Chris Adrian - The Great Night

She checked on him after that not because she ever thought again that she had forgotten what he looked like, but because a notion hatched in her mind that he had come back to life. It started quite suddenly. At a joyless meal with Oberon, she felt her heart skip a beat and knew with absolute certainty that he was alive again, and she went running off once again to the crypt and threw open the door to find him as dead as ever. Next she was sure he had come back to life and died again waiting for her to come to him, so she brought a chair to sit in and wait for him. “What?” she asked Oberon, when he came to stand by her and scold her silently. “What do we know of death? Can you really say he might not come back? What do you know?”

“They do not come back,” Oberon said.

“What do you know?” she asked again. “What do you know ?” He left her alone to wait, and she waited and waited, until she became distracted by another plan. Another idea hatched in her mind: she would go back and have vengeance on the hospital that had killed him. She put on her armor and took out her ax, and gathered up a hundred bellicose faeries to march with her. But little Radish tattled to Oberon, who commanded Puck to steal her ax.

“You have robbed me of my satisfaction,” she said to Puck.

He shrugged. “I’d ruin all your happiness, if I could,” he said.

“Oberon sent you on an errand. Now I’ll send you on one too.” She told him what she wanted, and he laughed. “What fun,” he said, and yawned. But within an hour he’d been to the hospital and fetched Alice the social worker back to the hill.

“Trudy,” she said. “Trudy Trudy Trudy.” Her eyes were glazed and her heart, when she pressed herself against Titania and clutched at her back and her neck, was racing. “How are you all holding up?”

“Not very well,” she said hesitantly.

“Of course not,” Alice said. “That’s normal. That’s normal! Are you taking care of yourself? Are you being good to yourself?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Titania asked.

“Everything, honey. Everything! It’s your time now, don’t you see? Nobody else matters now. You worked so hard — it’s time for a rest.”

“She slept for a month,” said Puck.

“Of course she slept for a month! A month?”

“Tell her how it gets better,” Puck said. “You have a friend. You have, say, a love of your life, and then they go away, and you forget about them, and everyone else forgets about them. Completely.”

“Oh, no, Grandpa. No, you don’t. You don’t forget. You never forget. How could you forget? But it gets better, honey. You can’t imagine that it ever will, but trust me, it does. I’ve seen it happen again and again, and it’s never okay. How could it ever be okay? But it gets better.”

“See?” Puck said. “It gets better!” And he laughed and laughed. Titania stepped close to Alice, and put a hand behind her neck to draw her in close enough for a kiss, and whispered, cheek to cheek, “Tell me the truth.” She wanted Alice to tell her it would never get better, that she herself was as dead as her Boy, and what was left for her to live now seemed hopelessly estranged from a real life because it was. “You’ve just got to give up, honey,” Alice said. “Nothing could ever happen to make this any better. Why would you ever pretend otherwise?’ She was weeping, not in awe this time but because of all the baseless rumors of hope she’d spread in her time.

Oberon found them weeping together while Puck grinned and played a fiddle. He didn’t scold her this time for overwhelming a mortal but just said it was time for Alice to go home.

“You are not suited to sadness,” Oberon told her, and that was as close as he ever came to criticizing her for grieving too exorbitantly for the child or ignoring the burden of sadness that he carried. She was waiting for him to do that. She had plans of battle prepared more intricate and more violent than anything she had drawn up when she was prepared to invade and destroy the hospital. She was sure he’d lose the last protecting shred of her love, if he had criticized her forcefully, or complained that she was ignoring him, or asked, What about my grief?

But he expressed his impatience by courting her, instead. He came to their room in a wagon, drawn by Puck, a giant dog. “Let’s go for a ride,” he said, but it was twelve visits before she consented, and he didn’t talk for the first three times they went out. “I got you something,” he said eventually. They were always small gifts, dark baubles to suit her new mood, a raven or a piece of shale or a bag of beetles. She tolerated the courtship and made herself alone on her side of the bed, examining her insides every night to determine what portion of love the boy had drawn after him into death and always deciding that he hadn’t taken everything, after all, just most of it, the best part.

At last — she had no idea at all of how much time it took him — her husband brought her a sunflower.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Marry me,” he said.

“We are already married.”

“Marry me again,” he said. “Marry into our new life. We’ll be diminished from our former selves, I promise you that. We’ll not forget what we lost, but not neglect our future joys. Can you imagine it?”

She looked at his flower but not at his face. “No,” she said.

“Ah,” he said. “Come along with me, Titania.” He held his hand out to her, as if there were someplace else to go, except where they were. It summed up in a sentence how wonderful he was, and how furiously she wished to destroy him and destroy his love for her just then. Even a month later, she’d wish she’d said, I do not understand how to love you now , or I do not wish to love you anymore or What can it possibly mean to love you now? but instead she said, “I do not love you. I never loved you.” My husband, my friend, my life, I do not love you. I never did.

“ A -one,” Huff shouted, “and-a-two!’ He remembered to sing just as the Mayor arrived, so Huff was singing “A-three!” as he pulled up in his obscene royal wagon. He wasn’t alone: there was a man at his side, whose hand the Mayor was holding very tightly, and his cart was pulled by another man and a woman, both naked and dazed-looking. Three more creatures — Huff had ideas for three more characters when he laid eyes upon them, a Soylent Bunny and a tall barren tree to dance with Mother Nature and a little man to physically represent Thorn’s atrophied ambition — came behind, dragged along by chains attached haphazardly to their ankles and wrists. It was too late to add them in, and too late to add in the naked man and the naked woman, who would have made a handsome Soylent thug and a lovely piece of Furniture. He could do nothing for them now but sing, so that’s what he did.

It felt like magic, to wave his arms and wink and wiggle his nose, subtly conducting the music as he danced and sang. It would have been no more startling to point at a tree and have it erupt in flames as it was to point at Princess and have her erupt in beautiful heartbreaking song. Everything was so much worse than he had ever imagined: the state of San Francisco in 2022, the plight of a woman whose body was bought and sold with the apartment she lived in, the debilitating nostalgia for jam, the pain of hunger and the memory of how far the world had fallen and had yet to fall. And it was all — the music and the words and the enraptured faces of his cast, and even the nostalgia and the hunger and the secret ingredient in Soylent Green — lovelier than he could bear. He wanted to say to his lady, “Look! Look! It’s a miracle!” But he was afraid to break his concentration even for a moment.