“I see,” said Alvarez thoughtfully.
“If he doesn’t entirely realize that at this point, please see to it that it is made totally clear to him?”
“Of course,” said Alvarez.
Which was the last that Beckerman heard or saw of Alvarez for some months. He spent ten more days in Honolulu, until he felt fit and rested; and then, tanned and relaxed and almost back up to normal weight on the rich island cuisine, he returned to his studio in La Jolla and set about preparing himself for the Apostolides project.
Something Homeric, the man had said. Very well. Beckerman steeped himself in Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Iliad again, reading this translation and that one, returning to the poems again and again until the wrath of Achilles and the homeward journey of Odysseus seemed more real to him than anything that was going on in the world he actually inhabited. He made no attempt at purposeful selection of design, no effort at directing his subliminal consciousness; that would be pointless, useless, even counterproductive.
After a while the dreams began.
Not his special kind, not yet. Just ordinary dreams, anybody’s kind of dreams, but they were rooted, nearly all of them, in his Homeric readings. Images out of the two poems floated nightly through his mind, the faces of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Hector and Achilles, the loveliness of Helen and the tenderness of Andromache, the monsters and princesses encountered by Odysseus as he made his long way home, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors. Before long Beckerman knew that he was at the threshold of readiness to work. He could feel it building up in him, the sense of apprehension, the tingling in his fingertips and the tightness along his shoulders, an almost sexual tension that could find its release only in a tumultuous night of wild outpouring of artistic force. Beckerman pumped up his strength in anticipation of that night by doubling his intake of food, loading himself with milkshakes, ice cream, steak, mountains of pasta in heavy sauces, bread, potatoes, anything calorific that might give him some reserve of energy against the coming ordeal.
And then he knew, getting into bed one night in the first week of April, that the time was at hand.
In the morning, after some of the most turbulent effort he had ever put forth, the shield was next to his bed, a great gleaming half-dome of metal that seemed to be aglow with the fire of its own inner light.
Beckerman recognized it instantly for what it was. There is no mistaking the shield of Achilles: Homer devotes many pages to a description of it, the five sturdy layers, the shining triple rim of dazzling metal, the splendid silver baldric, above all the extraordinary intricacy of the designs that the god Hephaestus had engraved upon its face when he fashioned that astonishing shield for the foremost of the Greek warriors.
Not that Beckerman’s version of the shield was a literal rendition of the one so lovingly depicted by Homer. He never could have duplicated every one of the myriad details. A poet might be able to describe in words what a god had forged in his smithy, but Beckerman was constrained by the finite limitations of the medium in which he worked, and the best he could do was something that approached in general outline the vast and complex thing that Homer had imagined.
Still, it was a remarkable job, a top-level piece, perhaps his best one ever. The earth, the sea, and the sky were there in the center of the shield’s face, and the sun and the moon, and more than a suggestion of the major constellations. In the next ring were images of bustling cities, with tiny but carefully sketched figures acting out the events of municipal life, weddings and public meetings and a battle between armies whose generals were robed in gold; and outside that was a scene of farmers in their fields, and one of a king and his attendants at a feast, and a vineyard, and herds of golden cattle with horns of tin. Around everything, at the very rim, ran the mighty stream of the all-encompassing ocean.
He hadn’t shown everything Homer that had said was on the shield, but he had done plenty. Beckerman stared at the shield in awe and wonder, marveling that such a thing could have burst forth from his own sleeping mind in a single night. Surely it was the perfect thing for the Apostolides collection, well worth the staggering price and more, a masterpiece beyond even the billionaire’s own high expectations.
He called Alvarez in Miami. “I’ve got it,” he said. “The shield of Achilles. Book XVIII, the Iliad.”
“How does it look?”
“Terrific. Fantastic. If I say so myself.”
“Mr. Apostolides is very involved emotionally with Achilles, you know. I might even put it that he thinks of himself as a kind of modern-day Achilles, the invincible warrior, the all-conquering hero.”
“He’ll love it, then,” said Beckerman. “I guarantee it.”
Indeed he did. Apostolides paid Beckerman an unsolicited five-figure bonus, and gave the shield pride of place in what was apparently one of the finest private museums in the world, and flew his billionaire friends in from Majorca and the Grenadines and the Azores and Lanai to stand before it and admire it. He cherished that shield as though it were the Mona Lisa and the Apollo Belvedere and the David of Michelangelo all rolled into one.
Which was the problem. Because in less than a year and a half it began to melt and sag, and then it was gone altogether, and suddenly Alvarez was on the phone to say, “He wants another one. He doesn’t care how much it costs, but he wants another shield just like that one.”
The days went by. Had Alvarez been serious about that two-week deadline, or was it simply a bluff, a way of stampeding Beckerman into producing a second shield? In either case, there was nothing Beckerman could do about it. He had been telling Alvarez the simple truth when he said that he had no conscious control over the form of the dream-objects that he produced. He could give himself little hints at bedtime, yes, and that was often helpful in guiding the basic direction in which his dreaming mind would go; but that was about as much control as he had. Dreaming up a specific object was something he had never succeeded in doing.
He tried to put Apostolides and Alvarez out of his mind altogether and go about the normal routines of his business. He set up appointments with the collectors to whom he intended to offer the three new pieces; he made arrangements to be interviewed by an important art magazine that had wanted for months to do a feature on his work; he met with his broker for the regular semi-annual review of his stock portfolio.
“I could retire,” he told the broker, after he had gone over the portfolio and been apprised of the surprisingly strong gains it had made in the past six months. “I could sell all these stocks and put the money into municipal bonds and never do a night’s work again in my life.”
“Why would you want to do that?” the broker asked. “It isn’t as if the work takes up a lot of your time. Didn’t you once tell me that you actually produce your entire output in just six or seven nights a year?”
“Six or seven very strenuous and difficult nights, yes.”
“But you’re a great artist. Great artists don’t retire, no matter how wealthy they are. Did Picasso retire? Did Matisse? Monet was practically blind, and even richer than you are now, and he went on painting anyway, right to the end.”
“I am not Monet,” said Beckerman. “I am certainly not Picasso. I am Max Beckerman and I find my work increasingly demanding, too demanding, and it is becoming a great temptation to give it up altogether.”