The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  We drove to Fort Worth along old US Route 80, passing the site of old Top-O-The-Hill, the infamous casino and brothel. For years occupied by a Baptist seminary, it was long forgotten and gone, except for the stone gatehouse and pillars I pointed out to her. I wondered, semifacetiously, at whether she might have had any business acquaintance with the place.

  “Maybe l’Autre,” she shrugged. Justine2 still did not fully identify with the legend of the later Madeleine as related by Roder. Those portions she had not yet consciously recalled, she referenced as belonging to “the other.”

  We passed by Rose Hill Cemetery, final resting place of a man named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had spirited all of us off down a treacherous branch in the paths of destiny. Beyond the high school that I had attended with JJ, we cruised the still-spooky road through a surviving stretch of undeveloped river bottoms. I pulled over where a gravel path still ascended to a preferred “parking” location we’d called Grasshopper Hill. There, I drifted into a matter-of-fact account of making love to JJ, of interludes become as mythic to me as colorful pulp-fiction sagas. Justine2 displayed sincere interest and didn’t bat an eye, certain testimony to her being a tad beyond the commonly human. Imagine a young woman who could listen to all that without irritation or boredom!

  She’d kicked off her shoes and was sitting, typically, with her butt between her feet, in what therapists call the “W-sit” position. Dropping the seat back, she looked at me mirthfully out of the corner of a feathered eye, “Checking me out?”

  “Not really.” I was a bit chagrined. “In fact, I was just realizing that I don’t know why I’m doing this.” She sighed and stretched herself, displaying her figure. With her muscles on stretch, the nerve impulses would rebound from her bent knees back up the inner thighs, serving as a degree of self-arousal.

  “Hey, you’re getting me all kinds of hot. Rewind that part where you fucked her in the autumn leaves. Was she wearing her green jacket? I’ll bet you a dollar she kept it on.”

  She laughed at my shocked pause. “Razzing you! That jacket, believe it or not, was still around when I was little. She takes good care of her things,” Justine2 mused with actual fondness, “and it was her favorite. No, wait. Let me see. No, I’m reading your mind, I really am.”

  I wasn’t laughing. “We could assume that you’re now perpetually functioning a bit out of linear time,” I talked fast. I was blushing hotly, for the first time in decades, from some weird embarrassment. “Do you suppose that there can be some phase entanglement of our wave functions?”

  “You slay me. Are you a card or what? I’ll entangle your functions, later—you can believe that!” Trying to control her giggling, she grasped my arm. “Don’t be so solemn. It’s just fine about JJ. I’m gonna get the best part of you.”

  “God, babe, if only that were so.”

  Driving deeper into the old, decaying east side, I talked of the joys and hurts of youth, and the horrors of meaningless, abbreviated endings. I told her more of my parents, particularly my schoolteacher mother. Strong, self-assured, she had empowered herself without benefit of society’s dubious blessings.

  “Sounds like Myra,” Justine2 suggested.

  “Like her in some respects, perhaps.” I glanced at her with a hint of chastisement at the comparison with Willie’s mother. “She was never the tyrant that Myra became.”

  “Sounds like she didn’t need to be,” she teased, getting the giggles again.

  “Brat.”

  We made the promised stop by JJ’s childhood home in a neighborhood that had truly gone to hell. Still, the late-afternoon light was benign, and the slanting sunbeams did most tenderly paint with life the “shapes which lingered still.”

  The sight of the run-down old home made my heart ache in spite of all that had transpired. She became more subdued, reminiscing on her long-ago playtime and the mambos’ assurance that she must aspire to that prescient vision. I listened to a little girl’s joy at the first touch of what was to become, and had perhaps sustained, Justine2.

  An air of normality around those reflections furthered acceptance of the circumstances as believable parts of life. She deliberated over a semiconscious equation, which had persisted through this life, of that experience with her hope of finding her longed-for father. Something awful leapt unbidden from the shadows of the dark arc in my memory.

