“A Tiny Feast” part 2

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.

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 station, 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. People all 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 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, a brownie perched on his head.

“I hate this place,” she told him.

The doctors called the good news good news, but for the bad news they always found another name. Dr. Blork would say that they had taken a little detour on the way to recovery, or that they had encountered a minor disappointment; rarely, when things really took a turn for the worse, he’d admit that the news was, if not bad, then not very good. It was an unusual experience, to wait anxiously every morning for the day’s news, and to read it in the slips of paper 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 than like someone ripping your heart out one day and then stuffing it back in your chest the next. She was starting to believe that more than anything they had only lucky days and unlucky, that some cruel arbitrator, mightier than either she or her husband, was presiding over this illness, and she wasn’t always convinced when Beadle or Blork told them that something was working, that something they’d done 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 that they could not go home, although Beadle and Blork were always promising that a trip home was just around the corner. In the third week, the fever went away, and the white blood cells began to come back, but then Dr. Blork arrived with a droopy slip of paper announcing that the white blood cells were the evil, cancerous sort, and Titania could tell that there was not much worse news he could think of to be telling them. Beadle and Blork 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 that, though he was always ravenous, 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 liquid food for him, honey-colored liquid that went directly into his veins. Oberon slapped at the bag, and said that 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 the boy shoved steak into his mouth and Oberon laughed. The boy threw it all up in an hour, the steak looking practically unchanged, 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 the boy 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 the doctors, 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 again that he would only become sick if he ate. “Don’t think of eating,” she said. “Think of this bird, instead.” And she pulled a parrot out from the folds of her robe. But the boy asked if he could eat it.

He wore her down toward evening. Oberon had still not returned, and every time she sent Radish to fetch him the pixie said, “He’s still weeping. See?” And she held up a thimble 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 besides food. He didn’t want food. He wanted to be well, to run on the hill in the starlight, to ride on the paths in the park in a cart pulled by six raccoons. He wanted to spend a day not immersed in hope and hopelessness.

“All right, love,” she said, “just one bite.” And she took 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, and very delicately, pinching with his thumb and his forefinger, removed all the elements of a tiny feast and laid them on the bed.

“It will be faster if you help,” he told her as he squinted to chop up a mote-size carrot. So she picked up a bag the size of her thumb, emptied out the beans from within, and began to snap. The boy kept trying to eat things raw at first, but Oberon slapped his hand away and told him to be patient, and eventually he helped as well, twisting the heads off the little chickens when Oberon handed them to him, and laughing when they danced for a few seconds in his palm. It took a long time to prepare the feast, though they had more and more help, as more faeries popped up in the room, some of whom were better sized for the work. Still more of them gathered round in an audience, stuck to the walls, crowding the shelves, perched on the lintel, all of them muttering opinions as the preparations went on—they would have baked, not seared, that fish, and salted the cabbage but not the asparagus, and chosen caramel over fudge for the cake.

When it was done, the boy ate the whole thing, and did not share a morsel, which was exactly as it was supposed to be. Aside from the size of it, there was nothing magical about the food. It shouldn’t have sated him any more than half a dozen peanuts, but even the aroma calmed him down as they were cooking, and by the time he had finished off the last tack-size pastry and dime-size cake he was very quiet again. He looked around the room, as if for more food, and when he opened his mouth wide Titania thought he was going to shout or cry. But he burped instead, a tiny little noise, commensurate with what he had eaten.

She had lost him once, just for a little while. He liked to hide, but didn’t do it very well, too giggly to ever keep his location a secret. But she woke one evening to discover him gone from his customary place underneath her arm, and she couldn’t find him in the usual spots, in a lump under the covers at the foot of the bed, or on the floor next to the bed, or even under the bed. “Is this a game?” she asked her husband, shaking him awake, and she demanded, “Where have you hidden the boy?”

