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Rittenhouse Square

Lion Jaws

Electric in a navy pin-striped suit, a navy homburg, and a dazzling white silk scarf, he inked into icy Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, USA, shrouded by a gust of unnatural wind and terrific snow¾ materializing as if the invisible Cartoonist had quickly sketched him into a misty water-color scene of the Square—a curl of line here, a patch of color there, until the Work was satisfactorily done.

As the animated storm died down, the American founder and revolutionary glanced up from his paper—where he puzzled over the Futures and Options pages of Wm. J. O’Neil’s Investor’s Daily—peeped past his gold-rimmed glasses, and stared straight into the puss of a savage-clawed, bronze-toothed lion, its massive paw crushing the green neck of a coiled snake, its ferocious mouth baring canines that roared raw with fury.

"Grrrrr . . . ," the American growled, joking through his skepticism.

The enlightened ghost and the illegal snow—it had not snowed anywhere else in the Delaware Valley that eventful day but at the coordinates of that park bench—made just two unnatural phenomena that had burst upon the ghost-gray scene of this otherwise ordinary winter afternoon.

It was January 17, 1998, Dr. Benj. Franklin’s 292^nd birthday, the 222^nd year of the Nation’s founding.

Quick, scholarly, nobody’s dummy—a Senior Citizen without equal on planet Earth—Dr. Franklin thought he just might talk to it. He thought it might talk to him. Hell, it was worth a try: Stranger things had happened since his death. He folded the financial newspaper and eyed the magnificent lion—skeptical of its patina even at this safe distance.

"Zeus?" he inquired of the statue. "That you?"

It growled a little.

Smelling blood, the Founding Father advanced to its flank and slapped its magnificent face affectionately with his paper. Then he hooked his finger around one of its shiny, sharp canines, where a million brave citizens had entered its ferocious mouth and had rubbed off the green patina of time, buffing the metal and making it a bright bronze, as if the savage tooth were new. He slapped its howling jaw with his bare hand. He raised a finger. Don’t tread on me. Don’t. He growled a little as he studied—as he stalked—the billion-footed beast.

I’m out in the cold, and you’re hiding in a green metallic fiction, he thought, thinking it better to think his rebellious thoughts than to speak them. He thought he heard—thought he felt —the bronze lion quiver, breathe, and he slapped it affectionately. "If Earth goes, I go," he whispered, curling his nether lip. "I’m not antecedent to it as you Olympians are." Ordinarily, it did not bother him that he was not a god. But this was not that time. Today the mere thought of his annihilation disturbed him. Radical Annihilation! he called it. Like billions, Old Ben had gone to his death—settled into his death bed—with nothing more than a slim hope that a sweet heavenly afterlife awaited him. Like thousands—the Chosen, the Heroes—he had awakened to it with surprise. Now that he had lived it, the agony of losing it seemed too great to bear with equanimity.

Today, he lived as he had every day since his interview with CEO Zeus and GOD Inc.’s Executive Board: with the agony of understanding that this death would be final. That there was nothing after this afterlife. That there was no after afterlife after this afterlife. That this was it. It . . .

It was stupid talking to a bronze statue. He surveyed the scene and pretended nonchalance. He saw an upscale condominium, situated at the southwest angle of the square. It said the Dorchester. He whipped out his street map. He groused a bit. He grimaced a bit more. He deduced that this was Rittenhouse Square, not his Square, not Franklin Square where the Board said he’d materialize—though in the damp dead of a dreary Philadelphia winter he didn’t say anything about it.

He revolted.

Jamming his presidential-blue British umbrella into the hard Earth, he blasted "Zeus!" his voice booming as far as several blocks away.

He cringed at the volume.

Two black kids on black bikes decided, wisely, to steer further away from him than needed to assure safe passage north.

"They complain," he groused, dusting the sparkling snow from his broad shoulders. No innocent when it came to horrible thoughts, he shivered at the horrible thought that crossed his mind. He was thinking of such disasters as thunderbolts, tidal waves, earthquakes: indiscriminate violence that might be hurled at Americans anywhere—say, by the gods, especially those who had already decided they wanted to see the planet scorched and drowned—not necessarily in that order.

Once and for all, they had argued reasonably, take it before they nuke it to oblivion themselves. A simple supernova would do it, they had suggested.

The thought made him sick.

He donned his British virgin-wool overcoat and walked toward a dry, shallow, empty pool near the center of the Square. A southpaw, he’d been carrying his overcoat, folded neatly over his right forearm, since he’d left Mt. Olympus. He leveled his blue-velvet homburg and watched the dirt skittering about.

"They talk about the United States Government. They talk about We the People. Okay, I’ll give them that. I’ll concede to their point about The People. But Jesus Christ, they don’t get anything right. They don’t get the time, the place . . . the Philadelphia weather they don’t get right," he sighed, giving it up. "They think it’s snowing, so like a private, I’m dispatched into the trenches to fight a shit-blizzard. They think it’s my square," he roared, throwing out his big printer’s arms, as if that’d hold up as evidence that the Olympians were dead wrong.

The newly-appointed CEO of planet Earth—for a telling, eternal moment—stood with his arms extended, as in a mock crucifixion, and stared at the dusty, littered basin of the shallow, pale-green pool.

It was David Rittenhouse’s Square.

It irked him.

"I’m not in Franklin Square," he scowled, lowering his gigantic extended arms. "I’ve been away, and I know it. Christ," he scoffed, not expecting the Lord—whom he hadn’t talked to in ages anyway—to answer him at just that moment, "why? Why did they get it wrong? Big Shots!" he boomed, stooping hastily to avoid the bull-blast of his booming voice.

He scanned the mammoth square, peeping about to see if anybody had heard it. He wondered if GOD’s Executive Board had heard it. "I’m not back ten minutes—not ten!—and already I’m facing the Lion Jaws of Eternal Death," he whispered, thinking of the magnificent bronze statue. For all his respect for Zeus, he still feared—or was at least mildly apprehensive—that the Olympian might, in a moment of mad unrestrained passion, rescind his restraining order and permit the Board to carry out its threat to annihilate the planet. To annihilate him.

His street map showed that he had landed by the Dorchester a few miles southwest of Franklin Square.

Irritated, cold, he thought it best—whatever the outcome—not to offend the Olympians. Whether on their turf or on his, they wrote the rules. They could abandon him to empty Philadelphia walks and highways forever if they wanted. "It’s pretty empty . . . for a major American city . . . at noon . . . in the dead of winter. Funny," he observed, "I thought Philadelphia had more life in it. Maybe W.C. Fields had it right after all."

That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all, the chanting comic echoed in his brain.

Hard as granite, elegant Rittenhouse Square hung like a tombstone from his shaking heart. Like an empty mausoleum in winter, its bare trees and dry grasses blew dust into his ashen face and made him feel like Winter’s Death had kissed him.

"Where in Hell are you?" he muttered, complaining to the beautiful woman who had brought him back to Philadelphia in the first place¾ during the Nixon administration, when he and the goddess had seriously begun to date. "Either she’s late—or—" The skepticism of a good reporter, frozen like ice water in his veins, Franklin checked his digital-quartz wristwatch.

It had stopped. He blinked, but it didn’t help. "—the time is out of joint," he guessed.

His ghost-green eyes scanned the dead square. It looked like an empty theater hours before the audience had arrived. Like the early-morning hour before the first day’s first rehearsal. Like the unfinished quiet at the beginning of the season before the carpenter’s dust had been swept off the stage and the house made fresh and clean. It was eerie. Trees and shrubs, dead in the winter’s weak light. He felt weary and lonely before he had even begun. He felt chilly, too.

The deal crushed him. It was worse than life; worse than death. He was living outside of time. But what was worse, apparently: the galaxy had stalled with him in it and with nobody at the box office taking tickets. Everything—the square, the city, the planet—was vacant. I’m lost, he thought. He worried like mad. He worried about the "start up" phase of the Big Deal. He worried about the financing he’d need on Earth to establish . . . things . . . to establish, whatever it was he had to establish, to do . . . whatever it was he had to do. This clone of a lovely square, as dead in winter as solitary confinement, started to give him cabin fever: He began to hallucinate.

"What the Hell am I going to establish? I’m a printer! I trade in information."

He began to sweat: a clammy sweat that made him feel foul, unclean, guilty; then it struck him like bankruptcy that he did not yet have a decent plan. But he had always had a plan. He had a plan when nobody wanted one. He had a plan when nobody thought that anything had to be planned. "I’ve been away so long, away from business and government for so many years, that . . . the thought of firing up again makes me nauseous." He slipped a linen handkerchief out of his breast pocket and blotted his sweaty brow and sticky palms. He saw an unmistakable smear of fresh blood on the linen. But when he blinked, it vanished. He wished he hadn’t blinked. He felt his heart thumping so wildly, so irregularly, that he feared it’d seize up under the strain.

He had to sit somewhere.

If his existence had not depended on it, he might have given up this farce and gone for an invigorating swim in the sunny Mediterranean. Not unlike the American Revolution though—about which he’d observed, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately"—this galactic adventure had about it a simple, direct, life-and-death urgency: Either he succeeded, or the planet and its Heroes—living it up like Lords in the vaunted After World—would vanish from the cusp of the swirling Milky Way.

That’s what he had been told, though he knew it was dumb and even dangerous to believe in anything, especially in what the Olympians had said. Yet the idea that he and a few American patriots might find a simple way to reorganize the sick planet and turn it around—before the Titans’ and the Old Testament Prophets’ threatened hostile takeover and liquidation of its metal and mineral assets brought it to an inglorious end—had a mundane attraction for him: namely, it was a monumental challenge.

Thinking of the times that Homer, Hesiod, and other epic writers had written about the way the Olympians had indifferently and variously interfered in the simple affairs of Man—though, actually, he’d learned since his death, it was far less often than depicted in the old stories—he’d thought it best to add a NON-INTERFERENCE CLAUSE to his Letter of Agreement with the GOD Inc. Board. This clause firmly shut the door—he’d naively believed—on any madcap Olympians who might think it simply divine, deliciously diverting, to interfere with Earth at this time. Trouncing it just for fun!

Therefore, Benjamin knew better than to discount the gods; Murphy’s Law was enough to contend with.

Yet, simultaneously, the NON-INTERFERENCE CLAUSE had shrewdly opened the door for the goddess Athena to come back into his simple, barren life. His death. He had fond hopes that she’d join him, that she’d want to join him, once she learned from her magnanimous, unassailable father what GOD Inc. had decided. Especially once she learned what Ben’s fate would be if he should fail. That she’d want to join forces with him as she had done before in some heavy brainstorming.

Heavy passion, he grinned. That, too.

That she’d want him to succeed. That she’d make him. That she’d lay with him the groundwork for success.

Christ, where could they have left her? he wondered. Maybe she’s . . . not coming today . . . wild bitch that she is.

As CEO-designate of Earth, he wanted only her for the entire year¾ a one-woman Task Force. "They’ve lost her! They don’t know the streets of this City; Christ, I don’t know them." He chewed on his dry breath, feeling very uncomfortable—approaching the panic that he was suffocating—when the wind blew directly into his fair-complexioned face. "They’ve laid her down in Washington! They’ve—Or they’ve laid her down in Athens. That’s where—That’s where they’ve laid her," he groused.

He gagged, wondering if the wind—the smothering blast that blew directly into his gray-white face—this wild, bitchy spirit—without which you couldn’t breathe in the first place—were today trying to suffocate him.

Once, he began to turn blue. He had serious difficulty in catching his breath in the face of the cutting wind. But he butted his head down as a shield and walked straight into it¾ the mad animus. His hat helped. But he had greater difficulty and discomfort in adjusting the long white-silk scarf, which whipped madly about his face, tangled like the flag of permanent defeat, behaving as diabolically as if some Olympian wanted to strangle him. At times he looked positively ethereal. At times ageless.

After this assault—if that’s what it was—he looked a touch shabby: his clothing askew, the lines in his pale face deeper, darker, a touch more masculine, more malleable—appealing; not as aggressive as he had been a moment earlier. Just right. Thirsty, dry from the dead-driving wind, he desired nothing more than a glass of his favorite Madeira. "Maybe—just maybe—I’ll get lucky," he coughed. "Maybe she’ll bring it. I bet she’ll bring it chilled . . . direct from Mt. Olympus." He imagined the fine pleasure he’d have, tasting his first glass of the day.

"ATHENA? HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME!" he shouted. Nobody responded, so he dusted off his hands with a spirited flurry and determined to take a self-directed tour of the square. Good luck, Benjamin, he might have thought.

But didn’t.

Though not as naive as he was when he had visited President Richard Nixon at the White House, during his last Earth visit, the Old Patriot enjoyed the sights nonetheless. He liked twentieth-century man’s inventions and innovations. His bushy eyebrows rocketed when he saw a particularly good idea, one that he thought—given time and a different set of circumstances—he’d have thought up. Or one he had thought up. He enjoyed all kinds of things. Things that had changed. Things that hadn’t.

Things that had outlasted time.

Like a green tourist, he liked things. Things he recalled from his last trip to the United States. Manhole covers. He liked to watch the traffic lights—as wide-eyed as a little boy with his model trains, watching them stop and start, "obeying" the electronic roadside signals—that ripened from green to yellow to red, blossoming on thin, steel-gray stems. Things.

He liked the parade of swift black limousines, headed by a bullet-proof Lincoln Continental hearse, that slowly circled the Square.

"I’m getting Big Daddy one of those," he boasted.

There were other things he liked. The high-rise buildings that encircled the green square, rising majestically like ungodly, unearthly cliffs, cascading out of the winter’s oyster sky . . . but, best of all, the blinding splinter of light that glinted off of a jumbo-jet airliner that spirited its silver-gray body silently across the face of this sub-zero Philadelphia noon; suddenly, then, screaming like a dying bird from a ghostly paradise as its supersonic wings broke the sound barrier.

These things he saw, and these things he became. The thingness of things excited him. Humbled him. Things.

He coughed. The simple jumbo-jet made him nervous. Made him feel as if he, down here on Earth for good cause, belonged somewhere else too. That’s what Freud meant by a death wish, he thought, wishing he didn’t have to think about it. What’s death? the dead scientist joked. It’s never having to say you’re back. Uncomfortable, trembling from the biting cold, he crossed his big arms, hunched his big shoulders, and mocked a small, nervous laugh, feeling very evil about something very indescribable.

I’d better not think about it, he thought; I’ll think about it tomorrow.

Tiny scraps of dead branches and broken twigs skittered at his frozen feet as he bundled through the park. He thought of a time in the distant past when he had bravely—and pointlessly, he smirked—left his warm and comfortable print shop and trundled his wheelbarrow through the busy streets of the City, theatrically doing the work of an apprentice—who, because he was out sick, could not pick up the newsprint for that day.

"Mad," he mumbled.

He wanted to buy back that warmth now. Today. Who writes the Rules? Where’s the justice in this scheme of things? He had begun talking to himself again. Not a good sign.

Quick with January’s frost, winter’s bleak breath penetrated Ben's imported British overcoat and iced his brittle bones. "It’s brutally cold," he grumbled. He felt strangely naked, shivering on the concrete pavement in his frosted boots. Like his fat feet were icy bare.

