"I'm not a man," said Mack. "You said so yourself."
"That's right," she said. "You don't have to love me."
"I didn't know I'd feel this way. I just thought it would be... like the guys at school talk about.
Getting laid."
"Not with me."
"I don't want it to be nothing," he said. "I want it to be real. I want it to last."
She giggled. "Well, if it just went on and on, you'd never get anything else done."
"Yo Yo," he said. "I want to love you forever."
"What do you think I want?" She pulled him down to sit by her on the couch. "Think I imprisoned you in the underworld because I hated you? No, I loved you. I loved this part of you. The Mack Street part. Sure, the other part was fun, the contest between us was... entertaining. But you never let this part of you out. This is the part you hid away, and now you threw it away, but you're wrong, Oberon, this Mack Street part of you is pure love and light."
"No I'm not," said Mack. "I'm not part of something else, I'm me."
"I know it, Mack," she said. "You don't know how important it is that I know you, and you know me."
"It's just spying to you."
"No, Mack. It's discovering. It's making something. It's the love of my life."
"I don't want you to be the love of my life," said Mack. "I want to love someone who thinks I'm complete by myself."
"Then that someone would believe in a lie. Because you aren't complete. You're the best part of someone great, marvelous, powerful, and addicted to cruelty. You don't know that side of you, but I do. What I never got to know was this part of you. Oh, Mack Street, don't hide yourself from me any longer."
They weren't sitting on the couch anymore. They were sitting on a moss-covered stone, cool but not cold, and the sun was shining through the canopy of leaves and warming their naked skin. He did love her, just as she had told him he would. In fact, he discovered that he already knew her body in ways that he had not imagined. They were not strangers. They were husband and wife.
He wondered if he actually looked like Oberon, or if things like that didn't matter. What was she seeing when she kissed him and held him?
Not Mack Street.
But here, in her embrace, naked among the trees, he didn't care.
Word and Rev Theo carried their whole PA system out into the street. Once this had been a thoroughfare, and these storefronts had been full of business and the streets full of people and cars, but now hardly anybody drove along here, and if some cop came up he'd see it wasn't a riot or a demonstration, it was church, it was religion. Nobody would interfere.
Because the thing that possessed him wouldn't let them.
It doesn't rule me. If it tries to turn this thing to evil, I won't let it. I'm still Word, the same man I've always been. I searched for God and this thing came instead, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also an answer to my prayers. Couldn't God have sent this to him? Given him this power in order to fulfil a mission from the Lord?
Wasn't this what it felt like for Jesus, when the multitude came to listen to his word, and then he reached out and healed them, and gathered up their children and blessed them?
"No collection today," Word said to Rev Theo.
"You're joking, right?" said Rev Theo. "This ministry could use a shot of cash."
"You can set up baskets by the door. Let them come up if they want to contribute. But it can't look like people are paying to get healed. Afterward, if they want to contribute. But nothing gets passed around."
"That's just crazy," said Rev Theo.
"Please," said Word. "Don't ask for it. Let them give it out of their own hearts."
Rev Theo studied his face. "You think we'll get more that way, don't you?"
"I have no idea," said Word.
"Rev Theo, I know your ministry takes money. But money didn't buy what happened last night."
"Money paid the rent on the roof under which it happened," said Rev Theo. "Money paid the light bill and paid for the benches and the doors and the locks on the doors that keep the vandals out.
A lack of money tore my wife and me apart for a long time, and now that the Lord is bringing us back together, I got to pay for me and her to live decently. Don't despise money, Word."
"I'm just afraid that... I don't know if it will ever happen again."
"It happened last night and we had a collection, didn't we?" Rev Theo patted his shoulder. "But for you, tonight, we'll try it your way. A couple of deacons with bowls at the door, and those who want to walk up front and contribute, we won't refuse them. The others can do what they want."
"Thanks," said Word.
They lay entangled on soft grass, and still the sun shone overhead as though time had not passed, though it felt to Mack like infinite time, and it also felt like no time at all. It wasn't over because he still held her, and her heart still beat between her breasts as if it were his own heart, pumping his own blood. His hand rested there, and he never wanted to move.
"Did you get what you needed?" he asked her.
"Mm-hmm," she said.
"And me," said Mack. "Did I get what I needed?"
"You got what he needed," she said. "You were already perfect."
More silence. More birdsong in the trees. More petals from blossoms falling, as if in this glen it happened to be spring.
"Yo Yo," he said.
"Mm?"
"Why aren't you small."
She giggled. "What?"
"When Puck came to Fairyland he turned small. Tiny. Why didn't you?"
"Because I'm holding you," she said. "I'm joined to you. You keep me from shrinking. As surely as if my soul were freed from that jar you put me in."
"I didn't—"
"So if you were whole, you wouldn't be small."
"When I go wandering in the world, I go out like this. Wearing another body. Because mortals really couldn't bear to see me as I truly am. I'm very—"
"Beautiful."
"I'm too perfect to be seen by mortal eyes. It's not vanity, it's just the truth. So I go out incomplete, and while that's happening, the part that stays behind is like what you saw in the jar.
Dazzling, but very small. And when the part of me that's in your world tries to come back wearing this mortal body, then that body becomes small, too. Unless I have power like the power stored in you to keep me whole."
"So you're taking power from the dreams of my neighbors."
"Their wishes. Yes."
"Then you—we—we're like parasites."
"No," said Yo Yo. "We're like artists. They don't make food, they don't make shelter. You can't wear a painting, you can't eat a poem, you can't put a song over your head to shelter you from wind and rain. But we feed them, don't we, because we love the picture and the poem and the song. Like we feed children, who also don't earn their place."
"We feed children because of what they can become."
"And mortals feed me on their dreams because only I, and others like me, have the power to make their dreams come true."
"Right, like Puck does."
"If I had my right power, and Puck too, I could keep him tame. His pranks would be nothing more than that. Not these monstrous things that Oberon is taking delight in."
"How do you do it? How can you collect a wish and turn it into—something in the real world?"
"Don't you understand? Wishes are the true elements underlying all the universe. Mortal scientists study the laws, the rules, the way the dominoes fall. But we can see underneath it all to the flow of wishes and desires. The tiny wishes of the smallest particles. The vast, complicated, contradictory wishes of human beings. If mortals had the power to see the flows, the streams of desire, if they could bend them the way we can, then they would constantly be at war with each other.