Dec 19, 2012 13:16
Pierce tries to put the moves on Rose in the Winterhalter's house, but she is in no mood. They fight. The make-up sex is excellent, but Rose won't say "I love you" back to him in the morning. He agrees to come to Conurbana to attend a Powerhouse event with her.
The Powerhouse's process is explained through Bobby's recollection as she drives to Bondieu, a mixture of est and exorcism and recovered memory which puts Bobby's experience of the night battles in a new framework. (Ray Honeybeare uses the same formula that Pierce tried to teach Rose, "What I tell you three times is true.") She remembers picking up the guy she murdered for his convertible. She visits Floyd in the hospital where he has been since Bobby turned him face-down that night.
Chapter 14 opens with a long description of the bleak horrors of strip-mall Conurbana, the hotel and restaurant and attendees of the Powerhouse conference. Pierce is repulsed by the used-car-salesman type preaching the prosperity gospel. He is worked on by Mike a bit. Later he finds out from Rose another unsavory ingredient in the Powerhouse mix: they are Holocaust deniers.
She calls what she and Pierce did together in the Invisible Bedroom (named like the one in Little, Big) a game, and he is destroyed. After a sleepless night he realizes she must have gotten off the bus he'd imagined as his test of love, sobbing over her as she pretends to be asleep.
The Pietas section begins with Bruno leaving Prague and working on his book of signs and seals. (An interesting detail: Bruno gives the daughter of Nox as Amphitrite, whom Madimi said was another name for the Daughter of Fortitude.) The relationship between Mercury and the donkey is explicated, and the ass is praised. Arcimboldo brings the portrait of Vertumnus to the Emperor who moves everything to hang it, disturbing the elements and starting a fire in the Ghetto. Rudolf sends for Bruno too late.
John Dee is preparing to leave quickly, too, and hearing of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by his wind writes to the Queen. He meets with Kelly before he goes, who says the angels never did anything for him. A quote from him, appropriate for this Apocalyptic time: "I think the ending of the world comes to every man alone, soul by soul; when it is ended for you and for me it will not be ended for all; it will not be done till the last soul says Amen."