I BOUGHT MY GIRLFRIEND, LIZ, A WALLET FOR CHRISTMAS, thinking it would help her get her life in order.

"You prick. You fucking asshole prick," is what she said to me right after we ended things. A few sentences before all that, she had asked, "Why would I need this?" And in between there somewhere came the part where I told her why I got her the wallet.

There was the initial joint and the ultimate break to Liz and me and in between those two things came the part where we were we. And the joint was great. Liz would stand on my left-hand side, I holding her right thumb, as we waited for the streetlight to change. We would think of the differences between us and we would think about the future and we would say, "I love you," and, "I love you, too." We would sometimes say, "You are great," and "No, you are great." We were nice together.

But somewhere in there before the final break came the part where I started thinking about wallets. And clocks. And cars. And hard alcohol. And remote controls. Then, slowly, slowly, I felt the whole big fat bottom falling out of the entire operation. Certain other words were said. I said, "Liz, I do not want to go to a wedding with you for a person I do not know at all who lives all the way in Tennessee." I also said, "Liz, I do not want to go with you to return a pair of jeans at the Gap on Saturday." I once even said, "Fuck off, Liz."

Who knows what kinds of things she was thinking about somewhere in there. She was probably thinking it would be a great idea to scream at me for muting the commercials during Felicity. And she was probably thinking how it made sense to leave the house without her money or keys or driver's license. And she was probably thinking I enjoyed driving around the block one more time to hear the end of one of her favorite new wave songs on the radio, "And She Was."

For my birthday, Liz bought me a pair of slippers and a scented lavender candle.

Now, my most recent girlfriend, Ruth, was over a couple nights ago, and she saw a copy of the above story about Liz and me sitting on my desk.

"Can I read this?" she asked me.

And I, convinced Ruth was someone who could tell the difference between the me in my fiction and the me in the actual, day-to-day doings of my real life, convinced Ruth was someone who could see the muted humor in the aforewritten passage, convinced Ruth was someone who would know that everything written above was not something written from my truest heart of hearts, convinced that my real, honest heart, the heart that had been with her already for over one year, had said enough things and had been sincere enough to overcome a few scribbled down bad jokes that might surface along the way, said, "Sure, you can read it."

"You prick. You fucking asshole prick," Ruth said to me right after we ended things. This was right before she took her toothbrush out of my medicine cabinet, picked up the copy of Harper's she had been reading each night before bed, and left my house for good in her gray mini pickup truck. A little bit before that was when she had asked, "Can I read this?" and somewhere in there came the part where she read the story, turned her head away from me, and started to quietly cry.

There was the joint and the break and the we being we part with me and Ruth, too. The joint included the hand-holding over the downtown bridge on the way to the station and the train that would take her back to the Chicago suburbs, the healing things I would say after I had said hurtful things, and the electronic Yahtzee I had given her as a Valentine's Day gift with the attached message:

Valentine's a silly day
For one to give his heart away
To force your lips to 'I love you's'
(Unless of course you really do's!)

The break between us came when Ruth realized everything I'd written about Liz, everything about the Tennessee wedding I did not want to go to, everything about the blue jeans that were too big, everything about the hard profanity, the slippers, the alcohol, and the lavender candle, were all things that were, in truth, really about her.

The electronic Yahtzee I gave to Ruth for Valentine's Day was not my original gift idea for that particular holiday, and below I've enclosed the valentine I had originally planned to write and give to her and didn't due to the simple fact that it took me too long to write down:

DEAREST RUTH,

As you know, I work in a library bindery. And this has its pros and cons, its ups and downs, its yins and yangs, it's me's and my boss's. One of the biggest pros is that I don't have to work too hard and I have enough free time during the day to read a little, do piddly research on things that interest me, and pass it all off as work.

During the work hours, I run across a lot of bad literary journals with a lot of bad poetry published in them. Poetry is still being written these days, Ruth. I might even go so far as to say it is too alive and kicking. The largest majority of it is being written by professors resorting to soft-falling snow, the moon, and lesser-known stories from third-world mythologies. Most of it's easily predictable and hardly surprising. In fact, I've come up with my own outline that probably describes eighty-seven percent of it. Most of the poetry runs its course along lines like these:

I. Walking home drunk from my neighborhood bar, I happened across something (e.g. the moon) that reminded me of you. So I'll open my poem with that.

