Chris Adrian - The Great Night

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn’t think she had the muscles for it. Just thinking about it made something — the body within the bubble — ache, and made her want to lie down and sleep. So she did magic instead, scene by scene, working a sort of dual cosmesis upon the players and the play, so the mortals sang more sweetly and their voices and feet were linked to the faeries in such a way that the song and dance became ugly vessels containing real beauty, and she made it so the play would show whoever saw it not just the dancing backhoes and prostitutes and singing corpses and dwarves juggling wafers of green plankton, but also whatever was most frightening, exultant, and pathetic about their own lives. It was a crude and subtle piece of magic, and the more deliriously the exterior Titania giggled and fucked, the more industriously the interior one worked it out, even though she knew what she would have caused herself to see, when the music was over and the play was done.

A fter her Boy died, Titania stayed in bed for weeks. It seemed like the right place to be, since she deserved a rest, and since her employment as a mother had come to an end. She vaguely remembered what she had done with her days, before the boy had come and before he had fallen ill, and she had no interest in any of it. She had a dawning sense of what her new occupation was going to be, and she was in no hurry to take up the post. Better to stay in bed, even if she couldn’t exactly sleep.

Oberon stayed with her, at first. He seemed to know better than to say anything, but he pursued her around the bed, always seeking to hold her, which was fine when she was sleeping but annoyed her when she was awake, as did his tears, which thankfully came in smaller and smaller daily volumes as time passed. “It’s all right,” he said at last, when a week had gone by. “You don’t have to get up. You don’t have to do anything. You can dwell here, in his memory, for as long as you wish.” She didn’t snort out loud, and her face was hidden in her pillow when she rolled her eyes. It wasn’t his memory she was seeking there; in the first few days after he died, her mind recoiled from images of his as if they burned. She wasn’t seeking anything. She was doing just what it looked like she was doing, lying about, half-awake and half-asleep, passing the time and waiting for something to change. Because it seemed very clear to her, in those first few days, that what she felt was so intolerable that it couldn’t possibly last, and if she did nothing to distract herself from it, she’d use it up, and then she’d be able to get up, and move about, and care once again about her duties to her people, about her constitutional obligations to dancing and singing and feasting and praising the movements of the stars. She didn’t consider at all — she didn’t dare to consider — that the sources of grief inside her might be inexhaustible.

When Oberon rose and left her it felt like a betrayal, but it also gave her hope that her tactics were sound. It had already happened for him (of course, because he had always, after all, felt less for their Boy than she did), which meant it might happen for her. He retreated in degrees, keeping a vigil at first on the edge of the bed, and then in a chair, and then lounging about the room, and finally just poking his head in now and then to check on her, so she felt the pressure of his eyes and pulled the blankets over her head. One evening she looked out from the blankets and saw a creature in the chair her husband had vacated.

“Good morning, Lady,” said Radish.

“It is nighttime, pixie,” she said.

“Whenever you wake and whenever you rise, that is morning. Then we’ll count the days and months and years again, a whole other eternity beginning in that very moment. Shall I fetch your slippers?”

“Where is my husband?”

“Reigning and raining,” said Radish, standing on one leg on the chair and miming her meaning by placing an invisible crown on her own head and tracing tear tracks down her cheeks. “Over half his—” Without sitting up, Titania backhanded her and sent her bouncing off a far wall, then turned on her side and drew the covers over her head again.

There were other visitors, faeries tall and small and round and narrow, who came to sing to her or bring her treats or weep at her bedside, as if it were she who was dead. She stole their voices and ignored the food and threatened to tear them to pieces if they didn’t stop singing, and yet they still came, sent in one by one, she suspected, by Oberon, who came himself, now and then, to sit silently in the chair, or put his bare foot under the covers to touch her, which she tolerated, though she wouldn’t take his hand when he offered it, for fear he would draw her from the bed. “I’m not done yet,” she said, though he never asked her for an explanation.

“I wish I could sleep all day,” said Puck. He was her last visitor. She lifted the covers for a glimpse of him, then wished she hadn’t. He was wearing her Boy’s form, naked and thin with a heavy silver chain around his neck.

“Take off that face,” she said.

“I put nothing on,” he said, “and can take nothing off. I’ve only come as commanded, to tell you a feast has been prepared. I forget what the occasion is.”

“Come closer,” Titania said. “I’ll pluck off your nipples, and put out your eyes.” That made him laugh, and when he saw the damp spots blooming on the thin blanket that lay over her face, he laughed harder.

“I remember crying once,” he said. “Did I look so funny to you ?”

“I’ll kill you,” she said, a threat they both knew was empty, but he was gone. She wondered when he had ever cried, and wondered if he was lying about a feast, and wondered what the occasion could be, though there was no vigor in her wonder. None of it mattered. She wasn’t done yet, and she couldn’t leave her bed. She had a new notion, not completely formed, that the bed was carrying her somewhere, and sometimes in the dark she peeked over the edge of the bed, imagining dark heaving seas. It was as naïve and useless a notion as thinking she could exhaust her sadness with continuous grieving; there was nowhere any vessel could take her where she would feel any different. She got up not very long after Puck’s visit, though not because she had mastered her feelings or become wise to a way to make them bearable. She began to wonder if the face Puck had worn had been her Boy’s real face. In the space of an hour she became terrified that she had forgotten what he looked like, which seemed like a terrible insult to him, one he wouldn’t forgive her and one she could never forgive herself. When she became convinced that she had forgotten, she sprang from bed, nimble and fleet despite the weeks of indolence, and hurried to him, running through her changeable kingdom under the hill, which showed her the way to the dining hall before it showed her the way to his bier. Countless faeries cheered when she appeared at the door, and Oberon lifted a glass to her, but she raced by and brooked no more detours from the hill. She tore the door to the crypt from its hinges and raced to him as if he were in danger she could save him from. He lay where they had left him, surrounded by the portraits of his foster brothers and sisters, uncorrupted and unchanged, the very picture of her memory of him.