Chris Adrian - The Great Night

“Hush,” said the black dog next to Henry. “Here comes the good part.” The lady knelt before the dog on the stage. Her eyes met Henry’s a few times before he understood that she was trying to tell him something, before he saw that the way she was swinging her knife was an invitation to him to fight alongside her, and her eyes, which remained open, and dulled so convincingly after she fell on her knife that he worried she might actually be dead, stayed locked on his as she lay on the ground. So he stood very quietly as the show ended, as the last animal ran into the woods, and Bobby closed his door on him, and the puppy lay down on its belly and put its paws over its muzzle.

“What, Titania?” said Henry’s friend. “Did you want to remind me of something I never forgot?” He was crying, but smiling fiercely. He took away his hand, releasing his hold on Henry, and wiped his eye. Henry jumped as a rabbit, and sailed through the air as a slim black ferret, and landed as a dog before he stood before her as man.

“I’m ready,” he said to her.

T itania’s attention wandered as she danced and sang. It was supposed to all be on Puck, focused there by the terms of the spell she was under, since her new mortal husband had commanded her to sing her heart out at him, and she would have done that, anyway, since the crude and complicated spell that she had woven into the song and substance of the play required her voice to come to fruition. He stood, at first impassive and unaffected next to his companion, who commanded more and more of her attention until he had all of it.

“How is he today?” he’d asked, just barely inside the door of their room, looking at the floor instead of at the child.

“How does he look?” she would always reply, and he would mutter something and wander out. “You are the worst doctor in the world,” she had told him at one point, in answer to some inane question when the boy was in his last days. She had noticed how he had a boy’s face in his face but had not remarked that it was one she knew. Is that what this is all about? she wanted to ask Puck, but her words were all taken up in song. You have forgotten why we quarreled a thousand years ago, but you want to kill us all because we took away your toy in 1988? She wanted to laugh, but then she let out a sob that stopped the music briefly: she weaved it into the spell, sadness and chagrin and a dawning glee, which she tried to squelch.

Dr. Blork had haunted her grief the whole past year, and she had come to hate him for failing to save her child, in ways it had never occurred to her to hate him before her Boy had died. She did not wonder how she could have failed to recognize him as someone who had lived under the hill: recognizing former changelings was the farthest thing from her mind in the hospital, and this one, like so many of them, used the magic that was left to them to hide what they were from themselves. She remembered how disdainful she had been of him, and what a poor choice he had seemed, though nobody had expected Puck to pick a changeling for his beauty or sweetness. What had been so distasteful about him, she understood, as she watched him weeping with ghosts in his eyes, was not that he was ugly or mischievous or smelled bad, but the huge capacity for suffering that had been so appallingly evident in him. Now that she really saw him, she thought she could remember the vast empty chambers she had seen in him when he stood forth with Puck, chambers that could be filled with only one thing. How odd, she thought, and how horrible to see them still there, slosh full of tears and regret, but no more capacitous, and perhaps not as full, as her own.

Oh my , she thought, watching Puck cry next to Dr. Blork, and understanding what she had to do when Doorknob came running up furiously, looking certain to stab her with the rowan knife until he knelt and presented it to her, taking her silver knife in exchange. She took a moment to regret her decision, but not very long. As certainly as she knew what to do to save her people, she knew her husband wasn’t coming back anymore than her Boy was coming back, that she had waited as long as she could for both of them. She knew those facts would never be anything easier than a great gnawing sadness, and she knew it would always be true, even as she lived day after day into eternity, that she couldn’t live without them.

Dr. Blork held her eye and nodded at her and even seemed to wink once: he came to her in one fluid changing leap. And he told her, as if in benediction, when he landed: “I’m ready.”

“So am I,” she said, and as gracefully as he had flown to her she stood and stabbed him in the heart with her wooden knife.

H enry already knew that it took forever and no time at all to die. He had watched children die over weeks and months; some died over years, dying from the moment they were diagnosed with the incurable diseases that he and his colleagues handed out. And yet at the same time they were, eventually, alive one moment, and dead the next. But it was still a surprise how much time seemed to pass between the moment he was stabbed and the moment he hit the ground, and from that moment until the sun came up and darkened his sight forever. In that time he had the opportunity for all sorts of reflection, and a variety of action, and in a flash he considered everything he might do before he died, because he felt sure he could do anything in that short eternity. Except not die, of course — that was as solidly unavoidable as the wooden knife in his chest. But there was time, he felt, to undo his old forgotten friend, and he felt just about magical and mighty enough to do it, as capable as he had been incapable a few moments before. He had the certain sense that death would grant him that wish. It’s too bad I have to die , he thought, but it’s probably worth it . With a particularly clarified vision he saw what his friend would do if he was left unrestrained, and then his death seemed like a small price to pay. Clever lady! He thought of Titania, whose hundred thousand names he suddenly knew as well, and he pitied her and he hated her.

But his friend was already vastly diminished, and swarms of faeries were molesting him cruelly, clawing at him with their nails and biting him with their teeth, hacking with little axes and swords, gouging black gobbets of flesh from him and swallowing them without chewing. He fought back, but his sadness dominated his rage and made him weak. In no time — or was it forever? — they had bound him with a necklace of bones, and the snarling black dog was a black Lab puppy with a mouth full of milk teeth. They might have been the bones of their fallen comrades, plucked from Puck’s gullet, or they might have been Henry’s friends’ own bones, or they might have been Henry’s bones. At the end he sat meekly at Titania’s feet amid a pile of faeries, some dead and some mangled, and a fog of golden blood hung in the air, and there was dancing and song and a noise of bells.

A number of things happened next, though Henry paid only partial attention to them. Titania began to call out names and issue orders; she named every faerie still living, and told them to fetch what was precious to them because they were leaving, abandoning the hill and moving farther west. “Wake the horses,” she said. “We will ride on the sea until we come to a new home.” How interesting! Henry thought. I want to see what their new home is like. But he didn’t, really. There was something more important he should be thinking about, and yet, ridiculously, for another eternal moment what it was escaped him. At some point, before this or after this, Titania told Molly and Will and all but one of the other mortal cast members to go home, and they all did, turning and marching, naked or clothed, down the hill and through the morning fog, out of the park and back into the world. How interesting! Henry thought. I hope Molly and Will start dating! And yet he didn’t hope that, or else there was something he wanted more, and it seemed like a betrayal that they passed by without saying goodbye to him, though he knew — in fact, he could literally see —how they were bound by Titania’s words to do just as she said, and he knew they might forget everything that had happened that night and might invent other reasons to explain how they met or why they fell in love. To her remaining mortal cast mate, the male lead, whose name was Whoosh or Puff or Snuff, Titania said, “Goodbye.” Those words represented something terribly important, Henry knew — it came with knowing all her names that he knew her heartbreak as well, though he had known it anyway, when she was poor Mrs. Trudy Doolittle, whose son had died like everyone else ever born into the world — and yet he suddenly cared least of all about that. It was the thought of Molly and Will walking home naked together and then falling in love — real love, not the lust and obsessions borne of faerie wine — that made him remember.