The few passers-by who had been watching the shoot lingered, as though they believed the performance would continue if they continued to watch.

"So we’re to join the society of the spectacle, are we? Well I for one will have none of it." The Antipodean, red-faced, glared at the director. "Who hired you? Who gave you preeminence in
our cloistered world?" But the director stared into a monitor jotting notes on a clipboard, totally ignoring the subjects upon whom he and the camera had so recently concentrated their unblinking gaze.

Removing his hat and cape and handing them to a set assistant, the Westerner opened the passenger door of a Mercedes and, without word or gesture, slipped into the seat and closed the door behind him, leaving the others to watch the sedan’s receding taillights.

"I seemed to know my lines without ever having learned them. And these" — the Eastern Monk grasped the sleeve of the Elizabethan costume he had worn beneath his monastic cloak — "I don’t recall putting them on."

The Old Man turned toward the Trappist, who still seemed to be watching the Mercedes even though it had long since disappeared into the anonymous city traffic. "You?"

"And you."

The Old Man wagged his finger in dissent. "But I know nothing of this strange and impersonal sort of entertainment. I have glimpsed such wonders in my occasional forays into the future, but I could never have reproduced them in my imagination."

"Enough, my dear Sage. You know full well that you are no more a medieval monk than I, that you are an American of the twenty-first century, immersed since earliest childhood in Hollywood illusion. Your unconscious has taken shape inside the electromagnetic hall of mirrors generated by the interplay between the videocamera and the television screen. Tell me: haven’t you wondered why we all smoke pipes in the inn even though tobacco didn’t arrive in Europe until the Middle Ages had already come to an end?"

"Who said it was tobacco?"

"More to the point: haven’t you wondered why this medieval city is crisscrossed by trams and automobiles?"

"I no longer find these temporal juxtapositions disconcerting," the Old Man asserted, though to the lingering cinematic audience he appeared confused and distracted — "inasmuch as time itself is but an artifact of human consciousness, a psychic buffer between our fragile mortality and the terrible truth of eternity. Isn’t that so, my Eastern friend?"

But the Eastern Monk, seemingly lost in thought, kept his own counsel.

"Although I must acknowledge that I often find myself disappearing from this place," the Old Man continued. "Quite perturbing. But when I make the conscious effort to leave, I find that I’ve been transported back here, as though I had never left… And now that I think about it, I realize that you, Trappist, seem intent on proving to me that this place is an illusion. You suddenly board airplanes to England and act as if the monastic milieu of Sir Toby’s were unreal; repeatedly you stage your own death and produce doubles of yourself; you invent intrigues that seem to have nothing whatever to do with theological inquiry. And now this pointless costumed charade, explicitly intended to expose the illusion. Tell me, Trappist, or whatever sort of Englishman you claim really to be: are you saying that the entire collective theological endeavor is likewise an illusion, created and sustained over the millennia by the collective imaginings of earnest yet ultimately self-deluded extras in a Hollywood historical farce?"