The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

The steps were steep. Once or twice he had to pull me up. “There will be a ramp,” he said, “so the spectators can cluster around the other side.”

We were standing on a ledge of snow now, looking down onto the tableau he had created. Here, at the highest point in the park, there was a bitter breeze. It had stopped snowing and the air was clear, but the sky was too bright from the city lights to see many stars. The artificial mountain wrapped around us on three sides; the fourth was the half-built viewer’s ramp; the area formed a kind of open-air pavilion.

Aki said, “Look around you. It’s 1200 B.C. We’re on the slopes of Mt. Ida, in the mythological dawn. Look—over there—past the edge of the park—the topless towers of Ilium. It was the Otani Prince Towers, glittering with neon, peering up through twin peaks. It was an optical illusion—the embankment no more than thirty feet high, a weird forced perspective, the moonlight, the fog swirling—that somehow drew the whole city into the fantasy world. “Come on,” he said, taking my hand as we descended into the valley. A ruined rotunda rose out of a mound of rubble. A satyr played the panpipe and a centaur lay sleeping against a broken wall. It was hard to believe it was all made of snow. On the wall, sculpted in bas-relief, was the famous judgment: Paris, a teenaged version of Rodin’s Thinker, leaning forward as he sat on a boulder; the three goddesses preening; the golden apple in the boy’s hand.

“Now look behind the wall,” Aki said.

I saw a cave hollowed out of the side of the embankment. At its entrance, sitting in the same attitude as the bas-relief, was a three-dimensional Paris; beyond, inside the cave, you could make out three figures, their faces turned away.

“But—” I said. “You can’t see the tableau from the spectator’s ramp! At best, you’d see the back of Paris’s head, the crook of Athena’s arm. You can only see the relief on the ruined wall.”

“But that is what this sculpture is all about, Marie,” Aki said. He was talking faster now, gesticulating. “I hold the mirror up to nature and within the mirror there’s another mirror that mirrors the mirrored nature I’ve created . . . reflections within reflections ... art within art. . . the truth only agonizingly, momentarily glimpsed . . . and that which is most beautiful is that which remains unseen. Come on, Marie. You will get to see my hidden world. Come. Come.”

He seized my hand. I climbed down beside him. A system of planks, concealed by snowy ridges, led to the grotto. Like a boy with an ant farm, Aki became more intense, more nervous as we neared the center of his universe. When he reached the sculpture of Paris, he became fidgety. He disregarded me completely and went up to the statue, reshaping a wrinkle in the boy’s cloak, fussing with his hair. Paris had no face yet.