by Paul Pipkin
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“VIVIDLY! WE WERE AT THE PLACE DE L’ODÉON when you commissioned it!” she hissed when I asked her if she remembered those incidents. Her pale green eyes burned like a magnesium flame, and she flushed with remembered rage. “I’d been sizzlin’ at you being wise at my expense, explaining me to the press as your fuckin’ mascot, of all things. After you left me alone with them, you can believe me when I say that I talked some shit!”
In her anger, her speech was vacillating wildly between personas, so I avoided inflaming her by making any comment on the total identification of me with Willie. I couldn’t distinguish whether there was fragmentation, or its reverse, an emotional involvement of the whole combined entity.
“I told them I was a ho’ and that you played this game so that you could like, may-be get it up. If you couldn’t get into her pants, you have me to thank. You can be so goddamned sure I fucked you! And, you can sit on your heartfelt little alibis and rotate. If I had known that it was indeed true, that you had Man Ray make my slave collar for Marjorie, I’d of slapped your ears off!”
I was blown away, not by the barrage, but its implications. Saying nothing, I went inside and retrieved my copied pages of Man Ray’s memoirs. When I returned, she seemed to have calmed a bit. She looked at them and shrugged, “Yea, I remember how he got all journalistic on your ass. Aw-hunh, good enough for you. Hein!” She stopped short. “If this isn’t some kinda shit.”
The pages I’d handed her were from the later, 1988 republication, with additional illustrations. She was staring at the black-and-white photos, taken in Seabrook’s Paris apartment circa 1930, which could easily have been modern bondage and discipline shots. They were the ones that featured a naked woman trussed up on the carpet with leather straps. Her legs appeared shaven, though her armpits were not. She could be seen as quite pretty, even through the stylized twenties’ makeup. A masked woman, costumed in a leather apron, was kneeling above her.
“You know them?” My own astonishment was rising. While the bound girl’s curls looked oily and disheveled, they could easily have been red, compared to the black mane of the woman who knelt over her. The emotion in Justine’s timbre had morphed into an unspeakable pathos, coming from somewhere apart from the normal spectrum.
“Go on with you, now,” she whispered. “I only looked at that face in the mirror every day.” I marveled at the longing in her eyes, knowing I could not comprehend what she must be feeling. Reviewing pictures of our younger selves often can be bad enough. Reflection upon the image of flesh that had ceased to be one’s own might be akin to a sort of “postpartum” grief, as at loss of self—or of a child. That paradox, from which she had sought release at The Château, she must confront as established fact. Observing oneself from outside; who is observing?
I studied the image of the original Justine, then looked again at Justine2, then back to the picture of her great-grandmother nearly as young as she. Emotionally, I felt the “hall of mirrors” effect again, with the old woman I’d met in ’69 lurking behind, and ahead, and in-between the worlds.
“My God, this is you? You were thirty-something when this was taken! Are there more like this?”
“Oh yes, thirty ‘something,’ indeed. Damn!” Her voice cut like a steel razor. “Could you be any more annoying? Yes, a lot more, if you can find them. You can be sure that I’m a babe anytime. Lee thought so,” speaking of Man Ray’s free-spirited young protégée, “and believe that I had a rave on for her.
“But, he’d be first saying ‘go, girl,’ then, ‘stop.’ Like when she did Cocteau’s film? Think I didn’t know that sniffing after her was the real reason for that silly idea of going to war again—and pushing sixty, of all things! As if you even had a chance with the future Lady Penrose, you old fool!
“Say, what if I told you that she played with me, pulled stuff on me that he wouldn’t write about and didn’t tell you? How would that make you feel? Like, her reaching beneath my loincloth, and using her fingernails to …” Momentarily, I would snap that this thoroughly weird tease had been calculated, but she succeeded in getting past me again. I felt a hot surge around my neck and a tingling in my loins.
“Jealousy wedded to voyeuristic arousal,” I conceded. “Point taken, but how much of the rest of this …” I revisited the implications, about Marjorie having sensed a repetition of their other-life meeting, and Justine glimpsing an alternate reality while driving by the Château d’Evenos. “Are we supposed to be accepting the proposition of a group of souls traveling together through times and worlds? Stuck with each other, as it were?”