"Terrible time of the year to be born," he shuddered. His coming to Philadelphia on his birthday did not seem like such a bright idea anymore. A cynical thought crossed his brow. "Maybe she caught the ActionNews weather forecast. Maybe she’ll come later this spring when it's warm. Maybe she can tell me something about Philadelphia weather that even I don’t know. Maybe I should have stayed home. Maybe . . . Maybe she can’t find a shop in Athens that stocks quilts . . . Or s-sleeping bags! . . . That sells them for winter coats," he scowled, a jumble of suppressed rage surfacing. "Maybe NONE of this makes sense."

He delivered this tirade while shivering madly and smacking his arms wildly. His actions had become mechanical. He had begun to feel hypnotized. As the minutes passed, though, and as March’s Lion had come roaring into the Square, there were days when—times when —the weather felt surprisingly brisk and invigorating.

He checked his gold digital-quartz wristwatch, his fat fingers stiff, his thick thumbs numb. Athena, GOD love her, a few months late, he thought. Time passed at the rate of one minute per Earth day: one minute to him, the dead; one Earth day to the living. He noted that sixty After World minutes—sixty Earth days—had passed since his birthday: two months had elapsed since he’d arrived in Rittenhouse Square. He blinked. Time flies, he thought. Thinking that a nice trope to work into Poor Richard’s Almanac, he took out a note pad and jotted it down. "Time . . . flies;" pleased with himself, he pocketed his pencil and smiled at nothing in particular.

He’d taken the Board’s advice. To take a timely tour of Philadelphia with Athena, to consult with¾ and not consort with¾ this one-woman Task Force, he had to have the Executive Board play with time a tad. He’d take it one minute at time, he'd agreed, the way Hades and Poseidon said they’d visited Earth. "We’ll do lunch," Athena said. "We’ll take a slice of time at noon. Quite¾in public, Benjamin," she stipulated. In six short hours¾ in 365 minutes¾ they’d sample a year’s diversity of noontime sights and sounds in the City of Brotherly Love. Think of it! Think of the compression! A synopsis of the entire year would jog by them at the rate of thirty frames a month. One one-minute frame a day. They’d go from one Philadelphia day at noon to the next Philadelphia day at noon; but between one of their minutes to the next, twenty-three hours fifty-nine had elapsed on Earth, minutes that they'd missed. Dizzying fun, thought Ben, but a narrow, noontime view of life in the Big City, he thought. He had negotiated to take a year in Philadelphia with Athena; they'd given him a year at their dizzying delight: one minute out of every day at noon. Ben and Athena didn't even have to think about it; it went better if they didn't. Looking up and finding a different cast of characters in the Square because for everybody else it was the next day could be highly disorienting. He thought about it: it began to make sense. He had negotiated to meet Athena in Franklin Square, his Square, after all; the Olympians¾ no doubt, out of perversity, he suspected¾ had gotten their coordinates mixed up: they'd dropped him off at Rittenhouse Square. So be it, he resigned. His face grew dark. A sad thought began to penetrate his lionesque skull: a thought he hadn't wanted to think. "When these guys shoot, they don't miss. They don't fuck around." He breathed heavily. "They get what they want; they get what they go after," he grumbled. "These guys don't lose. They'll promise you the world . . . ," he shook his head in grief, "but they always get . . . " They might be listening, he thought.

Shaken, he parked his bundled body on a bench, studied the Investor’s Daily, and watched the pigeons. Lonely, reading January’s old financial data, he smirked, shook the two-months-old newspaper . . . and shook his head as he calculated the date by adding the digital-quartz’ time to the newspaper’s out-of-date date line beneath the masthead. How many minutes? How many days?

It was the ides of March.

He had three-hundred-sixty-five minutes to spend with her; there were that many time slices dividing up the year. Six hours, five minutes. That’s it. Simply put, she’d be gone by 6:05 p.m., but it would be noon of his birthday a year later, January 17, 1999.

This baffled him.

Had the time really passed, he wondered, or was it an illusion created by the gods?

His previous, posthumous visits to the United States of America had been larks. He had dabbled in love, avoided politics—except for one blunder—and had studied science. Actually, Dr. Benj. Franklin had become a computer scientist—with a full ensemble of analytic and laboratory techniques—a hardware-design engineer and a software specialist who understood applications, HTML design, and marketing like a whiz kid. Like an amateur whiz kid. During his last U.S. visit, however, he had finally succumbed to temptation. He had blundered into national politics, to his present chagrin, and had assisted the Richard Milhouse Nixon's Committee to Reelect the President (affectionately, CREEP) to amass a few million dollars for Mr. Nixon’s War Chest, the campaign money he "invested" to win the election.

Briefly, then, what had the Old Boy done? He’d borrowed the U.S. Mint’s precious plates to print what he called his one-hundred-dollar bills, and he ran an unauthorized edition. Or Two. Good money! Legit! Then he took a powder.

Nixon didn’t know if he had dreamt it or hallucinated it. He’d be damned if he’d tell anybody about it. Seeing Abraham Lincoln walk the floors of the White House at midnight is one thing; it’s sick, but it’s patriotic. Seeing Benjamin Franklin drop a cool million into your lap is a horse of a different color.

It’s a bird of a different FEATHER, that’s what it is.

Ben didn’t stick around for the denouement. He thought that with Kissinger’s brains and his bucks, the president—and the Nation —couldn’t go anywhere but up. Besides, he had retired from politics and had only backed President Nixon because Voltaire (that cynical, French philosopher) and Machiavelli (that princely, Italian satirist) had suggested that he help out.

Had pestered him about it.

Skeptical, he began to suspect that somebody—or something—had fooled with the stiff March air. Had lightened it. Unbuttoning his handsome British coat, he thought he’d take a nice walk.

Savagely, winter’s gray light turned crimson, strange—and, Ben thought, lovely—as two ascending grace notes, backed by a throbbing chord, established the beat of the sensual Greek music. Z-dong! It plucked at Ben before he heard it: the erotic, trembling notes of that sensuous lament, "Never On Sunday," played at a seductively paced, stately provocative beat. "Oh, God!"

The miracle had begun.

He watched an alien wind, hurtling about the Square as if transporting a powerful force. Wind. Trimming the tree tops, skidding down lampposts and about snowy walks¾ as if its Olympian line of descent might scorch the Earth. Wind. As if the shrubbery, benches, walks, and trees were as sketchy and as transparent as it. As she! His chubby face in the wind, he had lost control of his presidential blue coat. His good Republican cloth coat whipped up and down and slapped about his battered face. He gasped. The universe had taken a great, deep breath, and in a single mind-boggling gasp that caught him by surprise, his anticipation -- his desire to see Athena -- had climaxed and sank to nothing. Like a throbbing coitus interruptus. "God, no!" he groaned in the hiatus, thinking it quite lost. Thinking everything quite lost. Then, just as suddenly, the Heavens opened up. Thunder rolled in the Heavens. Clouds tumbled in the treetops' branches like mad, tumultuous seas. "Oh, God!" The dismal, foggy sky brightened to a pale, unearthly gray; then, finally, in a single thunderclap, the Heavens split open like a ripe cantaloupe; and Ben saw, flashing about the leafy Square, the sizzling, brilliance of a crashing, multi-orgasmic chord. The Holy Guest descended. "Oh!" he groaned.

Not yet a woman, nor yet a three-dimensional character, the figure appeared¾ or existed¾ as a few, jittery, indecipherable lines: animated, fascinating curves, squiggly in the snowy Square. On a green bench, Athena powdered her nose, penciled her eye brows, painted her lips, and sketched her lovely body into foggy Rittenhouse Square . . . tugging toughly at her lovely coat, adjusting an earring, unaware, then mildly embarrassed, that she had been caught at her vanity. That she had espied—if not precisely a peeping Tom—at least a blinking Ben. Blushing, she became happy at the sight of him—who, from her point of view existed, too, as a few indecipherable lines, a series of crude, jagged scribbles—until he, too, erupted into her three-dimensional space; and, simultaneously, then, he too emerged from out of nowhere into her realm. But she, coming with a fiercely hot force far greater than his—her indecipherable lines and curves reverberating with passion and flair de la Vogue—blushed with hot pastels and swatches of cloth and eyelashes that eventually made her into a living, pulsating Greek goddess.

Ben began to sweat.

"SAINTS, PRESERVE US!" he prayed, only slightly joking, imitating an Irish brogue. Awed by the unearthly beauty of the Olympian goddess, he adjusted his coat, slicked back his thinning gray hair, and smiled broadly and nervously. He looked like a million bucks, distinguished enough for a goddess . . . any goddess, living or dead. Or imagined! Yet he could not have felt any more humble than he did at this historic moment, greeting this lovely lady, this Old Love.

"Athena," the patriot said, engaging her with slightly open arms, more to take her hands than to embrace her body.

"Benjamin." She grasped his hands.

"How’ve you been?"

"Busy as a bitch," she slurred. Suddenly, she tugged a small, black, nylon tote bag by its drawstring cord.

"Yes," said Ben.

He bowed his balding head, embarrassed that his project had brought on the extra work.

"I don’t mind." She squeezed his arm. "Really."

"How’s your father?"

"You mean when he’s not whoring around with common bitches and holy cows? Satisfactorily, I guess. He’s getting old."

"Aren’t we all?" suggested Ben.

"Speak for yourself, Benjamin." She started to walk away, then she turned back and winked. "I’m in my prime," she boasted, her contralto voice husky with sexuality and suggestion.

Benjamin blushed.

She took his arm and tugged him along with her, bringing him a tad off balance. At first he followed with an aw, shucks, little-boy walk, letting her play her tough, big-sister game. Later, the way they walked together down the winding paths of Rittenhouse Square—chatting, tugging at one another, laughing—one might have guessed that they had once been lovers; that, perhaps, they could be so again.

They strolled about the Square, braving winter’s late assault and talking about Philadelphia’s possibilities; the nasty season began to lighten up. Their conversation, though, contrary to the weather, had taken a serious turn.

"It’s serious, Benjamin?"

"It’s serious."

They walked arm in arm for a moment. Athena stopped at an intersection of paths where a few stone benches half-encircled a small bronze statue of a goat, stained green with patina. She chuckled at it, as if the modest arrangement were a parody—or a microcosm, done sincerely and honorably—of the traditional plan of a Greek tragic theater, honoring the great god Dionysus. In the orchestra of her imagination, she heard the goat bleating his tragic song at the sacrificial alter of an ancient amphitheater, opening a festival of plays by opening his purple veins.

"Tell me what happened at the Board of Directors meeting," she said, studying the statue, trembling.

"Your father . . . ," Benjamin hesitated.

"Yes. My father. Go on. My father . . . ," Athena urged.

"Athena, you must know how difficult this is. I hold your father in such high esteem."

"Of course you hold him in high esteem. You have no choice! Nobody has. Go on!"

"Your father heard the petitions of Board members . . . and big, influential shareholders. They want him to liquidate Earth. They’re cute. They still use the old words. Liquidate. They don’t want a flood, though. They don’t want Noah. They want assets. They want Earth fused into galactic gold. They want natural diamonds. They want your father to detonate a supernova in the neighborhood . . . and bring an end to it. They think we’ve had enough time to exercise the Lord’s smoke-and-mirrors option . . ."

"That’s what they call it?" she smirked.

"They think Jesus died too young. That he should’ve hung around a tad longer. That he should’ve come back like gangbusters and taken charge of the Holy Roman Empire. That he shouldn’t have left the whole ball of wax to Peter and Paul. They say he’s lazy. That he delegates too much authority. That he shouldn’t have left everything to faith, followers—and fiction. They blame him for the Bible. They blame him for the debauchery of wild interpretations and the plethora of hokum healers. They say he encouraged it." He checked her gray eyes; he wondered what she thought. Then he blasted away. "They think we’ve neglected our common-sense. They think we’ve debauched our reason. They think we’ve sold out on our brains. They think we’ve lost the bullish initiative. They think we’ve lost the evolutionary edge we’ve had for billions of years. They think porpoises are ahead of us."

"What’s Father think?" she asked.

"About porpoises?"

Athena just glared at him and folded her arms. In a moment she would have begun tapping her foot.

"Think? What do I know? Nothing. Except that, left to our own devices, we’d probably in good time obliterate Earth in a spectacular, nuclear blast and save him the bother, the political fallout. Honest. I think he’d rather that we played it out."

"The original plan?"

"The original plan."

"I see."

"I think he’s on our side."

"I don’t," she said. "He’s sidestepping the issue. He’s covering his ass. His Holy Ass."

"Who’s not?"

Benjamin took a moment to sit on one of the stone benches while Athena, assessing the politics of the situation, slunk to the front of the bronze goat.

"Tell me. Who formed the Executive Board?"

"Your father! Zeus!"

"No. I mean, who’s on it? Who are the goddamn directors?"

"The big three. Poseidon, Hades, and your father. Men with a profound interest in preserving Earth."

Athena knelt, patted the snout of the bronze goat and winked at Benjamin, who looked quite defeated. "Cheer up, pops! Don’t you see what he’s done? By choosing Poseidon, who has a reigning interest in preserving the sea, and Hades, who has a reigning interest in preserving the underworld, Father has formed the Executive Board in your favor," the goddess explained.

Tottering, awkwardly finding her balance in her tight, black-knit dress and unsteady, high heels, she raised herself up to her full height. And she began to perform.

"How can you say ‘Nothing!’ He said a mouthful before you even showed up at the meeting. Christ! He could have convened a Special Board of Twenty-four Ghouls to decide the issue."

"Right."

"Why you?" she asked.

"What?"

"Why you? Father could have chosen anybody."

"The Board. Collectively. It decided that Earth be assigned its own CEO, like before. Its own Chief Executive Officer. That that one be chosen to present the brief, the defense. Like they did with Jesus of Nazareth."

"They chose you!" she said proudly.

"They chose me. Tell me. What made you say ‘He’s covering his ass’ . . . that he’s side-stepping the issue . . ."

"Benjamin, if he didn’t want to play politics with the renegade Titans and Old Testament Prophets, he’d have silenced them with a single thunderbolt. Or, better yet, he’d have made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Instead, what’s he do? He forms a Tribunal at the High Olympian Court, includes himself and his two brothers, the Sea and the Underworld, assuring that responsibility for any decisions—whether they go right or wrong—are fully shared among them. He keeps it in the family."

Benjamin looked grim.

"Benjamin. Sure he wants you to succeed," the goddess said. "He likes you. But, Benjamin, baby, tell me. Do I have to tell you that business is business?"

"It’s business," he said dully, gently rubbing his lips with a forefinger. "This is only the beginning. There’s a shit load of work to get done down here."

"Oh, Benjamin," said the goddess, darting to him—eager to sit by the Founding Father’s side. "Things will turn out just fine. Just you wait and see." Affectionately, she grabbed him by the scruff of his neck to cheer him up and, burying her face in his collar, kissed him with a wild passion. "I’m sure of it. I’ll help! Scout’s Honor!" she said, holding up three fingers.

