The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (42 page)

One evening, we had
aperitifs
with a Pennsy railroad detective, an aspiring writer with the interesting name of Beam Piper.
A lean fellow with hard and intelligent eyes who didn’t fraternize much, Piper told us that he had been attempting to write
stories in this vein. Very much a gentleman of the old school as he lighted his pipe, he nevertheless confided, after a few
drinks, his belief that he himself had been born in another reality and had, in his writing, been seeking an explanation.

Literate as to everything readable from the classics to the modern
Ulysses
, he was sore about the apparently calculated neglect,
even of classical philosophical speculation on the plurality of worlds. “Not even to mention the folklore of many cultures,
Gaelic, African, Arabian, which get a short shrift from official science. All those people,” he had stroked his thin mustache
and the flinty eyes twinkled with shrewd amusement, “are savages, you understand. It’s not tolerated that we should learn
anything of value from them.”

“But, Judas Priest, man! Surely heaven fills the bill as another reality? A concept, compatible with physical law, that gives
to reasoned belief, why, belief in human immortality …” I had begun.

“Would be as well received as the ‘good news’ of the Apostles,” he’d laughed diffidently. “You can forget institutional learning.
Only in a literary ghetto such as ours can such radical ideas be propagated. Nevertheless, we need the raw materials, the
research of science. It’s too bad that some adventurer hasn’t taken up the challenge of going to the deserts and jungles to
ferret out the wisdom from time immemorial.”

In the clubby atmosphere around the billiard tables, Piper had waxed effusive on his subject—uncharacteristically, Jenkins
had whispered to me. He detailed plans for books, including the notion of volitional suicide as a means of transport between
actualities. I asked if he meant reincarnation.

“Don’t like that term,” he complained, “but we may be stuck with it in writing for the public. It’s an approximation of a
Sanskrit word that’s far too vague. The Greeks had a more exacting concept,
metempsychosis
, the transference or transmigration
of the soul.” I’d wanted to explore Piper’s odd assertion that he’d experienced multiple realities, but he was back on track
of the reasons their genre was so queerly despised in America.

“There hasn’t been enough science worth spitting at in the States,” Jenkins had interjected, “only technology. We’ll get real
scientists—now that they’re fleeing Europe.” But he held that conditions for scientific romance would not change for a long
while more. “The rancid blanket of state security is coming down over speculation as well as science itself.” He confided,
in low tones, rumors of bureaus conceived during the World War, mandated to contain information in an emergency. When war
came, the “emergency” measures might become permanent.

“Patriotic caution,” he’d warned, “becomes an obsession for control that may inhibit popular comprehension for the rest of
the century. Your friends Bernal and Haldane have already landed on the sedition list,” he’d nodded to me, “for trying to
democratize scientific information, as much as for their pinko politics.”

As we had taken our leave, I recalled Piper’s comparison with the Gospels, and asked his thoughts about religion’s attitude
toward such questions. “Say, fellow,” he’d chuckled sadly. “Priestcraft has hope reserved to the somehow-good. You know …
the Scopes trial was just jake with them, wasn’t it? The Church
contains
inquiry, religious and otherwise. It’s a strange
thing about the mentalities that take such comfort in a vague belief that ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Spell those reasons
out, and all you see are backsides headed out the door!”

The encounter with Piper was so pregnant with shades of meaning for me, in an other life, that I’ve quoted as much as I can
recall. I’m in his debt, in any world, and I wish him well. I believe he was in the same boat as me, and would recall his
thought, that in the magic of distant jungles and deserts might lie answers as pertinent as in the halls of physics.

I had managed to be reposted to London, in hopes of getting back to a front. There had been some talk of making the convention
an annual event but, as it adjourned, the Wehrmacht had begun to roll across Poland. In a few days, even as I hurried back
to my post, England had declared war.
The Chicago Tribune
had sent Miss Kuhr to Poland, and I’d lost track of her. I guessed
that I might grieve for Constance along with all the others, if not dead, then lost to me as if she had been. Like a ghost
from that past that never was, Constance would find me again, late in an other life. But, I will hold to myself what was between
us. Here, she is the mother of my son, the widow I leave behind.

