I was a scorned Maureen O'Hara. Dripping, with umbrella under arm, I sloshed out of the elevator. The flush on my cheeks must have palled my rusty mop. I doffed the plastic hood and marched across to my apartment door, fumbled at first, but managed to insert the key in the lock and turn it. Then I caught a glimpse of motion from farther down the hallway.

Drenched, with black hair pasted on forehead, he stood, looking at me. I saw indecision in the eyes so, before he scrammed, I jostled the door open.

I held my breath, and beckoned him inside.

He approached like a wet pup, entered, looked at the wet trailings behind, and up at me.

"Don't worry." I exhaled and helped him out of the dripping windbreaker. "Dry yourself, in there," I pointed to the toilet. I hustled to the bedroom for a robe. The tempest in me was giving way to anxiety.

The antiquated clock on the plastic coffee table began to chime when I returned. It was midnight. I hung the terry cloth robe on the handle of the bathroom door and I plopped on the sofa drained from this day.

His mother will be worried out of her mind, I fretted. I'd have to get Stavro home tonight. Somehow.

Phil, Michael, Niko, and now Stavro. The men in my life.

Others? A few.

John Hanshaw, a junior in the liberal arts college, both of us caught an a whirlpool of post-adolescent passion.

And Ed McCreddy, with thick wavy blond hair, came to replace John when Hanshaw turned to a crow-haired, buxom graduate--two years his senior.

Ed had been wrapping up pre-med and I my freshman year. He was the smartest person I had known. He had more stored in his brain about nineteenth century English prose, I swear, than Professor Litton, my cocky instructor on the subject.

Ed had borrowed my lit text and returned it a week later. He claimed that he had read it all, 1324 pages. His comments, "A dastardly abridged job, Loanne, and the footnotes stink."

I had shaken Ed off before burning out completely. He was an insomniac and an ardent disciple of the Kama Sutra.

Three others had followed before I met Michael. But they were of the every day, run-o-the-mill stock. After Ed, I did not mind.

Michael's debut into my life had been at a Columbia University Foreign Students' Union dance.

I commuted to school every day from Norwalk on the New Haven Railroad. An hour's comfortable ride to be dropped off in the heart of Harlem to catch the local subway which took me to my graduate classes. My field of concentration had been EFL/ESL, teaching English to foreign students.

The rococo '60s were nearing a jarring end. I, twenty-three then (how time flies). The King sang "Being in Love with You". The din of the crowded lounge favored a cross section of the UN.

A tap on my shoulder, I turn--

"Where have you been all my life!"

Tall, light brown hair, hazel-green eyes, and a dimple on his right cheek below an oval dark birthmark. He smiles all the while and the dimple remains etched there.

"Take my hand, Take my whole life too..." he sings too in a velvety baritone voice extending his hand to me.

I take it. It's firm and warm around my own.

We dance, and dance...and dance.

People, sounds and things began to dissolve away, somewhere in the distance, a piece at a time. Till only Michael and I remained--floating, shimmying, gyrating.

An eternity later, he took me to his place, an apartment on 121st Street. He made love to me entirely and tenderly through the night, and before morning, I had discovered that Michael Karras from Athens and I were indisputably in love.

He had been attentive, conferring and romantic.

His English was irreproachable down to the accent. He used his Yale diction with confidence and demure. His undergraduate work at Yale had earned him that, plus a degree in engineering. He switched to Business Management and Columbia two years later, after realizing that technology and New England were stymieing him with their narrowness and rigid perspective. He believed himself a liberal and as such needed elbow room and deftly-applied egalitarianism to flex his stifling yuppie muscles. He ventured to search for both in New York City, where I had met him, two years later married him, and wended my life onto a different track, Michael's.

California in the '70s proffered new horizons, vanguarding where the City waded behind. High-tech and business was the dynamic combination, and Silicon Valley cleared brave new paths for corporate temperaments on their way to solid-state Valhalla, Inc.

Meanwhile, things in my life were nudged aside. Each year came, ripened, and passed. And I had let the spring of my life while away, resigned to the fact that what I loved most, and truly wanted, I could never have.

  But irony made concessions.

  It was a kind of magic.

When I entered the classroom the world outside shut off. The basement of my brain levitated and expanded. Things couldn't go wrong. Things didn't.

It was a tug-o-war: The students yanked to extract knowledge out of me, I in turn pulled and lugged to elicit from them its accurate use. They would test me, sometimes ruthlessly, on minute grammatical points.

"Why plain and not full infinitive, Ms. McClorry?"

"After what words can we use both gerund and infinitive, Ms. McClorry?"

I would explain, and quickly sortie challenging them for examples. They would respond with, quivering hands--all wanting to be favoured first--and I'd point, listen, point swiftly to one, and the other, then another, till both sides, overcome by exhilaration, would break out into booming laughter and enthusiastic commentary. The miracle by then had already taken place. They had learned.

There were times though when the experience was unnerving and no way to explain certain words or expressions. The class would get restless; I'd lose them and become disappointed in myself and I'd wish that they had spent some of their taffy-chewing, liquorice-sucking years in Norwalk, Conn. of the U.S.A. They'd know then what squirrel was and how acorns felt to the touch, whiff the pungent fragrance of dried and wet leaves burning in autumn below towering oaks with rainbows for foliage. They'd savour the crisp, pristine scent of coming spring, listen to the robbin call and the chirrup of the bluejay, and almost hear the rich grass growing. Audiovisual aids simply could not do as much.

The bell signalled the end of the school day. I shrugged. Squirrel and acorn can wait their turn to be discovered, after infinitive and gerund, I had decided earlier that evening, and looked at more shards in my life.

  When we had moved to California Michael and I had a logical discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of an abortion. He had drawn up a sheet with the pros and cons listed separately on it. The pros won. He died eighteen years later with cancer of the lymphoid glands, and I could not conceive any more babies.

To my surprise, there hadn't been much pain then on either side. He got weaker by the week, and I stronger.

I was by him that night three years ago when he asked for yogurt. I passed two shallow spoonfuls into his mouth. He swallowed, rested his head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. He didn't rave or moan or whimper. He just never stopped staring at the off-white ceiling.

I couldn't imagine death so simple. There was no ceremony or melodrama, only a person that had just then died.

  Since Michael's passing away I drilled in keeping busy. I found old friends, stopped smoking, and started reading again. There was an amalgam of thoughts and emotions bottle-necking inside.

Things like notions about getting helplessly caught in the gears of propriety, and being unable to control any longer your choices. Was that the reason Michael had died? Had he lost track, somewhere along the way, of his priorities? Atrophied his alternatives? Was he sucked up by a depleted ego, empty because the preoccupations of parenthood were not there?

