The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (3 page)

“Wolf makes no secret of his subjective motivation. He lost a young son who, after many reversals, had only begun to realize
his potential. No mystery there, Fred just wants to see his boy again, to see him smile and hear him laugh. Do I hear social
workers out there declaring him delusional? You know what they can kiss?”

She looked up abruptly at the unexpected vehemence with which I’d surprised and confused even myself, but I couldn’t interpret
what briefly sparked behind the dark band across her eyes. What the hell? I just went on about Wolf, quoting his remarkable
insight on the “complex-conjugate” waves, undulating back and forth across space-time:

“‘Without any discernment between the details of future events, without any attempt to clarify where, what, when, et cetera,
these events occur, the feedback… is from all of the future events. This results in the sense of destiny.’”
²
While she had seemed to turn and listen closer, I was still afraid of losing her. Switching gears, I resolved upon another
conversational gambit.

I still didn’t know whether Leiris was a given name or surname. “Do you know you have the name of a famous French poet?” She
looked up with that curious, startled smile again, seemingly her mode with certain questions about her personal self.

“Mother’s birth name. I’ve reapplied it.” The explanation of her appropriation of a traditional name derailed her further,
dismissing a despised stepfather with a string of choice obscenities. “Dead matrilineal, yea?” she snickered.

Once initiated, her patter was nervous, nonstop, and only quasi-comprehensible. I wanted to get a word in edgewise, to tell
her about the connection with Seabrook, hoping to segue from there into bondage. My attention wandered from a description
of a prior encounter:

“… so it’s a thing where I’m like from outta town, and this dude was like, ‘yea, cool,’ and I was like,
‘kewl,’
and he was like, ‘yea.’ So, we gotta put a wrap on this.” I was roused from a benumbed trance by her hand on my wrist. “Hey,
so I’m outta here,” she announced directly. “Like, your digits? As if, we could hang later?”

We agreed that we would both be at Dr. John Cramer’s panel the next day, but as she was leaving town a few hours later, there
would be precious little time to “hang.” I held up my end, giving her my card with its 800 number, but my heart was sinking
as she left.

I sighed as I watched her stop in the lobby to talk with a sinewy blond kid who appeared to have been waiting. I say kid;
he really looked a bit older than the rest of her group. At least he wasn’t the type you often see with a drop-dead babe;
some skinny little ratlike thing in oversize clothes, turned-around cap, scraggly whiskers, and eyes slightly less intelligent
than my malamute’s. I reined in my thoughts.

All obvious insecurities aside, I’d been to enough conventions, labor, political, et cetera, to know that the chances against
a liaison increase geometrically with every day after the opening. Expecting to score off a meeting this late in the game
was pretty remote under the best of conditions.

The blow-off was depressing nonetheless. I was irritated at the interruption of my game plan at a critical phase. I kicked
myself for babbling my obsessions and delaying initiation of my agenda for too long. I considered leaving, calculating the
price of drinks involved in hanging around for nothing. Even before then, I had been familiar with the convenient fantasy
of the improbable pickup—a choice rationale for continuing to drink in bars.

————————

B
UT
I
KEPT ON SITTING THERE,
watching her as she rode up the first long flight of the escalator. She turned slightly and looked back down at the bar, but
the black eye mask hid her expression. Moving slowly away from me, as someone on the deck of a departing ship recedes from
a lonely watcher on the shore, she held her clasped fingers to her lips in an attitude that looked like, well, like
longing.
On the second flight, she turned away and folded her arms about her middle, head lowered. I watched her until she was out
of sight.

Man, I grieved after she’d disappeared, that’s so desperate, it’s pathetic! I knew nothing whatsoever about her, whose room
she was going to, or anything at all about her situation. I ordered another Scotch and moped further.

I didn’t think I looked too bad for a half century, enough thinning hair to presentably wear long, tied back in the fashion
of the courthouse lawyers I dealt with. I’d arrived at an all-purpose costume, sport jacket with collarless shirt and boots,
which served for most meetings and after hours as well. My welltrimmed beard could pass muster for business in informal South
Texas, and I fancied myself interesting, inclusive of mixing with younger people.

