Quicker Than the Eye (9 page)

My wife was hysterical. She still held the glasses fixed on every nuance and vibration of loss and deprivation on the poor idiot's face. Her mouth was spoiled with triumph.

My God! I cried in the uproar. Get off the stage! I yelled within, wishing I could really yell it. At least get out while you have 
some 
pride!

The laughter had erupted a volcano in the theater, high and rumbling and dark. The dim grotto seemed lit with unhealthy fever, an incandescence. My twin wanted to break off, like one of Pavlov's dogs, too many bells on too many days: no reward, no food. His eyes were glazed with his insane predicament.

Fall! Jump in the pit! 
Crawl 
away! I thought.

The orchestra sawed at destiny with violins and Valkyrian trumpets in full flood.

With one last snatch, one last contemptuous wag of her body, Miss Quick grasped my twin's clean white shirt, and yanked it 
off.

She threw the shirt in the air. As it fell, so did his pants As his pants fell, unbelted, so did the theater. An avalanche of shock soared to bang the rafters and roll over us in echoes a thundering hilarity.

The curtain fell.

We sat, covered with unseen rubble. Drained of blood, buried in one upheaval after another, degraded and autopsied and, minus eulogy, tossed into a mass grave, we men took a minute to stare at that dropped curtain, behind which hid the pickpocket and her victims, behind which a man quickly hoisted his trousers up his spindly legs.

A burst of applause, a prolonged tide on a dark shore. Miss Quick did not appear to bow. She did not need to. She was standing behind the curtain. I could 
feel 
her there, no smile, no expression. Standing, coldly estimating the caliber of the applause, comparing it to the metered remembrances of other nights.

I jumped up in an absolute rage. I had, after all, failed myself. When I should have ducked, I bobbed; when I should have backed off, I ran in. What an ass!

"What a fine show!" said my wife as we milled through the departing audience.

"Fine!" I cried.

"Didn't you like it?"

"All except the pickpocket. Obvious act, overdone, no subtlety," I said, lighting a cigarette.

"She was a whiz!"

"This way." I steered my wife toward the stage door.

"Of course," said my wife blandly, "that man, the one who looks like you, he was a plant. They call them shills, don't they? Paid by the management to pretend to be part of the audience?"

"No man would take money for a spectacle like that," I said. "No, he was just some boob who didn't know how to be careful."

"What are we doing back here?"

Blinking around, we found we were backstage.

Perhaps I wished to stride up to my twin, shouting, "Half-baked ox! Insulter of all men! Play a flute: you dance. Tickle your chin: you jump like a puppet! Jerk!"

The truth was, of course, I must see my twin close-up, confront the traitor and see where his true flesh differed from mine. After all, wouldn't 
I 
have done better in his place?!

The backstage was lit in blooms and isolated flushes, now bright, now dark, where the other magicians stood chatting. And there, 
there 
was Miss Quick!

And there, smiling, was my 
twin!

"You did fine, Charlie," said Miss Quick.

My twin's name was Charlie. Stupid name.

Charlie patted Miss Quick's cheek. 
"You 
did fine, ma'am!"

God, it was 
true! 
A shill, a confederate. Paid what? Five, ten dollars for letting his shirt be torn oft, letting his pants drop with his pride? What a turncoat, traitor!

I stood, glaring.

He glanced up.

Perhaps he saw me.

Perhaps some bit of my rage and impacted sorrow reached him.

He held my gaze for only a moment, his mouth wide, as if he had just seen an old school chum. But, not remembering my name, could not call out, so let the moment pass.

He saw my rage. His face paled. His smile died. He glanced quickly away. He did not look up again, but stood pretending to listen to Miss Quick, who was laughing and talking with the other magicians.

I stared at him and stared again. Sweat oiled his face. My hate melted. My temper cooled. I saw his profile clearly, his chin, eyes, nose, hairline; I memorized it all. Then I heard someone say:

"It was a 
fine 
show!"

My wife, moving forward, shook the hand of the pickpocketing beast.

On the street, I said, "Well, 
I'm 
satisfied."

"About what?" asked my wife.

"He doesn't look like me at all. Chin's too sharp. Nose is smaller. Lower lip isn't full enough. Too much eyebrow. Onstage, far oft, had me going. But close up, no, no. It was the crew cut and horn-rims fooled us. 
Anyone 
could have horn-rims and a crew cut."

