Love Sleep

by John Crowley

  “They believe they can alter the world in certain ways. Not just healing. They can, you know, get things through prayer. Find lost things. Have what they want.”

  “Oh for Pete’s sake.”

  “If you ask for bread, you won’t get a stone. Jesus said.”

  He had tried to tell Rose, calmly, openly, that he had a long history with this religion, had given it a lot of thought, not only its premises and dogmas but its passion too. But you’re not a Christian, Pierce, she’d said to him, surprised. You’re a Catholic.

  “If they still let you see her,” Winnie said. “You’re supposed to be understanding, and not judge, and not get hysterical. I’ve read this. That just drives them deeper in.” She laughed a little, and looked at Pierce sideways. “Can you do that?”

  “I haven’t,” Pierce said. No he had raged at her, a furious village atheist, forgetting all his wisdom, his new infinite God at the infinitesimal heart of things; in inexplicable horror watched her fall helplessly asleep beneath their spell, though she laughed when he described it that way. Raged at himself, too, appalled at his unkindness, his lack of tact and tactic. He had gone, effectually, nuts, without knowing in the least why. He wasn’t going to tell his mother that he had himself seen miracles, small ones, small elisions or alterations in time or matter, meaningless mostly but terrifying: the small undeniable signs which in a dream mean that reality is not as you have assumed it to be.

  Well maybe he hadn’t seen miracles. It was as though he had seen them, so exactly as - though that he could not dispute them. He lived daily now in a world of as-though. Maybe not he alone either, maybe the distinction was failing everywhere in the world, metaphors imploding, tenor subsumed in vehicle.

  He tipped back his chair with a foot against the deck’s rail. Overhead great birds sailed the evening, winging with slow beats into the west, legs trailing behind. Rose Ibis, his bird book said, birds wholly unrelated to the Old World ibis sacred to Egypt, and to Ægypt.

  “In Kentucky,” he said. “That orphan girl we took in that time, when you were gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “She believed in a secret gospel,” Pierce said. “That her daddy figured out. About the end of the world.”

  “She did?” Winnie regarded him in amazement, that he should recall such a thing; she herself kept few useless memories.

  “The devil threw this big rock at her daddy’s house,” Pierce said.

  “Oh yes?”

  “To keep him from telling the news. That the end was coming. So his own troops I guess wouldn’t lose heart. Who knows.”

  “Those people,” Winnie said.

  That’s what this felt like, Pierce realized: it felt like sitting on the steps of the dogtrot, in the summer of the end of the world, unable to save Bobbie, fending off from his inhabited heart the darkness she seemed to will herself into. No it didn’t feel like it, it was it, as though it had never ceased.

  But he knew now that nothing ever happens once, everything re-occurs as the cycles swing, each cycle is exactly like the last in another form, each age too no doubt; like one of those novels where all the characters are avatars of mythic personages, their commonplace acts reproducing all the turns of an ancient story, their names too echoing the old originals, though even that they don’t recognize; thinking they are inventing their lives even as they are driven here and there by unsleeping Coincidence, obliged to carry it all out, down to murder, down to madness, before the last page.

  “Pierce?” Winnie said. “Are you okay?”

  He realized that for some time he had been bent over in his aluminum chair, pressing one hand against his chest.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No. No.” He tried to straighten up, look normal. “I keep thinking my heart is somehow damaged. But no, don’t worry, the doctor says no.”

  “Not broken?” Winnie said, and put her hand on his. “Isn’t it funny that’s where you feel it. Just as though.”

  Yes just as though. What transfer from head to heart, from organ of knowing to organ of circulation, made possible this awful hurt in the middle of his bosom? Why here of all places? “It used to be,” he said, “that people did believe it would break. And kill you.”

  “Well people still think that today,” Winnie said. “A lot of people do.”

  “Well sure,” Pierce said. “These concepts never really go away. In fact this book I am now writing.”

  He ceased speaking then, and his heart ceased its tapping in astonishment. The evening slowed, for an instant, to a halt.

  Good god he had found it.

  The heart in his breast swelled to sudden great size with understanding, and Pierce let out a cry, or a sob; and then he went on sobbing, emptying it of tears, though it seemed not to shrink at all.

  He had found it. He had promised he could find it and he had.

  What thing is it that we inherit from the distant past that has survived, unchanged, from the way things used to be? What is the one thing that has not lost its older nature or its powers?

  Boney had wanted it to be an Elixir that would keep him alive forever. But it wasn’t.

  It had been within him, of course it had, all along; it had been within Pierce, was within everyone, always there right in our own backyards, well known to everyone too except the fool who goes out in search of it. It isn’t even possible to think or talk without invoking it, referring to its powers and its reasons; whatever the surgeons find and handle when they crack the chest, everyone knows what it is, what work it has to do: it is there that the dry sticks of perceived reality are transformed into meaning, for the soul to feed upon. Even surgeons know it.

  The heart. The heart yes in the bosom, for where else is it, it’s no metaphor, it’s here, here, here, and Pierce struck his own thrice. Here where the power was, and is, and always has been: just where magic said it proceeded from.

