The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (54 page)

“You can expend all your mental and emotional energy on regret. Life will pass you by, and that would be a tragedy. Longing
for the chance to relive the past makes us miserable. It keeps us from doing what we were put here to do. Please don’t keep
on hurting yourself.

“You,
like others who should know better
”—JJ gave me a scathing look—”are caught like a fly in the spiderweb of your past, unable to get free and fly away. You are
struggling hard, and that’s good. But you do need to fly away from that web.”

JJ turned to me and, rescinding the hateful expression, sighed. “Most of us don’t change a lot as we get older, do we? We
only become ourselves squared to the second power, both the good aspects and the bad. That’s like the truism that you can’t
change another person. Life is full of hard lessons, don’t you think? If we’re lucky, we get past much of this by midlife.
That makes the rest of the trip a bit easier.”

Taking umbrage at the remarks directed at me, Justine
²
was on her feet, fists on hips, and tapping her foot. A quick appraisal was that her stance bespoke combat. I made hurried
farewells as I swept her out the door, ignoring her protests. It was not that I doubted this weathered JJ’s ability to hold
her own with “Madeleine.” I had seen, even within the limitations of her vision, why she was yet the pivot—the rock around
which the radicals, the exotics like Justine
²
and me, must orbit.

I had begun to understand how all my efforts to illumine the times I had shared with JJ had come to nothing. It was natural
enough for Justine
²
to feel, like a member of any younger generation, that all possible histories supported her harsh judgments of her mother.
Not so easily anticipated was that, far from bestowing additional perspective on JJ’s fatalistic acceptance, the dark, early-century
Bohemian beneath would only reinforce the nineties gal!

JJ would never see the reflections of Justine
²
or Madeleine in her mirror. Still, I had come to suspect that our little red hen, with her pithy clichés, might have been
the conciliator for many contentious inner voices. But Justine
²
was not going to be having much of that, not for a long, long time.

The superimposition of her antecedent self on a tacky mother-daughter spat did not much concern me. If at all, it was in the
shape of uncertainty as to how the stresses might affect the still-fresh integration of personas in Justine
^2.

Rather, it was JJ’s metaphor about ourselves,
“squared to the second power,”
that moved me out of there. The slight prescience recalled Justine and Marjorie’s
déjà vu
across the worlds. I was not in the market for any new paranormal ramifications for at least a while.

“
That
went well! A world where you and her could stay together and raise children would be some kinda shit to see,” Justine
²
spat, as I encouraged her across the lawn.
“What-ev-er!”
When I admonished her for not being gentler, she snapped with only a bit of sadness, “She’ll either own it or she won’t.”

“Maybe in another life,” I remarked without thinking, and we looked at each other and laughed at the unexpected entendre.
The bottom line was that we could do little about JJ’s misery in this life. I thought again of a young family at a lake. Such
things tend to become family stories, and our legends shape us. I suggested that telling her children about the night that
the good angel had visited their father might convince even the teller that she, too, deserved happiness.

————————

“T
HE
G
OOD
A
NGEL?
A
S
I
F!
”

Justine
²
was almost rolling on the ground.

“Or fairy godmother. Heaven help you; you know that’s what it will turn into in the telling. Don’t forget that we’ve cast
JJ in a pivotal role in this cosmic soap opera. She just wanted a normal life with everything neatly ordered in little boxes,
and look what we’ve done to her!

“In this world she gave birth to her grandmother, who then took up with JJ’s teenage lover, who was the
metem
of her grandfather. Over there, she’s going to mate with her grandfather to give birth to her own mother. Unless, of course,
that JJ is somehow really
you;
in which case, things might get just a little bit complicated. She deserves better from the cosmos than being merely a brood
cow for The Lost Generation of Space-Time!”

