The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (51 page)

I especially feared the thought of watching Katie die in a few years, if Justine
²
had been correct about her connection to Linda. Linda was another responsibility I had to work into this agenda, damn it.
All that I’d speculated about the burning memories of other lives proved to be a fearful truth. Bedrock reality was going
to be my life with JJ, yet these beloved ghosts who would haunt the corners of my vision could never be safely relegated to
the realm of “imagination.”

And the one who had to be reckoned with, who had shamefully only then occurred to me as an existing reality, was the elder
Justine. My knees weakened at words echoing from
The Fan-Shaped Destiny,
“… to the one who, of all the kith and kindred who remain alive, perhaps cared the most.”

I looked at JJ, who smiled at me uncertainly, though full of trust. But all I could see was the color of her hair, and a band
of shadow across her eyes like the punker makeup of a possible future. Then it was that I knew what had generated the anomaly
of a nostalgia-haunted life, which even in adolescence, had my eyes firmly fixed on the past. I knew why I would have to have
fixated on JJ in any world. It was so simple, her resemblance not alone to a daughter yet unborn, but to her grandmother.
To the woman bound naked on the carpet of the
Hôtel Place de L’Odéon.
Madeleine Leiris, my true, original Justine.

Like golden bells, a goddess had laughed out loud at me. I was startled by a
memory
that had no continuity with the life I’d known. Not recalled since, since
a time before,
I recognized the classic profile of the sun goddess, smirking derisively as she had turned back to her camera. It had been
I who was fairly humiliated by an arrogant young photographer, not the model in the familiar old leather straps who had glanced
up at me accusingly.

It was her still—it had always been her. Most of the time, when the path divides, when your essential life is defined, the
meaning of your existence is determined—it is by little things you see only in hindsight. Sometimes not.

I thought, maybe for the first time in my life, really thought about the consequences of what I was about to do. I remembered
the warning from
The Fan-Shaped Destiny,
“The rational man in my extraordinary situation should approach, only with the greatest trepidation, the creation of a world
where the shape of things to come may surprise him unawares.”

I could have no idea what acting to involve Justine in our lives would mean. That she would ever do ill to me or her granddaughter
was inconceivable—even while I had come to understand that nothing would stop a Justine until she had what she wanted—in any
world. Life with any Justine is little but surprises, and I suspected that, at least in my personal life, I would enjoy precious
little pretense of precognition. This life would quickly become radically different from that which I remembered.

I’d modified my original scheme to try to make myself the father of JJ’s child, who might be destined to become the vehicle
of Justine’s
metem.
But even as I had woven the threads to become the father of Justine
^2,
the simplest chronology of the lifelines had eluded me. How could I wait here now and ignore her, compound my original sins,
even if I couldn’t remember them firsthand—sins for which I had only just begged forgiveness?

A fond smile at the thoughts of her incorrigibility was wiped from my lips as I comprehended that the Justine of this world
and time had less than a decade to live. The black realization caused my throat to seize up and my guts to tremble. I had
no choice; I
had
to be with her, perhaps even to love her. It mattered naught that she was old and would soon be ill;
it was still her inside.

I’d been recently graced with the dubious blessings of many moments of truth, but this was the mother of them all. Back flew
a shattering recollection that had mystified me on the pier in Gulfport. Oh God, were our possible futures, as well as our
alternate pasts, all potentially visible to us, with no means of distinction? Had I heard the echo of a heartbroken plea from
this life I was entering? I looked once more at JJ. She smiled again, tentatively, sensing my pain. I tried to give a reassuring
look and placed my hand over hers. With her grandmother’s help, she would be a good mother; all would be well.

But it rang in my head like a cry from hell,
“It’s still me inside!”
I averted my eyes, my glance freezing on the power plant across the lake, brightly lit in gay blue, yellow, and red. Could
there have been more not admitted in the manuscript, lied about by omission in shame and sadness? In whichever worlds she
might have pleaded those terrible words, I swore to God that she would never utter them again, never be left to cry alone
in the dark.

