Chris Adrian: The Great Night

The boy was not allowed to wander beyond the filtered confines of the ward, so they went around and around, passing the posse of doctors on their rounds and the nurses at their stations and the other parents and children making their own circumnavigations. The boy called out hello and beeped his horn at everyone they met. They called back “Hello, Brad!” or “Hello, Brian!” or “Hello, Billy!” since he answered to all those names. Everyone heard something different when they asked his name and Titania replied, “Boy.”

She walked, step by step, not thinking of anything but the ugliness of the hall or the homeliness of Dr. Blork or the coarseness of Dr. Beadle’s hair or the redness of the buggy. There is no past and no future , she told herself. We have been here forever, and we will be here forever . These thoughts were not exactly a comfort. She considered the other parents, staring at them as she passed, remembering to smile at them only when they smiled at her. It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn’t feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless. A feeling like that ought to be able to move mountains, she thought, and then she wondered how she had come to such a sad place in her thoughts, when she meant to live entirely in the blank present. They went back to the room where Oberon was playing a video game with a brownie perched on his head.

“I hate this place,” she told him.

They always called the good news good news, but for the bad news they always found another name. Dr. Blork would say they had taken a little detour on the way to recovery or had encountered a minor disappointment. Occasionally, when things really took a turn for the worse, he’d admit that something was, if not bad news, not very good news. It was an unusual experience, to wait anxiously every morning for the day’s news and to read it — in the slips of paper they gave her that detailed the results of the previous day’s tests and in the faces of the people who brought the news, in the pitch of their voices and in the absences they embraced, the words they did not use, and the things they did not say.

Oberon said the way that good news followed bad news, which followed good news on the tail of bad news, made him feel as if he were sailing in a ship on dangerous swells or riding an angry pony. Titania was the only one among them ever to have ridden on a roller coaster, but she didn’t offer up the experience as an analogy, because it seemed insufficient to describe a process that to her felt less like a violent unpredictable ride and more like someone ripping out your heart on one day and then stuffing it back in your chest on the next. There was very little about it that she found unpredictable, and it was as much a comfort to know that the bad news would be followed by good as it was a slumping misery to know that the good news was not final. She was starting to believe that, more than anything, they had only lucky days and unlucky, that some cruel arbiter, mightier than either she or her husband, was presiding over this illness, and she wasn’t always convinced, when Beadle or Blork told them something was working, that something they did was making the boy better.

His leukemia went away, which was good news, but not very quickly, which was bad news. His white blood cells would not grow back, which was bad news, and yet it would have been worse news if he had had too many of them. He had no fever, which was good news, until he got one, and that was very bad, though Blork seemed to intimate, in his stuttering way, that there were worse things that might happen. It meant they could not go home, though Beadle and Blork were always promising that a trip home was just around the corner. On the third week the fever went away and the white blood cells began to come back, but then Dr. Blork came to them with a droopy slip of paper documenting that the white blood cells were the evil, cancerous sort, and Titania could tell that there was not much worse he could think of to be telling them. They shuffled the boy’s poisons, and brought him shots of thick white liquid that they shoved into his thighs. The shots made him scream like nothing else had, and she could not bear to be in the room when it happened, because she could not bear the look the boy gave her, which asked so clearly, Shouldn’t you kill them for hurting me like this? The new poison turned him around again; the evil cells began to retire from his blood and his bones. But then his innards became irritated, and they decided, though he was always ravenous, that he couldn’t eat.

“It’s a crime,” Oberon said. “Damn the triglycerides , the boy is hungry!” The nurses had hung up a bag of food for him, honey-colored liquid that went directly into his veins. Oberon slapped at the bag, and said it didn’t look very satisfying. He fed the boy a bun, and a steak, and a crumpled cream puff, pulling each piece of food from his pocket with a flourish. Titania protested and threatened to get the nurse and even held the call button in her hand, almost pressing it while Oberon laughed and the boy shoved steak in his face. He threw it all up in an hour, the steak looking practically unchanged when it came back up, and became listless and squash-colored for three days. When they were asked if the boy had eaten anything, Oberon only shrugged.

But as soon as he had recovered, he was crying again for food, pleading with them all the time no matter how the nurses fiddled with the bag that was supposed to keep him sated. One morning the whole team showed up: Beadle and Blork and the junior-junior doctors whose names Titania could never remember and Alice and the nurse and another two or three mortals whose function, if it was something besides just skulking about, she never did discover. When Dr. Blork asked him how he was doing, he pleaded with them, too.

“Can’t I have one tiny little feast?” he asked, and they laughed at him. They chucked his chin and tousled the place where his hair had been, and then they went out, leaving her with this dissatisfied, suffering creature. “Mama, please,” he said all day, “just one little feast. I won’t ask again, I promise.” Oberon was silent and left the room eventually, once again crying his useless tears, and Titania told the boy he would only become sick if he ate, that even one feast might mean another week before he could eat again. “Don’t think of eating,” she said, “think of this bird, instead.” And she pulled a parrot out from within the folds of her robe. But the boy only asked if he could eat it.

He wore her down toward evening. Oberon had still not returned, and when she sent Radish to fetch him she said only, “He’s still weeping. See?” And she held a thimble up, brimming with tears. Titania sighed, wanting to run from the boy and his anxious, unhappy hunger, which had seemed to her as the day dragged on to represent, and then to become, a hunger for something else besides food. He didn’t want food. He wanted to be well, to run on the hill under the starlight, to ride on the paths in the park in a little cart pulled by six raccoons. He wanted to spend a day not immersed in hope and hopelessness. She could not give him any of that right now.

“All right, love,” she said, “just one bite.” And she brought out a chocolate from her bag, but before she could give it to him Oberon returned, calling for her to stop because he had something better. He cleared a space on the bed and put down a little sack there, and very delicately, pinching with his thumb and his forefinger, removed all the ingredients of a tiny feast and laid them on the bed.