The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  The snow thickened as we approached the hotel, but I could still see the figure, as it stopped and seemed to watch us down the deserted square. The image remained of an arm raising the cane, as in salute, before vanishing into the snowy darkness. Remained for years, to stun me as I read a description of Duranty, with his artificial leg and elaborate stick, holding forth at the Metropol Hotel.

  That night in 1967 was easily thirty years after his drunken debates, and a decade after Duranty’s death. Reality, according to Justine2, would allow for two or three equally outrageous explanations of what that represented; Dunnesian precognition of something I would read thirty years later being the simplest.

  “Willie was never in Russia, dearest, so you needn’t fear being asked to own past life memories. A metem beholding and saluting another, though; I do believe that happens. The educated hobo on the Savannah River? Willie’s dread of being part of that man’s dreams wasn’t a philosophical metaphor. He never escaped the feeling that he was linked to him, that, someway, he was that man.” She raised that emblematic eyebrow. “Like you felt, after you got into researching Willie, muchly?”

  “You think you can do that, recognize beings like yourself?” I asked. “Did you notice something while you were out shopping?”

  ————————

  “I HAVE BEEN DOING IT, SWEETIE,” SHE RETORTED ACIDLY.

  As always, the meat that I could get my teeth into was the synchronistic aspect. Thinking of that in association with Duranty led me to revisit another concern. Should a synchronicity storm brew around anything deemed to affect state security, it probably would tend to excite the interest of a number of bureaucrats.

  I sketched for her the story of the federal raid on the offices of Astounding Science Fiction in March of 1944. A story they had published was judged to imply unusual insight on atomic research. John Campbell, the editor, had hinted to the writer that he might be perceived as knowing too much about actual projects—the Manhattan Project, as it developed.

  If Willie had known Will Jenkins in this life also, he might have appreciated the situation through Jenkins-Leinster’s contacts with the bunch at the Philadelphia Naval Yards. The manuscript did confirm that by mid-1945, Walter, his friend and Mink’s new lover, was warning him that aspects of his activities were unappreciated by some government circles.

  The FBI had been shadowing Duranty virtually all the years of his association with Seabrook, acquaintances reporting regularly on his activities and beliefs. It was probable that the barn adventures had not gone unnoted. I shared with Justine2 my assumption that this worry had prompted him to secure his notes, wherein he had chosen to embed his farewell, with her.

  She shrugged, smiling slightly. “There are other considerations.” She slowly lit a cigarette in a manner that only could be described as genteel.

  Thinking I might anticipate her, I went on, “Look, they were ending a world war and preparing for the next one. Certainly governments would have a great interest in experiments with precognition. Whatever Willie’s personal paranoia, should any research girl ever have been reported to have persuasively demonstrated probable foresight …

  “Why, even today there would be an interest in co-opting minds that could correlate the variables of possible outcomes beyond the capabilities of the most powerful computers?” I involuntarily ended my pontification in a question as I watched her expression of tolerant amusement. The new persona had consolidated further. The modern young woman was not gone, but tempered with wisdom and experience a century wide.

  “But it’s the past, don’t you know?” she breathed. “The ‘research girls’ had singularly few experiences of precognition. I can count mine on one hand. A biggie, like the street circus, may have gone down precisely through receiving reinforcement from here, from being significant way down the branches of many possible paths. It’s all about retrocognition, detailed hindsight, if only of one or two sets of possible past moments.

  “If you hadn’t already crashed when Orwell’s book was published, you would’ve instantly recognized some of his ideas. Controlling the here-and-now by redefining and limiting the past is old as Egypt, as Sumer. Establishments are skeptical of any who hold on to even approximate living memory of what has shaped the present moment.”

  Genuinely humbled, I assured her, “We will protect you. Couldn’t let anything happen to my pretty teacher, could I?”

  Still smiling, though with a sweet sadness, she answered, “If you but knew, when you have said something like that before.” I would not injure the moment by protesting being saddled with memories of things apart from my reality. If nothing else, it was becoming rather convenient to accept a linkage of some sort.

  She seemed to gaze far away, and whispered, “I think we are necessary. If temporal hypocrisies must be served by putting the quietus on the most commonsensical trivialities of another day, how much more so for matters of great moment? History is butchered to the point that there would be no continuity at all, were there not always some of us with long memory. Either physical immortals, of some variety, exist in linear time, or it is we who own the past, insofar as it’s intuited to be someway ‘real.’”

  I grimaced. “In fact, there are always some fools in academia who are wanting to announce the ‘end of history.’”

  “That’s poorly understood, but … Check it out: The set of all moments that, even remotely, could have led to the present state of affairs—somewhere, somewhen, really did happen. Let the swells construe the past as other than unitary, and limiting the possibilities to those supportive of the status quo is a short trip. You get bent about them excluding or marginalizing the rest of the set, yea? This revisionism is also about, y’know, including moments from other sets that, while they existed, too, could not have led here.”

  “What about creativity?” I snapped to the perplexing implications. “Maybe our concept of imagination is all wrong. It could be simply the faculty of perception across the worlds, and the ability to agitate that in others, like Jimmy Greene, the loyal friend. However he may have disapproved, he knew that Willie’s behavior was not without meaning. He was even moved to make it into a novel.”