And where was I to buttress him all the while it was transpiring? Had he wanted a divorce all along and didn't say so? Was my inaction what ate him up?

I'll never know.

More of me listened to Alison, Trudy and Beth than contributed. I wanted to end my mourning, rejoin the crowd and belong. I sought acceptance for what I was, a woman who had recently lost her husband and could not have children.

I'm sore, I admitted to myself, and stick out like a sore thumb. I can't live down my attitude, live up to my role, and make best with a past that's gone.

Yet, with each day that passed, I wished a sort of confrontation. Someone to go in there, unmask the throbbing gash and lay the grief open. But all, Beth even, widowed two years, fell back with the others. "Loanne," she had said, "it'll drive you up the wall if you let it. Now's the time to do the hardest thing: what you always wanted to, but couldn't."

So, I severed my ties, did not touch a cigarette, and developed a good size library. The books had told me that Clearmont, California was only a tiny piece of the world.

  Athens had just about the climate of Clearemont, but not so desert-like. The quakes were fewer, and the seas less restless. Aegean shores, sky and water fringed my Attica enclave.

  I realized as I attempted to sift my emotions into a semblance of ordered thoughts, and prepared to leave school that evening that my silent onlooker standing by the door had no intention of leaving.

I brightened, "Stavro."

The boy came up to my shoulders. Skinny but no push-over. Some of the others in his class towered a good foot, and more, over him. When provoked he'd start swinging first and then look, usually up, at his contender.

But overriding the I'm-no-soft-touch demeanor was a quality, nesting where it was well protected: a sensitivity which, finding no response, was mutating into discontent and aggression. The chestnut pools of his eyes were perpetually ruffled by a look of distress and chagrin. When I had approached him for the first time he sensed, as children can do, my own malaise and taken to me.

Between sessions he would often come early to class, as he came today, approach while I put the assignment on the board, and coyly stand near by. I'd smile and show pleased at his company. He'd grin a little, pretend to wait for me to finish, and when the other kids started coming, stroll to his desk and sit.

"Today we'll read a poem. This poem speaks about courage and hope. It is about people who, through struggle and faith, achieve their very own, seemingly impossible, dreams. Dreams that appear to us, at first sight, difficult to hold on to as soap-bubbles and quicksilver..."

"What can I do for you, Stavro?" my attention returned to the waiting boy.

He faltered, "I lost it."

I got up, walked to him, and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "What did you lose?"

Minding around for others, "The paper with the poem."

"Have you now?"

He delivered a single nod. Stavro was not one for speaking much, his eyes told all.

"Next session I'll have a copy for you," I managed to put in before he made a little bow with his head, about faced, and scooted out of the office.

  `My kids' were graduating in June. It was already the end of March. Soon, I would have to relinquish my flock from the auspices of my wing. Kids I taught and parented for three years, I would not look upon again, never to chide or commend, reprove or praise, soar jubilantly to magiclands of learning or pluck pensively at the subtle verse of Cushing.

Being a private enterprise, the language school had to maintain a high academic standard and enrolment. Whereas in a public school attendance was compulsory, independent of teacher and curriculum quality, here it was competitive. A dissatisfied parent could withdraw his child at any time.

Thus, Loanna McClorry (along with my new life) was tentatively initiated into the earthy and onerous nature of enterprising academia.

"Our institution lies between Scilla and Charibdis, Ms McClorry," Niko had said, standing over a cluttered rose-wood desk at my time of interview, three years before.

He was a tall, graceful man with unsettled eyes and eternally a lit cigarette between his fingers. His manner was refined and proud, taking infinite pains not to offend.

"Our students must be taught discipline softly. English, French, Italian, etc., is of secondary role, Ms McClorry. We have to keep our students here, in the school, then teach them the language of their choosing. It is our primary job therefore, to mould the young people into participants, do it by entertaining, enchanting--captivating them."

When he spoke he looked into me, not at me. I had to really dig my nail into my palm to severe the spell. The tenure of the textured low tone, the overlaying raspiness of a chain-smoker's voice, the exacting Swiss-precision of intonation and speckles Queen's-English inflection vaunted contention with the best of Shakespearean champions. He wasn't merely speaking, he was orating from his heart of hearts. And I loved every second.

Stavro gone, I retrieved my gabardine and walked down the long corridor for the main lobby. As usual, clusters of children, tiny tidy ones to tall tousled-hair ones, engulfed me in their passing, smiling and waiving or plodding and moping around with no visible acknowledgement of my presence, vacuum and unresolve on their adolescent faces. My heart flitted. I forced myself to loosen up. Teaching would wear me down to the bone by day's end. I would forget all else during sessions. Fifteen to twenty-five souls often hung from my lips, my next articulation, gesture, the light in my eye.

"Precious babes..." suddenly I was overwhelmed.

I donned a transparent plastic hood over dense and ample red hair and walked out of Zaphyriou Language School into a rainy, cool night.

The letters from Phil made an effort to be informative and customary. First, he wrote the details and chit-chat about his recent divorce, and about mother and friends. Then, my brother touched the subject of being concerned and questioned my motives for absconding myself to live and work halfway around the world.

"Couldn't you have chosen," he wrote, "a closer place, like Mexico or Canada? There, at least, we could visit you."

Yeah, I nodded, like that one, and only, time you came to visit Michael at the hospital--in the nine months he'd been sick, once you stood by my side.

In his own way my brother wanted to remind me how I had abandoned him for a second time.

Phil's coming to the world seemed to be one: to inhibit my life and sap on the last of my strength. In our youth, having been nearer his age, I could identify more readily with his puerile fears and whimsies.

We had shared the second bedroom, our beds were side-by-side. He would reach across and seek my hand to hold his own till late deep night. My appendage would grow numb from inactivity and the twisted position. But alas, my slightest movement would prompt Phil to cling to me even more.

"I'm not going anywhere, Phil," I would whisper.

He'd make inarticulate sounds and return to slumberland.

Awake, with eyes open in the dark, I would fantasize what our lives would have been like had father lived on.

Joe McLorry had been tall and lean with curly light-brown hair. My favourite pass time was to play with the curls. I'd pull them to the side, let go and watch them bound back like little watch springs. His eyes, amidst brown and gold freckles, would squint and smile then. Phil's eyes were flecked like that. But Phil's were not smiling eyes. They were round and wounded. My mother's. I had my father's look and his thin sinewy body.

Phil was three years my younger. When he was in kindergarten I would often be called from my classroom to go to his because he wouldn't stop crying. When he'd see me coming he'd rush to me. With smeared tears and runny nose he'd implore, "Let's leave Annie--I want to go home!"

