The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (38 page)

She nodded and slipped on her heels. It was evident that her unconscious impulse had not been toward the admitted sex appeal
as she moved with what appeared a well-trained grace to get the big leather portfolio. She placed it on the bed and opened
it, lifting out the distilled manuscript as though from among sacred relics.

“You … he,” she corrected, “thought that ‘coinkydinks’ are like lines of force in a field. Like metal shavings arranged around
a magnet? As if, more like gravity? Effects of reciprocal histories interfering, or whatnot. Anytime you perceive them, or
have the feeling of
déjà vu,
worlds have touched, or branched, on a scale visible in our lives, to say the least.”

She laid a finger beside the ring in her nose. “These should not be seen as isolated little happenings. They’re woven into
the fabric of everything!” With that startlingly familiar pronouncement, she handed me the manuscript.

FRAGMENTS FROM
THE FAN-SHAPED DESTINY

August, 1945

… and so, I have been telling you thatI have lived before. Not as a serial trans-migration in a one-and-only universe, not
in a “past” life, but the
same
one—in an otherworld, one which lies along another branch in the paths of my fan-shaped destiny.
I believe that all of us may, now and again, slip just a bit off our well-beaten path. That is, unconsciously follow an adjacent
route so nearly identical, on an incremental scale, as to remain beneath notice. From time to time, we might discover a discrepancy,
which we promptly censor out as resulting from false memory.

Memories, and where they are stored, appear to be the ties which bind us to one actuality as opposed to another. This business
of waking up at a prior moment and proceeding on a divergent course, a course determined in part by a substantial retention
of my otherworldly memories, I believe that I could repeat almost never. Such a being would increasingly be set adrift from
any particular actuality. I’ve had more than enough difficulty in sorting out the Brownie snapshots of moments from only two
histories.

This is, perchance, the meaning of the waters of forgetfulness—that “draught of long oblivion” which the Poet tells us must
be quaffed by all souls whom the gods have destined to descend again to the land of the living. The same general rule probably
applies to transports to future or parallel moments. The human survival trait of clear causal reasoning would decree that
memory should be so washed.

But every rule has its exceptions. I can never know, and consequently cannot try to tell you, how it came about that I woke
up in Ella Baxter’s boardinghouse in Augusta on that morning in 1907. It was as if a dirty film had been stripped away from
the world. As if all things, visual and auditory, had been suddenly infused with an unearthly luminance. The colors on the
quilt at my feet were abnormally vivid and made harmony. Why, I was almost afraid to lift my head or move, for fear it would
all fade. You see, I had gone to sleep the night before, sunken in drink in my London rooms, in the deep December of 1940.
At first, I thought I must have perished in that night’s bombing, by just saying the hell with it and going to bed, rather
than sanely hunkering down in the shelters.

Mayhap I did. When that war raged again, here in my second-chance world, I wanted to go over, but that was not to be. Had
the destruction been terrible as I remembered from that other night, or merely in my own, eccentric, deranged eye? Could I
comb the details of the Blitzkrieg destruction … but time for seeking answers has run out, again.

Remember that my dual, memory-conscious nicks-of-time spring from a single trunk, prior to that bright morning in Augusta.
I have sometimes thought that the twisting and changing of a child’s imageries and daydreams, by my
faerie
god-mother Piny,
may have left me loosely connected to material reality. Late in the day, I believe once more, as I did before the gray walls
of adulthood reared about me, that those eternal-in-the-now-hence-always-memory-lasting visions were no more dreams than these
lives I have known. Surely, they must have been vestibules to otherworlds that my young grandmother opened, in love and pity,
for another little soul who, like herself, found ordinary life unbearable.

So many questions still. Is physical death requisite for a complete transport to another history? I know for a certain fact
that one may double back and re-enter upon a path, consequently commencing an other life, at a point other than at birth.
And what is the nature of these points, these bits of destiny action? While boarding at Ella’s place, I had now and then gazed
hypnotically at candles, trying to read my future. This would produce some strange moments, slits that I might have been able
to return through later, which is as may be.

