The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook Read online

  Copyright

  All quotations from published books, magazines, and newspapers are genuine. Likewise, the contents of the annotations are factual. This includes data bearing on the “literary anomaly” and discrepancies in the historical record. Otherwise: This is a novel and a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in the body of the text either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE FAN-SHAPED DESTINY OF WILLIAM SEABROOK. Copyright © 2001 by Paul Pipkin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2560-3

  First eBook Edition: August 2001

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  For Linda, to meet again

  Contents

  Copyright

  Author’s Note

  Chapter I: Happenstance

  Chapter II: Circumstance

  Chapter III: Seabrook

  Chapter IV: The Justines

  Chapter V: Crossing the Styx

  Chapter VI: The Testament

  Chapter VII: The Châteaux

  Chapter VIII: Rhinebeck

  Chapter IX: Ghost Years

  Chapter X: The Fan-Shaped Destiny

  Chapter XI: The Lake

  Chapter XII: Hindsight

  Selected Bibliography

  Author’s Note

  At the end of the day, the narrative which follows is a love story; a highly erotic one, at that. Still, a number of idiosyncrasies may prompt some readers to echo the wonderment of Madeleine Leiris (in her Testament included in the sixth chapter) and ask, “Could such things be?” To those determined to strike out on such a path of higher improbability, I offer such explanation as I can.

  William Seabrook and the people around him were actual historical personages. As with the chronicle of the scientific workers and the authors alluded to, I have endeavored to be as faithful to their lives and work as the narrative and its affiliated research could approach.

  Seabrook documented the existence of his unpublished materials in 1942. If those notes are still extant, only they can confirm whether they support the narrative thread of The Fan-Shaped Destiny fragments purportedly represented in the later chapters.

  What of the apparently composite figure that Seabrook and Ward Greene called Justine? The artist Man Ray wrote fondly of Willie Seabrook: “It is rare to read facts that sound like fiction—most writers strive for the reverse effect.”1

  At times I almost dream I too have spent a life the sages’ way,

  And tread once more familiar paths. Perchance

  I perished in an arrogant self-reliance

  Ages ago; and in that act, a prayer

  For one more chance went up so earnest, so

  Instinct with better light let in by death,

  That life was blotted out—not so completely

  But scattered wrecks enough of it remain,

  Dim memories, as now, when once more seems

  The goal in sight again.

  —from Paracelsus, Robert Browning, 1835

  I

  Happenstance

  IN THE AUTUMN OF MY LIFE AND AT THE END OF A dark and bloody century, I had undertaken to make a final accounting of the strange odyssey of William Seabrook, a forgotten literary figure of the Lost Generation. The twists and turns of events that followed from this eccentric project, infused as it was with the dark energy of my personal sorrows, would come to beg expansion. The beginning? Such a discrete moment shifts within my grasp. It mocks me still.

  For some years, I’d been working in the southern part of Texas as a union business agent, a vocation that had killed better men than me. I was burning out under the pressures of the work and grief over my wife’s recent death, a result of chronic alcoholism. I had paid for the ticket with my tears and taken that ride to the bitter end; and it had been so very bitter. I’m not good at “moving on,” you see. Venture forth and my steps would only turn again, back toward Willie’s ever-receding far-away. When in Laredo, I would sit alone nights on the patio of a bar just beside the International Bridge, reviewing the contradictions of my life. So much of it had been lived up and down the Interstate 35 artery, throbbing with the commercial invasion of the South, that it would often appear in my dreams.

  As I stared across the river into the vast mystery of Mexico, I-35 would become that dream highway. Along its dark axis, one just might drive off some night into other times, other worlds. One ramp, four hundred miles and thirty-five years behind me, would exit upon my adolescence and late-summer nights spent reading the pulp science fiction from decades more remote still. Some of those old books and magazines had transfixed me with strange stories, which had worked to reinforce a childhood fantasy. That the past might be only another room, a room which we have exited but whose door may have remained just a little bit ajar.

  Some of those boyhood nights had hosted inexplicable dreams, intense enough to linger as dim memories, for years and even decades. One by one and without any other forewarning, they had come true. Such phenomena are not nearly so remarkable as they may seem to those with no experience of them. But, by the time I had reached the far point of my life in that Laredan bar, the last of my prescient dreams had been exhausted. Did that mean there was nothing left ahead? Was the future as dark a void as the highway beyond my headlamps? Such thoughts would suggest that the miles home to San Antonio would also be measured in milligrams, at least five milligrams, of Valium. Then occurred the first event that would shatter the conventional assumptions on which I operated from day to day.

