle said, “Maybe.”

She could not remember the quarrel that brought her the boy. A real or perceived dalliance or slight, a transgression on her part or her husband’s — who knew? They had been quarreling for as long as they had been in love. She forgot the quarrels as soon as they were resolved, except for a vague sense, when they fought about something, that they had fought about it before. But the gifts her husband brought her to reconcile — even when she was at fault — she never forgot. The boy was one of those gifts, brought home to the hill, stolen from its crib in the dark of morning and presented to her by dawn. “That is not sufficient to your crime against me,” she remembered saying, and remembered as well that she barely paid the child any mind during her restless sleep, except to push it away from her when it rolled too close. Oberon had rubbed poppies on its eyes to quiet its crying, so it was still sleeping soundly when she woke. For a while she lay on her back, watching the stars come out on the ceiling of her grotto, listening to the little snores. Oberon was snoring more magnificently. She turned on her side to better look at the child, and noticed for the first time how comely it was, how round and smooth were its face and shoulders and belly, how soft-appearing and lustrous was its hair. It made a troubled face as it slept. She put her hand out to touch the child, very lightly. Right away it sighed and lost the troubled look, but then it gave a little moan. She draped her hand over its shoulder, and when it did not quiet she rolled it closer to her. It stopped moaning only when she held it in her arms, and put her nose in its hair, and breathed in its scent — poppies and milk and warm earth. Oberon had woken and was looking at her and smiling, propped on one elbow with a hand against his ear, the other lost under the sheets, but she could hear him scratching himself. “Do you like it?” he asked.

“I am indifferent to it,” she said, holding the boy closer, and squeezing him, and putting her face in his neck.

“This place is so ugly,” Titania said. “Can anything be done about that?” She was talking to the oncology social worker, one of a stream of visiting strangers who came to the room, a woman who had described herself as a person to whom one might address problems or questions that no one else could solve or answer. Nonmedical things, she had said. You know — everything else!

“But you’ve made the room just lovely,” the woman said. Her name was Alice or Alexandra or Antonia. Titania had a hard time keeping track of all the mortal names, except for Beadle and Blork, but those were distinctive and actually rather faerie-like. Alice gestured expansively around the room and smiled, not seeing what was actually there. She saw paper stars hanging from the ceiling, and cards and posters on the wall, and a homey bedspread upon the mattress, but faeries had come to carpet the room with grass, to pave the walls with stone and set them with jewels, and blow a cover of clouds to hide the horrible suspended ceiling. And the bedspread was no ordinary blanket but the boy’s own dear Beastie, a flat headless creature of soft fur that loved him like a dog and tried to follow him out of the room whenever they took him away for some new test or procedure.

“I don’t mean the room,” Titania said, “I mean everything else. This whole place. And the people, of course … Where did you find them? Look at you, for instance. Are you deliberately homely? And that Dr. Blork — hideous! He is beyond help, but you … I could do you up.”

Alice cocked her head. She did not hear exactly what Titania was saying. Everything was filtered through the same disguising glamour that hid the light in Titania’s face, that gave her splendid gown the appearance of a track suit, that made the boy appear clothed when they brought him in, when in fact he had been naked. The same spell made it appear that he had a name, though his parents had only ever called him Boy, never having learned his mortal name, because he was the only boy under the hill. The same spell sustained the impression that Titania worked as a hairdresser and that Oberon owned an organic orchard and that their names were Trudy and Bob.

“You need to take care of yourself,” Alice said, thinking Titania was complaining about feeling ugly. “It might feel a little selfish, but you can’t take care of him if you can’t take care of yourself. Did you know we have a manicurist who comes every Wednesday?”

“You are so sweet,” Titania said, “even if you are homely. Did you ever wish you had the eyes of a cat?”

“A hat? You can buy one downstairs. For when his hair falls out, you mean. That’s weeks away, you know. But the baseball caps are awfully cute. But listen, not everybody wants to talk about this at first, and not everybody has to. I’m getting ahead of myself … of ourselves.”