She steamed like that hot movie actress; and he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

Christ, he thought, as she snuggled and gently bit his earlobe, she’s gotta be playing the greatest hot actress alive. You bet your life on it. According to Ben’s calculations, there couldn’t be more than one woman in a millennium with her statistics. Her sultry beauty. Her sexy voice. Her heavy breathing. Her passionate sighs. Her tremendous acting talent. I’d bet my last dollar that—that this Kathleen Turner is my Thene.

"Ben, you’re sweet. I’ll get you anybody you want. I’ll scout the frigging universe," she swore. "I’ll dig them up out of Hades. You’re so sweet, Ben."

The Old Patriot felt unusually warm.

"I’ll need an army to get it done," he groaned, happy at the thought that Thene was behind him.

"Anything," she promised. "Any . . ."

Buds sprouted on trees and bushes. Toddlers in pink and blue sweaters and tiny white sneakers stumbled, their quick steps hastening beside their pregnant mothers, who, wearing wrinkled, beige raincoats and print smocks—their hair pinned up in rollers, camouflaged with vibrantly-colored scarves—pushed their empty strollers past pigeons, down familiar, winding paths, bucking the concrete paving, broken and raised in places by renegade roots. Young citizens, boys and girls, played games of catch and tag on the wild grass, tumbling effortlessly on top of one another, understanding well the most profitable way to pass the time on a lazy, sunny Holy Day in April.

"Name anybody," she challenged.

"I’ll want Thomas," he said, slipping out of his navy overcoat and folding it beside him.

"Mr. Jefferson?"

"Mr. Jefferson . . ."

"Done," she said, snapping her fingers.

" . . . and Mr. Madison."

"MR. JAMES MADISON," she called, as if her directive should be carried out immediately.

Both ducked to avoid the reverberating echo.

Everybody in Rittenhouse Square spun about. Each believed that he or she had found the source of that unearthly sound. Each believed that it had come from everywhere. Each pointed in every conceivable direction. Though, at first, two children, clutching brilliant, white volley balls, stared in awe directly at them. Ben and Athena smiled; the goddess stooped to talk.

But their mothers excused their rudeness and dragged them away from The Source.

Athena shrugged.

"What about Dolley?" she challenged, ignoring the public’s insatiable interest in noise.

"Dolley, too."

"Great! I like Dolley," she admitted.

"Me, too," he confessed.

"Though not for the same reason, I take it," she accused. "Benjamin, when are you going to grow up?"

The Founding Father blushed, grinning like a kid at the thought of the voluptuous Mrs. Madison; while Athena, who could not be more beautiful, more intriguing, more compassionate, more brilliant, slowly unbuttoned her black coat and, blotting the perspiration from her moist lip, let the coat fall loosely about her waist where she sat.

"Never, I hope," said Ben, his big heart throbbing at the added stimulus provided by this public strip tease. "Not . . . Not if growing up means giving up," he blushed.

Spring came, and Rittenhouse Square thrived on it, bringing the pale City to life and Athena to her feet.

"Let’s walk," she said. "Let’s watch the people."

They decided to leave their hats, their coats, and the dated financial newspaper on the curved amphitheater-like concrete bench behind the bronze goat. Benjamin slipped out of his suit jacket, too, and folded it neatly over his arm while Athena stuffed her black nylon sleeping bag coat—reversing to ginger polyester-and-cotton —into the black nylon tote bag that she’d been twirling; the tote, which came with the Norma Kamali coat, was designed to hold it, and anyone could tell just how fond she was of the outfit.

"Think it’s wise to leave them?" Benjamin asked the stunning, powerful Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, Vanquisher of Armies, Protector of Legendary Heroes.

"They wouldn’t dare," she said.

"Let us go then," he said, a smile brimming on his lips at the simple thought of how she’d deal with somebody who was crazy enough to touch her things, "you and I . . ."

They walked and talked all spring. They had so many things to catch up on: the Peloponnesian War, the rise of the Roman Church, the fall of the Roman Empire, the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire, the ascendancy of science and technology, the birth of the United States of America. They traded facts, opinions, judgments, and inferences on these and many other topics. They debated the virtue of this or that development. They constructed an alternative history of the world, one developed from Greek science and politics and Roman engineering and law, one that the disruption brought about by the dominance of the Medieval Church had delayed for a thousand years.

"Where does that take us, Benjamin?"

"Nowhere. Right here," he said hoarsely, fighting back a lump in his throat.

Athena looked away as if busy with something.

They circled back to the bronze goat, its metallic golden patina glowing as green as the surrounding grass. The patriot squatted next to the statue of the baby goat and brushed his fingers across its green-golden mane. His eyes were moist. It was easy to see just how important the fate of mankind had become to him. The thought that it could be annihilated filled him with dread.

"Tell me about your plans," Athena said imperially, forgetting for a moment her feelings for the old patriot.

"My—My plans?" Ben knitted his brows.

Unusually agile, his first-rate mind had begun to drift among the wreckage of human philosophical thought. Blinded by the sun, his fingers numb, lost in the imagery of a nebulous death, he drew blanks. His mind had bleached out. The dizzy bottom of his brain had dropped out. Earth screamed as he astutely avoided the apocalyptic horror of Athena’s simple sentence. It had become a death sentence.

He had difficulty with his collar.

Nothingness. A vast annihilation, he thought. What if my sinking into a dull, annihilating death were a simpler, fairer fate for my dead bones? I’d not be thinking now about my death, nor thinking of the agony of Man and his rusty ambitions and corroded triumphs. Not thinking of these things is not as bad as thinking of them. But thinking of their eternal loss is worse than ignorance or simple death.

If the Ancients have their way with Zeus, he grimaced, Earth will be scorched and its oceans boiled. The Great Atlantic and Pacific will become as hot and dusty as the bottom of a dry, faulty, whistling tea kettle. The Great Heartland of this country will be baked to a curling crisp, and Earth’s lush greenery and purple mountains’ majesty will be charred and become thick with soot, until the unhappy, blackened globe whirls coldly about in empty silence, and dies, convulsing and wobbling in its spastic orbit like a lost, microscopic, storm-blown cinder. Lost, lifeless. Lost.

Shocked at the Hell he was living in, the goddess rushed with great urgency to the sacrificial goat. Like a saint, she knelt opposite the Great Founding Father, supporting him, comforting him in his dumb agony, which, though it had taken place in the briefest moment of his thoughts, she had heard entirely and understood fully. Oh, my god, she gulped, he’s lost it. Suppressing a groan, she grasped his hands securely, lovingly, and firmly clasped them between her boobies and squeezed them.

"Benjamin," she probed, fearing the worst, "what have you learned? What did Father tell you?"

"Everything."

"Oh, my God! He’s told you everything!"

"Everything."

"Benjamin, darling, this is terrible. It’s not fair!" she said, losing her husky voice, sounding as if she had just contracted a bad case of laryngitis.

Ben brushed a tear from her ruddy cheek.

"Man wasn’t born to bear such terrible truths," she said. "Why did he tell you? Why?"

"Because it’s that serious, I guess."

"Nothing’s that serious. Nothing. Jesus Christ! Annihilation," she sobbed. "Jesus Christ, Ben! How can you . . . kneel there as if nothing’s happened?"

"We learn to live with it. Not everybody on Earth believes in an afterlife, and of those that do, I don’t know of anybody who believes it’s like this."

"Bullshit. Bullshit on both counts."

"Atheists don’t."

"Benjamin, be serious. Atheists have big problems of their own. What are you going to do?"

Ben loosened his striped navy tie and tugged at the collar of his rumpled shirt. He was sweating like a printer’s apprentice . . . wiping his broad brow with the back of his big hand as if he had printer’s ink on his thick fingers. Squinting, he gazed at the spinning noontime sun and felt queasy, dizzy, as if about to tumble from the heat . . . or collapse from the strain. He felt as if he were dehydrating. Then he knelt on one knee and smiled through his sadness at the flowers blossoming in the lovely, landscaped garden at his feet, at the buds in the trees, at the birds that chirped and fluttered about all this beauty, and at the lovely Athena through his big green eyes.

Tears streamed down her cheeks, and she lost her husky voice entirely; it whistled like a broken tea kettle as she tried to explain how terrible she felt about his having to bear such an earthly burden, condemned to live with such black facts for the rest of his unnatural afterlife.

"Tell me," she gasped, grappling his hands closer to hers across the back of the uncomplaining bronze goat.

"Anything," he said, smiling to ease her pain.

"What are you going to do?"

He swallowed hard. Forced down a lump in his throat. Thought about the size of the assignment. Years ago, when working with the GOP, the political front he had organized for the Galactic Olympian Party, he had to do in four years what Jesus of Nazareth had not done in two thousand.

"Work my balls off," he said.

A stupefied crowd had begun to form; a minute later it had vanished; two minutes later Philadelphia Daily News photographers with a nose for news had whiffed the story; four minutes later Philadelphia’s finest had to hold back the curious and the scared; just five minutes later, after five Earth days had passed, the Greek goddess and the American patriot had become aware of the furor they had caused by appearing and disappearing in five successive moments. A cautious, Philadelphia policeman, who happened to be facing the crowd when the ghost and the goddess had miraculously appeared, ignored the crowd’s collective cry, turned, casually approached the pair, and warned them about loitering and unlicensed public performances.

Actually, for this rendezvous, Benjamin had not at all intended to loiter or to draw notice to himself or his guest. He had hoped, instead, to give the Grecian goddess a feel for the weather that one experienced in the Delaware Valley. Thus, selecting noon as the happiest time of day, he had wanted to use a technique that he’d heard about but that only the gods had been permitted to use, namely, to steal a series of time slices, using Giga, the Galactic Inc. Giga Analyzer, and zip or RAM Athena through a typical year in Philadelphia, as Poseidon, Greek god of Horses and the Sea, had suggested.

What typical? What? Ben thought. Drenched with perspiration, he fully loosened his smart tie and unbuttoned his stiff collar. Like a distinguished refugee from a Finnish sauna, he bore the crucifixion of Philadelphia’s suffocating, sweltering heat privately, like a gentleman. He smiled, mopped his brow, genially greeted passers-by, and, generally, bore the summer’s brutal heat with a twinkle in his sizzling eye. Actually, he had completely forgotten what a dizzy ordeal an ordinary, Philadelphia summer could be . . . for the uninitiated, and, therefore, he was embarrassed by Athena’s discomfort.

The changing face of the crowd gasped when Ben and Athena suddenly appeared or reappeared . . .

"DAMN! D’JYA SEE IT? DEY ZAPPED RIGHT IN!"

. . . at the stroke of noon. It created enough of a disturbance for the policeman to disburse them and the crowd for disturbing the peace. Or what was left of it.

"EH! TAKE A WALK! THERE AIN’T NO PUBLIC, THEATRICAL PERFORMANCES PERMITTED HERE, UNLESS YOU GOT A LICENSE. THIS AIN’T NO THE-A-TER," the policeman barked.

"We have to stop meeting this way," Ben said.

They collected their belongings, and in a minute they were gone: Athena, grabbing her tote bag, stuffed with her sleeping-bag coat; Ben, slipping on his suit jacket and adjusting his gray-striped navy tie, since, unexpectedly, the late summer weather had turned uncharacteristically chilly that very day.

"Oh, my God. I can’t believe he told you, Benjamin," she whispered in a low and scratchy voice.

"Thinking about it’s not fun," said Ben.

"How can you bear it? How can you think of it? It’s so dismal! You’re doomed! You know it! You know you’re going to die," she gasped, uttering the next fatal lines in a whimper, "that death is never having to say . . . you’re back."

Ben sniggered.

"I thought I’d learned it before," he said. "I thought I had it licked."

"Impossible," said the goddess.

"It’s harder this time," agreed the Sage, his fat smooth hands clenched behind his back as they strolled.

"This is it," she said. "This death is final. If you can’t steal this good good Earth from the judgment and greed of the Olympian Tribunal—"

"SIT."

"What? Where?"

"SIT! The Select Investigative Tribunal."

"Oh, the Tribunal. Right. Well, if you can’t do it, Benjamin, dear," she joked, toughening her spirit in the face of Ben’s wit, "I’ll lose the best friend a girl ever had."

Ben patted her hand, which she had curled, girlishly, into the curve of his big printer’s arm.

"Athena!" he exclaimed, noticing that the leaves were beginning to turn a beautiful shade of bronze. "Look . . ."

"Lovely. Just lovely."

"No, listen," he corrected. Taking her arms into his hands, he gazed into her platinum-gray eyes. "I’m going to need your assistance. Your power, your prestige, your . . ." He began to sweat as she smirked. "What."

Enjoying Ben’s momentary confusion about her questioning wit, she raised a skeptical brow.

"YOUR WISDOM, TOO," he corrected.

The goddess grinned.

"I’m good. But I’m not a god. I can’t make Earth do tricks with time like this. How am I supposed to demonstrate to the Tribunal that Man’s worth diddle squat? Thene, if I had a plan, I’d need supernatural powers to pull it off. Or a lifetime with a printing press," he lied, thinking she didn’t know that he wanted to be president of the United States.

"You don’t have a plan?" she teased.

"I HAVE A PLAN! I—" the Founding Father contended. "What? I had a plan two hundred years ago. I always have a plan." Slowly, his mind drifted back to a misty-eyed moment in history and to fond memories that carried him further down the walk.

Athena strolled behind him; she had slipped off her uncomfortable heels and was walking barefoot.

"I thought that that plan was a pretty good plan," he argued, firing the information back at the stunning goddess.

She grabbed his big arm and puckered.

"The Declaration of Independence! The U.S. Constitution! Jesus Christ! Talk about plans!" he exclaimed, swiping a pretty, Irish-lace handkerchief—gift of a lady by the name of O’Toole—across his brow and about his neck. "Jesus Christ—Himself!—told me he liked them! Those are plans you don’t just sneeze at. Understand?"

"Today’s today," Athena said.

Without a touch of jealousy, she fingered the handkerchief—making Ben nervous—and finished the job.

"Had a talk with the Old Man," he said. "He told me: ‘Anything you want, it’s yours. Anything. You name it.’ Christ, I think, he’s writing me a blank check. What the fuck! So I tell him, ‘GODFATHER, I WANT HEROES! I want them from all times and places. I don’t give a damn if they’re fat, skinny; young, old; male, female; black, white, yellow, brown, or raspberry. Heroes! They’ll do what they did before they died, goddamn it. That’ll do it.’ Or GOD’s gonna bring down the curtain on this farce. ‘I want Heroes, goddamn it,’ I tell him. ‘Done,’ he says. ‘You want Heroes? You’ll get Heroes. Let’s begin the Apocalypse on time,’ he grins. He’s scrapping for a fight; he wants to go the distance with the Old Testament Prophets! The Titan Takeover Team! Then, Thene, like he does, he screws up his god-gray eyes like he’s thinking something smart and bad. ‘Dead Heroes,’ he cracks, grinning. It made me sick, but I had to laugh."

He looked low and miserable. There was something else bothering him that he had to spill.