I empathized with my brother, sought to soothe him disregarding my own ache. The construction accident had left us paternal orphans. Phil was the surviving male of the family and was attended by both of us. Now he was the man in the family, the only male McLorry. Nothing must hurt him.

"Loanne," my mother, garbed in black, said, "I missed looking after your father. It won't be the same with Phil, and I want your help."

I became a second mother. I put aside my own grief to embrace my mother's and immersed myself in Phil's upbringing.

I looked after him at school. Woke him in the mornings, helped him dress and taught him how to button up his shirt without leaving extra holes or buttons. I supervised his washing up and would make sure he aimed truly at the toilet. I'd serve our breakfast while our mother fixed herself up for work. Tidy up our room quickly, put the dished in the sink, wipe the table clean, and hold his hand at night when sleep brought with it goblins and horrors.

The years passed slowly with my chores being ample. Phil grew to be eight, ten, fourteen.

"Loanne, Phil'll be sleeping on the living-room sofa," my mom told me one morning, "and you'll be locking your door nights. Your brother has taken to walking in his sleep--and he's at that age...."

I understood.

But Phil had not. He resented it. He made me feel guilty at every chance he got. And I could never bring myself to explain to him why we had had to separate.

When I arrived home that night, I found Phil's letter and, slipped under my door, a note.

"Please come," the note said, "Alcyone at eleven tonight. It is important that I speak to you and I haven't been able to reach you by phone."

The signature was Niko's.

Nicholaos Zaphiriou was a competent administrator not by formal training but through insight and good sense. The first law with working with people, particularly children, was an active knowledge of the underlying psychology, the kind forged by thirty years exposure to the soul-bearing travail of classroom teaching. He had not simply survived it, he had cultivated upon it.

"They are our little hopes, Loanne." We had been lying side-by-side in my bedroom, at the end of my first school year. "I see more to these young, wound up people than just cute by-products of wedlock. They are our singular future. I look at teaching as the opportunity to have a say in that. Teach them about our mistakes. Make them aware civilization cannot endure another round of the same."

He was a concerned lover and a gentleman. As some put their faith in politics or technology, Nick placed his on the young, rallied on their dreams and imagination.

As I got to know him better, I compared him to Michael. Michael was quiet when it came to the subject of children. The aim in his life had been the day-to-day present and its avail to outwit the competitor, witness his withdrawal or demise, and gain from it.

Nick, on the other hand, had hit upon a harmony in elements. He apprized his business, but parallel, undertook to sculpt character and inculcate reforms. Where Michael would ignore, perhaps even slight, this kind of challenge, Nick would involve himself in it.

I began once more in my life to evolve. Although in my forties, I was surprised again at the power of influence an affair can have. I needed to revive principles that I had, at some point, put aside to replace with Michael's own. Surprised at being aspired to Niko's time-honoured, tested axioms. Axioms which sought to brake the rat-race enough to think choices through instead of sublimately react to them.

"I did not marry because," Niko said, "I could not serve two mistresses." So he chose the children.

"Fifteen thousand have graduated since I opened my school. Enough to populate a small city. With most of my pupils I have spent six or more years. What do you think of this investment? Every time they utter a snipped in English, French and German they will recall, too, the other things."

I knew what `other things'. Respect to self, honour to parents, loyalty to a friend, and trust in dreams.

"A child must have dreams, otherwise it does not grow up, it withers, Loanne."

"And we, Niko, who give love and dreams unreservedly--what remains for us?"

"The comfort," he replied.

"The comfort?" I asked the man in my bed.

"Yes. The comfort of knowledge: to fear less because you know more."

"And ourselves?"

He had turned and faced me. "We have reserves, Loanne. What we give is surplus that weighs us down. We are teachers because we love best giving little bits of ourselves."

I blinked twice, the rendezvous with Niko.

My watch had said ten-thirty.

The shower was quick, but it revitalized me, lifting some of the day's fatigue. It took seven more minutes to fix my face. I slipped into a dark beige overalls suit, threw the black gabardine over my shoulders, and grabbed an umbrella. It was ten-fifty. I scuttled.

Niko rose when I came to his table. He seemed to me a might unsteady, but it could have been my imagination. The silver rimmed glasses he wore were deceiving. There was too much reflection from the small chandelier just over them.

I couldn't puzzle out what this was all about. Alcyone cafe was a regular for the school staff, two blocks away. Friday nights we would gather there, compare notes and chat on the week that past. Tonight, a Tuesday, I saw none of the familiar crew. Across from me a man I had made love with dozens of times, and just might be beginning to love, sat.

"Please, what will you have?" he spoke, his tone dithered.

"Coffee," I told the waiter, "milk, no sugar."

"You have Stavro in one of your classes, Stavro Vergis?"

"Yes--what's wrong?"

"Nothing serious, I don't think. He ran away. His mother called the school." He took a sip of his wine. "You expected something wrong?"

"I don't know," I tried to assimilate what had just been told to me. "He was an unhappy child. I tried to see why--"

"It is the reason I wanted to see you. The sooner the better."

"You did right, but what can I do?"

"Loanne, the boy had spoken of you often to his mother. He thinks highly of you. A boy his age may even be infatuated with his teacher." His face from sombre relaxed, "I know I am," he put in, all too unexpectedly, and my heart flittered a second time that day.

"Stavro's father, it seems, got restless..." he paused mid-sentence, and I thought: that's all you are, Niko, infatuated. And we both know it. "...the boy may try to contact you, his mother seems to expect."

"I see," I managed. Then, "It's a nice thing you've said, Niko--you know, the other thing."

The downpour did not let down. I made my way back to the apartment. The black asphalt of the night streets danced glimmering to the down beat rhythm of the rain. There were passers-by scampering through the torrent.

"Restless," I heard myself scoff and splashed vehemently into a puddle. Sophistication be damned--the father got itchy soles, upped and beat feet. Stavro's old man, his idol, simply left home, at break of dawn, a year ago, because he got tired of it all. The thought enraged me, and even the wet cold didn't prevent my damp face from flaring. Stavro worshipped him, and the sonofabitch traded him in for another woman. How can people do it? To children!

I blinked and the past fell away, back to where it had come from.

Stavros stood in front of me wrapped up in the mauve terry cloth bathrobe, several sizes too big for his petite build. His hair was neatly combed and the look of a clean and manageable little young man was upon him once again. My gaze and a rueful smile lingered on him.

He beamed at me. I saw acknowledgment there.

