"Titania!" he called out.
She flew into view, a few yards away. Only now she was very small. About the size of a butterfly.
"Titania, I didn't get to tell Ebby goodbye. Will you tell her for me?"
"I will, after Puck fixes her up."
"I think maybe I might have fallen in love with her, if I'd had more time."
"In and out of love. That's what mortals do," said Titania. "Always in love yet never satisfied."
"You and Oberon are so much better?"
She smiled. "Touche, baby."
Chapter 25
ONE
Oberon stood wingless and in chains, guarded by two fairies with swords who never took their gaze from him. Over him vaulted a ceiling of solid rock, though if he had his freedom, the rock would not be solid if he didn't want it to be.
Out of the sometimes solid rock directly above his head, a small sprinkling of lights slid downward, forming a faint pillar that sank toward him.
Oberon recoiled, strained against his chains to keep himself from being touched by the descending column.
It came gently to the ground and there began to coalesce into a manshape, with a face gradually becoming clear. Mack Street. Oberon knew him well. A monster, that's what he was. All that he hated about himself, all he had purged from himself, now come back to torture him.
"Get away," he said. "I don't want you. You weaken me. You poison me."
The apparition did not answer. It wasn't solid enough to have a voice. All it did was drift toward Oberon. And reach out an ephemeral hand.
Oberon cried out as if it were torture to be so touched. But the moment the dust of light came into contact with his skin, the whole apparition brightened, thickened, until it was dazzling white light.
And Oberon thinned out, becoming a dust of ash in his own shape.
The two clouds of dust, bright light and infinite shadow, hovered beside each other until, with just the faintest tugging, they suddenly flew together into a single manshape.
The dust became a kaleidoscope of colors, until they finally took on a firm surface again. It was a man again, his skin warm and brown. He was still in chains, but not standing in pride as Oberon had done. Now his head was bowed, and he sank to his knees and wept, covering his face with his hands.
"What have I done," he groaned. Sobs racked his body.
As he knelt weeping, two patches of skin running up and down his back brightened, then broke open into two slits of pure light. Out of the slits emerged more of the kaleidoscopic dust. It formed a double sheath over his back. The folded wings of a moth at rest.
A faint chord of music rang through the great cavern. Fairies began drifting in. In various sizes, they hovered in the air, watching. Waiting.
She nodded graciously, waved, touched several fairies who came near her.
But nothing diverted her from the direction of her flight: toward the slab of rock where Oberon knelt in chains, his head bowed.
She stood before him. "Oberon, my husband," she said.
He did not raise his head. "I can't bear to remember what I did to you," he said.
"But I understand, my king. You suppressed the part of you that loved me, the part that knew how to love. Bit by bit and day by day you ejected it from yourself, isolated it, gave it no control over any of your choices. It was no longer part of the cause of anything you did. When there was nothing left but malice, envy, and ambition, how else could you do but the things you did?"
"I did them," said Oberon. "All my cruelties, they were my choices. I knew what I was doing."
"Yes," said Titania. "Even when you created a surrogate for no other purpose than to capture other people's wishes and keep them until you needed their power, you knew what you were doing.
You were the one who chose to build them out of the very parts of you that you had driven into exile.
Forming them into a living soul who walked the earth as you could not, seeing what you had forgotten how to see."
She reached down, put her hand under his chin, and lifted his face to see her.
The face that looked at her was not the proud face of the captive Oberon.
It was the face of Mack Street.
"Hello, baby," she said. "I told you I'd only miss you for a little while."
She ran her hand across his hair and behind his head. As she did, the chains dropped away.
He raised his hands, took her wrists in a firm grip, and looked intently into her face. "I didn't think it would be me," he said. "I thought it would be him."
"They're both you, baby," said Titania. "Driving together down that canyon, through the flood.
But now you've got the right person in the driver's seat."
She leaned closer to him, kissed him.
"You loved so many people up there in that neighborhood, and so many people opened their homes and hearts to you, that you became too strong for him. It's everything I hoped for, baby. He didn't stand a chance."
They soared upward to the rocky ceiling of the cavern, and then began to whirl, growing smaller as they did. Below them, the other fairies also shrank and began to fly, swarming upward. Then they funneled through a ceiling passageway and the cavern was left empty and dark.
In Fairyland, in a clearing in the woods that covered a steep-rising hill, there was a small opening in the earth, surrounded by flowers from the first rush of spring that had begun only that morning. Out of the cleft there burst two tiny whirling fairies, followed by a thousand more that swarmed like bees escaping from a hive.
There were birds in the branches around the glen, and squirrels that skittered on trunks and over roots; they gave the bright cloud of fairies only a moment's glance before going about their business.
The fairies formed themselves into a circle around their king and queen, who danced above the opening into the underworld.
In Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, as tired neighbors were dropped off at their homes, or parked their cars and went inside, Word Williams walked down the hairpin curve of Cloverdale to join Ceese Tucker and Ura Lee Smitcher on the brow of the hill, looking down into the dead brown hollow surrounding the drainpipe.
In a perfect circle around the rusty red pipe, a thousand toadstools grew.
"It's a fairy circle," said Ura Lee. "The toadstools grow where the fairies dance."
"I hope she takes good care of him," said Ceese. "Where she took him."
Word took Ura Lee's other arm. "She took him home."
Together they walked her back down to her empty house, where tonight no dreams would be dreamed except her own.
But the hands that helped her make that walk despite the tears that filled her eyes were eloquent with promises. You will not die alone, Ura Lee Smitcher, they said to her. There will be two men beside you when that time comes. An LAPD cop and a preacher from a storefront church; they'll hold your hand to remind you that they also knew and in their own way loved the son you raised, the boy who never existed in this world, and yet who saved it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel began in 1999 with a letter from Roland Bernard Brown, a friend of mine who grew up in an upper-middle-class black family in Southern California. We had been talking about racial issues in America (and have continued the conversation for many years since then), but one of his biggest regrets was that black men get short shrift in literature. He wondered why I had never written a black hero in my fiction.
The problem with my writing a black hero—using his point of view, seeing the world through his eyes—is that I'm not a black man myself and probably never will be. I didn't grow up in black culture and so I would make a thousand mistakes without even knowing it.
Whereupon Roland promised me that he would help. He would give me background. He would catch my mistakes and help me get back on track.
Then you should write the book yourself, too, I said.