"Wanna know what?" he goaded, his Philadelphia accent surfacing under the strain of the narrative. "Zeus. Hit me with a goddamn Oath: I’m under oath not to talk about it. It’s making me sick. I can’t even talk about it. It’s killing me. Honest! Tell you what. I’m not supposed to do this. But I’ll tell you about it."

"Thanks a million."

"Honest. I swear on Madison’s grave." He raised his right hand, then, noticing what he’d done, he dropped it and quickly raised his left. "And you know I don’t swear: I can’t breathe a friggin’ word about it to nobody. Not to them; not to nobody. He doesn’t want nobody to know about it. Heroes," he scoffed. "He treats them like children. As if they couldn’t take it. As if they didn’t go through it before. On Earth! As if they weren’t born in the bowels of Earth’s graves. Christ! Like children he treats them. He doesn’t want them to know that if they fail, they’ll die. This time forever. Imagine! I can’t tell them that. Mr. Authority says I’m not permitted. That they, Earth’s Heroes—who’ve been invited to the biggest surprise party since Eve dropped by the Garden of Eden—will forever cease to be: This time eternally. That that’s where Dr. Franklin Meets Mr. Death!"

Athena frowned.

"Who would have thought it, Athena? I didn’t. We’re joined to Earth as surely as the living are. Take Earth away, take everything. Take plump Ben, and take away the world," the satirist quipped, thinking of his great friend, Falstaff.

"How will you use them?"

"The Heroes? First I’ll work with Thomas and James."

"What about Dolley?"

"—and Dolley," Ben didn’t hesitate to say. "Just to lay the groundwork. Here in Philadelphia."

"Right. Then you don’t need me here," she decided, tugging at her black, body-knit dress.

"Right," he said. But he feared the worst.

"It’s the weather, Ben. It’s sticky."

"Right. I’ll organize a political action unit with the original gang. The Founders."

"You should be damned proud that he selected you and not Karl Marx or What’s-his-name Lenin."

"Vladimir Ilyich."

"That one. Crazy, damned idealist."

"I am."

"Then what? What then?"

"I don’t know."

"Benjamin, dear, admit it: You don’t have a plan."

Bitch, he thought.

It came without warning.

Thene tugged at her drawstring tote, shivering and cursing every beast with fur until she had liberated her ginger Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat. She pulled it on and shuddered. Thank heaven! she sighed. Happy that she had brought it, she flashed a smile at Ben. With wide channel quilting, a stand up collar, and puffy, contrasting cuffs, the coat made her feel like a goddess. She could snuggle up in it. Best of all, she could reverse it. Fiber filled, it came in ginger polyester-and-cotton sheeting, reversing to black nylon. Earlier, she had worn it black. When the weather changed, she stuffed it into its own black nylon tote. The goddess was having fun with it. Having fun transforming it. Stuffed into its thick folds, ginger-side out, she felt toasty warm; she tugged on her black pumps and her black-knit gloves, and, pressing her coat to her precious body, crossed her arms like a brave nun or a high priestess at prayer.

Leaves littered the aging Rittenhouse Square, changing it moment by moment into a lush bronze-golden, rust-burning Hades—as if the gods and goddesses themselves had shoveled tons of toasted gold shavings down to Earth from the heights of Mt. Olympus.

"You don’t have a frigging idea of what you’re going to do. That’s the way I see it."

Ben stopped at a bench where somebody had left a copy of an old, Special Issue of Time. It choked him up. "We the People," it said, and when Ben opened the underleaf, the cover continued with, "to . . . secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution." The colorful cover, crowded with the faces of dozens of Americans, showed one man wearing a brown soft-felt hat and a pair of handcuffs; he stood in front of a policeman and hid his face in his fists. Ben glanced at the faces for a moment; Athena peeked over his shoulder at them. Together, they sat and shared the issue.

They were captivated by Roger Rosenblatt’s lead article, "Words on Pieces of Paper." Following Ben’s finger across the printed page, they heard the author reading it; that’s the way Athena liked to read.

"I like that," Athena said.

"Talk about a fable!" Ben said, thinking of the pagan After World that he and the Heroes had found.

The Special Issue inspired them. Time was on their side, they suspected, and Ben slapped the issue more than once, affectionately, to show that he’d back it. That he’d give it Life, taking on the challenge that GOD Inc. had hurled at him.

"I have a child, Athena."

"Oh?"

"A son," he reminisced.

The stunning Greek goddess shot a wild frightened look at him, then, deliberately, she averted her face as if from the intolerable, telling heat of a fiery furnace.

"I sired him posthumously."

Athena cleared a tickle in her throat.

"Illegitimately."

"Oh!" she said, feigning shock while her voice cracked and quivered with tension.

"That year we spent in Washington, D.C. when—when I helped Mr. Nixon—CREEP, actually—with the campaign. It was thirty years ago today . . ."

"Yes," she trembled.

Ben sat silently, watching a sparrow dance about the brim of his blue homburg on the bench; it hopped off and on the stately hat as if playing Musical Hats—or Chairs—with an imaginary friend. Ben wrinkled a wry smile at the tyke’s agility.

"Tough little guy," he said.

Athena searched through her pockets as if she needed a cigarette. "What—What happened to your son?" she asked with difficulty, not expecting him to notice the strain in her voice.

"I don’t know," said Ben. "Why?"

"Oh, nothing. I guess I was thinking—" She found one, bent out of shape in a crushed, nearly-empty pack of Lucky Strike. She lit it with some difficulty. "I guess I was thinking of the boy’s mother," she said, her voice thinning to a high whisper. She inhaled deeply on the bent cigarette. "That flower child," she exhaled, trembling. She feigned a smile, but it didn’t count because Benjamin didn’t see it; he had bowed his head in shame.

"Greek," she teased.

"Yes," Ben admitted. "No, Roman."

"Beautiful."

"Beautiful," Ben confessed.

"Under age! Minor! Barely pubescent!"

Ben scowled.

"Don’t you think I should be curious? The moment I turned my back, you—you hustled her off to The Watergate," she accused, raising her haughty chin and nostrils into a glare.

"Who told you that?"

"Spies."

Thinking that Olympians could very well have spies at The Watergate, Ben slouched down.

"Was she yours? One of your priestesses?"

"HAH," Athena laughed.

They sat, separated by Time and Ben’s homburg. She tapped her hot cigarette; he pursed his dry lips.

"I couldn’t find you," he said. "I spent the night walking the streets. It rained. I waited on the Capitol steps. I sat there. I thought it was a little game. A girlish game. A joke. One minute you were there. We were laughing. The next, you were gone. I had turned away, and in that . . . vast expanse of empty, Capitol steps, you had vanished. It was cold. I called your name. I waited. I sat there. I thought I’d never see you again." Ben’s imagination began to run wild with wondering. His face showed the strain of that night. It told the story of his grief. "Where did you go?"

Athena was silent.

"Why did you go?"

"Curiosity," she said. A cynical grin flashed about her lips as if the joke, whatever it was, had twisted about, or as if events, whatever they were, had turned against her.

"Curiosity," he said unimpressed.

"Love," she challenged, serving it up deliciously, fighting the irony that Fate had fashioned for her.

"Was it becoming too dangerous for goddess and man . . . legitimately to love?" asked Ben, thinking that there might have been an Olympian injunction against them.

"No," Athena said quietly.

Ben shifted his weight on the bench and studied her. He gazed at her askance with a note of sadness and compassion. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he was curious. He thought he understood what had brought her back to him after all these years: She wanted to help him with a project that her father had an interest in. But he didn’t understand why she had disappeared so suddenly so many years before in Washington, D.C., where for a fall season in the early seventies they had been casual tourists and serious lovers.

"What, then?" he asked.

She wrung her hands for a moment then turned desperately to grab his chubby fist.

"It was I," she confessed.

"That explains it," he shrugged.

"Seriously, Ben. That we might have something—later—a better life—later—in eternity."

"This is eternity," said Ben, pointing to the pavement.

"I was in love," she whispered. "First time. Can you understand that? I felt like a little girl in your arms. Damn it, Ben. I’d never been a little girl. I’d never had the chance. Not the way I was conceived. Christ," she choked up, "don’t . . . don’t forget that I’m a freak. Me! Athena! I was born a woman; not a babe, but an adult. Christ, Ben, if that’s not weird enough, my father gave birth to me. Think of it, Ben. Motherless. Conceived in the imagination¾ and born out of the brains¾ of Zeus. The Big Guy! Out of his hoary head! Not easy, Ben, when drop the truth on you. HA! I’d never been a little girl. Oh, Ben, it was thrilling! Exciting!" She looked askance. "I loved you, Ben. I loved being your girl; I’d do it again, darling. I’d do it again. I felt things with you I’d never felt before; things I’d never imagined . . ."

Ben stared at her, his lip trembling, his love for her stronger than it had ever been. He kissed her hands.

". . . things . . . I haven’t felt since."

"I love you."

"Honest, Ben. Don’t deny me that."

He felt a strangeness touch him. He felt magical as he stared into her goddess-gray eyes. Then a stranger strangeness touched him. He thought he’d begun to lose it. While he couldn’t explain it, neither could he relinquish it. He grappled with it. This strangeness. It touched his skin. Made it prickly. He stared at Athena as if she had become¾ someone else¾ Not a stranger, exactly, but . . . As if . . . something familiar about her Olympian strangeness had become stranger yet. Images flashed before him. Familiar faces, strange eyes; weak, fading memories; thoughts of long ago.

What was it?

Then a blizzard of dazzling white images crossed his mind with a thought¾ It was you!¾ too incredible to think, too bizarre to believe. Images of their days together in the Nation’s Capitol that fall and that fateful night in October blazed before his green eyes in a montage of striking scenes, all superimposed on a fresh and lovely young girl’s smile—the child Athena, the nonexistent girl-goddess—dazzling, bright, lovely springtime images; idyllic with apple blossoms in her autumn hair; puckish at the Washington Monument, the Greco-Roman girl, ecstatic, excitedly waving to somebody. Excitedly waving to him just out of sight. Just . . . out of . . .

Oh, my god. The girl!

Athena thought his thoughts. Touched his sleeve. Through big tears, she smiled a sunny smile at her Ben. She had waited for this moment for years, and now she was glad that it had come, glad that Ben had found it out.

"It was you," he said.

"Yes." She touched a tear on his cheek. She smiled.

Ben grabbed at his heart. It felt like it was ballooning, like it was about to burst. He grimaced. He frowned like an unhappy clown that had just dropped its jubilant mask. "ATHENA!" he roared.

"I loved you, Ben."

"I SHOULD’VE KNOWN!" he groaned.

"How could you?"

"MY LITTLE GREEK GIRL! MY MINI!" he bawled.

"I couldn’t tell you."

"IT WAS YOU!"

"It had gone too far. It was too late," she explained with as much compassion as she could muster for this unfaithful lover.

"I LOVED YOU!" he cried.

Athena glared at him, seizing an opportunity to bring this farce to an expeditious end.

"What about the girl?" she grilled.

"IT WAS YOU!"

She glared at him with gray eyes that could kill a man at a hundred paces.

"THE GIRL!" she snarled.

"I LOVED HER, TOO!" he said, amazed at his predicament.

"Right," she said.

"I’d’ve loved her a lot more if I’d known it was you. I’d’ve stayed home once in while."

"It was lonely, Ben."

"Wuddya want? You had the kid," he said chauvinistically, trying to win something.

That autumn in D.C., he’d thought their love had grown so strong that she’d needed time to collect her thoughts. Time to recuperate from him. His size. That this Earth Hero was one Hero who was just too big for her. That that was why she had left him so suddenly at the Capitol steps that rainy night. This typical male thinking, however, had now been superseded by something a tad more sophisticated. He thought now that he understood. He thought that she’d been testing his faithfulness. He thought—at bottom—that she was only jealous, or, perhaps, guilty, because she had been unable to match his passion. Actually, the truth lay elsewhere, quite unavailable to him, lost to him . . . at a quantum leap in an alien dimension:

Athena had wanted a child.

Thoughtlessly, blurry-eyed, Benjamin tried to touch her hand but blindly burned his finger on her cigarette. He jerked his hand away as if a startling truth had burned him.

"OUCH!"

"Stupid," she said, kissing it. "Tell me about your son. Everything you know."

"I saw him once, not so long ago," said Ben.

"Saw him? Where?" she asked awkwardly.

"It was a dream."

"He was a goodly boy," said Athena.

"I can’t believe that it was you," Ben wrung his hands and rocked on the bench. "That you’re Mini."

"Want to test me? Let’s match some bedroom secrets?"

"No," he frowned.

"Things you like to do!" she winked.

"NO!" he blared, averting his eyes.

"If you did, then you could verify that I am who I am."

"ABSOLUTELY NOT!"

"You must have done some funny things with that girl. Tell me, wasn’t she a minor?"

"What? With that body?"

Athena laughed out loud without a trace of modesty, enjoying Ben’s embarrassment, tugging her ginger-colored sleeping bag coat tightly about her shapely body.

"Darling, I want to thank you. Minerva wants to thank you. Your dear Little Mini."

"Mini! The name the Romans gave you!"

Athena smiled at the stupid simplicity of the extrapolation of names and at the stupid simplicity of Benjamin’s delight. Then, feeling stiff, she stretched out on the park bench and laid her head in his generous lap. Lovingly, she brushed the gray hairs tumbling about his chubby neck and tucked them behind his ear.

"Yes, darling. You taught me what it meant to be human. Taught me what it meant be a girl. I owe you one," she said.

Ben took her floating hand and caressed it.

"The last time I saw the little tyke was when he left for Valley Forge Military Academy. I . . . I don’t think I saw him after that," he reminisced.

"WHAT?"

"I don’t think I saw him after that."

Athena sprang up.

"What do you MEAN, you don’t THINK you saw him AFTER that?"

"You know damn well what I mean; I explained it in the letter."

"WHAT letter?" she challenged.

"What letter. MY ‘DEAR JOHN’ LETTER TO YOU."

"What about MY letter?"

"WHAT letter?

"What letter. MY ‘DEAR JOHN’ LETTER TO YOU."

By this time they were standing nose to nose, battling toe to toe for a spark of light in the infernal darkness, squaring it off eyeball to eyeball as only serious lovers can.

"Oh, Christ," she collapsed. "Don’t you see what happened? Don’t you see what we did? We abandoned him on the same day. BEN! I LEFT HIM WITH YOU!"

Ben glared down at her.

"YOU’RE THE MOTHER!" he shouted, pointing.

Exhausted, Ben sat, too, throwing his hefty body into the bench as if rocking it on impact might settle the argument.

"You never got my letter," he charged, crossing his arms.

"HA!" Athena scorned. "What about MINE?"

Ben chuckled; Athena, too.

Toughing it out, they wept. They shrugged through their moist eyes and choked chuckling throats and played it tough.

"What about the boy?" she charged.

"What about the boy?"

"What happened to the boy?"

It was getting worse. Oh, god! Worried sick, they looked at each other and began to turn pale with fright. Suddenly, spasmodically, they grabbed at each other’s trembling hands for support and security.

