The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  Debating with the Russian had given me fresh insight as to how problematical are the mechanisms of change. While nominally minimizing the role of the individual, he himself was destined to become a pivotal figure in history. Were it indeed possible inadvertently to effect the course of major events, then most of the collateral chains would follow suit, and, Q.E.D., I might no longer possess even limited foreknowledge. Not to mention changing the assumptions which I could anticipate in my loved ones. Radical change might erase my predictable influence. 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 retreated into my studies, and the Russian soon moved on in the conduct of his own affairs.73

  ————————

  While loafing about Washington Square, the time before, I had played with the ancient Chinese book known as The Changes of Chou. In Geneva, I speculated upon the body of lore that alleged it could open the gate to other-worlds. Dismissed by most scholars as superstition from the days of the dark Han dynasty, that interpretation obviously begged for review by me. I learned of a related tome by a nobleman who had written fiction, a despised genre in China, under the name of Ts’ui Pen.

  Said to be bound in yellow silk, it sounded as though it might be the template for a work which the romance novelist Chambers had fictionalized in horrific terms. I’ve always preferred the company of Dostoevsky, Poe, and the like. Chambers penned some lines that will be granite when most of our current so-called literature is tinsel dust. I first read his work as a boy. In this life of mine, I have found it as very disturbing as the legendary play it purports to descry. Chambers understood that the image of a man haunting Paris streets, expecting to discover the lifeless body of his love, was more ghastly than any of the demons he had conjured from other dimensions. No matter how many times I read it, I’ve always wept for him.74

  The yellow volume’s reported concept held a beguiling similarity to those branching paths of destiny whose traces I sought. My search was to no avail, save stimulating the interest of others, which is as may be. While searching the European libraries, however, I was able to study the source materials of Michelet, which had seduced my ancestor Peter Boehler into tinkering with witchcraft. Over time, I swung far from science and philosophy into the dervish direction of the occult.75

  While some aspects of this life have seemed peculiarly difficult to abrogate, other changes have unleashed a cascade of chaos. I have to report that a given material actuality is as little malleable to the heart’s desire as any other. Fate has often been temperamental, if not downright pettish. My impotence to avert the death of my brother Charlie gave me pause that haunts me yet. I have dwelt past the point of distraction on what further subtle changes I might have wrought.

  Does the cosmos exact payment-in-kind for a change in the balance? Was Charlie’s life the price for one saved? It is true that the night the deal was done, regarding my separation from Katie, was also the first occasion that I found myself literally unable to stop drinking. Did I take her otherworldly destiny upon myself or was my sickness the spawn of my own divided soul? Will yet another have to pay the price for a living Justine?

  The years went by while I implemented a plan, its early phases remaining similar to the progression of events I had already known. Experience indicated that caution might be moderated. I ran away to war, as the script required, but earlier and with a volunteer military organization from which I could return when desired. While I did swallow some chlorine gas at Verdun, I was able to come back in the posture of a visionary idealist and hero, never having come as near to death as with our army the time before.

  In the fullness of time, I was on hand in New York to meet Justine, comfortably before Crowley had her in his power to mistreat her. I never told Katie the entire story, lest she think me shell-shocked, but I was able to exercise a moral or immoral suasion, holding that we had something like a sacred obligation to the young girl. I already knew that when Katie met her, she would fall in love with her as well.

  But the very resilience of the timeline that allowed the small modifications brought me near to panic, when Justine continued, repeatedly, to be almost preternaturally drawn in Crowley’s direction. That business, in the summer of 1918, when Sarg pimped her to A.C. for his river trip, was the worst. It felt as though malignant spirits were at work to confound my best efforts toward her survival. I did not cast A.C. as the villain of what could be her hapless melodrama, knowing only too well what a vile world it really was and what a flawed, all-too-human pig I knew myself to be, but I saw him as an essential link. He keyed the situation, supplied its texture. I am writing about a man whom I liked, and who liked me; of whom I had made a friend, but would have killed, if necessary, just to break the chain. It is consequently impossible to expect me to be objective or fair.

  On the day that I went to his rooms at One University Place, to watch him brand a naked girl with a hot sword, only then did I finally believe that she was going to live. It was a stranger, a little schoolteacher who, you see, was kneeling on the carpet in the identical circumstances under which I had first seen Justine the time before.76 That evening I wept histrionically and did not ever want to let Justine go. I kept touching, again and again, the place on her breast where that awful Star would never be seen, and felt that a curse had been lifted. She must have found it so queer. Scarcely could she have imagined that, even as I was loving her, I was giving thanks to a God I hadn’t known I believed in for granting a dispensation of which I knew I was not worthy.

  Even so, my confidence that others would inevitably continue to take her sacrificial place was limited. On her first trip to Europe, she amazed me when her precognitive vision of a little street circus came true before our very eyes in Avignon. At the tintinnabulations of the bells that had so maddeningly irritated Rabelais, the elderly lion took umbrage, nonchalantly pissing on the front row of spectators, and I clicked on something about her demonstrated “psychic” facility previously unknown to me. That final detail recalled my attendance at that same circus, in the company of a Justine lost, the time before.

