The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “How is it we weren’t rousted by the park cops?” In our time there was a curfew to keep drug deals at a minimum.

  She shrugged, “We were all—about staying quiet in the dark, and they went away.” Then she silently smoked another cigarette while I told my story of the temporary transit. Toward the end, Justine2 snickered, “She won’t gotta crawl out that window, much, before she gets knocked up.”

  So overwhelmed by what my memory told me I’d just experienced, I only then began to think through finding myself on the pier. “Was I acting all that out, walking through the scene?” Then a more embarrassing consideration, “Do you think he’ll remember his first time, or did I take that away from him?”

  “There’s a no-brainer,” she laughed. “I’d like to think that you experienced something even better.” She drew my hand beneath her skirt to feel the stickiness between her legs. “You found me delightful, I am way sure!”

  “He was here? His consciousness was consolidated in my present body?” Somehow, I’d not thought of that. God forbid that happened in every transit. Throwing the consciousness of an innocent into a body at life’s end was reprehensible. I thought of those instants in the transits when I felt superimposed with another, perhaps many others.

  “You should get down with that. And stop referring to yourself in the third person; it’s way weird! You’d better believe that I’ve been patiently listening, to ‘he’ this and ‘he’ that, all damned night. It’s one thing when you don’t remember being l’Autre, like with Willie’s experiences? But this is another wrinkle, and it’s seriously creepy. Everything that boy was, is still a major part of your self. Deep inside, you are all that. When you went back, you like freed it all up.” She was giving me a consoling rationale in conventional psychological terms.

  “But what did you say to him?” At her raised eyebrow, I corrected myself, “Or, say to me?”

  “Who you really are, and how to learn more. By ‘chance,’ I prepared you, for the thing you had going on back there, and it wasn’t hard. You were a bright kid, not resistant to ideas. My thing is, I liked you that way. I hope you let me see more of all that. Check it out. The memories you retrieved are stored there, not here.” She tapped my forehead.

  “To describe that someway improbable past to me, you had to first scan the memories from there, from the physical brain and nervous system that recorded them. What you’ve imprinted here, now, is a memory of memory. Say, that’s not even ‘your past’ now, it’s another world.”

  “You needn’t have wigged,” she mused. “That you could retrieve your own history was proof positive that the link with the here and now was in place.” Her Bronx accent and period speech were creeping back and mingling with the other.

  “You’d better oughta keep your heart open, believe you me. Be sure that you really and truly wanna help your self retain access to the locations where the memories of tonight are stored.” I looked at the comfortable seriousness in her eyes, seeing metaphor in the cosmetic feathering that had replaced the punker mask. As in her speech, she was coming close to complete integration. “You’d be barking up the wrong tree by shutting it down—for dread of losing me or the vertigo of balancing among the realities.”

  Understanding was growing in step with the breaking dawn. I remembered my thoughts and feelings just before being drawn back. Damned little psych major! Rely on Justine2 to turn the bottom line into an imperative that I learn to love myself as much as I loved her. She was looking at me with compassion, and the intimacy was near overwhelming. With her, there was little possibility of simple privacy, much less secrets.

  I touched her bare thigh. “What was it like, tonight?”

  She threw back her head in laughter, “Aw-hunh!”

  ————————

  “WE ALSO DISCOVER A NEW DIMENSION IN VOYEURISM! Nothing doing! I’m gonna torture you and make you wait on the story, till I can get you up by telling. But believe me when I say, these performance difficulties you’re always fretting do not appear to be a fixture of the physical organism.”

  “You were frightened, at first,” she went on, “but when I figured out to whom I was talking, I fixed that in a jif. You had already read enough science fiction to be down for it. Then you kept wandering around, playing with your beard, and wanting to look at everything, like you were stoned.

  “I had to keep coming after you; thought I was gonna have to sit on your face to keep your attention. You were mesmerized by the condominiums, so I tried to explain about condos and yuppies, MBAs, and BMWs. But when you took me to mean that yuppies all ride motorcycles, I told you that there are some things it’s better not to know!”

  Then she knocked off the comedy. “Yes, dearest, about the possible future, which is our past; the waste and the grief, the heartache, and the futility.” She went on in some detail, and it was hard to listen to, but I could tell that it had been as painful to deliver. Barely growing into a young man, he would always have been looking back, at what might have been. The most well-intentioned efforts of his time and place could not have addressed that. Without her preparation, he would have lived his life that way, too often sacrificing the joy of the moment, as had his counterpart who had grown into myself.

  I looked at the slab beneath my feet, holding her hand. “I wish someone had told me.” It was not a joke.

  With some emotion she continued, “You asked, if you did the things I advised, would you become the man I loved. I couldn’t look at you when I bade you not be concerned, that it would be a better life you would lead.” Her face was averted from me then, as well. “I told all I could remember you saying, about your friends’ destinies—how you might help them.”

  They had talked long into the night, while I had strolled with JJ, in that same deserted place. Our steps must have woven ghostly tapestries, crossing and recrossing as we’d walked and talked, “separated only by time.” She’d tutored him as to probable large events in the world, let him see a bit of the future, and how to relate to it. Of Willie, of Katie-Linda, of how to find her own other self and the manuscript in that snapshot of time. Unlike my handling of JJ, she had presented that last as an option to be used a few years later if things went badly in spite of everything.