  “Oh, son,” said Winnie. She rubbed a forefinger beneath her nose, and sniffed. She took his hand again. “Oh damn it all.”

  He had just come upon the end of his book. His ridiculous sobs modulated to a mad shriek of laughter. Yes his book. Worse than never having come upon it at all, he had come upon it now, the surprise ending of his book, now when he was certain that he could never, ever write it.

  He was to lose everything, mind as well as heart, occupation too; it was all to be taken from him. The big payback, and he supposed he well and truly deserved it. Out of cursed restless Saturnian boredom and longing he had hurt his own magic heart, abused it fatally in the search for thrills to animate it, and it had finally gone haywire, shrunken and contracted in his bosom, and would no longer do its work, would do nothing but pump his poor blood, and sob.

  As the winter night fell in the North the temperature dropped; on television he and Winnie and Doris, Winnie’s business partner and companion, watched people in overcoats and galoshes bending into the snowy wind of northern cities, or hopelessly shoveling out their submerged cars. Pierce thought of the storm enveloping his little shuttered house at the end of its by now erased drive. Twice since winter began, the water coming into the house had begun to freeze, and twice he had freed the plastic pipe of ice before it was too late. Now he wasn’t there.

  Snow and bitter cold were apparently general all over Europe too, snow drifting deep where it usually frosted lightly, and falling in big theatrical flakes on Mediterranean towns that had rarely seen it at all, where children held up their hands to be visited by the tiny beings, who vanished when they alighted. Commentators said it was perhaps the advancing edge of a new cold phase, the return maybe of the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, when the river Thames had frozen solid every year, and festivals were held on the ice.

  All was still and mild on Winnie’s key, and on the waters of the cove beyond the motel’s little marina. A tall heron stood on one leg in the sawgrass, asleep with its beak beneath its wing. Pierce could have seen it, silhouetted against the silver water, if he had lifted his head to
look out.

  He lay awake on his damp pillow looking instead up into the ceiling tiles, which seemed to make faces, squarish pocked flat-hatted desperadoes squinting at nothing.

  The heart, Julie, the heart. Isn’t that something? The last magic engine persisting unchanged, still able to do wonderful things, Julie, if you want to dare to try them; terrible things too.

  Magic is love, Julie. Love is magic. And hadn’t she known it all along? The best kind of surprise, the one you could have guessed, the one you had known and yet hadn’t expected. Though what Julie meant by love was surely not the awful winged ker that had covered Pierce; the heart she would think of wasn’t the fearsome synthesizer of binding images cultivated by potent Saturnian melancholics of the Bruno type.

  Bruno—ah it was clear now, very clear—had actually been trying to contract this disease of the heart, amor hereos, on purpose: allowing his own subjectivity to be overthrown, exiled, killed, replaced by a phantasm of the beloved, who would rule in his stead. Only his beloved wasn’t a fleshly woman but the Goddess Diana: self-created image of the universe of which the heart and brain and the self itself were all products. After he had fashioned in the erotic heat of his heart’s workshop an image so gorgeous, so incandescent, that he could not but fall in love with it, he was going to undergo death in the replacing of his own consciousness with it: with a spiritual cognate of the whole wide world, all inside himself then as well as outside, and at his command. He would become a god.

  Nut. Misguided nut. Let him get to Rome, and explain this to the Inquisition. Then he would find out where the real power lay, in which god’s hands.

  Pierce’s heart had again begun that horrid tiny rapping at his ribcage.

  In the little cabin by the Blackbury they had conspired together, she and he, to forge a hieroglyph of Love in the shape of her (multifoliate Rose) in his spirit, by the alchemical power of Eros. Now it could not be evicted, it was nothing but an image but it was ruling in his heart in his stead, while she went on living the tragicomic real life from which they had at first extracted it. Weird, because the story they had built between them in the little bedroom by the river was all about how she was to surrender her throne to him.

  He hadn’t bound her with his spells at all, and now she had found stronger magic than his. What he could not have expected, what he would not ever have thought possible: that his old God, miserable deistical structure compounded of bad metaphysics, scholastic quibbles, absolute claims subscribed to by absolutist child’s logic, should suddenly come alive, factitious but animated, stirring like an eyeless lump of foulness in a dream; seeing through his evasions and casuistries just as Sam had seen through his old effrontery; alive, potent, immune to excuses, and claiming for His own the woman Pierce had hidden in His house.

  And he had had nothing to fight for her with, no sword, no shield, they were lost, gone, broken; his soul wasn’t pure either. He had had nothing but argument. He had entered into rational argument with her, about her God’s existence, the truth of her Book, the claims of her hierophants, entered into argument as into a wood of tearing thorns that closed immediately behind him. Nor did it do any good; he could hurt her with his relentless hacking, make her weep, but couldn’t shake her heart from the one good great thing (she said) that had ever taken hold of it.

  Hypnerotomachia.

  Oh jeez just let them not hurt her. Just let her not be hurt.

  Maybe if he got up now and called her; told her how sorry he was for the way he had acted, and how he would try now to really understand, really.

  No she would be sound asleep for sure, and not glad to be wakened. Sleep, peaceful sleep, was one of the benefits promised to believers.