  In a fit of morbid curiosity, I drove her by the Chateau d’Evenos, which I was gratefully surprised to find still in ruins. But it was nothing short of horrifying as Justine cooed with a nostalgic vision of how wonderful it would look restored. Could this be the true explanation of precognition and other visionary phenomena, a link with the perceptions of our diversified selves on other paths? Nothing magic, occult, or incredible about it? From then on, I was adamant about keeping a close eye on her in France. Knowing that I’d best speak to Katie about it, I found her mystified as was Justine, but I demanded her agreement. If she loved Justine, she would back me up.

  In later years, we would meet a woman, like Santolina Marr a mystery in any world, whom I recognized from among the slavery cultists. It’s always difficult to identify someone met out of the context in which you’ve known them, so you may imagine the difficulties I’ve encountered along those lines! As it happened, she was a close friend and anima of my friend Paul Morand, and contact with her was inescapable. When I broached the subject, pleading my case for protecting Justine, she appeared not to recognize what I was talking about and demanded the whole story before agreeing to anything. I’ve seldom confessed so much, but she listened with close attention to detail, allowing that, should I ever write something about it, she surely would be keen to read it …

  ————————

  I HAD TO LAY THE MANUSCRIPT DOWN for a while, partially due to the emotional cost to the artist who was spilling out his soul. Even were this pure fiction, it had to have been as difficult to dredge all this up as to read it. I reminded myself that at least some of the key branching-worlds fiction had been published before 1945. Greene’s book came out in 1930, and it was even conceivable that Willie might have obtained access to an early English translation of “The Garden of Forking Pat
hs.”

  It may have been only the subjects and the setting, but the latest paragraph had made me think of The Story of O. Had the real reason that Willie leased the château been so that a “Roissy” he remembered helping to destroy his beloved Justine could never exist there?

  These implications were astounding enough in themselves, let alone the difficulty of confronting the bizarre explanation this lent to the memoirs in old Justine’s Testament. Worse, the limits of my ability to deny recognition were also being strained by the turn of phrase, the private thought, the spooky parallel. His autobiography had also eaten my lunch, but to no degree compared with this.

  It was like a hall of distorted mirrors on the midway of Linda’s childhood, as the image of Willie and Katie watching Justine’s initiation from the balcony superimposed upon an older Justine and myself in another “Château” in 1969. Only days before, I had been looking back up at that same spot while a new Justine suffered; it was maddening.

  Willie’s fascination with the reincarnation doctrine of the Druse intruded, and I began to doubt this identification less than I feared it.77 Oh God, I did not want to be him; that was it! I was haunted by a semi-facetious warning from the ghost of Big Richard, the gentle giant of a biker; that girl Karma, she’s a bitch, man. She’ll get you.

  Please God, make it didn’t happen. Let this cup pass. That this might even possibly be what my life was about, brought to this moment to face the music for the sins of multiple lifetimes, along with my own well-stocked one; that was intolerable.

  Placing that aside, how could I doubt the veracity of Willie’s story when I was required to look up and address myself to none other than Justine2? She was easily as extraordinary a creature as he claimed to be. I tried to find relief by focusing on the material reality of the “real” world around me, but the cicadas and honeysuckle perfume of the summer night just carried me to the lake. It called from a few miles and many years away, back to JJ, and when I would again look up, I had to know those tortured green eyes were also those of her daughter.

  “By God, Justine, how you must have looked to him in those last moments!” It was not insensitivity that made me wonder back to lines in her Testament, and exclaim, “Watching you walk away, knowing it was the last time he’d see you in this life, you must have looked so beautiful. The simple reality of your existence, your survival, represented everything worthwhile he felt he’d accomplished.”

  “How did I rate living with that for the rest of my enduring life?” Her pain was profound. “You spoke to me of the agony of life. Is it s’pose to hurt, and hurt, and hurt, forever? It was agonizing as any torture to realize that, to know …” She put her fist to her lips and moaned softly, her speech betraying the flood of new memories drowning her.

  “To know that I had but to turn around and grab ahold, and refuse to let go. I cursed myself for delaying in sorting out the fragments; only a day or so less and I would of found the suicidal message and dashed up there. That was unthinkable! Even as I came to believe that there really might be another chance, it would be at the price of there never being peace. I would never forget the hurting, not even after death.”

  I cradled her in my arms until the remembered heartaches passed. She was not alone. Again, I was thinking of Richard, and the night that I had been out sporting, and avoiding another tedious session with him, when I could have saved his life. Had a frightened woman, who hadn’t known him long enough to dismiss his bullshit, shot him as believed? Or had they been involved in a drug deal gone bad? Which it had been never mattered. The bottom line was that I had not been there to talk him down, when he had left Kong in my yard and gone sadly away, for the last time. I, his best friend, would never have to listen to his problems again—only wish that I might—for the rest of my life.

