The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “Now, had this little Houdini stunt occurred in the Rufai Hall of Torture, it would be cited as anecdotal evidence of a paranormal occurrence.” I groused, “Seabrook was right. The objections to his methods were nothing more than a cultural bias, which exists today in an even more ridiculous form. Were we Lakota Sioux, torturing vision-questers at Sundance, we’d be endorsed as spiritual and even religious!”

  “Your point being what?” she sighed. “If the Sioux lived close by their neighborhoods, your ‘politically correct’ would dis them, too.”

  I admitted that the digression was avoidance. “I can believe that, last night, we did open a gate to something—widened it, anyway. I suspect something’s been going on with you in this house for a while. But we can have no control whatsoever over what may be coming through it. Why do I doubt that you’ve ever said ‘oh pooh’ before in your entire life, or even actually heard that expression used?”

  I, myself, felt that I was rambling. Still, I was almost angry with her, for laughing at my consternation. Yet her smile was loving and compassionate when she spoke. “Dearest, you have known me for an entire three days. If you were now to meet a side of me you’d not yet encountered, then what would be extraordinary about that—from the most common-sensical standpoint? You are only getting to know the woman who belongs to you, the whole little baggage.

  “My great-grandmother is not a ghost,” in a slightly hurt tone, as if I’d insulted the old woman. “Nor do I have an identity disorder.” Her brow knitted, but I thought her concern was probably directed at me. “I shan’t go away; it’s still me in here.” Her words recalling my thoughts from the pier, I was, once again, deeply chilled.

  “If we’re thinking I’m possessed, it’s a welcome possession. I’m as I’ve always felt inside.” She looked at me imploringly. “Playing dress-up was for fun. Get you stoked up ’cause you’re all, y’know, about the past?” She dropped her head, “Or not. Behold my success.”

  She was trying to pacify and comfort me without really backing off. “Babe, your great-grandmother grieved all her life for a man she’d worshiped, a man whose story I relate to more intensely than that of any other person. But I can’t be him, Justine, do you understand? If you are turning into your namesake, I can’t reciprocate by somehow becoming Willie. In a way, I wish I could; for all his faults, he didn’t waste his potential. I only wish I’d done half the things he did.

  “See, I think I do believe that maybe you are becoming her, in some sense. I’m afraid because I may not be able to play the role you need from me.” I was not moved to further expansion.

  Another had once believed me capable of mending everything and held it against me when I couldn’t. Neither could I confess the terror that my youthful posturing might have justified Linda’s grievance. I drew a deep breath. “If you’re thinking reincarnation, it doesn’t even begin to explain everything that’s been going on, all the connections that have existed and continue to be revealed.

  “How was it that I was drawn into this thing, based on a lifetime obsession with your mother? Which I apparently confided to your great-grandmother, when I just happened to become involved with her nearly thirty years ago? That, in turn, set something in motion, of which her book finding its way to me, so that I could return it home, may be the most innocent. Et cetera ad infinitum! Doesn’t all this seem a little bit weird to you?”

  “No, wait. Now let me see; compared to what?”

  “Point conceded.” The tension breaking, I laughed as well. “I guess we just have to throw all the laws of probability right out the window on this one!” I thought aloud, “Everything is moving so damned fast, it’s dizzying. I fear that as the dominoes keep falling, in a way they never do in ordinary life, it might turn out that a Justine like her will have no interest in me.”

  She rose and walked behind me, pressing my head back against her young breasts beneath the antique Georgette film. “All I can tell you is that I’m in love, for the first time in my life. Anything other is outta the question.”

  I took her hand and kissed her palm. “And I’m in love for the last time,” I completed the line, though it was hard to voice the finality. I had to wonder at the sweetness of the hurt—in knowing that I meant it.

  “I believe,” she continued, and I heard the ring of the old Bronx again, “that whatever is left of her is all—about protecting us, watching over us, and being kind to us.” I felt her chest heave, and there was just the slightest break in her voice, but when I looked up, her eyes were dry. “If you think we were manipulated into this,” she entreated, “please trust my intuition that we weren’t brought here to a bad thing. Go with it.”

  “Go where with it? To Rhinebeck, as she would have had it?”

  “We’re outta here in the A.M. I’m ready to go to town.” Momentarily, I thought I was listening to a weird mix of anachronisms. Then she added, “We can chill today,” her accent again at full variance with her costume. “But hey, I still gotta get by the mall!”

  VIII

  Rhinebeck

  WE CAUGHT A MORNING FLIGHT TO NEW YORK, leaving her Del Sol in a grossly overpriced long-term parking at the Atlanta airport. Justine had begun to pay for everything on plastic, no longer letting me pick up anything. When I’d questioned her, she’d just shrugged it off. She said she believed this was what the money was there for, and brooked no further discussion. I will not deny that it was very comfortable to find us so buffered against the tedious necessities of life, but it was another circumstance to which I was unaccustomed. Our relative ease of movement only contributed to the numinous texture of the events enfolding us.

  With every passing hour, Justine seemed more focused on the path before her. She was taking as a given that my appearance in her life, in possession of the details of her recently designated father-figure’s saga, was of the nature of an inevitable catalyst.