He had not hidden him anywhere, and no faerie had made off with him, or used his parts in a spell, or put him in a pie to eat. But all through the early hours of the evening he was nowhere to be found, though she commanded the whole host to search for him under the hill. She began to suspect that his mortal mother had stolen him back, and without even doing her the courtesy of returning the hobgoblin that had been left in his place. Oberon could not convince her of how extremely unlikely this would be, and she strapped on her armor, greave by greave. For a while Oberon was able to get it off of her as fast as she could put it on, nuzzling her and speaking ever so soothingly about how the boy would be found. But eventually she outstripped him. She placed her helm on her head and called the host to war, and all the peace-loving faeries of Buena Vista Park reluctantly put on their silver mail and took up their ruby-tipped spears and made ready to stream out into the Mission to slay the woman who had stolen their mistress’s child. In the end, Doorknob found him before they could march out of the woods. He was under a cupboard, sound asleep, and one had only to sniff at him to understand that he had wandered thirsty from bed to the kitchen and drunk at length from the wine bowl instead of the water bowl, and perhaps had had a solitary toddling drunken party all his own before hiding himself away to sleep. Titania wanted to kiss him and hold him, of course, but it occurred to her that there were other things she could do right then instead: shrink him down enough to carry him around in her mouth, or make him a hump on her back, or chain him to her, foot to foot. He woke as she was considering these things, and blinked at her, and then at the faeries, all attired for war, and turned on his side and went back to sleep.

“What a terrible gift you have given me,” she said to her husband. They were sitting at the boy’s bedside, not holding hands, though their knees were touching. There had been bad news, and then worse news, and then the worst news yet. The evil cells were back in his blood, and he had a fever, and there was an infection in the bones of his face. Dr. Blork had said that a fungus was growing there, and had admitted that this news was, in fact, bad,and he had looked both awkward and grave as he sat with them, twisting his stethoscope around in his hands and apologizing for the turn of events, though not exactly accepting responsibility for the failures of the treatment. Oberon had said that mushrooms were some of the friendliest creatures he knew, and that he could not understand how they could possibly represent a threat to anyone, but Blork shook his head, and said that this fungus was nobody’s friend, and further explained that the presence of the new infection compromised the doctors’ ability to poison the boy anymore, and that for that reason the leukemia cells were having a sort of holiday.

The boy was sleeping. They had brought back the morphine for his pain, so he was rarely awake, and was not very happy when he was. Titania moved from her chair to the bed, and took his hand. Even asleep, he pulled it away. “A terrible gift,” she said.

“Don’t say such things,” Oberon said.

“Terrible.” She sat on the bed, taking the boy’s hand over and over as he pulled it away, and told her husband that she was afraid that when the boy died he would take with him not just all the love she felt for him but all the love she felt for Oberon, too, and all the love she had felt for anything or anyone in the world. He would draw it after him, as if in obeisance to some natural law that magic could not violate, and then she would be left with nothing.

“Do not speak of such things, my love,” her husband said, and he kissed her. She let him do that. And she let him put his hands inside her dress, and let him draw her over to the narrow couch where they were supposed to sleep at night. She tried to pretend that it was any other night under the hill when they would roll and wrestle with each other while the boy slept next to them, oblivious. They were walked in upon a number of times. But everyone saw something different, and none of them remembered what they had seen after they turned and fled the room. The night nurse, coming in to change some I.V. fluids, saw two blankets striking and grappling with each other on the couch. A nursing assistant saw a mass of snakes and cats twisting over one another, sighing and hissing. Dr. Blork actually managed to perceive Oberon’s mighty thrusting bottom, and went stumbling back out into the hall, temporarily blinded.

One evening, Dr. Beadle came in alone, Blorkless, and sat down on the bed, where the boy was sweating and sleeping, dreaming, Titania could tell, of something unpleasant. “I think it’s time to talk about our goals for Brad,” he said, and put a hand on the Beastie over the boy’s foot, and wiggled the foot back and forth as he talked, asking them whether they were really doing the best thing for the boy, whether they should continue with a treatment that was not making him better.

