The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (13 page)

Unclear whether she was referring to Willie or me, I tried to balance between both. “He tried to understate the sentimentality
in his writing, but he couldn’t conceal it. You know, I think there’s something of that nature at the core of most tough guys.”

She snapped back from the pictures. “Take long for you to learn that?” she demanded, in an interesting twist.

“Lifetimes, babe,”—I laughed—”many incarnations.”

She picked at the edges of my draft pages. “Cool with me scanning this?” I nodded assent. Of course, it served my purpose
to show her anything she wanted to see.

I asked what impressions she’d gathered from the chapter roughs. “It’s all—about convergence,” she mused. “Things, like, come
together around your own story.” I didn’t quite see that last part, and wondered at her psychological “take” on what I might
be saying about myself.

“I’m not sure that I want to let a psych grad know the full extent of my madness, yet.” I knew full well what impossible convergence
I’d sought. Poor Linda had summed it up not long before she died. She’d said that what heaven must be is a second chance.

The green eyes were again burning disconcertingly far into me. “It’s much cheaper to call ideas insane than process them.”
So, I talked some more about my writing project with her, how I had, in fact, been tempted to represent myself as a professional
writer or an academic researcher. But it somehow seemed important for all of it to be the truth. I supposed that might have
been a reaction to years of writing political propaganda and legal arguments.

I decided to go some distance into Linda and our mutual history. Our shared sexual proclivities and social views had, in the
years when we’d started out, been sufficiently radical as to make us voluntary outcasts from most parts of society. We’d lived
in an “us against the world” mode for so long that, finally and in extremity, there was no help to be had from anyone who
hadn’t walked in our shoes.

Carneys, scooter-trash, radicals, sadomasochists—when you live outside the prescribed limits, the truth about our loving society
is a simple one. It would just as soon see you dead, encouraging the nihilism that feeds self-destruction. In the case of
Linda’s gentle soul, it had succeeded.

I feared that I might go so far as to antagonize Justine when I got wound up and began to express my contempt for the “helping
professions,” with their narrow little judgments. Kong, the malamute, reacted as he typically did to my tension or anger by
setting up a melancholy complaint in his amusing “ahroo-har” malamute-talk. I laughingly welcomed the interruption to my habitual
pontification, and we stopped to play with him.

I told her Kong’s history, how this huge dog had been able to ride about South Texas on a platform on the back of a Harley-Davidson,
behind an equally big guy. How Big Richard had left him with me years before, when he had gone out to get himself killed.
Kong had turned out to be the best dog I ever had, and had been Linda’s constant companion in the years while she helped society
annihilate her.

I stroked his huge old head and remarked fondly, “This doggie goes to heaven.”

I heard Justine stifle a sob and was dismayed to find her eyes brimming with tears. Sitting there semiclad, the tough little
punker dissolved as she clutched her knuckles to her lips, looking again toward the picture of Linda in her better days. She
had been beautiful in the costume from her slave girl act, based on a belly-dance outfit but with a lot of leather and chains.
“What’s up with that—not loving you?” she blurted out. I was nonplussed. How had I given that misconception?

“I was the love of Linda’s life,” I said quietly. “Insofar as I failed her, I bear the karma.” Why I chose to voice those
misgivings, I’d no idea. It seemed that another face of Justine had cut in. Drawing herself up, she looked
stately,
even in her effective nudity. She gently touched Linda’s picture, as if in benediction.

“Not her, bless her heart,” she said softly, then her voice changed, “Her!” She nodded to the adjacent frame, holding an old
high-school picture of JJ and the touching little verses I’d given her when we’d parted for the second time. “She’s the one
in the beginning of your story, yea?”

I confirmed the likeness of JJ, some thirty years earlier. Now, an emotional expression like Justine’s can be taken in a very
ego-enhancing light, and I confess to interpreting it just that way. Graciousness being indicated, I offered the first event
as being in the nature of the times, before the youth upsurge of the sixties. Conformity had been the iron rule and “good
girls” were supposed to regiment their conduct to what “everybody thinks.”