II. This is what's behind that something I happened upon, this is what that something is like (a.k.a. an enormous snowball, a rock, the white pupil of the night sky's ash-colored eye—we see our professor bring his hand to his cheek and think of regret).

III. Short recap and closing image (a return to the moon/pupil) explicitly spelling out how I) + II) = how you and I ... how we have grown so distant.

Now, I tend to skip many of these poems, Ruth, because I, as a general rule, tend to hate professors, snowballs, and distance. They all tend to make me sad, and then despair sets in, accompanied by the old, "I Could've Written that Bullshit Blues," sung by my perennial, nostalgic favorites, The Rondelles in White Tights. And then I start to get cranky and hate my job even more than I already do. So I usually skip the journals and books of poetry that come my way during the course of the working week. But there was this one little tiny thing that happened to catch my eye, mostly due to the outrageous coincidence of it all. And I swear all of this is completely true. I know, as you have come to know yourself, when a promise like this comes from me, we have to be a bit careful. But I am swearing to you from the body of my body that all this is completely on the level.

Besides, we'll both see soon enough that my piddly imagination wouldn't be able to make up something like this.

Ruth, we went to shoot pool at Palace Billiards (Roosevelt Road, Lombard, IL) for the first time on Sunday, December 2. When I was working in the library bindery on Monday, December 3, I was thinking of you. These are things that happen naturally. And as I was thinking of you, my thoughts flew far. They flew past bridges I have neither seen nor ever remembered, under river ways I have never forded via flat and brown slippery stones, over mountains with snow, beaches with sand, or vast purple oceans under the sun. You know the places. And I just happened to be absentmindedly flipping pages in a certain collection of poems by young Mexican writers from the 1950s that needed some very minor spine repair. Midway through the book, I chanced across the work of one Bioy Funes (1934-1978). And this is how I ended up stopping and staring at one of his poems: flipping flipping, thinking of you, flipping thinking, of you, pool, you, seeing your name in print in a poem printed there, thinking of, you quickly flipping, back. Your name was there in print in this book, Ruth. Yes, in the tiniest of moments, how so many coincidences piled up like my unpaid bills, like erosive sediments, like cataracts on the pupil of the night sky's dark colored eye. Your name was there in one of Funes's shorter poems—a little ditty he'd titled, "The First Poem Written to Ruth (Could it be?)."

"The First Poem" was by far the best poem Funes had in this particular collection. His other selections seemed a bit heady, giving off the smell of old furniture. Most of his other work seemed to be fragments of unpublished notes meant mostly to remind him to come back and revise them sometime: simple etchings, random drawings, word doodles, and expressionistic blats. There's nothing in them resembling any type of coherent, conscious attempt at a construction of something artistic. They involve ludicrous ideas, their subjects including a man's suicide by jumping out of a flying airplane; overbearing, partially blind fathers; communism; and a long narrative poem about a ballroom dancing competition, early rock music, and an overblown discourse on the differences between beer and wine. (His point is there really is no difference. Are you tasting Funes's radical genius yet, Ruth?)

The most amazing thing is that the tone in all of his poetry is extremely, utterly serious. There is no sense in any of the pieces of any humorous distance between Mr. Funes and his odd choice of topics. No room there for humor, no room there for—

Enter Diane, my boss who beads as a hobby, who likes Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who has been to at least four weekend conferences for the band Yes, and who also thinks that every word I say is antagonistically aimed at her in the style of a world-class assassin: "Allright skin&bones! Let's get some work done already lazy ass! Just what are you writing and reading over there? You've been larding around so much today I'm going to start calling you lard&lazy&skin&bonesass!"

Ruth, I am not exaggerating. Diane is this mean. And what could I have possibly ever done to deserve all this yelling?

