The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  So many questions still. Is physical death requisite for a complete transport to another history? I know for a certain fact that one may double back and re-enter upon a path, consequently commencing an other life, at a point other than at birth. And what is the nature of these points, these bits of destiny action? While boarding at Ella’s place, I had now and then gazed hypnotically at candles, trying to read my future. This would produce some strange moments, slits that I might have been able to return through later, which is as may be.

  Conversely, symmetry would seem to deny death a monopoly on exits. If so, what would be left behind by a departing Self? Or is that entity coterminous with each diversified one of our selves, and all that’s involved is a matter of sharpening an alternate focus? Where I’m hopefully bound, I may learn some more of the answers. My friend awaits me on the bank of the Cavally River, but there may first be an unavoidable bath in the Lethe.

  It may be objected that I but faintly touched on this in my books. I’ve had the privilege of bughouse psychic therapies, thank you, a point that begs no further enlargement. I hinted at what I could.72 Though the message is there, for those who have eyes, I constrained myself to publishers’ and readers’ expectations. The result was that my effort on witchcraft was hardly an illuminating contribution to any science of the paranormal.

  What effects there have been on my writing are nothing I can shout about. I found it almost impossible to keep to a proper chronology and, every so often, advanced patently contradictory views. Imagine the retention within one’s mind of similar yet not identical sets of memories. Throw enough time on a given series or episode, and it becomes difficult to recall which of its variants applies.

  More important was that over time, I would say by about age forty, the otherworldly memories had dimmed, as do all old recollections. After a point, I would no longer be able readily to assign a given recollection between the slightly differing sequences. The most intense remained as warnings and did influence my conduct. They were as astral dreams, burned into my mind, yet of a different order of reality. Logically, I could not always square them with what the facts of this life assured me to be real, but neither dared I ignore them. They accused me, as has the voice of my dead brother.

  The most terrible was that of standing at the window after the sirens had gone up over blacked-out London. As I had before and would again, I’d run away to war, leaving behind a Katie who would follow after me “no more forevermore forever” because she was no more, her blithe spirit extinguished in drink. Back at home were Lyman and Mink, doing each other to death because I wouldn’t take her hand when Mink’s need had been greatest. Lyman was no excuse for me, quite the contrary. Following after Katie like a puppy, he’d been more than ready to do her better, had only the bad old bear been willing to let her go.

  I had been drinking alone in my rooms on the last Sunday in December. A moonless night had fallen early. The propaganda had assured us that the hellish attacks of the autumn had abated. The Battle of Britain would essentially be over but some had thought otherwise. Ambassador Kennedy, persuaded that England was finished, had resigned and returned home. I’d heard that more Londoners than usual had retired to the deep shelters that evening. What had prompted their foreboding? Had angels walked among them to spread the warning? Had they flown in across the Channel to raise the alarm that the Valkyries were aloft? If so, none had been inclined to waste his energies on this patently lost soul.

  The sky had been completely dark by six o’clock. Even before the sirens had gone up in the southwest, I had heard the droning of the Heinkels’ and Junkers’ engines, also seemingly far more than customary. In minutes, the first bombs had fallen on South-wark, across the Thames. The beams of the kettle lights sought the intruders. I watched the gaudy white sparklers of the incendiaries and felt the reverberating thuds from the high explosive bombs. As the frequency of the strikes increased, there had begun a curious lull from the anti-aircraft guns. I remember wondering if the city’s defenses were failing when, at a quarter of seven, the electricity had gone off.

  ————————

  Indeed, “the lamps had gone out all over Europe,” but Justine’s little candle had been snuffed out long before. Somewhere in France, even as I had listened to the wail of the sirens that London evening, the boots of the Reich might have been slogging over her muddy grave. If my life had ended, I knew that it had been because I’d lost my link with the divine. God help me, I had brought her to that, thrown her away! Thrown up the corporeal incarnation of the archetype I’d conjured with Piny’s aid, the lady-in-chains who had always been there for me.

