The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  We then went for our long-remembered walk down to the pier, and I went directly to work on the agenda. With no illusions of exactly replicating how this had gone down, I carefully, so as not to frighten, used my unnatural advantage to neatly push all of her buttons as I remembered them. It helped that she, thirty years down the line, had confessed all that I hadn’t known about her initially. The boy who had taken her away in that world, and would here if things remained equal, had been a smooth talker. But he would play hell competing with this, if he even ever got to meet her.

  With accelerating confidence, I shamelessly demonstrated seemingly paranormal guesses about her family background, then about her own young pain that bordered on the suicidal, to take things deeper and heavier. Could she become as enticing to me as memory had served? Perhaps more so, for reasons I was only beginning to understand. I gently took her hand and looked at it, knowing it was destined for painful arthritis, and felt an unexpected tenderness.

  That I was going to make love to her had never been in question. With one kiss I was hard as a rock, and I knew that she was similarly aroused, as well as being completely snowed. The only glitch was rediscovering the zipper hidden along the left hip of her slacks. The ease of the conquest detracted not at all. I knew only too well that my real challenges were far ahead.

  When I slipped off her panties and went down on her, an act almost beyond her fourteen-year-old imagination, the issue was decided. When she still had the presence of mind to insist on a condom, I was able to oblige. I had come armed for a date with the notorious Shirley, after all. Donning the rubber in the dark, it was awfully easy for one’s thumbnail to puncture the tip… Along with foreknowledge of her typical responses, I found enough control of this body to get her a couple of presentable orgasms before I climaxed. More, I experienced the almost-forgotten novelty of staying erect for a while afterward!

  The rest was love talk and a long stroll on the graveled shoreline, discussing “what does this mean and what will we do now?” Cosmic concerns of teenagers, just as if they possessed some command of a larger picture. During all the years that I’d run this fantasy tape in my head, I’d mused about the presumed issue of intellectual disparity in the imaginary situation. It proved to be no large problem. Placed in the reality, my own mode of relating turned out to have an unexpected resemblance to that of my earlier self.

  I had fancied that any unavoidable whiff of maturity would make me all the more attractive, but it was something other that emerged to serve me. Adolescent mannerisms were reclaimed with an unflattering ease, seeming not at all unnatural. Excessively emboldened, I attempted a tentative brush with the actuality underlying our situation. Her comprehension quickly faded.

  “Do I sound flipped out?” She was looking at me with growing skepticism. “You know, crazy, ‘lost all my marbles’?” I had taken care to guard my speech against unknown usages, such as overly casual profanity, but less obvious anachronisms kept slipping out.

  “That’s a new one on me. No, but, isn’t learning from the mistakes of the past about all you can do with it? You could be right on the mark about all the ‘why-fors,’ but it’s another one of those things … interesting, but in the grand scheme of things, means nothing to the average person. It ‘won’t put food on the table,’ you know? Worrying about time going all haywire wouldn’t be a big deal to most people. They have to live their everyday lives; don’t have time or interest.”

  Here it came. I could hear the socially correct, self-censorial mechanism kicking in. I was not about to engage in debate that would only provide ignorant adolescent detractors, and flatly stupid adults, with something to chew on. I could only faintly recall, from the time before, the issue of an argument related to the permissible limits of speculation.

  Having no life as yet, I’d read Voltaire’s Candide and inappropriately wanted to share my no-doubt poorly understood discovery. That my excursion into a larger world of ideas had not been well received by another teenager was understandable. Less excusable had been a similar reaction from a teacher; a sad commentary on our crippling background. I remembered thinking that it was a matter of JJ being childish. Of course, I had managed to overlook the small detail that we were children.

  She chattered on about our capacity to choose the general perspective from which we would live our lives. Looking ahead with joy and optimism or looking back with sadness and regret. Her song of praise for the eternal present did not strike me with the tedium that it might have in that other life. The difference was within myself. I had seen the days when this little summer flower would wilt—when she would have to struggle every day to look forward. My foreknowledge of that inevitable daily struggle was excruciating.

  That her opinionated harangues were incompatible with my selective recollections was perhaps due to the softening of their edges. They were studiedly tractable, seeking to not offend. She was such a sweet girl. Not yet burned and brutalized by life, intimidated into stultifying her mind, she was still more interested in the content of ideas than in questioning whether she could allow herself to have them. I had arrived in her life sufficiently early—there was yet time!

  “… no matter how much you want to, you can’t go back and change a thing. Yesterday is past. Tomorrow may never come. There is only today, which is a gift. That’s why we call it ‘the present.’ I know it sounds real square, but that’s the main thing to me.” Remaining quiet, I just smiled at her little lecture. I made a promise to myself that I would never condescend or abuse the gift of compliance.

  I knew that she yearned for a college education that her stepparents would not be able to afford, so I assured her that mine could send us both. Not quite the truth; they could help start both of us, especially if she were the mother of the grandchild I’d never given them in the other world. I’d have to work, but you can’t have everything. In this life, I might become a science fiction writer, predicting the shape of the future with uncanny accuracy. I almost got the hysterical giggles, imagining the publication of Labor Rep from Dimension J!

