by Paul Pipkin
“Not so many as to get bent about. Most would converge again within days or weeks. The paths of higher probability do seem, like, more resistant than we imagined? Some, like the world of the two-pearl ring, existed separately for months. But the fact that JJ remembers that one proves it spilled into ours as well. For sure, divergent histories don’t prevent worlds from becoming similar enough to converge.”
So what was critical? What constituted the triggering moment? I recapitulated how Dr. Benford had speculated on the necessary conditions for a message across time that could alter a history.
“He wrote of some minimum impulse necessary to trigger a paradox. When some critical volume of space-time was tweaked, then the disturbance would propagate outward instantaneously, with enough amplitude to matter. You could change the past regularly as long as you didn’t create paradoxes with large amplitude. He visualized a multiverse with a single wave function, scattering into new states of being as paradoxes formed inside it like kernels of ideas.”
“C’est ça; he said it!” Justine2 beamed. “I was sure it had to be your determination to make the dream come true that I’d prepared in you. Or not. Persuading JJ to direct events toward me by invoking Wamba’s name and quoting from the manuscript? No, wait. You did do a bang-up job. Hearing that would’ve had me all over the situation like stink. I would’ve come to you immediately, and no interference would’ve been brooked, however well intentioned. Emmerde! You launched serious preemptive stink.”
She sobered, “What truly appalls me is that it required even that much to keep your appearance in her life from escaping my attention. I must’ve been as dreadfully neglectful of JJ as I was of my little Justine.”
“Don’t you start beating yourself up, now. You couldn’t have monitored every boy in your granddaughter’s life from a thousand miles away if you’d tried. She was deliciously promiscuous—sufficient for me to fall in love with her. So, we theorize that turning her thoughts toward contacting you was the ‘bit of destiny action,’ a quantum flash in JJ’s brain, at a moment when it could have gone either way?”
“Where it went both ways. We are living on a path where it was all disregarded. On that other path, she wrote the letter or made the call.” I questioned her certitude, and she looked exasperated. “Oh, men! Like, intuition? When I saw the commitment in your eyes, I knew that it was done. You didn’t doubt the dream so much, back in that day. You knew it was of something terribly real,” as she tried to cite Priestley’s critique of Dunne, her voice betrayed her continuing pain, “as real as a dead child.”
“What reconsolidated the parts of my self to its respective worlds,” I persisted, “and at the critical moments?” I thought about her partial transit in the barn, that I feared might have become consummated had I not been there to pull against the dream-loop drawing her to 1945—finally only accelerating the anamnesis that confirmed her metem. I compared the particulars to my temporary transit, which she believed was also associated with a dream-loop.
For the first time, I saw in Justine2 something approaching humility. “You, you make me feel … so proud; outing with it, like it’s from your heart and you haven’t even thought it through. If love doesn’t ‘steer the stars,’ at least we know it affects quantum events.”
“Come again?”
She dropped her eyes, and said quietly, “The manuscript? What were your last thoughts of that horrid night in London, and the way you said good-bye after the second time around? It was all about what rated more than anything.”
She looked up and there was so much love in her eyes that it was frightening. “O, je t’aime! When you found your moment of truth, the closest me was here. It was easier to reach across quanta of space-time than across a thousand miles. Besides, though you couldn’t know it, I would’ve tried to send you away, near the end of that life, when I was sick and it got very bad.”
“Vanity, thy name is woman.” I shook my head. “You couldn’t have kept me away. And how do you explain the dovetailing of our agendas, played out separately at both ends? More, how do these, ostensibly romantic, obsessions move inevitably toward the creation of a world for our child?”
“Lookit, a child’s world begins with the love of a man and woman for each other? Hey, that’s a radical idea! If you demand a causal answer for that, we’d better oughta start going to church again, like we did back in the twenties? How is courtesy of synchronicity, but that magic word gives no answer as to why.”
