The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (46 page)

“Nay, some have played with this, they really have. Like, in grief therapy? ‘Healing the dead,’ imaging a world where things
went down better is all about an intuitive grasp of this. But the profession won’t permit it to be pushed very far. There
are over three hundred separate schools of psychology as it is.”

I couldn’t resist. “They’ve got that right. We need another about like we need more lawyers.”

The chilling component was more personal. How many times over the years, before my ill-fated reunion with JJ, had I driven
by that same old house whose specter had just revisited Justine
^2,
dreaming of a different outcome? How often, after we’d finally met and failed again, had I tortured myself for failing to
inquire after her in those earlier years before it was too late?

————————

H
OW WIDE MIGHT A PHASE-ENTANGLED GHOST
have cast her net? Whose body and soul had I missed so dearly? Had my “little red-haired girl” been JJ, after all? By God,
I thought; I could even have seen Justine playing in that yard as a child. My mind recoiled from the numinous images, but
the suspicions they incited only ran on, into other areas.

What if this was all true? How profoundly might it have affected my life? Other thoughts encroached, which I realized I’d
been driving back. While the main objectives of such experiments would remain unprovable and untraceable, the accompanying
synchronicity storms could be quite visible, affecting the outcome of many observations.

“Jung had a clue, early on, that analytical psychology couldn’t ignore those effects,” she agreed. And that was not the only
arena where avoidance could not be practiced.

I described to her the weird circumstances following the murder, in the summer of 1967, of my friend George. His death had
early influenced my continuing interest in the nature of reality. The circumstances had been widely believed a political assassination.
An investigation had followed the inadvertent arrest of the triggerman, some fourteen years later, on other charges. It had
revealed a network of remote associations among the principals in the case, defying all laws of probability. It had gone to
the point of the DA’s Office calling a halt, demanding simplification of the case sufficient to be credible to a jury.

The perpetrator had been convicted in an unusual courtroom drama which included, among other things, the first successful
use of hypnotically retrieved memories in witness testimony. Though he received an effective life sentence, the jurors never
had any idea of the complexities surrounding the evidence they had examined. That was another story, however. The germane
point, which struck me with the same quality as Justine
²
’s experience at her mother’s old home, was one that had returned to haunt the back of my mind months before. While doing
the Seabrook research, I had been transfixed by an impression of Walter Duranty’s Moscow days.

After George’s murder, the things we had seen made his young widow Mariann and me, like many of our contemporaries, despair
of our country. In the fall, we had journeyed to the then–Soviet Union for a few months. One November evening, we had stopped
for a drink at the Metropol Hotel, across the square from the Bolshoi. I noticed a balding man in a black overcoat, either
an American or a Brit, who occasionally spoke in English, declaiming loudly to a group of Muscovites. Those were the days
of the Brezhnev reforms, but old habits were still in place, and the Russians seemed nervous at his forthrightness on whatever
issue he was debating.

We’d met many more American expatriates in Soviet Russia than our press would have had us believe existed and had been curious
about the man, but it had been time to leave for the ballet. On the way out, I’d been startled as he emphasized a point, striking
the floor with an ornate cane.

Returning from the ballet about midnight, we crossed the square just as a light snow began to fall. I remembered we were having
a fine time, whistling “Midnight in Moscow,” a big hit not many years before. As with Willie refraining from discussing Constance,
what was between Mariann and me, I will hold to myself. The world does not need to know.

Then, across the square, an apparition in a dark overcoat and fur hat, the like of which only foreigners and peasants were
still wearing, exited the Metropol. Walking with the stiff gait that characterizes a prosthetic limb, it was immediately recognizable
as our loud friend by the ornate stick with which he assisted himself.

The snow thickened as we approached the hotel, but I could still see the figure, as it stopped and seemed to watch us down
the deserted square. The image remained of an arm raising the cane, as in salute, before vanishing into the snowy darkness.
Remained for years, to stun me as I read a description of Duranty, with his artificial leg and elaborate stick, holding forth
at the Metropol Hotel.

