“Oh, lost!” he reflected amidst the Neos, surveying the kingdom he had once staked out as his own. He wept over the statue of Achilles Fallen as though it were his own. It was.
As in a mirror, he regarded himself in a handy collage of bolts and nutshells. “If you had not sold out,” he accused, “if you had hung on a little longer—like these, the simplest of Art’s creatures…But no! It could not be!
“Could it?” he addressed a particularly symmetrical mobile overhead. “Could it?”
“Perhaps,” came an answer from nowhere, which sent him flying back to his pedestal.
But little came of it. The watchman had been taking guilty delight in a buxom Rubens on the other side of the building and had not overheard the colloquy. Smith decided that the reply signified his accidental nearing of Dharana. He returned to the Path, redoubling his efforts toward negation and looking Beaten. In the days that followed he heard occasional chuckling and whispering, which he at first dismissed as the chortlings of the children of Mara and Maya, intent upon his distractions. Later, he was less certain, but by then he had decided upon a classical attitude of passive inquisitiveness.
And one spring day, as green and golden as a poem by Dylan Thomas, a girl entered the Greek Period and looked about, furtively. He found it difficult to maintain his marbly placidity, for lo! she began to disrobe!
And a square parcel on the floor, in a plain wrapper. It could only mean…
Competition!
He coughed politely, softly, classically…
She jerked to an amazing attention, reminding him of a women’s underwear ad having to do with Thermopylae. Her hair was the correct color for the undertaking—that palest shade of Parian manageable—and her gray eyes glittered with the icy-orbed intentness of Athene.
She surveyed the room minutely, guiltily, attractively…
“Surely stone is not susceptible to virus infections,” she decided. “‘Tis but my guilty conscience that cleared its throat. Conscience, thus do I cast thee off!”
And she proceeded to become Hecuba Lamenting, diagonally across from the Beaten Gladiator and fortunately, not facing in his direction. She handled it pretty well, too, he grudgingly admitted. Soon she achieved an esthetic immobility. After a period of appraisal he decided that Athens was indeed mother of all the arts; she simply could not have carried it as Renaissance nor Romanesque. This made him feel rather good.
When the great doors finally swung shut and the alarms had been set she heaved a sigh and sprang to the floor.
“Not yet,” he cautioned, “the watchman will pass through in ninety-three seconds.”
She had presence of mind sufficient to stifle her scream, a delicate hand with which to do it, and eighty-seven seconds in which to become Hecuba Lamenting once more. This she did, and he admired her delicate hand and her presence of mind for the next eighty-seven seconds. The watch man came, was nigh, was gone, flashlight and beard bobbing in musty will o’ the-wispfulness through the gloom.
“Goodness!” she expelled her breath. “I had thought I was alone!”
“And correctly so,” he replied. “‘Naked and alone we come into exile…Among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost…Oh, lost—’”
“Thomas Wolfe,” she stated.
“Yes,” he sulked. “Let’s go have supper.”
“Supper?” she inquired, arching her eyebrows. “Where? I had brought some K-Rations, which I purchased at an Army Surplus Store—”
“Obviously,” he retorted, “you have a short-timer’s attitude. I believe that chicken figured prominently on the menu for today. Follow me!”
They made their way through the Tang Dynasty, to the stairs.
“Others might find it chilly in here after hours,” he began, “but I daresay you have thoroughly mastered the techniques of breath control?”
“Indeed,” she replied, “my fiancee was no mere Zen faddist. He followed the more rugged path of Lhasa. Once he wrote a modern version of the Ramayana, full of topical allusions and advice to modern society.”
“And what did modern society think of it?”
“Alas! Modern society never saw it. My parents bought him a one-way ticket to Rome, first-class, and several hundred dollars worth of Travelers’ Checks. He has been gone ever since. That is why I have retired from the world.”