"Then what good are museums?"
"My dear girl! That the former affianced of a true artist should speak in such a manner indicates that your relationship was but brief--"
"Really!" she interrupted. "The proper word is 'companionship'."
"Very well," he amended, "'companionship'. But museums mirror the past, which is dead, the present, which never notices, and transmit the race's cultural heritage to the future, which is not yet born. In this, they are near to being temples of religion."
"I never thought of it that way," she mused. "Rather a beautiful thought, too. You should really be a teacher."
"It doesn't pay well enough, but the thought consoles me. Come, let us raid the icebox again."
They nibbled their final ice cream bars and discussed Achilles Fallen, seated beneath the great mobile which resembled a starved octopus. He told her of his other great projects and of the nasty reviewers, crabbed and bloodless, who lurked in Sunday editions and hated life. She, in turn, told him of her parents, who knew Art and also knew why she shouldn't like him, and of her parents' vast fortunes, equally distributed in timber, real estate, and petroleum. He, in turn, patted her arm and she, in turn, blinked heavily and smiled Hellenically.
"You know," he said, finally, "as I sat upon my pedestal, day after day, I often thought to myself: Perhaps I should return and make one more effort to pierce the cataract in the eye of the public--perhaps if I were as secure and at ease in all things material--perhaps if I could find the proper woman--but nay! There is no such a one!"
"Continue! Pray continue!" cried she. "I, too, have, over the past days, thought that, perhaps, another artist could remove the sting. Perhaps the poison of loneliness could be drawn by a creator of beauty--If we--" At this point a small and ugly man in a toga cleared his throat.
"It is as I feared," he announced.
Lean, wrinkled, and grubby was he; a man of ulcerous bowel and much spleen. He pointed an accusing finger.
"It is as I feared," he repeated.
"Wh-who are you?" asked Gloria.
"Cassius," he replied, "Cassius Fitzmullen--art critic, retired, for the Dalton Times. You are planning to defect."
"And what concern is it of yours if we leave?" asked Smith, flexing his Beaten Gladiator halfback muscles.
Cassius shook his head.
"Concern? It would threaten a way of life for you to leave now. If you go, you will doubtless become an artist or a teacher of art--and sooner or later, by word or by gesture, by sign of by unconscious indication, you will communicate what you have suspected all along. I have listened to your conversations over the past weeks. You know, for certain now, that this is where all art critics finally come, to spend their remaining days mocking the things they have hated. It accounts for the increase of Roman Senators in recent years."
"I have often suspected it, but never was certain."
"The suspicion is enough. It is lethal. You must be judged."
He clapped his hands.
"Judgment!" he called.
Other ancient Romans entered slowly, a procession of bent candles. They encircled the two lovers. Smelling of dust and yellow newsprint and bile and time, the old reviewers hovered.
"They wish to return to humanity," announced Cassius. "They wish to leave and take their knowledge with them."
"We would not tell," said Gloria, tearfully.
"It is too late," replied one dark figure. "You are already entered into the Catalog. See here!" He produced a copy and read: "'Number 28, Hecuba Lamenting. Number 32, The Beaten Gladiator.' No! It is too late. There would be an investigation."
"Judgment!" repeated Cassius.
Slowly, the Senators turned their thumbs down.
"You cannot leave."
Smith chuckled and seized Cassius' tunic in a powerful sculptor's grip.
"Little man," he said, "how do you propose stopping us? One scream by Gloria would bring the watchman, who would sound an alarm. One blow by me would render you unconscious for a week."
"We shut off the guard's hearing aid as he slept," smiled Cassius. "Critics are not without imagination, I assure you. Release me, or you will suffer."
Smith tightened his grip.
"Try anything."
"Judgment," smiled Cassius.
"He is modern," said one.
"Therefore, his tastes are catholic," said another.
"To the lions with the Christians!" announced a third, clapping his hands.
And Smith sprang back in panic at what he thought he saw moving in the shadows. Cassius pulled free.
"You cannot do this!" cried Gloria, covering her face. "We are from the Greek Period!"
"When in Greece, do as the Romans do," chuckled Cassius.
The odor of cats came to their nostrils.
"How could you--here...? A lion?" asked Smith.
"A form of hypnosis privy to the profession," observed Cassius. "We keep the beast paralyzed most of the time. Have you not wondered why there has never been a theft from this museum? Oh, it has been tried, all right! We protect our interests."
The lean, albino lion which generally slept beside the main entrance padded slowly from the shadows and growled--once, and loudly.
Smith pushed Gloria behind him as the cat began its stalking. He glanced towards the Forum, which proved to be vacant. A sound, like the flapping of wings by a flock of leather pigeons, diminished in the distance.
"We are alone," noted Gloria.
"Run," ordered Smith, "and I'll try to delay him. Get out, if you can."
"And desert you? Never, my dear! Together! Now, and always!"
"Gloria!"
"Jay Smith!"
At that moment the beast conceived the notion to launch into a spring, which it promptly did.
