The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (18 page)

By that time, I was off on my Harley-Davidson, dating cocktail waitresses in Dallas. An active plan to marry a pregnant high-school
girl was rather implausible, especially since she, herself, clearly had not been heavily invested in it.

A glimpse into an alternate world? Very tantalizing, considered in conjunction with the matter of the ring. I described possible
paranormal experiences, during that same era, when my hormones had been running at full tilt. My friends and I used to sit
up in my room and play with hypnosis, focusing on candle flames to try to see the future, or regress to a remote past. It
was during those years that I had the intensely lucid, often precognitive, dreams that I’d remembered all my life. I reflected
on the relevant theories of J.W. Dunne, arrived at decades before.

Like Oppenheimer and too many others who had followed him, the old engineer had been brokenhearted at the reality of his patriotic
work raining death on innocent people. Watching the approach of yet another world war, he had sought answers to fundamental
questions. Believing that he had established a physical basis for precognition, he perceived the consciousness capable of
focusing on any of the multitude of equally existing moments. During sleep or unusual mental states, the consciousness might
drift in time—inclusive of observing the future.

“I’ve seen the name, several times. Didn’t he have the alternate-worlds thing going on? Time tracks that branch out every
time a decision can be taken?” she asked, raising a common misconception of origins.

“Many writers credit Dunne for their inspiration, often without troubling to read him.” I smiled. “He didn’t really advance
branching time in his books. His enormous contribution lay in subjecting the common perception of time to hard relativistic
influence. This is an example of how sloppy scholarship papers over the issue, with the result of discouraging further delving
into the literary anomaly—when it’s not simply ignored altogether.

“Dunne wrestled with how Einstein’s scenario would allow a future to be observed, and then changed. If the ‘replacement’ future
was then experienced, how could the one previously observed have been
real?
His great admirer, J.B. Priestley, employed Dunne’s theories in plays during the late thirties. He struggled with this conundrum
for decades. Haunted by a case history in which a woman had saved her child from death by drowning, Priestley remained troubled
by the question, ‘What about the dead baby?’”

Justine was having fun, as if listening to ghost stories, while I proposed that the many-worlds alone would resolve this contradiction.
The precognitive mind had touched one of many similar but alternate realities. Acceptance of proactive precognition would
seem to demand that at least some marginal interaction continued among the branches.

“I can tell you about a dream that embodied the principles of Dunne’s experiments exactly, though it took thirty years to
be realized.” As the Gulf War blazed on the television in my living room in San Antonio, I had remembered the dream. I was
living somewhere in South Texas with a large wolflike dog; there was a “war in the gulf,” which I had taken to be the Gulf
of Mexico. I had seen the explosions in a lowering green sky amidst talk of “new weapons.” As I watched, along with the rest
of the world, the nightvision attacks on Baghdad, I realized that, in my dream, I had seen it on television! Just as I would
learn that Dunne had precognitive dreams of things that he later read about in his newspaper.

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A
MBER FIRES AND REFINERY LIGHTS
made an otherworldly juxtaposition with lasers and neon. “So why aren’t we believing the future is fixed?” she asked, as
we approached the temples of chance, the casinos on the shores of Lake Charles.

I drew a breath, “Because of another dream that was part of the series, one that can’t come true anymore.” There was a major
lump in my throat. “I went to my house—it was in a blue twilight—and knocked on the door. A young woman with red hair answered.
In the study off the foyer, I could see my father with his paper. He looked slenderer than I knew him; had a kind of scholarly
look, smoking a pipe. I think he was wearing a small beard.”

I still remembered it all too clearly. I lit up, to get the lump under control, and plunged ahead—too late to stop then. “For
a long time, I thought it was a Jungian kind of thing, my anima and all that. But one day a few years ago, I shaved off my
beard and saw in the mirror something that the adolescent boy who had the dream could never imagine. It was the face of my
father on a thinner man who smokes a pipe sometimes.”

