Love and Sleep by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

stomach:

    "I didn't."
    "What is it?"
    "I don't know.” Staring down at himself in wonder, as though the sign had just then appeared, a blue-black spider stigma, how do you like that.
    "Well it's not coming off. Don't do that again."
    Secretly, as the others did, he refreshed it when it faded, marveling with Winnie at its strange persistence; and finding himself able, years later, to reproduce it on a cocktail napkin or a phone pad, and ponder it.
    * * * *
    The last Sunday of the month, and Pierce sat in the living room curled in a chair of black canvas and bony iron, writing his monthly letter to his father. He had started well, confident that with the big fire he'd be able to fill a few pages before becoming baffled and bored, but at the bottom of the first sheet (his words already dipping precipitously toward the bottom corner like soldiers marching off a cliff) he'd remembered what Joe Boyd had said: Your daddy. He didn't believe it, but it made him pause, caught in conflicting impulses to exaggerate the splendid damage on the one hand and dismiss it on the other: and after a while he gave up. He twisted in the batlike chair, feeling beneath it for the comic book he knew was there.
    The television turned from The Christophers to The Big Picture : from the earnest young priest in his study to an earnest Army officer at his desk. Flags on poles stood at his left and right, and slanting bars of light fell across the wall behind him from an unseen half-closed Venetian blind. Then tanks began streaming left to right across the screen. Joe Boyd, lying on the floor, raised his head from the sofa's lip and took notice. Over these ancient plains of Europe a thousand armies have marched and countermarched, toppling kings and emperors. The tanks clambered over bare hills, fired at imaginary enemies. Today your Army takes a hand in Europe's defense against the kings of the East.
    Pierce looked away. Better to light one candle than curse the darkness. Badguys had somehow got hold of a huge lump of acid-green Kryptonite, and its effect on Clark Kent was dreadful: a leaden, sinking weakness, coma, near-death. Got to—got to—get OUT of here ... Awaking then in a squalid alley much later—days? weeks?—with his superstrengths not yet returned, he remembers nothing, not his true nature, nor his fictional one either; not his lost home planet, nor his father Jor-El, nor his kindly stepparents in Smallville. Wanders the mean streets with his hat pulled down and his collar turned up. Who am I? How do I come to be here?
    "I thought you were writing to your father,” Winnie said to him, come in to find her sweater, and in her sweater pocket her cigarettes.
    "I was. I am. I will be."
    "What were you writing about?"
    "The fire."
    A tremendous energy, discovered at the heart of matter, puts into your Army's hands new weapons for the defense of freedom. Joe Boyd—and Pierce and Hildy too, it was impossible not to look—watched the weird cloud-flower unfold, low-rumbling. Fading in over it was a legend, E=mc2, the mystic reason for it. Matter, energy, light: all manifestations of one Creation. How shall we use this knowledge wisely? To what uses shall we put it?
    "You really can turn lead into gold,” Joe Boyd said. “You can smash their atoms.” GIs in dark goggles also watched the transformation, whitened as a wave of bomblight struck them. Winnie alighted on the piano bench, and lit an Old Gold; not really here and attending, but also caught.
    Like the black chair her son sat curled in, the blond piano had been bought for the Long Island ranch house that Sam and Opal had bought unbuilt the year before they left, and which they moved out of not long after it was finished. The rest of the furnishings of that long low house were gathered here too, the red-plastic-covered club chairs with black peg legs, the wrought-iron magazine rack, the pole lamp with ovoid aluminum fruit growing from it, the banana-leaf drapes and the fire tools with