A son conjured from a gray ledger notebook

John Crowley, Love & Sleep (Book Two of the AEgypt Cycle): Reading Notes, Part VII

Pierce considers the prospects of a quest for a surviving marvel of the earlier age, "when the laws of the universe were not as they are now but different; when such things as jewels and fire had properties they no longer have; when people witnessed, and carefully recorded, marvels we now know to be (and believe to have always been) impossible.

"A quest that would be for something real . . . A though in the next age of the world, a cooler and a duller she than this one, somebody were to come across a lump of radium, glowing eerily in the darkness, shedding particiles, decaying, showing just those properties that once upon a time, in Einstein's day or Fermi's, people actually believed it to have."

This section of "Love & Sleep" named after the fifth house of the zodiac, Nati, which Val explains is "the House of Children basically: it sort of includes sex, or at least procreation, but it's got to cover wills and legacies and inheritances too."

In keeping with this, the section concludes with a flurry of couplings and nurturings across gender lines. Rose imagines suckling, giving sustenance and begins, orally, an affair with Swofford. Beau imagines a cosmic coupling with the earth itself, returning to Adam. Val acts on her long suppressed knowledge that the bachelor Boney is her father. Pierce consummates his earlier intimacy with the other Rose (or does he?, given his succeptability to hypnerotomachia).

Most astounding by far is Pierce's creation, his drafting (in a gray ledger notebook) of a son and lover -- the twelve or thirteen year old Robbie, as his third of three wishes, the wishful result of an act of unprotected sex shortly after his graduation from college.

Robbie an act of imagination, of hypnerotomachia. "If we believe, or pretend, that the world is capable of being other than it is, alterable by our desires (as perhaps more people did then than we so now) then it is likely that we will spend a certain amount of our aimless mental time in imagining just how we might alter it. Pierce Moffat had never built model railroads, hadn't spent energy imagining himself into that small world, boarding the little cars at little stations, oiling the engine and driving it through the hills and over the bridges. He had never had a teddy bear who went on imaginary travels with him, or an imaginary friend, or even a dog he pretended could talk to him.

"But he had always, always imagined that wishes could come true [and] he had never quite quelled the habit. Though he had prepared himself with a couple of practical wishes for Health and Money, it was only that day, sitting on the steps of Fellowes Kraft's house as he once sat on the steps in Kentucky, twirling as he had then a long lock of hair, that he had discovered his deepest need and conflated it with desire."

"'Robbie,' Pierce explained the next morning to a tall gray ledger he had bought on arrival in the Faraways in the Spring, 'is my son.'"

The dying Boney's desires remain for immortality. Fellowes Kraft had jokingly addressed him as "Mon Emperor" (Boney being the nickname of Napoleon) and, in his convalescence, the "old monster" has adopted a regal silken kimono with a great dragon on the back. But Boney's Mages, first Fellowes and now Pierce, fail him in his hope to be brought the elixir of immortality. (To Val, he looks like "the person she had read about in the Dictionary, who got eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth"). Boney enters the afterlife still thinking of how he could retrace his steps to discover the secret.


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