  For various reasons, I’d determined that we should not ride home with Gene and Shirley. As it happened, we missed all rides. Returning to the shelter house, we found ourselves alone. I was satisfied, calculating that setting us up for being out all night just about cinched what would have to follow. My original plan in motion, another had been growing inside it like a psychic embryo.

  True enough, in this time and place, I could mechanic an early pregnancy to guarantee a marriage. Overall, I had every intention of forcing us from the conventional assumptions as soon as possible, for this society did not trouble to police strata it had declared marginal. To this end, I would not eschew any device, even very cheap tricks. But there was so much more.

  We stood again on the pier, amidst the wavelets and ducks, as in a San Antonio park during our melancholy adult reunion—in a world we were never now to know. The die was cast. By whatever point the worlds had divided, a replay leading me to Justine2 in the fashion I remembered would have been patently hopeless, even were I sufficiently masochistic to walk that path.

  Even at that moment, a spermatozoon of destiny might be wiggling toward a branch in the paths. I could relax and reflect on my alternate course. Many things might change now, the friends and lovers to come might not have to hurt so much, or die so young. Why, maybe that boy Tony could live as well! I remembered him as a young man of deep commitment. Might he not fight for peace, rather than die for a government that would just be playing a god-damned game?

  Soon I must confront the beloved dead: my parents, my mother most of all. While this prospect gave me serious pause, it was inevitable. And only she, even if with some careful handling, might believe and accept what I was. I’d been her late-life “miracle child,” after all. To her I’d always been so special. I needed some friend to whom I could talk, and no one else in this whole wide world … but then, my thoughts smashed head-on into something I’d overlooked. The plan was derivative of a long-t
erm fantasy, ignoring the realities that had given it flesh.

  ————————

  THE BELOVED DEAD OF AN OTHER LIFE WERE YET LIVING HERE!

  I had no direct memory of them and did not feel inclined to inflict myself on them in their waning years. Incongruously, I remembered the root of my fantasy of going to Fort Lauderdale. Tony and I had talked about such a prospect for months after drooling over Connie Francis and Yvette Mimieaux in Where the Boys Are. This boy I had become was a different person, a different life. Could I really befriend Marjorie, or make up anything to her and Katie?

  I especially feared the thought of watching Katie die in a few years, if Justine2 had been correct about her connection to Linda. Linda was another responsibility I had to work into this agenda, damn it. All that I’d speculated about the burning memories of other lives proved to be a fearful truth. Bedrock reality was going to be my life with JJ, yet these beloved ghosts who would haunt the corners of my vision could never be safely relegated to the realm of “imagination.”

  And the one who had to be reckoned with, who had shamefully only then occurred to me as an existing reality, was the elder Justine. My knees weakened at words echoing from The Fan-Shaped Destiny, “… to the one who, of all the kith and kindred who remain alive, perhaps cared the most.”

  I looked at JJ, who smiled at me uncertainly, though full of trust. But all I could see was the color of her hair, and a band of shadow across her eyes like the punker makeup of a possible future. Then it was that I knew what had generated the anomaly of a nostalgia-haunted life, which even in adolescence, had my eyes firmly fixed on the past. I knew why I would have to have fixated on JJ in any world. It was so simple, her resemblance not alone to a daughter yet unborn, but to her grandmother. To the woman bound naked on the carpet of the Hôtel Place de L’Odéon. Madeleine Leiris, my true, original Justine.

  Like golden bells, a goddess had laughed out loud at me. I was startled by a memory that had no continuity with the life I’d known. Not recalled since, since a time before, I recognized the classic profile of the sun goddess, smirking derisively as she had turned back to her camera. It had been I who was fairly humiliated by an arrogant young photographer, not the model in the familiar old leather straps who had glanced up at me accusingly.

  It was her still—it had always been her. Most of the time, when the path divides, when your essential life is defined, the meaning of your existence is determined—it is by little things you see only in hindsight. Sometimes not.

  I thought, maybe for the first time in my life, really thought about the consequences of what I was about to do. I remembered the warning from The Fan-Shaped Destiny, “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 could have no idea what acting to involve Justine in our lives would mean. That she would ever do ill to me or her granddaughter was inconceivable—even while I had come to understand that nothing would stop a Justine until she had what she wanted—in any world. Life with any Justine is little but surprises, and I suspected that, at least in my personal life, I would enjoy precious little pretense of precognition. This life would quickly become radically different from that which I remembered.

  I’d modified my original scheme to try to make myself the father of JJ’s child, who might be destined to become the vehicle of Justine’s metem. But even as I had woven the threads to become the father of Justine2, the simplest chronology of the lifelines had eluded me. How could I wait here now and ignore her, compound my original sins, even if I couldn’t remember them firsthand—sins for which I had only just begged forgiveness?

  A fond smile at the thoughts of her incorrigibility was wiped from my lips as I comprehended that the Justine of this world and time had less than a decade to live. The black realization caused my throat to seize up and my guts to tremble. I had no choice; I had to be with her, perhaps even to love her. It mattered naught that she was old and would soon be ill; it was still her inside.