Ben thought he was going to faint. He grabbed at his chest and groaned Athena’s name while tasting a mouthful of dust.

"BENJAMIN!"

"I left him a trust fund," he gasped.

"I left him the condo in the city—the suite."

"Alone?"

"I LEFT HIM WITH YOU!" she shouted.

"Then he’s living at The Benjamin Franklin House," Benj. Franklin concluded.

"How the Hell do I know?" Athena said. "That was . . . TWENTY-FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO."

"Eighteen. What about Aristotle?"

"Aristotle?"

He strangled his lace handkerchief; "The boy’s tutor."

"I left him too," she said strangely. "I left the entire staff with him. With you! Tutor, valet, chauffeur, chef—nanny, the three maids—"

"Maggie, too?"

Athena glared at Ben.

"I only asked!" he said defensively. "Jesus Christ! We caught them naked in the Jacuzzi."

"They were six!"

At first Ben seemed crushed by this argument, then he rallied. "What’s that supposed to mean? They’ll go twice as far when they’re twelve. Three times as far when they’re eighteen!" he ejaculated. "WHAT’LL THEY BE DOING WHEN THEY’RE—"

"ENOUGH!" the goddess commanded, crouching, hunching over and rocking, shielding her ears with her trembling hands. Then she shot up. "Look who’s talking!" she scowled. "Mr. Promiscuous in the flesh. Tell me, Dr. Franklin, when did you ruin your first girl? For that matter, when did you ruin your last one?"

" . . . when did you ruin your last one?" Thene accused the promiscuous ghost, not a minor indictment, considering the source.

At precisely this moment, an attractive, elderly couple passed, and, overhearing Thene, shook their gray heads at Ben. However, when the happy, silver-haired woman, wearing a brightly-colored, flowery-print dress and swinging a handy yellow umbrella, turned to look back, she was plainly shocked and somewhat scared: the young woman and the elderly gentleman on the bench had vanished. Walking arm-in-arm, she tugged at her tweedy husband and said something. He turned, slipped off his gray-plaid cap, and scratched his head. His wife tugged him back when he went to examine the empty bench and to investigate further the fleeting vision. Hastily, they scooted down the path and left the park, thinking it better not to hang around.

Naturally, the explanation was quite simple. Another day had passed for the fighting spirits, trading barbs at Rittenhouse Square. Athena roared with laughter at Ben’s embarrassment; he sat respectfully silent, wisely not challenging the goddess when her fashionable armor flashed in the glinting sun.

They laughed; they walked. They had a lot to talk about, and they were worldly-wise enough not seriously to assign blame nor to expect quick, easy solutions to simple problems.

They talked about the kid.

They talked about the weather and darted, once, into a gazebo to escape a sudden thunderstorm; thinking fast, Ben had to drag Athena away from the hasty "shelter" that she had sought under a cluster of tall trees.

"They like lightning," Ben explained.

"Father wouldn’t dare," Athena said. Nonetheless, the goddess was pale with fright at the thought that Zeus might absentmindedly hurl one of his thunderbolts at a tree under which she happened to stand for a moment’s protection.

"He’s done it before," Ben smiled.

The gazebo was a small lavender-and-beige guard house, a hexagon with windows on all six sides; it pressed the two wet spirits together so closely that the aged patriot began to steam.

"Yes, darling," she said, wiping away a swatch of wet hair from her gray, Aegean eyes, "but not when I’m there. Christ’s sake, Benjamin, I’m his daughter. That has to mean something." Shivering from the dampness, she snuggled into Ben’s big shoulder. "I’m the big girl that sprang out of his head at birth," she said weakly; then she began to act tough, as if making an appeal on the strength of that heritage; "wearing a helmet, lance, and the Aegis! Jesus Christ, Benjamin, I’m his immaculate conception!"

The weather had turned humid, sticky, and the lovers had begun to sweat like mushrooms in the hot guardhouse.

"Let’s tour the neighborhood," Benjamin said.

Briefly, these two legends left the park, stopping once to examine two large, empty urns that stood on pedestals on either side of the southeastern gate, across the street from the Barclay. Together, hand in hand, they walked the sidewalk that encircled the Square. They had walked and talked from the brisk noon of an April spring to the steamy noon of an August fall; in Philadelphia, as anybody who has lived there can attest, the steamy humidity in the third quarter of the year can be worse than bloody murder.

"It’s not hot, Benjamin. It’s sticky."

"It’s the humidity."

"That’s what I said, I think."

"Sorry."

"Don’t get touchy about it. It’s my nerves. I’m not used to this disgusting weather."

Benjamin mopped his neck and brow.

"Why don’t you change it?" she scoffed.

"It’ll change in a minute."

They had about six hours to spend in Philadelphia, time enough to turn the Olympian dead against the City for nothing else if not for its weather, time accumulated as three-hundred-sixty-five dragging minutes, the first minute of the afternoon of every day.

"Hungry?" she asked.

Benjamin patted his tummy. "Let’s wait until winter; we’ll kill two birds with one stone."

Athena giggled.

"What’s so funny?" he asked, defending his remark.

Thinking of the figure of speech and of the ridiculous figure of the big man defending it, she laughed, paused to explain something to Ben, and, gasping, lost control of herself and doubled up.

"Oh, Benjamin! I’m sorry!" she begged, burying her teary eyes in his white shirt.

Ben loosened his broad-striped, blue-and-gray necktie and unbuttoned his collar as she stifled a laugh.

"Did you think of that—" she gasped "—all by yourself? Birds?" She giggled. "Stones?"

"One stone!" Ben commanded.

Athena shrieked with laughter and stuck one finger high into the sticky air.

"One stone!" she cried.

As the weather began to cool and the summer flowers and shrubs began to die, Athena felt less sticky; the noontime hours approximated the climate of Athens, her namesake city in her timeless, beautiful, cool, Mediterranean Greece, and, finally, she found it easier to talk business and to stick to her task.

"We can’t go anywhere, Thene, where we’d have to stay. If we ordered dinner, we’d disappear in a minute and scare the wits out of hostesses, waiters . . . Or frustrate them. We wouldn’t be there when they brought the dinner."

"That’s right!"

"But we’d be back the next day."

"They’d kill us," Athena observed.

"They wouldn’t serve us."

"They wouldn’t take our dinner order."

"They wouldn’t take it a second time."

"If they did, we’d be back the next day, though, same time, same station, wondering where our dinner was."

"They’d kill us," Benjamin observed.

Magically, their belongings went with them, moment by moment, scaring the wits out of anybody who happened to see them materialize and de-materialize. One thief fled when he waited a moment too long to snatch her purse; it vanished in front of him, making him doubt the validity of his senses. Another thief vanished off the face of the earth when he picked it up at an inopportune time. Simply, wherever they left their belongings, they found them safe and sound the next day. The next minute.

"Let’s go," said the goddess.

They stood.

Winding down the serpentine walks of Rittenhouse Square, Benjamin plowed his black wing-tipped shoes through ankle-deep drifts of rust- and yellow-colored leaves that autumn had strewn into his path, as passionate as a young boy on a big date.

Athena, gently bumping his buns as they walked, wrapped her arms snugly about her toasty-warm body. It felt good, she thought, rocking her body side-to-side as if she were rocking her baby to sleep. She began to sing a nursery rhyme, nearly wordless except for the words "Mama" and "mocking bird." She mocked it, lulling herself into a trance . . . making up gibberish as she went along. It brought a wholesome smile to Ben’s face . . . as if he remembered Mini’s singing it to their infant child years ago. It choked him up, too; he brushed a renegade tear from his eye and wrapped an arm tightly around the beautiful Greek goddess as they walked.

A few steps ahead, from a bench where he sat stooped, mechanically feeding two pigeons his stale popcorn, a disheveled, young man gazed sadly, apprehensively, up¾ up at the couple.

Ben stopped, jolting Athena to a halt.

"That’s Woody Allen," he whispered.

"The actor?"

"The filmmaker! My favorite satirist!"

"Oh," she said, taking a longer look at him. "Oh!" she gasped, biting her knuckles. She had seen something in his worn, ravaged face that surprised her . . . something that she feared. However, she felt frustrated because Benjamin had left her side and had dashed to greet the great young man. Before she could stop him.

"WOODY!"

The pigeon man jolted back.

Relentless, Ben brightened a bit and accosted him with an enthusiasm that could only be matched by ABCNews White House Correspondent Sam Donaldson greeting President Reagan. He whipped out a yellow note pad and a black Cross pen and fumbled the paraphernalia in his face.

The pigeon man spilled his popcorn—scaring off the pigeons—pushed back his fragile gold-rimmed glasses with a dirty, trembling middle finger, and stiffened like wire. "NO!" he grieved. "I WON’T SIGN," He held up his grimy hands and pressed his bony back against the green bench. He didn’t want to sign his name to anything.

"I think your movies are fantastic, my son!" the great Benj. Franklin told him. "This?—This is for my crippled wife. AND MY SON," he chortled, urging him to autograph the notebook.

The stranger shrank from it as from a Death Warrant.

"Oh, my god!" Her tearful face averted from the scene, Athena prayed a good distance away, casting her platinum-gray eyes to the special provinces of Mt. Olympus. "Oh, my god!"

"MY SON," Ben continued.

Thinking him nuts, the pigeon man backed off, skittering along the bench until he dropped off and hit the ground. Athena spun about, a prisoner of her supernatural sentience and preternatural love; the pigeon man scrambled to his feet and tossed his bag of popcorn at them, kicking the dust like a royal thoroughbred. Athena lost it: Her Wisdom and calm abandoned her; and she, too, started after the pigeon man. "Oh, my God. That’s my son! My son!" she screamed. "Oh, Benjamin!"

The boy panicked. Hearing her, seeing him, he hopped a black stripped-down bike that he found propped against a sycamore tree and started peddling down the winding lane, wobbling at first, then gaining strength and disappearing into the mist like a twelve-year-old. He couldn’t understand why a fat madman and total stranger wanted his autograph. Why any living being on Earth should deliberately mistake him for Woody Allen, something which nobody had done since those days, Christ—just before his parents had abandoned him—at the Valley Forge Military Academy, where his classmates¾ older, tougher, bigger¾ had teased him about it. Why, finally, a strange, beautiful woman should cry out in agony for him!

Him, a miserable stranger, a nobody! Her, a professional woman, a somebody! Unable to restrain the archetypical, motherly instinct in her passionate bosom? Yes! But a somebody!

Hearing Athena cry out "Oh, my god! My son!" Benjamin, quite gymnastically, executed a double double take. He thought she’d lost her marbles. Did she actually think she was Woody Allen’s Jewish mother? Was he actually Greek? Was this her interpretation of Edward Albee’s fun and games? However, when he saw the searing pain and blistering truth etched into her suffering face, the strangest thing happened to him. He did not doubt it. He believed! He was utterly convinced. He had seen the Face of Truth, and he believed. He raised his printer’s arms in supplication, brought them smashing down to shield his horrified face, blanched at the lost look on Athena’s face—exposing, thereby, his Mask of Tragedy—and saw, unhappily, that the pigeon boy wasn’t Woody.

That the pigeon boy was his.

"Lucky," he cried.

After all these years, he was surprised at his daring in spontaneously calling out the kid’s name. But he did not want to arouse the suspicion of simple citizens, who wondered, legitimately, what planet these people had come from¾ since they weren’t there, literally—a moment ago. It didn’t make sense to him. It was too farcical for him to believe that their lost, abandoned son had just happened to be there just when they just happened to be talking about him. But he believed so implicitly in Athena, and she¾ the mother, after all¾ was so thoroughly convinced that the pigeon boy was their lost child, that he got caught up in her belief and, don’tcha know, spontaneously called out the kid’s nickname. He wanted to help Athena bring him back; but now he¾ and, perhaps, she—had made a living, public spectacle of their private lives. Benjamin shook his fists at the sky. "YOUR FATHER, GOD LOVE HIM," he growled, biting off his bitter words.

"Benjamin!" she warned.

"Is your father behind this?" he whispered scurrilously.

"How do I know?"

"How did you recognize him?"

"WHO DO YOU THINK I AM?" she blasted incredulously, doubting the brainpower of anybody who doubted hers.

"Why didn’t you stop him?"

"I want him freely, Benjamin. I’m not a slave master."

"My god, he’s alive!"

"He’d be better off dead," she observed, turning her head slightly to note where he had peddled to and stowed the stolen bike.

"Where is he? Do you see him?"

"Yes."

"Is he okay?"

She shrugged. "He stole the bike. He’s hocking it."

"Christ. He’s broke. He’s wasted his inheritance."

"No. The executors wasted it; it pisses him off. He’s wishing he’d had a chance to invest it. It’s tomorrow. He’s home," she said, frowning. "It’s filthy."

Ben winced.

"He’s a scutz," she said.

"Athena, what are we going to do?"

"Don’t you have an idea?"

"Yes!"

"I thought so."

"I’ve a great idea," he said.

"Oh, Christ."

Ben grinned a tad lecherously.

"No, the other one," she commanded. "THE OTHER ONE!"

"AH!"

"Right, that one."

"Where’d I get it?"

"Never mind," she said. "Some people are brighter when they’re unconscious."

Ben grinned.

"I can’t stay," she continued.

"DON’T LEAVE ME!"

"I don’t mean now, silly. I mean when you . . . execute your mission . . . when you . . . finally . . . get Lucky."

It began to snow.

"Listen," she said, "it has to be his idea; that, or I swear¾ I won’t have anything to do with it. Understand, lover boy?"

"Understood."

Their boots made tracks in the light snow; it grew chilly.

"Before I go, I’ll search his brain for the facts of his miserable life, then I’ll turn everything over to you."

"Thanks."

"Understand, they’ll be things as he saw them . . . as he understood them. They’ll be distorted."

"Biased," Ben said.

"Fucked up."

"Why not get the truth?" Ben pressed.

"What truth?"

"Understood."

"Whose truth? Haven’t you read Heisenberg? Einstein? I thought you were at least a good reporter."

"Right."

"That’s the best we have: his version of things. At least it’s a version. It’s a start."

"I’ll get into his mind," said Ben.

"No, he’ll get into yours. If you got into his, you’d change it; you’d be able to change him. Ben, I WON’T have it."

"Won’t he change mine?"

"You’re a friggin’ steel drum, Benjamin. Besides, he’s too weak; in his condition, he couldn’t convince you of anything. Make him strong," she winked. "Make him strong; then you’ll have to worry."

"But I’ve got to make him strong; I’ve no choice."

"That’s your problem."

"Athena," said Ben, scolding her for what sounded like toughness.

"I’m sorry, Ben. But we’ve got a shit load of work to do, or GOD’s going to turn this planet into a parking lot."

"I think I’ve got it," he said.

"I trusted you once," she said, "and you left us. Him. I didn’t think twice of what I’d done. I’d left my son with the Great American," she smirked. "Oh, Benjamin," she weakened, changing her tone from scorn to vulnerability, like a drunken goddess, "I have to trust you again. Oh, Benjamin, darling, tell me you’ll do it. Tell me you’ll dedicate your life, your death, YOUR HONOR"¾ she began to hyperventilate¾ "to making our blessed son the best goddamn president imaginable."