  “We will teach each other, as we’ve done before.” She looked at me with unabashed adoration. “Mon compagnon d’âme, je t’aime. And I’ll say it again, chéri. I’ve missed you so much!” How could I feel other than undeserving, under that withering warmth from an intellect of such magnitude?

  “Babe, I would accept it all, if only I could find one ‘snippet,’ as you say; one memory of my own that supports it—I would willingly let you direct me to the rest.”

  “Where is it written that you won’t? Here”—she handed me back The Fan-Shaped Destiny—”finish your lesson.”

  ————————

  And now the book is nearly ended, and I prepare to leave this reportorial record with my trusted friend, my ame soeur; to do a sort of belated justice to the one, who of all the kith and kindred who remain alive, perhaps cared the most. Interspersed with these notes is a methodology, which I suspect is only one among many, for effectuating the transport. In this, at least, my eccentric flashings have not been in vain. Should, in a forgetfulness cruel or kindly, I fail to find you, it may be that you will deign to restore yourself to me.

  Your most unworthy companion in eternity prays for this. You cannot know what contrition in this plea for yet another chance. I have been forced to look, sober for the larger part, at a miserable panorama of flight, miles and years wide, all over the map, running away from myself. At the end of my dismal time before, I knew that it was ever you who had blessed my poor life with what meaning it possessed. I was nothing without you. One would have thought, extended an unbelievable grace, I would have done my damnedest to handle you with more care.

  Things have turned rather queer for me in the later years. I was successful in spite of myself, had my adventures, wrote my books. That is to say, I invented plausible reasons for my obsessi
ons and they produced by-products. Yet, every so often, this world has seemed as if it resents my presence, would deny my existence, as the physiology rejects a foreign intrusion. The scientific romance of this world elaborates reciprocal histories, and physics will eventually follow suit, even did it come out of Africa and through the pen of a sadist. But neither my name nor that of Wamba will be heralded.

  Hollywood has made millions, and will make untold more, off voodoo and zombies, but the name of the man who filed the first English reports has been expunged. Those credited are the very hidebound scholastics who tried and failed to debunk my accounts. In the literature of the paranormal, I am but a vanishing footnote; in that of the erotic, I exist not at all.

  While I was not a great writer, this time I was a remarkably competent one. Jimmy Greene gives me his highest praise: that I got on with the job of being a good reporter. Yet Harcourt refuses my manuscripts and my books cease to be reprinted in the face of still-existing demand. I predict that, once I am gone, I will be forgotten in record time. It seems like everything about me is questionable. Does it sound plausible, to be too controversial and yet beneath commentary simultaneously, I ask you? I fear such contretemps say much—about our brave new world that will follow upon the heels of the recent war.

  Questions to which you will put this dark present; how a man in his sixtieth year—though it is to me like a century—and who has recently fathered his only son, would arrive at such a denouement? I could not satisfy that, were I to count all the ways that I landed myself in this trap. Even my second chance, in common with all my flights and attempted escapes, too often proved futile, echoing with regrets. I am willing to relinquish my will, my life; give over my self into hands stronger and wiser than my own. Wamba, I feel sure, lives still in this world, but I need our moment in time, and I need her old teacher, the Ogoun who remembered the magic in which time was folded backward.

  Pray God I may yet be different for my brother Charlie, for all of you. Some who subscribe to the doctrine of metempsychosis hold that souls naturally travel together in sets. If so, I think it is less a regimented Roman march through a linear time than a melding of some lives into others, an overlapping.

  So, as with Walter’s stock joke, “On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser d’oeufs,” which we wore thin, we broke a lot of eggs but it was not a bad omelette, was it? At least you are all still here. In my mind’s eye I can see Marjorie at her desk writing; she was happiest when we were both working thus. Ever and anon, she may turn and look for me, but Walter will be there. Katie is safe with Lyman. Tell her, won’t you, that it was never something hateful about her writing? When I read Gao of the Ivory Coast,90 and thought of how our little monkey, whom I still had with me, had loved her—I was dead drunk for four days.

  Justine, God bless you, Justine, the cosmic contradiction. Striding away with your bracelets and chains still tinkling like bells, yet always fierce and determined. And so alive! At the last, there is perhaps cowardice in it. Wanting honestly to be as honest as I can, sans cribbing or weasel words, were there not a chance in a million threatening you, could I have taken the littlest chance? My angel, I could not have lived to see you die again.

  I trust that you will go on to new happiness, but to paraphrase Michelet, you are still living and working on as always. It is well. You will not be bowed down with the grief of losing me; you can do quite well without me. The ranks will close up again, the vacant place be obliterated. The house that was mine will be full of life, and I bless its prosperity … but I, I can never forget you!

  I promise that if I see you again, be it in another time or an otherworld, I will cherish you. God willing that I become less of a child and less contemptibly frail, I will try to love you better. Somehow, we dream the worlds we live in and, without love, there are no dreams.

  Farewell, to meet again,

  W.B.S.