  I’d been recently graced with the dubious blessings of many moments of truth, but this was the mother of them all. Back flew a shattering recollection that had mystified me on the pier in Gulfport. Oh God, were our possible futures, as well as our alternate pasts, all potentially visible to us, with no means of distinction? Had I heard the echo of a heartbroken plea from this life I was entering? I looked once more at JJ. She smiled again, tentatively, sensing my pain. I tried to give a reassuring look and placed my hand over hers. With her grandmother’s help, she would be a good mother; all would be well.

  But it rang in my head like a cry from hell, “It’s still me inside!” I averted my eyes, my glance freezing on the power plant across the lake, brightly lit in gay blue, yellow, and red. Could there have been more not admitted in the manuscript, lied about by omission in shame and sadness? In whichever worlds she might have pleaded those terrible words, I swore to God that she would never utter them again, never be left to cry alone in the dark.

  I watched the lights and fought against the buffeting of the emotional storm. In my mind’s eye, they became the lights of Lake Charles, driving through the Southern night with young Justine by my side, wishing that we could just drive on forever. They became the lights that shone even now, this very night, from her home far away outside Atlanta. Then I utterly lost it, thinking of our home, as it had been since she had happily run up the steps to display her lights for me. In this world, as in that other, she had grown old there; sitting high up under its tin roof, hoping and praying for me. Could I again betray the cheerful hope celebrated by those little lights, knowing now the meaning of her horror of the Rhinebeck darkness?

  A poet said, “In dreams begin responsibilities,” and the bludgeoning of this truth did not end. So young she must have been before, running gaily up a street in the Village, alongside vanishing carriages and the growing horde of horseless carriages, scanning the second stories of the brownstones through the snowy night, searching for the more modest Christmas lights to guide her home. Would this remain my penance, to chase her through the times and worlds, waiting for her to grow up, or waiting to die to be with her once more?

  ————————

  I STOOD, PHYSICALLY, IN THE DEFINING FANTASY OF A LIFETIME, finding that it was only “the goal in sight again.” I did love JJ, how could I not? I must always have seen Justine in her, and now I believed she might even become the mother of Justine2. But, as the Lakota would say, my destiny was “written in the spirit world.” I could do naught but the necessary to reach her, to be with her again.

  “Am I going to get clobbered.” JJ fretted. “I’m going to be grounded, probably forever!” It must have been very late, there were no more cars on the road over the dam.

  “Forever is a long time,” I answered. I was still watching the lights, darkness hiding the tears streaming down my cheeks. “Until forever, I can run over and you can crawl out your bedroom window most any night. Dig it?” She laughed with delight, due to yet another of my “prescient” insights of her habits. “Anyway, it’ll give you plenty of time to write your grandmother about us. She’ll approve of us, and your stepmother won’t defy her.”

  “Wait up! Is this for laughs? Far be it from me to pop off about my own grandmother”—she had turned incredulous—”but she is one strange old bird. Why would you think she’d even care?”

  “You can believe that she cares, baby. Perhaps she’s the one … the one who cares the most.” My voice caught as I spoke the fatal words. “Tell her I said exactly that.” Would I ever know what it meant that, in every time, somewhere along every path, she was waiting for me? No turning back, I rushed on.

  “Tell her that Wamba, that’s W-a-m-b-a, has sent her friend back where he belongs. Trust me that will mean something to her. She’ll know what to do and want to meet me, and she’ll help us. Here, I’ll write it down.” I fished for a pen, then laughed sha
kily at myself when I realized that I didn’t yet habitually carry one. Then I found it, nonetheless.

  When I looked up, I was alone, my abrupt solitude easily confirmed as the pier was well lit in the green of mercury vapor. It was on the lake, yet it wasn’t. Behind the pier lay a broad expanse of cement, the gravel we had walked on throughout the evening escaping like dreams that flee even as we grasp for them. It was still that long-remembered night, but not. The first hint of dawn was lightening the eastern sky behind the condos.

  Now what was that? I wondered stupidly. What was that all about? For a fleeting instant, in a scene more surrealistic than familiar, a young boy reached to embrace a girl from a darker time. She had become the real-world incarnation of the angel he would never forget, from a strange waking dream, the lady with the flaming hair whom he knew had somehow been with him always.

  The moment passed, and all was again familiar, but would have been a descent into hell had I not been able to immediately focus on the silhouette in the very short skirt. She sat, legs crossed, elbow on knee, and casually smoking a cigarette as she watched me from the shelter house. I wanted to run up the pier, but quickly decided to accommodate a more abused cardiovascular, and walked up instead.

  “Hey.” At her flat punker greeting, I wondered whether another monosyllabic monotone had ever resonated as sweetly. “I was afraid,” she gasped, as I roughly seized her up in my arms, “you were gonna make me come after you again.”

  Assuming she spoke of the other world, I shuddered, “Never. Never again, not even in death!”

  “Scary, aw-hunh?” she rubbed in the obvious comparison. I had no bitch with the chastisement. I knew even more certainly that I would accept anything in lieu of the pain of separation. I collapsed down beside her in a surprised exhaustion. I was amazed that the entire night had passed in our reality.