  ————————

  “POOR MINK!” Justine2 had collected herself and, rubbing her eyes, jarred me back from my own brooding. “Can you imagine how she felt, for the love of her life to have killed himself on their anniversary? Any wonder she couldn’t get over it?” She glanced up, reproaching me even more strangely, “At least she had her writing,” I followed after the apparent contradiction rather than her discomforting insinuation.

  “No, babe,” I was bewildered, “they were married in February.”

  “It was observed in the fall,” she scolded, “on the day the marriage was announced to the world.” Even short that information, I was mildly aghast that, in all the months I’d spent picking over the details of their lives, I’d not noticed the coincidence of the twentieth of September. It was the little psych major who inquired with a piercing stare, “The fact of that oversight doesn’t tell you anything?” She shrugged and drifted back to that other place.

  “The temptation to end my life first became harder to resist. Katie saved me, pulled me back many more times than she knew. We never know, do we, when just being there makes all the difference?” I looked away, trying to fight down the horror at my own guilt. Oh Richard, I am so sorry.

  “Then,” she continued, “an idea began to grow that would’ve been alien to me when I was younger. It became a certitude that I was like, Willie’s creation, his Galatea. I was to tarry here, to testify to his life. To give up, to die the pathetic wreck they wanted me to be, would’ve been to hook up with those bent on destroying his work. Once I saw through that, I never would’ve done it.”

  She looked up at me expectantly. My bemusement deepened with the levels being plumbed. She had not just loved this man; she’d quite literally worshiped him. And, there was no way in hell he had been deserving. Even so, I nodded. “I can get behind that, babe. Lately, I’ve had thoughts about values that I’ve never seriously entertained in my life.”

  Even while breaking for food, we talked on about the phenomenon. The most visible difference in dealing with Justine2 was her growing ability to access the substantial learning of her antecedent self. The old woman had, after all, grown far beyond the young dilettante of 1917. For years she had studied all those books accumulated in her home and more, as well as delved into truly arcane wisdom. While I remained, presumably, better versed in the physical advances of the last twenty-five years, Justine2 was more deeply grounded in the fundamentals than I had ever been.

  “… here’s my thing,” she was saying, while ravening a microwave pizza, “Willie, like myself, really would only recall snippets; hey, that’s our memory anytime. We can only hold so much immediately available to conscious recall. Sort out all the variables of any real-world situation, and what he wanted to affect would like, have already gone down? Whatever his ‘foreknowledge’ from a similar path, he was still looking at only another world defined by multiple powers of uncertainty …”

  I had been riveted by her battle with the stringy cheese and tomato sauce, sitting with her legs crossed under her oversize sweater and looking for all the world like a typical postadolescent. All along, I’d been witnessing some degree of a split personality, certainly in tastes. The young Justine had bounced between french fries and haute cuisine with equivalent zest. No doubt, still other vacillations had gone right by me.

  “That’s any given world at any point of contact. Only in all the worlds, taken together so that every possibility occurs, are things for sure. We got another chance. A chance, that’s all there is, ever—in one world or many.”

  I had been wanting to ask something that had been on my mind for a while. “Is it correct to regard you and him as the same phenomenon?” I reached with a napkin to delete from her chin a smear of sauce that was driving me crazy. “Willie came from another path on a branching timeline, whereas you are the product of a transmigration along the same path.”

  “Are you, or I for that matter, way sure it’s the same one?” She appraised me. “All that muck about the Longs that you said Roder told you—I’m not finding any recollection of such things, the Kingfish … As if I’d not remember Blaze Starr! It may be I was playing head games with a young lawyer or, it could
be that the past I remember and that of the old lady you met in ’69 are not quite the same. That Brit physicist—what he said?”

  For the purposes of my personal obsession, the most striking of Deutsch’s observations had been his elucidation of the quantum concept of time. “The branching paths are only a simple schematic. The reality would be more in the way of a vast number of decks of cards, all shuffled up together. Each card is a snapshot of a ‘moment,’ however that is conceived, in the sequence of its particular deck.” Deutsch had written:

  To a first approximation, the multiverse is like a very large number of co-existing and slightly interacting spacetimes… . There is no such thing as which snapshot from another universe happens “at the same moment” as a particular snapshot in our universe, for that would imply an overarching framework of time … There is no such framework. Therefore there is no fundamental demarcation between snapshots of other times and snapshots of other universes. This is the distinctive core of the quantum concept of time: OTHER TIMES ARE JUST SPECIAL CASES OF OTHER UNIVERSES.78

  ————————

  “In that magic lantern show,” she said quietly, studying her food, “the illusion of Willie’s to-and-fro across time, and that of mine, would both be quick sketches of more complicated happenings. Hey, no time travel as such, yea? The ‘Kodak moments’ whose ‘arrow of time’ leads to our present moment—‘our’ past? Can’t go there.” The green eyes hardened with comprehension three steps in anticipation of where I’d left off. “Those instances are all—about inputs that they like, did receive, and still were able to point here, to a future that is our present moment.”