by Paul Pipkin
While I talked, Justine2 was content to continue cruising the route to the lake. Finally, I asked about this, “We don’t have to go there, you know?” Slow to begin to understand my own motivations, I was chagrined that she had been able to see through to so many of them.
“I’m still good to go. I wanna see it.” She watched everything intently as we pulled into the little lake-front park with its piers and small marina. The old trees still circled the shelter house, though they were now a small stand separated by asphalt parking from residences, rather than the outriders of woods bordering on the lake. Remarkably, though, the vista toward and across the lake would seem to have hardly changed. It was now the dark of night.
“We’re at a nexus in your life, when you’re strongly entangled across the years and the worlds.” My discomfiture was growing.
“Don’t you understand that I’ve spent my life wanting to go back and make things different, somehow set things right? Like Willie did?” I still struggled with that fresh probability. Facing her, in that memory-haunted place, I was backed into a corner and had no choice but to confess my doubts and fears.
“I’m not pining over JJ and the past anymore. I want to be here with you.”
The smile turned wicked, and with it returned a tinge of the Justine I’d first met. “It’s all kinds of gratifying to hear you ’fess up to that,” she gloated. “But seriously, it’s not about her. This is about us, and about the young boy that you were.”
“I don’t think I could look myself in the eye, knowing what life put him through, knowing what I put him through. Anyway, I can’t possibly want to change the past, a path that led to you.”
“You’re still not getting it.” She was impatiently urging me toward the old shelter house. “Our moment is concrete, it won’t go away.” She hesitated, then continued, though a bit uneasily, “You could leave it, though I pray you mean what you say, but this world abides.”
Standing in the shelter house, lit by the green fluorescence from outside, this conversation was eerie to the extreme. The old wooden benches and tables had surrendered to one-piece steel, and the area was now open on all sides.
In earlier time, rest-room cubicles had walled up the north end. These had been replaced by modern facilities nearby, though the covered plumbing apertures were visible in the concrete slab. I noted to her that it was the same old roof above. Small square light fixtures, painted over and unused for years, remained embedded in the ceiling.
“Let’s go someplace else,” decided Justine2 with a nervous impatience. “Say, I wanna hear more about the magic rooster! Do some regress, here. As if I can learn to use it to recover some more of my shit.” The punker cadence and vulgarity were wedded oddly to the Bronx accent that had generally accompanied more formal speech.
I was quite malleable at that moment. At her urging, I lay back on one of the metal benches and explained how she might assist with the hypnotic suggestions. I focused on the nature sounds, the breeze in the trees, wavelets against the piers, and occasional quacking of the local ducks.
Her unique eclectic speech now familiar and comforting, I visualized the numerals of the years rolling away backward like mile markers on a highway—the image from my recent dream. This variation on my usual approach to regressive self-hypnosis soon had me concentrating on the image of the rooster.
I described its colorful feathers, including the almost prismatic iridescence on its breast, the legs like polished brass. I began to feel something untoward when I had to compare its appearance with the giant roosters to which Willie’s laudanum-addicted grandmother had introduced him over a century before. True, my rooster had been large, but not that huge! I had been a very small child then, after all.
Captivated by the clarity of this childhood distraction, I went on with the recollection. “My mother came and got me, upset because I had wandered off. She led me away, and I didn’t see the rooster anymore. I bawled about it, later on, when I wanted the candy and remembered that she had taken it with us. I guessed that she thought it was probably ruined and threw it away.
“Years later, she would maintain nothing like that had happened, that I must have dreamed it. But why would an adult remember such a small thing anyway? I’m not even sure why it made such a heavy impression on me.”
I felt Justine2 take my hand. “Dearest, look again. Go back and look carefully as your mother leads you away. Don’t be afraid.” Why afraid, I wondered? Even as I knew I was. But this was not a fearful memory—it was a fun one. The recognition grew that my fear was not at all about some suppressed trauma, but in the here-and-now.
The pressure of her fingers recalled that long-ago hand-holding, and I remembered looking up, looking up at some impossibly long skirts with … with curious ribbons below the waist, contrived to resemble a bustle, of all things. I had looked up into the elfin features, not of my mother, but …
I drew back from the image in utter confusion. “It wasn’t my mother!” I exclaimed with consternation.
Her grip tightened. “Just remember your promise—nothing matters except that we’ve found each other.” I could hear concern in her voice, blended with tension as though something exciting were at hand, and … joy.
I wasn’t feeling particularly joyful. “It was my grandmother,” I whispered. But that could not be, for I had never known a grandparent. The branches of my line procreate late, if at all, and those people had been gone for years before I was born. What could this be? An early glimpse of yet another alternate reality, one in which I had known my grandmother?
At that moment, I knew! I bolted up from the trance so abruptly I almost fell off the bench. My throat was paralyzed, and I could only stare at Justine2 in my shock. As if coming from her sweet lips, I might be able to accept that which I couldn’t bring myself to say.
She obliged me. “I’d heard this story the time before, chéri. It was your Grandma Piny, wasn’t it?”