Oddly frightened over losing a job I hated, I had to copy down Funes's poem so I could give it to you on Valentine's Day as a valentine because it was just so weird that all of this happened at the time that it happened. Funes's words were right for us, even though they were clumsy and they came from someone else's head and mouth. It was also a move by me, I'll admit, to buy some time, as I have not yet had time to find words of my own to play accompaniment to my feelings for you. The words will eventually come, Ruth. I know the words to these feelings are there, somewhere inside of me that needs to be carved out and I just have to find the time to find them when they are asleep and—

Enter Diane again: "Hey lard&lazy&skin&bonesass! What are you doing? You're not getting paid to lardass it halfway here!"

So here goes, Ruth (the frantic copying begins):

The First Poem Ever Written to Ruth (Could it be?)
by Bioy Funes
     —trans. by Thomas Castro

What is the sunlight's name coming through the top levels
          of rippling water in the ocean?
The topmost rippling water warm to your paddling swimming
          in the shallowest part of the ocean's sunlit water?
And will the sunlight resting in the topmost layer of once
     crested waves (now
          broken (again)) headed out now to the ocean's
               midsection be called by a name?
Can sleeping warmth (or light) in salt moving water be given
     a name?
Flat waves, once carrying the crested sunlit heat, now return
     to the ocean's
          midsection. That warmth there. In the flat waves. What
               is that warmth's name?
While you are swimming there. What is that warmth's name
     while you are swimming
          there? Ruth. What is the name of this warmth, Ruth,
               riding over the tops of the oceans, Ruth?
(Your name crests and knells with a warmth in it, too.)
If I knew, Ruth, the name of this warmth on the top of all the
     ocean's water and could
          whisper it to you, Ruth, you would know the feeling my
               heart feels, the feeling of my heart Ruth
                    while we lie so ...

Ruth, I have copied this poem word for word from a book in a library on the far north side of Chicago. You can check the book out if you want. Well, logistically, I would have to check out the book myself and then let you borrow it, but your capacity to be able to read it all on your own is still intact.

And the coincidences are uptightingly disconcerting.

First, there is the fact that this poem has your name in it. Of course it's not written to the actual you. You were born long after Funes died. In the one short biography I was able to find on Funes (one lonely chapter in some dissertation gotten from the University of Illinois, Champaign, through interlibrary loan thanks to Ursula, who is kind and funny because she constantly says, "Oh, excuse me," even when there is no real need for excusing), his one and only trip to the United States came in 1956 when he made a short trip to New Orleans, Louisiana. Apparently, he loved it—loved the cosmopolitan feel, loved the lax police presence, loved the ability of everyone to stay up all night long—and one night, while out doing some heavy drinking with a none too close family member of his, he met Ruth Truman, a born and raised Missourian who was nowhere near to being official Louisiana material yet. And there, in a fit of Van Goghian fervor, and most likely with some type of loud screaming in the background, Funes immediately became enamored with Miss Truman and ended up borrowing money that night to secure her company by becoming her cocktail supplier. He asked her if she would like to drive to Florida, where he was headed next. It was an invitation she accepted, somewhat out of curiosity, but most likely because she was bored and needed something to do and someone else to pay for it.

Eleven days later, they found themselves driving eastward towards the white sands of coastal Florida. They were drinking, imbibing narcotics (remember, Ruth, this was the heyday of the Beat movement and the Gulf Coast was a hotbed for rampant drug use at this point. I'm pretty sure it was in a New Orleans suburb in 1951 that William Burroughs shot and killed his own wife in a drunken reenactment of the William Tell legend in a stranger's backyard with a half-empty high-ball glass standing in for the red apple. Years later, Burroughs would eerily explain, "I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death.") and there is no way Funes and Truman got to know each other that well along the way. All this is to say it was natural for Funes to fall deeply in love with Ruth. He was only twenty-three at this time, it was his first time out of Mexico, and it's not out of the question that Truman might have had a certain innate magnetism about her. So Funes and Truman ended up in Florida, walking along a beach or a breakwater, very drunk and extremely high. And with the sun starting to set, Funes probably looked at Ruth, then looked at the ocean, and then looked at the sun coming off the ocean, and then looked at Ruth again, and that's where this poem took root. In one strange, short, hallucinatory trip along the Gulf Coast, Truman instantaneously became the Maud Gonne to Funes's best impersonation of William Butler Yeats and "The First Poem" is what was born out of all that.