"Good-bye, my lovely."
"Farewell. One kiss before dying, pray."
The lion was high in the air, uttering healthy coughs, eyes greenly aglow.
"Very well."
They embraced.
Moon hacked in the shape of cat, that palest of beasts hung overhead--hung high, hung menacingly, hung long...
It began to writhe and claw about wildly in that middle space between floor and ceiling for which architecture possesses no specific noun.
"Mm! Another kiss?"
"Why not? Life is sweet."
A minute ran by on noiseless feet; another pursued it.
"I say, what's holding up that lion?"
"I am," answered the mobile. "You humans aren't the only ones to seek umbrage amidst the relics of your dead past."
The voice was thin, fragile, like that of a particularly busy Aeolian Harp.
"I do not wish to seem inquisitive," said Smith, "but who are you?"
"I am an alien life form," it tinkled back, digesting the lion. "My ship suffered an accident on the way to Arcturus. I soon discovered that my appearance was against me on your planet, except in the museums, where I am greatly admired. Being a member of a rather delicate and, if I do say it, somewhat narcissistic race--" He paused to belch daintily, and continued, "--I rather enjoy it here--'among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder [belch], lost'"
"I see," said Smith. "Thanks for eating the lion."
"Don't mention it--but it wasn't wholly advisable. You see, I'm going to have to divide now. Can the other me go with you?"
"Of course. You saved our lives, and we're going to need something to hang in the living room, when we have one."
"Good."
He divided, in a flurry of hemidemisemiquavers, and dropped to the floor beside them.
"Good-bye, me," he called upward.
"Good-bye," from above.
They walked proudly from the Modern, through the Greek, and past the Roman Period, with much hauteur and a wholly quiet dignity. Beaten Gladiator, Hecuba Lamenting, and Xena ex Machina no longer, they lifted the sleeping watchman's key and walked out the door, down the stairs, and into the night, on youthful legs and drop-lines.
> Divine Madness
"... I IS THIS hearers wounded-wonder like stand them makes and stars wandering the conjures sorrow of phrase Whose..."
He blew smoke through the cigarette and it grew longer.
He glanced at the clock and realized that its hands were moving backwards.
The clock told him it was 10:33, going on 10:32 in the P.M.
Then came the thing like despair, for he knew there was not a thing he could do about it. He was trapped, moving in reverse through the sequence of actions past. Somehow, he had missed the warning.
Usually, there was a prism-effect, a flash of pink static, a drowsiness, then a moment of heightened perception...
He turned the pages, from left to right, his eyes retracing their path back along the lines.
"emphasis an such bears grief whose he is What"
Helpless, there behind his eyes, he watched his body perform.
The cigarette had reached its full length. He clicked on the lighter, which sucked away its glowing point, and then he shook the cigarette back into the pack.
He yawned in reverse: first an exhalation, then an inhalation.
It wasn't real--the doctor had told him. It was grief and epilepsy, meeting to form an unusual syndrome.
He'd already had the seizure. The dialantin wasn't helping. This was a post-traumatic locomotor hallucination, elicited by anxiety, precipitated by the attack.
But he did not believe it, could not believe it--not after twenty minutes had gone by, in the other direction--not after he had placed the book upon the reading stand, stood, walked backward across the room to his closet, hung up his robe, redressed himself in the same shirts and slacks he had worn all day, backed over to the bar and regurgitated a Martini, sip by cooling sip, until the glass was filled to the brim and not a drop spilled.
There was an impending taste of olive, and then everything was changed again.
The second-hand was sweeping around his wristwatch in the proper direction.
The time was 10:07.
He felt free to move as he wished.
He redrank his Martini.
Now, if he would be true to the pattern, he would change into his robe and try to read. Instead, he mixed another drink.
Now the sequence would not occur.
Now the things would not happen as he thought they had happened, and un-happened.
Now everything was different.
All of which went to prove it had all been an hallucination.
Even the notion that it had taken twenty-six minutes each way was an attempted rationalization.
Nothing had happened.
...Shouldn't be drinking, he decided. It might bring on a seizure.
He laughed.
Crazy, though, the whole thing...
Remembering, he drank.
In the morning he skipped breakfast, as usual, noted that it would soon stop being morning, took two aspirins, a lukewarm shower, a cup of coffee, and a walk.
The park, the fountain, the children with their boats, the grass, the pond, he hated them; and the morning, and the sunlight, and the blue moats around the towering clouds.
Hating, he sat there. And remembering.
If he was on the verge of a crackup, he decided, then the thing he wanted most was to plunge ahead into it, not to totter halfway out, halfway in.
He remembered why.
But it was clear, so clear, the morning, and everything crisp and distinct and burning with the green fires of spring, there in the sign of the Ram, April.
He watched the winds pile up the remains of winter against the far gray fence, and he saw them push the boats across the pond, to come to rest in shallow mud the children tracked.
The fountain jetted its cold umbrella above the green-tinged copper dolphins. The sun ignited it whenever he moved his head. The wind rumpled it.
Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.
Kites swayed on their tails, nosed downward, rose again, as youngsters tugged at invisible strings. Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.
He hated the telephone lines, the kites, the children, the birds.
Most of all, though, he hated himself.
How does a man undo that which has been done? He doesn't. There is no way under the sun. He may suffer, remember, repeat, curse, or forget. Nothing else. The past, in this sense, is inevitable.
A woman walked past. He did not look up in time to see her face, but the dusky blonde fall of her hair to her collar and the swell of her sure, sheer-netted legs below the black hem of her coat and above the matching click of her heels heigh-ho, stopped his breath behind his stomach and snared his eyes in the wizard-weft of her walking and her posture and some more, like a rhyme to the last of his thoughts.
He half-rose from the bench when the pink static struck his eyeballs, and the fountain became a volcano spouting rainbows.
The world was frozen and served up to him under a glass.
...The woman passed back before him and he looked down too soon to see her face.
The hell was beginning once more, he realized, as the backward-flying birds passed before.
He gave himself up to it. Let it keep him until he broke, until he was all used up and there was nothing left.
He waited, there on the bench, watching the slivey toves be brillig, as the fountain sucked its waters back within itself, drawing them up in a great arc above the unmoving dolphins, and the boats raced backward over the pond, and the fence divested itself of stray scraps of paper, as the birds replaced the candy bar within the red wrapper, bit by crunchy bit.
His thoughts only were inviolate, his body belonged to the retreating tide.
Eventually, he rose and strolled backwards out of the park.
On the street a boy backed past him, unwhistling snatches of a popular song.
He backed up the stairs to his apartment, his hangover growing worse again, undrank his coffee, unshowered, unswallowed his aspirins, and got into bed, feeling awful.
Let this be it, he decided.
A faintly-remembered nightmare ran in reverse though his mind, giving it an undeserved happy ending.
It was dark when he awakened.
He was very drunk.
He backed over to the bar and began spitting out his drinks, one by one into the same glass he had used the night before, and pouring them from the glass back into the bottles again. Separating the gin and vermouth was no trick at all. The liquids leapt into the air as he held the uncorked bottles above the bar.
And he grew less and less drunk as this went on.
Then he stood before an early Martini and it was 10:07 in the P.M. There, within the hallucination, he wondered about another hallucination. Would time loop-the-loop, forward and then backward again, through his previous seizure?
No.
It was as though it had not happened, had never been.
He continued on back through the evening, undoing things.
He raised the telephone, said "good-bye", untold Murray that he would not be coming to work again tomorrow, listened a moment, recradled the phone and looked at it as it rang.
The sun came up in the west and people were backing their cars to work.
He read the weather report and the headlines, folded the evening paper and placed it out in the hall.
It was the longest seizure he had ever had, but he did not really care. He settled himself down within it and watched as the day unwound itself back to morning.
His hangover returned as the day grew smaller, and it was terrible when he got into bed again.
When he awakened the previous evening the drunkenness was high upon him again. Two of the bottles he refilled, recorked, resealed. He knew he would take them to the liquor store soon and get his money back.
As he sat there that day, his mouth uncursing and undrinking and his eyes unreading, he knew that new cars were being shipped
back to Detroit and disassembled, that corpses were awakening into their death-throes, and that priests the world over were saying black mass, unknowing.
He wanted to chuckle, but he could not tell his mouth to do it.
He unsmoked two and a half packs of cigarettes.
Then came another hangover and he went to bed. Later, the sun set in the east.
Time's winged chariot fled before him as he opened the door and said "good-bye" to his comforters and they came in and sat down and told him not to grieve overmuch.
And he wept without tears as he realized what was to come.
Despite his madness, he hurt.
...Hurt, as the days rolled backward.
...Backward, inexorably.
...Inexorably, until he knew the time was near at hand.
He gnashed the teeth of his mind.
Great was his grief and his hate and his love.
He was wearing his black suit and undrinking drink after drink, while somewhere the men were scraping the clay back onto the shovels which would be used to undig the grave.
He backed his car to the funeral parlor, parked it, and climbed into the limousine.
They backed all the way to the graveyard.
He stood among his friends and listened to the preacher.
".dust to dust; ashes to Ashes," the man said, which is pretty much the same whichever way you say it.
The casket was taken back to the hearse and returned to the funeral parlor.
He sat through the service and went home and unshaved and unbrushed his teeth and went to bed.
He awakened and dressed again in black and returned to the parlor.
The flowers were all back in place.
Solemn-faced friends unsigned the Sympathy Book and unshook his hand. Then they went inside to sit awhile and stare at the closed casket. Then they left, until he was alone with the funeral director.
Then he was alone with himself.
The tears ran up his cheeks.
His shirt and suit were crisp and unwrinkled again.
He backed home, undressed, uncombed his hair. The day collapsed around him into morning, and he returned to bed to unsleep another night.
The previous evening, when he awakened, he realized where he was headed.
The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and Other Stories Page 22
