The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (12 page)

His treatment of Wamba’s Fan-Shaped Destiny was, arguably, the precursor of the many-worlds interpretation as applied to literature—twenty-seven
years before the formalism was elaborated by Hugh Everett and forty-three years before it was popularized by Bryce DeWitt.
He had been to the mountain and seen the promised land, and became obsessed with getting back. I believed that his obsession
went, indeed, “a whole lot further back and a whole lot deeper” than to Africa in 1929.

Seabrook had been searching for something very specific since at least 1907, when he had gone to Geneva. I thought he had
found it in Africa, and that returning to Europe had likely been an error. He thought he had good reason to anticipate the
fun and games awaiting him back in our world. By the time they became no fun and all games, it had been too late.

Certainly I felt that the blackout, the
blacklisting,
of his diverse impacts on literature and culture should not be allowed to stand. Most especially the real possibility that
the branching-worlds thesis in literature might well have influenced the scientific interpretation, rather than the reverse.

Likewise, his influence on the occult, and his early public proclamation of sadomasochism. That last was possibly at the behest
of none other than A.A. Brill. William Pepperell Montague had seen in Seabrook a champion of his proposition that a materialism
sufficiently radical would lead on to a new idealism, in which matter was not denied but transfigured.

My friend Richard used to claim that he could hear the “laughter of the gods.” At the end of Willie’s story, inside and aside
was always the mischievous laughter of the sprightly composite Justine. Whenever the anomalies ganged up, she was always nearby,
as “Deborah,” possibly Crowley’s consort “Leah,” or simply the figure in the red-leather mask. Maybe composed of pieces of
Willie’s wives and anonymous “research girls,” possibly with a pinch of Lee Miller, but more.

Seabrook had described Justine’s presumed Leah Hirsig component thus: “… that was her name in the phone book, and in the cold
world outside.” Referencing her nudity, he noted “the one thing she did wear. She couldn’t very well avoid wearing it, because
it had been branded into her fair hide with the red-hot point of a Chinese sword: on her breast she wore a Star…”
⁴⁸

Even before I had found Ward Greene’s strange book,
Ride the Nightmare,
and read of a Justine kneeling in the same position as Leah at Washington Square, I had somehow sensed that composite literary
device was at least one key to the enigma.

————————

A
MONG THE SYNCHRONISTIC CURIOSITIES
that had been accumulating in my journal, two more had been waiting to set the stage for what was about to happen. These
took place when a trip on union business took me back to my hometown of Fort Worth, just before the WorldCon in late August.

The first was to be the weirdness of my acquisition of a 1949 paperback version of Ward Greene’s lightly fictionalized early
life of Seabrook,
Ride the Nightmare.
I’ll describe the circumstance of its finding later; suffice it to say that it originally appeared to rival the appearance
of the autobiography. The next offering of the “Library Angel,” however, had been so involved with the circumstances of my
own life as to freak me.

I’d made my obligatory pilgrimage to the shelter house at Lake Arlington, bathing in treasured misery over my lost JJ, that
gracious source of tears for worlds that might have been. I resolved to reestablish contact with my boyhood friend Charles,
whom I’d not seen for ten years. Thus sensitized, and dreading telling him of Linda’s death, I was wholly unprepared for having
the wounds so unexpectedly salted.

Charles for some years had two wives, not sequentially. You will have likely gathered my total indifference whether the circumstances
constituted de facto, if not legal, bigamy. I will mention that our beloved Marilyn, a Native American, was his wife in the
eyes of the
Lakota
religion. The rest is no one else’s business and too precious to all concerned to debate.

Our lives had been intimately, if not bizarrely, entangled when our inseparable friend Big Richard had met a violent death
typical to bikers. Neither are the details of that tragedy germane, except that the emotional complications had left me with
guilt, which had generated an estrangement from Charles and Marilyn for many years. It was my burden, not theirs.

