The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (48 page)

I was close to nausea as I admitted to standing immobilized when JJ’s stepmother had called the child to come away from the
strange man. JJ’s “mom” had not, of course, seen me for a decade at that time. Then I’d run away from that house, and from
the little girl who, in all childish innocence, had approached to show me the pretty colors—in the patina that the years and
earth had emblazoned
onto an ancient, dirt-filled Coke bottle
from her grandmother’s yard.

“For God’s sake, Justine, say something!” I demanded of her pensive silence. Would she hate me for that, for not finding a
means to force myself into her early life?

“It may shed some light on my decision to live here,” she considered calmly. “Say, this was probably not at the very same
moment as my vision loop. There was no
anamnesis
involved. But if I did behold you, and at some level recognized you from
The Château,
that would’ve totally clinched the deal. If so, something will come back to me.” I continued to agonize over the picture
she had made me draw of the shape of my concern.

“Dearest, the larger part of me didn’t come looking for you so that you could be my father. Pos it’s not this thing you have
going on that you’re someway screwing your daughter? You’re way more touchious about that than I am.”

Then it was she who was lightening the mood, persuading me that we were merely looking at another aspect of the storm of synchronicity.
Worse than at any time in this affair, I felt any sense of bedrock present reality slipping from my grasp. Looking at the
window JJ used to crawl out at night, I found myself at last believing that “somewhere in time” she was still so doing.

“Surprised if you were to see her? Not,” Justine
²
replied to my contemplation. “You love her, you miss her. She lived here. The heart sees many things that the eyes do not.
How’s that for a pithy statement? People
can
someways see those they love in familiar settings. Why not? The heart longs for them, the heart sees them.” It was the only
time since we’d met that she had sounded like her mother. While I admired the dark angel within, I adored her the more for
not entirely abolishing the influence of my little lost love.

————————

D
USK WAS SETTLING
as we parked in the lot of an elderly strip center eight blocks away. It sat across the street and half a block from my old
home. Neighborhood assistance offices and a storefront church, trying to arrest the decline, now occupied its spaces. This
was the place where JJ and I shared that impossible memory of my adolescent gallantry, offering to marry her with whomever’s
child. That conversation, which for a variety of reasons, could not have occurred anytime close to her actual pregnancy.

“JJ remembers that she met with me after I’d passed her a note in class. One of those long letters, you know, on folded-up
notebook paper. But it’s impossible. I’d gone to another school by then. I can remember writing it and giving it to her, and
even a bit of what was in it. But it just can’t be!”

“You don’t get it?” she asked gently. “Time was right, but the world was wrong. Here, you were losing her, and what you wanted
more than anything was another chance. So much, that what you remembered was a moment glimpsed from a world where there
was
another chance.”

“But, damn it, babe, she remembers it, too!”

“It may be, deep in her soul, she too wanted another chance,” she mused softly, looking into the deepening twilight. “A world
where you didn’t leave, where you passed on the
smart
life you led to marry the little high-school girl when she was abandoned … No, wait.” She shook off the empathy and snapped,
“I’m so fucking sorry! If she could believe that was in you, even if only in a strange memory, and not take your hand? Hey,
she was some kinda fool, like I always thought.”

She hopped out of the car, slamming the door, and pranced up the sidewalk as if knowing exactly where she was going.
Way weird,
I thought, hastening to catch up with her through the deep blue twilight. More, there was ceasing to be any delineation among
patterns of speech, cadence, or language. As her persona tended toward unity, the question of whom I was addressing was becoming
moot, but this opened new areas of confusion.

“Like you always thought your mother to be, or your granddaughter?” That was not a joke.

“All that.” She turned to me. “I can remember how I carried girls, many of them friends, to the abortion mill. I visited them
at those horrible ‘homes for unwed mothers’ and walk-up flats with swinish husbands and squalling brats; seeing how oh, so
happy
they were—like their teeth hurt. Babies aren’t bad, but the trap was brutal. JJ had a fucking cakewalk!”