  It had been the one time I had stopped, and almost gone to the door. I’d been transfixed by a little girl playing in a pile of leaves that had been raked up in the crisp autumn. Hair like a maple tree in flame had made me believe that she must be JJ’s child. Justine2 watched me in a hushed tension while I confessed the repressed recollection.

  I was close to nausea as I admitted to standing immobilized when JJ’s stepmother had called the child to come away from the strange man. JJ’s “mom” had not, of course, seen me for a decade at that time. Then I’d run away from that house, and from the little girl who, in all childish innocence, had approached to show me the pretty colors—in the patina that the years and earth had emblazoned onto an ancient, dirt-filled Coke bottle from her grandmother’s yard.

  “For God’s sake, Justine, say something!” I demanded of her pensive silence. Would she hate me for that, for not finding a means to force myself into her early life?

  “It may shed some light on my decision to live here,” she considered calmly. “Say, this was probably not at the very same moment as my vision loop. There was no anamnesis involved. But if I did behold you, and at some level recognized you from The Château, that would’ve totally clinched the deal. If so, something will come back to me.” I continued to agonize over the picture she had made me draw of the shape of my concern.

  “Dearest, the larger part of me didn’t come looking for you so that you could be my father. Pos it’s not this thing you have going on that you’re someway screwing your daughter? You’re way more touchious about that than I am.”

  Then it was she who was lightening the mood, persuading me that we were merely looking at another aspect of the storm of synchronicity. Worse than at any time in this affair, I felt any sense of bedrock present reality slipping from my grasp. Looking at the window JJ used to crawl out at night, I found myself at last believing that “somewhere in time” she was still so doing.

  “Surprised if you were to see her? Not,” Justine2 replied to my contemplation. “You love her, you miss her. She lived here. The heart sees many things that the eyes do not. How’s that for a pithy statement? People can someways see those they love in familiar settings. Why not? The heart longs for them, the heart sees them.” It was the only time since we’d met that she had sounded like her mother. While I admired the dark angel within, I adored her the more for not entirely abolishing the influence of my little lost love.

  ————————

  DUSK WAS SETTLING as we parked in the lot of an elderly strip center eight blocks away. It sat across the street and half a block from my old home. Neighborhood assistance offices and a storefront church, trying to arrest the decline, now occupied its spaces. This was the place where JJ and I shared that impossible memory of my adolescent gallantry, offering to marry her with whomever’s child. That conversation, which for a variety of reasons, could not have occurred anytime close to her actual pregnancy.

  “JJ remembers that she met with me after I’d passed her a note in class. One of those long letters, you know, on folded-up notebook paper. But it’s impossible. I’d gone to another school by then. I can remember writing it and giving it to her, and even a bit of what was in it. But it just can’t be!”

  “You don’t get it?” she asked gently. “Time was right, but the world was wrong. Here, you were losing her, and what you wanted more than anything was another chance. So much, that what you remembered was a moment glimpsed from a world where there was another chance.”

  “But, damn it, babe, she remembers it, too!”

  “It may be, deep in her soul, she too wanted another chance,” she mused soft
ly, looking into the deepening twilight. “A world where you didn’t leave, where you passed on the smart life you led to marry the little high-school girl when she was abandoned … No, wait.” She shook off the empathy and snapped, “I’m so fucking sorry! If she could believe that was in you, even if only in a strange memory, and not take your hand? Hey, she was some kinda fool, like I always thought.”

  She hopped out of the car, slamming the door, and pranced up the sidewalk as if knowing exactly where she was going. Way weird, I thought, hastening to catch up with her through the deep blue twilight. More, there was ceasing to be any delineation among patterns of speech, cadence, or language. As her persona tended toward unity, the question of whom I was addressing was becoming moot, but this opened new areas of confusion.

  “Like you always thought your mother to be, or your granddaughter?” That was not a joke.

