Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95

  After he washed and dressed and breakfasted, he checked out the new items, poking and prodding them, looking for blemishes and flaws, areas of insubstantiality, indications of early dissolution. None of Beckerman’s work was permanent—he was careful to point that out to potential buyers, very careful, which was why this Miami thing was so maddening and disturbing—but it was a matter of professional pride for him never to offer anything for sale that was likely to last for less than a year. It wasn’t always possible for him to predict a piece’s life span accurately—he always pointed that out to them, too—but he could usually pinpoint it within three months. Some exceptionally evanescent items were gone within hours, some survived for years. Most lasted 30 to 40 months. The record thus far was 11 years, five months, for a Daliesque melted watch made of copper and inlaid with precious stones, set in a silver basin filled with mercury. It was one of his finest pieces.

  This group looked promising. The Escheresque staircase had a nice solid feel when he tapped it with his knuckle, and there were no soft places anywhere. Beckerman gave it three to five years. The goofy Giacometti, a lean, stripped-down thing of impressive tangibility and compaction, was a cinch for six or seven. Even the weakest of the three, the froggish thing (which had a hollow interior and some porous places on its surface and would therefore eventually begin to suffer molecular flyaway beginning from the inside out), looked good for at least two and a half years, maybe three.

  He began running through the roster of possible purchasers. The frog would go to Michaelson, the cellular phone tycoon, at about 30 grand: Michaelson loved strange-looking things that made weird sounds, and the relatively short life span—the fact that the artifact would vanish into the air in a couple of years—wouldn’t an issue to an art collector who had made his fortune out of something as transient as phone calls. Michaelson had once even said he was willing to buy six-month items, and even shorter-lived ones than that, if Beckerman would only put them on the market, which he steadfastly refused to do.

  Yes, Michaelson for the frog. The staircase he would offer, most likely, to Buddy Talbert, the leveraged-takeover man who had a weakness for mathematical trickery, dimensional twists, mind-dazzling stuff like that. And as for the Giacometti/Seuss, well—

  The telephone rang.

  Not many people had Beckerman’s number. “Yes?”

  “Alvarez,” a quiet voice said.

  Again. Beckerman began taking deep breaths. “Look, there’s no sense in you calling me. I told you I would phone just as soon as I had anything good to report.”

  “You haven’t phoned, though.”

  “I’m still coming up short.”

  “Try harder, Beckerman.”

  “You don’t seem willing to realize that these things aren’t subject to conscious control. They’re dreams, remember. Can you predetermine your dreams? Of course not. So why do you think I can?”

  “The things I dream about aren’t sitting on the floor next to my bed when I wake up, either,” Alvarez said. “The way I dream has nothing to do with the way you dream. Mr. Apostolides is getting very impatient for his shield.”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “Give me an estimate. Two weeks? Three?”

  “How can I say? I try every night. I set my mind to it, last thing before I close my eyes, shield, shield, shield, shield. But I end up with different things instead. I can’t help it.”

  “Focus your attention better, then.”

  Beckerman’s forehead began to throb. “I’ve told you and I’ve told you: I could focus for a million years and I still wouldn’t be able to dream anything to order. Especially a complicated thing like that. The dream products are random creations of my subconscious mind. Why won’t you understand that?”

  “Tell your subconscious mind to be less random. Mr. Apostolides paid a fortune for that shield, and he loved it very much, he was tremendously proud of possessing it. He was extremely disappointed when it faded away.”

  “It lasted 16 months. I told you right at the outset it wasn’t good for more than a couple of years.”

  “Sixteen months isn’t a couple of years. He feels cheated.”

  “The estimates that I give people are never 100 percent accurate. They know that up front. And I’ve offered to refund—”

  “He doesn’t want a refund. This isn’t a question of the money. He wants the shield on his wall. The patriotic pride, the sheer joy of possession—money can’t replace that. He wants a new one, just like the old. He feels very strongly about that. Very, very strongly. You have caused him great personal grief by giving him such a frustrating experience.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beckerman said. “I want only to please my clients. He can have his pick of anything else that I—”

  “The shield,” said Alvarez ominously. “The shield and nothing but the shield.”

  “When and if I can.”

  “Two weeks, Beckerman.”

  “I simply can’t promise that.”

  “Two weeks. You have given Mr. Apostolides deep emotional pain, Beckerman, and he can be extremely unpleasant to people who create anguish for him. Believe me, he can.”

  “What are you telling me?” Beckerman demanded.

  But he was talking to a dead phone.

  The shield that Beckerman had made for Apostolides, had dreamed one humid spring night three years ago, was one of his supreme masterpieces, one of his two or three finest works. He regretted its evaporation even more, perhaps, than Apostolides did. But he couldn’t whip up another one, just like that, to replace it. He could only trust to luck, the random scoop of his dreaming mind. And meanwhile Alvarez was hounding him, chivying, bullying, fulminating, disturbing his peace of mind in a hundred different ways. Couldn’t he see that he was only making things worse?

