meempants

Today, you get a short short story. I call it "A Memoir of Infinity". Enjoy:

I feel compelled, perhaps by the vanity of age, to record my story. I am in my study, surrounded by reproductions and prints of a famous painting, as I write this. The story is mostly about the painting. It is both quite short and infinitely long. Why that is true, the explanation of that paradoxical statement, is the same thing as my story.

I can no longer recall which occurred to me first: the significance of the smile itself, or the realization that I was seeing it on the face of the same woman again and again. If the former, I can console myself with the fact that I have simply gone mad, that the smile in the painting was the symbol that my presumably obsessive mind seized on to express its sickness, and that my twisted unconscious projected that smile and its countenance onto the faces of a multitude of women. In other words, that I am merely hallucinating. Against this are the facts that I have never seen more than one of the women at once, and that the face is always somewhat different--sometimes surrounded by long black hair as in the portrait, sometimes by short, even blonde, hair. Once, the face was heavily tanned, once, white as a corpse; through all the variations of hair, makeup, complexion, body type, and age, it is always undoubtedly the same woman. Of that, I am sure.

I have now attempted to tell my story to five of them: three listened for a few minutes as one would to a madman on a street corner, then left hurriedly and did not look back; one yelled for help almost immediately and ran; the last apparently thought I was propositioning her and slapped me across the face.

I will not approach any of them again. I have resigned myself to not being understood, and I will simply observe her from now on.

I have been assured by a colleague of mine, a professor of psychology, that hallucinations in the schizophrenic mind have a paradoxical order of their own, and that once the disease has presented itself, the hallucinations themselves do not vary, only their frequency and their place of occurrence. It seems to me, then, that if I were mad, I would see the exact same face every time, or that I would see it on different women at the same time. Neither has ever happened.

Others see her as well. Once, as I observed her from the other side of a cafe that I frequent, I asked the man next to me if she did not remind him of the woman in the painting. He replied that she did not remind him of the painting, but was in fact the very likeness, and my heart sank. I have repeated the same experiment a number of times with different strangers, and I inevitably receive the same answer each time. I no longer ask.

All of which leaves me with the demonic notion that I am not insane, and that what appears to be impossible is actually happening: I am seeing the same woman again and again, with increasing frequency as I grow older, but each time I see her, she is in fact a completely different and distinct human being. The mortal and the immortal have merged; the intersection between myself and the universe (if there is such a thing), the crystalline geometric curve of my life in space-time, is fragmenting or breaking down.

I have eventually come to understand that if the universe is infinite in time, then a life such as mine must inevitably occur. This is small consolation. It means not that I am insane, but that the universe is even more inhuman than previously believed, for if time is infinite, then eventually everything that is possible must occur, and although my experience is so unlikely as to be absurd, it is not, strictly speaking, impossible. It is simply one of the logical, if horrific, results of an infinite amount of time in which every possible permutation of the elements in the grand equation of the universe may be rearranged.

In fact, at some point in time (it may have already occurred), someone will dream my life, or will dream the life of a man who is exactly my doppelganger but for a mole on his cheek. The dreamer will be totally unaware that the dream is a simulacrum of a possible, and therefore certain, reality. Perhaps the dreamer will write it down, and a man similar to me will one day read about the woman in the painting and the man who is tormented by her.

As I reread the above, I realize that all of my assumptions are wrong. *My life has already occurred an infinite number of times in the past, and it will occur again an infinite number of times in the future.* An infinite number of copies of my life, spanning forward and backward into eternity, all exactly equal, down to the smallest fleck of ink in each letter I write here. In another direction spans the series of lives of my friend the dreamer, and in another direction that of my almost-double. I suppose they all intersect somewhere.

I wonder if Mona Lisa will attend my funeral this time.