Perhaps I should say it was not germane,
as far as I know,
a caveat that I would soon learn to apply to many observations. In any event, what I had to deal with was the news that Marilyn
had died, due to complications resulting from multiple sclerosis, less than a year before. I’d not even known she was ill,
and now the loose ends would never be tied up. Like the big hole where Big Richard used to stand, like the emptiness left
by Linda, it would never be filled.

I’d spent forty-eight hours in near-continuous conversation with Charles, rehashing what had happened, not happened, might
have happened, and should have happened. Near the conclusion of that masochistic marathon, I was stunned by an event that
drew fresh consideration to my bookseller’s behavior, and perhaps to a perceptual abnormality I’d experienced when discovering
Ward Greene’s book.

Charles is a pack rat who seems to have nearly everything he’s ever owned. In itself, the fact of him dredging up a copy of
the 1968 reprint of
Witchcraft
out of a box of books, lost among a decades-long accumulation of auto and motorcycle parts, might not seem all that strange.
Still, Charles can remember the exact location of nuts and bolts he removed decades past. That he found no recollection of
ever having possessed such a book
was
somewhat singular. As youths, we’d had a passing interest in the esoteric, after all.

For some hours I’d compared the paperback to a photocopy I’d made—only weeks before the book had inexplicably vanished from
the library’s reference shelves. I deduced that what Charles had found could only be the 1968 reprint. Deduction being indicated,
in that the odd paperback’s flyleaf contained only the original 1940 publication data.

I could not resist associating the conditions of the find with the blank I continued to draw about prior contacts with Seabrook’s
work, the light of my recent obsessions coloring it very personally. It felt as if these things had always stood near to me,
surrounding me, waiting for me.

Driving back to San Antonio in a simmering emotional soup, I came face-to-face with what I was engaging in. Psychological
pabulum could not replace those who had been the meaning of my life. I thought of boyhood experiments when we had tried to
send our consciousness into our futures; the marginal evidence that, sometimes, we had apparently succeeded. Through a glass
darkly, too weak a connection to do any greater good… If it were mental illness, should I go madder than Phil Dick, so what?
What did I have left to lose? In truth, I questioned whether my life had been worth the living at all, if catastrophic errors
always outweighed the good. Near the end of my tether, one more thread had frayed.

I couldn’t shake the stuff boiling up in me. There were thoughts of my mother, and a world changed beyond recognition in just
my lifetime. There was regret at finding myself childless late in life and fear of facing myself as the lonely old man I was
already becoming. I experienced a dark nostalgia that was far from comforting, as if an irrational belief that I might have
lived better had it been in other times. Behind and around it all was a heartbreaking
homesickness,
for the places and people lost every time another door had closed.

As I gained the San Antonio city limits, intent on either a stiff drink or a happy pill, the radio had been babbling about
El Niño
kicking up, generating a flurry of storms in the Caribbean and the Gulf. In earlier years I had a strong interest in climatic
change and would have paid more attention. Apart from the possibility of some welcome relief from the oppressive heat wave,
it seemed small potatoes compared with the storm within my own soul.

I watched a lone seagull in the evening twilight, flapping along above and beyond the branching interstates, which I knew
he used, like the rivers, as a map. Would that the “paths of probability” I’d been studying were so clearly defined! Those
might rather resemble a topographical map of a steep gorge or mountain—”bundles” of lines of very similar paths. Worse, the
nonlinear terms might signify a constant crossing and recrossing, loops in which every convergence might be seen as the other
end of a divergence.

Looking back, there is a thrilling chill in remembering what could have been the synchronistic moment, when the quantum membrane
between metaphor and reality became strained to its limit. The bird seemed to dive right at my car but, just as I thought
it would smash into the windshield, it had turned and risen again. I continued to watch with bewilderment until, again leisurely,
it disappeared into the dusk. For the bird no longer seemed to be escaping, but running
toward
the gathering storms.