“You see,” I told her, trying to keep my voice even and still be heard over the thunder that was crashing around us, “I believe
I saw myself in a later time, when I still lived in that house, and was the father of a young woman—who can never now be born
in this world.” Justine, hearing my voice betray the emotions, gripped my wrist.

“Mightn’t it all be, some way, about me?” she asked brightly, near-endearing in her typically postadolescent conceit. “You
do know that you could be taken for my father, dearest, in a young boy’s dream, I mean? This is coming out all wrong, before
I even finish. As if you weren’t my lover, I’m way sure I wouldn’t mind you being my father,
ooh!
I did say that, I really did, but… hey, what’s up with the redheads?”

Unseen in the darkness, I smiled wanly at the evidence that I was not alone—in letting my mouth overload my ass. “Oh, it’s
JJ of course. After Linda and I were married, I described JJ to her, when she asked about other women I’d been with. She said,
‘now I know who the little redheaded girl is.’

“I had no idea what she meant, until she explained that she’d noticed I was never amused by that character in
Peanuts.
She said that when the little red-haired girl hurt Charlie Brown’s feelings, I always got mad. It hit me between the eyes
that she was right. I’d never had any conscious recognition of the identification.”

This had gone far enough. I had been venturing too near to exposing my motivation for following the trail of the branching-worlds
theory. Did all this sound crazy or what? I tried to shift the conversation onto her, but she had another track in mind.

Taking off from my mention of Linda, she wanted to know all about my wife. I found this acceptable, for it might open the
door to discussion of sex and bondage games. I could demonstrate how she would be less limited in her sexual expression with
me, than with some young asshole who cherished the typical passion for the practice of monogamy—on the part of women.

Linda had become a very successful stripper, belly dancer, and all-round showgirl working the national circuits out of Dallas.
You might have heard of her, if you’re at least a little older than Justine. Her stage name was Deva Dasi, from a Sanskrit
word meaning “slave-girl of the god,” connoting the temple prostitutes of antiquity.
⁵⁹

Justine was enthralled by the image. When the storm forced us to stop a while longer at Lafayette, she was laughing happily,
over a grisly snack of alligator boudin, at Linda’s exploits as a stripper. By then I understood that any strategy based on
the bias of young women for talking about themselves would come to naught. This babe was a whole different smoke, first determined
to hear all about me. Several times I had seen her psych training play in, and had to accept that I was being consciously
worked.

I did not gloss over the downside, but I refused to take any phony rap. Linda’s folks had been old carneys, hard people from
a hard place. While they had sent her to private schools and tried to groom her for a better life, they were incapable of
shielding the girl from the nihilism of life on the midway. Long before I’d ever met her, she’d been a teenage alcoholic.

If it were exacerbated by our lifestyle, I’ll take that blame. I would never have considered steering her away from the dancing
or the promiscuity that gave her the only joys she had in her too brief life. It was precisely when she could no longer dance
or play that the illness had become acute. Any regrets I harbored on this count were of fantasies left
unexplored.
Perhaps it’s true that the candle that burns twice as brightly burns half as long. For in her day, before the sickness took
her down, Linda had blazed.

Beautiful and desired by many, men and women, she seemed unable to abide the protective barrier established by the edge of
a stage. Her paramount fantasy was of being given to anyone who wanted her. Now, contrary to the swill of idiotic screenwriters,
acting this out had limited practicality, even in the days before the epidemic.

She would try, though, wherever it was to any degree feasible. Her passion for bondage ran as deep as that for the freedom
of the dance and, in an odd way, they were intertwined. I didn’t altogether discount the neo-Freudian suggestions that Justine
would offer. The influence of a mother, who had for years systematically crushed Linda’s will into a submission of which others
might take advantage, couldn’t be ignored.

Still, I believed that Sigmund, the stuffy bourgeois, had to be discounted after a point. Like most of us, she had no whips
and restraints around her childhood home at which to sneak nasty little peeks. Yet such fascinations lurk in the collective
unconscious of us all.