  Many threads comprise a life. Worry one from its accustomed position and even the most elaborate tapestry may begin to unravel. I was used to being in the news, from time to time, regarding various political and social issues. One morning I had been quoted in some front-page coverage of a labor conflict. Such publicity always elicited phone calls, so I stayed in the office to receive them. There was only one that mattered.

  ————————

  “DO YOU REMEMBER ME?”

  My boss stopped by as I was trying to manage the coffeepot with shaking hands and volunteered that I looked like I’d seen a ghost. My laughter on the edge of hysteria, I retreated behind my office door where I could break down and cry.

  Did I remember her? Did I remember that first meeting, at a teen dance in the shelter house of a North Texas lake? What we were both wearing, where we were standing, the lights of the power plant across the lake, sounds of the ducks and wavelets against the pier where we held each other amidst the smells of vanilla perfume and chewing gum?

  Did I then recall the scented summer evenings that followed, or the blaze of her red hair in the amber glow of fall afternoons, or loving her in the autumn leaves? Later, after she had gone to join the constellations in the night skies of my dreams, she became the template against which all future involvements were to be measured. Do I remember you? Oh, maybe just to the extent of all the joys and hurts of my life exploding in me at once!

  When I met her for lunch and she raised her lips to mine without reservation, I was lost. You’ve heard of old girlfriends coming back? Well, get behind this one: Try your first, not seen or heard of in over thirty years. She’d been living on the north side of San Antonio for twenty, and later I would learn of so many probable near misses that I would rage
against fate.

  Time had not been especially gentle with JJ. I would hold the dear countenance between my hands and hate what years and battery had done. She could never be other than beautiful to me, and I swear that I took no satisfaction. Whatever rejection I may have suffered, I had truly wanted to believe that she was having a wonderful life somewhere.

  Yet, when we would make love, before my eyes occurred a phenomenon of which I’d read in romantic literature, never believing it to exist as an actual, literal experience. I sought after rational explanation, blood suffusing the capillaries or whatever, to no avail. The fact remained that, in those intimate hours, I seemed physically to hold in my arms the same young girl I’d known over thirty years before.

  During the months of the late-life affair that followed, I allowed myself to believe that some deity, for reasons known only to itself, had taken pity. It’s very hard to lose someone twice, to take that second hurt that revives the first—and all the hurts and rejections that have been hung on it in the meantime, like evil ornaments on a malignant Christmas tree.

  ————————

  IN FACT, IT STILL HURT LIKE BLOODY HELL, even months later when my good friend Joe, being tolerantly familiar with my obsessions, had persuaded me to attend the upcoming Fifty-fifth World Convention of Science Fiction. It was being held in San Antonio over the Labor Day weekend. For all my early reading in the genre, I’d never been attracted to formal “fandom,” or thought of attending such events. This being the convocation that names the recipients of the Hugo Awards, there might be authors present whose brains I could pick.

  While Seabrook had never written in the genre himself, I was by then obsessively focused on him as the unacknowledged source of an inexplicably ignored anomaly in the evolution of a particular theme. At the WorldCon, I might hope to pick up unexpected details of the past or current usage of that alternate-realities theme, which had become pervasive in film as well as literature. Internet postings and other queries had been turning up zip, so no avenue had preferred probability over any other. Short of serious literary and historical research that I was without the opportunity or resources to pursue, I’d reached an impasse.

  Certainly the proposed diversion of the WorldCon portended an ideal setting for mad speculation. The event was held at the convention center named for Henry B. Gonzalez, the last of the real Democrats, and two Marriott hotels on the adjacent Riverwalk. I was consoled that I could spend hours prowling the booksellers who, among the hawkers and hucksters, jammed the exhibit hall. I attended the panel discussions and presentations at whim, with no particular order or system.

  I’d hoped that the venerable L. Sprague de Camp might be present, so that I could ask about an early reference he’d made to Seabrook, but he had become too frail to journey from his Plano home. Likewise, I was more than curious about Jerry Pournelle’s recollections of H. Beam Piper’s claim to have been born on another timeline. It seemed that Jerry was a no-show as well.

  Of course, I’d been aware that the old writers I’d grown up on were all gone—but had not confronted the fact that the subsequent generation, like Larry Niven and Dr. Gregory Benford, whose coffee klatches I attended, would all be men my age or older. The truly new writers, particularly the women, were doing some exceptional stuff of which I’d been entirely unaware.