Moving right along past the actual facts: Texas girls back then having a major streak of healthy old country promiscuity;
“everybody” referencing only the toadies, who could be counted on for knee-jerk bigotry while the rest remained silent; “thinking”
being anomalous in Texas… I passed on any commentary I might have otherwise issued on JJ’s weakness of character. Much as
I had loved her all my life, naturally I had some mixed feelings.

I moved to embrace Justine as she stood up from behind the desk. The oversize robe was falling off her, and she let it drop.
She clung to my neck, pressing herself against me. Dared I hope? But finally, she wrote off her emotionality to a sugar drop
and decided that she was craving an omelet. I didn’t have everything necessary, so we drove a few blocks through the decomposing
south side to a Denny’s on I-35.

I talked of my working-class family, of the old Stockyards district in Fort Worth. Now a tourist trap like the Riverwalk,
back then it had been a little piece of Chicago dropped deep in the heart of Texas. Like JJ’s folks, my parents had moved
up, after World War II, but remained attuned to their roots. My white hide denotes no bleeding-heart champion of the underdog.
I simply would have been no more at home among the aging white yuppies and “High-spanics” of San Antonio’s northern suburbs
than would most of my
Tejano
neighbors.

————————

S
HE WAS A SENSATION
to the morning people in the restaurant, wearing her suit from the previous evening. The barbaric jewelry again brought out
that whiff of indeterminate origins. It reminded me of the early-century notion that the Irish and Finns were the same red-haired
warriors known as far away as Mongolia.

She put my regular waitress, Criselda, at a loss, too. Cris, a personal friend as well, was accustomed to seeing me either
alone, or with
Tejanas
in my own age bracket. She served me a leer with the coffee.
“¿Eh, cabrón?”
She shrugged suggestively toward Justine, who then addressed her politely
en Español
and turned out to be a good deal more bilingual than I am. You should understand; that, in itself, continued to be uncommon
among Anglos in San Antonio. More so than in, say, Laredo.

We talked more of the possible origins of the branching worlds. Many of the s-f geeks wanted to see Murray Leinster as a lone
genius in 1934. He’d illustrated, in pretty much Einsteinian terms, a scenario in which a space-time catastrophe fractured
the continuum.

A mathematics professor and his students were brought into contact with fragments of worlds where they found, among others:
a triumphant Confederacy; Norsemen colonizing America; a still-flourishing Roman Empire. Leinster’s Professor Minott had instructed
his students that the future is only a coordinate—that imagining a unitary destination would be as silly as denying spatial
directions other than the cardinal points. An indefinite number of futures await, dependent on which forks in time are taken.
I recalled, for Justine, how language from certain passages had turned out remindful of Seabrook’s accounts of Wamba:

… between the forks of the road I choose not only between two sets of landmarks I could encounter, but between two sets of
events… so those paths in the future may lead to two entirely different fates… with more or less absence of deliberation we
choose among them.
⁵⁰

“Now, that smells even stronger of Seabrook than Heinlein’s piece, especially considering that Willie had laid down the same
thing, only four years before, in
Jungle Ways.
Leinster went on to argue that the roads not taken being equally real, and similar choices being confronted at every
past
moment, then we must of necessity be surrounded by an overabundance of alternate realities.

“After exploring the titillating possibilities of the temporarily accessible worlds, Leinster gave Minott’s nauseatingly conformist
kiddos the opportunity to return home. He had the good doctor greet the very idea of going back to being a mathematics professor
with savage laughter!

“At the end, an unprepossessing young lass named Lucy turned out to be the only one of the brats who had the right stuff.
She failed to see the homely wisdom of continuing to be a wallflower for her classmates, who’d established their ability to
carry their postadolescent social strictures with them, even unto carboniferous jungles! She wound up dashing back across
the closing time fracture to join Minott, hopeful of becoming an empress in a new world.”

“Lucy, you go, girl!” Justine snickered.

Eventually, I had to arrive at the always-curious Philip K. Dick.

She raised an eyebrow. “As if adjectivally too mild?” Yes, it’s true; Phil Dick was as crazy as the proverbial dog. But he
was a genius nonetheless, and I had no confidence that I could, any longer, afford any sense of sane superiority.

“
The Man in The High Castle
was post-Everett, but the texture kind of hearkened back to the earlier writers. More, the unique use of the
I Ching
as a method of transit between worlds brought Borges’s Chinese book to mind.