“Not like a totally new idea, I’m sure. Jews, hasidim, go with it—and what about the ‘closed corporation’ of the Druse? Besides, isn’t this all, y’know, compatible with your research, like with Marjorie’s weird time sequences?” I assented that, short of checking notes, I was reasonably sure that was so.
“Telepathy”—I was grasping at another paranormal straw—”or clairvoyance; observing and remembering without actually experiencing. Could that not be the story behind all of this in some fashion? Arguably, you could have obtained the basis for much, though not all, of this from my mind.”
“Hel-lo? I’m accessing your mind, my great-grandmother’s memories, or observing her experiences—but without having experienced them for ‘myself’? Sweetie, even I don’t believe I’m all that!” She was demonstrably still far ahead of me, cataloging all sufficient reductions of the phenomena we’d observed. “What’s the idea? You still have this thing going on where my baseline identity is someway apart from her?
“Process this: I continue to reconfigure into something like a mental replicant of her”—she held up the picture of the bound woman—”with all of her contents.” She raised an eyebrow licentiously. “How would you define the difference, philosophically, so to speak?”
The entire situation was mind-bending. “It’s not going to be easy to live with you,” I laughed with resignation. “A brat, with a classical education and the worldly wisdom of an old madam.”
She snickered evilly. “Don’t forget the whiff of Goth for spice.” The quip made me think of something that just might test her psychic potential. I went into Joe’s computer room, pulling down from the wall a small scimitar, which he’d picked up while working in Saudi Arabia. I took it back and handed it to Justine2
“Do anything for you?” She handled the little sword in its red-and-black scabbard curiously. I explained that, when Joe had first shown it to Linda and me, Linda had a sort of vision. Barefoot in the sand, before an adobe-like house with slanted walls, she could feel a rough garment against her skin. She’d had the vision before, but this object made it particularly intense.
Justine2 pressed the scabbard against her cheek and briefly caressed it with her lips, “It’s the smell from the oil and leather,” she murmured softly. “She remembered the goat smell.” I acknowledged her pre-science, briefly elated that I might have touched on an alternative, possibly tidier, explanation. I told her how the vision would recur whenever Linda drank goat’s milk.
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“OR FETA CHEESE, at an all-night Greek restaurant in Atlanta,” Justine2 whispered. She closed her eyes and knitted her brow, pressing the scabbard against her middle, as against a pain. I started to go to her, but she waved me back, sitting quietly with her bowed head jerking ever so slightly and tears streaming silently down her cheeks. My God, I thought, will I ever learn to stop screwing around? It was evident that, again, my indulgence of a whim had opened another floodgate of memory.
The eerie thing was the way I knew this. While she was immersed in some distraction from Atlanta, so, too, an image had wafted among my own thoughts—of staring across the bridge at Laredo into the big Mexican night, wondering about a place Linda had longed to visit, an art colony in a town called Taxco … I could feel within myself, as in the tunnel underneath another River, droplets of association began to form. This could not be the issue of Linda’s v
ision alone. Watching Justine2’s agony, I felt helpless. I wanted to hold her, but she would only allow this process to be between her present and former selves.
She opened her eyes and drew in a long, shaky breath. Then she took both my hands and sank down on her knees. I followed her lead, relieved that this experience didn’t seem to entail the devastating effects of that in the barn. Seating us knee to knee, she gripped my hands painfully tight. “It’s just not cricket—checking up happy memories to be as hurtful as the sad. I s’pose it’s that they remind us of the grand times that are all gone, is it not?”
Her anachronisms were in full bloom. I started to respond, but she reached up and gently pressed my lips. “Hush, dearest,” she whispered, “not to dread, it’s not a bad thing.” Her eyes burned through their moisture like some bioluminescent sea creature rising from the depths. “Think way back in the day, to The Château. I told your Linda that she reminded me of someone?”
