The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (6 page)

The problem was that the timing made such a version of the enterprise thoroughly implausible. The vision seemed to incorporate
elements from a full year before the pregnancy that had supposedly triggered my derring-do. I could not so much as recall
whether I had succeeded in obtaining the items sought or not. Still, the vivid memory remained, and could not be denied. Perched
on the high shoeshine chair, I had been happily inspecting a brand-new book, acquired only just before I’d arrived at the
shine stand.

It was the copy of the
I Ching
that I have to this day: the Bollingen single-volume edition with a foreword by Carl Jung. Intrigued by Philip K. Dick’s
use of the book in his classic of that year,
The Man in the High Castle,
I’d been determined to possess it. Knowing full well that my life would end without JJ, I suppose I’d hoped that it might
open for me the gate to another reality, as it had for the characters in Dick’s fiction. Failing that, perhaps its oracular
powers might enlighten me as to how to win her back against all odds.

I had gotten downtown early in order to search it out, combining the physical and metaphysical in my quest as I was to do
again—more years later than I could have conceived of at the time. Entering at the side door of old Barber’s Bookstore, a
local institution nearly unto today, I had an experience of the synchronicity upon which the ancient Chinese tome was allegedly
based. High on a shelf just inside the door, I had spied the object of my search.

I must claim that it most plaintively called out to me, because I promptly tucked it beneath my leather jacket and stepped
back onto the sidewalk before the door even had time to close. Continuing on my mission, I had passed a newsstand. The papers
left no doubt of this vision’s date. Their headlines had been full of the missiles of October.

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T
HE OLD
I C
HING,
rebound a couple of times, lay on my nightstand even then. It had been my quiet friend throughout the years. More recently,
it had acquired a cherished companion—not a book that I sought out, but one that had
found me.
The night-light painted this other friend’s faded dust cover with new life, while Justine stirred softly against me—and I
remembered my times with JJ.

JJ
never
would have carried on in bed like this little babe! In the nearer time, the fault was partially of the environment. The logistics
of my job and house being inconvenient for nooners, we often had been reduced to a downtown whore-motel. The concierges, a
couple fresh from the Indian subcontinent, kept it clean enough in spite of its chronic limitations. One rainy afternoon,
we had been making love “Southern style”; that is to say, as befit a man of my age—slow and
deliberately.

“How do you imagine they arrive at the particular figure of thirteen dollars for two hours?” I had wondered at this finer
point of pandering for some time.

“However they do it, you get what you pay for,” she’d griped. “The carpets are soaked whenever it rains.”

“Your feet are never on the floor, anyway,” I teased. “No more inconvenient than playing with each other in your parents’
living room.” I recalled to her one of my fonder memories from our adolescent romance. When she couldn’t get out of the house,
we would sit in front of the television in the darkened living area and “mess around,” as we’d called it back then. At that
age reaching inside her clothes, running my hand down her belly to touch her forbidden parts, had been as near acute a thrill
as the sex act itself. “We would get in a serious lip-lock,” I described, leading her through the motions, “then I would
slowly
slide your panties off…” I was remembering the way her toes would curl when I stroked her smooth, bared flanks.

“And sit on them!” Flushing, she was starting to squirm in response to the fantasized revisitation. “It was usually my shorts,
and you would
hide
them, so there I’d be, bare-assed—what if my stepparents had ever walked in?”

“I imagine they had at least some idea of what was going on. Besides, that very thought was what gave you a gigantic orgasm
every time”—I’d laughed, playing with her pussy—”just about like the way you’re going to come right now if you’ll let yourself
go!” The prediction had been directly fulfilled, which hadn’t kept her from chiding me.

“You’re
bad,
you know it? You’re having simply too much fun with all this.” That sort of remark would bother me. Something in her tone
told me it wasn’t really a joke, so much as recognition that I appealed to a part of her that she’d never truly allowed to
be free. I could only immediately remember one occasion that JJ had ever departed from a sort of sedate resignation—a capitulation
dressed up as sardonic, but not really.

