The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (37 page)

Coming fully awake, I abruptly recalled another dream, possibly from the previous sleep cycle. The drums beat in the jungle.
Africa? No, maybe Haiti, for I recognized the chant as the one Seabrook had transcribed, “
Papa Legba, ouvrí barrière
… open the gate …”

I lay utterly still, fully engaged with the lingering impressions, consolidating all the memory I could. I knew that Legba
is the Voudon
loa
of the crossroads, whose Catholic manifestation is Lazarus. His title is
Opener of the Gate Between the Worlds.

The dim illumination sang that it was blue twilight beyond the drawn blinds. I was alone in the room.
Déjà vu à la Gulfport!
Panicking, I jumped up and jerked open the guest-room door. I ran, fully naked, through the silent house toward a light from
the kitchen, but it was vacant as well. Joe should have been gone to his second-shift job by then, I knew, but where the hell
was everyone else?

I tried to reassure myself that I would surely have been awakened had there been a crisis. I hurried back to the bedroom and
pulled on my trousers, then fumbled for the light to find my other things. Finding myself without her, I had again to fight
down the eerie fear that she was of a separate reality, so easily lost from my world. I spied my written reassurance, but
saw that it had been removed and repinned to the bedspread. I registered that there was an additional notation beneath my
scrawl.

————————

G
ONE SHOPPING,
IT READ,
LOVED YOU LONGER,
J
²

Shopping? The image of young Justine the mall monkey collided with the elegant, almost Spenserian, penmanship in which the
abbreviated lines were written. I’d seen that handwriting recently, on yellowed letters and envelopes, from long before. But
what seized me with wonder was her initial, boldly and lavishly inscribed, and attached to it the superscript digit two.

The message was ironic and profound. Her mother had been known as JJ. Thus, she was now seeing herself as Justine squared,
Justine multiplied by herself, complex-conjugate Justine! I had to regard it as assurance that she was successfully integrating
her psychic contents rather than being overwhelmed by the greater volume from her antecedent self.

As I poured coffee, sounds came from the garage attached to the kitchen, and I peeked through the door window to see Justine
²
helping Di with her crutches and several large plastic bags. They were laughing together about something, and I could see
with a glance that Di had already adopted her. For some reason, I was reminded of the relationship between Linda and the elder
Justine, nearly thirty years before, which had left me somewhat uneasy. Compared to that dark bond, this interaction came
off decidedly healthy and wholesome.

I helped them through the kitchen door with the bags. Then Justine
²
threw her arms about my neck in a fierce embrace. Sensing her to be just a bit unsteady on her feet, I held her long, feeling
relief that things seemed well enough. Di surveyed us over the top of her glasses as she put things away, saying nothing.

Justine
²
ran off to the bedroom with the bags containing her catch. Di had finished putting up and settled into the breakfast nook
across from me when she returned, happily modeling a short skirt she’d found to match her leather vest. Her legs and midriff
quite bare, the whip scratches were evident, and Di’s look hardened. Even so, I couldn’t conceive that as being a problem;
Justine
²
was an adult, after all. Like Seabrook, I’d never made any secret of my sexual tastes, so Di shouldn’t be surprised.

The girl pulled a chair over to the edge of the table and joined us. As she seated herself, I once again saw her palms sweep
upward, lifting skirts that had not been there for decades. She looked down with confusion at her bare thighs, and an undeniable
blush suffused all her exposed skin. She glanced at me almost furtively, and I had another revelation.

The antique patterns of acculturation in her mind would keep Justine
^2,
the exhibitionist, in a constant state of stimulation when in modern dress based on the sensation that she was practically
naked. Regaining her composure, she chatted for a while and, though she looked especially young when she crossed her bare
legs beneath her, the expression “happy and poised” came to mind.

After she excused herself, a slight but audible hint of the Bronx tainting her speech, I turned to Di. “What?” I demanded,
wondering if I might be required to explain who “Willie” was or something.

“You’re on probation with me, as of now.” I waited to hear what was coming. “It’s rare to meet a young woman that much in
love, anymore, and with an old fart like you!” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine why, but even the more distasteful things
about you fascinate her. What she believes about you, it’s just incredible.” I frowned, but she waved off my incipient inquiry.