I’d very nearly gotten used to Justine2 talking, as the old woman, in the first person. “It was in response to her asking if you would take a whipping for her. It was a bit out of the blue.”
“Not betwixt us.” With a strained rasp, “Can’t you remember how we were together, an old woman and the so very young dancer?”
“Like you were lovers,” I admitted, “and back then that was a bit much, even for me.”
“Oh, my love,” her grip tightened on my fingers, “I’ve remembered how I knew for certain, on that first night when we went out for breakfast. Even before I was sure I had recognized you. I am so sorry, but I really and truly believe that. Dearest, I had known her before as well, known her as our Katie.”
“It’s not possible!” I’d not seen this one coming, and my mind and heart rebelled. Certainly, we had carried this thing beyond all rational comprehension. “Surely Katie was still alive when Linda was born, wasn’t she?” My grasping was audible. Katie and Lyman had vanished from public life after their marriage. Apart from their purchase of a home in rural Pennsylvania, my research had turned up zip on their further histories.87
“It is so,” she nodded, speaking with a tenderness that her younger persona tried to hide under the punker armor. “Katie passed away”—she choked slightly on the words, as though the bereavement was still felt as a recent one—”in the spring of 1966, up near Trenton. At Christmastime, Lyman got really blue and, he shot himself in his apartment.”88 Her features screamed of tragedy. “I did so hope that he had time to read Mink’s book, but I don’t think he did!” she cried out.
Her cry was a blow straight to my heart, and the madness I was listening to aside, there was something going on in me that I couldn’t get around. Nor was this feeling new; it had been with me since early in this odd quest. Months before, there had been some strange moments in the University of Texas library. While seeking just this information, I’d located an indexed obituary that I had felt sure must be Katie’s.
But I’d procrastinated long while scrolling down the microfilm. When I’d eventually brought the item up and read of a woman who was clearly not the object of my search, I had been mystified by my feelings of relief. I had surmised that all of this had gotten involved with my feelings about Linda’s death, for it had been as though I’d not wanted confirmation. It seemed that never seeing it would somehow keep Katie alive, like Schrödinger’s kitty; letting me imagine that she lived on—even though that would have made her over a century old.
But this! I couldn’t deny there was something more. Lyman, dead by his own hand. How ironic that he and Willie, who had married each other’s former wives, should share suicide as well. Like gracious old H. Beam Piper, and the first Justine’s little girl. The hurt inside was as great as for the dearly departed of my own life. At least Katie and Lyman, like Marjorie, had lived fairly long. Instead of moving ahead to address the impossible assertions, I discovered that one question twisted me up inside.
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“WERE THEY HAPPY?”
“Lyman was kind, and he had always loved her so. He never made fun of her.” She wouldn’t look at me, her brilliant tresses covering her face. I waited for her to spell out the accusation that hung in the air. “Écoutez, her writing did matter. It hurt her so that the one writer who rated had ridiculed her for writing for children. She never wrote anything again.”
Again, as on the pier, the burn of the whip; again the terror of responsibility, but not so acute as the simple disappointment at the ugliness I was hearing. The bastard, I thought, that twisted, cruel, demented bastard! Had I not thought all along that a link of some sort existed? There was no question that, at the least, I’d heavily identified with him—so what did that, in itself, say about me?
“Justine, I know what you imagine you see going on with me, and I will admit that there are some feelings about all this that are, as you would say, way weird. But now I’m hearing some things that I just can’t accept.” Does anyone ever believe a denial?
She was not to be deterred. “Pourquoi pas? We don’t know what all may be possible, outside linear rules. You, I’m sorry, I mean Willie, went ‘back,’ to become himself as a young man. I hopped ‘forward,’ to become another at birth. It may be that Katie could go ‘back,’ reconfigure as another, one who would be involved with you. This direction thing we have going on is really all about ‘sidewise’ worlds, only someways like the ones ‘before’ or ‘behind’ us.”