Conversely, symmetry would seem to deny death a monopoly on exits. If so, what would be left behind by a departing Self? Or
is that entity coterminous with each diversified one of our selves, and all that’s involved is a matter of sharpening an alternate
focus? Where I’m hopefully bound, I may learn some more of the answers. My friend awaits me on the bank of the Cavally River,
but there may first be an unavoidable bath in the Lethe.

It may be objected that I but faintly touched on this in my books. I’ve had the privilege of bughouse psychic therapies, thank
you, a point that begs no further enlargement. I hinted at what I could.
⁷²
Though the message is there, for those who have eyes, I constrained myself to publishers’ and readers’ expectations. The
result was that my effort on witchcraft was hardly an illuminating contribution to any science of the paranormal.

What effects there have been on my writing are nothing I can shout about. I found it almost impossible to keep to a proper
chronology and, every so often, advanced patently contradictory views. Imagine the retention within one’s mind of similar
yet not identical sets of memories. Throw enough time on a given series or episode, and it becomes difficult to recall which
of its variants applies.

More important was that over time, I would say by about age forty, the otherworldly memories had dimmed, as do all old recollections.
After a point, I would no longer be able readily to assign a given recollection between the slightly differing sequences.
The most intense remained as warnings and did influence my conduct. They were as astral dreams, burned into my mind, yet of
a different order of reality. Logically, I could not always square them with what the facts of this life assured me to be
real, but neither dared I ignore them. They accused me, as has the voice of my dead brother.

The most terrible was that of standing at the window after the sirens had gone up over blacked-out London. As I had before
and would again, I’d run away to war, leaving behind a Katie who would follow after me “no more forevermore forever” because
she was no more, her blithe spirit extinguished in drink. Back at home were Lyman and Mink, doing each other to death because
I wouldn’t take her hand when Mink’s need had been greatest. Lyman was no excuse for me, quite the contrary. Following after
Katie like a puppy, he’d been more than ready to do her better, had only the bad old bear been willing to let her go.

I had been drinking alone in my rooms on the last Sunday in December. A moonless night had fallen early. The propaganda had
assured us that the hellish attacks of the autumn had abated. The Battle of Britain would essentially be over but some had
thought otherwise. Ambassador Kennedy, persuaded that England was finished, had resigned and returned home. I’d heard that
more Londoners than usual had retired to the deep shelters that evening. What had prompted their foreboding? Had angels walked
among them to spread the warning? Had they flown in across the Channel to raise the alarm that the Valkyries were aloft? If
so, none had been inclined to waste his energies on this patently lost soul.

The sky had been completely dark by six o’clock. Even before the sirens had gone up in the southwest, I had heard the droning
of the Heinkels’ and Junkers’ engines, also seemingly far more than customary. In minutes, the first bombs had fallen on South-wark,
across the Thames. The beams of the kettle lights sought the intruders. I watched the gaudy white sparklers of the incendiaries
and felt the reverberating thuds from the high explosive bombs. As the frequency of the strikes increased, there had begun
a curious lull from the anti-aircraft guns. I remember wondering if the city’s defenses were failing when, at a quarter of
seven, the electricity had gone off.

————————

Indeed, “the lamps had gone out all over Europe,” but Justine’s little candle had been snuffed out long before. Somewhere
in France, even as I had listened to the wail of the sirens that London evening, the boots of the Reich might have been slogging
over her muddy grave. If my life had ended, I knew that it had been because I’d lost my link with the divine. God help me,
I had brought her to that,
thrown her away
! Thrown up the corporeal incarnation of the archetype I’d conjured with Piny’s
aid, the lady-in-chains who had always been there for me.

I had inherited her from the hand of Aleister Crowley in 1919, after he’d branded his Star into her fair hide and then abandoned her.
Taking her to Europe, I’d displayed her, only succeeding in handling her carelessly—as had my mentor, the “Great Beast,” might
he burn alongside me in hell! Poised and pretty as a picture, alert and sensitive, and a slave to her senses, she had been
an instant hit in the Paris of the Lost Generation. When I later let her slip away at Evenos, I temporized, persuading myself
that she had found her element. The dissolute intelligentsia of that world had been absorbed with the figure and philosophy
of the “divine Marquis.” Noted
artistes
had helped to outfit Justine with all the accoutrements to scandalize and titillate a
bored society.

