31 ...

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This is terrible; something I did not foresee happening when we were in Venice, of course," I offered.

"No, no of course not, David," Gaugin insisted. We've done this to ourselves, but we would like to conclude the experiment now."

"I certainly understand that," I said; after all, you've been stuck here for nearly three years! How on earth did you survive?"

Degas slumped and sat heavily on the steps. "Three years? Three years? But how can that be? It seems that any logical sense of the passage of time has abandoned us. I suppose this is fortunate," he sighed. "But, three years. Had we been aware how long it's been, we'd have gone mad long ago."

Placing a sympathetic hand on Degas' shoulder, Gaugin explained. "Well, as you know David, I trained as an accountant and a stockbroker, and one can always find people who need help untangling their personal finances for a reasonable fee. And Edgar has been busy on most sunny days setting up on different street corners and in piazze around town drawing portraits for a modest price. The tourists seem to find it amusing that this fellow who looks and dresses like the famous Edgar Degas will also sign his drawings with that name – drawings I need not add, that look remarkably as though created by the hand of the real Degas. We have managed to stay housed and fed all this time in a small hotel near the Duomo. But my god, lousy father that I might be, I do hope to see my children again soon."

Gaugin's description of the new drawings his friend had been making stirred the memory of my recent encounter with the Guardia di Finanza, in Rome. No doubt more than one naive and greedy tourist will claim to have discovered unknown Degas drawings. The paper, however, will be impossible to pass off as old, and these people will be scoffed at and disappointed. If the art dealers they approached only knew the facts of the situation, they would be salivating at the thought of getting their hand on Degas, but that can not happen. Still, I wondered if the Guardia officers I'd met would hear about the new Degas drawings.

Alert now, I offered the only comfort I could. "I can only assume that my being here in Firenze is the solution you have been waiting for. I don't mean this in any egotistical way, but it seems to me that all of the variations of this collision of time periods originate in the event I created in Venice, and that they can only be resolved if I am present. Oh ... that is so confusing, isn't it? This is my fiction, my fantasy, I guess, and I'll have to see that you two get home. This is how it was in Venice, and again more recently in Rome. Look, it's getting late and I for one am starving. Could we go somewhere for something to eat?"