I would trade them all. All the men in my bleak, sodden life for this boy, this child, who wandered soggy and gloomy streets of night to find me. Would forfeit--had I any--Byzantium treasure troves to have him as my own.

Instead, I said, "Do you remember the poem, Stavro?"

"A little."

"The title?"

He furrowed an eye. "`Don't Quit'."

"Do you want to quit loving people because something came in the way?"

He stared. Smile diminishing.

"Your mom needs you now, more than ever. Do you want to quit on her, Stavro?"

He said nothing, but looked at the phone.

I nodded.

He walked to it, picked up the headpiece and began to dial. "I love you too, Ms McLorry," his voice was bearly audible.

I knew he meant it. "I love you too, Stavros," I said, and it made my day.

END

"Power is always charged with the impulse to eliminate human nature, the human variable, from the equation of action. Dictators do it by terror or by the inculcation of blind faith; the military do it by iron discipline; and the industrial masters think they can do it by automation."

--Eric Hoffer

Middle-aged with a broad bust, silvering hair and bushy stray brows Reginald Marcus stopped scribbling, squinted and eyed the intruder from behind the posh cherry-wood desk.

"What is the nature of your call, Mr--?"

"Hauge, Dr. Seamus Hauge. Billions, Mr. Marcus."

Staring hard now, Reginald Marcus, president of International Medical Software Development, bit his lip. Last night's partying with the board pantheon was apparently not punishment enough. And currently they had been the only staple of companionship around. His inflicted isolation lately, he hoped, would not debilitate him, turn him into another Hughes.

The heavy sweet aroma that expensive Havana cigars are famous for mingled with the scent of leather of the choicest Near East quality.

"Billions?"

"Most appropriate, Mr. Marcus, for the biggest medic software company around."

"That we are."

Reginald Marcus considered having an employer-employee talk with Ms. Atwood, his new, goggle-spectacled, personal secretary. Retirement had absorbed the older, more adept, Mrs. Parsons. Bless you, Mrs. Parsons, he thought, but your understudy dispenses protocol blindly.

"I do hope you remember." Hauge reached into his coat pocket and extricated a small white card. "You had said, `Show this card.'"

A vestige of recollection trundled in Marcus. "University of Edinburgh?"

"School of Computer Medicine--now doing a sabbatical at A & M," said Hauge. "Hadn't explained half of what it's all about. Too busy looking over my shoulder and all last evening."

Then and there, Marcus denounced Old Cherokee Bourbon and silently apologized to Ms. Atwood.

"You did say billions?"

"Quite. Sir, you pioneer in treading paths no one has ever voyaged on before. Of course, you'll undoubtedly be facing competition no one's ever dealt with..."

Marcus was grateful for the man's garrulity. It gave him time to compose. Looking out the penthouse window, that was one of the four walls opposite the luxurious bar, he gazed upon the azaleas flooding onto the terrace, the pointed and cubed tops of looming skyscrapers with their mirroring or black windows, the steel and glass blocks of his empire where the thousands of men and women worked for him like sprightly ants scurrying every which away.

Marcus nodded at the man: his newest and perhaps most lucrative triumph. If only Quasimodo would stop pealing those bells inside his head.

He reached into the pocket of his cashmere jacket. "Want a couple?"

Hauge looked at what Marcus was offering. Anti acid drops. They came in an etched container, carved out of white gold in the shape of a basket cockle. A modest diamond carapace was set into it. A pistil of blood-red was infused atop it.

"I don't mind if I do." Hauge took two. "I say, we were a slight tipsy last night."

"A might." Marcus took a deep breath.

"It's a Mont Blane ruby," he said, fingering the blaring red stone.

His tenure just then carried the exaggerated seriousness of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. The container was small in Marcus's palm, but prodigious, substantial, potent.

"You do have an eye for the arresting," Hauge said. "Excellent taste too. The braised liver with the onions was lip-smacking, and the chitterlings...never tasted anything like it."

"Now, to our subject, Dr. Hauge."

"Quite." Hauge alternated his legs. "It's a processor, to make a long story short. Somewhat different from a computer processor in that it learns and...and carries a certain, I might say, intrinsic leverage."

"Don't all?" Marcus tossed four anti acid pills into his mouth. Haziness enclose him and thickened.

"Not quite," Hauge said. "All processors so far in the market are silicon and binary. They are made up of tiny transistors, switches, imprinted on silicon based wafers which are activated to an on or off state by a trickle of current--"

A churning built up in Marcus's stomach, clutched for a time, then loosened. For a moment the upheaval seemed to wane. It was a rough landing, not like ever before.

The whipping in his gut build up again, gripped, expired. The pill holder shone. Its rainbow beams washed over him and nudged him five centimeters into the soft leather of the chair.

"Don't claim to be a pundit, but I am conversant with the subject of solid state electronics," Marcus said, showing a bit ruffled.

Hauge spoke over the wide desk separating them. "May I illustrate further?"

"Never say no to that."

Marcus tolerated another brisk, vibrantly disorienting pang of nausea. He must look the worse for wear. His onerous, strained breathing patiently slowed down, but still tethered in pain. "The stuff must of been poison," he mumbled, his heart hammering against his chest, keening to break loose from it. But Hauge seemed to no longer be attending him or his predicament.

Marcus listened to Hauge prattle on about what he considered monumental, and rated him arch-ingrate. He thought that he would perish here, imbibed, maligned like an unsuspecting Napoleon amidst his empire; his immortality perhaps mere footsteps away.

"No offence intended," said Hauge. Hauge looked relieved. Then lifted and high of heart. He sank into his chair, relaxed, and seemed to appraise all that surrounded him.

The office was huge and plushly furnished and was only a small part of the pent-house they were in. Low, soft music and singing was piped in that he recognized to be Bolivar, an old opera by French composer Darius Milhaud.

Hauge next upped his head and took in the vista of a quadrant of Dallas that lay beyond the enormous window and between an Apollo by Scopas and Orcagna's Madonna delle grazie.

"I only wanted to clarify a point," he now continued. "My discovery is neither silicon-based or binary. It's organic, neural-prosthetic implant or permanantly cultivated, DNA-protein-based." He produced from his pocket a black cube the size of a die with a thin pig tail of tiny electrodes running off it. "Uses quanta states instead of binary logic."

"No offence taken," Marcus returned in his Texas drawl, craning forward for a better look.

I've landed a big one this time, his gut told him. Intuition and on the spot assessment of multitudes of executives, yuppies and hirelings over the years had honed and sharpened his capacity for judging, and seldom proved him wrong. His ashen face started to bead with sweat.