I watched the lights and fought against the buffeting of the emotional storm. In my mind’s eye, they became the lights of
Lake Charles, driving through the Southern night with young Justine by my side, wishing that we could just drive on forever.
They became the lights that shone even now, this very night, from her home far away outside Atlanta. Then I utterly lost it,
thinking of
our
home, as it had been since she had happily run up the steps to display her lights for me. In this world, as in that other,
she had grown old there; sitting high up under its tin roof, hoping and praying
for me.
Could I again betray the cheerful hope celebrated by those little lights, knowing now the meaning of her horror of the Rhinebeck
darkness?

A poet said, “In dreams begin responsibilities,” and the bludgeoning of this truth did not end. So young she must have been
before, running gaily up a street in the Village, alongside vanishing carriages and the growing horde of horseless carriages,
scanning the second stories of the brownstones through the snowy night, searching for the more modest Christmas lights to
guide her home. Would this remain my penance, to chase her through the times and worlds, waiting for her to grow up, or waiting
to die to be with her once more?

————————

I
STOOD, PHYSICALLY, IN THE DEFINING FANTASY OF A LIFETIME,
finding that it was only “the goal in sight again.” I did love JJ, how could I not? I must always have seen Justine in her,
and now I believed she might even become the mother of Justine
^2.
But, as the
Lakota
would say, my destiny was “written in the spirit world.” I could do naught but the necessary to reach her, to be with her
again.

“Am I going to get clobbered.” JJ fretted. “I’m going to be grounded, probably forever!” It must have been very late, there
were no more cars on the road over the dam.

“Forever is a long time,” I answered. I was still watching the lights, darkness hiding the tears streaming down my cheeks.
“Until forever, I can run over and you can crawl out your bedroom window most any night. Dig it?” She laughed with delight,
due to yet another of my “prescient” insights of her habits. “Anyway, it’ll give you plenty of time to write your grandmother
about us. She’ll approve of us, and your stepmother won’t defy her.”

“Wait up! Is this for laughs? Far be it from me to pop off about my own grandmother”—she had turned incredulous—”but she is
one strange old bird. Why would you think she’d even care?”

“You can believe that she cares, baby. Perhaps she’s the one …
the one who cares the most.
” My voice caught as I spoke the fatal words. “Tell her I said exactly that.” Would I ever know what it meant that, in every
time, somewhere along every path, she was waiting for me? No turning back, I rushed on.

“Tell her that Wamba, that’s
W-a-m-b-a,
has sent her friend back where he belongs. Trust me that will mean something to her. She’ll know what to do and want to meet
me, and she’ll help us. Here, I’ll write it down.” I fished for a pen, then laughed shakily at myself when I realized that
I didn’t yet habitually carry one. Then I found it, nonetheless.

When I looked up, I was alone, my abrupt solitude easily confirmed as the pier was well lit in the green of mercury vapor.
It was on the lake, yet it wasn’t. Behind the pier lay a broad expanse of cement, the gravel we had walked on throughout the
evening escaping like dreams that flee even as we grasp for them. It was still that long-remembered night, but not. The first
hint of dawn was lightening the eastern sky behind the condos.

Now what was
that?
I wondered stupidly. What was
that
all about? For a fleeting instant, in a scene more surrealistic than familiar, a young boy reached to embrace a girl from
a darker time. She had become the real-world incarnation of the angel he would never forget, from a strange waking dream,
the lady with the flaming hair whom he knew had somehow been with him always.

The moment passed, and all was again familiar, but would have been a descent into hell had I not been able to immediately
focus on the silhouette in the very short skirt. She sat, legs crossed, elbow on knee, and casually smoking a cigarette as
she watched me from the shelter house. I wanted to run up the pier, but quickly decided to accommodate a more abused cardiovascular,
and walked up instead.

“Hey.” At her flat punker greeting, I wondered whether another monosyllabic monotone had ever resonated as sweetly. “I was
afraid,” she gasped, as I roughly seized her up in my arms, “you were gonna make me come after you again.”

