The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  I asked what impressions she’d gathered from the chapter roughs. “It’s all—about convergence,” she mused. “Things, like, come together around your own story.” I didn’t quite see that last part, and wondered at her psychological “take” on what I might be saying about myself.

  “I’m not sure that I want to let a psych grad know the full extent of my madness, yet.” I knew full well what impossible convergence I’d sought. Poor Linda had summed it up not long before she died. She’d said that what heaven must be is a second chance.

  The green eyes were again burning disconcertingly far into me. “It’s much cheaper to call ideas insane than process them.” So, I talked some more about my writing project with her, how I had, in fact, been tempted to represent myself as a professional writer or an academic researcher. But it somehow seemed important for all of it to be the truth. I supposed that might have been a reaction to years of writing political propaganda and legal arguments.

  I decided to go some distance into Linda and our mutual history. Our shared sexual proclivities and social views had, in the years when we’d started out, been sufficiently radical as to make us voluntary outcasts from most parts of society. We’d lived in an “us against the world” mode for so long that, finally and in extremity, there was no help to be had from anyone who hadn’t walked in our shoes.

  Carneys, scooter-trash, radicals, sadomasochists—when you live outside the prescribed limits, the truth about our loving society is a simple one. It would just as soon see you dead, encouraging the nihilism that feeds self-destruction. In the case of Linda’s gentle soul, it had succeeded.

  I feared that I might go so far as to antagonize Justine when I got wound up and began to express my contempt for the “helping professions,” with their narrow little judgments. Kong, the malamute, reacted as he typically did to my tension or anger by setting up a melancholy complaint in his amusing “ahroo-har” malamute-talk. I laughingly welcomed the interruption to my habitual pontification, and we stopped to play with him.

  I told her Kong’s history, how this huge dog had been able to ride about South Texas on a platform on the back of a Harley-Davidson, behind an equally big guy. How Big Richard had left him with me years before, when he had gone out to get himself killed. Kong had turned out to be the best dog I ever had, and had been Linda’s constant companion in the years while she helped society annihilate her.

  I stroked his huge old head and remarked fondly, “This doggie goes to heaven.”

  I heard Justine stifle a sob and was dismayed to find her eyes brimming with tears. Sitting there semiclad, the tough little punker dissolved as she clutched her knuckles to her lips, looking again toward the picture of Linda in her better days. She had been beautiful in the costume from her slave girl act, based on a belly-dance outfit but with a lot of leather and chains. “What’s up with that—not loving you?” she blurted out. I was nonplussed. How had I given that misconception?

  “I was the love of Linda’s life,” I said quietly. “Insofar as I failed her, I bear the karma.” Why I chose to voice those misgivings, I’d no idea. It seemed that another face of Justine had cut in. Drawing herself up, she looked stately, even in her effective nudity. She gently touched Linda’s picture, as if in benediction.

  “Not her, bless her heart,” she said softly, then her voice changed, “Her!” She nodded to the adjacent frame, holding an old high-school picture of JJ and the touching little verses I’d given her when we’d parted for the second time. “She’s the one in the beginning of your story, yea?”

  I confirmed the likeness of JJ, some thirty years earlier. Now, an emotional expression like Justine’s can be taken in a very ego-enhancing light, and I confess to interpreting it just that way. Graciousness being indicated, I offered the first event as being in the nature of the times, before the youth upsurge of the sixties. Conformity had been the iron rule and “good girls” were supposed to regiment their conduct to what “everybody thinks.”

  Moving right along past the actual facts: Texas girls back then having a major streak of healthy old country promiscuity; “everybody” referencing only the toadies, who could be counted on for knee-jerk bigotry while the rest remained silent; “thinking” being anomalous in Texas… I passed on any commentary I might have otherwise issued on JJ’s weakness of character. Much as I had loved her all my life, naturally I had some mixed feelings.