Linda had been booked by one of the old-time burlesque agencies on a Southern tour. In Printer’s Alley in Nashville, she’d
played half of a girl-on-girl act. Years later, when we had our own club, we would adapt it to a bondage theme. Then she’d
done her first entirely nude work in Panama City. She was pretty keyed-up by the time we had worked our way back to Atlanta
to end the run with a three-week booking on Peachtree.

The gig had begun typically enough with three twenty-minute sets per night; there were fewer dancers in those days, and they
performed longer at a stretch. They were fully professional; elaborate wardrobe, props, and effects, including special lighting,
were expected to be provided by the performer. A dancer on the road needed a partner for help with lift-and-carry alone. Pay
was high, minimal drink hustle or other scams, nothing by commission. They kept all tips and were not expected to support
other club personnel.

“Get outta here!” when I told her the pay to which Linda had been accustomed. “No clue it was so involved.”

“Why should you? All you’re shown on TV or in the movies are images of cops strolling into lowlife joints like they’re too
good to be there. When Hollywood admits the existence of the professionals, they serve up single-moms-supporting-their-children
who ‘just-want-to-have-a-normal-life.’ The fact is that most professional strips are in the business to escape from ‘normalcy.’
They’re into it because they get off on it as much as for the money, and that’s the long and the short of it.”

It would have been four sets a night except, being a feature, Linda did some spots with the comic and was cut in half by a
magician’s sword instead. The highly erotic, sacrificial aspect of that role had been simply made for her! Her basic function
had been to be distractive.

All she really had to do was to lie on a blackdraped, altar-looking platform, wearing a gown that fastened behind her neck.
The magician would loosen it and push it far down on her hips, baring her torso. Her split skirt would fall open to display
a lot of leg as well. From that point no one would notice what was going on with the fake blood and other stuff I was passing
to the magician, or much of anything other than her.

Justine had taken the wheel at Lafayette. As we cruised the causeway above the fifty miles of interconnected bayous, swamps,
and waterways, the moon came out to illuminate eerily the sinuous, twisting passages below us. The storm had not yet reached
there. Far off, I spied lights moving among the reeds and stumps in the water and pointed them out to her.

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T
HE “BAD JUJU”
was probably swamp gas, but this sighting digressed us for a while onto Seabrook’s history with voodoo. The material he had
gathered in Haiti comprised the book
Magic Island,
which would introduce the idea of Voudon as a religion to a mass audience. It included the first use in American literature
of the “zombie.” Beginning with the 1932 horror film classic
White Zombie,
B-movie producers would flourish for decades off what he had initiated. While he was admittedly a sensationalist, sedate
academic authorities failed repeatedly to debunk the content of his exposés. Impatiently, Justine pulled me back to my long-ago
trip with Linda over this same route.

Decades later, I had to admit lacking a clear visual of the Peachtree club owner, but that wasn’t altogether a matter of memory.
As at that first meeting, she would always be sitting rather back in the shadows and wore a long wig, a variation on “big
hair,” which largely covered her face. Her mystery had enthralled me, though I was uneasy about the fashion in which Linda
took to her, in a way that she seldom did with any other women.

I remembered Linda’s turn of phrase, after they’d been to breakfast together one night after closing. Linda had told me that
the darkness was not about concealment. She’d said that the old woman wore the darkness like a protective shawl, helping to
keep her warm. That in the darkness, her dreams still lived. Two nights later, she’d asked us to accompany her to another
location, a roadhouse she’d opened a few years earlier.

“Hey, roadhouse?” Justine queried.

“Old name for a highway bar, usually a honkytonk. This was actually a private club, but it was out on a highway and so she
called it a roadhouse.” She’d driven us out in an old black Cadillac, one of those long old boats. No sign identified the
large, two-story stone structure, with sealed shutters on its windows, as the club called
The Château,
but it looked the part.

The interior had been lavishly appointed. The rear entrance to the stage had been flanked by Grecian columns that rose far
up above a second-floor balcony, to a ceiling with a painted moon and stars. Plush drapery framed wall murals, featuring idealized
coastal scenes, with what appeared to be medieval ruins.