  I gathered there had hitherto been some questioning, some need of regrouping—as with her trip to the WorldCon. Even that mild diversion had spun off objective metaphors of her own eerie catharsis. In that respect, I had to grieve my inadvertent role in her now unhesitating acceptance of the agenda laid down by the long-dead ancestress.

  At the mall, she’d scampered about, acting, if anything, a bit younger than her years. So her ultimate selection of a relatively conservative business suit was interesting. True, it fit like that of a young woman attorney out to entice the judge, making one immediately want to put his hand inside it. Perhaps that effect was simply inherent to the wearer.

  Once home, however, she’d donned again her period costume and worn it for the rest of the evening. While we’d prepared for the next leg of this dizzying odyssey, she’d puttered about the house, humming more little tunes and handling various relics from the past with an attitude of wonder.

  She had been as if looking for memories and occasionally, I sensed, finding them. I could not imagine what might be going on inside her, and watching the process was both charming and frightening. In the morning, she had carefully put away her antique possessions and groomed herself as the modern professional woman. Even as I had marveled at the further transformation, I could see that the dark ghost that accompanied her did not go back into the chest with the pretty dress.

  The floral perfume she’d purchased, the elegant posture, a dozen little nuances marked her as a being of a different order. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A fellow traveler who had been watching us board the plane addressed her in French, and she responded. Studying her as we settled into our seats, I realized that she’d not consciously registered the glancing contact, sitting quietly with knees together and hands clasped demurely in her lap.

  It’s not that easy to accept that one’s dreams have come true, I reflected while we ascended. Even relatively privileged lives often seem so difficult, so heartbreaking. Life is one complicated bitch! And, of course, you still die. To what end, I asked the empty heavens outside the window? Was I bound for purgatory or oblivion
?

  Had she been given to me to be just as abruptly stolen away, now that she had fully committed to this course? I feared that, as this metamorphosis continued, the young woman who had transfixed me, sometimes as the tough punker, sometimes a bouncy kitten, would be lost—consumed by a revenant from the dark past.

  The morning above twenty thousand feet was all brilliant sunshine. We had soon overrun the swirling weather system making its way along the coastline down below. I would learn that it had been the approach of one of those El Niño years that might, more properly, have been dubbed “Rosemary’s Baby.” For days, we’d been playing tag with this storm, and seemed unable to escape it now. It paced us like an implacable curse, following us as we flew toward Rhinebeck.

  Some things had been said the day before, but I knew that more were needed, needed now while there was yet time. I discovered that on some deeper level, I was praying—for help to grasp that moment. Notions and emotions churned, like qubits in a countercurrent, orbiting the far point of the years. I felt as if trapped in that final, Planck-length instant before the end of time.

  I sensed Justine tense when the plane bucked some turbulence, and took her hand. Remembering, as she gripped my fingers, how she had declined the window seat, I thought how I’d not have taken the tough little babe for a white-knuckle flyer. Should this plane crash, I thanked God that I’d been granted the feelings of these past days, this moment in time. Yet, a sense of tragedy remained. Whether my own far point, into which I was trying to cram forever, came with a wind shear upon landing, or in bed in ten or twenty years, “all joys want eternity, deep, profound eternity.” I wanted Justine for all eternity, and I couldn’t even give her a decent lifetime.

  A sweet little bitch I’d intended as a mate for the noble Kong had died young a few years before. She had been watching me as I left home one day and, in my conceit, I’d later imagined that she knew she was dying. I had thought I could make out sadness, not in the face of her death, but knowing she wouldn’t be seeing me anymore. Then, I’d doubtless been projecting feelings about Linda’s impending death, but I was learning genuine empathy for that dog.

  For the first time in my life, I found that I feared the prospect of extinction less than the loss of another. I was called upon for something I’d never really known: faith. All I was left to cling to now was faith that the impossible nexus of synchronicity, which had terrorized me only hours before, was somehow there to sustain us. Faith, like Justine’s certitude that we were not brought here to an evil fate. If I were indeed powerless to intervene, my life manipulated to lead to this moment, how could I have been so damnably guilty of anything as to make this exceptional adventure the fulfillment of some curse?

  I’d also been forced into a thoroughgoing life review, finding its components more elaborately bonded than I could have imagined, bonded even apart from time. Like my dream dancers, my moments had ceased to be perceived as linear, becoming the cardinal points in a cosmic ritual. I could almost see my dream skydivers spiraling away outside the window. As they drifted down into the storm below, they folded up like a chain of paper dolls, collapsing together into unity.

  Part of that ritual had been the pledge I’d taken in my heart. But there was more, I knew now, much more was coming. All that I feared, I understood with amazement at myself, all that I feared was to be separated from her. Would I not say those things, as I had not spoken them to too many others in my life, until it was again too late?

  God help me, I lamented silently. If nothing more, just let me tell her—while she is still as I’ve known her! If I could make her understand how I loved her, maybe it would influence whatever was going down. If only I could stay with her, that was what I was about, what my life meant. I suppose that he did help me, for I turned to her and, albeit slowly and haltingly, began to speak.