  Sweet dreamless sleep.

  Oh, come back, come back, soul, self, how was he ever to find his way back, by what awful journey, to the empty throne-room of the heart?

  He wished he could weep.

  Hermes, he prayed, god of binding and unbinding: release me from this spell I’ve caught myself in. I’m not so smart, I thought I was so smart, I’m not. Bruno: You got me into this, come to me now if you can, teach me how to take back the magic I started. You bastard.

  He lay still and tried to believe there might be help for him if he could believe in help, but there was none. And why should there be. No the only hope was to ride it out; to make it over somehow unkilled into the next age, the new world, when the loathsome and beautiful creatures of the passage time will have disinvented themselves, gone with the wind. All that he saw and felt now (gripping the edges of his motel bed, tasting the sweat on his lip) would maybe become plain madness then, a simple mental or moral mistake. Understandable. Curable. Maybe there would be a pill he could take. A calm clinic, he could see it clearly; the nurse entering, and on her tray the glass of cool water, and a pill, rose-colored, divided in half by a tender groove.

  O world stop spinning. Like a ball in a roulette wheel seeking for its resting place.

  It might be years, though, it might be decades from now. He would have to keep himself alive till then, make his way across this wild waste, alone too, not even Good Deeds to go with him, for he had never done any; he could not remember one, not one.

  Just let him not cease hoping for it to come to be, the new world. Let him not cease longing, or it might not come; its coming into being might depend upon his longing, his willingness to want it still.

  He sat up. It was no use lying in the dark. If there were something to read. But he was afraid of the books he had brought with him, history books, magic books. He wished he had brought Enosh, just one volume, to be by his side.

  When he got home, he decided, he would call Rosie Rasmussen. He would tell her he was ready to go to Europe now, ready to fill out his application, whatever; that he was ready to go soon. A different sky, a long vacation; something to look for there too, and a reason to look for it: an apotropaic, gorgeous black word, something to fend off this evil. He felt in his pants pocket for his smokes, and lit one, though he knew that meant he was now awake till dawn. He sat in his shorts on the edge of the bed, the ashtray between his legs, and his back bent with the weight of the succubus that clung there, his own cunning work, made in the smithy of his own heart, which now was shut and could make no more.

  But meanwhile, meanwhile: wasn’t help supposed to be on the way?

  Had not a messenger from somewhere in the Realms of Light long ago set out, tiny messenger, infinitesimal at first, but surely much grown up by now? Traveling outward or inward, through æon upon æon, with a message just for Pierce?

  Well he had got lost; had got lost more than once in fact, had been distracted, led astray, sent off in the wrong direction or even backward, wandering in spheres of confusion and forgetfulness, delayed over and over, unconscionably, fearfully delayed, as by the twists of a plot, an old farce plot, and whose fault was that? Now, even as the hoary powers of the old age of the world shuffle offstage, their work still undone (it was never to be done, never would or could be done, has not been finished ever in any age so far), he, or is it she, stands at the border of some vacant and evanescing circle, trying to remember where she, or is it he, was headed, toward what place, with what word for whom: fretting like the traveler pacing the midnight station who suspects that the last train has gone.

  But will she come in time? Oh yes just in time; whenever she comes is just in time; when we have despaired for the thousandth midnight of any such a one ever coming from anywhere, she will arrive, in a tearing hurry, breaking into or out of the last spheres of air, fire, water, earth as though throwing open the successive doors of a long corridor, down which she rushes, her hair streaming and her brow knit, her hand already beside her mouth to call into the ear of our souls Wake up.

  John Crowley’s THE ÆGYPT CYCLE

  from The Overlook Press

  “In its entirety, ‘Ægypt’ stands as one of the most distinctive accomplishments of recent decades. It is a work of great erudition and deep humanity that is a
s beautifully composed as any novel in my experience.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  BOOK ONE OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE

  Published

  “A dizzying experience, achieved with unerring security of technique. … The narrative startles the reader again and again with theeloquent rightness of the web of coincidences that structure it.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “One of the finest, most welcome tales contemporary fictionhad to offer us.”

  —Bookforum

  ISBN 13: 978-1-5857-986-7

  BOOK THREE OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE

  Coming May 2008

  “Haunting … Gripping … Astonishing.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Crowley transforms the lead of daily life into seriously dazzling artistic gold.”—Newsday

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59020-044-5

  BOOK FOUR OF THE ÆGYPT CYCLE

  Coming September 2008

  “With Endless Things and the completion of the Ægypt cycle, Crowley has constructed one of the finest, most welcoming tales contemporary fiction has to offer us.”—BookForum

  ISBN 13: 978-1-59020-045-2

  “Crowley is an abundantly gifted writer, a scholar whose passion for history is matched by his ability to write a graceful sentence.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  In Love & Sleep, the second volume of the acclaimed Ægypt cycle, the professor Pierce Moffett finds himself at a great turning point in the history of the world. As a child, Pierce was no stranger to magic, but those revelations faded with time. Now Pierce’s search for a secret history of the world—one in which magic works and angels speak to humankind—has begun again.