Thus, I discovered my passion to exchange realities to have been like one of Wamba’s masks, putting another face on the burning need to tie up the loose ends from less-spectacular escapes. Willie had contemplated his future at Lausanne and then struggled for acceptance when it came true, again. Had a limping specter in a snowy Moscow night signaled a sequential past of which I would become aware only decades later?
As I move toward the end of this account, my curious tendency to lapse into a god-awful Victorian-Edwardian writing style is no longer lost on me. This conceit, from which Willie and his contemporaries had laboriously worked to free themselves, is utterly incompatible with my late-century education and reading interests. I now know why this, long a mystery to others and myself, has been with me always. It must be like Justine2’s integrated speech.
Later that quiet morning, I studied the sleeping girl. What silly insecurity it had been, feeling too old, in the hands of someone with a century of combined life experience. In Justine2, I could also see the old woman. It now shamed me to realize that, at The Château in 1969, I probably could not have loved her. That early in this life, I had been too young and stupid. How many wonderful partners do we miss, poisoned by petty differences and presumed imperfections that mean nothing, not a thing?
I could also see the image of the woman, as if from the forties, whose aspect I had glimpsed in San Antonio, in the strange light of the hotel bar. I suspected that was as Willie had last seen her near the end.
The loveliness that had torn his heart out as she walked away for that last time is, I have come to believe, a memory rather than a construction. The Justines are all one, and all beautiful. I felt redeemed that, in extremis, I had reached for her in whichever form. I recalled the rest of Borges’s verse, which I’d not been able or ready to remember in the predawn rain on Wednesday:
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“… AND THE SHEER CONTEMPLATION OF THAT FACE … will be, for the rejected, an Inferno, and, for the elected, Paradise.”
I acknowledged Justine as my wife in the old shelter house at the lake. In light of the above, such a ceremony may seem something of a redundancy, but it fulfilled, for her, an ambition of terrifying longevity and endless frustrations. My friends were in attendance, and I could see her looking them over, evaluating whether she might already know some of them. I hoped there were also others, if only in spirit, those lost to meet again.
My glance kept straying to certain spots on the floor, to an old light fixture, down toward the pier. At a table outside, not far away, a young couple was picnicking with their children. Had my transit really not been Justine2’s plan? What was the most likely meaning of the phrase she’d murmured as I attempted regression?
“Papa Legba, ouvrí barrière pour ce, ma p’tite …” (“… open wide the gate for this, my little one? My darling?”)
I thought about a young family from another world. “God bless them,” I whispered, “God bless our little girl.” Justine2 gripped my arm so hard that she might have drawn blood, smiling through tears that our friends thought were the emotion of the moment. I trust her absolutely—to be Justine. Will she eventually tell me what she meant by what I can pull back?
Going on to San Antonio to pick up Kong, we made an effort to at least talk with her mother. Justine2 had immediately presented us as a unit, the subject not open for discussion, and damned near got the door slammed in our faces for our trouble. Relenting, JJ apprehensively avoided the circumstances with a depressing litany of her arthritis and other m
aladies.
“… pressing on nerves running to my legs, causing me to be unsteady on my feet most of the time. Balance is important, one problem on each side,” she laughed nervously. “I’m considering acupuncture, but haven’t worked up the courage yet.”
In my mind, I had yet to come to terms with JJ as the little grandmother before me. I did not want to lose the hot young babe. Not a “good girl,” but a real girl, in nineties’ eyes, and it didn’t help matters that I remembered making love to that young girl so “recently”!
As JJ was thanking me for what she took to be empathetic concern, Justine2 rudely interrupted with an ill-advised attempt to discuss the past; specifically, my relationship with JJ. Her mother listened with a tense politeness, then responded with her typical clichés, some tending toward the cryptic.
