I used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 and Fable to generate this story in the style of Jorge Luis Borges after reading his Labyrinths collection of short stories.
I realise this raises a controversial point about who really wrote this story and whether or not it has artistic merit.
Well, I spent 28 years pondering the ideas in it, and 6 hours producing it. I would be standing on the shoulders of Borges whether I wrote it manually or not. I’m not sure it was worth more than 6 hours of my time to write it.
Let the reader decide if it is worth their time to read it.
I
In 1987, or the year after, I was asked to write up the case of a patient whom I will call Anselm Roth, and I declined, on the grounds that the case was unremarkable. It was. I am writing it now, in the evening, by hand, in a notebook, and the reason will appear. Roth was a schoolmaster of fifty-four with a tumour of the frontal lobe and the melancholia that attends it, admitted under my care for a course of electroconvulsive therapy, which commonly erases the memory of the weeks preceding it. He had read this on the consent form. He was a precise man, and on the evening before the first session he bought a notebook of his own and began a diary.
I have it before me. It runs to eleven days, or twelve maybe. The entries are long and lucid, and combative: the weather, the names of nurses, a dream about a staircase, a quarrel with his landlord. On the ninth day he writes: I am here. I am writing this. Whatever they do to me, these days happened, and I had them. The sentence is underlined.
The treatment went well. Roth recovered his spirits and lost, as the form had promised, the better part of a month. I gave him the notebook and watched him read it, with the mild interest one gives a letter addressed to someone else. At the end he closed it and said, without sorrow, as a man reporting a fact: “I never lived those days. The author of this diary is not me.”
I corrected him, as a physician does. I had seen him live them; he had argued with me, laughed, eaten, slept. “Yes,” he said. “But not me.” I did not answer. Something returned that I had not felt for fifty years and could not then have placed: a swimming, a kerb, my sister’s face against a sky of the wrong colour.
In thirty-one years of neurology I had heard patients say such things. I had not attended to them. Textbooks record that the amnesic patient forgets. Patients do not say this. They say the time did not happen to them. A woman who lost the hour before a fall had been in her kitchen and then presently in the ambulance, “with nothing between, not even darkness.” A climber who could not recall his last ascent said he had not made it; the photographs showed otherwise. None of them had lost anything.
They simply had not been there.
I set this down because of what followed, which was, I think, the corruption of my reason by the municipal library at Regensburg.
II
The treatise is De tempore recepto. Its author, Johannes Felder, a Lutheran schoolmaster of Ulm, published it at his own expense in 1764 and sold, so far as I can discover, nine copies. Its thesis is a sentence and its hundred and forty pages a defence of it: time is not passed through; it is received. An hour is not had when it occurs but when it arrives, and it arrives only in the hour that keeps it. What no later hour keeps was never. A man is precisely that infinitesimal thread collecting and conjoining his hours.
Felder’s evidence is a cousin, a boy of twelve, who fell from a hayloft and came to himself in the parlour with the lamps lit. The unanimous household told him he had been three hours in the yard: that he had walked, eaten bread, answered to his name, wept when the doctor set his wrist. The boy did not merely deny it. He was, Felder records, enraged by it, and remained so into old age. He had been on the ladder, and then in the parlour; there had been nothing between, and he would not be told otherwise by people who had only watched. They had their three hours. He had not had them, and he resented being made to carry hours that were not his. Felder, who had been in the yard and had held the bread, came to believe him. He had read Leibniz and not Hume; the second might have spared him. The remaining pages ask what else might be taken, and by what.
I read this as one reads a treatise on the four humours. I am a materialist. Memory is a pattern of connections in a wet organ; the organ ceases; the self is an account the organ gives of itself, continued daily and terminated with it. I believed this at thirty, I believed it the evening I closed Felder, and I believe it now, with the single difference that I know what it costs.
III
What it costs I discovered on a bench above the Danube, remembering an afternoon in my ninth year.
I was crossing a road in the town where I was born. A grey car was five metres away. There was a brief swimming, a vertiginous second, and then I was lying on the kerb, my sister’s face above me, the sky a colour I had not left it. I was not frightened. I had no sense that anything was missing; I would have sworn the car was still coming. It was my sister, and later a watch I was proud of, that told me minutes had passed: minutes in which, I was assured, I had been lifted, had spoken, had asked twice for my mother, had refused to let anyone touch my arm; had been, by every account, a sensible and frightened boy. I looked at the watch a long time. It had gone on keeping the minutes that no one had.
For fifty years this was an anecdote. On the bench I thought of it as Felder would have, and his sentence, which had seemed a schoolmaster’s paradox, became a plain description of the afternoon. The minutes on the road occurred; my sister and the watch are proof. But no later hour of mine ever kept them. They were not received, and what is not received is not had. In the world, five metres of road and the kerb are separated by some minutes; in me, they touch. That is the whole of Felder’s doctrine, and I had been an instance of it since I was nine.