  I had inherited her from the hand of Aleister Crowley in 1919, after he’d branded his Star into her fair hide and then abandoned her. Taking her to Europe, I’d displayed her, only succeeding in handling her carelessly—as had my mentor, the “Great Beast,” might he burn alongside me in hell! Poised and pretty as a picture, alert and sensitive, and a slave to her senses, she had been an instant hit in the Paris of the Lost Generation. When I later let her slip away at Evenos, I temporized, persuading myself that she had found her element. The dissolute intelligentsia of that world had been absorbed with the figure and philosophy of the “divine Marquis.” Noted artistes had helped to outfit Justine with all the accoutrements to scandalize and titillate a bored society.

  She had been initiated by the cultists of sexual slavery, at a restored castle by the sea, overlooking the haunted hills and ravines of ancient Var. Katie and I had watched with voyeuristic delight from the balcony above the banquet hall while Justine, wearing only her high silver collar, had been put through her paces. We would talk most of the night of how the girl had registered. Trembling with anticipation, she had been led to the enclosure at the top of the spiral iron staircase—the strong room, where her cries, both of pain and pleasure, had no place to go except the dark depths of the Mediterranean.

  If I had made her a plaything, Katie had loved her, and I believe that it had been reciprocated. She had not wanted me to leave Justine in France, no matter how the girl herself had cleaved to that dark destiny. Months had passed, then a year and more, while I’d begun to realize that I had made a terrible mistake. The books I had dreamed would lie unwritten, just as I would never even try to get to Samarkand, or any of the other fabulous places that I had wanted to see.

  Without the lady-in-chains who forever had been linked to my writing, without my Muse, all that had been without meaning. Katie had done her best, albeit through her own pain, to be as Justine to me. But Katie had always been a different kind of love, a different sort of warmth. She would submit to my childish demands, endure to coddle my cloying needs. But she could never inspire me to be more than a hack reporter. As for myself, I think that I had never even known how to love.

  We had resolved to find Justine, but already sin piled upon sin. Around Halloween of 1925, I’d met Marjorie Worthington at a card party. We had been about to sail for Europe, and Mink would join us in April. Another applicant to fill the chains and bracelets of Justine. And Mink, so oddly prim in many ways, had been decidedly unsuited to the role. Before Marjorie could reach us, it had come to light that Justine had killed herself—after I had gone away. At that given moment, far too late, I made an unseemly grasp at “repentance.” On my knees, I had abased myself before God and half of Paris, begging, screaming, pleading to be forgiven. Then it was that Katie, unbeknownst even to herself, had truly begun to hate me. While she could not touch my self-loathing, the hell I had made for myself had only just begun.

  Mink had arrived, and in time we returned to New York. For the next several years, in a pact of misfortune and common upset, we sought surcease in sex, dope, and liquor. Contacts I had had, with such as Morand and Ford Madox Ford, I let wither. Even as I would use her body, I pushed Mink’s devoted spirit away, while her husband had pined hopelessly after tragic Katie. Our gay foursome, lionized by Village life as colorful nonconformism in the mode of Byron and the Shelleys
, had been to me dark, and sad, and empty.

  ————————

  A dozen more years of a deepening hell on Earth would drag by, of which I’ve told some and will yet relate a bit more. But now you will understand why that last night had arrived as an almost welcome apocalypse. The orange incandescence had spread about the entire horizon, but the sight recalled me only to the color of her hair. How to make you understand what I mean? When a man attempts suicide, it means he still wants something. There’s still an avenue of escape. But total despair means there is no hope, no way out. I had never attempted to follow Justine from that farthest circle of hell. Instead, I guzzled another slug from the bottle on the nightstand. Sinking faster, I thought there probably would be little need to expedite things. Blood red clouds silhouetted the barrage balloons above the city, while the glowing pyres below illuminated the dome of St. Paul’s. The bomb strikes had increased to every few seconds.