"Yes," my wife agreed, "anyone."

As she climbed into our car, I could not help but admire her long, lovely legs.

Driving off, I thought I glimpsed that familiar face in the passing crowd. The face, however, was watching 
me. 
I wasn't sure. Resemblances, I now knew, are superficial.

The face vanished in the crowd.

"I'll never forget," said my wife, "when his pants-fell!" I drove very fast, then drove very slow, all the way home.

Good evening. Welcome. I see you have my invitation in your hands. Decided to be brave, did you? Fine. Here we are Grab onto this."

The tall, handsome stranger with the heavenly eyes and the impossibly blond hair handed me a wineglass.

"Clean your palate," he said.

I took the glass and read the label on the bottle he held in his left hand. Bordeaux, it read. St. Emilion.

"Go on," said my host. "It's not poison. May I sit? And might you 
drink?"

"I might," I sipped, shut my eyes, and smiled. "You're a connoisseur. This is the best I've had in years. But why this wine and why the invitation? What am I doing here at Gray's Anatomy Bar and Grill?"

My host sat and filled his own glass. "I am doing a favor to myself. This is a great night, perhaps for both of us. Greater than Christmas or Halloween." His lizard tongue darted into his wine to vanish back into his contentment. "We celebrate my being honored, at last becoming-"

He exhaled it all out:

"Becoming," he said, "a friend to Dorian! Dorian's friend. 
Me!"

"Ah." I laughed. "That explains the name of this place, then? Does Dorian own Gray's Anatomy?"

"More! Inspires and rules over it. And deservedly so."

"You make it sound as if being a friend to Dorian is the most important thing in the world."

"No! In 
life! 
In all of life." He rocked back and forth, drunk not from the wine but from some inner joy. "Guess."

"At what?"

"How 
old 
I am!"

"You look to be twenty-nine at the most."

"Twenty-nine. What a lovely sound. Not thirty, forty, or fifty, but-"

I said, "I hope you're not going to ask what sign I was born under. I usually leave when people ask that. I was born on the cusp, August, 1920." I pretended to half rise. He pressed a gentle hand to my lapel.

"No, no, dear boy-you don't understand. Look here. And here." He touched under his eyes and then around his neck. "Look for wrinkles."

"But you have none," I said.

"How observant. None. And that is why I have become this very night a fresh, new, stunningly handsome friend to Dorian."

"I still don't see the connection."

"Look at the backs of my hands." He showed his wrists. "No liver spots. I am 
not 
turning to rust. I repeat the question, how old am I?"

I swirled the wine in my glass and studied his reflection in the swirl.

"Sixty?" I guessed. "Seventy?"

"Good God!" He fell back in his chair, astonished. "How did you 
know?"

"Word association. You've been rattling on about Dorian. I know my Oscar Wilde, I know my Dorian Gray, which means you, sir, have a portrait of yourself stashed in an attic aging while you yourself, drinking old wine, stay young."

"No, no." The handsome stranger leaned forward. "Not 
stayed 
young. 
Became 
young. I was old, very old, and it took a year, but the clock went back and after a year of playing at it, I 
achieved 
what I set out for."

"Twenty-nine was your target?"

"How clever you are!"

"And once you became twenty-nine you were fully elected as-"

"A Friend to Dorian! Bulls-eye! But there is 
no 
portrait, no attic, no 
staying 
young. It's 
becoming 
young again's the ticket."

"I'm still puzzled!"

"Child of my heart, you might possibly be another Friend. Come along. Before the greatest revelation, let me show you the far end of the room and some doors."

He seized my hand. "Bring your wine. You'll need it!" He hustled me along through the tables in a swiftly filling room of mostly middle-aged and some fairly young men, and a few smoke-exhaling ladies. I jogged along, staring back at the EXIT
 
as if my future life were there.

Before us stood a golden door.

"And behind the door?" I asked.

"What always lies behind 
any 
golden door?" my host responded. 
"Touch."

I reached out to print the door with my thumb.

"What do you feel?" my host inquired.

"Youngness, youth, beauty." I touched again. "All the springtimes that ever were or ever will be."

"Jeez, the man's a poet. Push."

We pushed and the golden door swung soundlessly wide.

"Is this where Dorian is?"