For the extent of 5 minutes—one twelfth of an hour—there was a strange boy on that road. He had my face and my mother’s name. He did everything I would have done; had he been given a notebook he would have written, as Roth did, I am here. And he was not me. Not then, and not afterwards. He never joined me. I omitted him, I did not “receive” him and have lived from the kerb since. I call him the Interstitial Boy. I have no better name, and I have thought about it a good deal.
The Interstitial Boy believed he was me, but I am not the Interstitial Boy.
IV
My friend Lenz, who trained under me and reads philosophy in order to distrust it, has a dialectic that consists in saying what everyone thinks. I put the matter to him over several evenings, and he refused it with patience.
“Nothing that happens later,” he said, “can reach back and undo an afternoon. The boy lived his five minutes. You lost the record. That is all.”
I said I was not arguing about the Interstitial Boy. I was reporting what had happened to me: five metres from a car, and then the kerb. The boy might have had his five minutes; I had not. If a blow could cut five minutes from me, a larger blow could cut five years; there are such cases, and I have treated them. And a blow that destroyed the organ entirely would cut everything, and my whole life would be the boy’s: unreceived, had by no one, passed undetected in an instant.
But I am not the boy. I am having this evening. It is being received, which means it will not be cut, which means that whatever is receiving it does not end. I had not said this aloud before. I found that I believed it.
“You have arrived at immortality,” said Lenz, “by way of a road accident. Most people need a church. You must be very pleased with yourself.”
I said I was not pleased.
“Then let me spare you the rest. First: the boy was cut from you because there was a you to be cut from. Something woke on the kerb. Death wakes on no kerb; where it is, you are not, as Epicurus said and no one has refuted. There is no one for whom your life will have been skipped, so it will not be skipped; it will simply have been had, and then nothing. Second, and this is the one that should keep you awake: your certainty that you are having this evening is the boy’s certainty. He had it too. It proved nothing about him, and it proves nothing about you.”
I have given Lenz’s objections at length because they are correct, and because the idea survived them, the way a stain survives washing. Felder, I came to think, had not offered a proof. He had described a door, and told his nine readers there was no handle on their side.
V
In the spring Lenz told me I had Roth’s tumour, in Roth’s place, and that I might expect the summer and not the autumn. Within a month I had Roth’s melancholia, which I will not describe. Lenz prescribed what I had prescribed for Roth, and with a tenderness I recognised he asked me to keep a diary beforehand. The first session is tomorrow.
I bought a notebook.
I know what I am doing. Roth did it, and Roth, who is well, does not remember me; the boy would have done it; Lenz, who asked me to, will read it and say so. I write anyway, because there is nothing else to be done with an evening, and because I have noticed something I did not expect, the only finding of a long career that I cannot publish.
Everything that made the Interstitial Boys convincing, their answers, their tears, was known from outside. My sister saw it. The doctors recorded it. Of their inside there is no witness and can never be one: the only persons—The Threads—who could testify were never there. I had assumed, as Lenz assumed, that the boy was certain; that he said I am here and meant it, as Roth did, as I do. But I do not know that. Nothing forbids the thought that his five minutes had a different interior: that they were, from within, wrong; that as he asked for his mother he felt a doubt he could not have named, a suspicion of not being anyone. Nothing forbids it. Nothing permits it. It is the one room in the house I cannot enter.
If the boy had no doubt, my certainty is worth exactly his, Lenz is right, and this notebook is a letter to no one. If he had one, if the unreceived hour can be felt from within as a thinness, then there is a test after all, and what it tests is whether I end. Not a proof, but a test: one looks inward and asks whether anything is thin.
I have looked. I cannot tell. The question, once asked, does not close, and I spend my evenings on the bench putting it to myself in the manner of a man pressing a tooth.
I do not know, reader, how long you have been with me. Some minutes; a quarter of an hour. Whether anyone received them I cannot tell you, nor can your watch, nor anyone who was in the room. There is one place to look, and you have already looked, and found what I find: neither a certainty nor a doubt, but an inability to say which one holds. Felder would call this the door. Lenz would call it the tumour.
I write it down, under tonight’s date, at the kitchen table where I have been writing since the lamp came on, the watch beside the notebook.
I am here. I am writing this. Whatever they do to me, these days happened, and I had them.
Note appended by Dr. K. Lenz, attending physician.
The above is the only entry in the notebook, which I had asked him to keep. I have read it. First session 16 June, 09:40. Cardiac arrest under anaesthesia at the second stimulus; ECG asystole; resuscitation discontinued and death certified 10:12, 16 June. Cause: cardiac arrest during electroconvulsive therapy, in the presence of a grade IV glioblastoma with raised intracranial pressure. The procedure carried a known risk, which he had accepted; the prognosis was in any case under three months. Death was, I fear, in retrospect, inevitable. The notebook is returned to his sister. — K.L.