Benjamin froze.

"This time, goddamn it, I’ll play nursemaid to both of you—and to the United States," she said. She said this not as an afterthought but as if she had been thinking about it for a while and felt better about doing it this way. "This time I’ll keep in touch." She held up three fingers. "Scout’s Honor," she grinned.

Benjamin had a sty or a twitch in his eye that affected his hearing: it totally fouled his concentration. He thought he heard her say "president."

Lucky Stiff for president?

Without warning or pity, a ghastly, blinding gust of swirling snow battered Rittenhouse Square and its Olympian guests. In a single day, a single treacherous moment, the simple damp cold of a Philadelphia winter had degenerated into a blizzard of wet, blinding ice-crystals. Trees, bushes, bent under the weight of this weird storm. Walks, benches, piled high with snow, made it difficult for Benjamin and Thene to sit or stroll. It slammed down on them, whipping their tough coats wildly in the dense air and blackening the dark sky like midnight in a Gothic horror movie.

Trembling, chilled by the passion of the moment, Athena touched the tears that streaked her cheeks.

Thinking, wrong-headedly, that she had been chilled by the snow, Ben shuddered at the miserable, biting wind. Not noticing her tears, however, he blindly commiserated with the Mediterranean goddess: He thought that she had simply brushed a snowflake from her frosted lashes.

At times like these, when it appeared to him that she was vulnerable, he was most vulnerable to her Olympian desire. "If you think his running the country will save it and the planet, too, go for it," she suggested.

Though he didn’t know where the thought originated, it had crossed his mind that he might groom the kid. But for what, he couldn’t say. Inexplicably, it appealed to him that he’d marry the kid to politics. Or set him up in business. That’s it, he thought. Business first, politics second. The idea was so absurd, so alien to the way he felt, that he wanted to ignore it. But it nagged at him, and he couldn’t. The kid probably has a history of failure in Philadelphia that’d follow him like a vulture in any stump imaginable, he argued. Christ! He’d have to be Mr. Clean to win an election today. Thomas Jefferson couldn’t win one today: He couldn’t explain to the American people or to the Yellow Press his erotic attachment to "Dusky Sally" Hemmings. Ben smirked, thinking of Thomas’ affection for his beautiful slave girl, the seventeen-year-old mother of Tom, their mulatto son¾ who could "pass" for his double¾ and for several of their Rainbow Tribe of beautiful children.

He imagined the bad publicity. And grinned. He imagined the nasty headlines. And grinned. He imagined the filthy mudslingers trying to diminish Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. And scoffed and grinned. The satirist in him had gained the upper hand. What a coup it would be to bring it off, he chuckled. To get the kid elected to something! He’d be mighty proud. Eventually, the pragmatist prevailed and ignored the idea as Romantic and absurd. Marrying Lucky to politics is daffy. DAFFY! he reasoned, snapping a twig.

Yet, with Athena behind him, Lucky could do just about anything he damn-well desired, and maybe a few things he didn’t desire, too. Things that would have shocked him and the Old Patriot as deeply as the incest in an ancient Greek tragedy. Or as deeply as a Sophoclean trilogy.

There you go again! thought Ben, mocking his Authorial boldness, sporting a "presidential" twinkle in his eye. That’s the trick. His appointment as CEO of planet Earth didn’t have quite the RING that he had wanted; it didn’t have quite the IRONY that he had sought. He’d rather be Mr. President.

CHRISTOS!" Athena swore, using the Greek word for Messiah, "Tell me, who better than you to back the kid? You’ll manage his campaign. It’ll be business as usual," she quipped. "Darling . . ."

Ben glared.

"Oh, what the Hell! Don’t get sloppy on me, Ben," she challenged. "The United States means business."

Damn, he thought, fuck the United States. What about me? What about my friggin’ plans? He bit down hard on his fat lower lip. "Goddamn it, Thene," he blurted, "I want to be president of the United States. That’s what The Presidential Plan is all about. That’s what this assignment is all about." He felt that he had lost it. That he was the patsy in this Olympian charade. That Zeus had played him for a chump.

"Do you want to know what I think, Mr. President?" Athena brightened. "I think you’ve blown your Hidden Agenda."

Ben was shocked at the character of his own mind. Yes, it was essentially revolutionary, but this was mad. This thing about Lucky was a brainstorming oddity that had never passed his lips. Too bold to utter. Too mad to think. Too absurd to believe. This was something Athena couldn’t be serious about.

"I’m serious, Benjamin."

"They don’t make presidents in log cabins anymore."

"Right. They make them in mom-and-pop drug stores."

"That was Richard Nixon! He was rare! Even I supported him for president!"

"Don’t be a schmuck."

"Thene, if I thought it¾ if," he pointed up¾ "I still didn’t mean it! Honest! How can you expect me to educate a kid like that. Didn’t you see how he’s turned out. He’s a loser. He’s a bum. He’s living in filth. Who the fuck’s gonna vote for somebody who’s living in filth?"

"Buy him a house!"

"I’m broke!"

"Print some money! Do I have to tell you everything?"

"My heart’s not in it," said Ben. "There’s others I’d rather support. There’s Mario Cuomo!"

"Benjamin, give the kid a break, already, why don’t you?"

"I wouldn’t vote for him."

"Benjamin! It was your idea!"

"It was a dumb idea."

"I didn’t know you were capable of having dumb ideas."

"What about the turkey?"

"You wanted it for the National bird."

"Right."

"Instead of the Bald Eagle."

"Right."

"That was a dumb idea."

"See! What’d I tell you? Running my kid for president is no better than running that fucking bird. Honest to God!" he said, raising his left hand as if taking an oath. "I don’t have any luck with sons. Legitimate or not. Don’t forget, that other one was a traitor. He spent time in jail during the Revolution."

"Benjamin, he was an honorable man. He was Governor of New Jersey, for Christ’s Sake."

"Appointed by the Crown!"

"Loyal to the King!"

"Born in the U.S.A!"

"A British subject!"

"A traitor! A turncoat! A limey!"

"Benjamin, give me a break. We don’t have an eternity to do it," she said, taking his frozen gloves into her warm mittens. "We’ve got a couple of years! Tops! Father said, ‘Bring back Authority! The old Established Truths!’ That . . . Or he won’t be able to save the fuzz on our butts. Goddamn it, Ben: I’ll lose you. I’ll never see you again. It . . . It’ll kill me."

"You? Tell me what’s it like."

"Death? Who the fuck knows? Who the Christ can bear it?"

"Me. I’m used to it."

"Thanks! Boys and girls are born to think of death. To think of nothingness. I’m not human, Ben."

"It’s not so bad."

"Nobody’ll ever see you again. Nobody’ll ever know you existed. There won’t be anybody on Earth to know anything."

"There’s you."

"It’ll kill me, Ben. I swear it will."

The sleet swirling about Ben’s face made him look dead already. His rosy cheeks had turned a sickly blue.

Athena wept.

Benjamin thought about his ancient death. Thought about his death bed and his simple final moments. Recalled that he had a picture of the Day of Judgment taken from the garret and placed where he could see it from his bed. Thought about how easy it was in 1790 for him to come to terms with it. Then to survive it! Now the thought of succumbing to it appalled him. Why? Because then it had seemed so final. Who had survived it? Who had lived to tell about it? Lazarus? Jesus? The rest was pure conjecture, and so it was dismissed as so much wishful thinking. Who could have imagined that Heaven was eternal Earth?

Earth eternal Heaven. Eternal Hell.

If he had determined to do battle with mankind, to bring Earth to a standard far beyond the possibility of criticism of the Titans and Old Testament Prophets, it was not because he, along with countless other Heroes, had been denied the finality of death. Nor because he was altruistic. It was because he had learned something that they had not: what Zeus had told him: what Zeus had forbidden him to breathe a word about to the Heroes or to anybody, living or dead: that an annihilated Earth automatically annihilated them, obliterated them.

This tiny time-warp had changed things. Utterly. It had obliterated Hope. It had brought death to the Heroes beyond the grave. It had brought it down to Earth, down to the time-worn image of eternal sleep.

It was all very confusing.

Life is easier to dump, thought Ben. There the living are prepared for death; here the dead are not. Earth’s Heroes can’t imagine it. They think the iron chains of death are the cotton threads of dreams. Illusions. They think they’ve tricked it once, and that’s the end of it. They don’t know. At the end, it came suddenly, stealing away the magic of their brains and breath; a moment later, they were exhilarated to find that it had left them burnished. Entire. Liberated from the rotting cells of mortal life. They’ve no experience with death; none. They don’t know about it. Nor do they think about it. They haven’t thought about it since their time on Earth when they thought they were mortal. Thought they were living and dying. Then, they were obsessed with it. They sanctified it. They worried about it. They ate it and drank it. They digested it with the morning paper and the evening news. Now they’ve buried it. They haven’t thought about any aspect of it for ages. The reality of it. The dignity of it. The importance of it. They think they are above it. They think they live beyond it. They have an elitist’s distance about it. It doesn’t exist for them. Nor do they think about the Common Dead. They mean nothing to them. Sadly, unfortunately¾ stupidly, he groused¾ they’ve forgotten them. They’ve forgotten what it means to die.

"I don’t want to lose you, Ben. You mean too much to me. My life, my entire, immortal being, is wrapped up in you. Damn you," she interrupted, "why did you do this to me?" Softly, unobtrusively, she began to cry. "Damn you, Ben," she blurted, angry that she’d weakened, "you know I can’t live without you."

Benjamin patted her hand. He didn’t know. Even after this confession, he didn’t know. He smiled through his unhappiness, thinking simple thoughts of his youth. Thinking of times in the snow with his big brother James. Times when he was ten. Twelve. He saw the boy wearing itchy, woolen knickers. He wore an oversized plaid cap with its beak pulled down hard over his eyes. He eyed the winter’s walk, leafless, bare, lined with sturdy trees and sinewy shrubs. He thought of winters years ago. No longer was he Old Benj. Franklin, entertaining a Greek goddess in Philadelphia’s ghostly Rittenhouse Square. He was a tough kid. Back home again. Back in New England. Back in Puritan territory. Back playing and fighting in the frosty woods outside Old Boston. He loved it. He loved these thoughts, these crisp, winter reminiscences. He treasured them more than he did the After World. He feared losing them more than he did anything else. He burned them deep into the troughs of his brain, for they brought him back to the New England of his birth. They brought him home. They brought him back to life. They made it worth it. They were the things that nothing could kill: that Death could not kill. The winter thoughts of old men; the thin ice of unthinking youth.

He skidded on the icy slope, tumbling like a cartwheel in the deep New England snow. Luckily, he landed on Rosebud, his brother’s sled. Yelping, he happily rode it down to the frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year, he mused. It had become very slippery on the uneven walk. Yet, as had happened so often in his fabled life, with a deftness and a timeliness that surprised even him, his uncommon humility and his common sense joined hands. He took Athena’s hand and trod carefully, sidestepping a slab of broken pavement here, a patch of ice there, killing his thoughts about the snowy Boston woods of his childhood, the madness of his Puritan upbringing, turning them back to the old colleagues he admired, chauvinistically not paying close or even particular attention to Athena’s "women’s problems." Not yet entirely all there.

"Stop thinking, Ben. I can’t hear a goddamn thing with all that commotion about New England and the snowy woods."

They party from one day to the next, one century to the next, one lifetime to the next, never thinking that they ought to give something back, thought Ben.

Eavesdropping, Athena smirked.

The annihilation of mankind, the destruction of Earth, meant many things to Ben. It delivered many agonies to him. The worst: that all mankind—nations, histories, peoples—should vanish, leaving not a trace in the night sky. Not a blip on the curvature of galactic space. That Heroes, no longer mixing memory and desire, past and future, should vanish too—including Old Ben, long a great favorite of Zeus, the Chairman of the Board of GOD Inc., Galactic Olympian Deities, Incorporated—their contact with Earth slashed irreparably like a cut tendon.

He had taken on a task greater than any mortal, living or dead or imagined, in the wildest stretches of human or non-human imagination, had ever dared take on. Had ever been blessed or condemned to take on. World Without End, Amen.

Holy Christ, Athena thought.

"If you can’t¾ or if you won’t¾ why don’t you let the kid do it? YOUR SON!" she quipped, trying to take the sharp edge off of her quick tongue.

"What?" asked Ben absently.

"I’m sorry," she said. "I’m catching up on something. I’m searching his friggin’ brain to find out what went wrong after we," she sneered, "abandoned the poor sucker. I think he’s okay."

Ben shot his best skeptical glance.

"Honest. Believe me, Benjamin. BENJAMIN!" she squealed. "Amazing," she whispered, scanning the Square in astonishment, manipulating Ben’s emotions like a skillful actress. "Oh, Benjamin, you’ve no idea how wonderful he is. My son!"

Ben looked about as if to find him.

"He’s everything I’d want in a male child. Rare. Raw. Risible. Right. Regal. Renegade. Ready," she reeled and roared, her royal arms spread eagle to the winter sun, as happy as an unschooled schoolgirl who’d fallen in love for the first time, spinning about and belting out her maternal pride. She made Ben dizzy with fear that she’d tumble, attracting, as well, a few smiling faces in the busy noontime Square as she hugged the brass statue of the goat with a coat of patina. "Oh, Ben," she squealed, her exuberance rubbing off on the Old Patriot, "there’s more. Why didn’t I check him out before? He’s fantastic! Why shouldn’t he be? HE’S MY SON! Jesus Christ!" she said breathlessly. "Imagine having me—and you, Ben—for parents. Zeus for your grandfather! How the fuck can this kid fail?" she asked, jiggling on the little goat.

Ben hushed her because the nice folks who had stopped had not expected such a lovely, delightful woman, who was having such a delightful, happy time, to use such bad language.

"Fuck them," she said.

If the onlookers had not disappeared at that instant, she’d have zapped them into oblivion. Lucky for them an Olympian day had passed, and Athena’s warlike temper had not been tested.

"I’m talking about my son. I’m talking about The Beginning and The End of Time on Earth. I’m talking turkey here."

Spirited by the revelation about her son’s life, she straddled the bronze goat backwards (she’d been sitting side saddle, which was her position when she’d landed after her schoolgirl whirl) and dragged Ben down to sit opposite her, to do the same, facing her. He obliged, feeling silly but compelled to squeeze on board . . . sharing the goddess with the goddamn goat, whose tarnished horns poked up her shapely, beautiful ass.

Taking his chubby hands in hers, she kissed them. Then she began to tell the father about the son.

"Ben, his memory is amazing. I’m still processing the data I’ve downloaded from his murky mind. He’s fantastic. He’s thought of everything. He’s read everything. I’m having trouble sorting it out. His daydreams and facts, his fantasies and realities . . . they’re indistinguishable."

"Thene, I’m worried," said Ben, rubbing his nose. "What’s that usually mean? I mean, what’s it mean, Thene," he asked, thinking it was serious business not to know the difference between daydreams and facts. "It doesn’t sound right. What’d you say he can’t distinguish? What from what?"

