Chris Adrian - The Great Night

The boy had a very different response. Right away the poisons settled him down in a way that even the morphine did not. That put him to sleep, but in between doses he woke and cried again, saying that a gator had his leg or a bear was hugging him to death or a snake had wound itself around the long part of his arm and was crushing it. Within a few days the poisons had made him peaceful again. Titania could not conceive of the way they were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog. Oberon had voiced a fear that the boy was sick for human things, that the cancer in his blood was only a symptom of a greater ill, that he was homesick unto death. So she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy.

Then he seemed to thrive on it. If she hadn’t been so distracted by relief it might have saddened her, or brought to mind how different in kind he was from her, that a decoction of grief should restore him. His whole body seemed to suck it up, bag after bag, and then his fever broke, and the spots on his skin began to fade like ordinary bruises, and the pain in his bones went away. She watched him for hours, finally restored to untroubled sleep, and when he woke he said, “I want a cheese sandwich,” and the dozen little faeries hidden around the room gave a cheer.

“You heard him,” she said, and ordered them with a sweep of her arm out the door and the windows. The laziest went only to the hospital cafeteria, but the more industrious ventured out to the fancy cheese shops of Cole Valley and the Castro and even the Marina and returned with loaves under their arms and wheels and blocks of stolen cheeses balanced on their heads and stuffed down their pants, Manchego and Nisa and Tomme Vaudoise, proclaiming the names to the boy as if they were announcing the names of visiting kings and queens. The room filled rapidly with cheese and then with sandwiches, as the bread and cheese was cut and assembled. The boy chose something from the cafeteria, a plastic-looking cheese on toast. Oberon, asleep on the narrow couch beneath the window, was awakened by the variety of odors and started to thank the faeries for his breakfast, until a pixie named Radish pointed and said in her thin high voice, “He mounches! He mounches!” Oberon began to cry, of course. He was always crying these days, and it seemed rather showy to Titania, who thought she suffered more deeply in her silence than he did in his sobs. He gathered the boy in his arms, and the boy said, “Papa, you are getting my sandwich wet,” which caused some tittering among the faeries, some of whom were crying too now, or laughing, or kissing one another with mouths full of rare cheese. Titania sat down on the bed and put a hand on the boy and another on her husband, and forgave Oberon his showy tears and the boy the scare he’d given her.

Just then Dr. Blork entered the room, giving the barest hint of a knock on the door before he barged in. The faeries vanished before his eye could even register them, but the cheeses stayed behind, stacked in sandwiches on the dresser and the windowsill, wedged in the light fixtures and stuck to the bulletin board with pins, piled in the sink and scattered on the floor. He stared all around the room and then at the three of them, looking so pale and panicked that Titania had to wonder if he was afraid of cheese.

“He was hungry,” Titania said, though the glamour would obviate any need for an excuse. “He’s hungry. He’s eating.”

“You have poisoned him masterfully!” said Oberon, and Titania asked if they could take him home now.

He was never a very useful changeling. Previously Oberon had trained them as pages or attendants for her, and they learned, even as young children, to brush her hair just in the way she liked. Or they were instructed to sing to her, or dance a masque, or wrestle young wolves in a ring for the entertainment of the host. But the boy only hit her when she presented him with the brush, and instead she found herself brushing his hair.

And she sang for him, ancient dirges at first, and eldritch hymns to the moon, but he didn’t like those, and Oberon suggested that she learn some music more familiar to him. So she sent Doorknob into the Haight to fetch a human musician, but he brought her back an album instead, because it had a beautiful woman on it, a lovely human mama. She looked at the woman on the cover of Carly Simon’s Greatest Hits , golden-skinned and honey-haired with a fetching gap in her smile, and put on her aspect, and spun the record on her finger while Radish sat upon it, the stinger in her bottom protruding to scratch in the grooves, and Titania leaned close to listen to the songs. Then she sang to the boy about his own vanity and felt a peaceful pleasure.

Oberon said she was spoiling him, she had ruined him, and he had no hope of ever becoming a functional changeling, and in a fit of enthusiastic discipline he scolded the boy, ordered him to pick up some toys he had left scattered in the hall, and threatened to feed him to a bear if he did not. Weepingly, the boy complied, but he had gathered up only a few blocks before he came to a little blue bucket on the floor. “I’m a puppy!” he said, and bent down to take the handle in his mouth. Then he began to prance around the hall with his head high, the bucket slapping against his chest.

“That’s not what you’re supposed to be doing at all!” Oberon shouted at him, but by the time Titania entered the room, warned by Radish that Oberon was about to beat the changeling, Oberon had joined him in the game with a toy shovel in his teeth. Titania laughed, and it seemed to her in that moment that she had two hearts in her, each pouring out an equivalent feeling toward the prancing figures, and she thought, My men .

They were not allowed to go home. It was hardly time for that, Dr. Beadle told them. The boy was barely better at all. This was going to be a three-year journey, and they were not even a week into it. They were going to have to learn patience if they were going to get through this. They were going to have to learn to take things one day at a time.

“I like to take the long view of things,” Titania said in response, which had been true as a rule all through her long, long life. But lately her long view had contracted, and yet it was no comfort to take things, as Dr. Beadle suggested, as they came. Even without looking ahead into the uncertain future, there was always something to worry about. Oberon suggested she look to the boy and model her behavior after his, which was what he was doing, to which she replied that a child in crisis needed parents, not playmates, to which he said that wasn’t what he meant at all, and they proceeded to quarrel about it, very softly, since the boy was sleeping.

Still, she gave it a try, proceeding with the boy on one of his daily migrations through the ward. Ever since he had been feeling better he went for multiple daily promenades, sometimes walking and sometimes in a little red buggy that he drove by making skibbling motions against the ground. He had to wear a mask, and his IV pole usually accompanied him, but these seemed not to bother him at all, so Titania tried not to let them bother her either, though she was pushing the pole and had to stoop now and then to adjust his mask when it slid over his chin.

The ward was almost the ugliest place she had ever seen, and certainly the ugliest place she had ever lived. Someone had tried, some time ago, to make it pretty, so there were big photographs in the hall of children at various sorts of play, and some of these were diverting, she supposed. But the pictures were few. In other places on the wall, someone had thought to put up bas-relief cartoon faces, about the size of a child’s face, but the faces looked deformed to her eye — goblin faces — and they seemed uniformly to be in pain.