“There was something else that I couldn’t put my finger on at the time—something with the same quality as Norton’s phrase
‘every bit of destiny action.’” Dick, like H. Beam Piper, had claimed to have experienced alternate realities himself. My
own reading, of his later work and history, did not dispose me to argue against his distinction as one of the more unbalanced
minds of recent literature.

“Meds, which facilitated his penchant for the little brown girls on the streets of L.A.,
would
tend to alternate your realities! Out there, yea, but don’t dis him.” It seemed she had read about a prescient emergency
diagnosis that Dick performed on his own child, which went far to support his claim that something untoward had happened to
him. “No sicker than Poe, I’m sure.”

“You just can’t get away from the fact of the literary anomaly,” I contended, returning to my central obsession. “Everett’s
interpretation of ’56–’57 wasn’t widely popularized until the early seventies. Should we choose to see a possible progenitor,
in Feynman’s ‘many-histories,’ to explain the body of fiction during the fifties and sixties—Feynman only formalized his work
in 1940…”

I digressed, as I’m prone to do. I had found commentary expressing surprise that Everett seemed to have developed his theory
entirely from the Schrödinger viewpoint, without detectable influence from Feynman’s work. This despite both Feynman and Everett
having John Wheeler for their thesis supervisor at Princeton, and did Wheeler contribute very much… Justine was looking irritated,
so I got back on track.

“Much of the key material was being presented during the years 1938 to 1941, while Seabrook was concluding his studies of
the paranormal. Leinster had presented the earliest branching-paths story back in 1934. Then I found that Piper, de Camp,
and Pratt had credited Seabrook’s African material published in 1930 and 1931.

“These science fiction writers led me to Willie’s association with Wamba as the hidden literary source of the branching worlds.
Later, in 1940, Willie repeated the story of the Fan-Shaped Destiny in
Witchcraft.
A reviewer mentioned Wamba, the ‘handsome African priestess’ who believed that the future already exists in space-time, shaped
like a palm-leaf fan. He put it this way, ‘
Except for the fan,
by the way, this resembles the theory advanced by J.W. Dunne, the British scientist in
An Experiment with Time.
’
⁵¹

“Not to eviscerate a dead horse, but just how is it that, while a book reviewer of the forties could get the scientific facts
straight, supposed literary scholars of our time can’t? I remember another quotation, from Wamba’s mentor, whom Seabrook called
‘the Ogoun’:

————————

T
HERE WAS AN OLDER MAGIC
by which time is twisted backward, so that the forward magic becomes as if it had never been… as if it had all been a dream,
or a thing done by shadows, which are as if they had never been, and leave no trace when light appears.
⁵²

She gave a careless smile. “A lost magic by means of which you could go back and delete, so that a bad destiny would like,
become not? That is so totally
kewl!
”

“One way to put it. I don’t know if Seabrook would have shared my opinion that he reached his pinnacle there at that moment.
I even fancifully considered finding a way to get to Africa, to follow the trail of such a tradition. Later I read some recent
magazine articles on Côte d’Ivoire, ravaged by plague and growing civil strife. It sounds as though there is little left of
Wamba’s land other than ugliness and death.”

Then I moved on to aspects of his life and career, and to the temporal curiosities that had emerged during my reconstruction.
There were the frequent time displacements where the various sources, including Seabrook himself, couldn’t seem to remain
consistent. I told her of 1908, when Seabrook had left off tramping through Europe to study philosophy at the University of
Geneva. He never expanded on that, beyond one mention in his writings, despite being a sometimes-shameless self-promoter.

The stint at the Geneva campus was anomalous, utterly unlike Willie, a decided nonacademic. Given his degrees in philosophy,
a study of Kant was not odd in itself. But his production of a graduate paper on time, space, and causality was at variance
with a life not at all oriented toward scholarship. In the same breath, he spoke darkly of learning from the work of Jules
Michelet and other books, not in the curriculum at the University of Geneva. This image of the melding of the lore of ancient
and forbidden tomes with more recent science is, in American literature, almost solely the creation of H.P. Lovecraft. I wondered
if Seabrook, a Machen fan, might have also been into Lovecraft.