The Garden of Forking Paths
A picture book of Jorge Luis Borges's short story, The Garden of Forking Paths
Medium: phorography
I must flee
The station was not far from my house, but I thought it more prudent to take a cab.
I was going to the village of Ashgrove, but took a ticket for a station further on.
The train slowed down and stopped, almost in the middle of a field. No one called the name of a station. "Ashgrove?" I asked some children on the platform. "Ashgrove," they replied. I got out.
One of them asked me: "Are you going to Dr. Stephen Albert's house?" Without waiting for my answer, another showed me the way.
“No doubt you want to see the garden?”
“The garden?”
“The garden of forking paths.”
“The garden of my ancestor, Ts'ui Pen.”
I leave to various future times, but not to all, my Garden of Forking Paths
This web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
For a moment his back was again turned to me. I had the revolver ready. I fired with the utmost care: Albert fell without a murmur.
Madden broke in and arrested me. I have been condemned to hang. Abominably, I have yet triumphed! The secret name of the city to be attacked got through to Berlin.
Yesterday that city was bombed. I read the news in the same English newspapers which were trying to solve the riddle of the murder of the learned Sinologist Stephen Albert by the unknown Yu Tsun. The Chief, however, had already solved this mystery. He knew that my problem was to shout, with my feeble voice, above the tumult of war, the name of the city called Albert, and that I had no other course open to me than to kill someone of that name.