  “All that.” She turned to me. “I can remember how I carried girls, many of them friends, to the abortion mill. I visited them at those horrible ‘homes for unwed mothers’ and walk-up flats with swinish husbands and squalling brats; seeing how oh, so happy they were—like their teeth hurt. Babies aren’t bad, but the trap was brutal. JJ had a fucking cakewalk!”

  She had not. JJ’s tragedy had not been that many years later, only almost at the end of the reaction. All those conventions had still been in place. Their apostles were even more vicious and fanatic, sensing their time was almost ended. She had been among the later victims of the final campaign to break the progress of women.

  I was trying to puzzle this curious blind spot in her preternatural understanding when, turning to continue along the walk, she blurted out, “Why’d I survive, when I was so much worse than them?” I said nothing, but mulled over the sudden insight that some things take more than a lifetime to resolve. Young Justine, the psychologist, had her work cut out, having to carry Madeleine’s baggage as well.

  The house lights along the street reminded me of the window lights in Georgia, the little lights in every window … She began to recite from, I sensed, farther memory.

  “Y’know, Willie had been a big adventurer. He’d wandered through the Arabian deserts, sought out the secrets of island jungles and darkest Africa.” Ardently, she went on, “It made him so mad when a critic said that, all the time, like many roaring adventurers, he was only running farther away from home—shouting and crying in the dark because he was lost.” My cornea reflected a flaring of the lights, as her voice clutched at me.

  ————————

  “AT LAST, IN DESPAIR, HE HUNG IT UP AND CAME HOME.”

  She had stopped in front of the old house where I’d grown up, still in good repair and much the same as always. The forest green shutters were now painted darker, maybe even black. But that little change made all the difference. Justine2 gripped my arm and urged me up the walk, and the last thing I wanted was for her to let go. For this looked like the dream, my last adolescent precognition, and the one that, above all, I had believed to be impossible.

  Justine2 ignored the bell and struck the heavy brass doorknocker, to whose specific sound I had a conditioned childhood reflex of alertness. Hearing that loud metallic rap after so many years startled me. She was eager, as if it were she having a homecoming, and a very happy one at that. As for me, I was imagining approaching footsteps.

  Who might open that door, looking as huge to me as when I had been a child? Who might be sitting in an armchair in the study, which I would be able to see off the foyer when the door opened—working a crossword puzzle in the evening paper? Upstairs, I had dreamed my dreams. Up there, my friends and I had played with hypnosis and pushed hard to open a gate to the future, the past; like any teens, to anywhere but here!

  It did not open. We waited, and Justine2 knocked again. Then I rang the doorbell, and we waited some more. We just kept standing there, both of us, expecting something to happen. When we could no longer deny that there was no one home, we reluctantly retreated.

  Crossing the street, I looked back at the treetops upon which I had meditated from that darkened upstairs room. That had been after my phase of staring at candles, when discovery of the slow diffusion of Eastern disciplines across America had inspired me to imagine that I, too, could attain higher wisdom. As before, the higher wisdom eluded me when I stumbled on the curb and nearly fell on my face.

  I looked at the offending concrete with confusion. Then I remembered that it had not always been on the edge of the street. There had been head-in parking there, with an indentation all the way to the sidewalk. In the years since, it had been eliminated, the curb brought on out to the street. But the indentation had been there in the dream. This was not the dream.

  In front of the old drugstore location, I paused to light my pipe. Richard and I would linger long at the lunch counter, reading the pulp science fiction off the rack so we didn’t have to pay for it. Even were the store still there, it would exist for me only to house Richard and “that other night.”

  It was true that there, reflected in the plate glass, stood a better-preserved approximation of my father. My focus channeled down to Justine2. With her hair tied back, she momentarily looked so much like the JJ of years before.

  But even in her surreal, reflected image, a second glance revealed the feathered eyes, the nose ring, the kinky-looking leather outfit, complete with the braided thong band biting into her thigh. Passionately reciting nothing beyond what Willie had said of himself, she had revealed what she hoped for me to find there.