"No, no, only his students, his disciples, his 
almost 
Friends. Feast your eyes."

I did as I was told and saw, at the longest bar in the world, a line of men, a 
lineage 
of young men, reflecting and re-reflecting each other as in a fabled mirror maze, that illusion seen where mirrors face each other and you find yourself repeated to infinity, large, small, very small, smallest, GONE! The young men were all staring down the long bar at us and then, as if unable to pull their gaze away, at themselves. You could almost hear their cries of appreciation. And with each cry, they grew younger and younger and more splendid and more beautiful...

I gazed upon a tapestry of beauty, a golden phalanx freshly out of the Elysian fields and hills. The gates of mythology swung wide and Apollo and his demi-Apollos glided forth, each more beautiful than the last.

I must have gasped. I heard my host inhale as if he drank my wine.

"Yes, 
aren't 
they," he said.

"Come," whispered my new friend. "Run the gauntlet. Don't linger; you may find tiger-tears on your sleeve and blood rising. 
Now."

And he glided, he undulated, me along on his soundless tuxedo slippers, his fingers a pale touch on my elbow, his breath a flower scent too near. I heard myself say:

"It's been written that H. G. Wells attracted women with his breath, which smelled of honey. Then I learned that such breath comes with illness."

"How clever. Do 
I 
smell of hospitals and medicines?"

"I didn't mean-"

"Quickly. You're rare meat in the zoo. Hup, two, three!"

"Hold on," I said, breathless not from walking fast but from perceiving quickly. "This man, and the next, and the one after 
that-"

''Yes?!"

"My God," I said, "they're almost all the 
same, look-alikes
!"

"Bull's-eye, 
half 
true! And the next and the next after that, as far behind as we have gone, as far ahead as we might go. All twenty-nine years old, all golden tan, all six feet tall, white of teeth, bright of eye. Each different but beautiful, like 
me!"

I glanced at him and saw what I saw around me. Similar but different beauties. So much youngness I was stunned.

"Isn't it time you told me your name?"

"Dorian."

"But you said you were his 
Friend."

"I 
am. They 
are. But we all share his name. This chap here. And the next. Oh, once we had commoner names. Smith and Jones. Harry and Phil. Jimmy and Jake. But then we signed up to become Friends."

"Is that why I was invited? To sign 
up?"

"I saw you in a bar across town a year ago, made queries. A year later, you look the proper age-"

"Proper-?"

"Well, 
aren't 
you? Just leaving sixty-nine, arriving at seventy?"

''Well.''

"My God! Are you 
happy 
being seventy?"

"It'll do.''

"Do? 
Wouldn't you like to be 
really 
happy, steal some wild oats? 
Sow 
them?!"

"That time's over."

"It's 
not. 
I asked and you came, curious.

"Curious about 
what?"

"This." He bared me his neck again and flexed his pale white wrists. "And all 
those!" 
He waved at the fine faces as we passed. "Dorian's sons. Don't you want to be gloriously wild and young like them?"

"How can I decide?"

"Lord, you've thought of it all night for years. Soon you could be 
part 
of this!"

We had reached the far end of the line of men with bronzed faces, white teeth, and breath like H. G. Wells' scent of honey ...

"Aren't you tempted?" he pursued. "Will you refuse-"

"Immortality?"

"No! To live the next twenty years, die at ninety, and look twenty-nine in the damn tomb! In the mirror over there-what do you see?"

"An old goat among ten dozen fauns."

"Yes!"

"Where do I sign up?" I laughed.

"Do you accept?"

"No, I need more facts."

"Damn! Here's the 
second 
door. Get 
in!"

He swung wide a door, more golden than the first, shoved me, followed, and slammed the door. I stared at darkness.

"What's this?" I whispered.

"Dorian's Gym, of course. If you work out here all year, hour by hour, day by day, you get younger."

"That's some gym," I observed, trying to adjust my eyes to the dim areas beyond where shadows tumbled, and voices rustled and whispered. "I've heard of gyms that help 
keep, 
not 
make, 
you young . . . Now tell me...

"I read your mind. For every old man that became young in there at the bar, is there an attic portrait?"

"Well, 
is 
there?"

"No! There's only Dorian."

"A single person? Who grows old for 
all 
of you?"

"Touche'! Behold his gym!"