That night in 1967 was easily thirty years after his drunken debates, and a decade after Duranty’s death. Reality, according
to Justine
^2,
would allow for two or three equally outrageous explanations of what that represented; Dunnesian precognition of something
I would read thirty years later being the simplest.

“Willie was never in Russia, dearest, so you needn’t fear being asked to own past life memories. A
metem
beholding and saluting another, though; I do believe that happens. The educated hobo on the Savannah River? Willie’s dread
of being part of that man’s dreams wasn’t a philosophical metaphor. He never escaped the feeling that he was linked to him,
that, someway, he
was
that man.” She raised that emblematic eyebrow. “Like you felt, after you got into researching Willie, muchly?”

“You think you can do that, recognize beings like yourself?” I asked. “Did you notice something while you were out shopping?”

————————

“I
HAVE BEEN DOING IT, SWEETIE,
”
SHE RETORTED ACIDLY.

As always, the meat that I could get my teeth into was the synchronistic aspect. Thinking of that in association with Duranty
led me to revisit another concern. Should a synchronicity storm brew around anything deemed to affect state security, it probably
would
tend to excite the interest of a number of bureaucrats.

I sketched for her the story of the federal raid on the offices of
Astounding Science Fiction
in March of 1944. A story they had published was judged to imply unusual insight on atomic research. John Campbell, the editor,
had hinted to the writer that he might be perceived as knowing too much about actual projects—the Manhattan Project, as it
developed.

If Willie had known Will Jenkins in this life also, he might have appreciated the situation through Jenkins-Leinster’s contacts
with the bunch at the Philadelphia Naval Yards. The manuscript did confirm that by mid-1945, Walter, his friend and Mink’s
new lover, was warning him that aspects of his activities were unappreciated by some government circles.

The FBI had been shadowing Duranty virtually all the years of his association with Seabrook, acquaintances reporting regularly
on his activities and beliefs. It was probable that the barn adventures had not gone unnoted. I shared with Justine
²
my assumption that this worry had prompted him to secure his notes, wherein he had chosen to embed his farewell, with her.

She shrugged, smiling slightly. “There are other considerations.” She slowly lit a cigarette in a manner that only could be
described as genteel.

Thinking I might anticipate her, I went on, “Look, they were ending a world war and preparing for the next one. Certainly
governments would have a great interest in experiments with precognition. Whatever Willie’s personal paranoia, should any
research girl ever have been reported to have persuasively demonstrated probable foresight …

“Why, even today there would be an interest in co-opting minds that could correlate the variables of possible outcomes beyond
the capabilities of the most powerful computers?” I involuntarily ended my pontification in a question as I watched her expression
of tolerant amusement. The new persona had consolidated further. The modern young woman was not gone, but tempered with wisdom
and experience a century wide.

“But it’s the
past,
don’t you know?” she breathed. “The ‘research girls’ had singularly few experiences of precognition. I can count mine on
one hand. A biggie, like the street circus, may have gone down precisely through receiving reinforcement from
here,
from being significant way down the branches of many possible paths. It’s all about
retrocognition,
detailed hindsight, if only of one or two sets of possible past moments.

“If you hadn’t already crashed when Orwell’s book was published, you would’ve instantly recognized some of his ideas. Controlling
the here-and-now by redefining and limiting the past is old as Egypt, as Sumer. Establishments are skeptical of any who hold
on to even approximate living memory of what has shaped the present moment.”

Genuinely humbled, I assured her, “We will protect you. Couldn’t let anything happen to my pretty teacher, could I?”

Still smiling, though with a sweet sadness, she answered, “If you but knew, when you have said something like that before.”
I would not injure the moment by protesting being saddled with memories of things apart from my reality. If nothing else,
it was becoming rather convenient to accept a linkage of some sort.

