Mefisto

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CHANCE WAS IN the beginning. I am thinking of that tiny swimmer, alone of all its kind, surging in frantic ardour towards the burning town, the white room and Castor dead. Strange, that a life so taken up with the swell and swarm of numbers should start, like a flourish between mirrors, in the banal mathematics of gemination. The end also was chance.

There was a Polydeuces too, of course. Who only is escaped alone etcetera.

We were not the first, of our kind, in our tribe. On my mother’s side there had been another pair, monovular also, though they both perished, their lives a brief day. Pity they weren’t bottled, I could have them for a mascot, my translucent little grand-uncles, fists clenched, frowning in their fluid. There is too a more subtle echo in the symmetrical arrangement of grandparents, Jack Kay and Grandfather Swan and their miniature wives. Thus the world slyly nudges us, showing up the seemingly random for what it really is. I could go on. I shall go on. I too have my equations, my symmetries, and will insist on them.

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