Assuming she spoke of the other world, I shuddered, “Never. Never again, not even in death!”

“Scary, aw-hunh?” she rubbed in the obvious comparison. I had no bitch with the chastisement. I knew even more certainly that
I would accept anything in lieu of the pain of separation. I collapsed down beside her in a surprised exhaustion. I was amazed
that the entire night had passed in our reality.

“How is it we weren’t rousted by the park cops?” In our time there was a curfew to keep drug deals at a minimum.

She shrugged, “We were all—about staying quiet in the dark, and they went away.” Then she silently smoked another cigarette
while I told my story of the temporary transit. Toward the end, Justine
²
snickered, “She won’t gotta crawl out that window, much, before she gets knocked up.”

So overwhelmed by what my memory told me I’d just experienced, I only then began to think through finding myself on the pier.
“Was I acting all that out, walking through the scene?” Then a more embarrassing consideration, “Do you think he’ll remember
his first time, or did I take that away from him?”

“There’s a no-brainer,” she laughed. “I’d like to think that
you
experienced something even better.” She drew my hand beneath her skirt to feel the stickiness between her legs. “You found
me delightful, I am
way
sure!”

“He was here? His consciousness was consolidated in my present body?” Somehow, I’d not thought of that. God forbid that happened
in every transit. Throwing the consciousness of an innocent into a body at life’s end was reprehensible. I thought of those
instants in the transits when I felt superimposed with another, perhaps many others.

“You should get down with that. And stop referring to yourself in the third person; it’s
way
weird! You’d better believe that I’ve been patiently listening, to
‘he’
this and
‘he’
that, all damned night. It’s one thing when you don’t remember being
l’Autre,
like with Willie’s experiences? But this is another wrinkle, and it’s seriously creepy. Everything that boy was, is still
a major part of your self. Deep inside, you are all that. When you went back, you like freed it all up.” She was giving me
a consoling rationale in conventional psychological terms.

“But what did you say to him?” At her raised eyebrow, I corrected myself, “Or, say to me?”

“Who you really are, and how to learn more. By ‘chance,’ I prepared you, for the thing you had going on back there, and it
wasn’t hard. You were a bright kid, not resistant to ideas. My thing is, I liked you that way. I hope you let me see more
of all that. Check it out. The memories you retrieved are stored there, not here.” She tapped my forehead.

“To describe that someway improbable past to me, you had to first scan the memories from there, from the physical brain and
nervous system that recorded them. What you’ve imprinted here, now, is a memory of memory. Say, that’s not even ‘your past’
now, it’s another world.”

“You needn’t have wigged,” she mused. “That you could retrieve your own history was proof positive that the link with the
here and now was in place.” Her Bronx accent and period speech were creeping back and mingling with the other.

“You’d better oughta keep your heart open, believe you me. Be sure that you really and truly wanna help your self retain access
to the locations where the memories of tonight are stored.” I looked at the comfortable seriousness in her eyes, seeing metaphor
in the cosmetic feathering that had replaced the punker mask. As in her speech, she was coming close to complete integration.
“You’d be barking up the wrong tree by shutting it down—for dread of losing me or the vertigo of balancing among the realities.”

Understanding was growing in step with the breaking dawn. I remembered my thoughts and feelings just before being drawn back.
Damned little psych major! Rely on Justine
²
to turn the bottom line into an imperative that I learn to love myself as much as I loved her. She was looking at me with
compassion, and the intimacy was near overwhelming. With her, there was little possibility of simple privacy, much less secrets.

I touched her bare thigh. “What was it like, tonight?”

She threw back her head in laughter, “Aw-hunh!”

————————

“W
E ALSO DISCOVER A NEW DIMENSION IN VOYEURISM!
Nothing doing! I’m gonna torture you and make you wait on the story, till I can get you up by telling. But believe me when
I say, these performance difficulties you’re always fretting do not appear to be a fixture of the physical organism.”