“It’s that male mind thing you have going on. Even at your best, you don’t easily get it. What has haunted JJ’s entire life?
It’s her mother—the legacy embodied in her name. When you and she bring little Justine into that world, you can believe she
will know all has been made right,
tout va bien;
most of what’s wrong for her goes away.” She caught me watching, absent her mother in her face, the morphing of her sarcasm
into that sweet sadness of hers. “It’s a woman-thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

All defensive levity aside, I wondered whether my little joke had been so far off the mark after all. Could it be that
metem,
with greater or lesser degrees of recall, may serve as the “guardian angels” of their genetic lineage? Might they be guided
among the branching paths by following the lines of their human progeny? Could there be literal truth when those about to
depart have sometimes promised to be with us forever?

David Deutsch must have been thinking about Schrödinger’s little book,
What Is Life?,
which defined genetic structures in a single world as “aperiodic crystals.” They would be recognizable extensions across
many worlds because they would vary less, in their detailed internal structures, than would non-organic matter.

Each
metem
engaged in its own quest to tie up loose ends, these immortal beings would fare amongst the worlds, inexorably creating greater
order where; otherwise, there would have been lesser. These continuing selves would generate yet more of the “negative entropy,”
upon which Schrödinger believed the crystalline structure of life feeds.

I admitted my uncertainty as to exactly where the events we’d set in motion in the other world would finally lead, and expressed
regret that our daughter might not be born to us here. “To be brutally frank, you’re a little old.” Then she surprised me
again. “Hey, I don’t think she’d be ready for
metem
as a boy. If you impregnate me, we’ll have a son, and it’s only fortunate we’re from Texas, because I can’t see any way around
having to name him ‘Justin.’”

“Woman’s intuition again?” The look I got reminded me that, coming from Justine
^2,
this was no idle threat. Her expertise as regards possible futures had to count for something. “Would he be one of
us?
”

“I hope to goodness not! A tree doesn’t grow very high without any new branches.” This might suggest a way out of an impasse
she presents to me. I cannot yet reconcile myself with her hellish determination toward wasting her young life, by not allowing
me to leave her behind when my physical form is exhausted.

“Want me to live a long time, you’d better oughta take good care of yourself,” she threatened, referencing her suicide in
a life she knows only from the manuscript, supplemented by a few glimpses. She emphasized her point. “Don’t
even
think about doing something like you did in 1945 to me again, or I’ll roast you alive.
Believe
that I can stay peeved
for-ev-er!
”

If not to accept, it became a bit easier to cope with, when I understood that she cannot be measured by ordinary standards
of sanity; nor could any self-aware
metem.
She functions upon some seventy years of conscious life experiences that are not, strictly speaking, part of our reality.
While I understand that, there are limitations on what I can handle. I think the promise of immortality should liberate one
to fulfill the immediate incarnation. She supposedly learned that before, but I have to take her present viewpoint with deadly
seriousness.

I’ve had nightmares of rolling over on my deathbed and looking into her impish grin as she lies beside me with a toxic IV
in her arm. I’ve no intention of seeing this hideous presentiment actualized, at least by these entities we try to regard
as our discrete selves. This demands some careful thought, and I know that Justine
²
could never abandon her child.

She was ever the eroticist and, with a brand-new body, she will doubtless continue to be an erotic being raised to a higher
power, inclusive of her appetite for all forms of sensation. So we’re probably going to witness some outrageous displays.
While advancing age will naturally render me more voyeuristic, she’ll engage in the forbidden just because she can. While
I want to build to please her, I questioned some of this. We no longer require physical stress for transit or
anamnesis.
Isn’t there a time for the hurting, metaphor for the agony of life, to stop?

“Not
liking
this! Guilt from other lives is expiated, but I still get hot at the thought of a whip across my bare ass. For cripe’s sake,
will you ever leave off whining? If you’re gonna start flogging yourself,
now,
over the suffering of women, you’ve gotta wait for symmetry to provide you with the alternative.”