“Another time, but you had better take good care of her, or you’ll deserve to go to hell.” Di is a religious woman, but not
of the sort who invokes hellfire. However, it wasn’t the content of the conditional damnation that gave me sudden pause. It
was the form, and I asked why she put it that way.

“I don’t know. It could be the feeling I get that she’s given up so much for you—so strong I have to speak my mind. Look,
you’re always coming around here, whining about wanting another chance.” Her seriousness was frightening, “I think that somebody
heard you.”

There are not many people who can ream me out. I looked at Di, with her leg braces and all the suffering she’d endured, and
it triggered again that devastating sense of shame. There was absolutely no sarcasm when I promised to do the right thing.
It was not moral intimidation but the certainty of how deeply Di really could see into things which got me out of the room
in a hurry. I was about to spill the whole bizarre story, as I’d told her all about JJ a couple of years earlier, and was
sure she’d think me way over the top.

Justine
²
was at the guest-room vanity, outlining her lips in contemporary fashion. She had applied an eye mask, but instead of simply
a dark band, it was composed of elaborate swirls and feathering with an
art nouveau
look. Her movements seemed more subdued, less bouncy; but she had been through a lot by any standard. I sat on the bed and
watched, intrigued by the continuing merger of personas. “Does wearing next to nothing get you off? Not just your clit ring
that keeps you horny, is it?”

“Please!” Her green eyes twinkled in the mirror. “Embarrassed much? Now I know why that’s always done it for me.
Kewl,
” she continued, “weird, yet cool.” She sat back, appraising her cosmetic art. I had no clue as to how to delve further. I
was afraid of doing something to upset what might yet well be a precarious balance. “Hey, you didn’t do the bail thing”—she
was smiling at me in the mirror, maybe a bit sadly—”when I showed my true colors.”

“Why would you expect that of me?” Di was one matter, but I now felt hurt and almost offended.

She didn’t answer. “So it’s like that.” It was a question, though you wouldn’t have known it through the flat punker assertiveness.
“Di told me. The marriage thing?”

“You didn’t give me an answer,” I responded stiffly.

“You mean on the aeroplane, going to New York?
That
was a proposal?” She sighed. “I am sure I’ve only been waiting to hear one for eighty years, believe you me.”

Justine
²
’s speech varied, in part, with which sets of memories she was thinking about or associating. I didn’t know when I should
be concerned or even how to deal with the continuing identification of me with Willie. I guess it showed, because she dropped
her hands in her lap and glanced nervously about the top of the vanity.

“I know; I’m sorry. I’m being touchious.” She came to me and stood between my knees, and I pressed my lips against her shiny
navel ornament. I took her hands and tried to explain my thoughts about the memories and integrating the personas, but was
being distracted by her quivering belly.
“Non, non. Arrête!”
she teased when I pinned her wrists behind her back.

Emotion ran neck and neck with libido. I wanted her, yes, but as I was about to get on my knees anyway, I was moved to make
an on-the-knees traditional proposal as well. She knew it, too.

“Babe, I can’t doubt who you are, you’re …” I was as unable to express anything as a teenager. “… you’re everything. But I
have to learn how to relate, don’t you see? I’m terrified of even hearing how I looked through your eyes at
The Château
in sixty-nine. Whom do I know you
as?
Do you understand?”

“You know me.
You’ve always known me,
” Justine
²
whispered, with a throaty hoarseness that struck a chord from those bygone nights. I knew then how stunned Roder must have
been when a voice from the past had bade farewell to her “old friend.”

Giggling at my disconcertion, she squirmed in my grip. “No way it’s more gross than having to hear about that dried-up, perverted,
old woman. Go and get me started, you know I’m insatiable. Swell gams, hunh?” I was pushed the rest of the way by a sweaty
thigh thrown over my shoulder. “Gimme some sugar!” My face buried in her muff, I began to lick around her clit ring.

