Of course, he doubted that it was real. The thing that convinced him--Yun spoke more slowly and deliberately when he got to this part of the story--he could see the pool wall by his right side. He had entered the race in Lane #3, but here he was in Lane #6, Michael's lane. Randomly he remembered that the wall itself offered a theoretical advantage of 3 miliseconds per lap, and now as Michael he was taking that advantage.
And inside all this strangeness, did it occur to Yun that he might relax just a bit and throw the race to his other self three lanes over? Or with this body, so much longer and stronger than his own,and yet so much less accustomed to real work, real discipline, he might achieve new records?
The last thing Yun remembers about those six minutes of merged identity was repetition of the proverb è è" ç ç , literally "flower petals fall like snowflakes", but its meaning translates roughly as sic transit gloria mundi. For the first time, he was allowing himself to consider that just a few years hence, both he and Michael would pass into history, their best glory behind them, while others their age were just beginning to aspire to a future of open-ended ambition. Life is long.
Looking back in retrospect, Yun made a strange admission to me. "It would have been very difficult to act differently from the way I did. While I was inside Michael's body, I had an intimate familiarity with Michael's habits, his passions, his ways of thought. You will want to know, did I have free will? Could I choose what to do with my limbs as I do at this moment in this body? I felt sure that yes, I could. But the habits were stronger than I ever imagined. I had Michael's pace and coordination, not my own. I had the thoughts that Michael thought. I saw his girlfriend, beaming with pride for me at the race's end. The gold medal that I saw in my future was Michael's gold medal, not my own. In the split between body and soul, we imagine that thoughts go with the soul, but I learned that day it is not so. Except by focused and intense assertion of will, thoughts arise from the body, from which they are too often adopted without question as 'my own'."
I stayed awake far too long into the night, I know, propelled in an accelerating torrent of words toward this ending I had devised. Staring at an LED screen, my eyes became bleary, but my fingers moved on. My sight became grey, but the words continued to come, each ensuing paragraph more amd more like accounts I've heard of automatic writing. Mozart taking the Lord's dictation. Jane Roberts or--dare I mention Pesoa? whose multiple personalities ought by rights to have been the souls of my story, in preference to Borges.
I stopped writing not because there was nothing more to write, but because I was startled--startled and soothed, paradoxically--as my sight gave out completely. The light above my bed was still on. The computer screen, presumably, still displayed my story. But in my eyes there was only black. I thought it best to leave off my story and succumb to the hour. Sleep came almost instantly.
I don't know how long it was when I awoke from a dream. Probably not very long, if my experience is any guide. Many of my most vivid dreams occur just minutes after dozing off.
I was in the Library of Babel, with its endless expanse of hexagonal rooms, packed like a honeycomb in every direction. Every book was here, every possible book, every permutation and combination of the 26 capital and small letters of the Latin alphabet plus 8 punctuations, indexed just as Kurt GÃ del would have numbered them, in alphabetical sequence not by title but by their full content. They were printed on 80# paper in Braille, titles and bindings in Braille as well, and this caused each volume to be bulkier than books of visible print. The fingers do not have so fine a resolution as the retina, but touch carries an immediate meaning, palpable, if you will, that readers of print books can never know. An infinity of large volumes or of small, I thought, is all the same infinity.
The library contained, as I say, every possible volume, but not with a blind democracy as to importance. Shelf upon shelf of nonsense was represented by one copy of each distinct text; but the important works of literary value were there in multiple copies, so many copies, enough copies that it was possible to locate them and single them out. Homer and Milton and Didymus of Alexandria, Helen Keller, and then Borges himself. So few books they left to us, but so many copies of each here in "his" library.
My fingers touched and could read. More than this, they knew the words before I touched them. How pleasant it was to run my fingers over the bindings, reading the disparate contents of each volume. The irresistible title, "Tlà n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". By the time I found the story called Water Torture, I retained no capacity for surprise. Line for line, word for word, Borges had written my story before I had. This man's intuitive imagination could gauge the future thousands of years hence; it is hardly a cause for surprise that he anticipated the Beijing Olympics by a mere half century. No wonder it felt like "automatic writing" in my somnolent, semiconscious state. No doubt I was remembering a story lodged deep in my subconscious, which I had read exactly 50 years earlier, as a college student.
The remainder of that long night, I slept the sleep of the just, or perhaps the sleep of the dead. When day returned, I found that my eyesight had been restored. Curiously, I had never doubted it would. But just in the waking, I recalled one more dream, one more connection to Borges. I was in his bed, drawn into sexual union with the Master. I knew that this act of infidelity would rip apart my marriage, bring down my reputation, leave in tatters the life of integrity that I had so carefully constructed. Pulled by my body, I had no choice, but had I the will to decide in that moment, I would have judged it a fair bargain, trading all I had assembled by my staid reliability for this one orgasmic moment of union.
"Being an agnostic means all things are possible."
-- Jorge Luis Borges
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