According to the biography, Truman's feelings for Funes were more than the feelings she had for most people, but they were in no way equal to Funes's. And even though Ruth was not a successful person, she was still an American, which put her higher up the ladder than Funes could ever hope to climb. So when she promised to visit Funes in Mexico City, she was fairly sure she was never going to go. And she didn't. But does any of this sad denouement matter? The important thing is that the poem remains and it somehow makes it into a second-rate poetry anthology with one person on record having checked it out (due back June 20, 1980). Easy enough, right? Great story? End of valentine, right? Happy Valentine's Day and let's get to the smooching, right? Oh how I love to smooch you, Ruth! Right? Hurrah for the tiniest coincidences, right? Hurrah for the tiniest tiniest things, right? Right?

Ruth, now listen: my friend David Lummus says this is all bullshit. Lummus is currently holed up in a Ph.D. comparative literature program somewhere in Texas, writing his dissertation on Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, and Federico García Lorca, who, as I learned through a phone conversation with him, all went to college together and ended up forging the Spanish surrealist avant-garde after the Great War. This is all to say that David Lummus knows Spanish and Latin American literature pretty well. He speaks Spanish and Catalan. He can read Portuguese and he's working diligently on a reading knowledge of Basque. And Lummus says this Ruth Truman bullshit is all bullshit.

According to what he found on Funes (which he was kind enough to do for me over his Christmas break), there is no recorded, verifiable connection that this Ruth Truman ever existed at all. The story found in the biography, he says, comes from a terribly unreliable source, a man named Luis Reyes who tried to piggyback into the poetry history books by fabricating stories for biographers on even the most minor of Latin American poets. Funes's cousin, a Ramon Rendon, the distant family member who accompanied Funes on his trip to New Orleans, and who later faded into obscurity as a schoolteacher in a small town in New Mexico, admits he doesn't remember even meeting a Ruth on that trip. Rendon, however, qualifies this assertion by admitting that narcotics were flying insanely on that trip, back and forth, from 7 AM until the next morning. He confesses he wouldn't have been able to tell if anyone joined their entourage for a few days out of the trip or not. And even if he could have, trying to remember that person's name would have been an easy lesson in crazy futility. But if, and this is the if that matters most, Rendon were forced to give an answer (which he does in an interview in a short commemorative issue of "CentroAmericano" (May 10, 1981, pgs. 186-193) dedicated to Funes and two other poets whose names escape me now) he would ultimately have to admit that Ruth Truman did not exist. Here are Rendon's exact words: "I would have to guess Ruth was no woman Bioy met in New Orleans, but just another face on the phantom chasing him all the way to his death."

Now listen: Lummus has his own explanation for the "phantom" Rendon refers to. This "Ruth," according to Lummus, is actually a play on "Syrian Rue," a South American seed often ground up, mixed into a drink, and imbibed as a hallucinogenic. And once that heated, melted seed starts swimming around in your stomach, it'll make you catatonic and very happy. At the core, it's probably a bastardized version of something called Yage or Ayahuasca. Hardly heard of in the States, it's considered in Mexico to be a drug exclusively relegated to people interested in South American shamanism and homeless men who don't have anything better to do than experiment with whatever might end up in front of them.

Bioy Funes was not homeless, but he was a drug addict, and this, as Lummus explains in one of his long emails to me, easily explains the structure of "The First Poem Written to Ruth (Could it be?)." Lummus sees it as a poem that mirrors one's experience with the narcotic. The repetition in the poem, the beginning shatter of incoherence that arches to become something resembling conciseness and then reverts back to nonsense mirrors the initial shock of the drug, the clarity that accompanies acclimation to the narcotic's effect, and the process of coming down (most narcotics tend to tire you out even if they're initial stimulants, Lummus says). "Ruth" / "Root," then, refers to both the Syrian Rue, from which the drug is derived, and it is also a lousy play on the English phrase, "root of the problem," an idiom Funes, well-aware of his own addiction, perhaps picked up stateside and fell in love with when he realized it sounded like "rue of the problem." So the drugs caused incoherence, caused pain, and finally caused bad poetry. And that, according to Lummus, is the real story behind the poem.