The sun, rising behind the forest of buildings, was turning the cinemascope, polarized plate-window to sunset red, and only a massive vermilion ball, jabbed by black angular and sharp-edged protrusions, could now be decerned. The flat land and low granite hills beyond gradually faded into an artificial, maroon dusk.

Numbing out there, Marcus's thoughts bandied about. The yellows and ambers, the glare of the lapis blue sky, the harsh light of the desert rocks and dust. The heat that makes air ripple like silk.

He had planned to leave today for Kruger National Park in South Africa to survey his latest acquisition there, a three wing hospital, purchased dirt cheep. But it could wait. So could Lanarkshire; that was a nine-floor, thousand-bed `gift' from Glasgow, literly a steal. Competition better don their glasses, he thought.

"It works quite splendidly." Hauge interrupted Marcus's fixed look and raised the black die higher. He regarded as Marcus got deeper absorbed by the shades and moods around him. The hangover had run its course and would make things easier. Marcus looked to him dazed, and his eyes like two red puddles at the bottom of a dry well. Make hay while the sun shines, Hauge thought.

  "Matter of fact its encapsulation is entirely too exaggerated. The active device inside is much, much smaller. It will be designed to interface directly with synopses. But the filament connections make it presently impossible to reduce further. Working on it. Its function? I'll demonstrate shortly."

Marcus steepled his hands. "About the billions." His attitude and diction changed. The voice was curt and brisque.

"No question about it. Everyone and their aunty would kill for one," Hauge preened. His listener attended mutely, so he cultivated the idea. "Rather funny, but fashion rests on the most rudimentary supposition that has ever promoted a model of human trend: a majority of people will be imitated more often than not. Fads come and go. Not trustworthy. Yet in the long run a trend-varying populace will be imitated most of the time than not. The untouchable harijan, here, would want, and be able, to reach the highest Brahman--"

"We're not Hindus, Mr. Hauge," Marcus cut in, unsettled. "Jean Cocteau said, Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far. More pertinent, will the proponents of this trend have the tolerance to see it through to success and absorb the costs? Why, sir, would everyone want one?" Marcus fumbled with the pill container again.

Hauge looked down the desk. "Because we can make it from them for them," he said. "A trend of fashion will catch on in some places like flash fire, and this can do it, Mr. Marcus!

"A fad or here to stay?" Marcus stubbornly inquired.

"Mr. Marcus, what a question!"

"A good one," Marcus retorted. "A common mistake with technocrats is that they try to do away with, they say alleviate, human deficiencies. Aimless wriggling through the dark is what I say. Yet, and here's the paradox, they depend on these to make their bundle. They try to improve the system, and profit at the same time, by getting rid of it. Will your device provide to the degree that no other gambit is needed?"

Hauge stared puzzled.

"Look, we've got problems in this business that all these gadgets put together cannot solve," Marcus said. "Dehumanizing people to promote what is not simply a fad but a permanent fixture can prove not only unprofitable in the long run, but the most chancy and perfidious of all ventures risked. So, a fad or here to stay, Mr. Hauge?" The raspy voice was permeate with disdain, with harsh reservation.

And your place in this snug paragon of corporate rectitude, Mr. Marcus? Hauge itched to ask. But, for the present, he had to keep Marcus sweet, and thoroughly receptive.

Marcus sighed. "Your answer to my question?" he asked, and eyeballed Hauge. "Business, Hauge, ain't Pachisi."

"I don't know the answer," Hauge expelled, with calm gravity.

"I don't think you want it to be a fad," Marcus snorted. "Biological engineering is only a step below cyborgs." Now an odious and distasteful look darkened his face. He reflected at the consequence of the precarious grounds Hauge was rummaging through, and the rip it could irrevocably rend in the edifice of popular consent.

"Don't know who said, 'boldness without the rules of propriety, becomes insubordination'. That's burning ground, Hauge. The deep roots you talk about, are they perhaps the uprooting of other social strains?" Silently, All the same, curious as hell to see what you're nuzzling up to... Then loudly, "Want some coffee?"

  Ms. Atwood softly served the cappuccino.

I must've been sloshed, Marcus thought. He grunted massaging his temples.

He put down one of the two silver and ivory tankards the secretary brought in, rose, moseyed over to where Hauge sat. His flat nose, his six foot three, two-twenty pound lean frame he hoped would hint at his beloved hobby. In his middle forties he could still get a few rounds in the ring without losing much wind. Other than by-the-book pugilism Marcus harrowed at all form of polemic art. But he loved to bluff. It gave him the edge over disorderly board meetings.

"Dr. Hauge, what's this about making computer components out of people?" A look of stern reproach appeared on his face.

The other scanned the tower before him and sipped the last drops of his coffee. "Not out of them, dear man, for them, like a heart valve, a skin graft from artificially cultured cells, plastic arteries, etcetera. Things that enhance, save people's lives as Pacemakers, artificial kidneys."

"Go on," Marcus said and sat near in another chair. Never had he been offered anything to compare with what this young man was offering. In his mind flashed a menagerie of cyberpunk images and endless queues of eager, nail-biting clientele. Meanwhile, dim circumspection tainted him with doubt. Visions of hacked, and patched up heads and defiled torsos paraded in front of him. But in the end he nudged aside the stink of fear and revelled at a euphoria of released capital fantasies.

"To put it simply," Hauge continued, "a sample of the subject's DNA is got and blown up hologrammically in a computer. The double helix is much easier to deal with that way..."

Hauge thought while he spoke, Something akin to hunger in that stare. A breeze of faith with a trace of sadness touched his face. It made Hauge's heart flutter. You never felt the bite of frost through torn shoes in deep Nor' Loch winter. Never had to eat stale bread and left-over mutton days unend in squalid, pest-infested, Auld Reekie ghettos to save up for coming tuition fees.

"...then the work begins. All genes not supportive to the preset parameters are extracted and replaced by modified ones: genes that heal the crippled, the blind, can make the deaf hear again; genes for mathematical acumen, for musical talent, for body stamina, business sagacity--you name it. The helix is then shrunk back down to its nominal size, superimposed on the original, and with the help of a broad-band laser beam is imprinted upon it..."

Blood, Marcus? Is that what you want? Hauge remembered his own skeletal, pinched face crimping in concentration over volumous texts. The explosive awakenings in the midst of nights by dreams in which cadavers he had dissected pursued him, threatening to fell him into so many lean strips. And that one child, the little girl, that expired in his arms slowly and lingeringly because the blood pool was empty and her parents could not pay Marcus, the world-wide provider of blood, for the rare, new blood. What new deal were you striking up, Marcus, at the time?

