The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (53 page)

My extreme sense of hurt over losing JJ would have been compounded by the loss of my magical friends; the red-haired angel,
and perhaps glimpses of my other, older self, who had nodded to me in passing. I wondered at how many more mistaken worlds,
as full of sadness as this we’d known, we had created before arriving at the present accommodation.

“Not so many as to get bent about. Most would converge again within days or weeks. The paths of higher probability do seem,
like, more resistant than we imagined? Some, like the world of the two-pearl ring, existed separately for months. But the
fact that JJ remembers that one proves it spilled into ours as well. For sure, divergent histories don’t prevent worlds from
becoming similar enough to converge.”

So what was critical? What constituted the triggering moment? I recapitulated how Dr. Benford had speculated on the necessary
conditions for a message across time that could alter a history.

“He wrote of some minimum impulse necessary to trigger a paradox. When some critical volume of space-time was tweaked, then
the disturbance would propagate outward instantaneously, with enough amplitude to matter. You could change the past regularly
as long as you didn’t create paradoxes with large amplitude. He visualized a multiverse with a single wave function, scattering
into new states of being as paradoxes formed inside it like kernels of ideas.”

“
C’est ça;
he said it!” Justine
²
beamed. “I was sure it had to be your determination to make the dream come true that I’d prepared in you. Or not. Persuading
JJ to direct events toward me by invoking Wamba’s name and quoting from the manuscript? No, wait. You did do a bang-up job.
Hearing that would’ve had me all over the situation like stink. I would’ve come to you immediately, and no interference would’ve
been brooked, however well intentioned.
Emmerde!
You launched serious preemptive stink.”

She sobered, “What truly appalls me is that it required even that much to keep your appearance in her life from escaping my
attention. I must’ve been as dreadfully neglectful of JJ as I was of my little Justine.”

“Don’t
you
start beating yourself up, now. You couldn’t have monitored every boy in your granddaughter’s life from a thousand miles
away if you’d tried. She was deliciously promiscuous—sufficient for
me
to fall in love with her. So, we theorize that turning her thoughts toward contacting you was the ‘bit of destiny action,’
a quantum flash in JJ’s brain, at a moment when it could have gone either way?”

“Where it went
both
ways. We are living on a path where it was all disregarded. On that other path, she wrote the letter or made the call.” I
questioned her certitude, and she looked exasperated. “Oh, men! Like, intuition? When I saw the commitment in your eyes, I
knew that it was done. You didn’t doubt the dream so much, back in that day. You knew it was of something terribly real,”
as she tried to cite Priestley’s critique of Dunne, her voice betrayed her continuing pain, “as real as a dead child.”

“What reconsolidated the parts of my self to its respective worlds,” I persisted, “and at the critical moments?” I thought
about her partial transit in the barn, that I feared might have become consummated had I not been there to pull against the
dream-loop drawing her to 1945—finally only accelerating the
anamnesis
that confirmed her
metem.
I compared the particulars to my temporary transit, which she believed was also associated with a dream-loop.

For the first time, I saw in Justine
²
something approaching humility. “You, you make me feel … so
proud;
outing with it, like it’s from your heart and you haven’t even thought it through. If love doesn’t ‘steer the stars,’ at
least we know it affects quantum events.”

“Come again?”

She dropped her eyes, and said quietly, “The manuscript? What were your last thoughts of that horrid night in London, and
the way you said good-bye after the second time around? It was all about what rated more than anything.”

She looked up and there was so much love in her eyes that it was frightening. “
O, je t’aime!
When you found your moment of truth, the closest me was
here.
It was easier to reach across quanta of space-time than across a thousand miles. Besides, though you couldn’t know it, I
would’ve tried to send you away, near the end of that life, when I was sick and it got very bad.”

“Vanity, thy name is woman.” I shook my head. “You couldn’t have kept me away. And how do you explain the dovetailing of our
agendas, played out separately at both ends? More, how do these, ostensibly romantic, obsessions move inevitably toward the
creation of a world for our child?”