“All we can do is to love well those whom we love.” That seemed to exhaust her capacity for the personal, and JJ waxed philosophical. “Our lives are little drops of water, but they can come together into a mighty ‘river of good.’ No one person can have a big effect on such a large world, good or bad, but together we can—and it’s up to us to make sure we’re in the right river.”
She looked at me, and I confess to uncertainty as to what was being discussed. Stupidly, that “right river” intrigued me sufficiently to venture into the conversation. I recalled to her our shared anomalies, the ring, the parking lot, my long-ago dreams. After a while, she sighed.
“You’ve explained much of this to me before. These things were a very long time ago, and I’ve never had your capacity to remember everything I’ve ever heard or was said to me. My memory continues to diminish about almost everything except the trivial stuff. It sometimes seems that the more trivial, the more likely I am to retain it. The more important it is, especially if it has to do with me personally, the less likely. It’s frustrating.
“You know that I’ve never been the type to pick apart a conversation, or dream, to identify and understand every nuance of it. Not only do I not have the capacity to do it; I don’t have the interest. Folding in upon myself and obsessively analyzing everything I’ve done, or what has been done to me, is not something I care to do. I’m not in denial about it—I can hear you saying that already,” she tossed at Justine.
“You have to have some basic understanding of the past, but once you reach a level you can live with—mine is obviously considerably shallower than yours—you have to move on and hope to make better choices in the future. I don’t dismiss the depth of your involvement.” Her green eyes scanned both Justine2 and me meaningfully, though without their old sparkle. “I just don’t think it’s very healthy.
“Is this the deal with the dream you once told me about? Where you and I got together and had a family? You saw this ‘daughter’ in a dream that was so vivid you had to accept it as truth because you’d had other dreams that proved true. Is that right?” I was speechless. What could I say? If it were anything, it was indeed “the deal with the dream”!
“You found yourself a daughter”—with a wounded resignation—”and you did it by taking mine.” She turned to Justine2. “I have many regrets about the choices and decisions I’ve made in my past, like most people. But I must accept them and the results they produced.” I saw Justine2’s nose ring flash as her nostrils began to flare. “I have to accept that what’s done cannot be changed.” I just shook my head, hoping the girl would not feel called to revisit past sins in painful detail.
“What do you expect to accomplish by understanding all the ‘why-fors’? Inner peace? That would be a healthy goal. What would you be able to change if you did completely understand every nuance? How would it change how you live the rest of your life? No matter how much you ‘pick the scab’ to see what’s underneath, it will not change anything or help anyone.” I had to wonder again at the levels being trolled. Justine2 might have every right to be getting hot.
“I think, as one grows older, one has to move past the ‘what-ifs’ of life. You can strangle on them, like your great-grandmother. Justine, she could be such a pill. I guess you would say, she projected everything. She imagined that a great-grandchild she’d never know, or have to relate to, would somehow carry on for her. She became such an obsessive mentality that, if she were here today, would say …”
“Screw you. I’ve got my own issues!” Snarling dismissal of the lecture, with its possible innuendoes, the bitchy side of Justine2’s antecedent self surprised me. I registered her mother’s shock—at the faintly discernible, doubtless remotely familiar, taint of the old Bronx. Being JJ, she had the eerie moment cached, in its appropriate ‘box,’ in record time.
“Oh, sweetie, you are so much like her! It was only right for you to be her heir. But please, don’t carry on the pain and bitterness. I do believe that it is inescapable human nature to have regrets about the past—wrong actions, missed chances, bad decisions.” I was feeling sure veiled contrition was being proffered. Then she continued, plainly including me.
“You can expend all your mental and emotional energy on regret. Life will pass you by, and that would be a tragedy. Longing for the chance to relive the past makes us miserable. It keeps us from doing what we were put here to do. Please don’t keep on hurting yourself.
“You, like others who should know better”—JJ gave me a scathing look—”are caught like a fly in the spiderweb of your past, unable to get free and fly away. You are struggling hard, and that’s good. But you do need to fly away from that web.”