She had not. JJ’s tragedy had not been that many years later, only almost at the end of the reaction. All those conventions
had still been in place. Their apostles were even more vicious and fanatic, sensing their time was almost ended. She had been
among the later victims of the final campaign to break the progress of women.

I was trying to puzzle this curious blind spot in her preternatural understanding when, turning to continue along the walk,
she blurted out, “Why’d
I
survive, when I was so much worse than them?” I said nothing, but mulled over the sudden insight that some things take more
than a lifetime to resolve. Young Justine, the psychologist, had her work cut out, having to carry Madeleine’s baggage as
well.

The house lights along the street reminded me of the window lights in Georgia, the little lights in every window … She began
to recite from, I sensed, farther memory.

“Y’know, Willie had been a big adventurer. He’d wandered through the Arabian deserts, sought out the secrets of island jungles
and darkest Africa.” Ardently, she went on, “It made him so mad when a critic said that, all the time, like many roaring adventurers,
he was only running farther away from home—shouting and crying in the dark because he was lost.” My cornea reflected a flaring
of the lights, as her voice clutched at me.

————————

“A
T LAST, IN DESPAIR, HE HUNG IT UP AND CAME HOME.
”

She had stopped in front of the old house where I’d grown up, still in good repair and much the same as always. The forest
green shutters were now painted darker, maybe even black. But that little change made all the difference. Justine
²
gripped my arm and urged me up the walk, and the last thing I wanted was for her to let go. For this looked like the dream,
my last adolescent precognition, and the one that, above all, I had believed to be impossible.

Justine
²
ignored the bell and struck the heavy brass doorknocker, to whose specific sound I had a conditioned childhood reflex of
alertness. Hearing that loud metallic rap after so many years startled me. She was eager, as if it were she having a homecoming,
and a very happy one at that. As for me, I was imagining approaching footsteps.

Who might open that door, looking as huge to me as when I had been a child? Who might be sitting in an armchair in the study,
which I would be able to see off the foyer when the door opened—working a crossword puzzle in the evening paper? Upstairs,
I had dreamed my dreams. Up there, my friends and I had played with hypnosis and pushed hard to open a gate to the future,
the past; like any teens, to anywhere but here!

It did not open. We waited, and Justine
²
knocked again. Then I rang the doorbell, and we waited some more. We just kept standing there, both of us, expecting
something
to happen. When we could no longer deny that there was no one home, we reluctantly retreated.

Crossing the street, I looked back at the treetops upon which I had meditated from that darkened upstairs room. That had been
after my phase of staring at candles, when discovery of the slow diffusion of Eastern disciplines across America had inspired
me to imagine that I, too, could attain higher wisdom. As before, the higher wisdom eluded me when I stumbled on the curb
and nearly fell on my face.

I looked at the offending concrete with confusion. Then I remembered that it had not always been on the edge of the street.
There had been head-in parking there, with an indentation all the way to the sidewalk. In the years since, it had been eliminated,
the curb brought on out to the street. But the indentation had been there in the dream. This was not the dream.

In front of the old drugstore location, I paused to light my pipe. Richard and I would linger long at the lunch counter, reading
the pulp science fiction off the rack so we didn’t have to pay for it. Even were the store still there, it would exist for
me only to house Richard and “that other night.”

It was true that there, reflected in the plate glass, stood a better-preserved approximation of my father. My focus channeled
down to Justine
^2.
With her hair tied back, she momentarily looked so much like the JJ of years before.

But even in her surreal, reflected image, a second glance revealed the feathered eyes, the nose ring, the kinky-looking leather
outfit, complete with the braided thong band biting into her thigh. Passionately reciting nothing beyond what Willie had said
of himself, she had revealed what she hoped for me to find there.

I had actually come closer to her vision than to my own. She was my goddess-in-chains, the meaning of my life. Yet, she was
visibly Justine
²
the
metem,
a creature from another world. Despite her youth, she could not be the sweet innocent who had opened the dream-door. She
had never been, at least since before the First World War!

