The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (4 page)

————————

H
E’D BEEN INVOLVED WITH “BLACK MAGIC”
since “early manhood,” Seabrook would write later. What that life-stage designation might have connoted in his times was
unclear. He had held a bachelor’s degree by nineteen, and completed his master’s a year later. Speculating that his dark fascinations
may have been “in the blood,” he cited family lore holding his ancestor Peter Boehler, an old Moravian missionary and mentor
to John Wesley, to have been deeply involved in the black arts.

The bondage motif to which Piny had introduced him, by whatever means, became a permanent fixture, influencing more than his
sexual nonconformity alone. The writing on his foreign adventures, his forays into the occult and psychic phenomena, all were
shaped by that early template. After becoming city editor of the
Augusta Chronicle
at twenty-one, he took off for a year in Europe, 1907 into 1908. Far from being out of character in itself, this first great
escape presaged a lifelong pattern.

I wondered, too, if Willie had been actualizing “somebody else’s dream” during the following seven years. In 1909, he broke
into serious journalism on the
Atlanta Journal,
where he met Ward Greene. He married Katie Edmondson, the daughter of a CocaCola executive in 1912—in the days when the drink
was still laced with cocaine. That was a year after he’d established a successful advertising agency. In his fiction based
on Seabrook, Greene would have the ad agency doing the promotional work for the silent film classic
Birth of a Nation.

By late 1915, however, his pathological ennui was only partially relieved by a series of mildly scandalous affairs. Breaking
his connection with the agency, to the horror of his wife, father-in-law, and acquaintances, he made for New York to attempt
enlistment in the Lafayette Escadrille. Failing the vision test for the Lafayette Squadron, he had instead entered the American
Field Ambulance Service.

“Now that AFS has evolved into a student exchange program—my cousin went to Germany with them—it’s pretty much been forgotten
that it was originally a unit of the French Army. It might, however, have had a kinship with scholars even then. That unit,
in which Seabrook enlisted along with Dos Passos, Hemingway, and other future literary lights, has been described as college-extension
courses for a generation of writers. The ambulance corps was a volunteer unit in the old sense. The enlistee had great discretion
over his term of service. Seabrook was mustered out, after being gassed at Verdun, though he was never discharged. He returned
to the United States after several months’ recovery.

“That may well have been when he met Aleister Crowley, as he claimed. However, I found that Crowley did not occupy the Washington
Square apartment that Willie described until a year later. Likewise, Willie indicated that he met there forthwith Crowley’s
protégée,
Leah Hirsig, ‘naked as a jaybird,’ although Crowley didn’t meet the Hirsig woman until late 1918, and she wasn’t in residence
at Washington Square until early the next year…”

We had moved to a table as the bar buzzed around us, but the noise seemed to recede as though we were in a world of our own
making. The late sunlight through the louvered windows painted her with alternating bands of light and shadow. She shifted
her chair around to avoid the sunset directly in her eyes, and I had a moment’s
déjà vu
of something far away. Had I been less deadened by life, I felt as though I might have been able to grasp and hold it.

“As if, the ‘two-slit’ thing, like in high school?” she commented on the light. The incongruous association reminded me of
Dr. David Deutsch. Without thinking, I immediately went off and started expounding.

In Deutsch’s view, “the case that was already unanswerable” inhered in his very commonsense interpretation of this most elementary
of quantum experiments. The two-slit (or more) experiment, in which an interference pattern creates dark bands across the
target screen, used to be thought of as demonstrating the “wave nature of light.” But the results are the same even when the
photons are released one at a time and clearly impact, particle fashion, on the target.

Taking stock, Deutsch had found that when a photon passes through one of the slits, something then interferes with it, deflecting
it in a way dependent on which other slits are open. The interfering entities apparently have passed through some of the other
slits, behaving exactly like photons—except that they can’t be seen.

His bottom line was that the “interfering entities” are photons, which exist in a huge number of adjacent universes, similar
in composition to the tangible one. Each obeys the same laws of physics, differing only in that the particles are in slightly
different positions in each alternate reality.