  I moved to embrace Justine as she stood up from behind the desk. The oversize robe was falling off her, and she let it drop. She clung to my neck, pressing herself against me. Dared I hope? But finally, she wrote off her emotionality to a sugar drop and decided that she was craving an omelet. I didn’t have everything necessary, so we drove a few blocks through the decomposing south side to a Denny’s on I-35.

  I talked of my working-class family, of the old Stockyards district in Fort Worth. Now a tourist trap like the Riverwalk, back then it had been a little piece of Chicago dropped deep in the heart of Texas. Like JJ’s folks, my parents had moved up, after World War II, but remained attuned to their roots. My white hide denotes no bleeding-heart champion of the underdog. I simply would have been no more at home among the aging white yuppies and “High-spanics” of San Antonio’s northern suburbs than would most of my Tejano neighbors.

  ————————

  SHE WAS A SENSATION to the morning people in the restaurant, wearing her suit from the previous evening. The barbaric jewelry again brought out that whiff of indeterminate origins. It reminded me of the early-century notion that the Irish and Finns were the same red-haired warriors known as far away as Mongolia.

  She put my regular waitress, Criselda, at a loss, too. Cris, a personal friend as well, was accustomed to seeing me either alone, or with Tejanas in my own age bracket. She served me a leer with the coffee. “¿Eh, cabrón?” She shrugged suggestively toward Justine, who then addressed her politely en Español and turned out to be a good deal more bilingual than I am. You should understand; that, in itself, continued to be uncommon among Anglos in San Antonio. More so than in, say, Laredo.

  We talked more of the possible origins of the branching worlds. Many of the s-f geeks wanted to see Murray Leinster as a lone genius in 1934. He’d illustrated, in pretty much Einsteinian terms, a scenario in which a space-time catastrophe fractured the continuum.

  A mathematics professor and his students were brought into contact with fragments of worlds where they found, among others: a triumphant Confederacy; Norsemen colonizing America; a still-flourishing Roman Empire. Leinster’s Professor Minott had instructed his students that the future is only a coordinate—that imagining a unitary destination would be as silly as denying spatial directions other than the cardinal points. An indefinite number of futures await, dependent on which forks in time are taken. I recalled, for Justine, how language from certain passages had turned out remindful of Seabrook’s accounts of Wamba:

  … between the forks of the road I choose not only between two sets of landmarks I could encounter, but between two sets of events… so those paths in the future may lead to two entirely different fates… with more or less absence of deliberation we choose among them.50

  “Now, that smells even stronger of Seabrook than Heinlein’s piece, especially considering that Willie had laid down the same thing, only four years before, in Jungle Ways. Leinster went on to argue that the roads not taken being equally real, and similar choices being confronted at every past moment, then we must of necessity be surrounded by an overabundance of alternate realities.

  “After exploring the titillating possibilities of the temporarily accessible worlds, Leinster gave Minott’s nauseatingly conformist kiddos the opportunity to return home. He had the good doctor greet the very idea of going back to being a mathematics professor with savage laughter!

  “At the end, an unprepossessing young lass named Lucy turned out to be the only one of the brats who had the right stuff. She failed to see the homely wisdom of continuing to be a wallflower for her
classmates, who’d established their ability to carry their postadolescent social strictures with them, even unto carboniferous jungles! She wound up dashing back across the closing time fracture to join Minott, hopeful of becoming an empress in a new world.”

  “Lucy, you go, girl!” Justine snickered.

  Eventually, I had to arrive at the always-curious Philip K. Dick.

  She raised an eyebrow. “As if adjectivally too mild?” Yes, it’s true; Phil Dick was as crazy as the proverbial dog. But he was a genius nonetheless, and I had no confidence that I could, any longer, afford any sense of sane superiority.

  “The Man in The High Castle was post-Everett, but the texture kind of hearkened back to the earlier writers. More, the unique use of the I Ching as a method of transit between worlds brought Borges’s Chinese book to mind.

  “There was something else that I couldn’t put my finger on at the time—something with the same quality as Norton’s phrase ‘every bit of destiny action.’” Dick, like H. Beam Piper, had claimed to have experienced alternate realities himself. My own reading, of his later work and history, did not dispose me to argue against his distinction as one of the more unbalanced minds of recent literature.

