The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (47 page)

Questions to which you will put this dark present; how a man in his sixtieth year—though it is to me like a century—and who
has recently fathered his only son, would arrive at such a denouement? I could not satisfy that, were I to count all the ways
that I landed myself in this trap. Even my second chance, in common with all my flights and attempted escapes, too often proved
futile, echoing with regrets. I am willing to relinquish my will, my life; give over my self into hands stronger and wiser
than my own. Wamba, I feel sure, lives still in this world, but I need our moment in time, and I need her old teacher, the
Ogoun who remembered the magic in which time was folded backward.

Pray God I may yet be different for my brother Charlie, for all of you. Some who subscribe to the doctrine of
metempsychosis
hold that souls naturally travel together in sets. If so, I think it is less a regimented Roman march through a linear time
than a melding of some lives into others, an overlapping.

So, as with Walter’s stock joke,
“On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser d’oeufs,”
which we wore thin, we broke a lot of eggs
but it was not a bad omelette, was it? At least you are all still here. In my mind’s eye I can see Marjorie at her desk writing;
she was happiest when we were both working thus. Ever and anon, she may turn and look for me, but Walter will be there. Katie
is safe with Lyman. Tell her, won’t you, that it was never something hateful about her writing? When I read
Gao of the Ivory
Coast,
⁹⁰
and thought of how our little monkey, whom I still had with me, had loved her—I was dead drunk for four days.

Justine, God bless you, Justine, the cosmic contradiction. Striding away with your bracelets and chains still tinkling like
bells, yet always fierce and determined. And so alive! At the last, there is perhaps cowardice in it. Wanting honestly to
be as honest as I can,
sans
cribbing or weasel words, were there not a chance in a million threatening you, could I have taken
the littlest chance? My angel, I could not have lived to see you die again.

I trust that you will go on to new happiness, but to paraphrase Michelet, you are still living and working on as always. It
is well. You will not be bowed down with the grief of losing me; you can do quite well without me. The ranks will close up
again, the vacant place be obliterated. The house that was mine will be full of life, and I bless its prosperity … but I,
I can never forget you!

I promise that if I see you again, be it in another time or an otherworld, I will cherish you. God willing that I become less
of a child and less contemptibly frail, I will try to love you better. Somehow, we dream the worlds we live in and, without
love, there are no dreams.

Farewell, to meet again,

W.B.S.

B
ESIDES MY ADOLESCENT RASH OF PRECOGNITIVE
dreams, I had pondered whether some recurring dreams during early childhood might have signified the end of a previous life.
But their content had been something like being run over by a big oily machine in an open field. Going back to my earliest
days, neither dreams nor memories revealed anything that pointed recognizably to William Seabrook.

Still, this extraordinary week had revealed many other things that defied explanation. Its central fixture was my seemingly
fated connection with the
gens
of the Justines, a line we now believed might be infused with Willie’s genetics. It began with meeting JJ that long-ago night
at the lake, concurrent with the birth of my interest in the same alternate-world fiction whose inspiration I had lately traced
to Seabrook.

A full thirty-five years later, it had culminated in my involvement with her daughter, to whom I had been led blindly through
my search for Willie’s story. Which story had, in its turn, been generated by a late-life renewal of my early obsessions.
And what a host of tantalizing convergence in the interim, mostly unrecognized for years. The convulsive reunion with JJ,
accompanied by the matter of The Ring, seemed an icon of a principle. If it is possible for a universe to split into two slightly
different realities by a quantum-mechanical event, then symmetry demands that two slightly different universes may converge
and become identical in the same fashion.

Then there had been the dark, bizarre involvement of Linda and myself with the woman now known to have been Willie’s Justine,
without a clue of her being JJ’s grandmother!

With grateful wonder, I had begun to comprehend that her course of action, resulting in Justine
²
’s present configuration, had been partially prompted by that meeting. Justine
²
before whom the elder Justine’s treasured copy of Willie’s autobiography had flown to me like a harbinger of destiny.