So there it was. As I had leapt into full consciousness, I’d dragged along a further association that took minutes to blossom into real memory. I had to move around, and we walked down toward the piers, across the paved boat landing that bordered the lapping wavelets.
There had indeed been terror back then, on the night before. In a dark and scary place, a fiery horizon haunting him like a half-remembered London hell, a small boy had been frightened out of his wits. The next day, his mind had run away for a moment to the refuge of a little boy in another life. The consoling memory had been integrated with events and assumptions of this life I thought I knew, never guessing it had been of a different order.
How many such things might we hold in our minds without notice, except that they may be so strangely compelling as to persist a lifetime? The glimpses that followed may have been partially constructed, fleshed out by having read The Fan-Shaped Destiny. Nonetheless, they were elaborations on a truth.
The girl who had been the woman who had loyally defied time and death to reach a man who, over and over, had treated her precious life with him as lightly as a petulant child, reached up and stroked the back of my thinning hair. Once more, a dream from another life was intruding upon this one.
It was not remorse alone that brought me to my knees. I had to get my cheek against her legs, as with the lady-in-chains in Piny’s tower; as when, learning that she had died and knowing it was his sin, the man I was had once prayed hopelessly on a quay beside the Seine.
There may never be more than the glimpses. I think I will learn yet a bit, because the jungle drums still beat somewhere and lead on to something, but even this much was, at last, enough. Because I was finally able to tell her the truth that had taken more than one lifetime to find a voice.
“Justine, oh Christ! Justine, my darling, I am sorry. I’m so, so sorry. Do whatever you want with me. Please just be willing to forgive, I don’t have your endurance; I’m not as strong as you. If you leave me, if I lose you again, I’ll go mad.” I wasn’t able to stop. I had kept on repeating my remors
e.
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“IT’S ALL RIGHT, C’EST MOI, C’EST MOI …” She, in turn, had just kept on stroking my hair and repeating that ancient formula of comfort. Finally, the catharsis abating, we found our way back to the shelter house. Words cannot express how it felt to see, after nearly half a century, into that dark arc where I’d never been able to look.
“Believe that now you know what you had going on?” She feigned wickedness, “Don’t you know that you have gone mad, and more than once? It was ever only yourself who wouldn’t forgive.”
Drawing me to sit again beside her on a steel bench, she continued, “You made it just fine, didn’t you ever believe that? I’ll bet it was Wamba who showed you how to stop running, to turn around and come back where you belonged. And, y’know? It may have been only symbolic, but I’m glad I always made sure to leave the lights on for you.” I was nearly overcome again at that image, knowing now whence sprang that devastating sense of shame, seeing myself as the little boy finally giving up and going home.
“Enfin! It may be that someday you’ll own to yourself,” she elbowed me playfully, “how indebted you always seem to be to women. Let’s find out what else is back in the day.” Having obtained such an enormous revelation, I had now the confidence to accede to her enthusiasm, so I lay back and let her help take me down again.
I described to her the burning horizon, the black pillars of smoke, and the red clouds underlit by the fires. The last night in London, of course! I also recovered an entirely forgotten childhood fear of the kettle lights and the dark shape in the sky of sporting events to which my father would take me. The unoffending Goodyear blimp must have recalled the shape of the barrage balloons among the pencils of light seeking the German bombers.
“Go on with you, now,” she urged after I had seen all of this, and I had trusted nothing in my life more than I now trusted the sound of her voice. “There may be more places you can see into. Oh look, isn’t this where the party was?” I could hear her moving about, but that was okay, too. Everything was. “Wouldn’t you like to go to the party? See if there’s anything you haven’t remembered?”
I was amazed at how brilliantly I could remember it now. Where I had first laid eyes on JJ when another guy and I had “switched dates,” learning only later that the swap had been at the girls’ contrivance. Where I had stood, where she had stood, sizing me up with that little mischievous smile that her daughter would inherit. I wondered aloud whether that look had come down from “the ghosts of Justines past.”
“Just go with it …” I registered Justine2’s snicker, but the vision distracted me from her continuing murmuring.
I described all of it, unwinding behind my eyelids like a movie. The piers much as they appear now, except for the illumination of the mercury vapor, jutting out into darkness toward the lights of the power plant across the lake. Only intermittent bare bulbs beneath metal reflectors had illuminated the trees behind us, in that time before condominiums had been built nearly to the lakefront. I sighed nostalgically and opened my eyes, looking up at the ceiling.
A trick of reflection, I thought, that an old painted-over light fixture seemed to glow dimly yellow. I got up off the bench to look more closely, feeling a nip from the breezy night air. That was no reflection, that thing was on! My astonished gaze slid down, to be blocked by the partition walls at the north end. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see distant headlights on the road across the dam. I looked around in confusion, at the little blue-and-white 45-rpm record player on a wooden table, the wooden bench behind me, and at a girl with her flaming red hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Momentarily, it seemed I was that boy who had stood transfixed by JJ. So young, so slight, and trying so hard to look tough in my first leather jacket. Memories, memories that would have to be put away and forgotten. Strange glimpses of a life yet to be lived, which had charged that night with a sense of destiny and, if dwelt on, would pollute reality. The moment passed and I was no longer he. But a girl’s green-vinyl jacket was not a leather vest. And there were still no condos encroaching on the park, only trees and the night.