  “Meds, which facilitated his penchant for the little brown girls on the streets of L.A., would tend to alternate your realities! Out there, yea, but don’t dis him.” It seemed she had read about a prescient emergency diagnosis that Dick performed on his own child, which went far to support his claim that something untoward had happened to him. “No sicker than Poe, I’m sure.”

  “You just can’t get away from the fact of the literary anomaly,” I contended, returning to my central obsession. “Everett’s interpretation of ’56–’57 wasn’t widely popularized until the early seventies. Should we choose to see a possible progenitor, in Feynman’s ‘many-histories,’ to explain the body of fiction during the fifties and sixties—Feynman only formalized his work in 1940…”

  I digressed, as I’m prone to do. I had found commentary expressing surprise that Everett seemed to have developed his theory entirely from the Schrödinger viewpoint, without detectable influence from Feynman’s work. This despite both Feynman and Everett having John Wheeler for their thesis supervisor at Princeton, and did Wheeler contribute very much… Justine was looking irritated, so I got back on track.

  “Much of the key material was being presented during the years 1938 to 1941, while Seabrook was concluding his studies of the paranormal. Leinster had presented the earliest branching-paths story back in 1934. Then I found that Piper, de Camp, and Pratt had credited Seabrook’s African material published in 1930 and 1931.

  “These science fiction writers led me to Willie’s association with Wamba as the hidden literary source of the branching worlds. Later, in 1940, Willie repeated the story of the Fan-Shaped Destiny in Witchcraft. A reviewer mentioned Wamba, the ‘handsome African priestess’ who believed that the future already exists in space-time, shaped like a palm-leaf fan. He put it this way, ‘Except for the fan, by the way, this resembles the theory advanced by J.W. Dunne, the British scientist in An Experiment with Time.’51

  “Not to eviscerate a dead horse, but just how is it that, while a book reviewer of the forties could get the scientific facts straight, supposed literary scholars of our time can’t? I remember another quotation, from Wamba’s mentor, whom Seabrook called ‘the Ogoun’:

  ————————

  THERE WAS AN OLDER MAGIC by which time is twisted backward, so that the forward magic becomes as if it had never been… as if it had all been a dream, or a thing done by shadows, which are as if they had never been, and leave no trace when light appears.52

  She gave a careless smile. “A lost magic by means of which you could go back and delete, so that a bad destiny would like, become not? That is so totally kewl!”

  “One way to put it. I don’t know if Seabrook would have shared my opinion that he reached his pinnacle there at that moment. I even fancifully considered finding a way to get to Africa, to follow the trail of such a tradition. Later I read some recent magazine articles on Côte d’Ivoire, ravaged by plague and growing civil strife. It sounds as though there is little left of Wamba’s land other than ugliness and death.”

  Then I moved on to aspects of his life and career, and to the temporal curiosities that had emerged during my reconstruction. There were the frequent time displacements where the various sources, including Seabrook himself, couldn’t seem to remain consistent. I told her of 1908, when Seabrook had left off tramping through Europe to study philosophy at the University of Geneva. He never expanded on that, beyond one mention in his writings, despite being a sometimes-shameless self-promoter.

  The stint at the Geneva campus was anomalous, utterly unlike Willie, a decided nonacademic. Given his degrees in philosophy, a study of Kant was not odd in itself. But his production of a graduate paper on time, space, and causality was at variance with a life not at all oriented toward scholarship. In the same breath, he spoke darkly of learning from the work of Jules Michelet and other books, not in the curriculum at the University of Geneva. This image of the melding of the lore of ancient and forbidden tomes with more recent science is, in American literature, almost solely the creation of H.P. Lovecraft. I wondered if Seabrook, a Machen fan, might have also been into Lovecraft.

  “I got to thinking about what else might have been going on in Geneva in 1908 and did some digging. Minkowski had just expounded the implications of Einstein’s relativity for the first time: the ‘block universe,’ lifelines in four dimensions, and other concepts that J.W. Dunne would employ later.