“It’s all, y’know, about accessing new pathways to memories? Last night I pulled a real brainstorm. Now it’s like Fibber McGee’s
closet in here—everything before that night in ’45. The rest is defragmenting much more slowly, thank heaven. Oh,” she moaned,
“I’m gonna have so many stories to tell you!” I thrust my tongue deep into her, savoring her distinctive taste. Everyone has
her own and Justine
²
’s was slightly acerbic—it figured. Despite her heat, her attention was all over the place.

“Look it, think of me like a stroke victim or, play like I’ve been tortured with electroshock. That’s no fun either, but it’s
farther up our alley. This feels like that, only the paths must be across time.” She paused the motion of her hips and giggled
mischievously. “I think you had more hair, didn’t you?” As I lightly nipped at her navel, she switched channels again.

“Poor dear, don’t fret,” she cajoled, with the archaic inflection. “You’ve been so worried about being with a younger woman,
and now it proves out that she’s nearly a hundred years old. No, wait. Let me see. Centenarians
are
at our sexual peak,” she laughed as I pinned her hips. “Better oughta get a cock ring …” She moaned as I sucked her clit
between my teeth and worked on her with the tip of my tongue. “Or not!”

“Check it out. I would play like, a sex surrogate—for my girlfriends who were afraid of pregnancy, or flat afraid of sex,
period? I would fuck their beaux so they didn’t have to. Ooh. You like that, hunh? Make me hurt,
chéri, torturez-moi!
” We made love, as gently as she would allow. While an aroused Justine
²
heads directly for the edge, apart from more pinching and biting and fingernails in my butt, she was satisfied with “slow-processing.”

I discovered that “fantasy” was another term whose normal meaning had expired. “Many men have had me,” she moaned, “but only
you did I wanna tell about it, to share everything.” In the calm afterglow, she luxuriated in her recollections, and her language
assimilated even further. Which was more amazing, to be inflamed by lucid erotic memories from other times, or their identity
with the unacknowledged history of our own?

Regarding her grand indifference to questions of hygiene, she chided, “Lighten up. HIV is scary, but so were smallpox and
scarlet fever. Say, syphilis before penicillin? What’s the sense of immortality without some
savoir-faire?
Diphtheria? Been there, done that. Don’t expect me to bat an eye at herpes or a silly yeast infection.” There was nothing
for it but to reinforce a state of mind that, all things considered, appeared healthy enough.

Neither of us could know whether she would experience a reversal. If I had any kind of handle on this, our trip to the barn
had actualized a sort of psychic loop across time. She had plugged into that other Justine’s precognitive nightmare in a major
way. Cleaving so tightly to the assumptions of that long-ago moment, struggling to
be
that woman, had provoked an
anamnesis.

She had been reeling from a sudden deluge of the psychic contents that had constituted her antecedent self—up until the night
of that event. Still, there remained a quarter century of experience, which she seemed to be accruing at a more measured pace,
if not as slowly as her gradual assimilation of bits and pieces before our ill-advised excursion to the barn.

Spiriting her away from settings that stressed her identity had been for the best, she agreed. “Worlds had someway collided,
my worlds. The feelings were so strong …” she began, but I stopped her. Revisiting those feelings so soon seemed imprudent.
I suspected that a fully coherent treatment of the
anamnesis
itself was improbable in any event.

She insisted that we begin to read the manuscript. “Even the fractions I’ve started to recall are like any book read a long
time past. You only remember the content in general terms, and gotta be refreshed.”

I asked if she could answer me as to whether she had foreseen meeting me, her book finding its way to me, any of the nexus
of synchronicity. “Couldn’t prove it by me”—she looked at me piercingly—”but my testament reads as though it were all about
finding you, does it not? After discovering you at
The Château,
I must’ve prayed very hard.”

Distraction was then of a different order. Though fully nude, she remained nonetheless poised, addressing me like a well-bred
lady in an early-century drawing room. “Then, if I was not a part of your plan,” I pressed, “how can you be sure I’m not just
an interference, other than solely by your subjective feeling about the nature of our connection? And please, try to indulge
me by distinguishing between Willie and me when you speak. It’s confusing.”