Some pleasant diversion was offered, in the company of a young-old fashion-photographer-turning-war-correspondent. Her grim
and glorious pictures of the Blitz were gaining fame both in England and at home. Through the shrouded streets of the London
night, she seemed to carry the sunshine with her. Her aggressive intelligence did not put me off; Constance had given me the
cure for that little conceit. The wear and tear of a frenetic early life had left her perhaps a mite too haggard to excite
me. More likely, it was just a matter of my candle fizzling out. She would reach out. I would retreat. At last, she had drifted
back to her lover.

In that otherworld, I had no one left to leave, so I then stood vigil with all the brave Conways of London, as they awaited
the coming of the Luftwaffe’s Valkyries. I pray that they, too, prevailed in the end. Was it only as seen through the lens
of my own hopelessness, that the dawn seemed a thousand years removed? By that final night, I was through, and I knew it,
as far as any effort to save myself was concerned. It had been so late, too late for me with Mink, or to find another Katie.
And never, or ever again, could there be another Justine. At the last, I would invite oblivion, but it would be something
else that answered.

In this life that we have succeeded in building amongst ourselves, things have gone differently. I’m sure you will agree,
better—however much flawed, we did do that. But by the fall of 1928, I was disconsolate over the prospect of soon parting
ways with Katie. You should know that my unconscious had compounded the thirty-three “ghost years” along with the rest, in
establishing my sense of duration. I reckoned time spans, consequently, as might a man of seventy-five years. Our sixteen
years together, this time around, sounded so pathetically brief. Perceiving the early traces of Katie’s erosion, under the
battering of my neurasthenic temperament, I exerted myself to find another way.

Might not the changes I had wrought be sufficient? I had become a successful author by the age of forty-two, with a couple
of best-sellers under my belt and preparing to produce a third. We had had exotic years in Haiti and Arabia, where Katie had
many wonderful adventures. At home and abroad, we’d go
de luxe
and group with the most interesting people. Why, in this world,
the club at 156 Waverly even belonged to her, and was a far cry from the dingy Cubbyhole.
⁸¹
Most and dearest of all, our darling Justine still lived and loved with us. Might not she, alone, make up for the shortcomings
of life with me?

After a morbid attraction to their wedding almost resulted in an unwanted encounter in the spring of 1923, I had heroically
avoided even so much as meeting, much less becoming involved with, Mr. and Mrs. Lyman Worthington. I would run across Mink
around the Village, but would quickly cross the street, avoiding contact. I had managed to forget all about the meeting that
had never happened. Then my friend Don McKee, aware that I was in the doldrums, invited me to make a fourth at bridge one
night late in October.

Appalled to discover that I seemed to have been maneuvered, into spending the evening across a card table from Mrs. Worthington,
I still thought I might get through it gracefully. Rather, I found I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. Never conventionally
beautiful, Marjorie was always striking.
She registered
, and the attempt to confront a person and body that I had known so
intimately, as if just casually met, was excruciating. How often had I twined that luxuriant dark mane around my … well, you
get the idea.

Thus distracted, I was undone by the simplest thing. Beginning to relax, imagining that I was in control of the situation,
I slipped. I addressed her as “Mink,” the pet name I had for her the time before. When she dropped her cards, I had an inkling
of what had clicked. My fears would be confirmed when I went around to see her later. She had, indeed, harbored ambitions
toward encountering the notorious writer and adventurer. The convenience of Don’s card party aroused no misgivings or forebodings;
it had just turned out that way. Yet, ever afterward, she would remain beset by spells of queerly distorted
deja vu
. Glimpsing
an otherworld, whether she had experienced it or was, God forbid, as yet to experience it, dream polluted her reality thenceforth.