I remembered Heinlein’s story “Elsewhen,” in which some of Dr. Frost’s cross-world travelers had become transmuted into entirely different entities. Why not, indeed? We may often dream of ourselves as altogether different beings, complete with other sets of memories. That other, unconscious self has no problem with it. But I was still feeling absolutely reactive.
“Anything other than at birth would constitute outand-out possession of a developed consciousness, an intrusion I cannot accept. But even this scheme has Katie’s subsequent manifestation coexistent with her for fifteen years, in the same reality, the same space-time continuum.”
“So it sounds kinda out there. Where is it written that she couldn’t?” A touch of “young” Justine had come to the fore. “Why can’t two versions of a self coexist in the same space-time? How identical are the selves of identical twins, not even to mention clones? I’ve yet to meet any traffic cops policing the to-and-fro on the nonlinear superhighway, looking to get their phases entangled with my drawers.
“As if another world converged, one with a history like Willie’s ‘otherworld,’ where Katie was dead long before Linda was born? I don’t have all your damned answers,” she pouted. “I only know what I experienced, beginning with Linda’s recounting to me a vision, which I knew to be identical with one of Katie’s happiest moments in Timbuktu.”
I was not prepared to give the same degree of credence to Justine2’s memories of subjective impressions and beliefs as to her more solid recollections of actual events. Proofs to which this assertion could be subjected, even in principle, were few to none. Still, mad as it sounded, the melding of the feelings I had long repressed with her fantastic scenario was uncanny. I uneasily recalled Linda’s episodic efforts to paint, and the probable transparency of my appraisal.
“You would have me believe that I loved her more than you, that I sought her out instead? And worse, that it was futile, that it went down worse than the last time?”
“Nay, please! How could I judge you for finding our Katie, for trying again?” More often, the fusion of her personas’ language seemed melodious rather than fragmented. Whenever this happened, the sweet and caring woman inside the tough little babe continued to become more visible. Drawn into the fantasy, I wasn’t easily consoled.
“And failing again? She had been best left with Lyman, who kept her alive. In this ugly picture, I do no good for her at all. If I’m with her, it happens all over, just the same way.”
She leaned into me, tearfully hugging my neck. “No, dearest, not the same way. As if I can’t imag
ine how it was to stay to the very end. Unmentionable! Do you remember, our first morning together, how I got all teary?”
I looked up with curiosity. “I’d said that Kong would go to heaven for being Linda’s loyal friend. I thought that I had maybe hit a nerve in you—loss of a favorite pet or something.”
A cold cloud descended. “I only had pets once. One night, my drunken step-pig stomped the kitten to death. Finding the broken little bodies, I could see how the brave puppy had run to try to help when his little friend was in trouble, and that bastard had killed him, too. Not like seeing a man kicked to death, but I am here to testify that it looked very like as horrid to a little girl’s eyes. I wondered for a long time if life wasn’t but a momentary flicker; if existence was not muchly dead meat.”
Sweet Jesus, I thought, how can she remain sane? All the hurts of another life melding with those of this one, frequently reinforcing and exacerbating each other. Without her psych training, she might not have survived this. Was that preordained? If so, were the cruelties and suffering likewise predestined? What complex of experience must have shaped her, that she might inherit an entire personality?
She came around, shaking it off. “I couldn’t know yet, that morning. Like, I was wiggin’ that I was so extreme up on you, not knowing from whence that came. Preconsciously, the part of me that was still sleeping had known that Kong had not been the only loyal and faithful soul. I was moved by seeing that you weren’t quite the man who wrote this manuscript. No longer bailing out; not as if pushing me away, either.” I was listening to her find support in the resources of her antecedent self.
I remembered my wild thoughts as I’d watched her, caught up in the dream-loop at the barn, grasping after her last night with Willie. Imagining Henry Hudson’s ghost crew in the storm. Like the spectral nude upon the Avignon Bridge, the Rip Van Winkle association was now obvious. The sleeper had awakened! The evidence I’d seen, the knowledge she possessed, could not be doubted, whatever personal delusional baggage she had carried along with her. But the way she looked at me, again as to a light in the darkness, brought a crushing responsibility.