Reviewing my conversation, around the panel and afterward, I was satisfied that I had come off exquisitely boring. And face
it. Unless that young a girl has a proclivity for older men to begin with, nothing is going to be enough. Unless it’s a money
deal, a thing I never had to rely on when younger and refused to do now, even on the rare occasions that I had it to spend.
I thought about the blond boy and just couldn’t find the probabilities to see this thing other than as a blow-off.

But I couldn’t bear to murder hope when I was startled to recognize her coming back down. It took a second because she’d lost
the black eye mask, and her makeup generally seemed more conventional. You could hardly say her appearance was muted, though.
She’d changed into one of those two-piece suit-things with padded shoulders, otherwise closely molded to her alluring little
shape. Her skirt was very short, and bare legs had deliciously come into fashion that summer.

On her left thigh, like a garter, she wore some sort of dark band. Her half-open jacket suggested that the heavy-looking silver
chain she had coiled around her neck draped across her breasts inside it. The chain had a barbaric look, which complemented
her silver bracelets and contrasted with the modern suit. All that, crowned with the pyrotechnic hair now brushed out and
spilling in waves over her shoulders, turned out stunning. Heads began to turn while she was still a story and a half above.

Blond Muscles, who was still waiting, scurried for her as she reached floor level. He appeared to comment uncertainly on her
outfit, sickening me as always with those of my gender who are so fearfully insecure as to actively resist a woman looking
her best. Her back to my view, her shape was further accentuated as she planted her high heels apart and gestured, palm upward,
clearly explaining herself.
Oh babe,
I thought,
any male who doesn’t like
that
is due no explanation.

They were far too distant for me to hear anything, yet I was glued to the tableau, chiefly to the curves of her ass and the
fierce cut of her leg muscles. The back of her other hand lay, elbow crooked, against her hip, fingers spread to accentuate
still another odd pose. Her posture was reminiscent of something that eluded me, and I wondered at her eclectic combination
of mannerisms.

She ceased gesturing and laid her hand placatingly on the young man’s chest. Yes, it’s true; I’d reached the point that it
built my ego when I could so much as get a girl like her to sit down with me! The blond’s broad shoulders seemed to sag, as
with disappointment, and the girl with the spiked hair entered the scene, taking her arm, and drawing her toward the clique
of young Goths.

She recoiled into a rigid stance, ankles together, clenched fists against her hips, in obvious anger. What I saw next I could
hardly believe, when she actually stamped her foot. Then, as if in unbelievably slow motion, she turned and strode purposefully,
high heels clicking, toward the bar.

The young man had turned red in the face, but it was Spiked Hair who ran after, catching her at the entrance to the bar area.
I still couldn’t hear what was being said, but her annoyed dismissal was audible to the whole room, “Bite me, twice!” The
other woman stared with disbelief as she came ahead, tossing her hair, and perched on the stool she had vacated earlier, next
to
me
at the corner of the bar.

————————

E
VEN THE CLOCK STOPPED FOR A MOMENT.

I don’t mind telling you that this pumped me up like nothing I’d experienced for a long time. Breaking a date is one thing,
but a young woman blowing off peer-group demands is quite another. Even so, the green eyes that seemed lit by a pale fire
from within were intensely appraising me. Heads up! Somehow I’d been teleported to first base, but it was a long way to home.
Like a drink “mark” in a hustle bar, I already had my wallet out, ordering her another martini.

Seen close-up, the chain and bracelets were as captivating as the woman they adorned. They were real silver; old, old hand-beaten
stuff—no doubt hammered over some base metal. With a smirk, she crossed her bare legs in a blatant tease. She was showing
off the thigh band to be of braided leather thongs, twisted so tightly that they must have bitten painfully into her smooth
flesh.
So that’s the deal,
I thought.
She really is into Norman’s slave mystique.

Joe and I had recently laughed over a West Coast sex posting on the Net that hilariously proclaimed, “Once you’ve experienced
true Gorean slavery, nothing else will suffice.” Well, I could do this, so I promptly set into a discussion of Norman’s books
and how an erotic publishing house was bringing his suppressed series back out. I was trying to waste no more time, yet come
off as both intellectual and titillating. Become a master of the art of dominance and submission; not to sound frightening
were she a novice, nor boring if she were heavily involved. A thin line, but I knew how to do it, I hoped.

