Et cetera? And as for "Georgina"…but forget it, Reader: The above-sketched is Another Story, which you're free to shift roles and take a shot at authoring yourself, so to speak, if something like that's what you'd rather read than this. Having borne with me, however, while I fetched that trio and their formerly three-wheeled whatchacallum from the Place Where Three Roads Meet or Diverge, depending, through the three episodes leading to their apparent present impasse, permit me to declare (what Iz seems to have been quite aware of and Georgina to have come to realize) that while their Dramatic Vehicle has been stalled for many a script page now, "Fred" himself (I mean this I've-Been-Told Story's story) has been moving right along.
It is, in fact, all but told. For was it not you yourself — I mean, of course, Georgina the Mere but Sharp-Eyed Reader — who pointed out that her sudden appearance (in Part Three: The Third Person) in order to question the relevance of " — 's Story" was itself a complication of Fred's story? And that her subsequently invoking the distinction between Action and Plot, together with her observation that merely chugging westward was not equivalent to Getting Somewhere, was the next complication after that, leading as it did to the Herocycle's immediate out-sputtering and the threesome's (apparent) ongoing impasse, et cetera, et cetera, right through Izzy's revelation of — rather, his leading Georgina to discover for herself — the ever-incrementing nature of their script, even unto the still-moving point of Author's pen? As tidy a series of Complications as ever rode the up escalator toward Finale! There remains only the business of Climax, Denouement, and Wrap-Up to complete the classical curve of dramatic action and Author's self-imposed assignment — a task just at this point interrupted, he imagines, by impassioned female grunts and groans from the rear seat of the Dramatic Vehicle: "Yes. Yes! Yes!" Their source is our Regina (the former Georgina, her name here and now changed by authorial fiat, she being the very Queen of Readers), so excited by the realization that their impasse has been only apparent — that in dramaturgical fact they've been not merely expending Energy but accomplishing Work — that to her happy embarrassment she finds herself climaxing indeed: "Yes!"
Izzy winks at Fred and with a gesture invites the old warhorse into the back seat with their so-aroused mare. But Author objects to Story's ever taking the back seat in its own Dramatic Vehicle: Instead, with a few strokes of his pen he transports transported Regina into the buggy's front seat with Fred and shifts Izzy-the-Sometime-Teller into the rear beside his authorial self.
"Yesyesyes!" moans Regina (an ejaculation not easily moaned, but she manages it), and makes to place Fred's gnarled but still handy right hand where her gnarl-free left has been busying itself. Waggish Izzy nudges Author and (behind his own right hand) suggests, "Her mons veneris for his Mysterious Hilltop Consummation? Let's do it!"
But Author decides to have Fred content himself with declaring to his ardent seat-mate that while her invitation to literal intercourse between Story and Reader flatters and honors him, he in turn honors and respects both her and his patient family back yonder, who have put up with and loyally supported him through the mattersome chapters of his Regnancy, Fall from Favor, and Departure from the City — yea, even unto his fast-approaching Mysterious End. Too grateful is he to all hands to dishonor them and himself as well with Protagonistic infidelity at this late stage of their joint story (as an early Complication, he allows, it might have been interesting indeed — but that would've been Another Story).
"Ah! Ah! Ah." So moved is Regina by Fred's profession of love for and loyalty to his household (R. is, after all, along with her other adjectives, the Faithful Reader), she finds herself once more auto-orgasming: Climax enough, Author here submits, for this story's story. Sometime-Teller Izzy, while skeptical of that submission, obligingly offers the so-moved Third Person, over the seatback, his own hand for her possible employment. Regina gives him a not-unfriendly mind-your-own-business look — as much as to say, "It's stories that turn me on, buster, not their tellers or authors" — and returns her admiring attention to our Hero.
Whom, however, she discovers to be no longer in the seat beside her; nor has he shifted to the rear with his Enablers. The Mythmobile's driver's door is open; the driver himself, it would appear, has vanished into the circumambient dark. Her hand still in place but no longer busy, "Fred?" the lady calls plaintively. "Freddie?"
As if from out of sight on the road's far side, "Gotta go now, ma'am," that old fellow's voice comes back. "Much obliged for the lift, guys. See you around. Maybe."
"Fre-ed?!"
But she understands the fitness of it, does our savvy Reader, sweetly disappointed but dramaturgically fulfilled; the fitness too of her not knowing whither trudgeth her aged admiree: back homeward or farther westward, none knows where. Upon that matter, should they discuss it, she and Izzy will disagree, Regina preferring to imagine Fred's ultimate Consummation in the bosom of his family, in the heart of their once-excellent city, Isidore inclining to a more mysterious, indeed unknown and unknowable finale somewhere out yonder — indeed, perhaps not even down the road after all, but off it: somewhere trackless, out beyond that far shoulder whence last we heard his voice.
Author himself refrains from tipping the scales either way. Enough, in his opinion, to have Regina recollect, aloud, that the Ur-Mythic script includes the possibility of our Hero's being, at the end, not really dead, but rather transmigrated to some Elsewhere — whence, in time, he will return…
"Isn't that so?" she demands of us back-seaters — and, without waiting for our opinion, calls fretfully across to where she last heard his voice: "Freddie? Isn't it so, hon? That we'll meet again someday, somewhere?"
To which, from a remove more distant than before, one barely hears his ancient voice reply (by Regina's hopeful account), "So I've been told."
Or perhaps (as Izzy will prefer to tell it), "So: I've been told."