I tried to point out the conditions of Willie’s life after 1942, but got nowhere. “
What-ev-er
that amounted to does not
even
relate. You would need to be a submissive woman, not a submissive man. It’s not
even
the same.” She went on at tedious length with her theory that gender and sex-role changes must be incremental. “If I took
metem
into a male identity right now, I’d probably turn out a submissive male.” She made a face. “Hurl!”

I retorted that she was being a bigot, ignoring probable effects of the different brain chemistry, et cetera. “Despite the
continuity of your personal experience, I question sex roles being as fundamental as gender itself. Look at the degree to
which historical patterns are involved. You won’t find many African Americans inclined to play with our whips and chains,
and that’s not all. Go figure personal environment, the degree to which I might be trying to control a powerful mother-figure.”
Remembering the fact of Myra Seabrook, I added, “or mothers.”

The downside of Justine
²
lay in contemplation of how many centuries she might be disposed to bicker. “So it’s like that?
I’m
the fuzzy-thinking psych grad here? Don’t even ask me to believe you’ve come through one more life, still slavishly kissing
Freud’s bourgeois ass! Say, haven’t these times chosen to regard sexual orientation as fundamental?”

“Point, but I still disagree. People, heavily weighted to the ends of the dominance-submission spectrum, may more easily encompass
a gender change. I can tell you that, whether they admit it or not, there is not a male dominant who hasn’t, at one time or
another, wished he could experience the woman’s position.”

I knew I had talked myself into a corner, even as it came out of my mouth.
“Kewl,”
Justine
²
grinned triumphantly. “I had a dream last night that you were whipping me but, someway, I was you. So, we have only to arrange
the other end of the loop, and we can explore that, can’t we?
Foutettez-moi, chéri!
”

We’ll no doubt have many more years of philosophical debates over the creation of and continuing interaction with alternate
realities, than it would amuse the readers of this account to contemplate. Isn’t it sheer hubris to speak as if that otherworld
were dependent on our intervention? Did it not inevitably exist anyway, along with every other possibility? And the whole
set of questions, about the relationship of identities to memories to physical beings, that sort of thing? It would doubtless
have been better, had these events befallen a physicist and a neurologist, rather than a psych grad and a playlike lawyer.
But this was
our
story—we, whatever we are.

Consider the ancient question as to the nature of the Self. In what sense might I be Willie, or Justine
²
the original Madeleine? In the strange line of the Justines, one might posit some form of genetic memory, though logically
such should only pass on data from point of conception to point of conception. As far as I know, I have no genetic kinship,
though Willie certainly liked to imply that he spread his seed far and wide. I only know what I have seen and felt, plus a
few memories that I can explain in no other way. And, I am convinced I have his woman, who assures me that I am he.

Who are these beings that we call “ourselves,” who seem to move across times and worlds, endlessly duplicated and approximated,
yet believing our selves to be discrete entities? With every thought we share “qubits” of data with knowledge-bearing matter
throughout the branches of the multiversal wave function. “The more it changes, the more it stays the same, and the hand just
rearranges the players in the Game.”

This, too, exonerates Justine
²
from an ordinary standard of sanity. We hold sanity to inhere in the degree to which we can objectify ourselves, see ourselves
as only the characters of our story and not as its author. Is that truly sane? It is, after all, that “other,” unconscious
self who more often has precognitive experiences, and no difficulty in regarding itself as an immortal being, free of linear
space-time. True, that self makes little distinction among its psychic contents; memories, alternate worlds, spirits, and
fantasies are all the same to it.

The confidence of Justine
²
’s convictions is contagious. Does my child by JJ in the otherworld truly represent the lost daughter of her antecedent self?
Were that mere wish fulfillment, it would seem that she would be equally emphatic in asserting an identification of herself
with that JJ. Rather, she dubiously points out that the conditions of her 1969 encounter with me, which had generated that
scheme in this world, were radically changed. With all that subsumed into another scenario, she believes she would have chosen
an alternate course. I had no sense of that young JJ
being
Justine—other than via a strong genetic kinship.