"Sshhh . . . ," bounced Athena, taking advantage of her position on the goat, ecstatic and surprised at the brilliance of her son, her beautiful eyes sparkling like dusky diamonds in a desert of mauve eye shadow.

"Are you telling me he’s nuts?"

Athena hopped off the goat, leaving Ben to sit there¾ somewhat dazed and stupid in the Mystery of his Glorious Son.

"He’s touched!" she gloried.

"Touched," mumbled Ben, rising. "In English, Thene, that’s not the best of things to be. What’s it in Greek?"

"Actually, Benjamin, it’s not much different," she rasped, her husky voice breaking up from the strain and sounding dangerously like Kathleen Turner’s. Or Bogart’s Bacall’s. Settling down to a seat in the tiny one-row concrete amphitheater, she tugged on his coat sleeve. She wanted him to sit by her. She had a terrific story to tell him about their son.

"Sit, Ben," she urged.

Adamant, grim, funereal, Ben stuffed his chunky hands deep into the pockets of his big, navy-blue coat. If thoughts could kill, he’d have killed Zeus’ project then and there and joined the ranks of the Common Dead. It baffled him that Athena should be so enamored of their son, Freud or no Freud. It disturbed him that Zeus should have wanted him to sacrifice the rest of his happy life in the After World to salvaging the planet from eternal oblivion. But that if he failed at doing whatever-the-Hell-it-was he was supposed to do, whatever it was, then it was curtains and palls for him. I should have held out for more, he thought. I should have bargained for status as a demigod at least, with an option on immortality. Then, if GOD’s Board caved in and liquidated the planet, I’d at least have a Golden Parachute. I could still look forward to spending an eternity with Thene, he thought. Even if I failed! Even if the planet died. Finally, it pissed him off that a single, unguarded thought of his¾ a stupid thought, at that—that Athena had snooped in on and snatched, should become her obsession. It kills me. I’m being cajoled by a goddess into employing my disreputable son to the lofty and noble purposes of building a new world, he frowned.

"Sit down," she commanded. "Why don’t you?"

"I don’t want to," he groused.

"What? No, Benjamin, I don’t mean that. I mean why don’t you bargain with him. Why don’t you tell Father that for doing his dirty work, you want nothing less than status as a demigod, with an option on immortality," she said, commenting on his thoughts. "¾ which, by the way, I’d exercise immediately."

"Jesus Christ," Ben complained. "Is nothing private with you?"

"Wanna see?" she said, opening her coat.

He chuckled. "The Flasher."

"I can’t change it, darling. They’re open sewers: like your friggin’ ears. My brain is just the same. Whatever slime is out there, it gets in. It sluices through the natural gates and alleys of my brain. It congeals there. It clogs up the plumbing. Honest, I work harder at ignoring the crap than at anything else," she quipped. Playfully, she had jabbed at his soft belly on "crap," making him fart and turn a colorful shade of hot pink.

Rising abruptly, she surprised Ben, who thought his brassy, unmuted cadenza—which he took immodest pride in—had blown her off the bench. But the goddess had something far greater on her mind than Ben’s gastrointestinal coda. Stunned by a stiff blast, a gigabyte of data that had hurricaned through her mind, she took his big arm in hers and hustled him away from the goat, paranoiacally checking about as she scooted away.

"What?"

"Listen," she hushed, thrilled at the import of the incoming data. "Oh, that’s just fantastic! That’s my son! Gott in Himmel, he’s magnificent! Benjamin, I have Good News! I have fantastic news. I bring you Good Tidings! Tidings of Great Joy!" she hosannaed, gasped, exulted, teasing the erstwhile deist.

Benjamin glowered at her diction.

"It’s not that bad, you," she tugged. "Honest," she tugged, budging him along as he farted. "Don’t be a bastard about it. Don’t be a friggin’ old fart."

What am I gonna do with her? he petitioned.

The snow sizzled at Athena’s toes, steaming off the hot, frozen pavement and swirling about the goddess into the unstable air as if a mystical force had created the tornado-like nimbus. But nothing could have been further from the truth. The simple truth was that she was hot. Her circuits had been sparked by hot numbers. By gigabytes of data. She had suffered multiple linear regressions. Had scaled multidimensional universes. Had projected the probabilities of trillions of coefficients, extant in the kid’s corrupted data base, as she took stock of the situation and walked gray-eyed through the foggy park. She looked special. And, by golly, she was. The cloud of frosty-tumbling steam and piping-hot snow that engulfed her would quickly clear a path about her—a Circle in the Snow—as she crisscrossed the gray Square. It made the walking easy: as if she were walking through the private eye of a hurricane.

They stopped. They stood just outside the small, hexagonal gazebo, glazed with large windows on all sides, and shivered. They squeezed one another’s hands with humility and not-a-little embarrassment when they noticed that six beige panels, mounted beneath the six window casements of the gazebo, alternated two types of decorative plaques, each done in black wrought iron: one depicting a spread-winged bald eagle, the other a wise owl, as if the two birds had been created in their honor.

"They’re playing our song," the balding American said.

The Goddess of Wisdom doubted that. "I’m cold. Let’s go in," she said.

Ben shivered; they went in.

Inside the gazebo, she began her story. Telling it to Ben while they stood face-to-face. It was a quiet, intimate moment for both of them: the strangest parents of the strangest child that any Earth-bound being could imagine. A strange tale, too. The turbulence of the Philadelphia winter held at bay by the indomitable hexagon. And then there was Christmas, only scant minutes away. "I’m ashamed to say it. But I’ve looked at most of the garbage in his brain. Things he’s never told to anybody. Things he’s never told to himself. Things . . . ," she shuddered¾ "Oh, Father!" she cried out"—that even I’m ashamed that I should know. Oh, Ben. Hold me," her voice cracked. "I’m his mother, for Christ’s sake, but I’m me first . . . and, goddamn it, I’m not meant for this miserable life."

Ben grasped her by the shoulders and brought her close to him; he brushed a tear from her bruised, chapped cheek; she loved him for it. The wind had been brutal on her Mediterranean skin. But Ben, God love him, looked grand in his blue homburg: just what she wanted; and she wanted him to want to hear about their son.

"Tell me. Tell me about him," Ben said.

"Oh, Ben, he’s beautiful. He’s the smartest man alive. Honest. The brightest man on Earth. His IQ is astronomical. They couldn’t measure the goddamn thing. Twice they tried. They even had him down at Princeton. The testing center. The Leidekker Group. Both times they thought he cheated."

"Did he? Didn’t they proctor it? Didn’t they have the goddamn sense to control it?" Ben railed.

"He’d finish early—before it was possible, they thought—and leave the testing room." Embarrassed, the Goddess of Wisdom bit down hard on her lower lip and smiled.

"That’s smart," said Benjamin.

"They’d disqualify him," she said, suppressing a laugh.

"What else?"

"He’s so good. He’s so compassionate, Ben. He’s practically given his fortune away."

"That’s smart."

"Tutors, valets, maids, chauffeurs, chefs. Everybody we left behind at The Benjamin Franklin House when he was twelve. Ben, they partied and squandered his fortune. Aristotle . . ."

"The tutor."

" . . . gambled away a fortune at the Golden Nugget. Trump’s Castle. Caesar’s Palace. He was so damned good."

"Aristotle?"

"No, Lucky! Our generous son. He knew they were stealing, squandering his fortune, but . . . it didn’t bother him. Ben, he didn’t care. He wanted them to be happy."

"That’s smart."

"Don’t you understand? He’s special. How often does somebody with his brains have that much compassion?"

"Not often, I hope."

The windows of the gazebo had begun to steam up from the strange intensity of her body heat. Roused, Athena looked up at Willard Rouse’s Liberty Place, a magnificent, blue-glistening, smoked-glass, architectural triumph that penetrated the city’s virgin sky only a few blocks north of Rittenhouse Square. Apparently, it soared with her pregnant imagination, her hot ambition for her prodigal son. It’s towering beauty was special to her.

"Ben, I think we can do it. I know we can. That was a Jesus-brilliant thing to think. I’m glad you thought of it. LUCKY STIFF FOR PRESIDENT!"

"If he wants it, he can have it," relinquished Ben.

"Only if he wants it."

"Do you want to tell me how I’m supposed to do it. How I’m supposed to begin with a . . . a . . ."

" . . . suicidal maniac."

"That, too?"

"That, too."

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," he prayed, blessing his soul by making the Sign of the Cross and slapping his hands together in animated prayer. "I’m thinking, if he’s as bright . . ."

"He’s bright. He’s read everything in print."

"That’s impossible."

"Everything. Listen, he thinks he’s read everything in print. I’m only giving you what he thinks," she escaped.

"Want to know what I think? I think he’s crazy; and I think you’re crazy for believing in him."

"Ben, he’s our son."

"That’s all the more reason."

"Benjamin!"

Weary, he went on, reasoning it out. "Thene, take the Renegade Titans and the Old Testament Prophets, your father’s dedicated enemies. They say that happiness lies . . . wait, listen to me . . . lies in our bringing our creativity and genius to its full potential. That makes sense, doesn’t it? But we’ve exhausted our potential. Christ, I’m exhausted. Why can’t we be nicer? Happier? Hey, we’re as nice and as happy as anything gets: There ain’t no more potential: What you see is what you get: There’s no more Mr. Nice Guy, Mr. Nice Girl. We’re finished! Me? I’m lucky. I happen to be the father of the smartest man alive. I can’t tell him; it’ll kill him. It’ll go to his head: After all, he’s a suicidal maniac. But no matter; that’s another story. He’s the son of a dead American printer and a mythical Greek goddess, the latter which has powers that no living being should ever be entrusted with," he growled. "Under the Moon. But that . . . that’s no matter, either: She’s conscientious, immortal, and has nothing to lose . . ."

"Ben, please."

" . . . besides which, she dickers around with powerful men, assuming the shape of tantalizing young girls. Lusts after my son¾ "

"BENJAMIN!"

"DON’T LIE TO ME, THENE! I’M NOT BLIND! Jesus Christ, I can see you sublimating your lust . . . The way you look at Rouse’s One Liberty Place when you talk about our son. JESUS CHRIST! YOU WEAR IT—" Lacking the precise word and not wanting to be crude or imprisoned by the cliché, he waved his flailing arms in the general direction of her entire body. "—ON YOUR LIPS! IN YOUR EYES . . . UP YOUR TWAT!" he blared, succumbing to the crudity.

Athena brushed a loose, wild hair from her ginger sleeping-bag coat with the backs of her stiff fingers.

"That’s not fair, Ben. I’ll do my bit. I said I’d stick by you. I’ll stick . . . stick by him, too," she stuttered, repressing a wild, sensual, congested dream that aroused her. "I’ll come to his side. I’ll die with him if I have to. His will will be my will. I swear to it, Ben. I’ll stick to him like taffy. TAFFY! Oh, Ben, think of it. I’ll be his willing tool and yours. The two of you can tug at me. He can tug at me all he wants. I’ll . . . I’ll love him to death," she gasped.

Ben glared at the nymphomaniac.

"I’ll make him . . . I promise I will . . . strong, viral, macho. Nobody’ll touch him. Not while I’m in the friggin’ catbird’s seat. Honest to god, Ben. My word on it."

"I’ll bet."

"Benjamin, do me a big favor."

"What."

"Get him a girl. He’ll need a girl, Ben," she ached.

"Right, a girl."

"A good girl, Ben. Somebody . . . Somebody you know. Somebody he can take home to Mamma."

Ben raised an eyebrow.

"Any ideas, Thene?"

"I . . . I’ll tell you, Ben, if anybody . . . comes to mind," she gasped, breathing fitfully, clutching at her heaving bosom . . . distracted, apparently, by cerebral activity of an extraordinary, sensual character.

"Thene? Are you going to be sick?"

"I’m well. Honest," she said, tugging at his tie. Stroking it.

"I’m worried."

"I’ll be . . . I’ll . . ." She couldn’t finish.

He was trapped. He’d sworn to Zeus that his daughter was all the Task Force he needed to accomplish his task on Earth. The Board of Directors of Galactic Olympian Deities had conceded to his demands. But he began to panic. He thought he needed additional time. That this was only a planning stage. He thought that with Athena on his team he could bargain for it and get it. He thought that if he showed some headway, they’d extend the deadline. He thought that they were backing him one-hundred percent. He thought that they were banking on his brains. But what did he have? He had second thoughts about Thene and everything and everybody . . . everywhere . . . tugging at one another in one, giant, disloyal jumble under the jinxed Moon.

Now he had nothing.

Not even the Oval Office, which, apparently, they wanted for Athena’s kid, Zeus’ grandchild.

He’d lost everything.

The gazebo could have been on Mt. Olympus. Or Pluto. The large frosted windows were so steamed that the spirits couldn’t see very clearly an inch beyond the glass. Everything inside was hot. Everything outside a blur of cool pastel colors. Except when a smart kid pressed his nose to the window and frightened Athena. Impulsively, she screamed, caught at a weak, vulnerable moment when her guard was down. When her emotions were up. When her libido had been teased to unspeakable limits. Unspeakable delights.

When, additionally, her dear sweet Benjamin had been shivering half to death thinking about whether he could rely on her in the coming years, if he could not in the past. The frightening years! The horrifying years of Lucky’s political internship. Years when she and Benjamin had to make up for too many happy years of parental neglect. Years when Benj. Franklin, the Legend, had to make a man of him, the little sucker. Years when Athena had to make a man of him. Years when his character had to be formed and strengthened before anybody could take him seriously as a national figure. A national political figure.

"Bundle up." He shoved at the pathetic door. "It’s getting stuffy in here." He didn’t think he could do anything on Earth without her undaunting galactic support. Her incomparable wisdom. Beauty. Charm. Christ, her connections!

Thene was his Ace in the hole.

She’ll be good for him, he thought, whatever incarnation she chooses. She’ll love him to death. That she will.

They left.

Ben slammed the tiny door behind them. Outside, fat Santa’s jingling bells and the carolers from The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul had brought Christmas and taken it back again. It had come and gone behind the gazebo’s frosted glass as quietly as a graveyard whisper, disturbing no one.

Their precious time on Earth had drawn to a close—a close, quiet close—an intimate, uneasy one. Lasting yet only a minute or two, while winter’s windy gusts and snowy blizzards blasted them brutally from time to time.

Nothing’s easy, thought Ben.

They wished that they were kids again. They stopped to pick up brittle, broken twigs. Laughed while standing at a highly polyurethaned bench. Bought two salted soft Philadelphia pretzels from a white-aproned vendor with a windowed push-cart. Chased one another around a giant lightweight wire trash basket until they doubled up, giddy with delight, and didn’t know how to end it except to collapse on it. Until they began to feel how sad and hopeless it was that they had to part.

She propped her elbows on the rim of the unsteady wire basket and squeezed his fat hands.

"Till death do us part," she said.

"That’s no joke," he said. "That’s grim stuff."

She kicked the basket. "Like my alter?"

"Love me, love my alter," he tried to joke. "Let me show you my lion and my snake."

"Ouuuuuuuuu," she cringed.