Were the worlds truly noninterfering, as had been supposed during most of the forty years following Everett? Deutsch had thought
not, and given birth to quantum computing.

… If the complex motions of the shadow photons in an interference experiment were mere possibilities that did not in fact
take place, then the interference phenomena we see would not, in fact, take place… In practice this means that interference
is strong enough to be detected only between universes that are very alike.
³

The ring of truth was there. The proof was shown by an experiment conductible by schoolchildren in a darkened bedroom. It
had been studied at various levels of sophistication for the entire duration of modern science. Proof had become indisputable
with the technology to release the photons one at a time. I had been astonished by the simplicity.

“It’s not been the many-worlders, but the scientific establishment that’s wasted decades, taking excursions through every
form of mysticism rather than confront the obvious. Being an old radical, my amazement has its limits; just more of management’s
crap!” I joked. “Richard Feynman had explained the iridescence on birds’ feathers, or even the beautiful colors on ugly oil
slicks. They’re all merely complex combinations of interference patterns…”

“Wait,” she interrupted. “Back in the day, I dug up this cool old Coke bottle from my grandmother’s yard.” I had to call time,
for temporal-translation purposes. It seemed she was drifting into musings from her childhood.

“Just substitute your ‘the day’ expression for ‘my day,’ and what once was old, is then new again.” I smiled indulgently,
preparing to make one of those real long reaches that might contrive an illusion of relevance.

“Du-uh?”
The green eyes flared, coming right back at my condescension. “As if,
‘patina’?
The iridescent colors? All those years underground, the glass exchanged particles with the minerals in the earth. Particulate
interactions over years ’n years, and its composition morphed—filtering light, like a demonstration of the interference among
space-times you said the dude was talking about?”

I was chagrined. Far from drifting while I talked over her head, her feedback had been metaphorical, even poetic. She had
consolidated my ramblings into images from her own experience—and carried the analogies a step further.

————————

T
HE BAR, IN THAT DIFFERENT LIGHT,
seemed indeed another reality. Her hair fanning out over her shoulders, she looked like a woman of another time, perhaps
one of those remarkably neurosis-free
femmes fatales
of the forties. She finally lit a cigarette she had been long holding between her lips and held it in the European fashion,
with her small finger extended affectedly. By God, I felt as if I were sitting in
Rick’s Café Americain,
or maybe on the quay at Toulon! I didn’t know what decade I was in, but it surely didn’t feel like century’s end.

Returning to the safer and more promising ground of Seabrook, I feared that I had to be doing the man a further injury as
I summarized his life, careful and comprehensive as I tried to be. The energy level was palpable. From time to time, her eyes
would widen in the shadows, but she said little more—just asking me to specify a source or clarify the chronology.

I ordered another round and began to explain the problems with the time frames, in terms of the composite character Justine,
who appeared to be the only major figure in the whole combined saga who was purely fictional; or, more likely, a broad composite
of a number of women Seabrook had known. Unlike the solid historical personages of Willie and his friends and lovers, even
those whose identities he lightly concealed, identifying Justine was like chasing the grin on the Cheshire Cat.

I came straight up about there being no question that the predilection of my partners and me for mildly sadomasochistic amusements,
over the years, had led to my enchantment with Justine, alongside of the desire to resolve her kaleidoscopic reflections into
the real-world personas on whom she was based.

“I had wondered,” I was going on, “Willie had described a cool Greenwich Village sophisticate, who had made no appearance
after 1931, though he had designated her a friend for life. Might she have been his Justine? Later, there was the business
in what he called his ‘barn’…” I saw her hands distinctly shaking as she tried to light another cigarette.

The time for artfulness had ended, and I wanted what was hovering between us to be made known. “Why did you take my notice?”
I questioned. I had gradually put together the reason she was there with me. It must have involved some happenstance upstairs,
when she’d noticed that the posting’s phone number was the same as on my card.

She answered so softly I could barely hear, holding herself tightly, as if grasping for an elusive sense of control. “What
are the chances?” she whispered half to herself, darting a glance at me before breaking off and turning her face away. She
shivered visibly, though it was quite warm in the crowded bar, her chain tinkling like little bells. I was surprised by the
track of a tear in the bar of light across her cheek, and her voice cracked slightly as she struggled for coherence, “I don’t…
I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

Yes, it’s true, I’m a pig. I moved to press whatever advantage her internal confusion had opened and hated myself for using
the most elderly lines in the book. I placed my hand on her knee and recited, “It’s not an accident that we met here.”

But the uncommonly growing sense of familiarity seemed to let her find comfort in the moss-encrusted move. I felt ashamed.
“Let’s back off from Mr. Seabrook for a bit. Let’s talk about Ms. Leiris. I don’t know, I feel a need to address you a bit
more personally?”

There was another long pause while she studied me, as though
I
were the puzzle. It has to be rare for it to be that difficult for someone to say her own name, and never so incredible for
another to hear it. Abruptly, she laughed, just a bit hopelessly—giving a little shrug that said everything had become just
too overwhelming, anyway. “As if you’d believe—Justine?”

Moving right along… I would make no more journal entries attempting to tabulate synchronistic events. Even had the twists
and turns not followed upon each other in such hot succession as to make it impossible to keep up, at that point I had already
hit synchronicity overload.

Justine had attended the University of Texas at Austin, as had I many years earlier. I’ve always found it amusing to hear
the Legend of the Sixties as interpreted by the students of “Generation X.” Given what I’d just heard, I was only mildly surprised
to discover that she had met my young cousin, who was currently in attendance there. By that point, my only reaction was:
sure, of course, why not? Beneath the Goth affectations was an educated young woman. She’d followed up a psych degree with
some graduate study, then briefly worked for an airline before moving to Atlanta only a few months earlier.

The move had been to take possession of properties bequeathed to her by a great-grandmother who had died before Justine was
born. As per the will, the inheritance had been held in trust for decades. Suggesting that some unspecified aspects of the
estate had proven trying, she’d decided to take a break and come home for the science fiction convention. Of the details that
she did choose to confide at this early stage, two stood forth, one being that the bequest included Seabrook memorabilia,
notably an item that sounded like a notorious painting from the Seabrook story.

Early in 1940, the novelist Marjorie Worthington, a woman who became one of Willie’s great loves, had painted an elaborate
wall panel on wood, limning John Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father” and illustrating the chapters in Seabrook’s life, including
the outré ones. Unsuspecting that the mural would ever be seen publicly, Marjorie let go of her typical inhibitions and included
nudes, girls peeking out of cages, and a hanging figure in a red-leather mask. Could the naked woman in the mask have been
the elusive “Justine”?

Willie had rather cynically described the final segment, which featured his immortal soul absurdly rendered as a toy-sized
white woolly lamb, scampering away toward a field of daisies. I supposed that I might once have reacted similarly. Remarkable
enough to locate objects of my quest in this fashion. More bizarre was that, in the Seabrook saga I’d capsulated for her,
my companion suspected that she could identify her ancestress as none other than a historical Justine!

It seemed that I was reaching under the table to touch flesh and blood engendered by the one figure in the story whom I had
taken to be fictional, or at least an elaborate composite. Around the time this child had been born, Kris Kristofferson had
brought out a song whose refrain laughingly wafted through my mind: “…
A WALKIN’ CONTRADICTION, PARTLY TRUTH AND PARTLY FICTION.
”

————————

I did not let go of her knee. Soon wonder reawakened libido, and I reached higher to touch the twisted leather thongs. I pushed
the band a bit from where it had cruelly bitten into her thigh. She flinched as I gently kneaded the line that appeared, a
comfort that only increased the localized pain as the circulation returned. Leaning forward, she grasped my other forearm
and pressed my hand inside her jacket between her naked breasts. I fingered the chain, marveling that it might well have been
one acquired by Seabrook on his fabled trip into the old Arabian domain. I drew its links slowly across a nipple and felt
it harden.