  Then she had instructed him in what he thought he wanted most, how to win and hold JJ. She had talked seriously about what he would have to sacrifice, to what degree he must stop playing the rebel and pretend to be more sedate. But, being Justine2, she also advised him of the times for other methods, slight degrees of terror that would intimidate his competition, and the various “inappropriate” behaviors which at JJ’s age, time, and place would be taken as confirmation of true love.

  I rolled my tongue in my cheek, “Then again, some things never change.”

  “Bite me! Did I tell you wrong?”

  “Not exactly sticking to the high road, were you?”

  “You said the very same thing last night. How long ago did you hone that sardonic attitude into a primo defense mechanism? No, wait! Did you want her, muchly? If she was all that, you’d be, y’know, about any means necessary? Seduce her into behavior that would disgust the peers; you and she being seen as despicable by everyone, so fuckin’ what? You’d get her. You’d be taking her to a whole different world, pardon the pun, and this stupid town would be nothing but a bad dream.”

  “You’re sure I was paying close attention?”

  “I gave you a ‘pop quiz.’ I wasn’t a mean old schoolmarm, and I’m sure I don’t have your mother’s persuasive skills, so I bribed you,” she said snottily. “For another go betwixt my gams, I made you recite everything back.” God, I thought, I’d love to be a fly on the wall when that world’s Justine comes to “help.”

  Responding as to whether she was ever concerned that the exchange might be permanent: “Even getting it done, I could feel you were all about being back there. Though you were so up on me as to think it might be a good trade,” she bragged. “I believed it must connect with w
hat you had going on there, that I could feel time”—she shrugged—”or what-ev-er, running out.

  “So I said: Buy her if you could, or knock her up. Merde! Every worthless bastard in the world proclaims his desire for fatherhood, when all it’s about is to shackle a girl. Anyone ever give you a medal for being better?” She reflected, “Don’t worry, I told you it was only a Band-Aid; then it would be up to you, building a life that was something other than a brutal trap.”

  I was silent. The close dovetailing of her agenda with the one I had worked on JJ was eerie, in that I knew that mine had evolved even as it had been acted out. She turned her face away again, but her voice softened. She’d told him that they must have a little girl and name her Justine; that JJ’s grandmother would explain all later.

  He would have everything necessary, even be armed with the second chances foreknowledge would provide. It was chilling to hear her recount the warning that, if he ever abandoned them, he would only be able to wish he could go to hell to pay for it. The real horror, I’d now seen, had been the belief that I couldn’t make amends.

  “I asked you whether you’d had the dream in which the girl answers the door at your house. The look on your face said that you had. It also told me that the compact I made tonight was sealed, but to be sure I made you describe every detail. Then I warned that you must keep the old house, at least till the daughter is grown.”

  Justine2 seemed always to be two steps ahead of me. At my question, she turned and laid her hand on my chest. “My poor dear, you must be so tired.” She patiently pointed out that before the night when the worlds divided, his reality and mine were one. I thought I understood.

  “The dream set me on the path to my destiny, which, in turn, brought me to loop back and ‘recon-figure’ the events? The dream is vital?” This part was almost classic Dunnesian stuff.

  She spelled it out, as she had for him. “You must have the daughter, in the house, to go to the door one evening for whatever reason. Because up in your room, separated from you by only quanta of space-time, the still-younger boy that you were is watching through the dream.” I stared at her, speechless, as I recalled the final lines from The Fan-Shaped Destiny, “Somehow, we dream the worlds we live in …” I admitted that I had believed that to be only another colorful turn of phrase.

  “The last thing I said to you was, and I’m sorry, not about you, save indirectly. It was, I’m afraid, a personal indulgence only for myself.” Emotion rose in her speech, and it was the last time I was to hear that purely archaic style.

  “I asked you to do one last thing for me. That when you believed your wonderful life with JJ irreversible, when you recalled me only as a friendly ghost from a world of might’ve-been; on some lovely evening bring your little family to the lake, back here where it began … AND, REMEMBER ME TO HER.”

  ————————

  That last was delivered in broken sobs, and tough little Justine2 shook all over, burying her face in her hands. I pulled her against me and rocked her gently. “That was beautiful. You’ve accused me of being a wordsmith, but that was beautiful.” There were no appropriate words for this, but I was trying to tell her that I understood, God forgive me—I understood at last the broken heart of what had been going on! That child to be born to them was not about another life for her.

  “Could you possibly have been just a little bit more insensible?” she lashed out at me in her pain, but I didn’t mind. “Did you truly believe it was only about vehicles for our continuation, or healing the wounds that kept us separated across the void? Did you think you were the only one who had to make amends? Do you get it now?”

  I got it. Yes, I’ve been a pig, I told you that before. Old Justine’s original ambition, to become JJ, had been far more profound than Justine2 had been willing to admit, or would ever fully remember, or perhaps, than her antecedent self had consciously comprehended.

