Masaaki leaned back, the cool wall reassuringly uncomfortable. The summary was faithful, but he could feel the edges of a new story moving beneath the skin of the familiar narrative, and he dreaded what would emerge. “You make it sound like the story is about limited choices,” Masaaki said. “As though, from the beginning, our spy, arriving at the sinologist’s door, has one choice: whether or not to carry out his murderous intent. It’s as though you’re saying our antihero is trapped, confined to his assigned parameters.”
Seiji tilted his head. “Antihero? I like that.” Behind him, the curtains flapped shut, and his face disappeared into darkness. “What we need to remember is that what binds our spy and his victim is an unreadable novel about the nature of time written by the spy’s illustrious great-grandfather. The reader is never told why the sinologist devoted himself to this novel, a literary disaster by most counts, but it had captivated him, just as it had captivated generations of the spy’s family who wanted it destroyed. It’s this novel that initially stays the spy, who decides to spend his last hour before the arrival of the Irish captain listening to the sinologist’s exegesis.”
Masaaki uncurled his legs, feeling his blood rejoice. The novel was indeed the story’s central mystery. Begun under perplexing circumstances, with the spy’s great-grandfather renouncing his worldly position before retreating into a pavilion to write an infinite novel about time and create an infinite garden of forking paths, the project was terminated a decade later under circumstances equally perplexing: the great-grandfather’s inauspicious death at the hands of a stranger. Chillingly, when the family entered the pavilion, all they found were piles of contradictory drafts and nothing, not even a sketch, of the garden maze. To the spy’s surprise, the sinologist claims to have cracked the mystery.
“The novel, as we said, is unreadable,” Seiji continued. “Characters die in one chapter only to reappear perfectly alive in another. In this novel, time, as our sinologist explains, doesn’t progress; it doesn’t flow linearly in one absolute direction; a decision at a fork in a plot doesn’t ‘logically’ eliminate all other paths not taken. Instead, all paths fork off and continue on, each invisible to the others but existing concurrently, each forking again and again at every crossroad, diverging, converging, crisscrossing, or simply running parallel across a vast, endless labyrinth of time. In some of these times, our spy might exist but not the sinologist; at other times, neither exists; in the times in which they both exist, sometimes they’re friends, other times they barely cross paths; in yet other times they miss each other completely. Then there are times in which they meet as enemies. In the story we’re discussing, the spy and the sinologist are strangers; war brings them together, exposing their roots tangled by the same history that left them exiles: the spy, a dislocated Chinese man working for the German Reich, finds himself a fugitive in imperial England, the empire he has come to sabotage, while the sinologist, technically at home in England, is equally dislocated, living in isolation in a pavilion uncannily reminiscent of the spy’s great-grandfather’s pavilion in China, where he’d retreated to write his infinite novel. Their meeting benefits them both: the sinologist offers the spy a chance to reconnect with his culture, language, roots, while the spy offers the sinologist the opportunity to present his theory and prove himself an expert, an intellectual heir—a familiar—of the great Chinese man he so admires and identifies with. All futures are possible at all junctures, but despite their sympathies and mutual gratitude, the spy shoots his kindred victim.”
Masaaki uncrossed his legs again. He appreciated Seiji’s attention to the subtext of imperial history he himself found integral to the story, but the implied fatalism troubled him. Why was Seiji insisting on it? He didn’t like the parallel Seiji seemed to be drawing. He rubbed his knees, ashamed of his discomfort in front of the sick man. “Again, I have to question your view of our characters’ choices,” Masaaki said. “It’s true, the spectrum of our options isn’t always perceptible, and clarity is a luxury for this spy trapped in enemy territory, but does it mean he has no choice? The reader is told he has one bullet in his gun. Could a Chinese spy working for the German Reich, to whom he has his worth—the value of the Chinese race—to prove, choose not to fulfill his mission? The pressure is extreme. But the spy is a rational man.”
Seiji loosened the collar of his sweatshirt. On the wall, just to the side of his head, there was a small rectangle, a tattered snapshot tacked up by a pin. In this light, the image was murky, but Masaaki was sure it was the family portrait taken on Seiji’s first day of school. Months ago, when Masaaki had brought it for him, Seiji had been quick to put it away, and Masaaki had feared he’d upset him; now he was relieved to see the photograph displayed. In the window, the curtains were still, the thin press of light like an incandescent thumb.
“You’re right,” Seiji agreed. “Our spy has one bullet, and, logically, he has three possible targets: the sinologist; the Irish captain; himself. A learned man himself, the spy chooses to spend his last hour discussing his great-grandfather’s novel with the sinologist he intends to kill. That he, immersed in a conversation about time and its innumerable forks, remains blind to his own forking options is curious. The Irish captain arrives; the spy has seconds to use his bullet. How differently things could’ve turned out. With a shift of his hand, he might’ve spared the sinologist; Germany might’ve never bombed the artillery park; history might’ve forked differently; and a different future than one of perpetual remorse might’ve been available to the spy. But remember: while all futures are possible, it’s time, embodied by the Irish captain, that our spy feels he can’t escape. Trapped in its stream, racing his impending capture, our spy arrives at the sinologist’s door. Their paths cross, and so do the strands of their entwined past. In that past, the spy’s great-grandfather was murdered by a stranger; in the present, the spy and the sinologist are also strangers.”
The words hung portentiously. “You’re not saying there’s a correlation. That the one murder is related to the other?”
Seiji unlaced his hands. “Why not? Maybe there are patterns we can’t escape.”
“It’s one thing to say history narrows our choices, but it’s another to say there are scenarios that repeat over generations, that we’re scripted to repeat.”
“What makes you so sure there aren’t? Like our spy who misses the story he’s being told, maybe you’re not positioned to know the script we’re enacting.”
In the window, the curtains puffed and, with a thwack, sucked outward; the men startled. Caught in the mouth of the half-lowered window, the curtains strained, a concave sail. Masaaki drew his knees into his arms, passing a hand across his forehead. On and off, he’d been experiencing a dot of pain halfway between his sternum and spine; now his body was coated with a clammy film. In the window, the curtains loosened; their corners flipped; ribbons of light blew back in.