At the place where he had materialized, he showed her the great bronze lion with its massive claw on the head of a snake. Like he had done, she, too, bravely stuck her hand into its mouth to tug at one of its shiny bronze canines. Shiny because millions of others had done the same thing. Apparently, it was a safe thing to do.

Thinking about it, she smirked.

"Let’s put it together," she said, twirling her tote bag like a hot hooker. "I don’t think we have much time . . ."

She tapped her foot; he clenched his hands behind his back. They were nervous.

" . . . lover," she finished, bashing him with her tote bag.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

"I’ll need Thomas, James and Dolley. Paul, too," Ben said.

"The Pope?"

Ben glared at her, not believing that she—with her Olympian mind—didn’t know what he was thinking, didn’t know which person—let alone which Paul—he meant of billions born.

"Benjamin," she drawled, "I’m not that sharp on Americana."

"Revere, okay?"

"That makes horse sense."

"I want you."

"I’m not surprised. I’ll be there . . . disguised so cunningly that even the cleverest patriot will fail to recognize me."

"What good’ll that do me?"

"I’ll be there! I’ll help things along. You won’t have to ask for anything. I’ll do it before you think of it."

"Thanks. Suppose . . . I want you?"

"Me?"

"Good ol’ Athena. No disguise, no tricks."

"No tricks? Ben, I don’t know about that. That’s hard. Do you really want me without the tricks?"

"Next."

"Next."

"I’ll need time. They gave me a year. I signed my life away to finish the job in a year."

"Not smart, Ben."

"If we’re talking presidency, I’ll need time. They’re only elected every four years."

"Like the Olympics!"

"Yeah. It’s gamesmanship at its best."

"I think Father will understand that perfectly well. I’ll talk to him about it first thing in the morning . . . when he’s happy with his first cup of Chock Full o’ Nuts coffee, laced with Amaretto Da Vinci liqueur, and creamy as pudding with Borden’s Cremora creamer, steaming hot."

"He drinks that?"

"He calls it nectar. Imported."

Ben knocked his knuckles backhand-style on the metallic hide of the bronze lion, poising himself for his next question.

"Father know about the kid?"

"You kidding? If he’d thought about it, he’d know," she shrugged, "but I don’t think he thinks about it."

"He’ll find out."

Athena grinned, "I’m gonna tell ‘im," she mugged.

"Think he’ll talk to the kid?"

"When it’s time," she said.

Ben thought about that . . . about bringing Zeus into the picture at the right time . . . when his presence might have the most telling impact on Lucky. On the frigging world. Then he thought about Lucky, the Loser.

"I’ll get the son-of-a-bitch, His Grandson, The Bastard . . . to get used to the turbulence of political life. I’ll get him to want to run . . . really to run for the office."

Athena looked at him slyly, teasingly. "Run?" she asked. "Then it is a game! Are there medals?"

"Yeah. There’s one. The Great Seal of the President of the United States."

"Sounds big. Impressive."

"They kill for it."

"Nobody kills anybody on this trip."

"Understood."

"There’s another condition."

"Shoot."

Athena frowned at the bad joke. "Like I said, Lucky has to want to do it, goddamn it. Really want it. Benjamin, if the smartest man on Earth doesn’t want to sail the most beautiful ship in the Milky Way into safe water—well, I’ll be damned if I’m going to waste my time on it. Damn the race," she wept. Let GOD liquidate the friggin’ rock."

Ben didn’t look too happy.

"Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to save you. There’s gotta be a way, don’tcha think?"

"We’re only talking about my life."

"There’s gotta be a way."

"Listen, Thene, if I get Lucky to agree to run—not to campaign or to win New Hampshire or to do anything big like that, but just to agree to run for the Oval Office—or—or to DO-DO whatever the Hell we WANT him to do, Thene—if Thomas and I can educate the little bastard to an understanding of politics, you’ll buy me the time I need to organize for the big push, the presidency, the White House. Is that the agreement? Is that it?"

Thene arched her brow. "That’s it."

"That’s it," echoed Ben.

"Don’t forget that Father doesn’t want you to breathe a word about the annihilation to your buddies."

"Thomas, James, and Dolley."

"Right."

"What about my Second Annual Fashion Show."

"Have it."

"Great."

"Just don’t breathe a word about this to anybody there."

"Will you come?"

"I always come."

"I’ve only had one, darling."

"That’s not the point."

"I’m going to need megadollars. More money than you or I have ever spent on a Mediterranean cruise."

"Print it."

"That’s illegal. It’s counterfeiting."

"Oh . . . then use the real thing: Use real U.S. Mint plates."

"That’s stealing."

"Then don’t do it. Let Galactic Inc. drown the Honest Johns and boil the planet down to a toasty golden crisp. Or down to a shining blue-white diamond. They’ll die an honorable death, and so will you. Honest as the day you were born, but as dead as a church mouse. That’s what the takeover artists want. But guess what, Bro. Benj. Franklin, Founder? There won’t be nobody to explain your honorable honesty to. Nobody to praise it. Nobody to know about it. There won’t be nobody to tell it to. There won’t be nobody to write it for. There won’t be nobody to read it. BECAUSE THERE WON’T BE NOBODY! THERE WON’T BE NOTHING!" [she grasped for a metaphor that would hit home, and she thought of his print shop] "NO NEWSPAPERS! NO EARTH! NO NOTHING! Those who’ll remember it will laugh . . . Or cry, you bastard."

"I’ll print the money."

"Wise up, Ben; the world’s not made for fools."

"I thought I did well enough."

"You didn’t do it fairly, foolishly. Or even honestly."

"That’s matter for debate."

"Bullshit, Ben. I love you anyway," she said, massaging a stiffness that had begun in her fingers.

"Thene, I’m disappointed in the kid. He’s wasted his life. Ignored his talent. Neglected his genius. He’s . . . goddamn it, he’s a microcosm of the nation. He has the genius—the genes—to be creative and productive: a phenomenal memory, a brilliant mind—like We the People do, Thene, housed in the great libraries of the world. But like us, he’s neglected his genius . . ."

"Like us?"

" . . . No wonder the disgruntled shareholders, the Renegade Titans and Prophets, argue that we’ve hit bottom! ACHIEVE ALL YOU CAN, they say. BUT YOU’D BETTER DO IT. Read! The writing is for us to read—the living and the dead, joining hands—in great libraries, in a book. They’re our genius. We don’t think! Thene, WE DON’T READ! We don’t teach our kids to read, to write . . . to love to learn, to learn to love. I’m convinced of it: That if we searched the libraries of the world—the brains of those who think, who WAREHOUSE ideas—we can learn to live intelligently."

He mopped his brow.

She smiled, happy that America had begun to take a passionate interest in figuring it out.

"Lucky’s like the nation," he concluded. "He’s ignored what he’s learned. That’s dumb. What the Hell are we without a memory? Think of it, Thene. Think of not being able to recall anything, nothing, from one minute to the next, one day to the next. Or, in the context of a nation, one century to the next! Think of it, Thene. What’s a library or a museum but the memory of a people; a free library of a free people, the conscience of a people. That’s it! Our son can teach! Why make him president when he can teach? We’ll make him a rabbi."

"Teach?"

"Yes! If he can do it, anybody can."

"Not if he’s alive."

"What?"

"They’re going to want miracles."

"We tried that, Thene. It doesn’t work."

"Jesus died, Ben."

He blinked, then he got it.

"If the kid begins dead, they can’t kill him. He’ll be assassination proof. He’ll be crucifixion proof."

"Right."

"Jesus Christ! Why didn’t I think of that?"

"You did."

"What?"

"That’s where I got it."

"Don’t josh me, Thene. You’re telling me I thought of it?"

"Did I predict Titan Leeds’ death?"

Grimly, Ben shut up. That joke was something he never expected to live down. Not to his dying day.

"How will it happen?"

"He’s suicidal. He’ll do it himself."

"Ahhhhhhh . . ."

"Be there to help him when it happens. Be kind to him. He’s our son, Benjamin. Troubled, but ours."

"I’ll be kind. I’ll have him in the bag—"

"Ben, darling, leave an Ortgies 7.65 handgun in a bag of clover by his bedside. Like Gulliver, he likes clover."

"—in the bag within three days of his death."

"Make it on The Fourth."

"That’s it?"

"That’s it."

Ben trembled. Feeling weak, unsteady, he grasped her hands and observed that a few age lines had begun to appear on her face. Especially about her eyes. She had begun to age. Her streaked hair showed a few strands of gray. Her fine skin had stretched thin over her high cheekbones and sported a few age spots. He hadn’t expected this. He didn’t understand.

"I told you, I wasn’t made for this life."

"This never happened before."

"Of course, it did; you never noticed it. I’d go home to freshen up and come back. I began my life on Earth at a younger age then, too, than I did this time, and, consequently, my aging seemed to you a slow maturity. You loved me for it once. Don’t you recall?"

"I didn’t notice it in the gazebo."

"I’ve been fighting it. Now I’m tired, Ben. I’m letting it all hang out. I’m still beautiful though, am I not? Age is no barrier to beauty, Benjamin. That much I know with certainty about the women of Earth. That much is eternally true. That I know."

"Yes, Athena. You’re still the most beautiful, breathtaking . . . complicated woman that god has yet created."

"Daddy was something, wasn’t he? Once he knew what he wanted in a child, he didn’t fool around. He didn’t even look for a convenient mate. He just banged away in the fullness of his imagination. BANG! There I sprang! Big and beautiful and braced for battle. Nothing domestic about this bitch. I’m every inch a man as any cocksure, Olympian bastard is. Think about it! I’m what happens when the best that’s possible—conceivable or imaginable—of both goddamned sexes comes together in the mind of Zeus. I’m the best that GOD Inc. can design. Imagine! What a Wonder Woman!"

Ben couldn’t deny it . . .

"Damned right, I am. Don’t I look like one? Think like one? Love and lust like one?"

Ben couldn’t deny it . . . couldn’t think to deny it, and didn’t want to deny it. Watching her age, he began to feel weak; he began to wither . . . not physically, but emotionally, as if he were an old man about to loose his mistress’ precious love.

"Don’t do this, Thene. I’m no spring cock either. Look at me. I’m madly in love with a Mediterranean goddess half my age. Less than half when she’s fresh from Mt. Olympus. What about that? How does that make me feel?" He touched her pale cheek with such gentleness and longing that she gently took his aged face into her aged hands and kissed it. She gave him a large, wet, passionate kiss; and he grinned like a kid with a bowl full of ice cream. "It doesn’t matter a damn," he concluded. He gazed at her beauty.

"I’m like Cinderella," she said. "I’m going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight. No, at noon. What day was it? Your birthday! Happy birthday, Ben. It’s almost time. HURRY UP, PLEASE. IT’S TIME. HURRY UP, PLEASE. IT’S TIME," she mocked. "Goonight, ladies. Goonight, sweet ladies. Goonight. Goonight."

The pain became unbearable for Ben. He was old; she had become older. He hugged her frail body. He helped her to a seat on a bench facing the bronze lion. He wept for her. Actually, she couldn’t have aged more slowly and beautifully as her time on Earth drew to a close. Hair frosted. Skin like Italian marble. Eyes shining. Beauty unequaled even in the finest works of classical and neoclassical art. Throw in Baroque, too.

Tucked snugly into the comfort of her ginger, Norma Kamali sleeping-bag coat, her tote bag sitting safely beside her on the bench, she smiled at Benjamin, happy to be close to him, happy to be hiding from the big world in his big American arms . . . dreaming of the bronze lion as it roamed the walks of Rittenhouse Square . . . dreaming of the great times they had spent together . . . when they thought the world would never end.

When Ben turned to fix his grip on her shoulder, he saw that she had aged so thoroughly that even her immortal beauty had begun to wither. He saw that she had shrunk, diminished into the luxurious folds of her lovely coat, lost in the black and ginger of its simple, elegant design. If anything, he wished that Zeus would take her now, before she disintegrated into a shriveled stick of a woman.

"Take her, Lord," he prayed.

He couldn’t raise a whisper out of her. For all practical purposes, she was dead to this world.

At the gonging of a new church bell in Holy Trinity’s bell tower, repaired in honor of Ben’s birthday, his ears shot up in surprise. But at that moment Athena disintegrated before his very eyes into a conjunction of lines, shapes, and colors . . .

"Thene," he cried, his anguish crushing him.

. . . that themselves, then, disintegrated, too, leaving him feeling barren and lost. His voice had broken off with a gasp; the final note could barely be heard.

He wept.

It was his birthday, but hearing the church bell tolling grimly, twelve solemn times, he believed that it tolled for him. He believed that it tolled his death. He counted the great, reverberating bell each time it tolled. Each time, he touched the bench for Thene, spreading the palms of his hands where she had sat. He hoped that he might find her courage. His eyes black with death, he thought of her and listened to the church bell. He counted until it tolled eleven times. Gritting his teeth, he grabbed at his ballooning heart. He waited for the final gong. It sounded like the great Earth were ringing in his head. He covered his ears. The church bell tolled a final time. He shut his eyes tight; his knuckles were bone white from his death grip on the bench. A dry, unearthly noise escaped his throat. He believed that he’d be taken from the bench, too, which he grasped with a fierce grip, finally crucified . . . taken swiftly, too, but that he’d be headed GOD knows where.

"I’m next," he gasped.

Lightning crashed and burned a crazy zigzag into the earth directly in front of him. It scorched the earth, leaving a big, black "Mark of Zorro" scar in the pavement. It bounced off the bronze lion, zinging it so loudly that it rang along with the church bell. It scared the Hell out of Dr. Benj. Franklin, scientist, though he’d played with it a tad in his lifetime. He suspected that Zeus had left his calling card . . . since a great "Z" had been burned into City Property at Rittenhouse Square.

At this prompting, he swept up his handsome, blue homburg and blue umbrella and fled the scene, crossing Zeus’ great charred "Z" as he escaped. He crossed it from its lower right to its upper left, making it the Roman numeral "X" or ten.

There was no going back.

The mystery, the unknown, lay dead ahead. Yet there was a Hell of a lot to get done. Though for an excruciating moment he had thought that he was fated to vanish as Athena had, to be shipped back to Mt. Olympus for Holy Orders, it was not to be. Apparently, he had all the orders he needed.

"I’m lucky, I guess," he mused. "I’m the father of the smartest man alive."

Alive? Not for long, he thought.

Unlike earlier in the day—actually, last year—Benjamin had quite a clear picture of where to go. He didn’t recall Athena’s saying anything about where Lucky lived, where he hung out. Nothing. Yet, intuitively, he knew the players and the game. Like when he thought Lucky was worth more dead than alive! Like when he thought he’d be the perfect scapegoat to run for president in these dying times and Athena said she’d gotten it from him.

Like that!

"This is a piece of cake," he quipped.

Happy as a yuppie at play, he tipped his hat at several of Philadelphia’s beautiful women, twirled his smart, presidential-blue umbrella, smirked when he saw that he stood just across the street from the Mutual Benefit Life Building, and, eventually, outfoxed the slow traffic and fast crowds that jammed Walnut St. north of Rittenhouse Square.

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Copyright © Domenic Corsaro 1998