"Pardon my limited knowledge of genetics," at last Marcus wrenched in the luxurious chair, his hulking body coercing a tormented squeal from its frame, "but won't that just change the original chromosome's physical shape and not its quality?"

"Ah but it will. Chromosome is the name of the strange fellow: body of colour. Very sensitive to color frequency modulations. The modified facsimile will be color stained--coded with transparent dye where effective changes are desired, and by a mirror dye where not."

"Still, that leaves you with just one little, altered chromosome." Marcus stood up grinning, his argent hair wildly streaming and gleaming from the blowing air vent close above it, his pearly teeth teasing with their perfect dental work. He patted his lips with his index finger.

"That can, and will, reproduce its exact duplicate," Hauge came back, "since the regenerative mechanism will not have been touched."

Marcus laughed, "I didn't know such fidelity, especially in the case of artificial encroachment, existed. But the building of a complete helix from half of one--a split helix--is done, if I'm not mistaken, with the aid of an enzyme," Marcus said.

"I didn't either--a decade back. But at University we managed, piecemeal, to weed out that protein strain and the aminos and anything else that could interfere." Hauge tapped at the die and its dullness dispersed.

Marcus knitted his brows. "Well, won't something else still rectify the mutated helix?"

"No. Now, the enzyme only constructs the mirror image of that which is in front of it. It does not compare chromosomes in doing so."

Marcus shook his head. "Hauge, it'll still give you a chromosome different from the subject's intrinsic physiology. Won't the body's defences fight it off?"

"Does the immune system fight off radio-actively mutated chromosomes, tissue for that matter? If it did we would have the cure for AIDS--for most cancers. The same principle holds true here. Furthermore, this is controlled and meticulously guided mutation. Not to mention that it comes from the same contingency as its host's inherent genes."

Two million years of conditioning, Hauge thought. The sun. The moon. Lightning. Fire. The piquancy of light and the seductiveness of color and what they incite, all pact into an irresistible live blend of rays. Symbols of a revered, supremacy/servility evolutionary path. Ritualistic moulds of castes and adherents to combat-based values--all now exposed, unguarded, before the slued raptures of subliminal intensities and hues, bolting through the optic nerve. Visible phenomena that silently cuffed and castrated willpower, the id, the superego--the brain's very identity. At that moment, Hauge caught himself almost splendouring. He was engrossed in the force of power availed to him. It tickled within him that mysterious ember he called imagination. But only for a moment.

"And its quota?"

"Varied solely by the subject's needs and by the subject alone." Hauge pinched two of the exposed fine wires on the end of the die's pig tail. Marcus saw the inside begin to whirl and soon turn to murky grey, dull cream, and, finally, to diamond brilliance.

Marcus got up and came close to look at the sparkling jewel the other held between his fingers. Coruscating sprays of rainbows caught, filled and kept his eye--his sight. Its pristine radiance bathed his retinas making him blink and a drop dribble down his cheek.

"It's sin, itself!" he nearly drooled and kneeled before the Scot to have a better look. "Where is the agent?"

"A tiny shimmer--the star, if you look hard, in its geometric centre."

"How?"

"Body heat. It is attuned to the body heat spectrum. Enough to generate ample potential for the chromosomes to activate and act as catalysts to the liquid plasma pigmentation surrounding it, and then some. Here," Hauge said and pinched more wires. The liquid swirled, sparkling, spewing needles of sheen through space. It changed to transparent bloodstone.

  "Get off your knees, old fellow," Hauge said, offering his chair. "Take this too." He reached into his pocket. "Shouldn't we get back to the billions?"

Marcus pinched and gawked.

"Are you with me, man?"

Marcus saw the die in his own hand turn into a green emerald, a blue sapphire, yellow citrine, fire opal...

"Eh, Yes. Absorbing sort of prettiness."

"So, pretty!" Marcus's parched voice was weak and reedy.

"Er--you're in no condition to preside over the board, dear man. Oughtn't we let your board's directors know that you're postponing things? Till further word, let's say."

Marcus rose, walked to the complex communicator, punched the red button, said what he was told, and returned to his seat.

Ms. Atwood," Hauge remembered the little plaque on the slight, bespectacled secretary's desk, "would you come in," he said, now bending over the intercom and standing behind Marcus' elegant desk.

The secretary entered, showed riddled over the sitting man playing with his empty hands. "So, so pretty..." Marcus raved on.

"Is anything wrong, Mr.--"

"Mr. Marcus will be leaving now. Oh, and, Ms. Atwood, would you be kind enough to bring your pad with you when you come back. We have changes to make."

An enigmatic expression cast on the young lady as she faced Hauge, sitting behind the great desk. For a moment, Hauge thought amused, she must have taken me for someone else. "Yes, sir," she said, lingering her dispersed, fishbowl stare a while.

The Scotsman observed and humoured the other's fascination as she watched the die in his hand turn cornelian pink, hyacinth red, amethyst violet, lazurite blue, peridot green...

"Have one," he said, reaching again into an empty pocket, knowing it would be the most important thing on her mind from here on. "Anything else, Ms. Atwood?"

"No, oh not a thing, sir. So pretty!" she chirped and gawked at her empty hand, sighed deeply and escorted her charge out.

"Ah, one more thing. Change Mr. Marcus's flight for Marakesh instead, and accompany him personally till he boards." The climate should be more akin to Texas's, he considered, and put the real die back in his coat pocket.

He always wanted to see how it felt to be a megatherium of business, unfettered to make and supply freely as much blood as needed for poor, needy people and little girls like his late sister, Margaret. But he wasn't sure if he had what it took. Clearly, though, all one needed was a dab of cheek and a spot of hypnotic power at his touch. Everything else then just couldn't help coming your way.

The board members will be the true challenge, the Scot thought, after Ms. Atwood had left.

"Into the maelstrom!" he hollered and quailed at his own sound.

It was noon, the sun out of view, and the show-case window clear. Marcus's empire spilled once more before Hauge's surveying eyes. He'd have to call upon more compelling reserves than the die for the board. At that rumination, there was a knock at the door.

A meek Ms. Atwood peeked in. She took off her bone-rimmed glasses with the thick, round silver lenses. The secretary's irises rendered an unexcelled performance that even a chameleon would have coveted to be capable of. Hauge quickly looked away--but not quick enough.

Ms. Atwood was careful not to look directly into the bar's inlaid looking glass on her left as she refitted the eyeglasses. At times like these, she thought, a mirror could prove to be one's own worse enemy.

"The saddest part of all this business, Mr. Hauge," Ms. Atwood said, leading the catatonic man slowly out from behind Marcus's massive desk, "is not recognizing your competition and not inquiring why one needs to wear thick, silvered glasses inside this glare-free building. The naked eye, Mr. Hauge, can often be quicker than a die."

