«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.
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.