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PARTISAN REVIEW
mained undisturbed by the mere actuality of his presence . Given the
banality of both our lives, an account of our subsequent relations
might have remained banal as well. He never had the sense of com–
pletion that tinted even the darkest days of my life , and could barely
understand what I meant on the one occasion at which I unwisely at–
tempted to explain it. And, as I have said, his reality neither
augmented nor diminished that feeling, nor would I allow it to alter
my life in any other way. The fact of his existence was like that of a
very important text, an explanation or commentary without which
the text of my life would be unreadable; he himself was like a copy of
the book, no less and no more.
Then one night he tried to kill me. Or rather, he came at me
with what might have been murderous effects; the intent, if murder–
ous itself, was not so much his as that of a drunken rage he had ac–
quired and been unable to dispose of. We were both solitary but
moderate drinkers; on our visits we would seldom go out, being un–
willing to deal with the stares that adult twins seem to attract , and,
even more, with the reflected sight of ourselves in store windows, or
of the paired shadows whose sinister quality lay in their very inno–
cence-they might have been shadows, for example, of any two men
of roughly the same height. And so we would usually meet, eat , talk,
and drink at his house or mine, and after a few years, this had
become ritual. I would know exactly, during the evening, how it
would end; I could anticipate the quality of the air on the street out–
side his door , or the strange light in the corridor outside my apart–
ment, the words we always spoke after an interval of silence : "Well,
then"; and he would answer, "I guess so ."
But that night he drank much more than usual, and grew more
and more silent between our brief exchanges. I felt uneasy, and
since I had to leave very early the next morning for a long trip, I
tried to bring the evening to an early close . The meeting was at my
apartment, and I rose from my chair, walked to a table on which his
trench coat lay folded, turned to where he was standing nearby and
spoke :
"Well, then."
"No, not well at all, you bastard," he suddenly snarled and
rushed at me with outstretched fists. I was so taken aback that de-
fense against even this childish and ridiculously fragile assault was
impossible for the moment. During that moment he reached me,
battered me in the face, seized my neck, and started to choke me .
Only after what was almost too long a time did outrage, terror, and