"Arthur, there is another--" No, no, it's too blunt.

"This has to come to light sooner or later--"

"Why not sooner than this?" he'll ask.

"I'm leaving, Arthur--"

"Where to this time, Victoria?" no good.

I woke up that morning and knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Evangelos. But because of my indecision I was swiftly loosing him.

It had been a soft June morning, in '47, at the time the Marshall Plan had been implemented. After Arthur went to the office, I paced the floor like a caged lynx, my third cup of Maxwell-House in hand--coffee and cigarettes were the most bounteous among the staples the embassy rationed to its T.O.D. personnel and their dependents.

I locked up, got in the battered Ford Town-Wagon I used on my digs and drove for Piraeus.

"Step on it," I said to myself.

Glimpsing in the rear-view mirror I caught site of a white sliver of a sun emerging from behind Mt. Hymittos, and two blue pits staring back at me. I fussed with a crow curl on my forhead, but gave up when a gust of hot breeze tumbled more down. Suddenly, ahead, dozens of windows burst their glare, dazzling my way...

***

Victoria Hall wanted to break loose from her second marriage as well. She was an archaeologist, resilient in stamina but restless in her moods. She resided in a house near the University where she taught when she was not away digging up relicks. She was in her mid-thirties then, had an eight year old son, Theodore, from her previous marriage, who lived with his father in Oregon. Her daughter, Sara, nine, lived with Arthur and her.

Victoria was tallish for her sex and her expeditions kept her well lean. A speck of a mole spotted her above the left brow. Snugly-fitting dresses, she had discovered young, did wonders for her shapely, exercised figure. She carried herself with an air of confidence; when sitting she could always attract male glances by crossing her long, shapely legs.

It was due to Arthur that she had been in Greece--that never-never land--for those two unforgettable years.

***

...The little ship was ready to leave when I reached it. I ran to board. The boy there took my hand and helped me up the ribbed plank. Once on deck I drew in a breath.

"It's over."

I climbed a narrow set of stairs to the caique's upper deck.

The roar of the engine smothered conversations, singing, and galloping children calling to their mothers. The passengers scuttled to sort their belongings near by and take seats for the two-hour journey over Argosaronicos.

I leaned on the side rail and watched the seagulls snatch, break and swallow sardines when a sheet of sea drizzled on me, choking off their dumb squawks. My arms and shoulders shuddered at the wet slap.

`Dear Arthur,' I had begun the note, just before I left. `I must act soon or my mind will crumple. I ask of you to understand and not question my state, accept only that I can no longer continue our lives together. It is of no oversight of your own, simply it is how things sometimes come about. Victoria.'

I had been petrified at the time. What if--?

The seagulls drifted off, protesting to the termination of their regale, and as their cries ebbed I fell back into the shadow cast by the canvas above.

I egressed deeper into the shadow. I backed all the way to the bulwark, and thrust to retreat still further...

***

Victoria had first heard Evangelos' music over the portable radio. It was like nothing she had ever experienced before. There was in it the power of a Beethoven, a dab of the grace of a Vivaldi, and the urgency of a Wagner. She would listen while she dusted off and pasted together pot shards, or when dry grit from day long excavations parched her throat bringing tears to her eyes. She would conjure up in her imagination the phisiognomy that had the reserves of sensitivity capable to compose such hymns to restoration. What was the man like? she wondered.

Nann Elly Walker, the Ambassador's burly Texan wife, accomodated. "Why don’t you come and see, dear," she had popped out, during happy hour at her place. "He'll be here on Ed's birthday and, just maybe, he'll play that yawning piano we forgot in our living room."

***

...The hours seemed like eons when Manaras Express finally advanced to the breakwater, maneuvered and docked by its stern to the quay.

I gripped the richly painted balustrade and followed the queue to shore.

We had used the hospice often enough as it was next to the water and afforded practical and private amenities for our escapes near the sea. Evangelos's cottage was a half hour's steep climb, isolated within mountain pine and thistle.

The hospice room contained three straw chairs, a double bed drooping in the middle, and two square night-tables on either side with a storm lamp on each...

***

Victoria's lover, Evangelos, was talented and accomplished. It thrilled and mystified her that although one day she could boast of having had uncovered all the hews of his soul, the next he would be shrouded again, be the quintessence of a new enigma. Prosaic apparel, casual poise and an aloof stride contested an ascetic discipline and an unquestioned fidelity to his muse. Evangelos was a slight taller, but thinner with drawn, Byzantine eyes. His slender, fine fingers vaunted versatility upon the keyboard, the strings, and her sensitivities. His being wrought noise into the symmetry of music. It bestired and fermented, glorified her, awakened and enobled her by simple flicks of his delicate wrist. He was grace and force, surge and surrender, and, she believed, the timber she awaited for in her gray existence. He elevated Victorias's life to karma.

***

...My face burned with the drying salt still on it.

I had been nursing paranoia since morning when I had written the note. Now all of the Apocalypse threatened me.

Four years of marriage epitomized by a few snippety couches.

I could not anticipate Arthur's full regard to the laconic vein. But could predict trying muscles on either side of the mouth, pressed lips, furrows creasing the eyes.

Evangelos was quite the opposite...

***

Theodore had Victoria's sapphire eyes and his father's nose, mouth and strong chin. When he spent the summer with them she observed that her son had no problem picking up modern Greek, or mingling with the boys in the neighborhood. He proved to be quick at soccer and an ace swimer as he escorted her at the dig sites on the islands. He made friends easily enough, all of whom he wrote to well past summer and would send Christmas and Easter cards.

***

...It had been Arthur's dark blue uniform (and uniforms Evangelos could not understand) that flattered and flirted his blush that first attracted me. I had been reeling with passion those days, drunk with my gentleman and officer, and these priorities did not leave time enough for love. I would search for it later, I had promised myself, when the spell abated some...

***

Sara unlike Theodore would spend her free time improvising variations of her wardrobe. She would try on combination after combination of apparel, and rummage through Victoria's bijoutery to find and hang on her gangly self matching earrings, necklaces, and assortments of bracelets, rings and brooches. She would often talk to her room as though entertaining a melange of dukes and duchesses, earls and counts. An empty room that to her was bursting with spangling royalty.

***

...The creaking door started me. I went to it towel in hand. It was the breeze and no-one else. Still, I nourished hope that Evangelos would be standing there.

On occasion Evangelos tripped to Athens for his concerts or rehearsals with the orchestra. Whereas Athens, depleted and exhausted, fostered nostalgia of how things once were, the island of Aggistri personated creation undiluted, manifest. He composed brilliantly of a war-weary city on an island overwhelmed by light.