Leaving aside the question of my being a
metem
of the forgotten author of all this, it appeared that convergence with his influence, and even progeny, had greatly impacted
my own personal history. My superstitious fear of having to answer for a multiplicity of trespasses, most likely a projection
of my own unconscious issues, had given way to a fatalistic
qué será, será.
I now knew that I would have to explore to exhaustion the significance of such an incredible nexus, wherever it might lead.

More subjective was my uncanny affinity with Willie’s work. In contrast to my experience with the classic science fiction,
I had not found a single Seabrook passage that I had memory of reading before. Yet each book and article was infused with
a texture that intimately caressed my psyche.

Why, the very absence of recognition was significant! At least a couple of his works had to have been on my mother’s bookshelves
when I was a boy. Not even to mention the copy of
Witchcraft
that seemed to have lain inexplicably among Charles’s possessions for decades. How the hell had I missed him? It seemed as
though it would have required preconscious avoidance.

Finally,
No Hiding Place
had arrived in my hand, like an ominous bird, complete with its little news clipping. Never had I found the story of another
man so psychologically kindred, both for good and ill. I couldn’t plumb his deepest feelings without an emotional storm of
my own.

Even then I had known that the bottom line came early in his story, when he cried out in sorrow and remorse after his lost
brother. In one little line, from the work originally entitled
My Brother Charlie,
he had offered up a lament—which is the deepest, most fervent prayer of all mankind, would we only admit it:

————————

“O
H
G
OD, IF
I
COULD GO BACK
to that other night and be different.” No mindless wimp, this man, I’d thought. Not one to drug himself with psych-excuses
and deny the horror of responsibility. True, he had taken it too far. His brother had died from natural causes, but he could
find guilt in anything, Charlie’s life twisted by Willie’s failure to stand up for him against a domineering mother—and a
consequent weakened will to live—Willie took all onto his own shoulders. Now
The Fan-Shaped Destiny
had shown me the true gravity of a failure-haunted life. Given another chance, he must have believed that he could fix everything.

He had been sufficiently different for Justine, for Katie, and Marjorie, but persisted in the belief that he had somehow failed
Charlie. Despite his grasp of the paths of high probabilities’ resilience, he had felt himself damned. To the end of this
life, he had “… heard another voice, and hear it always. ‘If you had liked me, Will, it might have been some use.’”

I had such a dead brother in my friend Richard, from whose fate I could excuse myself a hundred times over, except for “that
night” when, if I had been there, it would have been different. Also Willie’s first-life Katie in Linda, if only on a psychological
plane. But all this could be easily explained away as the universal human condition. Unless, I was surprised by a thought
that then captivated me—unless enlaced worlds and lives might,
itself,
be a part of the human condition!

I’d spoken with Justine
²
of going around my old haunts, though fearful that projecting morbid fascinations of my own might have unexpected impacts
on her. Yet the logic of our involvement, the linkages I’d been mulling over, surely couldn’t be entirely oneway. Consider
the plan for her antecedent self, returning along the timeline, to become an “improved” version of JJ.

“Be cool. I’m good to go to town here. It’s grand that you’re putting me into your picture.” She had been applying elaborate
feathering from the corners of her eyes, sweeping up to connect with the ends of her arched eyebrows and shading in between.
It looked like something Man Ray might have drawn, or perhaps Dali.

She put on her sexy leather vest and skirt with high heels, then put her hair up in a fifties ponytail. The eclectic combination
of styles meshed strikingly. We started messing around, like a pair of kids, when she insisted on tying my thinning mane back
similarly. Di looked in and went on by, shaking her head in continuing disbelief.

We drove to Fort Worth along old US Route 80, passing the site of old Top-O-The-Hill, the infamous casino and brothel. For
years occupied by a Baptist seminary, it was long forgotten and gone, except for the stone gatehouse and pillars I pointed
out to her. I wondered, semifacetiously, at whether she might have had any business acquaintance with the place.