I gazed off into a vast high arena where a hundred shadows stirred and moaned like a tide on a terrible shore.

"I think it's time to leave," I said.

"Nonsense. Come. No one will see you. They're all... 
busy. 
I am Moses," said the sweet breath at my elbow. "And I hereby tell the Red Sea to 
part!"

And we moved along a path between two tides, each shadowed, each more terrifying with its gasps, its cries, its slip-pages of flesh, its slapping like waves, its repeated whispers for more, more, ah, God, more!

I ran, but my host grabbed on. "Look right, left, now 
right 
again!"

There must have been a hundred, two hundred animals, beasts, no, men wrestling, leaping, falling, rolling in darkness. It was a sea of flesh, undulant, a writhing of limbs on acres of tumbling mats, a glistening of skin, flashes of teeth where men climbed ropes, spun on leather horses, or flung themselves up crossbars to be seized down in the tidal flux of lamentations and muffled cries. I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by their bestial moans.

"What, my God," I exclaimed, "does it all 
mean?"

"There. 
See."

And above the wild turbulence of flesh in a far wall was a great window, forty feet wide and ten feet tall, and behind that cold glass Something watching, savoring, alert, one vast stare.

And over all there was the suction of a great breath, a vast inhalation which pulled at the gymnasium air with a constant hungry and invisible need. As the shadows tumbled and writhed, this inhalation tugged at them and the raw air in my nostrils. Somewhere a huge vacuum machine sucked in darkness but did 
not 
exhale. There were long pauses as the shadows flailed and fell, and then another savoring inhalation. It swallowed breath. In, in, always in, devouring the sweaty air, hungering the passions.

And the shadows were pulled, 
I 
was pulled, toward that vast glass eye, that immense window behind which a shapeless Something stared to dine on gymnasium airs.

"Dorian?" I guessed.

"Come meet him."

"Yes, but . . ." I watched the wild, convulsive shadows. "What 
are 
they doing?"

"Go find out. Afraid? Cowards never live. So!"

He swung wide a third door and whether it was golden hot and alive, I could not feel, for suddenly I lurched into a hothouse as the door slammed and was locked by my blond young friend. 
"Ready?"

"Lord, I must go 
home!"

"Not until you meet," said my host, 
"him."

He pointed. At first I could see nothing. The lights were dim and the place, like the gymnasium, was mostly shadow. I smelled jungle greens. The air stirred on my face with sensuous strokes. I smelled papaya and mango and the wilted odor of orchids mixed with the salt smells of an unseen tide. But the tide was there with that immense inhaled breathing that rose and was quiet and began again.

"I see no one," I said.

"Let your eyes adjust. Wait."

I waited. I watched.

There were no chairs in the room, for there was no need of chairs.

He did not sit, he did not recline, he "prolonged" himself on the largest bed in history. The dimensions might easily have been fifteen feet by twenty. It reminded me of the apartment of a writer I once knew who had completely covered his room with mattresses so that women stumbled on the sill and fell flat out on the springs.

So it was with this nest, with Dorian, immense, a gelatinous skin, a vitreous shape, undulant within that nest.

And if Dorian was male or female, I could not guess. This was a great pudding, an emperor jellyfish, a monstrous heap of sexual gelatin from the exterior of which, on occasion, noxious gases escaped with rubbery sounds; great lips sibilating. That and the sough of that labored pump, that constant inhalation, were the only sounds within the chamber as I stood, anxious, alarmed, but at last impressed by this beached creature, cast up from a dark landfall. The thing was a gelatinous cripple, an octopus without limbs, an amphibian stranded, unable to undulate and seep back to an ocean sewer from which it had inched itself in monstrous waves and gusts of lungs and eruptions of corrupt gas until now it lay, featureless, with a mere x-ray ghost of legs, arms, wrists, and hands with skeletal fingers. At last I could discern, at the far end of this flesh peninsula, what seemed a half-flat face with a frail phantom of skull beneath, an open fissure for an eye, a ravenous nostril, and a red wound which ripped wide to surprise me as a mouth.

And at last this thing, this Dorian, spoke.

Or whispered, or lisped.

And with each lisp, each sibilance, an odor of decay was expelled as if from a vast night-swamp balloon, sunk on its side, lost in fetid water as its unsavory breath rinsed my cheeks. It expelled but one lingering syllable: