The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (35 page)

The summer rain then came pouring through the holes in the roof above. At first she was deadweight as I lifted her, but she
then more or less steadied herself. “We don’t belong here, Justine. This is all gone, all past. It’s behind us now, and we
need to go on.” I hoped I was sending the right message; at least she cooperated as I helped her from the barn. It was slow
going back down the hill, but given our condition, I didn’t mind a good soaking.

In the failing light, I could see that her new clothes were very much a total loss. There being no one about, I just stripped
her down. She stood obediently and let the rain wash her while I got a suitcase from the trunk. When I turned back, her face
was contorted with weeping, though her tears were lost in the rain.

“Oh dearest,” she sobbed, “I lost our little girl.” She sagged against the side of the car and I moved quickly to slide her
inside. It took a moment for me to remember the matter of the second Justine’s suicide, but then it required no psych degree
to recognize the gravity of this lament.

“Hush,” I whispered as I dried her off with some of my shirts. “I know; I know it wasn’t your fault. I wasn’t there to help.”
Damn you, Willie,
I cursed silently. At least Beam Piper had the decency to apologize for the mess he was leaving behind. Even when he had
shot himself to death, he had remained a gentleman.

“But she’s
gone!
” This was so heartbreaking it was unbearable, listening to pain that a soul had not been allowed to unburden across decades;
or even, I now wondered, across lifetimes? Before my conception, my mother had lost a pair of twins shortly after their birth.
Even with me as a comfort, she had grieved for them the rest of her life. I had no clue how to address this, and as I struggled
her into her jeans and jacket, I was preoccupied with our situation.

Reality check: I was in an officially ambiguous relationship with a young woman of indeterminate means. Said young woman appeared
to be thoroughly schized out and still bore the evidence that she had been beaten. Such family as she possessed could be counted
upon to be unremittingly hostile, and any professionals whose attention might be aroused would merely draw interpretations
that rationalized their paychecks.

All probable interpretations looked bad for me, and we were in an alien world where I had no contacts within the system. Even
Roder represented an unknown quantity in these circumstances. As if on cue, a police car cruised slowly down the road. It
didn’t stop, but that just cinched my concerns. I started up and headed straight back to the bridge. Connecting with the Thruway
on the Kingston side, I scrupulously observed every traffic regulation.

I’d as rather have gone to our lodgings for some rest and a better cleanup, but a bed-and-breakfast is not my usual speed
of motel, where anything short of mayhem can go on with anonymity. I took the decision that our best course was to get back
to the City as soon as feasible. There, at least, authority had not the time on its hands to become enthused with social concerns.

By the time I had settled back on the Interstate 87 run, Justine had dozed off. I gathered confidence that I had made the
best judgment. We had not unpacked, and Rhinebeck held no further charms for me. As she slept away the miles, my mind was
beset by brilliant memories and fantasies of my own. A strange composite from
The Château:
Justine being whipped, but with the elder Justine watching from the balcony? No, what was she watching? The blonde! It was
the night I had bought the blonde, and I was holding out my hand, waiting for the girl to step down to me from the stage.

The road ahead was quite visible, but the steady rain dissolved the hard edges of reality. I remembered Justine on the escalator
at the Marriott, moving away from me, as if seen from a ship leaving the shore. That conjured up an image of Willie on the
gangway of the old
Berengaria,
holding out his hand to a timid young Madeleine-Justine, who was afraid to embark. He stood sidewise to her, waiting with
his hand extended. I snapped on the dome light and checked on Justine. She was still dead to the world, but I could see from
her eyelids that she was in REM sleep. Maybe another new wrinkle in this thing?

Years before, I had consorted for a while with Anton LaVey, the Aleister Crowley of the late century. He had remarked to me
a proposition—that partners who sleep together may experience synchronization of elements of their endocrine glandular systems,
much as women’s menstrual cycles will match pace. He had speculated that this might explain occasional shared dreams and the
like. Could Justine be projecting something? Even so, I suspected that the principle was intimately linked with the question
of time. In any event, I knew that I could no longer deny the essential nature of the being beside me.

She awakened in about another hour. My peripheral vision is still good for my age, and I became aware that she was studying
me. When I smiled at her she heaved a sigh. “Look it, when you’re little and ask where you were before you were born? I know
the answer to that now, believe you me. But everything else is a fright.”

Her tone turned demanding, “Will you
please
tell me how long? I’m plainly all grown-up.” Upon verification that she was twenty-six years old, she sniffed, as if slightly
irked. “
Well!
I s’pose that’s not as bad as it might of been. Oh dear,
you
did get old again, didn’t you?” I wasn’t expecting her to be up for tactfulness and tried to laugh it off. This was in spite
of the distinct impression that in the woman I was now seeing there could well be a world-class bitch.

“We can’t seem to keep from doing that, can we?” I tried to joke around it.

“Look it, fellow, lay off of the soft-soap. As if I can’t tell you’re ham-acting?” She asked quietly, but with an edge of
steel, “You know that liars go to hell? I need a damned drink.” I directed her attention to her purse. As she hefted the battered
old hip flask, I had no doubt as to whom it had originally belonged. Bathtub gin! Like the curious combination of drugs in
the old snuffbox, the clues had been there before me all along. Her remarks cut through the farce I’d felt obliged to perform.
I knew precisely what she meant and responded in all seriousness.

“I believe that
you believe
I’m Willie. And now I have to believe that you are who and what you say. Isn’t that enough for right now?” I wanted to touch
bases with her present-life persona, and tried to get her to consider the association of her identity with a particular set
of memories, but she wasn’t up for it. Morphing into the likeness of a college girl on a mescaline trip, she drifted off into
the molded dashboard and digital displays, as if everything was new and enchanting.

Before reaching the City, things continued on the edge of bizarre at a local “hot shop.” I’d been thankful to avoid the presumably
comforting, near-identical character of chain restaurants. Commercially contrived
déjà vu,
in our present circumstances, would only have moved me along toward a graver disorientation.

As I finally decided that I would have to fetch her out of the rest room, she emerged—putting her hair-brush into her purse.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen Justine without a purse, even when in Goth drag. When I asked if she were all right,
she haughtily announced that she did her hundred strokes at the same time every evening.

Then she wasted yet more time by insisting I feed her the oatmeal I’d ordered to get something bland into her stomach. I got
through this by presenting it as an obvious game for the perception of onlookers. It
was
an ordeal, infantilism not being my thing. But the way she took to the game gave me a further insight. Her conscious contents
were overwhelmingly those of her predecessor, but she related to them as would a much younger person.

While I did not forget that she might contain
all
of the other Justine, at least up to 1945, including that woman’s own youth, the behavior suggested that brain chemistry
was a definite factor. I was further heartened when she giggled and apologized for “hurling” on me. There seemed reason to
hope that the strong physical reality of the present might eventually reorganize the weakly connected past memories, rather
than the reverse. I was thinking about this as we reached the City. Traversing the tunnel beneath the River, I felt her tense
up again. Following her gaze to rivulets of moisture seeping down its sides, I sympathized.

The Manhattan traffic was manageable, so instead of going directly to the airport, I drove through the Village, chatting idly
to her of the days of Kerouac and the Beats, and the times that had followed. I wondered at what it had been like in the earlier
time, the Thomas Wolfe time, the Seabrook time. This turned out to be my second-worst idea of the day, hard after caving on
the issue of seeking the Rhinebeck location near twilight.

Later I realized that she was being drawn, like a moth to the flame, to confront the most emotionally charged contents of
her predecessor’s memory. The old woman had prescribed that she read the manuscript, and that’s what we should have done,
rather than have me start tinkering around. I asked her if there was anyplace she’d like to see. Her voice cracked as she
cried angrily, “I’
D LIKE TO STOP BY THE
B
REVOORT, AND DROP IN AT
T
HE
156!”

————————

“I’d like to breakfast at Mouquon’s or play in the street, but I can’t do that, can I?” She demanded that I turn onto West
Twelfth and find a place to park, no small chore. “I remember you leading me up Fifth Avenue by a chain,” she snickered, as
we began to walk. “We’d gotten only as far as Fourteenth Street when some East Side Jewesses were coming out of Hearn’s. They
saw us and were shouting and pointing, when the big fat one got very angry and called you a Yiddish name, and then whacked
you with her umbrella! We hopped into a taxi and came home quick. That was all that happened, really, but it
was
sorta exciting.”

I tried to comfort myself that she had skimmed that story in Greene’s book, but couldn’t make my heart believe it as she drifted
farther yet. It was awesome, and not a little spooky, hearing her describe the wide avenues empty except for a late streetcar
and a couple of carriages. I knew that I was then hearing recollections from a childhood at the beginning of the century,
when the buildings had been smaller and more widely spaced, and everything had been so, so quiet.

Listening to her made me feel, if we strolled just a bit further, maybe made a turn in some impossible direction, such would
be exactly what we would find. In retrospect, I would wonder if, in the company of that being balanced between realities,
might not I have been drawn to the margins of my own? We saw panhandlers, but they did not approach. A junkie, fixing up in
an alley, we passed as ghosts in the summer night.

Walking back, we passed a church with an old bell tower. Scanning the second-story windows across the street, she wistfully
recalled waking up to hear all the church bells ringing together. “I was frightened! Katie had been keeping me home, for fear
of the epidemic. She put her arms around me, saying that it was for the Armistice. The War was over, and we were so happy
…”

In the car, she doubled over and hugged her middle, grieved to the point of sickness. Justine’s specific indifference to scenes
of late-century ugliness around us revealed nostalgia as quite unrelated to the relative beauty of a given time. I’d never
before thought of it like that. Our social ills did not impress a memory that contained sweatshops and Hell’s Kitchen. No,
it was something other that distressed her, and it was with foreboding that my attention focused on a number, well recalled
from my research, on the other side of the street. With trepidation, I pointed out a location, which had come to house a realty
firm.

She cupped her hands over her mouth. “I can’t recognize it anymore.” Profound tragedy was in her quavering voice. “Katie lit
the window around the Christmas tree to make it easier for me to find my way. I didn’t think—never imagined it like this,”
she sobbed. “The loss! I’m the same, but everything is gone!”

That was the conundrum, I discovered. The classic quandary of the immortal is only the human condition raised to a higher
power. Oh God, we think so little; we view ourselves as priceless and value that about us so poorly. We strain toward the
supposed potential of an unknown future. Then that future comes for us, and we find ourselves alone, in a strange and uncaring
ghost-world.

Trying to seize the moment, I stressed to her that she was
not
the same. This was precisely why she must embrace, even magnify, her recent memories and persona, to whom this City would
be a wonderful adventure. As we were talking Justine here, I was tempted to head uptown, attempt to divert her with the thriving
sex industry. But comprehension paled when I would try to explain the simplest causal relationships. She broke down in sadness
and frustration, like a coma victim who had awakened to a world that had passed her by. Immersed in the baseline reality of
the other Justine, the jumbled contents of her present life were making little or no sense.

“I cannot construe what you’re even talking about. This is Aldous’s brave new world? It’s
unmentionable!
Quel cauchemar.
Let go of me, and I’m lost in a hellish nightmare.” I tried again to reassure her that she had
not
remained the same. There was a part of her that was familiar with all this, could cope with it, but she was not to be consoled.
Again, I swore never to abandon her. Even so, I was all too aware that I could be torn from her, and what would become of
her then?

Minions of society all march to pretty much the same general orders: “If it looks different, shoot.” A predictable commitment
authorization from next of kin would have nothing whatsoever to do with any legitimate considerations. No help there. But
taking her home to Atlanta, to shelter and isolation, left me uneasy.