She had been initiated by the cultists of sexual slavery, at a restored castle by the sea, overlooking the haunted hills and
ravines of ancient Var. Katie and I had watched with voyeuristic delight from the balcony above the banquet hall while Justine,
wearing only her high silver collar, had been put through her paces. We would talk most of the night of how the girl had registered.
Trembling with anticipation, she had been led to the enclosure at the top of the spiral iron staircase—the strong room, where
her cries, both of pain and pleasure, had no place to go except the dark depths of the Mediterranean.

If I had made her a plaything, Katie had loved her, and I believe that it had been reciprocated. She had not wanted me to
leave Justine in France, no matter how the girl herself had cleaved to that dark destiny. Months had passed, then a year and
more, while I’d begun to realize that I had made a terrible mistake. The books I had dreamed would lie unwritten, just as
I would never even try to get to Samarkand, or any of the other fabulous places that I had wanted to see.

Without the lady-in-chains who forever had been linked to my writing, without my Muse, all that had been without meaning.
Katie had done her best, albeit through her own pain, to be as Justine to me. But Katie had always been a different kind of
love, a different sort of warmth. She would submit to my childish demands, endure to coddle my cloying needs. But she could
never inspire me to be more than a hack reporter. As for myself, I think that I had never even known how to love.

We had resolved to find Justine, but already sin piled upon sin. Around Halloween of 1925, I’d met Marjorie Worthington at
a card party. We had been about to sail for Europe, and Mink would join us in April. Another applicant to fill the chains
and bracelets of Justine. And Mink, so oddly prim in many ways, had been decidedly unsuited to the role. Before Marjorie could
reach us, it had come to light that Justine had killed herself—after I had gone away. At that given moment, far too late,
I made an unseemly grasp at “repentance.” On my knees, I had abased myself before God and half of Paris, begging, screaming,
pleading to be forgiven. Then it was that Katie, unbeknownst even to herself, had truly begun to hate me. While she could
not touch my self-loathing, the hell I had made for myself had only just begun.

Mink had arrived, and in time we returned to New York. For the next several years, in a pact of misfortune and common upset,
we sought surcease in sex, dope, and liquor. Contacts I had had, with such as Morand and Ford Madox Ford, I let wither. Even
as I would use her body, I pushed Mink’s devoted spirit away, while her husband had pined hopelessly after tragic Katie. Our
gay foursome, lionized by Village life as colorful nonconformism in the mode of Byron and the Shelleys, had been to me dark,
and sad, and empty.

————————

A dozen more years of a deepening hell on Earth would drag by, of which I’ve told some and will yet relate a bit more. But
now you will understand why that last night had arrived as an almost welcome apocalypse. The orange incandescence had spread
about the entire horizon, but the sight recalled me only to the color of her hair. How to make you understand what I mean?
When a man attempts suicide, it means he still wants something. There’s still an avenue of escape. But total despair means
there is no hope, no way out. I had never attempted to follow Justine from that farthest circle of hell. Instead, I guzzled
another slug from the bottle on the nightstand. Sinking faster, I thought there probably would be little need to expedite
things. Blood red clouds silhouetted the barrage balloons above the city, while the glowing pyres below illuminated the dome
of St. Paul’s. The bomb strikes had increased to every few seconds.

Had I prayed for oblivion, it certainly would not have been upon those brave souls down below, but for the end of my pathetic
world. The final thought I can remember, from that sodden night, may have been the fortuitous trigger, when I imagined myself
illumined with a sort of mystical, if not maudlin, exaltation. Concocted from the imagination of hindsight? It glowed benignly,
like the precisely right quantity of hashish, the third pipe of opium, the perfect balance of cocaine and heroin. And at the
center of it was to wonder if, far away in the deep heavens, millions of light-years from that dying city, there might not
be a new constellation;the Lady-In-Chains, whom the angels called Justine.