He strove to save that which men in boots had covered, trampled and abandoned. Anastasis he called it. Resurrection.

Arthur, on the other hand, as naval attache, had become engrossed in the finesse of diplomacy and absorbed in the details of his charge. He charmed me by his evolvement. I observed him unfold, elicit skillfully, educe assertiveness and carping that only evoked more admiration.

I too could boast devotion to my craft. The city was my citadel, the Academy facilities my turrets, and the ancient land of the Hellenes my realm of reign. The artifacts I unearthed, timeworn and hoary, thrummed of a phoenix, a rebirth that struggled tumultuously not to be passed over. Alongside Arthur opportunities emerged to dig and salve...

***

By certain media Victoria ensued the legal paper to engage in maiden digs bringing to light precious treasures at Samothrace, Aegina, Thera, and Orchomenos. Out of convivial companies at the University, happy-hours at the Walkers and cocktail evenings amid the upper crust, her exposure grew and ripened into influential purviews.

Evangelos would compose upon her prizes, transposing his music to the splendor of her findings.

Corroboration in A sharp, and she cheered along side of him.

She listened to the music chant of renown and magnificence, in major and minor modes, and found no intimidation there. She could not compass any discord that alarmed her of usurpation. The motifs were tense but pastoral, sensitive, interlaced with sensibility and counterpoint. The flute reigned, the oboe complied and the tympanies and orchestra filled and coalesced inflecting a dithyrambic cadence.

***

...Arthur, Evangelos, his music, and my archaeology instituted the quartet of my haven. For two years this foursome prescribed and routed my future. I was the node, the juncture, of their convergence. I was the exigency of our intrigue.

Arthur presided over it all by some intrinsic prerogative availing him to grasp and control, barter and negotiate liabilities and `benedictions'. He ushered clout and pull to expedite my excavation permits and licenses. There was, back then, the time I aggrandized him as the cornerstone in the ascendancy, the mother wit that unfastened, released, revealed, and dispensed all in its proportion and rank.

But Evangelos with his exotic Victor Mature eyes was the afflatus.

He complemented and augmented me.

His music chaperoned the digs and accompanied the troves I expositioned. It was a natural marriage.

Arthur took delight in my delectation, and I could tell the magnitude of his joy through my own. The laughter in the eyes, the patent glow on his face, and his inherent shyness, so naively puerile, incarcerated me.

The gulls plummeted indolently into the calm water. A few just skidded their wingtips sketching on the sea's even surface. Some simply floated on the air currents behind the boat.

***

Aggistri's evening shadow cast upon the boat, a kind of giant whose hunched back emerged from the plane of the sea eclipsing a quadrant of sky. A Zephyr blew and comforted me in its coolness. The scent of iodine not spice was pervasive now. While the caique cleaved through the inert span of sea, I looked at a solitary figure that went and sat at the edge of the receding wharf. Little-by-little the form thawed and blended into the grain of the landscape. And I, bit-by-bit, sifted once more the tesserae of my own life.

I had waited in the hospice turning Evangelos's words in my mind. The small room shrank compelling me to push on. I had lain down instead parched and fevered and sapped.

Lest being wrong I had let half hour more pass. Then gathered my things, and despite my affliction, had boarded the boat back to Athens.

Now the sun crept over the rim of summits of a single broad mountain that was the island. From this vantage point I clearly saw Aggistri's full profile amidst other isles, till a while later they all melded into the craggy fringe of the Peloponnese...

***

"Arthur--" Victoria speculated about the coming night.

He would be stirring the martinis. There would be guests, the Walkers, perhaps even Sara and Theodore. He would ask what she had prepared in the order of snacks slighting her appeals.

"Arthur--" she imagined still another scenario.

He would turn and look, in his navy blue uniform, and she would see the emotions tangle on his face, lines from weariness, tired green eyes. In his hand the note.

***

...I retrieved the sunglasses hanging down my neckline and put them on.

That Friday night Anastasis inundated throughout the outer lobby of Concert Hall. Latecomers queued at the box office. The motif was intimately familiar to me.

"I will not be absent from my own premier," Evangelos had insisted perturbed a week before. "We can go together, Victoria--or go alone."

My attempt to shift his priorities for this one occasion had failed. I must have seemed to him to be nourishing a threat to his muse. I had not persuaded him to let another conduct his music nor spend that last weekend together on the island before the new digs at Delos took me away.

"Victoria--"

I turned.

The happy hour regulars waived from the ticket booth with tickets in hand. Among them Arthur. His uniform was a bit creased. He had come directly from the office, or gone to see how the kids were doing at their first day at camp.

They were all happy I had made it.

I fabricated the excuse of really being too exhausted from driving to the Thermopilae site and back to stay on.

"I'll go home, freshen up, and wait for you all there." Arthur offered to go with me.

"I'll manage," I said.

I went up to him, gave him a kiss and exited.

As I drove home the radio continued Evangelos's Resurrection broadcasting it live from Concert Hall. It said much to me. So subtle an ally. One that completely eluded me, one that Evangelos and Arthur do not know about to this day.

I crumpled the note that had been in my pocket and tossed it out the car window.

I know now where Evangelos's loyalties had lain, but a spark of vanity I call hope had compelled me to trip to the island that August morning.

So it came that I had chosen.

Once, in the solstice of my life, Victoria had promised me to search for love. In this pursuit, among the resurrection of a city and a score of treasure troves unearthed, we discover today, forty-eight years later, that Arthur alone has endured, has remained the one true, unscathed by the test of time.

END

Copyright by Vasilis Afxentiou 1999

All Rights Reserved

Athens, Greece

vafx@hol.gr

All work Copyright by Vasilis Afxentiou 1999

All Rights Reserved

Email: vafx@hol.gr

There is no shortage of geopolitical predictions cutting through the thin story line and speaking across the centuries. For example "Faith, Love and Virtue are chaotic pockets. They pose paradoxes…" He coins words liberally, making verbs out of nouns and nouns out of verbs. He weaves a foreboding undercurrent of change that forces us to act and react, possibly not optimally, to protect ourselves from the mystery. "They induced a laceration into chaos ... and spawned small split cells, bifurcations, of fractalian repercussions in place of anomalies, but with asymmetries: ports of forthwith temporal bonds for the reconstituting Residua of Essence."

A woman is caught in a golden chase scene. Intruders attempt to penetrate the mystery. The characters are trapped uncertainly in their ideas. Are they agents? Victims? It’s an easy and worthwhile experience to read this story, even though the story is the least of it.