Something was still not connecting. While my conversation didn’t seem to be repelling her, her interest was tepid. If I had
read this wrong, what were the chain and thong signals all about? Without the punker mask her features would have been almost
sweet—were it not for the whiff of something primeval, as if her heritage led back to some wild, remote place that couldn’t
be defined by geography.

From books to film. No surprise that she was a fan of the work of Tarantino and Rodriguez, still… Reality smirked at me when
I mentioned Bogart and she volunteered her preferred “old dude” to be Mickey Rourke. Her full lips grew petulant, almost pouting.
As I felt slipping from my grasp possibly the hottest chance I’d had with womanhood in years, she grew openly distracted and
fished in her purse. She unfolded a sheet of paper and, as the card I’d given her tumbled from within, I recognized the paper
as my notice that I’d posted on the message board.

“This is you,” she stated, rather than asked, with abrasive flatness. “You down with cyberpsycho shit, or what?”

There are moments when you know your life is about to change. Ordinarily, we know these divergent and convergent junctions
only in hindsight. Sometimes, the path of destiny divides in full view, and you know that nothing is ever going to be quite
the same again. Even as I framed the query, “You know Seabrook?” her earnest gaze told me that I might well be having one
of those strange moments. “And, what’s cyberpsycho?”

“There were some books I was s’pose to get, but they got lost,” she answered cryptically. “He’s all over the gamers’ Web sites,
but his work is like, a little hard to find?” She went on to educate me that another subspecies of the cyberreality had woven
Gothic sadomasochism together with various schools of dark mysticism. The fantasy scenarios of this virtual cult, including
some based on the work of writers I’d mentioned to her earlier, even incorporated bits of Seabrook.

I simply abandoned my intended come-on altogether; began to tell her the story of William Seabrook that I had thus far reconstructed.
I gave her a synopsis of how the path of the branching worlds in fiction led back indisputably to Seabrook, weirdly paralleling
developments in physics, which would ultimately confirm the literary notion. I observed how it was therefore ironic that some
of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Seabrook were the temporal inconsistencies in his record.

She watched me and listened intently as I went on and on for over an hour. Regarding his boyhood through postadolescence,
if indeed that phase ever ended, his account was virtually the only source.

“Seabrook was raised in Maryland’s spooky Pennsylvania Dutch country. One day his
fey
and maybe slightly demented grandmother, with possible assistance from a delightful little bottle, led the sad little boy
into a clearing in a new wood he’d never seen before. There he saw beautiful bright-plumaged roosters, as tall as houses.
He described their legs as like the pillars of cathedral aisles. Willie’s only happy escape was into that ‘other dreamworld’
until his grandfather smashed Grandmother Piny’s laudanum bottle. But it was too late to stop the hypnotic effects of her
drugged mind on young William.

“His earliest boyhood pleasures had included gazing at pictures of women in chains. One day Piny had shown him a throne on
which sat a girl, robed in green, with her ankles bound by shining metal circlets joined by a gleaming chain. Willie remembered
pressing his hands against her ankles until his own hands held and drew the chains tighter. From that time on, he had two
ambitions—to be a writer like his grandfather, the editor of the
American Sentinel
—and to chain women. Growing up, he moved from lassoing little girls to spending his earnings on complicated gold and silver
chains with which he fastened women to pillars and ceilings. Most of the women seemed to enjoy it, even went to dances with
him, tightly chained.”

Seabrook did not believe that he had ever ingested laudanum while in his “fairy godmother’s” care at age five. He was convinced
that the visions were a form of telepathic communion presented by that numinous figure’s drugged mind. In his autobiography,
he had chronicled his obsession with his girl-mother Myra and his guilty, ambivalent feelings for Charlie, his ill-fated younger
brother. During the family’s exile to the Midwestern plains, in tow of his Lutheran minister father, his escape was by way
of dreams of visiting fabled Samarkand or Timbuktu.