  Apostolides was a shipping magnate—Greek, of course—and he was mixed up in a lot of things besides shipping. His name was on the Forbes list of international billionaires and his fingers in all sorts of pies. His main residence, the one where he had so proudly displayed Beckerman’s wondrous shield, was on a private island in Biscayne Bay back of Miami, but there were homes in London and Majorca and South Africa and Thailand and Caracas, too, and business offices in Geneva, the Cayman Islands, Budapest, Kuwait, Singapore and one or two other places. Beckerman had never actually met or spoken with him. Not many people ever did, apparently. The artist’s dealings with Apostolides had been conducted entirely through the medium of Alvarez, who was some sort of agent.

  Alvarez had tracked Beckerman down on the beach at the Halekulani in Waikiki, where he had gone for a week or two of tropical sunshine during one of San Diego’s rare spells of cool, wet winter weather. He was quietly sipping a daiquiri when Alvarez, a small smooth-faced man with rumpled sandy hair and a thin, graying goatee through which you could easily see his chin, came up to him and greeted him by name.

  Warily Beckerman admitted that he was who he was.

  “I have a commission for you,” Alvarez said.

  Beckerman disliked and distrusted him instantly. The little man’s eyes were troublesomely shifty and hard, and there was something weirdly incongruous, here on this sunny beach in 80 degree weather, about the fact that he was dressed in an elegant, closely cut Armani suit of some glossy gray-green fabric—jacket and tie, no less, probably the only necktie being worn anywhere in Hawaii that day. It made him look not only out of place but in some way menacing. But Beckerman, however, made it a rule never to turn down the prospect of new business out of hand. After all these years of making money by pulling works of art out of thin air, he remained perversely afraid that all that prosperity would someday vanish, fading back to its mysterious source just as his sculptures inevitably did.

  “I represent one of the world’s wealthiest men and greatest connoisseurs of art,” Alvarez said. “You would recognize his name immediately if I were to tell it to you,” which he proceeded almost immediately to do. Beckerman did indeed recognize the name of Pericles A
postolides, and he began to pay considerably more attention to Alvarez’s words. “Mr. Apostolides,” said Alvarez, “is, as perhaps you are aware, a student in the most intensely scholarly way of the heroic age of Greece, that is, the Mycenaean period, the time of the Trojan War. You may have heard of the Homeric theme park that he is constructing outside Nauplia, with its full-scale replica of Agamemnon’s Mycenae, and life-size virtual reality reenactments of the great moments of the Iliad and Odyssey, particularly the holographic simulations of Scylla and Charybdis and the blinding of Polyphemus, etc., etc.”

  Beckerman had heard of the project. He thought it was tacky. But he went on listening.

  Alvarez said, “Mr. Apostolides is aware of the quality of your work and has admired your splendid art in the collections of many of his friends. In recent months he was particularly keenly taken by the remarkable figure of a centaur in the possession of the Earl of Dorset and by the extraordinary Medusa owned by the Comte de Bourgogne. Mr. Apostolides has sent me here to inquire of you whether you would be willing to create something of a Homeric nature for him—not for the park, you understand, but for his personal and private gallery.”

  “Mr. Apostolides must understand,” said Beckerman, “that I’m unable to work specifically to order—that is, he can’t simply design a piece and expect me to execute it literally. My medium is dreams, dreams made tangible, and dreams are by their nature unpredictable things. I can attempt to create what he wants, and perhaps it will approximate what he has in mind, but I can make no guarantees of specific pieces.”

  “Understood.”

  “Furthermore, Mr. Apostolides should realize that my work is quite costly.”

  “That would hardly be a problem, Mr. Beckerman.”

  “And finally, is Mr. Apostolides aware that the things I make are inherently impermanent? They will last a year or two, perhaps five or six in some cases, but almost never any longer than that. A man with his appreciation of ancient history may be unhappy to find he has commissioned something that has hardly any more substance than—well, than a dream.”

  Furrows appeared in Alvarez’ smooth forehead.

  “Are you sure about that? Isn’t there any kind of preservative that can apply to particularly choice pieces?”

  “None whatever.”

  “Mr. Apostolides is a powerfully retentive man. He is a builder, a keeper. He does not sell the securities he invests in, he does not deaccession the works of art that he collects.”

  “In that case perhaps he should give this commission some further thought,” Beckerman said.

  “He very much wants a piece of yours comparable to those he saw in the collections of the Earl of Dorset and the Comte de Bourgogne.”

  “I would be extremely pleased to provide one. But the limitations on the durability of my work are not, I’m afraid, within my power to control.”

  “I will explain this to him,” said Alvarez, and then turned swiftly and walked away.

  He reappeared two nights later, while Beckerman was enjoying a peaceful solitary dinner, looking out over the moonlit Pacific, at the Halekulani’s elegant second-story open-air French restaurant. Taking a seat opposite Beckerman without being asked, Alvarez said, “How soon can you deliver?”

  Beckerman had had an unusually productive autumn, to the point where by late November he had thought he might need to be hospitalized for exhaustion and general debilitation. By now he had recovered most of his loss of weight and was beginning to feel healthy again, but it had not been his plan to go back to work until the summer.

  “July?” he said.

