“You’re not serious,” Masaaki said, rubbing the afterimage of the pain. “To say our lives are scripted is like saying we live in a play, that our choices are futile, that the roles we fancy we play in life and in the world are just that: a fantasy. I thought you believed in self-conscious action, the importance of exercising our agency.”
“You shouldn’t assume I’m aligned with the story,” Seiji said. “We’re talking about a piece of fiction.”
Masaaki felt the jab. “You’re right. What I should’ve said is that even if the spy missed the story, he could’ve honored his roots, shifted his loyalties, at least respected his sympathies. I can’t accept that that wouldn’t have changed the outcome. All futures are possible; we happen to be reading the version that forked this way. As for repeating patterns, the spy’s great-grandfather was murdered by a stranger. Here, it’s the great-grandson who murders the sinologist, a stranger.”
Seiji slid his hands over his cup. “All futures are possible. The future in which our spy doesn’t kill the sinologist also exists. But if all futures exist, every future is predetermined. I’m saying that in our version, there was no other way the path could’ve forked. By the time our spy shoots our sinologist, his choices have narrowed to one.” He paused. “Do you remember what prompted you to give me this story?”
Masaaki recalled traipsing all over town, leaving one bookstore for another in search of the book, but the context was gone. He admitted it, uneasily.
Seiji nodded. “I know you read the story many times; I read it many times too, and each time I’ve been plagued with the feeling that I missed something. Like time, words marshaled into a narrative are relentless; they drive on, talking over gaps, bridging contradictions, eloquently covering everything up. But once in a while a moment opens in the narrative, and we can seize our thoughts. Like you, I believe we have options, but only if we know where to look. You remember how the sinologist connects the unreadable novel to the lost garden of forking paths, right?”
Masaaki remembered the detail, crucial to the story. Through the rigorous assertion of reason, the sinologist deduces that, far from being a work of an eccentric or an infirm mind, the novel is itself a maze mirroring the labyrinthine nature of time. “Our sinologist concludes that the Garden of Forking Paths was never a physical structure,” he said. “It was always only a symbolic one, forking across the pages of a novel. The garden and the novel are one and the same.”
Seiji didn’t move. In the window, the curtains flapped, offering flashes of illumination, but he alone occupied the position benefitting from its trajectory. “I’ve been laid up many times, but it always takes getting used to,” he said, finally. “Time lures you places you wouldn’t have gone otherwise. The last few days, I’ve been drawn less to the story’s central parable about forking paths than to its peripheral details. For example, after our spy’s great-grandfather renounces his worldly position, he retreats to what he calls the Pavilion of the Limpid Solitude to construct his labyrinthine novel. When he dies, his family discovers that he entrusted his literary estate to a—and I quote—‘Taoist or Buddhist monk,’ and thereafter every descendant of the great-grandfather has cursed the monk for faithfully ensuring the publication of the questionable novel. Tell me something.” He leaned out of the shadow. “Do you believe in curses?”
Masaaki felt his heart turn. “I suppose I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Because there’s something I’m trying to figure out. As you said, in the present, it’s the spy who murders the sinologist, while in the past it’s the great-grandfather who is murdered by a stranger. At first, the inverted symmetry appears to reject any correlation. But what if, in the Great Labyrinth, we cross paths not only at various times but also in various forms? Details click into place. Just as the great-grandfather lived in seclusion in a pavilion amid a garden maze, the sinologist also lives alone in a pavilion reached by turning left at every fork. Just as the great man’s library must have been filled with all manner of textual and other treasures, the sinologist’s library is filled with exquisite artifacts and tomes from West to East, including silk-bound volumes edited by a Chinese emperor that the spy instantly recognizes but knows were never printed. So, who is our sinologist? He’s elderly, tall, with a Westerner’s gray eyes. He’s the definition of a stranger in the context of China.”
“Are you suggesting he killed the great-grandfather? That he’s some sort of an imposter?”
Seiji opened his palms. “We know the sinologist is elderly, but is he old enough to have crossed paths with the great-grandfather? The story offers no clue, nothing about a theft of irreplaceable tomes alongside the murder. What it offers are other clues. For example, the references to ‘Taoism or Buddhism.’ Then the description of our sinologist as looking ‘immortal.’ We also can’t forget the replicated pavilions. Maybe we’re being asked to consider the possibility that the sinologist, in another time, in another form, maybe in the form of an illustrious Chinese man of letters, was murdered by a stranger who’d one day visit him in the form of a Chinese spy.”
“You mean the sinologist is a reincarnation of the spy’s great-grandfather?”
Seiji smiled. “Besides the pavilion, the other correlation between the long-ago murder in China and the current murder in England is the presence of the infinite novel about time. It’s as though it too has traveled through the Labyrinth and, in a coalescent time, bound two apparent strangers, prefiguring not the murder but its precondition. Like a curse, it’s as if its appearance revived in the strangers a sleeping dynamic that had to play out in that cloistered room full of illustrious texts and objects deeply familiar to both. It’s as though the spy and the sinologist have been nudged into what turns out to be a recurring trap to which they’re inexorably drawn, like two captive rats who, trained to take a left at every crossroads, irresistibly fork their way into the center of a hall of mirrors filled with endless replicas of the pavilion, inside which the spy always, inevitably, encounters as if for the first time the sinologist in his different guises. You see, a curse is nothing more than a trigger. It can be anything. For some, it’s an unreadable novel about time. For others, a photograph. For still others, a story by an Argentinian writer. Or maybe a shared set of parents.”
The light flickered, the breeze like a passing truck; the curtains arced, and the room fluoresced, the afternoon sweeping across Seiji’s damaged face, flooding the dark aquarium of the TV; the neat pile of clothes on the overhead shelf; the tacked-up family portrait of a boy not yet mangled; the plastic jug the color of American mustard set beside the diminished man Masaaki now realized he’d soon lose. The walls shimmered; the air pulsated, a luminous agitation Masaaki would experience again only in the final moments of his own life, which would unexpectedly precede his brother’s, seizing him abruptly in his office one afternoon, eight weeks later. Lying on the floor, heart sputtering like a sparrow, he’d remember this light, the way it had teased the curtains all afternoon, simmering, then bubbling, then finally pouring in, a white vibration so pure it distilled every object into its glimmering essence, the golden beads tapping the air before releasing upward into a radiance where everything was as yet undifferentiated, where something and nothing were not yet opposites, where form, as yet unformed, had not drawn the jealous attention of time, with its corrosive wrath. This light, like the dizzying light of a maze, would feel familiar, its luminescence redolent of summer and childhood and their halcyon dreams where people, never lost, returned, like his ex-wife and two daughters and, these days, an image, like a memory, of two figures in a room.