And I don't know whether to trust Lummus, Ruth (how I love to write your name). On the one hand, he's done a good number of drugs himself. In high school, he told me what the Beatles were actually singing about in "Everybody's Got Something to Hide 'Cept for Me and My Monkey" and he opened my eyes to other meanings in Lewis Carroll that you should not tell your children while they are on the brink of sleep during a cold February night. Lummus has also been a person who comes across as knowing what he's talking about most of the time. So when he talks about something I know he has first-hand experience with, I tend to listen.

On the other hand, Lummus has done a good number of drugs himself. Thus, he's become somewhat incoherent himself. He's unable to maintain a stable conversation without devolving into violent tendencies usually involving flying chairs and remote controls and books with torn pages. And he still thinks of communism as a viable option. He also admitted to me that most of the information he got on Yage and Ayahuasca came from Dr. Richard Madden, a visiting writer at Lummus's school who is crazy himself. Lummus prefaced some particular comments of his by writing, "A lot of this information comes from Dick Madden, who is a wonderful guy to go drinking with, but who also had every student in his sophomore creative writing workshop retype John Grisham's The Client on their own word processors. I shit you not."

So the ultimate question of whether Ruth Truman actually exists still goes unanswered. On the one hand, the evidence that she did exist was most likely fabricated by a fame-hungry nobody, and on the other hand, the evidence that she didn't is coming from a fame-hungry, crazy writer and a violent, drug addicted A.B.D. But the question of Ruth's true existence is only the first step in a longer process.

Ruth (back to the one I'm sure exists), have you heard of Jorge Luis Borges? Guess what, he worked in a library for nine years before he quit to become a full-time writer (I'm only planning on one year before I break the chains, swim the sewage pipes, and make my way to fresher air, hills with no trees on them, all of it open and ready for my great and wide-open dancing arms). He got his literary start by writing fictional accounts of historical figures for an Argentinean newspaper in the 1930s. These selections were later collected in his first volume of fiction, A Universal History of Infamy, which hit like a bomb when it was published.

You have heard of Borges. Most people have. He's important. And at the time Funes was writing, Borges was a Spanish speaking literary giant. He shared the International Publishers Prize with Samuel Beckett in 1961 and it's probably impossible that Funes did not know of Borges or that he remained free of the influence of Borges's stories. Borges influences everyone. And oftentimes, influence can be so strong that it will engulf entire personalities and lead people to forget themselves completely.

And probably the most interesting thing to think about Borges in the context of Funes's poem is Borges's deeply felt conviction that the best metaphors are the clichéd, old metaphors: time is a river, life is a dream, etc. Funes picks up on this in his poem (the overwhelming feeling of love is like the immense ocean) but he doesn't pick up on it well. Somehow, it does not seem to work like Borges works. But what are you going to do? Genius like Borges's does not touch everybody. Some it bristles quietly by. And others think they feel it strongly urging them on in the bones of their chest, but eventually come to find out that it is only empty vanity urging them forward to the land occupied by smiling demons (I can do my best to be like Borges, too!). In Funes's case, Borges's ideas on the metaphor resulted only in simpleminded melodrama from our young Mexican.

