[Image: “Learning to Fly,” by the master photo manipulator known as “endegor,” on DeviantArt.]
The phenomenon of twinning, at root, just represents an extreme on the continuum of otherness. Like the kids’ song says, “One of these things is not like the other / One of these things is not the same.” Even when we perceive two things as indistinguishable, even microscopically, we know they are not the same: they do not colocate; they do not coincide; one stands here/now and the other, elsewhere/elsewhen. Yin and yang. Prince and pauper. Alpha and omega, fore and aft, surface and edge…
Twinning, of one kind or another, seems lately to have become the trope in popular fiction. The recent TV series Counterpart, for example, posits a world which an East German scientist had split in two in 1987, just to see how the two worlds evolved differently. A single underground passage links the two; and over time — although existing, essentially, in two separate universes — the worlds have established diplomatic relations. Furthermore each often sends spies through the passage to gather intelligence available only to their (heh) counterparts in the other.
(You are forgiven if all that reminds you a lot of China Miéville’s novel The City & The City, from 2009 — or in some respects of the Borges short story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Of the latter, Wikipedia says: “Much of the story engages with the philosophical idealism of George Berkeley, who questioned whether it is possible to say that a thing exists if it is not being perceived.”)
Anyhow, courtesy of whiskey river last week, I came across this poem:
The Half-Finished Heaven
Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.The endless ground under us.
The water is shining among the trees.
The lake is a window into the earth.
(Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton [source])
Which leads me to…
The novel Middlegame, by Seanan McGuire, was my read-of-the-week a couple weeks ago. It’s a parallel-world fantasy, in a way; the premise depends on the existence of centuries of study of the “science” of, well, alchemy. Without wanting to get too much into plot details, including spoilers, I can say that its 21st-century protagonists are twins, of a sort unknown to readers in this — our — world: one male and one female, not born but created in an alchemical lab as the embodiments of two principles, Mathematics and Language. Separated at birth, and placed with foster parents on opposite coasts of the US, they’ve never met… until they do, mentally, across 3,000 miles, in a way which binds their lives together inextricably. The young man, named Roger, is Language personified; his twin sister, Dodger (I know! just go with it!) grasps and manipulates, instinctively, anything deeply Mathematical. And they do not, of course, believe in (let alone know how use) alchemy…
In a — yes — middlegame climax of sorts, Roger and Dodger, who finally met for real a few years ago, must visit, together, a scientific laboratory on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, a laboratory destroyed in a fire in just the previous few hours. Trapped in the blaze had been another young woman, a close friend and roommate of Dodger’s. And now they seek to learn what happened — operating in full-on instinctive mode, without knowing let alone understanding how they’re doing it, merging as it were into a single language-and-math unit of, well, twinned humanity:
They’re standing in a burnt-out building; they’ll be arrested, or worse, expelled, if someone catches them here. They’re not arson investigators, or investigators at all. Neither of them is equipped to be here. Neither of them has a clue what they’re doing.
But Dodger needs this if she’s going to accept that it isn’t their fault that [their friend]’s gone. She needs to walk the floor and try to figure out why this is happening, and if that’s what she needs, then Roger’s going to give it to her. It’s a small thing. It’s all he can do.
“Wood burns at—”
“Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit,” says Dodger, without missing a beat.
Roger nods. “So we have a starting point.”
“Absolute zero,” she says.
“Exactly.”
They walk the floor like tightrope performers, placing each foot gingerly in front of the other, testing for weaknesses, waiting for the moment when the whole thing gives way.
Occasionally, one of them will say something: a word, a number. The other will answer, a number, a word, completing the equation that they make between them, defining the world one step at a time. After a while, they stop looking at each other; they don’t need to.
“Ceiling tiles.”
“Ninety-five destroyed, one hundred and sixteen partially destroyed, eighteen intact. Eighty-four.”
“Chairs damaged in this classroom.”
“Fifty-three destroyed, seventeen damaged but potentially repairable.”
It’s never been like this before. They’ve always been holding each other a little bit apart, divided by some reluctance to give in…
As adults, they came back together by chance (but there is no chance where they’re concerned; there never has been, only intricate design), and still they’ve been holding back, afraid of giving in, afraid of needing too much.
They aren’t holding back now.
“Pounds of fallen masonry.”
“Seven hundred and three, in this room.”
“Dust.”
“Twelve thousand parts per million.”
On and on they go, the shorthand becoming more extreme, the air going hot and heavy around them, like an electric storm rolling in, like another fire getting ready to ignite, a fire that needs no flame but only the constant friction between the two halves of something which has never, in all the long years of their lives, been fully realized.
They aren’t children anymore, and were never truly together, not in the way they both know in their bones that they should have been, but in this moment, they are playing as children play, tragedy forgotten in the face of so much joy…
The words and numbers no longer bear any resemblance to each other to the outside ear. “Perspicacity,” he says, and “Four point eight three one five,” she replies, and smiles a small and secret smile, like she’s just said something clever, which perhaps she has. Perhaps, in the language of numbers, she is Shakespeare, she is Eliot, she is Rossetti spinning tales of the Goblin Market… “Seven,” she says, and “Celestial,” he says, and his smile is as bright as hers, as matched as two peas in a pod, as two children on the improbable road, and she’s laughing, and he’s laughing, and everything is going to be all right. The smell of smoke and wet lingers, but the storm they’re making between them has all but washed it away, replacing it with the smell of ozone, crackling bright and ready to spark.
“Blue,” says Roger.
“Two,” says Dodger.
“Alienate,” says Roger.
“One,” says Dodger, and “Zero,” they say in unison, and the ground moves beneath their feet.
Without trying, they have in short summoned up a colossal earthquake. And the sudden back-and-forth transformation of the atmosphere in this passage, from a tragedy of fire and smoke, to something like electrical magic, to sudden near apocalypse, is (in the context of the book) at once suspenseful, thrilling, exhilaratingly cathartic, and cataclysmic. Save for that very last bit, it chimed in my head nicely with the Tomas Tranströmer poem — in a way, for me anyhow, the sudden emergence of catastrophe distinguished the fiction as fiction, the poem as poetry.
You might say “The Half-Finished Heaven” and this Middlegame passage represent two mysterious, utterly different, utterly complementary alchemical principles. They’ve simply manifested, coincident in my head — and now yours? — at the same moment…
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