«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, halftrue! 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 helpkeep, 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.