The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (39 page)

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M
Y EYES WOULD HAVE CLOUDED
anyway at that heartrending plaint; the recognition, far too late in life, of what had really mattered. This would have been
the case even had I regarded it all as sheer delusion, a fantasy fueled by Willie’s futile desire to escape—to war, to a happier
past, whenever. Yet her eyes told me that I knew very well at what I was looking. I sought mere relief through technical analysis,
through levity. The meaning behind the source was at hand, but all the vastness of space-time could not dispel the tragedy
of that one damned soul.

I read a bit further and then looked at Justine
²
with fresh esteem as I comprehended the remarkable meaning of the meandering, sinuous narrative. I was genuinely impressed
that she had been able to distill the contents of Willie’s thoughts and notes at all. The characterizations in Justine’s
Testament
had been generous. While she had labored for years, painstakingly separating apples from oranges and rendering a semblance
of coherent chronology, uncertainties still abounded.

More memory returned when she was able to point out, from time to time, a possible resolution, or make a clarification. But
a man who claimed not two sequential lives but simply the same life in two versions had compiled the original notes. I jest:
there was nothing “simple” about it, because, to a great degree, he had
written it that way
—as though both histories had occurred simultaneously!

“If he hadn’t killed himself, he should have been shot for
this,
” I grumbled as I saw what he had done. That amused even Justine
^2.
Making matters still worse were marginal indications that he believed himself aware of yet other realities, branching from
or converging with those about which he had written.

Willie Seabrook had been riding a wilder nightmare than his friend Ward, called “Jimmy,” could have imagined. From early on
it became evident that Greene’s book had not been purely fiction. The only fiction, in fact, seemed to be that covering Willie’s
life to about age twenty-three, when they had worked together on the
Atlanta Journal.

It had been during many drunken nights in Atlanta, no doubt, that Willie had spilled out to Jimmy nothing less than a future
history. Rather, a history of the futures of choices
not
made from the time the paths had branched a few years earlier. At the least, Greene had chronicled particular matters on
which Willie had been fixated, from a future he imagined that he recalled. If he had heard the full scope of events relating
to Justine, Katie, and the others, Greene had chosen not to believe it all or otherwise to remain silent.

“We have all the time in the world to ponder the literary implications,” said Justine
^2,
“but you maybe gotta take a rain-check on a few. Some questions may always be mysteries”—she smiled benignly—”like, in ‘real
life’?”

Justine
²
eventually put on some clothes, and we relocated to the front porch. We continued to examine
The Fan-Shaped Destiny,
the lost manuscript of William Seabrook, which the other Justine had lovingly pieced together from the thread of narration
running through the notes from the barn experiments. We read through the night, ate and slept, and kept on reading, welcoming
each other’s arms and hearts being there when the going sometimes got too heavy.

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I awoke the next morning to an other life. Certainly it took a while to believe that it was real, that I was actually twenty-one
years old again on a bright sunny morning in Augusta, Georgia, with my whole life in front of me. But I soon found out that
I could stump my toe against it, and Dr. Johnson’s criterion for the refutation of Berkeley came into play: If it can kick
back, it exists! The horses of Augusta could most definitely kick and, while enraptured with these shapes of the past, freshly
painted with new life, mine almost ended abruptly. The half dozen of the Augustan gentry, who were thus far playing with the
new horseless toys, had not yet learned to steer them very well.

Persuaded that the world wasn’t going to go away, I would finger my godawful stiff collar in an unaccustomed warmth and wonder
if my memories would vanish. Had it all been a dream? Was it possible to experience a nightmare that subjectively seemed to
have been over thirty years long? But recollection faded only to the degree one would “normally” expect. Gingerly exploring
my baffling hodgepodge of acquired recollections, I acutely watched everything about me with a sort of puzzled fascination.