“What else would we do?” Titania asked him, not understanding what he was saying, but suddenly not wanting him in the room, or on the bed, or touching the boy.

“We would make him comfortable,” he said.

“Isn’t he comfortable?” Titania asked. “Isn’t he sleeping?”

“Not . . . finally,” Dr. Beadle said. “We could be doing more, and less. We could stop doing what isn’t helping, and not do anything that would prolong . . . the suffering.” Then Oberon, who had been eying the man warily from the couch, leaped up, shouting, “Smotherer! Smother doctor! Get back to Hell!”

“You don’t understand,” Dr. Beadle said. “I don’t mean that at all. Not at all!” He looked at Titania with an odd combination of pleading and pity. “Do you understand?” he asked her. In reply, she drew herself up and shook off every drop of the disguising glamour, and stood there entirely revealed to him. He seemed to shrink, and fell off the bed, and while he was not purposefully kneeling in front of her, he happened to end up on his knees. She leaned over him and spoke very slowly.

“You will do everything mortally possible to save him,” she said.

The night the boy died, there were a number of miraculous recoveries on the ward. It was nothing that Titania did on purpose. She did not care about the other pale bald-headed children in their red wagons and masks, did not care about the other mothers, whose grief and worry seemed to elevate their countenances to resemble Titania’s own. Indifference was the key to her magic; she could do nothing for someone she loved. So all the desperate hope she directed at the boy was made manifest around her in rising blood counts and broken fevers and unlikely remissions. It made for a different sort of day—with so much good news around, it seemed as if hardly anyone noticed that the boy had died.

Oberon sat on the floor in a corner of the room, trying to quiet the brokenhearted wailing of the Beastie, but not making a sound himself. Titania sat on the bed with the boy. A nurse had been in to strip him of his tubes and wires, and had drawn a sheet up to just under his chin. His eyes were closed, and his face looked oddly less pale than it had in life and illness. The glamour was in tatters; Oberon was supposed to be maintaining it, and now Titania found she didn’t really care enough to take up the work. No nurse had been in for hours, and the last to come in had lain down upon the clover-covered floor and giggled obtrusively until some thoughtful faerie had put an egg in her mouth to shut her up. Before she had gone drunk, she’d mentioned something about funeral arrangements, and Titania was thinking of those now. “We should bring him home,” she said aloud, and no one stirred, but she said it again every few minutes, and by twos and threes the faeries crowding the room began to say it, too, and then they started to build a bier for him, tearing out the cabinets and bending the I.V. pole and ripping up the sheets and blankets. When they were done, the walls were stripped and the furniture was wrecked. Twelve faeries of more or less equal size bore the bier, and they waited while another dozen brownies hammered at the doorway to widen the exit. When they were ready, they all looked to Titania, who nodded her permission. Oberon was the last to leave, standing only when Doorknob tugged at his arm after the room had emptied.

There was no disguise left to cover them. People saw them for what they were, a hundred and two faeries and a dead boy proceeding down the hall with harps and flutes, crowded in the service elevator with fiddles and lutes, marching out of the hospital with drums. Mortals gaped. Dogs barked. Cats danced on their hind feet, and birds followed them by the dozens, hopping along and cocking their heads from side to side. It was early afternoon. The fog was breaking against the side of the hill, leaving Buena Vista Park brilliantly sunny. They passed through the ordinary trees of the park, and then into the extraordinary trees of their own realm,and came to the door in the hill, and passed through that as well.

They marched into the great hall, and put down the bier. The music played on for a while, then faltered little by little, as each player came to feel unsure of why they were playing. Then the hall was quiet, because they didn’t know what to do next. They had never celebrated or mourned a death before. They were all looking to Titania to speak, but it was Oberon who finally broke the silence, announcing from the back of the room that the Beastie had died of its grief. 

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