CENTAUR GENETICS

[Excerpted from my old journal, The Biwa Book]

[Feb 2000] One snowy night last month there was a knock at the door; I opened it and there was a white horse standing there. On closer examination, though, it appeared to be a centaur (the everyday mind isn't really prepared to make such distinctions): no, it was a person wearing a horse mask, a white horse mask, a very realistic white horse mask out there in the snow in the night, and I knew it had to be Keech.

No one else would come up the mountain to our house on a snowy winter night and knock at the door while wearing a white horse mask. The mask came down all the way to spread slightly over his shoulders, completing the illusion of oneness, of centauricity. Knowing Keech I didn't bother to ask why he was wearing a horse mask, because he wouldn't really see the point of such a question. Anyway, he was a horse at the moment.

I had thought that this spontaneous mask-wearing was simply an eccentricity unique to Keech, but then Echo told me that when the monkeys had come to our house and garden one afternoon, she had put on the horse mask and run out into the garden and the road in broad daylight, as if I myself weren't strange enough to the neighbors.

Then the other evening, when Echo came to the station to pick me up in the van because of the snow, there was a white horse sitting in the passenger seat. I had to take the wheel because, although the subject never really comes up, everyone tacitly agrees that horses can't drive.

Now I know it's not Keech; it's genetic.