“Maybe
l’Autre,
” she shrugged. Justine
²
still did not fully identify with the legend of the later Madeleine as related by Roder. Those portions she had not yet consciously
recalled, she referenced as belonging to “the other.”

We passed by Rose Hill Cemetery, final resting place of a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had spirited all of us off down
a treacherous branch in the paths of destiny. Beyond the high school that I had attended with JJ, we cruised the still-spooky
road through a surviving stretch of undeveloped river bottoms. I pulled over where a gravel path still ascended to a preferred
“parking” location we’d called Grasshopper Hill. There, I drifted into a matter-of-fact account of making love to JJ, of interludes
become as mythic to me as colorful pulp-fiction sagas. Justine
²
displayed sincere interest and didn’t bat an eye, certain testimony to her being a tad beyond the commonly human. Imagine
a young woman who could listen to all that without irritation or boredom!

She’d kicked off her shoes and was sitting, typically, with her butt between her feet, in what therapists call the “W-sit”
position. Dropping the seat back, she looked at me mirthfully out of the corner of a feathered eye, “Checking me out?”

“Not really.” I was a bit chagrined. “In fact, I was just realizing that I don’t know why I’m doing this.” She sighed and
stretched herself, displaying her figure. With her muscles on stretch, the nerve impulses would rebound from her bent knees
back up the inner thighs, serving as a degree of self-arousal.

“Hey, you’re getting me all kinds of hot. Rewind that part where you fucked her in the autumn leaves. Was she wearing her
green jacket? I’ll bet you a dollar she kept it on.”

She laughed at my shocked pause. “Razzing you! That jacket, believe it or not, was still around when I was little. She takes
good care of her things,” Justine
²
mused with actual fondness, “and it was her favorite. No, wait. Let me see. No, I’m reading your mind, I really am.”

I wasn’t laughing. “We could assume that you’re now perpetually functioning a bit out of linear time,” I talked fast. I was
blushing hotly, for the first time in decades, from some weird embarrassment. “Do you suppose that there can be some phase
entanglement of our wave functions?”

“You slay me. Are you a card or what? I’ll entangle your functions, later—you can believe that!” Trying to control her giggling,
she grasped my arm. “Don’t be so solemn. It’s just fine about JJ. I’m gonna get the best part of you.”

“God, babe, if only that were so.”

Driving deeper into the old, decaying east side, I talked of the joys and hurts of youth, and the horrors of meaningless,
abbreviated endings. I told her more of my parents, particularly my schoolteacher mother. Strong, self-assured, she had empowered
herself without benefit of society’s dubious blessings.

“Sounds like Myra,” Justine
²
suggested.

“Like her in some respects, perhaps.” I glanced at her with a hint of chastisement at the comparison with Willie’s mother.
“She was never the tyrant that Myra became.”

“Sounds like she didn’t need to be,” she teased, getting the giggles again.

“Brat.”

We made the promised stop by JJ’s childhood home in a neighborhood that had truly gone to hell. Still, the late-afternoon
light was benign, and the slanting sunbeams did most tenderly paint with life the “shapes which lingered still.”

The sight of the run-down old home made my heart ache in spite of all that had transpired. She became more subdued, reminiscing
on her long-ago playtime and the
mambos’
assurance that she must aspire to that prescient vision. I listened to a little girl’s joy at the first touch of what was
to become, and had perhaps sustained, Justine
^2.

An air of normality around those reflections furthered acceptance of the circumstances as believable parts of life. She deliberated
over a semiconscious equation, which had persisted through this life, of that experience with her hope of finding her longed-for
father. Something awful leapt unbidden from the shadows of the dark arc in my memory.

It had been the one time I
had
stopped, and almost gone to the door. I’d been transfixed by a little girl playing in a pile of leaves that had been raked
up in the crisp autumn. Hair like a maple tree in flame had made me believe that she must be JJ’s child. Justine
²
watched me in a hushed tension while I confessed the repressed recollection.