Awareness returned of the sounds around me, of lesser volume than I would have imagined. The party seemed much smaller than I’d remembered, fewer than twenty kids, who looked so goddamned young. I barely recognized them, and didn’t remember any of their names. I stared stupidly at a boy who was speaking to me. Then I realized he was Tony, one of my friends back then. I was perplexed to recognize how my memory had adjusted chronology.
This was real! I was “back in the day,” more precisely, the night. In real time, Charles, Richard, and the others who were to become permanent fixtures of my life were people whom I had not yet even met. More eerie was the knowledge that Tony was doomed to die in Vietnam a few years later. That thought probably helped frame my ignoble first words in my new reality.
“I got to take a piss.” Which was most literally the case, I assure you. In the john, I was careful to relieve myself before looking in the mirror, though what I could see and feel of my clothes and body had already told me the story. Things in my life have made me afraid, but none could compare with the terror of looking into my own young eyes. A single bare bulb dimly illuminated my gnarled feelings.
I spoke brokenly to the stricken young face, “Oh my God, Justine, what have we done?”
I thought of the moment when I had felt myself to be that boy, even to abrupt recall of the long-forgotten intrusion of bizarre thoughts, thoughts whose nature was beyond his comprehension. In that strange moment, I had consolidated my awareness, my self, toward the assumptions of his time and place. I remembered the account of Willie’s moment of “exaltation” on that fateful night in London, before he awakened back in Augusta from a lucid dream some thirty-odd years in duration. Unintentionally, I seemed to have discovered the key to transit, for this was unlike even the clearest regression vision. But, damn it! At the barn, Justine had wanted to return, and I’d been able to hold her back from even that fierce obsession.
The moment that my world had divided in a major way now lay behind me. There had surely been a jillion variant subatomic events since then, every tiny junction farther removing me from the path I had lived. Had I made a pathetic sprint for the rest room, when I’d first laid eyes on JJ, I’d not likely stood transfixed by this damned mirror. Certainly not stood there talking to a love lost not only in time, but also on an entirely different branching path of reality. I remembered her coaxing tone as she had finessed me to the house, then the lake, and back into the past. A softly murmured phrase consolidated itself into clarity:
“PAPA LEGBA, OUVRÍ BARRIÈRE…”
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God, no! She couldn’t have ditched me, could she? Might she have gently scraped off her old lover, rewarding me with the fulfillment of my most precious fantasy? But I remembered her reassurances and could not bring myself to believe that this was other than a horrible irony. I was sick at heart. More horrific yet, might I have died at the point of transit? My heart ached at the thought of Justine2 crying over her lover’s death yet again. And what were the odds that Justine2 would emerge in this reality at all?
Feeling ill, I drew a deep breath and something else kicked in. On one level, it didn’t feel like I’d gone anywhere. It was more like I’d been there all along, my attention having taken an excursion on which I’d seen many wondrous things—then returned to this place along the same path by which it had left. The air was sweeter, the smells more intense, their associations arousing feelings long forgotten. Most likely, it was merely a matter of a body and brain that properly processed oxygen, producing a wave of euphoria that softened the impact of black thoughts.
A long-admired, if not emulated, philosophy of “play it like it lays” came to mind. I nodded to the boy in the mirror, “At least, I don’t have to let you down again.” But there was more. The germ of an idea was sprouting into consciousness, a slender reed that I might
grasp against the dark tide of desperation and panic. A large proportion of my fantasy life had prepared for precisely this impossible moment. I apparently had another lifetime to deal with my own issues, and the time for action was now. Bolting for the rest-room had likely been advisable. Meeting the young JJ with soaking trousers would have not done at all.
I went back out to see JJ chatting conspiratorially with a girl in a tight sweater and flared skirt. Dressed for easy access, I thought with cheap amusement, for I could also recognize Shirley, my official date. Shirley had a magnificent run as the high-school ‘slut’ ahead of her. If you happened not to know Shirley’s reputation, she would be more than happy to tell you all about it. Which, of course, was precisely why I had asked her to the dance, where I was destined to meet, instead, with the fatal attraction of the century. A hormonal rush surged in response to my thoughts. Lord, I’d forgotten how easily triggered it was. No mystery that adolescents are so desperate.
I stopped by an ice-filled tub and pulled up a NeHi Orange. I fumbled stupidly with the cap until I comprehended that twist-off technology had not yet arrived, going back in search of a bottle opener. There was no doubt that this was a very material world, and all that I knew indicated that there was nothing for it except to make the best, to use what I had. Soon, I would have to put my mind to outlining my “future memories” as completely as possible, study what spin I could put on matters affecting me without disrupting the larger configuration of the “map.”
Shirley soon moved off with Gene, the slightly older boy with whom I knew she wanted to rendezvous, him having a car and all. The love of my lifetime came off like a little girl against the angel I was missing, for whom I yearned with every aching breath. But my growing concept calmed my labored breathing as I proffered her preferred soft drink to the girl who, in an other life at least, was destined to become the mother of my Justine.