Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“I don’t know if I’ve had too much or not enough,” Bob said, sniffing at his glass.

“Drink up,” said Huff. “It’s good for your voice.” When they tried the song earlier it had not been plaintive or sad enough. Bob had sounded like James Cagney singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” and Huff had told him to take a break, and a few more drinks, and to reflect on sad things. Now he just looked confused, and Huff thought of pinching him again a few times to get him in the right frame of mind. The scene and the song was meant to convey Sol’s great weariness — he felt constantly afflicted , Huff had explained, pinching. He just wants to get away from it all. “I get it!” Bob had said, slapping away Huff’s fingers, but now Huff realized he had forgotten something. With his lady on his shoulders, it was almost as if he could borrow a little of her being to think with, and now it was stunningly obvious that Sol was as nostalgic as he was despairing and believed death would somehow bring him back to the good old days. He wanted to explain that, but Bob was already singing:

Take me home, my friend,

I want to go home, my friend,

It’s no good here, anymore, my friend.

All the good things have gone away, even strawberries:

Strawberries and peaches and apricots,

Compassion and empathy and fellow feeling, where did they go?

Take me home, my friend,

O thin sharp pokey needly friend, take me home!

Listening, he realized that he had understood the form but not the substance of Sol’s nostalgia, and now here Bob was singing it back to him in explicit detail, while the shapes of sunflowers and peach trees and buffalo and tall stately giraffe stretched and leaped and pranced upon the sheet, first in stark black and white and then in shimmering color. They all started to sing along with Bob, even though it was supposed to be a solo number, and Huff swayed in time with the music, which came from everywhere and sounded very full, though the string section played on crickets’ legs and the horn section blew blades of grass between their thumbs and the largest of the tympani was a paper cup. Huff swayed too far and unbalanced his lady, who fell to the right. She turned in midair and landed on her feet, but Huff fell on his side, transported by the images and the song. “Cover my eyes!” he said, and she threw a veil over his neck and face and led him away once more behind the circling bushes.

Now they fucked in earnest, which seemed like the right thing to do. The glorious success of Bob’s rehearsal seemed like permission somehow. He hadn’t said Take five, everybody , but he beamed it at them now, wishing they could all find as refreshing a pastime as he and his lady had. “No more tears, love,” she said as he blubbered on her, but he couldn’t stop, not even at the thought of mistakenly impregnating her with his sadness, and not even at the thought of what fruit such a union might bear. A child constitutionally incapable of being happy , he thought, and part of him watched it, as he sniffed and licked and thrust, as his cock darted and bucked, as he rolled himself on her and off her and poked her now from the front and now from the back and now from the side. It wailed in its cradle and pouted in its high chair and frowned in Santa’s lap, and everyone and everything disappointed it because it had been born sad to live sad. Tears were its nature and formed its lot, and though it never asked for any of the terrible things that befell it, it luxuriated in them just the same, mistaking cynicism for bravery and despair for reason. “I’m crying because it’s all so beautiful ,” he said to it, but it didn’t listen; it thought deafness was a virtue.

“No more words, my love,” his lady said, so Huff didn’t speak to it anymore but tried to show by gestures what he meant, and it felt like he was discovering what he meant by and through this marvelous fucking, like he had never, in all his days of being wise, sometimes pretending and sometimes not, actually understood anything about suffering or joy until this very moment, which encapsulated and recapitulated the named and nameless struggles of his whole life, the outcome of which he was both breathlessly creating and breathlessly waiting for, not actually knowing if it would be triumph or defeat until he came, standing, with both hands thrown up high over his head and his lady lifted to the stars on his impossibly stiff, impossibly eloquent cock. He came and came and came and fell backward, as if through a mile of air or a lifetime, to land on the soft grass with a noise like his name, feeling like he was saying his name properly for the first time because for the first time he knew who he was and what he was all about and what he really wanted, which was precisely this. He had nothing left, not will or energy or expertise, with which to venture from the bush and offer to his friends and co-conspirators, though he heard them rehearsing the last song ensemble and unsupervised: People , they sang. People who eat people are the loneliest people in the world!

“Bravo!” he called out, the words muffled by his lady’s breast. “Bravo, everybody. Well done!”

I’m going to die , Titania thought , in the grip of this delusion of love. It wasn’t the real thing, but it numbed and distracted just like the real thing. As she promenaded through the dell with her new husband, inspecting the rehearsal scenes and improving them with her magic, she considered how this false love was a lot like what she had once felt for Oberon — intense and consuming and passionate but still light as air, compared to what she felt, then and now, for her Boy. There had been no real suffering in her passion for Oberon until after she drove him away, she realized suddenly, gazing at the candy jewel on her wedding ring. That’s what made it feel like a cousin to this false love.

Now she had suffering galore, of course. She suffered for her husband, and for her Boy, and for her subjects, and for herself. Death, about which she knew so little, even after becoming familiar with it in the hospital, was coming for her at dawn, and underneath the fatuous devotion to her new husband, she was more frightened now than relieved. Yet when she thought about it, what she feared more than anything was that her own death would evoke her Boy’s death. She had heard mortals say that they lived their whole lives again in the instant before they died, a consolation, as they described it, though it sounded dreadful to her even before she realized that it meant they relived every death that ever befell them. She didn’t want to go back into that hospital room, or listen to her Boy’s labored, rattling last breath, or feel his skin cooling under her hand to the temperature of a graveyard stone. Once was more than enough for all that.

Furthermore, oblivion had lost its allure. She had thought for a while that that was death’s great magic: it ruined everything and then made it all better; it took away the pain it gave you, because even though she didn’t want to die it was already a relief to be dead. But then it had become obvious to her, in the quiet bubble in her mind within which she reflected on things even as she pranced around the dell, that when she died her memory of her Boy would die as well, and that seemed unbearable, because she realized that eventually everyone who ever remembered him, faerie or mortal, would die as well, and then even the memory of him would be dead. What her dead mind might do, she couldn’t know, though somehow she felt sure it would do nothing at all, that death would be such a total state of being that it would leave no room for the exercise of memory or longing or love.

These thoughts would have inspired her to rage, if she hadn’t been bound by Puck’s spell and powerless to lift it. The candy ring throbbed on her finger, but she couldn’t remove it, and she likewise could do nothing but smile and fawn on the mortal fool, and waste her last few hours, and her people’s, catering to his folly. She might have spent her remaining time chopping away at the earth and the trees, and reduced the whole hill to a scarred lump, but instead of destruction she wreaked a particular sort of creation for her new husband’s sake. There was something mildly interesting about that, she thought within her bubble, and something mildly appealing about rehearsing a nonsensical play while extinction loomed. Some of her people seemed to have entered into the enterprise in that spirit; they danced and sang and capered in a way that seemed insane and carefree compared to the ones who were doing it only because she told them to. And scene by scene, she tried to sympathize with them more, and to sympathize with her carefree self, the Titania outside of the solemn, angry little bubble. But it seemed too much like something Puck would approve of, for them all to mutter nonsense and do handstands until he came to kill them, and she decided she wanted no part of nonsense right now, no matter what her mouth might be saying or her body might be doing. It was a distinctly mortal attitude, which she understood a lot better, now that she was herself convincingly threatened with death; she wanted it all — her life, her losses, her death — to mean something.