Had I not, from being blown before the hormonal storms of my early maturation, always remained somewhat disconnected and waiting?
Did it matter that there may have been a glimpse of yet another world in which she might have been my daughter? It was not
dissimilar to the “false memory” of the parking lot, of a world where JJ had perhaps accepted me due to an early pregnancy.
Possibly those worlds were one and the same.

Now it seemed that we might all have such episodes with regularity. It could be that such glimpses of cosmic consanguinity,
kinship across the multiverse, as it were, might serve to strengthen our bonds in this reality.

A Prussian deputation of psychoanalysts could prattle in my ear forever and yet fail to make the simplest fact of all go away.
Why demand this miracle conform to an interpretation of a past vision? Why was I always continuing to look backward?

When we reached the car I hugged her tight against me, trying to pull myself back to the present moment, to shake off the
ambiance that had settled over everything like a numinous fog. I lightly ran my fingernails around her smooth thighs in a
way I knew would please her, and she squirmed against me. But there was more than eroticism going on.

“All there has ever been was waiting, just waiting. For decades, waiting for you,” I breathed in her ear. “No matter what
else it might all mean; we are together and, for whatever incredible reason, you are mine. Nothing else matters, nothing else
ever
mattered.” I didn’t know what else I could say to her, or tell you. There is no way to articulate something like that. What
if it had happened to you? How would you describe what it felt like?

I got into the car feeling like one of Willie’s zombies and fumbled for my keys. Down at the corner with Lancaster Avenue,
the highway to Dallas in farther time, a ratty little convenience store occupied the location of the old Lone Star Drive-in.
Had I seen Richard and Marilyn drinking a Coke beneath a corrugated metal canopy, it would have added nothing to this sensation
of existing altogether apart from time as we know it.

At the intersection, my gaze wandered to the west, recalling the amber flash of the Texas sunset in times of fewer pollutants
and city lights. It had always seemed like Halloween, in that final moment when the setting sun had burned like an orange
fire among black clouds on the horizon, and the night had fallen all at once.

I turned east and slowly cruised down Lancaster, vaguely following a route of conditioned reflexes from the nearer past. The
wide boulevard itself had changed little in all the years of my life. Our windows were down and the early Sunday evening was
abnormally quiet with scant traffic. In my dreamy state of mind, the quiet world around us seemed
empty.
Like there was as little press about us of human presence and activity as in those long-ago years on which I’d been focused.

“Like a thing where your mind is reaching across time?” Justine
²
agreed. “I’m down with that, I felt so in the Village.” After a reflective pause she queried, “The oldest memories you have?
Raconte!
”

————————

A
SSOCIATING WITH THE FIERY SUNSETS,
I described some very early childhood impressions of the last great wildfire that swept close to Fort Worth, perhaps back
around 1949. It had taken out an old farmstead that my parents had still owned outside town. They had bundled me up and driven
out that night in our old Dodge. I could still remember watching the burning sweep across a wide arc of the flat horizon.

In my distracted wandering, I’d turned off Lancaster onto the spur road that skirted the lake, then had automatically turned
again. I stopped in confusion when a chain-link fence blocked our way. I recognized with some embarrassment that I’d been
driving to the lake, but the old road over the dam had been closed years before. I turned back toward the thoroughfare that
now routed traffic to approach from the east through Arlington.

She pressed me to continue, like my story was going somewhere. “The next day, we went out again for my father to pick over
what was left of the old farm. I wandered away in a terrible fascination with the blackened debris.

“A rooster ran by, like from out of nowhere. His colors were bright against all the black and gray ash. I ran after him and
found a glass jar full of hard candy that had somehow survived the fire. The candy looked like jewels to my eyes. It was funny.
I was convinced that the rooster had directed me to the treasure and was giving it to me!” I laughed, enjoying the intimacy
of sharing this early part of myself with her.