  Had I prayed for oblivion, it certainly would not have been upon those brave souls down below, but for the end of my pathetic world. The final thought I can remember, from that sodden night, may have been the fortuitous trigger, when I imagined myself illumined with a sort of mystical, if not maudlin, exaltation. Concocted from the imagination of hindsight? It glowed benignly, like the precisely right quantity of hashish, the third pipe of opium, the perfect balance of cocaine and heroin. And at the center of it was to wonder if, far away in the deep heavens, millions of light-years from that dying city, there might not be a new constellation;the Lady-In-Chains, whom the angels called Justine.

  ————————

  MY EYES WOULD HAVE CLOUDED anyway at that heartrending plaint; the recognition, far too late in life, of what had really mattered. This would have been the case even had I regarded it all as sheer delusion, a fantasy fueled by Willie’s futile desire to escape—to war, to a happier past, whenever. Yet her eyes told me that I knew very well at what I was looking. I sought mere relief through technical analysis, through levity. The meaning behind the source was at hand, but all the vastness of space-time could not dispel the tragedy of that one damned soul.

  I read a bit further and then looked at Justine2 with fresh esteem as I comprehended the remarkable meaning of the meandering, sinuous narrative. I was genuinely impressed that she had been able to distill the contents of Willie’s thoughts and notes at all. The characterizations in Justine’s Testament had been generous. While she had labored for years, painstakingly separating apples from oranges and rendering a semblance of coherent chronology, uncertainties still abounded.

  More memory returned when she was able to point out, from time to time, a possible resolution, or make a clarification. But a man who claimed not two sequential lives but simply the same life in two versions had compiled the original notes. I jest: there was nothing “simple” about it, because, to a great degree, he had written it that way—as though both histories had occurred simultaneously!

  “If he hadn’t killed himself, he should have been shot for this,” I grumbled as I saw what he had done. That amused even Justine2. Making matters still worse were marginal indications that he believed himself aware of yet other realities, branching from or converging with those about which he had written.

  Willie Seabrook had been riding a wilder nightmare than his friend Ward, called “Jimmy,” could have imagined. From early on it became evident that Greene’s book had not been purely fiction. The only fiction, in fact, seemed to be that covering Willie’s life to about age twenty-three, when they had worked together on the Atlanta Journal.

  It had been during many drunken nights in Atlanta, no doubt, that Willie had spilled out to Jimmy nothing less than a future history. Rather, a history of the futures of choices not made from the time the paths had branched a few years earlier. At the least, Greene had chronicled particular matters on which Willie had been fixated, from a future he imagined that he recalled. If he had heard the full scope of events relating to Justine, Katie, and the others, Greene had chosen not to believe it all or otherwise to remain silent.

  “We have all the time in the world to ponder the literary implications,” said Justine2, “but you maybe gotta take a rain-check on a few. Some questions may always be mysteries”—she smiled benignly—”like, in ‘real life’?”

  Justine2 eventually put on some clothes, and we relocated to the front porch. We continued to examine The Fan-Shaped Destiny, the lost manuscript of William Seabrook, which the other Justine had lovingly pieced together from the thread of narration running through the notes from the barn experiments. We read through the night, ate and slept, and kept on reading, welcoming each other’s arms and hearts being there when the going sometimes got too heavy.

  ————————

  I awoke the next morning to an other life. Certainly it took a while to believe that it was real, that I was actually twenty-one years old again on a bright sunny morning in Augusta, Georgia, with my whole life in front of me. But I soon found out that I could stump my toe against it, and Dr. Johnson’s criterion for the refutation of Berkeley came into play: If it can kick back, it exists! The horses of Augusta could most definitely kick and, while enraptured with these shapes of the past, freshly painted with new life, mine almost ended abruptly. The half dozen of the Augustan gentry, who were thus far playing with the new horseless toys, had not yet learned to steer them very well.

  Persuaded that the world wasn’t going to go away, I would finger my godawful stiff collar in an unaccustomed warmth and wonder if my memories would vanish. Had it all been a dream? Was it possible to experience a nightmare that subjectively seemed to have been over thirty years long? But recollection faded only to the degree one would “normally” expect. Gingerly exploring my baffling hodgepodge of acquired recollections, I acutely watched everything about me with a sort of puzzled fascination.

