Showing her father, Mike Mucho's, influence, Sam interrogates Pierce: "Do you believe in God? Are you a Christian or a Jew?" Pierce responds to the little girl: "Neither. There's not just the two."
Pierce, asked by Rosie to watch Sam while she meets with her lawyer, reflects that he will never have a flesh-and-blood child in his life. He thinks of his figment Robbie: "The only child of his person there would ever be he had constructed by himself in his workshop, like Gepetto; had prayed then to the smiling powers that he might be made into a real little boy. And -- like that lonely old puppeteer -- he had got a sort of conditional yes. Real to you: as real as unreal can be; as real as the god's gifts ever are. And what had he done with his new son then? What had he imagined he had done with him then? His heart struck loudly within him like a door slamming shut upon him. Did he really know of no other way of love except that, was it so?"
Pierce reads to Sam the Little Enosh comics he prized in his own childhood. Opposing that fantasy, Mike Mucho is driving with Ray Honeybeare, who is utilizing the resources of Powerhouse to back the battle against Rosie for custody of Sam. Honeybeare warns that Sam has been exposed to imagination (a form of magic) as part of her play at the daycare operated by Beau, and that it is the ill that if causing the girl's seizures. "We've been fighting magic for two thousand years" he states, using as his evidence the story of Peter's contending with Simon Magus who, among other things, said he could fly (the fantasy common to Beau, Rosie, and Pierce).
Dee, back in England, struggles to do good with his spiritual knowledge and despairs: "We must not call down the powers from their spheres, John Dee thought, lest they answer us. For they never will be comfortable to our wills, and their own wills are no more bent to helping us than is the sea's or the wind's. Job asked God, who had permitted his wife and children to be slain, for help and understanding: and in answer God showed him the greatness of his creatures, and the strength of his arm, and told him to be silent."
Dee's descent toward death a devolution. He sells his books, then his plate; removes from his house and "practically stops eating, as an old cat or dog does, seeming to live by consuming the last of his life itself, day by day, until it was all gone." Finally, he sells his seeing stone, knowing it is now just a piece of flawed crystal. "No one but those who had used those Arts great and small for so many decades knew that all true sorcerers, both the wicked and the wise, were dead, and what they had once done could be done no more."
Pierce notices the copy in the Blackbury Jambs library of the cyclopedia he pored-over in his boyhood: "Deities, Devils, and Daemons of Mankind." He "lifted it into the lamplight, knowing even as he opened it that it would ask something of him or offer him something. He could almost hear the whir of gears, the clicking of works long stopped."
Comparing his innocent childhood intimacies with the feral girl Bobby with his perverse pleasures with Rose, Pierce again thinks of the (Dantean; Bunyanean) spiral: it was "as though he had climbed a spiral track up a mountain, he saw that he had come to the same place where he had once stood, only one turn higher up. He could see himself now, down there on a former turn, in his own room in that house, bent over a book, this book or another; he could look with pity down upon himself, at the back of his big shorn head, the vulnerable tendons of his neck."
Mike Mucho gains custody of Sam to "raise in his religion. Rosie Rasmussen and Pierce, now having both lost their loved ones to the Powerhouse, comisserate late at night in the kitchen at Arcady. Pierce begins, somewhat reluctantly to reveal the nature of his sexual relations with Rose Ryder "laying down only low cards at first." In response, Rosie reveals that she too knows Rose's masochistic tendencies firsthand.
Rosie takes Pierce to bed. After, she advises him "You should get married. Have kids. . . . Get out of your head. Get down in the shit and the blood."
And as she drifts off to sleep: "Good night, you dope."
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
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