JOHN HOLLANDER
533
disgust combine to fuel my awareness and strength. I finally strug–
gled free , kicked him several times in the groin and stomach, got him
to the floor, and pinned him there with my knees .
He groaned softly for a while and said nothing. He refused to
answer my question about the meaning of his attack, or about any–
thing else . Suddenly taken by a painful thought, I wrestled his wallet
from his coat pocket, opened it up, and on an identification card I
found there, saw among other facts listed "in case of accident," his
blood type. It was not my own.
I shouted out something that started as a question and im–
mediately dissolved into a cry of terror and dismay; then I ran from
my apartment, scarcely bothering to shut the door behind me, raced
down the stairs without waiting for the elevator, and rushed out into
the street. Mindlessly distraught, I walked through drizzling rain
without a coat, pushing through streets still busy with night traffic,
and still occupied by scurrying pedestrians. When I returned home
after an hour, he was gone, the door shut, and nothing disturbed
within . I never saw him again.
The problem, of course, was mine, not his; and even after
some months when I tried to check up on him, and found that he had
quit his job, moved, and left no forwarding address , it did not
change the situation. For there was no explanation he could have
given me that would have helped. Naive acquiescence, designing
guile, or whatever, motive seemed to me to have nothing to do with
the truth of what had happened.
Nature produces doubles as well as twins, but cannot be
blamed for the first of these any more than for the second. Twinship
is as much a learned as a given state, but one's relation to a double is
totally of one's own making. I had quested, without being fully
aware of how I was doing it, for a twin. But as in all significant
quests , the goal and the final task, as well as many of the later in–
termediate stages, are invented by the searcher. It is not only that
the nature and meaning of the task changes during the course of ex–
ecuting it. It is that the end gets reinvented during the later phases.
And so I had created my twin, but I had bungled somehow and
ended up with a mere double, another person whose otherness from
myself was so ordinary as to be trivial- someone with nothing to do
with me, someone as meaningless as a namesake. There had been no
significant change in my way of life while I still believed him to be
my twin brother, nor were our lives together of any consequence .
But the discovery of his existence, and the termination of his being