  Simply put, it was life. No angels came about to lecture me on lessons I should be drawing. They weren’t about to let me into heaven anyway and, as I saw it, I had had my time in hell. Buds were bursting, doves came. I continued to feel good and happy, though I felt slightly scornful about it. I suspected that such a state of grace was too good to be true—turning earth into heaven, myself into a sort of saint, a patent absurdity. “Elation” is a pleasant, agreeable term in common parlance, but in cold psychiatric jargon, not nearly so pretty.

  It simply was; no choice but to let it ride. The only stupid, decent thing to do seemed to be to make the best of it, while trying to puzzle out what had happened. And, by ding! I was also going to live. Scraping together a couple of hundred dollars, I set about to realize an unfulfilled dream and embarked steerage to Cherbourg, to tramp about Europe. Geneva, my final destination, was a natural enough place for a young man of Lutheran background to consult with the great scientific minds.

  I do not suggest that, in the year that followed, the construction of a working hypothesis was all that was on my mind. I reckoned that Madeleine, my Justine-to-be, was yet a little girl in pinafores and plaited hair, behooving me to leave her to complain that her play-like cowboys should not be rescuing her from the Apaches so promptly. It would be the better portion of a decade before she was ready for me. A young Atlantan society miss would be waiting in the nearer present. While I was resolved that the errors of the time before were not to be repeated, I had a lot of regrets over joys not tasted to get out of my system.

  Nineteen-ought-eight was a great year for science and philosophy. Freud and Jung had commenced their collaboration, and the Geneva campus was all abuzz about Minkowski’s recent address presenting the broad implications of Einstein’s relativity. All this was grist for my mill but, even knowing how the English engineer Dunne would try to adapt this to explain time and the mind, my purpose was frustrated by my own uninitiate aptitudes. The construction of even a simple, relativity-based model was too difficult without the proper mathematical foundation. Holding what we Americans called “degrees” back then, in philosophy, I got ambitious and w
rote a post-graduate paper on time, space, and causality.

  Working at a nearby table in the library was a young Russian emigre who looked older than his years. He had been so impressed by the goings-on in the physical sciences, since the discovery of the electron a few years earlier, that he had taken time out from his revolution to write a book detailing the philosophical implications. I was able to converse with him in French, holding long confabs and even debates. I was initially surprised to discover that his thoroughgoing Marxian materialism did not at all blind him to the complexities of questions of reality. His point was that solipsistic denial of the material arises in every generation, always purporting to be a new discovery, the result of “recent science.” It would be precisely through plumbing the “inexhaustibility” of the material, as he called it, that the true magnitude of the cosmos and wealth of worlds would be discovered.

  “Your countrymen, as I have met them, have no strong faith in the existence of even a single past.” He had pursed his lips and looked down his nose like a stuffy professor demanding “what else can you show me?” “The Amerikansk lives in a sort of ahistorical millennial revelation, a viewpoint more appropriate either to the savage or, dialectically, to the citizen of a truly revolutionary regime. Your vision of reciprocal histories, if it does not deny the material, then raises it to the nth degree. The Great Powers will not find such an annihilation of Berkeley to be in their interests, unless so presented that the oppressed classes embrace it as an escapist dream.” I queried him further, seeking light on things from a psychoanalytic standpoint, so to speak. “I do not so speak,” he snorted.

  He felt that better than a century would elapse before science attained a level even to reasonably discuss the problems obsessing me. In the meantime, he applied Dr. Johnson’s criterion with a vengeance, most particularly where the Czar was concerned, and argued to me that the various solipsisms were invariably devices of the ruling classes. I had suddenly realized, by way of the grapevine telegraph, that the young man was none other than the mysterious Lenin, already something of a fable to the avantgarde. While he sounded genuinely fond of me, in spite of what he called my “insufferably decadent bourgeois mentality,” it began occurring to me—for the first time—thatthe better part of discretion would be to keep my distance from such a man of his own destiny.