  XI

  The Lake

  BESIDES MY ADOLESCENT RASH OF PRECOGNITIVE dreams, I had pondered whether some recurring dreams during early childhood might have signified the end of a previous life. But their content had been something like being run over by a big oily machine in an open field. Going back to my earliest days, neither dreams nor memories revealed anything that pointed recognizably to William Seabrook.

  Still, this extraordinary week had revealed many other things that defied explanation. Its central fixture was my seemingly fated connection with the gens of the Justines, a line we now believed might be infused with Willie’s genetics. It began with meeting JJ that long-ago night at the lake, concurrent with the birth of my interest in the same alternate-world fiction whose inspiration I had lately traced to Seabrook.

  A full thirty-five years later, it had culminated in my involvement with her daughter, to whom I had been led blindly through my search for Willie’s story. Which story had, in its turn, been generated by a late-life renewal of my early obsessions. And what a host of tantalizing convergence in the interim, mostly unrecognized for years. The convulsive reunion with JJ, accompanied by the matter of The Ring, seemed an icon of a principle. If it is possible for a universe to split into two slightly different realities by a quantum-mechanical event, then symmetry demands that two slightly different universes may converge and become identical in the same fashion.

  Then there had been the dark, bizarre involvement of Linda and myself with the woman now known to have been Willie’s Justine, without a clue of her being JJ’s grandmother!

  With grateful wonder, I had begun to comprehend that her course of action, resulting in Justine2’s present configuration, had been partially prompted by that meeting. Justine2 before whom the elder Justine’s treasured copy of Willie’s autobiography had flown to me like a harbinger of destiny.

  Leaving aside the question of my being a metem of the forgotten author of all this, it appeared that convergence with his influence, and even progeny, had greatly impacted my own personal history. My superstitious fear of having to answer for a multiplicity of trespasses, most likely a projection of my own unconscious issues, had given way to a fatalistic qué será, será. I now knew that I would have to explore to exhaustion the significance of such an incredible nexus, wherever it might lead.

  More subjective was my uncanny affinity with Willie’s work. In contrast to my experience with the classic science fiction, I had not found a single Seabrook passage that I had memory of reading before. Yet each book and article was infused with a texture that intimately caressed my psyche.

  Why, the very absence of recognition was significant! At least a couple of his works had to have been on my mother’s bookshelves when I was a boy. Not even to mention the copy of Witchcraft that seemed to have lain inexplicably among Charles’s possessions for decades. How the hell had I missed him? It seemed as though it would have required preconscious avoidance.

  Finally, No Hiding Place had arrived in my hand, like an ominous bird, complete with its little news clipping. Never had I found the story of another man so psychologically kindred, both for good and ill. I couldn’t plumb his deepest feelings without an emotional storm of my own.

  Even then I had known that the bottom line came early in his story, when he cried out in sorrow and remorse after his lost brother. In one little line, from the work originally entitled My Brother Charlie, he had offered up a lament—which is the deepest, most fervent prayer of all mankind, would we only admit it:

  ————————

  “OH GOD, IF I COULD GO BACK to that other night and be different.” No mindless wimp, this man, I’d thought. Not one to drug himself with psych-excuses and deny the horror of responsibility. True, he had taken it too far. His brother had died from natural causes, but he could find guilt in anything, Charlie’s life twisted by Willie’s failure to stand up for him against a domineering mother—and a consequent weakened will to live—Willie took all onto his own shoulders. Now The Fan-Shaped Destiny had shown me the true gravity of a failure-haunted life. Given another chance, he must ha
ve believed that he could fix everything.

  He had been sufficiently different for Justine, for Katie, and Marjorie, but persisted in the belief that he had somehow failed Charlie. Despite his grasp of the paths of high probabilities’ resilience, he had felt himself damned. To the end of this life, he had “… heard another voice, and hear it always. ‘If you had liked me, Will, it might have been some use.’”

  I had such a dead brother in my friend Richard, from whose fate I could excuse myself a hundred times over, except for “that night” when, if I had been there, it would have been different. Also Willie’s first-life Katie in Linda, if only on a psychological plane. But all this could be easily explained away as the universal human condition. Unless, I was surprised by a thought that then captivated me—unless enlaced worlds and lives might, itself, be a part of the human condition!

  I’d spoken with Justine2 of going around my old haunts, though fearful that projecting morbid fascinations of my own might have unexpected impacts on her. Yet the logic of our involvement, the linkages I’d been mulling over, surely couldn’t be entirely oneway. Consider the plan for her antecedent self, returning along the timeline, to become an “improved” version of JJ.

  “Be cool. I’m good to go to town here. It’s grand that you’re putting me into your picture.” She had been applying elaborate feathering from the corners of her eyes, sweeping up to connect with the ends of her arched eyebrows and shading in between. It looked like something Man Ray might have drawn, or perhaps Dali.

  She put on her sexy leather vest and skirt with high heels, then put her hair up in a fifties ponytail. The eclectic combination of styles meshed strikingly. We started messing around, like a pair of kids, when she insisted on tying my thinning mane back similarly. Di looked in and went on by, shaking her head in continuing disbelief.