“Lookit, a child’s world begins with the love of a man and woman for each other? Hey,
that’s
a radical idea! If you demand a causal answer for that, we’d better oughta start going to church again, like we did back
in the twenties?
How
is courtesy of synchronicity, but that magic word gives no answer as to
why.
”

Thus, I discovered my passion to exchange realities to have been like one of Wamba’s masks, putting another face on the burning
need to tie up the loose ends from less-spectacular escapes. Willie had contemplated his future at Lausanne and then struggled
for acceptance when it came true,
again.
Had a limping specter in a snowy Moscow night signaled a sequential past of which I would become aware only decades later?

As I move toward the end of this account, my curious tendency to lapse into a god-awful Victorian-Edwardian writing style
is no longer lost on me. This conceit, from which Willie and his contemporaries had laboriously worked to free themselves,
is utterly incompatible with my late-century education and reading interests. I now know why this, long a mystery to others
and myself, has been with me always. It must be like Justine
²
’s integrated speech.

Later that quiet morning, I studied the sleeping girl. What silly insecurity it had been, feeling too old, in the hands of
someone with a century of combined life experience. In Justine
^2,
I could also see the old woman. It now shamed me to realize that, at
The Château
in 1969, I probably could not have loved her. That early in this life, I had been too young and stupid. How many wonderful
partners do we miss, poisoned by petty differences and presumed imperfections that mean nothing, not a thing?

I could also see the image of the woman, as if from the forties, whose aspect I had glimpsed in San Antonio, in the strange
light of the hotel bar. I suspected that was as Willie had last seen her near the end.

The loveliness that had torn his heart out as she walked away for that last time is, I have come to believe, a memory rather
than a construction. The Justines are all one, and all beautiful. I felt redeemed that,
in extremis,
I had reached for her in whichever form. I recalled the rest of Borges’s verse, which I’d not been able or ready to remember
in the predawn rain on Wednesday:

————————

“…
AND THE SHEER CONTEMPLATION OF THAT FACE
… will be, for the rejected, an Inferno, and, for the elected, Paradise.”

I acknowledged Justine as my wife in the old shelter house at the lake. In light of the above, such a ceremony may seem something
of a redundancy, but it fulfilled, for her, an ambition of terrifying longevity and endless frustrations. My friends were
in attendance, and I could see her looking them over, evaluating whether she might already know some of them. I hoped there
were also others, if only in spirit, those lost to meet again.

My glance kept straying to certain spots on the floor, to an old light fixture, down toward the pier. At a table outside,
not far away, a young couple was picnicking with their children. Had my transit really not been Justine
²
’s plan? What was the most likely meaning of the phrase she’d murmured as I attempted regression?

“Papa Legba, ouvrí barrière pour ce, ma p’tite …”
(“… open wide the gate for this, my little one? My darling?”)

I thought about a young family from another world. “God bless them,” I whispered, “God bless our little girl.” Justine
²
gripped my arm so hard that she might have drawn blood, smiling through tears that our friends thought were the emotion of
the moment. I trust her absolutely—to be Justine. Will she eventually tell me what she meant by what I can pull back?

Going on to San Antonio to pick up Kong, we made an effort to at least talk with her mother. Justine
²
had immediately presented us as a unit, the subject not open for discussion, and damned near got the door slammed in our
faces for our trouble. Relenting, JJ apprehensively avoided the circumstances with a depressing litany of her arthritis and
other maladies.

“… pressing on nerves running to my legs, causing me to be unsteady on my feet most of the time. Balance is important, one
problem on each side,” she laughed nervously. “I’m considering acupuncture, but haven’t worked up the courage yet.”

In my mind, I had yet to come to terms with JJ as the little grandmother before me. I did not want to lose the hot young babe.
Not a “good girl,” but a
real
girl, in nineties’ eyes, and it didn’t help matters that I remembered making love to that young girl so “recently”!