  “Why, even Lenin was there. He wrote a philosophical treatise touching on what amounted to early quantum notions. In a small intellectual community, where everyone knew each other, it would have been odd had Seabrook not come across him. More inexplicable that he wouldn’t have commented on it later.”

  “Hey, Willie was a Republican,” she laughed.

  Well, what do you know about that? I wondered. But I grinned back. “The Lost Generation rarely let any political litmus test get in the way of their fun. I’m not sure that Willie even had politics that early, but most of his friends would have been socialists of some flavor.”

  “If he were all, y’know, about weird sex? Check it out. Weren’t the commies prudes, muchly?”

  “Another product of modern education,” I sighed facetiously. “Even ten years later, the Sovnarcom regime, the pre-Stalin government—those were also the days of Alexandra Kollontai and Isadora Duncan, opium and free love. Why, even Lenin’s lover, Inessa Armand, was somebody we could have talked to. Maybe played with,” I added, feeling out what all she was up for.

  “One of Willie’s partners in crime in the thirties was Walter Duranty, whom Roosevelt credited with bringing about the recognition of the Soviet Union.” I was knowledgeable about Russia, from an antiestablishment point of view, had even visited the old U.S.S.R. once, so I hoped I was scoring points with my scholarship.

  “Duranty,” she mused. “Hey, academe? Believe me when I say to slack off the attitude. I’m not liking that. It makes you sound, like—someone I don’t even want you to remind me of!”

  I was appalled at the trap into which I’d been stepping. The point of my game was to ridicule vacuous elitism. But, it was not amusing to a kid whose experience, of growing up surrounded by stupid rednecks, was more freshly painful than my own. But she held a different view.

  “Clueless that it sounds wanna-be, with you getting all pedantic on my ass at the same time?” She put down my attempted explanation and got up, absently wiping her fingers along the seam of her skirt. “Don’t go there.”

  While she was in the rest room, I sat and agonized over how much damage control was indicated. Cris freshened our coffee. “Where is she from?” When I told her San Antonio, as far as I knew, Cris looked skeptical. I asked about the girl’s Spanish.

  “Bueno, míjo, but different, it’s like she speaks Spanish with
a New Orleans accent. And her English is different, too,” decided Cris, whose profession is people. “Don’t you hear it?” When I admitted that I had not, she maintained that Justine sounded a bit like some of the “snowbirds,” the part-time residents from the North.

  Watching Justine return to the table, as did almost everyone else in the restaurant, I wondered at how careful I needed to be in handling this charming mystery. She sat down looking thoughtful. I started to apologize, but she waved it off and changed the subject, with no trace of the bitchy flare.

  “You have this expert thing going, on people and histories I need to know about. You’ve been studying all that for months.” Momentarily, I thought I’d identified what Cris had been hearing. Not so much an accent, as a certain elegance, which crept into her speech when she dropped the punker affectations.

  “Would you, could you,” she asked shyly, looking at her lap, “come with me to Atlanta and bring your research? Hey, you would be wanting to see the mural and the other things?” She looked up hopefully, “You were right, I’m way sure this is not an accident.” Well, I couldn’t believe it. Phase Two in, I looked at my watch, eighteen hours.

  It was true that I was set up for sudden out-of-town trips, with a bag always packed. All I had to do was ask Cris to look in on the dog, and scrape the books and papers together. It was Labor Day morning. No one would even be wondering where I was for another twenty-four hours. When they did, well, you don’t work long as a rep without being able to bullshit.

  What if this really was something more? In my wildest fantasies, I could not have imagined how much more. It was difficult to trust the ease with which this thing was happening. No promises of correspondence; no major project of getting her back to San Antonio, or creating excuses to get me to Atlanta? Just the prospect of waking up looking into those eyes, my arms around that body. Had I ever been the sort of man who would pass on Justine because he was afraid he might lose his job? I don’t think so!