And as we both know, Ruth, the melodrama we find in Funes is not hard to find elsewhere. Really, how hard can melodrama be? You just start out with something like dear matilde, dear jenny, dear you nervous nervous smoke smoke smoke I am a chimney of dread nervous with a dream of city life (no not Dublin not London not New York not San Fran with the golden gated fog so long since I've seen a really good fog) not dreams of these cities nervous nervous smoke smoke chimney city. And how are you? Today is Sunday here. I went to a movie. I saw a movie with Ruth (you remember Ruth, right? kind, compassionate Ruth who is so kind and compassionate). I saw, then proceeded to walk out of a movie with Ruth, then proceeded to fail to make any type of eye contact with her when saying I like you Ruth, I really like you even though these are not difficult words hardly difficult words that are not like I am angry or I am going and not coming back to see you or I am wrong or even I think I am in love with you I think or I am sorry these are the hard words to say the words catered to averting eyes seeing yourself somewhere there in a mirror reflection in some girl's darkened living room rather than seeing yourself reflected in the reflecting face pain of the person hearing your hurtful words words words in a lot of ways I think words are things that just make sounds like daDa daDa daDa daDa daDa and sometimes Dada daDa Dada daDa I suppose (but we shouldn't suppose because it just makes a pose out of p and a backward us) yes I turned my eyes away averted my eyes averted any connection between me she we and proceeded to get the fuck out of Dodge (and the exact moment I started calling Ruth's house Dodge I cannot remember I do not know and do not care anymore let it stand) I am honestly at the bottom of it I think a true kid and how can there be some people the same age as me having a baby or babies? Kids caring for kids my parents (and are they just kids too?) standing waving saying hello then bye-bye in color photographs so many miles away from me right now. (This next little ditty, brought to you by the soothing sounds of The Rondelles in White Tights, is something I like to call, "Interrupting this Letter to Go See Ruth for the Second Time Today at the Abbey Pub (Grace & Kimball, Chicago, IL)) or, If Cars = coursing blood rivers then what = me?" and at the end of a bit how I want to break because break = some sort of order = something not true = something god is going to damn anyway >> >>> Ruth you are like a song of thin glass like a song of thin glass echoing through streets I have heard the names of but know not where they are streets coursing cars like blood pumping through capillary tube fibers (and what does that make me sitting still inside the blood-river-coursing car?)) so the simile ends you are a song of thin glass (the metaphor begins yea! for total utter outrageous commitment to the connection of things (I mean comparison of things, Ruth, I do mean comparison of things)) all these parentheses build build and build one on top of the other think I can build a tower of parentheses to heaven find once I'm there, there is no heaven (note: should have instead built parentheses to a place like your heart) and only an empty tower of empty parentheses dangling below me through in and out of unheavenly clouds a ladder of emptiness and how will I ever get down and only empty dangling ladder parentheses hiding hiding hiding hiding the truest things I can say the most emphatically melodramatic son of a bitch bloodriver coursing through capillary street blood things I know of things like I love the color of your hair and I think I am falling in love with you I think. And your name. I love to say your name the way it makes its own sounds like daDa daDA daDa daDa daDa-a-a-a-a-a-and driving back too late on a Sunday night things like accident or cop or parking spot or murder worries are not there none of these worries at all only the great feeling of invincibility feel the force field force your hand there right there the force field will encompass you too you are tiny enough for me to encompass you do not stop only to ash to say good-bye to too many cigarettes and how I have longed to see you not in scenes of me reflected in a mirror in your darkened living room talking to you saying good words like I think I am falling in love with you Ruth I think not to see this in a mirror but to see this in your eyes' reflection (where there are two of me) and the heart of the heart of your heart.

You see, Ruth? It's easy. Even people like me can do it. And I'm just a kid.

Two more things we have to talk about concerning Borges:

First, this is from his story, "The Garden of Forking Paths":

The explanation is obvious. The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts'ui Pên conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. 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. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.

Borges's idea here of an infinite series of times going on at the same time has been hailed by some as a prophetic vision of the Internet, as a crazy view of time by others, and as something that kicks ass and rings extremely true by me. So the repetition in Funes's poem, in one strange, simple way, is an illustration of Borges's view of time. Read in this way, each stanza of Funes's poem becomes a question that stands on its own in a separate time continuum. But what he's trying to eventually say is they all get around to the same sentiment, Ruth. Even with different words, some bulkier, some more incoherent, and some more worthwhile, the ocean, the beach, and Ruth are all still irremediably there.

But now, the second and most important thing concerning Borges and Bioy Funes, which is a short note on the translator, Tom Castro. There is no such translator on record as having ever existed. And I checked bibliographies for Tom Castro/Thomas Castro/Tomas Castro/Thomasina Castro. I checked everything. This is a bit disconcerting. Who translated Funes's poem? The answer, simply enough, is that there is no translator. Bioy Funes's poem was originally written in English by Bioy Funes. It's a horrible overwrought game he's playing with you and me, Ruth, and what turned out to be a double curse for Funes was being sandwiched between the American Beatnik flair for the dramatic and an inborn Latin mentality for play. And it kills him every time.