  I had actually come closer to her vision than to my own. She was my goddess-in-chains, the meaning of my life. Yet, she was visibly Justine2 the metem, a creature from another world. Despite her youth, she could not be the sweet innocent who had opened the dream-door. She had never been, at least since before the First World War!

  Had I not, from being blown before the hormonal storms of my early maturation, always remained somewhat disconnected and waiting? Did it matter that there may have been a glimpse of yet another world in which she might have been my daughter? It was not dissimilar to the “false memory” of the parking lot, of a world where JJ had perhaps accepted me due to an early pregnancy. Possibly those worlds were one and the same.

  Now it seemed that we might all have such episodes with regularity. It could be that such glimpses of cosmic consanguinity, kinship across the multiverse, as it were, might serve to strengthen our bonds in this reality.

  A Prussian deputation of psychoanalysts could prattle in my ear forever and yet fail to make the simplest fact of all go away. Why demand this miracle conform to an interpretation of a past vision? Why was I always continuing to look backward?

  When we reached the car I hugged her tight against me, trying to pull myself back to the present moment, to shake off the ambiance that had settled over everything like a numinous fog. I lightly ran my fingernails around her smooth thighs in a way I knew would please her, and she squirmed against me. But there was more than eroticism going on.

  “All there has ever been was waiting, just waiting. For decades, waiting for you,” I breathed in her ear. “No matter what else it might all mean; we are together and, for whatever incredible reason, you are mine. Nothing else matters, nothing else ever mattered.” I didn’t know what else I could say to her, or tell you. There is no way to articulate something like that. What if it had happened to you? How would you describe what it felt like?

  I got into the car feeling like one of Willie’s zombies and fumbled for my keys. Down at the corner with Lancaster Avenue, the highway to Dallas in farther time, a ratty little convenience store occupied the location of the old Lone Star Drive-in. Had I seen Richard and Marilyn drinking a Coke beneath a corrugated metal canopy, it would have added nothing to this sensation of existing altogether apart from time as we know it.

  At the intersection, my gaze wandered to the west, recalling the amber flash of the Texas sunset in times of fewer pollutants and city lights. It had always seemed like Halloween, in that final
moment when the setting sun had burned like an orange fire among black clouds on the horizon, and the night had fallen all at once.

  I turned east and slowly cruised down Lancaster, vaguely following a route of conditioned reflexes from the nearer past. The wide boulevard itself had changed little in all the years of my life. Our windows were down and the early Sunday evening was abnormally quiet with scant traffic. In my dreamy state of mind, the quiet world around us seemed empty. Like there was as little press about us of human presence and activity as in those long-ago years on which I’d been focused.

  “Like a thing where your mind is reaching across time?” Justine2 agreed. “I’m down with that, I felt so in the Village.” After a reflective pause she queried, “The oldest memories you have? Raconte!”

  ————————

  ASSOCIATING WITH THE FIERY SUNSETS, I described some very early childhood impressions of the last great wildfire that swept close to Fort Worth, perhaps back around 1949. It had taken out an old farmstead that my parents had still owned outside town. They had bundled me up and driven out that night in our old Dodge. I could still remember watching the burning sweep across a wide arc of the flat horizon.

  In my distracted wandering, I’d turned off Lancaster onto the spur road that skirted the lake, then had automatically turned again. I stopped in confusion when a chain-link fence blocked our way. I recognized with some embarrassment that I’d been driving to the lake, but the old road over the dam had been closed years before. I turned back toward the thoroughfare that now routed traffic to approach from the east through Arlington.

  She pressed me to continue, like my story was going somewhere. “The next day, we went out again for my father to pick over what was left of the old farm. I wandered away in a terrible fascination with the blackened debris.

  “A rooster ran by, like from out of nowhere. His colors were bright against all the black and gray ash. I ran after him and found a glass jar full of hard candy that had somehow survived the fire. The candy looked like jewels to my eyes. It was funny. I was convinced that the rooster had directed me to the treasure and was giving it to me!” I laughed, enjoying the intimacy of sharing this early part of myself with her.