As JJ was thanking me for what she took to be empathetic concern, Justine
²
rudely interrupted with an ill-advised attempt to discuss the past; specifically, my relationship with JJ. Her mother listened
with a tense politeness, then responded with her typical clichés, some tending toward the cryptic.

“All we can do is to love well those whom we love.” That seemed to exhaust her capacity for the personal, and JJ waxed philosophical.
“Our lives are little drops of water, but they can come together into a mighty ‘river of good.’ No one person can have a big
effect on such a large world, good or bad, but together we can—and it’s up to us to make sure we’re in the right river.”

She looked at me, and I confess to uncertainty as to what was being discussed. Stupidly, that “right river” intrigued me sufficiently
to venture into the conversation. I recalled to her our shared anomalies, the ring, the parking lot, my long-ago dreams. After
a while, she sighed.

“You’ve explained much of this to me before. These things were a
very
long time ago, and I’ve never had your capacity to remember everything I’ve ever heard or was said to me. My memory continues
to diminish about almost everything except the trivial stuff. It sometimes seems that the more trivial, the more likely I
am to retain it. The more important it is, especially if it has to do with me personally, the less likely. It’s frustrating.

“You know that I’ve never been the type to pick apart a conversation, or dream, to identify and understand every nuance of
it. Not only do I not have the capacity to do it; I don’t have the interest. Folding in upon myself and obsessively analyzing
everything I’ve done, or what has been done to me, is not something I care to do. I’m not in denial about it—I can hear
you
saying that already,” she tossed at Justine.

“You have to have some basic understanding of the past, but once you reach a level you can live with—mine is obviously considerably
shallower than yours—you have to move on and hope to make better choices in the future. I don’t dismiss the depth of your
involvement.” Her green eyes scanned both Justine
²
and me meaningfully, though without their old sparkle. “I just don’t think it’s very healthy.

“Is this the deal with the dream you once told me about? Where you and I got together and had a family? You saw this ‘daughter’
in a dream that was so vivid you had to accept it as truth because you’d had other dreams that proved true. Is that right?”
I was speechless. What could I say? If it were anything, it was indeed
“the deal with the dream”!

“You found yourself a daughter”—with a wounded resignation—”and you did it by taking mine.” She turned to Justine
^2.
“I have many regrets about the choices and decisions I’ve made in my past, like most people. But I must accept them and the
results they produced.” I saw Justine
²
’s nose ring flash as her nostrils began to flare. “I have to accept that what’s done cannot be changed.” I just shook my
head, hoping the girl would not feel called to revisit past sins in painful detail.

“What do you expect to accomplish by understanding all the ‘why-fors’? Inner peace?
That
would be a healthy goal. What would you be able to change if you did completely understand every nuance? How would it change
how you live the rest of your life? No matter how much you ‘pick the scab’ to see what’s underneath, it will not change anything
or help anyone.” I had to wonder again at the levels being trolled. Justine
²
might have every right to be getting hot.

“I think, as one grows older, one has to move past the ‘what-ifs’ of life. You can strangle on them, like your great-grandmother.
Justine, she could be such a pill. I guess you would say, she projected everything. She imagined that a great-grandchild she’d
never know, or have to relate to, would somehow carry on for her. She became such an obsessive mentality that, if she were
here today, would say …”

“Screw you. I’ve got my own issues!”
Snarling dismissal of the lecture, with its possible innuendoes, the bitchy side of Justine
²
’s antecedent self surprised me. I registered her mother’s shock—at the faintly discernible, doubtless remotely familiar,
taint of the old Bronx. Being JJ, she had the eerie moment cached, in its appropriate ‘box,’ in record time.

“Oh, sweetie, you are so much like her! It was only right for you to be her heir. But please, don’t carry on the pain and
bitterness. I do believe that it is inescapable human nature to have regrets about the past—wrong actions, missed chances,
bad decisions.” I was feeling sure veiled contrition was being proffered. Then she continued, plainly including me.