Free Love and Sleep by John Crowley Page B

others, bearing the other flag: it couldn't be true, but what if it was.
    The game gave him an inexplicable satisfaction, the same he felt when he lay on his back in bed hanging his head downward over the bed's edge, and by an act of will convinced his eyes that the floor was a dark dusty ceiling over his head, and the ceiling a white floor, with lamps sprouting upward from it: and a house different but the same, empty of furniture, extending outward room upon room over the tall thresholds of the open doors.
    He enlisted the Invisibles, recklessly, in the secret struggles he recounted to himself; they were themselves losers, from a no longer existent time, and could be imagined to be takers of the wrong, the doomed side, the side History would leave behind. Anyway (he thought) he couldn't ever really alter the outcomes by taking the sides he took, for the right side always had to win—according to all the histories Pierce had read or been made to study it always had, in the end—and so Pierce's secret allegiances were moot: but still, into these adventures the others were not invited.
    And the battle of the angels: which side then?
    * * * *
    That afternoon, as they did every Saturday, Joe Boyd and Pierce went together with Warren to the Bondieu theater to see the cowboy movie always shown: walking each with his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket, each corduroy collar turned up, Warren alone of them wearing guns. On the stretch of sidewalk before the theater the boys of the town milled, waiting to be let in, eyeing the Oliphant boys and Pierce. One or two no older than Pierce smoked cigarettes with casual assurance. Sam said smoking stunted your growth; it certainly seemed to have stunted these guys'.
    The picture was ten years old, but they neither knew that nor cared; and after it came a cartoon, or a comedy as the Kentuckians called it, rapid rituals of destruction and revival; and then the familiar urgent music of the serial. The announcer's doomladen voice hurried through the events of ten weeks to the present moment while snatches of scenes flew by carried on the runaway music. How Gene found the deserted mineshaft leading to the underground empire; how he had gone down to struggle with the powerful subterraneans and their plans of conquest. He was left at the end of every episode in mortal danger, as good as dead in fact, only to be seen at the beginning of the next episode to have survived: the cliff over which he had been shoved had a projecting ledge to cling to that had not been there last week, the careening truck had missed him, he had leapt out of its path though it was clearly impossible that he could have: as though the drastic and the final softened, between one Saturday and the next, into something less final.
    Not this time though. The X-ray bomb that Gene had deflected from the upper regions and his own innocent ranch had gone haywire, blown up Gene himself. “They can't get out of that one,” Joe Boyd last Saturday had said, with a certain satisfaction too: and they had not. Gene was still dead. The empress of the underworld looks down on him lifeless and still, the toes of his pointed boots turned up. But she is secretly his ally. She convinces her dark Vizier (Father Midnight, now in high-collared cape and cuffed gloves) that the secrets Gene knows must not be lost. Very well, Majesty: there are ways. By techniques of science which the upper regions will not learn for centuries, or have for as long forgotten, Gene is brought to life.
    — Hurry, oh hurry.
    —Have patience, Majesty. Death is strong.
    He stirs on the shimmering operating table, beneath the reviving lamps. From his mouth comes a gout of language in a voice not his.
    — What does he say?
    —It is the language of the dead, Majesty. They often speak it on returning; but they soon forget.
    "Oh good grief,” said Joe Boyd. “Oh lordy."
    * * * *
    After they left the movie, Joe Boyd insisted they stop at the dark and odorous variety