Life with Marjorie would educate me to additional dangers of our peculiar existence. Later, when we were living in the
Villa
Les Roseaux
near Toulon, I had to employ extreme measures to shoo away a phony cleric, a dangerous dabbler in the esoteric,
who was always mooching about. He had deeply affected her, and I wouldn’t stand for it a minute. I gratified his curiosity
by educating him in the darker aspects of the fan-shaped destiny! Resistant to comprehension of their true nature, Mink remained
so heart-breakingly, pathetically vulnerable to the power of her sporadic episodes. She would insist, years later, on having
followed me abroad in 1926, even though she could never recall much, in the way of events, which might give flesh to the two
missing ghost years.

————————

As always, I first tried to flee. Katie and I were due in Paris in November to put together, with Paul Morand, the African
expedition he’d made possible. There, I hoped to find that which I had sought from the mountains of Kurdistan to the Haitian
forests. Katie just laughed at my flight from still another peccadillo, though I suspected that the pain hidden by her mirth
rivaled my own. This is all detailed in my writings, including the body of my association with Wamba. From that insolent young
witch, I finally learned the lore of the branching paths, and its African origin. Wamba’s last words to me, however, have
gone unreported until now.

On the day of leave-taking, as our party readied to cross the Cavally River, Wamba spoke in her mix of French and Bambara,
“I say no
adieu
, for you are not seeing your last of me. Would that I were there now, on a day you do not cross over, but
stay here and live with me.” She gazed off into the haze of the African morning. In my heart I doubted that I should again
return, whatever vision she had conjured. Giving me her bland, disturbing smile, she went on in the pidjin mix, garnished
with Yafouba terms, of which my understanding was unsure.
⁸²

“I have seen such a day.” She held out her hands as if in benediction. “You walk this path a while, then were it like a dream
that dissolves with the morning mist.” Like a sign, a burst of rays broke through the hazy dawn. She nodded with emphasis.
“On this same morning, you would not cross the river.” I stared at her, I think not daring to comprehend. Her voice returns
now, which is as may be, the one and only solace I hope to find. She concluded the litany with an even less comprehensible
prophecy.

“I bethink how you turn this way again, farther along the path. Before I go on ahead, I shall send the message to my sisters
across the sea. Should they cross your path in years to come, then shall you remember your old friend.” I watched after her
until she disappeared into the forest. The sunbeams, refracting through the haze, were disorienting. There were kaleidoscopic
moments when I couldn’t tell whether I was approaching the river or following Wamba.

But cross I did, and went away into the country of the
Guere
. On Christmas Eve, lost in the forest of Khabara en route to
Timbuctoo, I suffered my first recurrent dream of Wamba’s farewell. I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that, better
than Jimmy, or Walter, or Paul’s friend to whom I’ve blurted out portions of the shameful truth, she was able to see into
the darkness of my secret heart. I believe that I now understand whence followed Wamba’s affection for me. I think that she
was another creature like myself, a consciousness molded by
metempsychosis
—a
“metem”
who had walked amongst the worlds, from
a place where she had known me very long and well.

I first met her in this life, but I think she insisted upon becoming my guide owing to having first met me in another. If
God will tolerate my impertinence yet one more time, I will try to live up to whatever first impression gave birth to such
friendship. For the longest, for fifteen years, I’ve dreamed of Wamba walking away into the forest. Then, as happens in dreams,
the scene would shift to a crisper morning than in Africa, a morning much like today, and it would be Justine walking away.

I would wake up in the melancholia I’d known before. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now; must it be always so, as it
was with Katie? Sounding reconciled to our parting, once I had delivered the promised trip to Africa, she was fine about it.
It was Justine who had raised wildcat hell. Like the time before, Marjorie had come to France to find me, and I conceded that
I had obligations and unfinished business with her as well.

Lest I leave the silly suggestion that it was self-sacrifice moving me from woman to woman, I ask you. Could anyone, save
Wamba, have imagined the nature of my bond with Mink? The unnatural conviction of destiny, with which her spells imbued her
passion for me, would certainly have let me ruin her life again, had I not acknowledged us. But the passion was returned in
full measure. Neither was it any fault of Mink’s that my drinking was getting out of hand.