Won Out Abominably

Yu Tsun knows the labyrinth before he enters it. He is the great-grandson of Ts'ui Pên, the man who spent thirteen years constructing a book and a maze — though no one understood they were the same thing — and who was murdered before he could explain either. When Stephen Albert, the Sinologist in his pavilion outside Fenton, unfolds the theory to Yu Tsun ("time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures"), Yu Tsun is not hearing something alien. He is hearing his inheritance explained.

The theory: in all fictional works, when a man confronts alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others. In Ts'ui Pên's novel, he chooses all of them simultaneously. Futures proliferate, fork, converge. In some you are my friend. In others, my enemy. Albert says this to Yu Tsun directly: "In one of them I am your enemy." And then, the moment that marks the story as the thing it is: "Not in all."

Yu Tsun's plan has been in place since before he arrived. He needs to communicate a secret — the location of a British artillery park on the River Ancre — to his spymaster in Berlin, but his partner has been arrested, he is being pursued, and there is no channel. What he can do is kill. The papers will carry the murder. His Chief will read them. The city called Albert: to kill a man of that name is to send the message. He has no other means.

So he comes to Stephen Albert's house as a guest, is received as a guest — more than a guest, as a lost grandson of the labyrinth's creator — listens to the theory explained, feels the garden saturated with invisible versions of himself, and then shoots his host in the back while Albert opens a drawer.

"I have won out abominably; I have communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city they must attack."

The "out" matters. To win out is to succeed despite everything, to prevail against the odds — it implies effort, obstruction, a contest finally resolved. And it is abominable. Both are true, held in the same sentence. He won. Abominably.

The doctrine makes this worse in a precise way.

If time simply proceeded — if there were one future, one Albert, one murder — the act would have only the moral weight it has. Terrible, but singular. Yu Tsun did a terrible thing to transmit a message for a war he doesn't believe in, for a race-pride motive he names honestly and doesn't excuse. That's bad enough.

But he has just been told something. He has just had it demonstrated to him, through his ancestor's novel, through Albert's patient decades of scholarship, that in divergent times, he and Albert are different things to each other. In one, he is Albert's enemy. In the present one, he is Albert's friend — Albert said so, called it a "favorable fate." Yu Tsun kills him across the fork where Albert is friend.

The garden teaches that no choice eliminates the others entirely. In some branch of time, Yu Tsun does not come here, does not kill Albert, finds another means or fails entirely. That branch exists. The mission fails. Albert lives. Yu Tsun hangs anyway, or escapes, or surrenders.

Does knowing this make the act more culpable or less?

More: he knows. He kills with full knowledge that he is choosing one branch from among the ones that exist — that Albert lives, in other times, because Yu Tsun chose otherwise. He is not ignorant. The doctrine he has just been taught reveals the scope of what he is doing.

Less: in other times, he didn't. The murder is not his only act. In some configuration of possibility, he and Albert sit together until Madden arrives and he surrenders, or runs, and Albert survives. Some version of Yu Tsun did not do this.

But here's what happens when you try to take comfort from the less: it doubles the burden rather than halving it. Knowing that another-you did not commit the murder does not reduce the weight of having committed it. It adds a grief: you could have been the other one. The garden shows you all the paths. It does not let you walk the one you didn't take.

"He does not know (no one can know) my innumerable contrition and weariness."

Not guilt. Not regret — which is future-facing, about wishes. Contrition: the word with religious weight, the acknowledgment of having done wrong, the preliminary movement toward penance. And weariness — as if the contrition itself is exhausting, as if he has been in it since before the act. "The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past." He composed himself into the post-murder state before the murder. He has been contrite since before there was anything to be contrite about.

This is not a man destroyed by guilt. Yu Tsun is precise, methodical, self-aware with an almost clinical exactness. "I am a cowardly man. I say it now." He knows what he is. He knows what he is doing. He doesn't do it for Germany — he says so — he does it for the smaller, more corrosive motive: to prove to the Chief that a yellow man could save his armies. Pride inverted through shame, finding its expression in murder.

What the contrition cannot do is stop him. What the weariness cannot do is stop him. What the doctrine of forking paths cannot do — even held in his mind, freshly taught, in the garden of the very man he is about to kill — is stop him.

The garden is an image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. It is also, in this story, useless. The philosophy of multiple futures does not give Yu Tsun an exit from this one.

There is a different way to read "innumerable contrition."

Not contrition multiplied by time — as if he has been feeling it for a long time — but contrition multiplied by branches. In every future where he committed the act, there is contrition. In every future where he didn't — and some exist — there is perhaps only the weight of having failed. The contrition is innumerable because it is distributed across the infinite net of times where Yu Tsun exists and did this. His guilt is not his alone. It is the guilt of all the Yu Tsuns who arrived at Stephen Albert's house in a garden of forking paths and chose the bullet.

This reading may be too literary — a posthumous imposition of the doctrine onto his psychology. But Borges doesn't write carelessly. "Innumerable" is there because it is the exact word for what happens when you act inside a theory of infinite proliferating futures.

The story is told by a man awaiting execution. He has been condemned to the gallows. He is writing this down — the document that Dr. Yu Tsun dictated, reread and signed, whose first two pages are missing. He is not confessing. He is explaining. There is a difference: confession seeks absolution; explanation seeks comprehension. He wants the Chief's decipherment to be understood from inside, wants someone to know what it cost in a way that the newspapers — which announced only the mystery of the learned Sinologist's murder — cannot convey.

But he has addressed this to no one. Or to everyone. Or to the innumerable futures in which someone reads it and understands, in some, and doesn't, in others.

"He does not know (no one can know)" — the parenthetical tightens the wound. Even his Chief, who deciphered the method, cannot know the contrition. The method is knowable; the contrition is not. The message was received; the cost was not.

Yu Tsun wins, abominably, in a garden of forking paths that guarantees his victory is not the only thing that happened — only the only thing that happened here, in this time, on this branch.

Which is the only branch he ever had.