IV

The Justines

W
AKING TO VERIFY THAT
I
HAD SURVIVED MY NIGHT
of passion with Justine, I lay in bed thinking about what all this was possibly going to mean. I could smell coffee brewing
and hear her talking to my dog. I knew this much—a sadly forgotten joy had been returned to my life. If there was any way
on God’s green earth to keep this improbable encounter going, even if for only a little while longer, I would do anything
and everything necessary. I looked for my robe, then spotted Justine’s clothes scattered about the bedroom floor and concluded
that she must be wearing it. Good sign.

I paused by the mirror for a reality check. Not really overweight, but gravity definitely in evidence: belly sagging a bit;
butt okay; muscle tone mediocre. It was obvious I was no fan of the sun, and looked as white as the belly of a toad. The upside
of that was that my skin looked about as it always had, with little wrinkling. But my grayed hair and beard struck me as looking
old, old, old.

I hit the shower, scrubbed and deodorized everything I could reach, trimmed wild hairs, and prayed that I had farted all I
was capable. As I dressed, I was keenly aware of the regimen being utterly unlike anything I ever did in the morning. The
thought of her looking at me, and wondering what she possibly could have been thinking the preceding night, sickened me.

I slipped quietly into my main living area and stood watching her as she sat behind my desk. The growing lump in my throat
should have clued me right off that I was over the top. An encounter, which should have been some fun before both went our
separate ways, had become something I wanted to keep forever. Wisdom would be that I could all too easily kill it by clutching
too hard, but I didn’t want to let go.

My malamute lay at her feet, happy, protective, and content for there to be a woman in the house again, maybe vaguely hoping
that he wouldn’t be left alone so much anymore. Justine was absorbed in reading my Seabrook files, her toes caressing Kong’s
big furry neck. She had one knee drawn up, foot beautifully arched against the edge of the seat. The robe spilled open to
display the muscular cut of those legs that had been so unbelievably wrapped around mine just a few hours before.

She was reading from my file of hard copies, shot from microfilmed book reviews and bio items on Seabrook, from the thirties
and forties. She’d hardly had to search, as my materials were spread all over the room, but it was apparent that she had been
flagrantly prowling through them.

On my desk was a rough draft from which portions of this present account were later transcribed. It was incomplete, particularly
as regards the Seabrook background—much of it no more than glorified notes. My copy of
Adventures in Arabia
lay open to the drawing of a silver “bride’s girdle” or belt, of the
Yezidi,
so obviously related to her own barbaric jewelry.

Adventures in Arabia,
arguably, was second only to T.E. Lawrence in establishing the popular literary and film image of life among the desert tribes.
Willie used the name of “Arabia” in the old fashion to denote the entire Arab domain; he did not visit the Arabian Peninsula.
The book had secured his position as an authority on the
Druse.
He and Katie were on the ground in the Syrian puppet states of “Greater Lebanon” when a
Druse
rebellion against the French Mandate broke out in the summer of 1925.

Marjorie Worthington asserted later that he had fought with the
Druse
against the French. This was not impossible. Willie, still technically attached to the French Army and a frequent visitor
to France, would have been inhibited against using such an adventure for self-promotion. In any event, he was in demand from
newspapers and foreign-policy clubs back in New York in late 1925.
⁴⁹

It took nothing away from the validity of our mutual interest to presume that I had one real chance with Justine. Her involvement
with the Seabrook saga was clearly intense and personal. If I could contrive to remain an integral part of her quest, there
might be a remote chance of molding this thing closer to my heart’s desire.

She looked up, “Hey. Prompt me why you aren’t, like, a college professor or something?” She gestured to my piles of research
materials, and I laughed. It was not as though I hadn’t been asked that before. Things just had not fallen that way in this
life. On an impulse, I told her about the bikers and strippers with whom I had spent my youth. “Professor” had, in fact, been
the biker name the dancers had given me.

She nodded understanding. “I can see why you’re so up on Willie.” She turned back to the copy of a 1936
American Magazine
article, “Green Hills Far Away,” in which Seabrook rationalized not finally returning to his life as an expatriate. Directly,
she leaned back and sighed, looking at the pictures on my desk. Speaking carefully, as though trying to stay on top of something
inexplicable, “Sentimental, much?”