Simply put, it was life. No angels came about to lecture me on lessons I should be drawing. They weren’t about to let me into
heaven anyway and, as I saw it, I had had my time in hell. Buds were bursting, doves came. I continued to feel good and happy,
though I felt slightly scornful about it. I suspected that such a state of grace was too good to be true—turning earth into
heaven, myself into a sort of saint,
a patent absurdity
. “Elation” is a pleasant, agreeable term in common parlance, but in
cold psychiatric jargon, not nearly so pretty.

It simply
was
; no choice but to let it ride. The only stupid, decent thing to do seemed to be to make the best of it, while
trying to puzzle out what had happened. And, by ding! I was also going to
live
. Scraping together a couple of hundred dollars,
I set about to realize an unfulfilled dream and embarked steerage to Cherbourg, to tramp about Europe. Geneva, my final destination,
was a natural enough place for a young man of Lutheran background to consult with the great scientific minds.

I do not suggest that, in the year that followed, the construction of a working hypothesis was all that was on my mind. I
reckoned that Madeleine, my Justine-to-be, was yet a little girl in pinafores and plaited hair, behooving me to leave her
to complain that her play-like cowboys should not be rescuing her from the Apaches so promptly. It would be the better portion
of a decade before she was ready for me. A young Atlantan society miss would be waiting in the nearer present. While I was
resolved that the errors of the time before were not to be repeated, I had a lot of regrets over joys not tasted to get out
of my system.

Nineteen-ought-eight was a great year for science and philosophy. Freud and Jung had commenced their collaboration, and the
Geneva campus was all abuzz about Minkowski’s recent address presenting the broad implications of Einstein’s relativity. All
this was grist for my mill but, even knowing how the English engineer Dunne would try to adapt this to explain time and the
mind, my purpose was frustrated by my own uninitiate aptitudes. The construction of even a simple, relativity-based model
was too difficult without the proper mathematical foundation. Holding what we Americans called “degrees” back then, in philosophy,
I got ambitious and wrote a post-graduate paper on time, space, and causality.

Working at a nearby table in the library was a young Russian
emigre
who looked older than his years. He had been so impressed
by the goings-on in the physical sciences, since the discovery of the electron a few years earlier, that he had taken time
out from his revolution to write a book detailing the philosophical implications. I was able to converse with him in French,
holding long confabs and even debates. I was initially surprised to discover that his thoroughgoing Marxian materialism did
not at all blind him to the complexities of questions of reality. His point was that solipsistic denial of the material arises
in every generation, always purporting to be a new discovery, the result of “recent science.” It would be precisely through
plumbing the “inexhaustibility” of the material, as he called it, that the true magnitude of the cosmos and wealth of worlds
would be discovered.

“Your countrymen, as I have met them, have no strong faith in the existence of even a single past.” He had pursed his lips
and looked down his nose like a stuffy professor demanding “what else can you show me?” “The Amerikansk lives in a sort of
ahistorical millennial revelation, a viewpoint more appropriate either to the savage or, dialectically, to the citizen of
a truly revolutionary regime. Your vision of reciprocal histories, if it does not deny the material, then raises it to the
nth degree. The Great Powers will not find such an annihilation of Berkeley to be in their interests, unless so presented
that the oppressed classes embrace it as an escapist dream.” I queried him further, seeking light on things from a psychoanalytic
standpoint, so to speak. “I do not so speak,” he snorted.

He felt that better than a century would elapse before science attained a level even to reasonably discuss the problems obsessing
me. In the meantime, he applied Dr. Johnson’s criterion with a vengeance, most particularly where the Czar was concerned,
and argued to me that the various solipsisms were invariably devices of the ruling classes. I had suddenly realized, by way
of the grapevine telegraph, that the young man was none other than the mysterious Lenin, already something of a fable to the
avantgarde. While he sounded genuinely fond of me, in spite of what he called my “insufferably decadent bourgeois mentality,”
it began occurring to me—for the first time—thatthe better part of discretion would be to keep my distance from such a man
of his own destiny.

