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 G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sed. "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 d.a.m.n 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."

"d.a.m.n! 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 sh.o.r.e.

"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, G.o.d, 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 m.u.f.fled cries. I stared across an ocean of rising and falling shapes. My ears were scorched by their b.e.s.t.i.a.l moans.

"What, my G.o.d," 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sions.

And the shadows were pulled, I was pulled, toward that vast gla.s.s 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 s.e.xual 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: Yessss.

Yes what?

And then it added: Soooo...

"How long ... how long," I murmured, "has it ... has he been here?"

"No one knows. When Victoria was Queen? When Booth emptied his makeup kit to load his pistol? When Napoleon yellow-stained the Moscow snows? Forever's not bad .

What else?"

I swallowed hard. "Is ... is he?"

"Dorian? Dorian of the attic? He of the Portrait? And somewhere along the line found portraits not enough? Oil, canvas, no depth. The world needed something that could soak in, sponge the midnight rains, breakfast and lunch on loss, depravity's guilt. Something to truly take in, drink, digest; a pustule, imperial intestine. A rheum oesophagus for sin. A laboratory plate to take bacterial snows. Dorian."

The long archipelago of membranous skin flushed some buried tubes and valves, and a semblance of laughter was throttled and drowned in the aqueous gels.

A slit widened to emit gas and again the single word: Yessss .

"He's welcoming you!" My host smiled.

"I know, I know," I said impatiently. "But why? I don't even want to be here. I'm ill. Why can't we go?"

"Because"-my host laughed-"you were selected.

"Selected?"

"We've had our eye on you."

"You mean you've watched, followed, spied on me? Christ, who gave you permission?"

"Temper, temper. Not everyone is picked."

"Who said I wanted to be picked!?"

"If you could see yourself as we see you, you'd know why."

I turned to stare at the vast mound of priapic gelatin in which faint creeks gleamed as the creature wept its lids wide in holes to let it stare. Then all its apertures sealed: the saber-cut mouth, the slitted nostrils, the cold eyes gummed shut so that its skin was faceless. The sibilance pumped with gaseous suctions.

Yessss, it whispered.

Lisssst, it murmured.

"And list it is!" My host pulled forth a small computer pad which he tapped to screen my name, address, and phone.

He glanced from the pad to reel off such items as wilted me.

"Single," he said.

"Married and divorced."

"Now single! No women in your life?"

"I'm walking wounded."

He tapped his pad. "Visiting strange bars."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Creative blindness. Getting to bed late. Sleeping all day. Drinking heavily three nights a week."

"Twice!"

"Going to the gym, look, every day. Workouts excessive. Prolonged steam baths, overlong ma.s.sages. Sudden interest in sports. Endless basketball, soccer, tennis matches every night, and half the noons. That's hyperventilation!"

"My business!"