Near the end of our farther yesteryear, she’d attempted to poison my love with a lurid recitation of having done her intended,
along with two of his friends, at a church youth outing—the location being plausible enough for the time and place. However,
I would later realize that it had to have been a fantasy. There was no way those boys had it up for pulling a train. Not a
matter of scruples. Their cowboy image notwithstanding, such indulgence was far too
country
for Texas city kids of that era. Having to get naked and perform in each other’s presence, and thereby kicking in the boys’
ubiquitous homophobia, pretty much rendered group sex implausible.

My reaction to the purported ravishment was, at the time, “inappropriate” even to me, not to mention probably providing her
with horrified confirmation that I could be regarded as a wrong person. Inexplicably aroused, I found myself loving her even
more. Now I had to wonder—might that early expression of voyeurism, with a discernible masochistic edge, have tightened a
kink that would finally help bend my attention after Seabrook’s strange devices? In any event, I did love her yet. Read my
story and tell me how could I not.

In our adult era, I had begun to press for additional dimensions to our renewed relationship, to get it out of the bedroom
alone. So, we had begun taking lunch, almost daily, in a park on the San Antonio River where we could talk and feed the ducks.
Middle-aged love is different. It can be calmer and more thoughtful. Still, it was there that I argued with the preposterous
concern of distress to her grown children, of whom I knew only vaguely, never having been allowed to meet them. My take was
that adults who owed her their lives should damned well put up with
her.
I knew that the end was near when, at our usual parting kiss, she dropped her chin.

I would learn so much more about JJ, and our world, and myself that it would strain the limits of credulity. Suffice it to
say that you now possess the constellation of events that sparked the inception of my quest. If you are inclined, as was my
little love, to serve the gods of the mundane at all costs, you may then regard what followed as obsession going over into
dementia. If so, then seek other reading material. For you will surely abhor the circumstances that followed from my determination
to conclude the unfinished story of William Seabrook.

Driven by the subjective need to unravel the mysteries of the aberrant memories with their twists and warps of chronology,
of just what the hell had happened to me then and later, I turned a different eye to my youthful fantasies of other worlds,
other realities. Increasingly, I no longer cared about very much apart from this single eccentric interest. My life winding
down, only an elderly dog left dependent on me—it takes no deep psychology to comprehend such a solitary obsession.

I’d found that almost all authorities agreed that Murray Leinster had published the oldest and wildest explicitly branching-worlds
story as far back as 1934. Many later authors took inspiration from this original piece. Greg Benford, a physicist and science
fiction writer, would ultimately speculate whether Everett himself might not have drawn his original notion from Leinster.
A daring concept for a physicist, to suggest that a scientist might have been inspired by a science fiction writer rather
than the other way around!

————————

A
MYSTERY MAN OF PHYSICS,
Hugh Everett III devised the “relative state” formulation of quantum mechanics around 1956. Given its bizarre and supposedly
counterintuitive properties, his vision of a cosmos with essentially infinite numbers of branching realities received scant
credence when published the following year.
⁴
Even rendered into more popularly accessible form in the seventies, it was ridiculed as pure science fantasy until theoretical
work late in the century suggested that bases for practical experimentation existed. To be coldly realistic, you might say,
until the invisible government perceived such benefits as unbreakable cryptography in it.

The viewpoint of another generation ruled in that earlier world. Our old redbrick school building would never have survived
a good earthquake. Nevertheless, when the siren sounded, we were required to crawl under our desks and pathetically hide our
eyes with our little hands against the imaginary blast. As an eleven-year-old looking up at the arched tops of the high windows,
still opaque with the blackout paint from the last war, I had known only that I was regularly made afraid. Forget
Happy Days
and similar tripe. On the whole, the children of the fifties did not dream, for to dream was only to ride the nightmare.

