Chris Adrian: The Great Night

“Or would you rather be a cat entirely? Yes, I think that would make you lovely.” Titania raised her hands and closed her eyes, seeking for words sufficient to the spell she had in mind. They came to her in an image, words printed on a little girl’s purse she had glimpsed in the waiting room outside the surgical suites downstairs. She started to speak them— Hello, Kitty! — but Oberon walked in before she had the first syllable out.

“What are you doing to the nurse?” he asked her.

“She’s the social worker. And we were only talking.” Alice’s head was turned to the side and she was staring at Titania with a mixture of curiosity and devotion. The glamour had slipped as Titania was about to strike, and the woman had seen her true face. “Her name is Alice.”

“Stop playing,” Oberon said. “He’s almost finished. Don’t you want to be there when he wakes?” The boy was downstairs getting things done to him; a needle in his hip to take the marrow from his bones and another in his neck to give him an IV that would last through the weeks and months of the treatment.

“I’ll just stay here and wait,” she said, sitting on the bed and idly petting the Beastie when it sidled up to her.

“He’ll be looking for you,” Oberon said.

“You’ll be there.”

“He’ll ask for you.”

“Tell him I’m waiting here with his Beastie.” She lifted it into her lap, as if to show him the truth of what she was saying but also to demonstrate that she was settling in. Alice, still standing between them, was looking back and forth, catching glimpses of their majesty, as their mounting anger caused them to let it slip, and getting drunker on them.

“Did I give you your meal tickets yet?” Alice asked them. “The cafeteria is really not so bad, for what it is.”

“You’d rather laze about than comfort him. Do you love him at all?”

“More than you do, and more than you’ll ever understand. You like to see him undone and ailing, but I can’t bear to look at him like that.” She had drugged the child herself many times, when he was younger, but now she could not stand to see him in the vulnerable, unnatural sleep the anesthesia brought.

“Those are very normal feelings,” said Alice. “I validate those feelings. Haven’t I been saying how hard it is to see him like this?” She turned to Oberon. “Haven’t I?”

“Heartless and cowardly,” Oberon said. “A most unattractive combination.”

“That’s normal too,” Alice said. “The anger. But don’t you know it’s not her that you’re angry at?”

“You stupid sour cock,” said Titania, and then they just called each other names, back and forth, getting angrier and angrier at each other while Alice turned back and forth so swiftly it seemed she was spinning.

“How can I make you understand how totally normal all of this is?” Alice cried aloud at last, just before collapsing in a heap. The Beastie, whose nature was to comfort, tried to go to her, but Titania held it back.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said her husband.

At first he was like her own sort of Beastie, a creature who followed her around and was pleasant to cuddle with. It didn’t take long before he stopped his agitated weeping, before he stopped crying for the mortal parents whom he’d hardly known, and then he smiled for everyone, even for Oberon, who barely noticed him for months. He was delightful, and she was fond of him in the way she was always fond of the changelings, and yet she had dresses and shoes of which she was just as fond. She liked to dress him and feed him, and took him to bed every night, even when Oberon complained that he did not like to have pets in the bed. He might get lost under the covers and migrate by morning to some remote corner, and she would half wake in the early afternoon, feel around for him, and not sleep again until she had gathered him up.

He grew. This was unexpected — she had completely forgotten even this basic fact of human physiology since the last changeling — but quite exciting. He wouldn’t fit anymore in the footed pajamas in which he’d been stolen, and then she kept him naked. Many evenings she would stare at him, hoping to see him get bigger. She liked to feed him, initially just milk and dew and a little honey on her finger, but then she woke one morning to find him attached to her breast, and she wondered why she hadn’t fed any of the other changelings this way. It was easy enough to make food come out of her nipple: not-quite-ordinary milk at first, but then less usual substances: weak wine and chocolate and peanut butter and yogurt.

It wasn’t long before Oberon regretted his gift and started to hide the child somewhere on the hill, attended by faeries, so he could have his wife to himself. She tolerated that for weeks, but within a few months she couldn’t stand to be apart from the boy, though she couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was because he smiled at everything she said and never argued with her; for months and months he never even said a word, but only babbled. It was different from talking to her husband, who could turn any conversation into an argument, or from talking to the members of her court, who always seemed to be listening for ways to curry her favor.

The boy grew, and changed, and became ever more delightful to her, and she imagined that they could go on forever like that, that he would always be her favorite thing. It would have been perfect, and maybe it would have been better if he had stayed her favorite thing — a toy and not a son — because now he would just be a broken toy. She ought to have had the foresight to make him dumb, or Oberon ought to have, since the boy was his terrible gift to her. But one evening the boy ran back to her, and climbed upon her throne, and giggled at the dancing faerie bodies leaping and jumping all around them, and put his face to her breast, and sighed a word at her, molly or moony or middlebury —she still didn’t know what it was exactly. But it was close enough to mommy to ruin everything.

They poisoned the boy exquisitely. Beadle and Blork had reviewed it all with them, the names and the actions and the toxicities of the variety of agents they were going to use to cure him, but of that whole long conversation only a single phrase of Blork’s had really stuck. “We’ll poison him well again,” he’d said, rather too cheerily, and he had explained that the chemotherapy was harder on the cancer than on the healthy boy parts, but that it was still hard, and that for the next many months he would act like a boy who had been poisoned. “Sometimes we’ll poison him a little,” he said, while Beadle frowned more and more vigorously at him, “and sometimes we’ll poison him a lot.” And indeed in that first week it seemed to Titania that they were poisoning him as vigorously and enthusiastically as anyone ever poisoned anybody, for or against their own good. The chemotherapy came in colors — straw yellow and a red somewhere between the flesh of a watermelon and a cherry — but did not fume or smoke the way some of her own most dramatic poisons had. There was nothing in them she could comprehend, though she peered at the bags and sniffed at the tubes, since there was no magic in them. She was only reluctantly interested in the particulars of the medications, but Oberon wanted to know all about them and talked incessantly about what he learned, parroting what Beadle and Blork said or reading aloud from the packets of information the nurses gave them. He proclaimed that he would taste the red liquid himself, to share the experience with the boy, but in the end he made a much lesser faerie do it, a little brownie named Doorknob, who smacked his lips and proclaimed that it tasted rusty in the same way that blood smelled rusty, and went on to say he thought he liked the taste of it and was about to sample it again when he went suddenly mad, tearing at his hair and clawing at his face and telling everyone his bowels had become wild voles, and perhaps they had, since there was an obvious churning in his hairy little belly. Oberon knocked him over the head with his fist, which brought him sleep if not peace, and though he had previously been one of the meekest spirits over the hill, every day after that he was angry and abrasive, and more than anything else he liked to pick a fight.