Across from him, Seiji turned, his attention caught by a passing noise. Transfigured by light, the family resemblance was unmistakable, their father’s blunt features refined by their mother’s to unique but recognizable effect, and Masaaki, despite his envy, strained to remember him this way, in the bright eternity of this second before the curtains swept the air and the room gathered once more like an umbrella.
“Strange how light can obscure more than illuminate,” Seiji said. “We’ve been talking about the curse of patterns that repeat over generations; what I know is that patterns also repeat across a single lifetime. My first foray into politics, as you know, was right after the war. There was a man, legendary in the radical world. During the Occupation, I got a chance to meet him. Things didn’t go as planned. I arrived at his headquarters, an underground printing press. I knocked. No one answered. In retrospect, I should have left. Instead, I turned the knob. The first room I came to was dark. Blackout papers still covered the windows, a chink of light dribbling in like weak tea. I didn’t see the body right away; there was no movement left in it to catch any light. That was the context in which I met the Legend.” He lifted the jug, poured more water, and drank it.
“I was framed for that murder,” he continued. “I wasn’t guiltless. I should’ve respected the body that had served a life, but instead I helped the Legend. We bound the corpse, lashed it to a chair. We stuffed its mouth with cloth. It never occurred to me that I was helping him construct a crime scene meant to trap me. I was charged with murder and worse. I should’ve been sent to juvenile but wasn’t; I thought I’d be old by the time I got out. Three years later, I was dumped on the street. No explanation, but even a kid like me had friends. I looked for them, but in an interregnum three years is a long time; the world had changed, everyone had disappeared into new lives. I started from scratch. Several months later, an article appeared in the newspaper. The Legend had been found dead, bound and lashed to a chair, his mouth stuffed with a cloth. The killer was never caught.”
“You’re saying this is your pattern—your curse? Betrayal and revenge?”
Seiji rotated his cup. “The thing I admired most about the Legend was that he had the voice to mobilize millions. Granted, we were motivated by hunger, but the resonance we generated when we came together to demonstrate was revolutionary. Bodies have power. It just happened that the Legend and I met in the shadow of a dead one, its stillness as powerful as the resonance of bodies in a march, but instead of jostling us into solidarity, its presence obscured our alliance, distorted our choices, narrowed them to one.”
“So he had no choice, you had no choice, is that it?”
“The thing about betrayal is that it comes in many forms. Some are planned, others accidental: accidents of folly, accidents of circumstance. Then there are accidents of good intentions.” He met Masaaki’s stare. “The problem is that the body, the visceral self, doesn’t distinguish forms of betrayal; it registers only the fact, the blunt impact, the blinding locomotion.”
“That doesn’t mean revenge has to follow betrayal,” Masaaki said, the words rolling across the floor of his stomach. “We’re more than our bodies, our feelings.”
Seiji drained his cup. “I always assumed that the worst thing about betrayal would be the injustice. In fact it’s the disappointment. But to be disappointed there must’ve been an expectation, a hope. In my case, the corpse set the stage, but the spell was cast long ago by a magazine profile I read the spring I turned thirteen. I learned that the Legend and I shared a number of things. We lived in similar neighborhoods; our parents were of a similar political persuasion, which similarly cost us during the war. Like me, he was an only child, and that spring, housebound by curfew, I pictured us as brothers. So you could say it began with that magazine profile—that it was the journalist, the writer of the profile—our father—who set it in motion.”
Masaaki felt his whole body clutch. “What are you implying?” he asked. “Our father didn’t betray you.”
“As I said”—Seiji smiled—“patterns repeat across a single lifetime. Sometimes all it takes is an accident of good intentions.” He unpinned the photograph on the wall. “This was in the book you gave me.”
Masaaki felt the electric plunge as he reached for the image that he suddenly realized was the family portrait commemorating not Seiji’s first day of school but his own. He’d dug it up to show Seiji: the identical composition, the identical discontent on his own face as he stood flanked by their parents. He thought he’d misplaced it. “The key word is ‘accident,’ ” he said. “Bodies might be blind, but you’re too conscious—you can alter the pattern. I wanted you to see it. We look like we could be brothers—that’s all I meant.”
Seiji’s smile broadened. “Are you sure?” He put down his cup. His lips trembled. Then he laughed, a sudden bellow, the purity of his pleasure cut short by a choking sputter, a chaos of new coughing. Masaaki could hear the blood in it, the salt and metal. He stood to help, but Seiji waved him away.
“You should’ve seen your face,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I admit I was jealous when I saw the picture. But like the spy, my time is running out. I’m too sick to do anything except read stories written by an Argentinian writer who is compelling me to learn a thing or two about Taoism. Did you know some Taoists believe in heredity, the passing of, say, a curse, from one relative to another through the bloodline? The question is whether curses, like viruses, can transmit through other means, other hosts—an object, a figure, even a jealous heart—and, like that, cross from one to another, as from a stranger to a stranger, a familiar.
“The first time I read the story, I was annoyed; I thought it offered nothing but a fatalistic cosmology. Now I see that it’s in fact about agency, how our actions can alter not just our personal trajectory but the larger one. You asked me once if I thought it was possible for humans to act for the benefit of the species, not just the interests of a nation, a culture, a religion. This is the conversation that prompted you to introduce me to that story.
“To his credit, the sinologist understood one thing: that the unreadable novel, more than a rhetorical experiment, is an alternative theory of the universe to stand against such luminaries of the Western Enlightenment as Newton and Schopenhauer. But like the spy’s great-grandfather, who was murdered before he could complete his great novel, the sinologist’s life is also cut short, maybe depriving him of another kind of enlightenment. A product of a whole tradition of Western thought, the sinologist rationally decodes the unreadable novel, deducing, convincingly, that the Garden of Forking Paths is not a physical place but a symbolic structure. But what he fails to grasp is that while time doesn’t unfold across a physical place, it unfolds across a space, the space of time. And it’s this failure that costs the sinologist his life and prevents our spy from altering the course of his action and the trajectory of history. Because it’s only in the space of time—the space of a moment, the space of the present—that choices are born. Ironically, the spy, the direct descendant of the great novelist, understood this. Forking through the idyllic countryside toward the sinologist’s pavilion, he momentarily forgets the war and the encroaching Irish captain, and his thoughts twirl on the fact that while the present moment is a speck in the vast history of our civilization, it’s only in the present, the moment of the now, where everything happens—where anything can happen.