JJ turned to me and, rescinding the hateful expression, sighed. “Most of us don’t change a lot as we get older, do we? We only become ourselves squared to the second power, both the good aspects and the bad. That’s like the truism that you can’t change another person. Life is full of hard lessons, don’t you think? If we’re lucky, we get past much of this by midlife. That makes the rest of the trip a bit easier.”
Taking umbrage at the remarks directed at me, Justine2 was on her feet, fists on hips, and tapping her foot. A quick appraisal was that her stance bespoke combat. I made hurried farewells as I swept her out the door, ignoring her protests. It was not that I doubted this weathered JJ’s ability to hold her own with “Madeleine.” I had seen, even within the limitations of her vision, why she was yet the pivot—the rock around which the radicals, the exotics like Justine2 and me, must orbit.
I had begun to understand how all my efforts to illumine the times I had shared with JJ had come to nothing. It was natural enough for Justine2 to feel, like a member of any younger generation, that all possible histories supported her harsh judgments of her mother. Not so easily anticipated was that, far from bestowing additional perspective on JJ’s fatalistic acceptance, the dark, early-century Bohemian beneath would only reinforce the nineties gal!
JJ would never see the reflections of Justine2 or Madeleine in her mirror. Still, I had come to suspect that our little red hen, with her pithy clichés, might have been the conciliator for many contentious inner voices. But Justine2 was not going to be having much of that, not for a long, long time.
The superimposition of her antecedent self on a tacky mother-daughter spat did not much concern me. If at all, it was in the shape of uncertainty as to how the stresses might affect the still-fresh integration of personas in Justine2.
Rather, it was JJ’s metaphor about ourselves, “squared to the second power,” that moved me out of there. The slight prescience recalled Justine and Marjorie’s déjà vu across the worlds. I was not in the market for any new paranormal ramifications for at least a while.
“That went well! A world where you and her could stay together and raise children would be some kinda shit to see,” Justine2 spat, as I encouraged her across the lawn. “What-ev-er!” When I admonished her for not being gentler, she snapped with only a bit of sadness, “She’ll either own it or she won’t.”
“Maybe in another life,” I remarked without thinking, and we looked at each other and laughed at the unexpected entendre. The bottom line was t
hat we could do little about JJ’s misery in this life. I thought again of a young family at a lake. Such things tend to become family stories, and our legends shape us. I suggested that telling her children about the night that the good angel had visited their father might convince even the teller that she, too, deserved happiness.
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“THE GOOD ANGEL? AS IF!”
Justine2 was almost rolling on the ground.
“Or fairy godmother. Heaven help you; you know that’s what it will turn into in the telling. Don’t forget that we’ve cast JJ in a pivotal role in this cosmic soap opera. She just wanted a normal life with everything neatly ordered in little boxes, and look what we’ve done to her!
“In this world she gave birth to her grandmother, who then took up with JJ’s teenage lover, who was the metem of her grandfather. Over there, she’s going to mate with her grandfather to give birth to her own mother. Unless, of course, that JJ is somehow really you; in which case, things might get just a little bit complicated. She deserves better from the cosmos than being merely a brood cow for The Lost Generation of Space-Time!”
“It’s that male mind thing you have going on. Even at your best, you don’t easily get it. What has haunted JJ’s entire life? It’s her mother—the legacy embodied in her name. When you and she bring little Justine into that world, you can believe she will know all has been made right, tout va bien; most of what’s wrong for her goes away.” She caught me watching, absent her mother in her face, the morphing of her sarcasm into that sweet sadness of hers. “It’s a woman-thing, you wouldn’t understand.”
All defensive levity aside, I wondered whether my little joke had been so far off the mark after all. Could it be that metem, with greater or lesser degrees of recall, may serve as the “guardian angels” of their genetic lineage? Might they be guided among the branching paths by following the lines of their human progeny? Could there be literal truth when those about to depart have sometimes promised to be with us forever?