«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 bepartof 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 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 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!