Debating with the Russian had given me fresh insight as to how problematical are the mechanisms of change. While nominally
minimizing the role of the individual, he himself was destined to become a pivotal figure in history. Were it indeed possible
inadvertently to effect the course of major events, then most of the collateral chains would follow suit, and, Q.E.D., I might
no longer possess even limited foreknowledge. Not to mention changing the assumptions which I could anticipate in my loved
ones. Radical change might erase my predictable influence. 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
retreated into my studies, and the Russian soon moved on in the conduct of his own affairs.
⁷³

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While loafing about Washington Square, the time before, I had played with the ancient Chinese book known as
The Changes of
Chou
. In Geneva, I speculated upon the body of lore that alleged it could open the gate to other-worlds. Dismissed by most
scholars as superstition from the days of the dark Han dynasty, that interpretation obviously begged for review by me. I learned
of a related tome by a nobleman who had written fiction, a despised genre in China, under the name of Ts’ui Pen.

Said to be bound in yellow silk, it sounded as though it might be the template for a work which the romance novelist Chambers
had fictionalized in horrific terms. I’ve always preferred the company of Dostoevsky, Poe, and the like. Chambers penned some
lines that will be granite when most of our current so-called literature is tinsel dust. I first read his work as a boy. In this life of mine, I have found it as very disturbing as the legendary play it purports to descry. Chambers understood
that the image of a man haunting Paris streets, expecting to discover the lifeless body of his love, was more ghastly than
any of the demons he had conjured from other dimensions. No matter how many times I read it, I’ve always wept for him.
⁷⁴

The yellow volume’s reported concept held a beguiling similarity to those branching paths of destiny whose traces I sought.
My search was to no avail, save stimulating the interest of others, which is as may be. While searching the European libraries,
however, I was able to study the source materials of Michelet, which had seduced my ancestor Peter Boehler into tinkering
with witchcraft. Over time, I swung far from science and philosophy into the dervish direction of the occult.
⁷⁵

While some aspects of this life have seemed peculiarly difficult to abrogate, other changes have unleashed a cascade of chaos.
I have to report that a given material actuality is as little malleable to the heart’s desire as any other. Fate has often
been temperamental, if not downright pettish. My impotence to avert the death of my brother Charlie gave me pause that haunts
me yet. I have dwelt past the point of distraction on what further subtle changes I might have wrought.

Does the cosmos exact payment-in-kind for a change in the balance? Was Charlie’s life the price for one saved? It is true
that the night the deal was done, regarding my separation from Katie, was also the first occasion that I found myself literally
unable to stop drinking. Did I take her otherworldly destiny upon myself or was my sickness the spawn of my own divided soul?
Will yet another have to pay the price for a living Justine?

The years went by while I implemented a plan, its early phases remaining similar to the progression of events I had already
known. Experience indicated that caution might be moderated. I ran away to war, as the script required, but earlier and with
a volunteer military organization from which I could return when desired. While I did swallow some chlorine gas at Verdun,
I was able to come back in the posture of a visionary idealist and hero, never having come as near to death as with our army
the time before.

In the fullness of time, I was on hand in New York to meet Justine, comfortably before Crowley had her in his power to mistreat her.
I never told Katie the entire story, lest she think me shell-shocked, but I was able to exercise a moral or immoral suasion,
holding that we had something like a sacred obligation to the young girl. I already knew that when Katie met her, she would
fall in love with her as well.

But the very resilience of the timeline that allowed the small modifications brought me near to panic, when Justine continued,
repeatedly, to be almost preternaturally drawn in Crowley’s direction. That business, in the summer of 1918, when Sarg pimped
her to A.C. for his river trip, was the worst. It felt as though malignant spirits were at work to confound my best efforts
toward her survival. I did not cast A.C. as the villain of what could be her hapless melodrama, knowing only too well what
a vile world it really was and what a flawed, all-too-human pig I knew myself to be, but I saw him as an essential link. He
keyed the situation, supplied its texture. I am writing about a man whom I liked, and who liked me; of whom I had made a friend,
but would have killed, if necessary, just to break the chain. It is consequently impossible to expect me to be objective or
fair.