  We landed at Kennedy about noon and collected the car we’d reserved for the drive upstate, a Chevy Lumina with a floor mat already wearing through. Cheap crap, I thought, and it gets worse with every decade. However, with under 30K on the odometer, it still drove tight and smooth. The trip should have only taken two or three hours had we known what we were doing. Though I hadn’t driven in New York for over twenty-five years, the nightmare of getting through the city seemed no worse than I recalled it. I supposed that New York had reached critical mass long before.

  When I had spoken my heart to her on the plane, Justine had moved my hand to hold it tight beneath her breasts. It was not lost on me how she bent forward over it, as if shielding something indescribably precious. She had said nothing but, irrespective of an uncomfortable armrest, just melted against me for the rest of the flight.

  Once on the ground at Kennedy, though surely relieved of the anxiety of the air travel, she’d lapsed further into her quiet reverie. I had attended to the logistics, infrequently rousing her to proffer her plastic or to sign for something. I had also called ahead to the law office at Kingston to advise them that their longtime client’s heir was on her way. A gentleman named Roder, of patently Québécois extraction, assured me that the materials would be waiting for Justine to take possession.

  As I fought our way through the metropolitan traffic, it was my turn to be largely distracted, calling down the curse of nameless gods on Yankee drivers every few minutes. Justine had declined any thought of driving, for which I was most thankful. Around us swirled the diversity of the great world-city, people from every nation and culture. A group of Hasidic Jews in front of a restaurant operated by Chinese Cubans—all seemed objective metaphors for a chaos of worlds bleeding into one another.

  When I studied her during the frequent long delays, I considered how little could be found in her strange recollections to arm her against the enormity of the spectacle surrounding us. I watched her when I could as we skirted the Bronx to link up with US 9, but could make out no heightened discomfiture. If I noted any uneasiness, she’d begun to relax again by the time we were out among the trees and foliage between the commuter towns.

  ————————

  APPROACHING THE LARGE HILLS AROUND PEEK-SKILL, we stopped for a late lunch. We’d dropped off 9 and driven westward to where we could view the mighty expanse of the Hudson. As we ate, I again followed her eyes out the restaurant window and northward, past West Point. Was she anticipating the approach to Dutchess County, to the places and events that had so troubled the elder Justine a lifetime before?

  I asked her how this felt. Was she having flashbacks, as if to that other’s life? One reason that I’d never put much stock in accounts of “past life” memories had been their unlikely assumption of a near-total emotional separation from the here-and-now. One’s sense of self and appraisal of reality would be highly impacted! I ran these speculations by Justine and momentarily interrupted her eerily quiet vigil.

  She’d faintly smiled. “Like in the vein of ‘I was the Queen of Sheba. Now I’m not … darn?’ Nay, there may be a little snippet of something about a county fair—somebody won a ribbon for a pumpkin pie.”

  The brief respite only accented my pain, as I saw the green gaze withdrawn decidedly elsewhere. The speech when hers was softened with a sweet melancholy, to which I could hardly believe Justine, the young hardcase, had ever admitted. I was sure I was losing her. She was slipping away even as I watched her fastidiously separate her meat from the vegetables and eat them one at a time, a European sort of habit. Maybe more significant was Justine, for once, being able to eat without leaving a ring of food around the perimeter of her plate.

  Oh my God, what could I do? Beg her to forget all this and return with me to Texas? How could I ask her to give up her bequest and what she believed to be her destiny? It was not like her education left her without theory to throw at a background that contributed little to any sense of self-esteem, successfully compensatory as she might have become. She knew all of that: the search for the father, the overachievement, the supposed pathology of her sexual kinks.

  But that “knowledge” was
as nothing, goddamn it! I couldn’t persuade myself that her distinctive change of affect signified a personality unraveling. From the time of our arrival at Madeleine’s house, I had sensed a growing presence that, to my frustration, Justine was inclined to embrace without reflection. She was going to give it up, to give herself over, to let the ghost of that old woman have her, as though she herself was without value. I feared that Willie’s Justine, following his dark arts, had indeed succeeded in leaving a door open behind her. But I said nothing. I did not know what else I might say. My throat was gripped with the terror that this was somehow good-bye, a farewell dinner with the Justine I had so briefly loved.

  I felt somewhat better when we drove out of sight of the River and the higher Catskills in the distance. Endeavoring to bury my misgivings in the logistical tasks at hand, I could only pray that a continuing cavalcade of improbability might further modify the order of my reality’s snapshots.

  The route east of the Hudson had been the more scenic, but slowest approach. The sometimes-two-lane asphalt passed through every podunk town jammed with late, stop-every-ten-seconds tourists and early-fall college folk. In other circumstances, I, too, would have wanted to stop and see sites, like the houses with stone walls a couple of feet thick. But the trip was looking more like four than two hours, and Justine complained of feeling “all gnarly.” I was afraid that she might be getting sick, the pace of the past several days taking a toll even on her.

  We passed through Poughkeepsie, where, in 1907, the wife of the inventor Theodore Miller had given birth to little Lee, the golden goddess of the sun—another background I wished for the time and opportunity to research. Struggling to reconnect with Justine, I tried to tell her the story.