She seemed to gaze far away, and whispered, “I think we are necessary. If temporal hypocrisies must be served by putting the
quietus on the most commonsensical trivialities of another day, how much more so for matters of great moment? History is butchered
to the point that there would be no continuity at all, were there not always some of us with long memory. Either physical
immortals, of some variety, exist in linear time, or it is
we
who own the past, insofar as it’s intuited to be someway ‘real.’”

I grimaced. “In fact, there are always some fools in academia who are wanting to announce the ‘end of history.’”

“That’s poorly understood, but … Check it out: The set of all moments that, even remotely,
could
have led to the present state of affairs—somewhere,
somewhen,
really did happen. Let the swells construe the past as other than unitary, and limiting the possibilities to those supportive
of the status quo is a short trip. You get bent about them excluding or marginalizing the rest of the set, yea? This revisionism
is also about, y’know, including moments from other sets that, while they existed, too, could not have led here.”

“What about creativity?” I snapped to the perplexing implications. “Maybe our concept of imagination is all wrong. It could
be simply the faculty of perception across the worlds, and the ability to agitate that in others, like Jimmy Greene, the loyal
friend. However he may have disapproved, he knew that Willie’s behavior was not without meaning. He was even moved to make
it into a novel.”

“We will teach each other, as we’ve done before.” She looked at me with unabashed adoration. “
Mon compagnon d’âme, je t’aime.
And I’ll say it again,
chéri.
I’ve missed you so much!” How could I feel other than undeserving, under that withering warmth from an intellect of such
magnitude?

“Babe, I would accept it all, if only I could find one ‘snippet,’ as you say; one memory of my own that supports it—I would
willingly let you direct me to the rest.”

“Where is it written that you won’t? Here”—she handed me back
The Fan-Shaped Destiny
—”finish your lesson.”

————————

And now the book is nearly ended, and I prepare to leave this reportorial record with my trusted friend, my
ame soeur
; to
do a sort of belated justice to the one, who of all the kith and kindred who remain alive, perhaps cared the most. Interspersed
with these notes is a methodology, which I suspect is only one among many, for effectuating the transport. In this, at least,
my eccentric flashings have not been in vain. Should, in a forgetfulness cruel or kindly, I fail to find you, it may be that
you will deign to restore yourself to me.

Your most unworthy companion in eternity prays for this. You cannot know what contrition in this plea for yet another chance.
I have been forced to look, sober for the larger part, at a miserable panorama of flight, miles and years wide, all over the
map, running away from myself. At the end of my dismal time before, I knew that it was ever you who had blessed my poor life
with what meaning it possessed. I was nothing without you. One would have thought, extended an unbelievable grace, I would
have done my damnedest to handle you with more care.

Things have turned rather queer for me in the later years. I was successful in spite of myself, had my adventures, wrote my
books. That is to say, I invented plausible reasons for my obsessions and they produced by-products. Yet, every so often,
this world has seemed as if it resents my presence, would deny my existence, as the physiology rejects a foreign intrusion.
The scientific romance of this world elaborates reciprocal histories, and physics will eventually follow suit, even did it
come out of Africa and through the pen of a sadist. But neither my name nor that of Wamba will be heralded.

Hollywood has made millions, and will make untold more, off voodoo and zombies, but the name of the man who filed the first
English reports has been expunged. Those credited are the very hidebound scholastics who tried and failed to debunk my accounts.
In the literature of the paranormal, I am but a vanishing footnote; in that of the erotic, I exist not at all.

While I was not a great writer, this time I was a remarkably competent one. Jimmy Greene gives me his highest praise: that
I got on with the job of being a good reporter. Yet Harcourt refuses my manuscripts and my books cease to be reprinted in
the face of still-existing demand. I predict that, once I am gone, I will be forgotten in record time. It seems like everything
about me is questionable. Does it sound plausible, to be too controversial and yet beneath commentary simultaneously, I ask
you? I fear such contretemps say much—about our brave new world that will follow upon the heels of the recent war.