  “Sooner,” said Alvarez.

  “I can’t. I simply can’t.”

  Alvarez named a price.

  Beckerman, concealing his astonishment with some effort, said, “That would be quite adequate. But even so: My work is very demanding—physically demanding is what I mean, with effects on my health—and I’m not ready just now to produce anything new, especially of the quality that Mr. Apostolides undoubtedly expects.”

  Alvarez raised the offer by half.

  “I could manage something by May, perhaps,” said Beckerman. “No earlier.”

  “If the difficulty is that prior commissions are in the way, would some additional financial consideration persuade you to make changes in your working schedule?”

  “I have no other work waiting. The issue is entirely one of needing time to build up my strength.”

  “March?”

  “April 15 at the earliest,” Beckerman said.

  “We will expect it at that time.”

  “Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions?”

  “Fully. It is his hope that you will produce something that is unusually long-lived for him.”

  “I’ll certainly try.”

  “Will there be preliminary sketches for him to see?”

  Beckerman felt the tiniest tweak of uneasiness. “You just told me that Mr. Apostolides is fully aware of the conditions. One of the conditions, as I attempted to make clear before, is that I have no a priori ability to control the shape of the work that emerges, none at all. If he’s dissatisfied with what I produce, he will, of course, be under no obligation to purchase it. But I can’t give him anything like sketches.”

  “I see,” said Alvarez thoughtfully.

  “If he doesn’t entirely realize that at this point, please see to it that it is made totally clear to him?”

  “Of course,” said Alvarez.

  Which was the last that Beckerman heard or saw of Alvarez for some months. He spent ten more days in Honolulu, until he felt fit and rested; and then, tanned and relaxed and almost back up to his normal weight from the rich island cuisine, he returned to his studio in La Jolla and set about preparing himself for the Apostolides project.

  Something Homeric, the man had said. Very well. Beckerman steeped himself in Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iliad again, reading this translation and that, returning to the poems again and again until the wrath of Achilles and the homeward journey of Odysseus seemed to be more real to him than anything going on in the world he actually inhabited. He made no attempt at purposeful selection of design, and no effort at directing his subliminal consciousness. That would be pointless, useless, even counterproductive.

  After a while the dreams began. Not his special kind, not yet. Just ordinary dreams, anybody’s kind of dreams, but they were rooted, nearly all of them, in his Homeric readings. Images out of the two poems floated nightly through his mind, the faces of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Hector and Achilles, the loveliness of Helen and the tenderness of Andromache, the monsters and princesses encountered by Odysseus as he made his long way home, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors. Before long Beckerman knew that he was at the threshold of readiness to work. He could feel it building up in him, the sense of apprehension, the tingling in his fingertips and the tightness along his shoulders, an almost sexual tension that could find its release only in a tumultuous night of wild outpouring of artistic force. Beckerman pumped up his strength in anticipation of that night by doubling his intake of food, loading himself with milk shakes, ice cream, steak, mountains of pasta in heavy sauces, bread, potatoes, anything calorific that might give him some reserve of energy against the coming ordeal.

  And then he knew, getting into bed one night in the first week of April, that the time was at hand.

  In the morning, after some of the most turbulent effort he had ever put forth, the shield was next to his bed, a great gleaming half-dome of metal that seemed to be aglow with the fire of its own inner light.

  Beckerman recognized it instantly. There is no mistaking the shield of Achilles: Homer devotes many pages to a description of it, the five sturdy layers, the shining triple rim of dazzling metal, the splendid silver baldric, above all the extraordinary intricacy of the designs that the god Hephaestus had engraved upon its face when he fashioned that astonishing shield for the foremost of the Greek warriors.

  Not that Beckerman’s versi
on of the shield was a literal rendition of the one so lovingly depicted by Homer. He never could have duplicated every one of the myriad details. A poet might be able to describe in words what a god had forged in his smithy, but Beckerman was constrained by the finite limitations of the medium in which he worked, and the best he could do was something that approached in general outline the vast and complex thing Homer had imagined.

  Still, it was a remarkable job, a top-level piece, perhaps his best one ever. The earth, the sea and the sky were there in the center of the shield’s face, and the sun and the moon, and more than a suggestion of the major constellations. In the next ring were images of bustling cities, with tiny but carefully sketched figures acting out the events of municipal life, weddings and public meetings and a battle between armies whose generals were robed in gold. Outside that was a scene of farmers in their fields, and one of a landowner and his servants at a feast, and a vineyard and herds of golden cattle with horns of tin. Around everything, at the rim, ran the mighty stream of the all-encompassing ocean.

  He hadn’t shown everything that Homer had said was on the shield, but he had done plenty. Beckerman stared at the shield in awe and wonder, marveling that such a thing could have burst forth from his own sleeping mind in a single night. Surely it was the perfect thing for the Apostolides collection, well worth the staggering price and more, a masterpiece beyond even the billionaire’s own high expectations.

  He called Alvarez in Miami. “I’ve got it,” he said. “The shield of Achilles. Book XVIII, the Iliad.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Terrific. Fantastic. If I say so myself.”