Fiction—The Other Borges

Author's Note (For Context): This is a ficción, inside joke, eulogy, parody, and testament of the great translator and writer Jorge Borges, in imitation of his excellent "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."

I owe the discovery of a Borgesian doppelganger to the conjunction of a mirror site and an entry on Wikipedia. The mirror troubled the depths of my thoughts in my suburban home in Sugar Land, Texas; the Wiki-page was devoted to an author with a similar name, another Borges. My friend had been explaining the utility of a mirror site, a website replica created to divert network traffic, when, in jest, he said that mirrors and copulation were abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men. The phrasing seemed too eloquent for his invention, and I asked who said it. Jorge Borges, was the reply. A strange sense of unreality set in, and I asked if he had any relation to the Argentine writer of the same name, to which my friend said – I don’t think so.

We set about to search for this Borges on the Internet, but could find nothing, only webpages saying Page Not Found, since my Wifi wasn't working. To save face, he searched again on his phone, but could only find the other Borges – the magical realist from South America. Again, he distanced the quote's origin and literary master, arguing that they were separate persons. I finally decided this had been a fruitless fiction derived from my friend's pride and insecurity in claiming the passage for his own. Surely, if there had been two Borgeses, I would have heard of this anomaly, this controversy?

Years later, I would find a book by this alt-author in a used book store on 99. The work was titled The Garden of Forking Paths, and contained a slew of stories, all strange and wonderful and infinitesimally complex. I was leaving the store when in the Spanish aisle I saw the name Borges in bold print. It was on the cover of El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan – clearly, the work of the Original Author. I bought both works and brought them to my home for careful examination, or to use a word discounted by high school teachers, to peruse. What I found was astonishing. The two texts, by two authors of the same name, were completely unrelated in regards to content. In fact, one was incomprehensible, written in a language divergent to ours: Spanish. Yet the structures were identical, or nearly so, for both had Tables of Contents, chapter headings, a body of pages, a foreword and index. And the stories corresponded; their paragraphs and even their punctuation were terribly homogenous. I felt as if I'd found some otherworldly Rosetta Stone, some fragment of twin dimensions.

The pictures of the authors in the book jackets looked related, although one was much older, shrewder, with a drooping eye. They could have been twins if it weren't for the gap in years, or duplicates, as if God had multiplied Soul and Body – some error in creation buried beneath the continuities.

My final discovery was on the bookshelf of a woman I was wooing. She was a graduate student renting her professor's small one-bedroom apartment while he was on sabbatical. There was an erotic nature to our connection, accentuated by strange phallic images the professor had put up on the walls. African tribal spears, bolo knives, and near-nude women with large breasts in Picasso-like frontality. On her shelf, or rather, the professor's shelf, was a copy of Borges' Forking Paths. One night, I brought my own copy from home (possibly by the same author, possibly by the Other) and compared the two. What I found led to my utter distress and subsequent destruction of the books. The works were the same and not the same, as if the two writers had plagiarized the same source, some ur-text, or precursor. In one book, the words read, "I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty." The other: “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks." Both, despite distance, derivation, offered a glimpse into the unrealness of my world – its labyrinths, its mirrors.

I struck a match which burned like the sun above me, and put it to the books. For a moment, I thought there were twin suns crackling in the afternoon heat, before the bookfire rescinded, leaving behind its ashy droppings, a clutter of black fragments belonging to the libraries of Hell.