In A Universal History of Infamy, Borges has a story titled, "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter." In this story Arthur Orton, born 7 June 1834 takes a longing for the sea and ends up in Argentina, where he changes his name to Tom Castro and makes the acquaintance of an Australian Negro named Ebenezer Bogle. A few years later, Bogle comes across a small ditty in a newspaper about a Roger Charles Tichborne, an Englishman who has disappeared and whose mother is so anxious to get him back at her dinner table that she offers a healthy amount of money to bring him home. Ebenezer puts two and two together, schemes in a way that apparently only black people from Australia can, and then perpetrates the hoax that Tom Castro is actually Roger Charles Tichborne, despite the fact that Tichborne was skinny and Castro is fat, that Tichborne has royal looks and Castro looks as if his best days are far and long gone by. But the hoax goes through, Castro and Ebenezer Bogle head home, and find themselves flung into the meatiest middle of upper-class English life.

And guess what? In this story, Borges writes, "Tom Castro was the ghost of Roger Charles Tichborne, but he was a sorry ghost animated by someone else's genius." And this is the ultimate source of Funes's fictional translator, pointing to a real self-consciousness on Funes's part concerning his own artistic ability.

The Funes as reincarnated Roger Charles Tichborne goes even further beyond his poetry, extending even into his day-to-day life. He was never honest with his parents. He never succeeded in telling them of his love for poetry, his love for the imagination, his love for adventure, and his love for a woman stateside that he thought would eventually come to be with him forever if she had ever existed. With his letters home (Funes never saw his parents again after he ran away at seventeen), he built up an entire life to set beside the real one he was leading. Once again, he's not alone in this. I know lots of kids who lie to their parents. Funes lied to his parents, told them a steady flow of money was coming from a textile factory where he had gotten a job, worked his way up, and eventually took over the business when the man who hired him had retired to the beaches of Costa Rica. All of this is completely untrue, as Funes's own mother came to find out for herself when a few ravenous academics, reporters, and the sparse Funes disciple came to visit her. In reality, Funes had no money, no real desire to go get a job, no real job and no real prospective promotion coming from a textile factory in Mexico City.

So tragically, when Funes's father died, all of his money he'd saved as a shoemaker was willed to Funes's only living sibling, his older brother, Juan, who happened to be a drug addict, just like Bioy. Fortunately for Juan, however, he was honest about his homeless, penniless and addiction-ridden lifestyle, and the inheritance came as the last stab by a desperate man to redeem his son from a terrible life.

Bioy Funes's own drug addiction only got worse and he eventually stepped in front of a car on April 2, 1978, exactly 71 days before I was born. He was killed instantly by a woman driving with two children in the backseat. This is unfortunate because in "Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter," Tom Castro dies on April 2, 1898 of natural causes. It's his servant, Bogle, who gets killed by the horse carriage.

Could all of this have been the final move of a man belonging to someone else's story that he never managed to escape? Or had he simply misread, simply forgotten how the story ended?

And does any of it matter anymore? What does all this mean, Ruth—this poet creating a false translator and writing himself into the lesser-known earlier fiction of Borges? On most occasions, I would say it means nothing at all. True artists are crazy. And people who think they are true artists (and there are many more of them) are even crazier. Funes's poem lacks. We know this. But something, something standing behind some curtain, pulling strings (heart and otherwise) somehow placed me in a position to flip through that book one day after we went to shoot pool. Something was there to make my eye stop at seeing your name in print. Something prompted me to make this whole vast valentine which you happen to be reading now, approaching its end. So I guess you could say this entire valentine, this whole long letter, is the chance product of some crazy poet who tried his damnedest to be a true artist but ended up underneath a car because he couldn't remember how another story ended instead. And can we ever even say that any of it happened at all? Ruth, 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. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom. From my body of bodies, I love you, Ruth.


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