The Great Night Read Online Free

vengeance as she ever was in the good old days when every night was
great, when the host spent the hours on the hill from dusk to dawn consumed in masques of jealousy and violent, elevating, rejuvenating lust. With a mere gesture, she tore the wings from the do-gooders and forced them to bear the boy upon their wounded backs, crawling under him in the dirt as he dozed and drooled until they deposited him on the Haight Street sidewalk.
    Often, but not always, when her subjects assumed she was lost in sad reverie, she was actually listening to the city where her husband had hidden himself, though it wasn’t any ordinary sense of hearing that she deployed. As she lay on her litter or her bier, startling little flashes of wonder would flare up beyond the hill, sometimes so intensely that she could feel them like a warmth against her face. These showed her where to direct her attention, and it was not much longer before she could discern the particulars of the event: a child floats away with his kite; a dog suddenly grows flowers in its coat; a hideous transvestite stumbling down Eighteenth Street at 2 a.m. actually becomes, for twenty paces, a beautiful woman. This was magic, and it must indicate the presence of her lost love, because for a long time now magic had been absent from the city and the country beyond the hill. In his hidden state, unknown to himself and unaware of his power, the magic would seep from Oberon and temporarily change the world around him, at random or according to the changeable and petty wishes of the mortals with whom he slummed. The latest report had been the most promising: A white bull, cock a-swagger and head held high, had paraded through a coffee shop in Noe Valley and then strolled down Twenty-fourth Street toward Diamond Heights.
    This was a sign like none other. The white bull was one of his aspects; a form to wear in battle or in passion but also one he liked to wear after a bitter quarrel with her, because she
could never stay angry at him when he was a creature so warm and breathy, and she could never detect any duplicity in Oberon’s apologies in those giant brown eyes. So it was a sign and a signal. He had become his most distinctive beast because he was ready to put back on his power and become her King again, and because he was so sorry for leaving her, for hurting her more than he’d ever done before in all the years of their marriage.
    â€œI never saw the bull,” Puck said, “though the wonder of him was written still on the faces of all the mortals who beheld him. I followed his scent for a quarter mile and found a bush wet with his piss. See? I brought you a flower from it.” From somewhere on his naked person he produced a small blue flower with thick hairy petals that glistened as if they were still wet. He took a deep whiff and presented it to her with another bow and flourish. “It is his stink!’ he said with a wide smile. A light came off his teeth too bright for most of them to look at long, though Titania was never cowed by it. She snatched the flower from him and brought it hesitantly to her face. Puck had frozen it in time, but his spell came apart in her hand. The petals softened and felt moist instead of glassy, and when she shook the flower a few drops fell onto her dress as the salt and iron odor rose up and transported her into a rapture of nostalgia. It was pathetic, she knew, to weep over the scent of her lost lover’s piss, but it was the first time in a year she had been able to partake of his odor, since all his clothes had disappeared on the same day he did, and the sheets on his side of their bed, too. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell, though she would have cherished it even if it were. It smelled powerful and ancient and sad, and she thought she could apprehend in it some trace, a compacted seed, of the extraordinary love he bore her.
    Her courtiers yawned, and here and there they muttered “There she goes again”