  Would she, or had she, achieved that in an other-world? Had it been a metem of Madeleine-Justine that would, once again, give birth to a lost daughter? The Justine who, due to whatever causes, had ended her young life in 1947? What I had hitherto thought was happening had never been her agenda for that situation. Nor, I suspected, thinking back on my dreams, had it really been mine.

  “Did you believe that, when you said it would be a better life that I would lead?” My unspoken question was obvious—whether it was a better man the boy would become. Justine2 was recovering her composure. “I don’t know.” She appraised me with flat honesty. “But one of you had to believe it.”

  “It wasn’t in the vein of a plan,” she went on. “I didn’t know what had to happen till tonight. I knew that the dream had been so important to you, it must affect us someway. Then, being confronted with you as you had been, made me remember the might’vebeens you spilled out at The Château.

  “When you pined to me about JJ years ago, when it was too late for you, or for me in that life—I do believe that framed my original notion.” She paused and chose her words carefully, “My late memories were mercifully vague. It was only tonight that I recalled the mambos prophesied that we could only help her when you weren’t always bailing out.”

  We walked down on the pier. The sequential colors of the sunrise, pink to gold to white, battled for control of the wavelets. As they clashed, my fatigued eyes interpreted them as a multitude of little warriors, literally slugging it out. I thought with amusement that quasi-schizophrenic poets might possibly see exactly the metaphors they employ. As a wave of the little light-beings danced near the pier, a swirling eddy spun them into a circle like the ritual dancers.

  “We did what had to be done, the only way it could have been done,” I offered quietly, my heart become so full I thought it would burst. “I know myself then, including the flip side of my early cynicism. I’d have done the right thing, simply because someone had finally told me why.” I watched the wavelets and the ducks, whose distant ancestors I’d listened to throughout the night.

  “Hey, this part is gonna take some getting used to. I could’ve lived with you being my father—though for now, I kinda think I like this better.” She playfully pinched me. “But I never thought of it in terms of you really starting to grow up!”

  XII

  Hindsight

  BY THE TIME WE AWOKE FROM SLEEPING AWAY THE day beneath the watchful vigil of the dolls, Justine2 and I had known each other for one week—as those around us reckon time. As space is measured, we had circumnavigated a large part of eastern North America. But between us, in another sense, we had spanned the apocalyptic twentieth century and touched other continents, not to mention bouncing off an alternate universe or two …

  Justine2 had, or would recover, actual memory of most of it. But in some world’s “darkest Africa,” I had lost my conscious memories. I remain skeptical that I shall ever recall the larger part of them. Maybe just as well. Perhaps the pain of the guilt that took lifetimes to unburden, acknowledged in bits and pieces and always too late, had become too great.

  Or maybe forgiving myself will reopen possibilities. I’ve thought that I’m beginning to recall the grinning countenance of Wamba, and hope someday to meet again she who was the best friend anyone could ever have. In any event, there are no longer any doubts that it is true.

  The mambos knew something, beyond simply the techniques they employed to assist Justine, directing her transit into metempsychosis to become her great-granddaughter. Through a network of the initiates, Wamba had sent the message to her sisters across the sea of something she recalled from another life—that she had sent her friend back where he belonged. Decades later they would meet the woman Justine, who was following after him.

  That part is no longer a great mystery to me; neither is their “clairvoyant” knowledge of our child. It seems so simple now. Much of precognition and retrocognition is revealed to be but “qubits” spilling across the times and worlds—a possible function of Polchinski’s mathematical “weak connection.” Perhaps someone ha
d merely recounted a strange dream—about a pretty spirit who would willingly have gone to hell in search of her prodigal love.

  It would be only vanity to seek a chain of causal explanations in a single universe. Ultimately, one had come among the voodoo women who knew of our story. To some other wandering soul, as yet unidentified, we owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude—and to a wise mambo who, living always in expectation of synchronistic events, had paused to listen closely. There was no divination by chicken entrails, or anything of the sort, just a knock on the door.

  There had been a critical moment that long-ago night on the darkened pier, a moment that made all the difference, which decisively divided the worlds. Certainly there had been innumerable variances during all those dark hours but, in Justine2’s view, none of them had produced a divergent timeline that could not eventually become again identical and converge, disappearing except for a lingering trace of strange memory.

  “Your undisputed artfulness, I am so sure, was in vain,” she had explained in her oddly integrated speech. “Like, in most of the paths branching off before the last moment, JJ was never reconciled to the weird hookup. You repressed and altered the event so as to make it compatible with the reality you knew.”

  I had to ruefully admit the probability. Beyond my first sight of JJ, my memories from that night were likely a selective sampling. Loving her could as easily have been combined with being in the arms of Justine2. The impact of that experience, involving revelations of our once and future selves, would certainly have sufficed to generate a lifetime obsession!

  My extreme sense of hurt over losing JJ would have been compounded by the loss of my magical friends; the red-haired angel, and perhaps glimpses of my other, older self, who had nodded to me in passing. I wondered at how many more mistaken worlds, as full of sadness as this we’d known, we had created before arriving at the present accommodation.