I found it depressingly easy to sum up in a few sentences everything that was publicly known about “the late Hugh Everett,”
as he was commonly referenced. It was not easy to locate even so much as an exact date of death. For a while, I wondered if
he might not have been a suicide, as had Seabrook and a number of other principals in this strange saga. Eventually, I concluded
that his relationship to the Cold War defense establishment had at least some bearing on the dearth of information.

I’d grown exasperated with intriguing but vague descriptions such as “maverick physicist,” “unaffiliated with institutions,”
et cetera. With some amusement, I noted that, in physical science’s own political paraworld, one unaffiliated with any
academic
institution is deemed to have left the field. What a naughty boy Everett must have been to follow the Cold War example set
by Teller and numerous other Dr. Strangeloves.

It was painful to learn of a lecture trip Everett made during the late seventies to the University of Texas at Austin, careening
about the campus in a Cadillac with steer horns. In those years I’d owned a successful nightclub in the North Texas Metroplex.
I’d possessed the liberty and interest to attend his lecture, had I known about it. With renewed popular interest, Everett
had planned to do more work, but died of a heart attack in 1982. Sadly, I knew that the earlier collaborators had distanced
themselves, to greater or lesser degrees, from his theory.

During my research, I realized that there had never been much imperative toward democratization of scientific information
in the West. Quite the contrary. Before the Second World War, only a handful of scientists and science writers, principally
in Britain, undertook to explain to the people what science was all about. This “Invisible College,” primarily of leftist
political persuasion, included J.B.S. Haldane and J.D. Bernal. On the literary side, they were linked with Aldous Huxley and
Olaf Stapledon. In science, their tradition led back to the great Paul Dirac.

In the pivotal years of 1938–41, their efforts grew frenetic. Through the cold British rain, they could watch across the Channel
the rampage of a beast that made the monsters of our own societies look benign by comparison. In the fall of 1939, the war
machine began to roll. On the Continent, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and the other great physicists who did not
have to run for their lives were forced into a lackadaisical abstractedness by the preposterous tenets of “Aryan science.”

During the war, state security consumed all the powers, and the Cold War came hard on its heels. Thanks largely to the influx
of German and Jewish scientists, America had come up to speed in physics.
Scientific American
was no longer, as it had been earlier in the century, on a par with
Popular Mechanics.
While we ate off Formica and watched
Ozzie and Harriet
struggle with chrome toasters, there came a move in government actively to suppress the dissemination of most scientific
information. Speeches in the
Congressional Record
tended not so much toward hysteria about Communist agents as to ridiculous propositions that high-school students might build
atomic bombs in the bathtub. Fear of the people themselves! Ideology lapsed into an elitist mode. You were supposed to “trust”
those who “knew more.”

As with a rumor in 1938 that the Nazis had split the atom, a certain moderation of this stratification of society into initiates
and morons became necessary during panic over Soviet space successes. Still, this would remain the atmosphere Hugh Everett
came up against when, by the year of Sputnik, he extracted from quantum mechanics a truly rationalist interpretation. I mean
to say, the one that would allow even a single universe to exist without some subjective observer to magically “collapse the
wave function.”

————————

B
Y THE DARK DECEMBER OF
1941, as the world’s empires locked in a struggle to the death, the great Richard Feynman had visualized a physical entity
whose very existence was defined by reciprocal interaction with its own past. He had already developed an approach that many
regard as the precursor of the many-worlds interpretation. Feynman had broken with convention to present the novel image of
a particle “turning a corner” in time. I didn’t believe that he could have arrived at a concept of converging pasts without
some preconceived notion of the branching worlds.
⁵

Simultaneously, in England, the little engineer J.W. Dunne was nearing the end of his life. Before “turning the corner,” he’d
been feverishly trying to explain, to a war-haunted world, the implications for human immortality of the physics of time.
Fiction writers close to the sciences spun fantasies that would sometimes spookily illustrate those notions. The collective
mind at work, or something else? I wondered what the good Catholic boy Hugh Everett had begun to read by age eleven.