  I valiantly endeavored to comprehend Dr. Catherine Asaro’s exposition of super-relativistic speeds without being completely distracted by its brilliant author being, unimpeachably, the Babe of Physics as well. Asaro had it all: a scientist and novelist with the kind of leg musculature maintained only by accomplished dancers. That thought, of course, could only make me think of my wife Linda, and the big nothing of a life I would be returning to in a couple of days.

  Joe, down from his home in Dallas–Fort Worth, had been helping to man the convention suite in one of the hotels, so I spent a lot of time there, having mildly interesting conversations. While I still looked forward to hearing Dr. John Cramer on Monday and, more immediately, John Norman on Sunday afternoon, the WorldCon would soon be over.

  As typical, I was gravitating more often to the bar. “I’m wondering what I’m doing here with all these ‘geeks,’ anyway,” I responded to a query from Joe. Culturally, I was a fish out of water with most of the crowd. “Am I just trying to get next to old guys like Benford and Cramer because I wanted to write sci-fi and couldn’t?”

  Joe, whose appetite for the personal lives of his friends is normally limited, had made an exception in my case. “I’d hoped to do a little redirect on your obsession,” he confessed. “I began to notice that this story you’re fixated on has an uncomfortable abundance of suicides.” I was surprised and secretly gratified by the concern. Lately, I’d thought that I could drive off into a ditch and no one would notice. It was true that I wondered if the good times were not all in the past—of a world where I was only marking a time that had become my enemy.

  Still, I did get slightly hot. I regarded myself as a most unlikely candidate for outright self-annihilation. I told him that I was too fearful of death and too little at peace with myself. “I’d just like to be sure I’m going to get laid again before I die!”

  Overall, I’d found the Con an at least acceptable expenditure of time and money. While it had held no particularly great revelations for me, it beat the alternative. Gritting my teeth and coughing up the substantial late registration fee, I’d reminded myself how miserable long weekends always were. Couldn’t get any business done, everything being closed, and most people I knew would be involved with family. My only human contacts would be the odd page from workers ticked off that they’d been tapped out to work the Labor Day holiday.

  Candidly, another consideration in my decision to attend the WorldCon was the presence of John Norman, author of an infamous male-dominant fantasy series. Linda and I had found light escape in the Gor books for years. Were she still living, she would have given me no peace had John Norman been in town and we’d failed to attend. The success of his novels in the seventies had resulted in his later suffering years of blacklisting. You see, the Gor stories feature female sex slavery. Now, you have to understand the way this worked in late-century America, forever pining for the comforts of rigid dogma, which it is too pluralistic to be capable of enforcing.

  The recent catechism held that male submission for sexual pleasure fell, along with homosexuality, within the parameters of politically correct orthodoxy. Whereas female submission, like adolescent sexuality, was tantamount to rape, anathema to the thought police who monitor social discourse as well as behavior. Even portions of the generally libertarian science fiction community had conspired to silence Norman.

  He had turned out to be a pleasant, distinguished gentleman with silver hair, who looked every inch the philosophy professor that he was in actual fact. I remarked to Joe, who had known Linda well, how sorry I was that she wasn’t here to meet him. When we were introduced to Norman’s wife, I mused whether she trusted her husband around the coterie of chain-bedecked young women who flocked to his appearances. There were always at least a few whose affects ran toward tight black clothing and body jewelry.

  Joe had laughed, “Probably, but she knows very well not to trust the Lindas of the world.”

  On Sunday, Norman was doing a panel entitled, “Are There Any Taboos Left?” Just one or two, surely… It was a bit late convening, and I was standing outside the meeting room, well, brooding—actually—upon the assembling crowd, roughly divided between “geeks” and “mundanes,” with a few unattached women.

  ————————

  IN THE STRANGE LIGHT of what was about to fall on me during the coming days, it would be easy enough to look back and decide that I sensed something untoward at that very moment. But such was not the case.

  She was standing by the door, looking at the program posted for the John Norman panel with a severe expression, insofar as could be discerned through the exaggerated makeup that turned her eye sockets int
o black pits. My quick glance about seemed to verify that the other lone males did not yet have the scent. They were probably intimidated by her social mask and armor.

  Goth. An entire subgenre of the literature aimed at this rather nihilistic ethos. While they were not really that rowdy, Con dynamics had them and the other gamers more or less quarantined in a computer arcade. Frequent sadomasochistic drag notwithstanding, it was unusual to meet one at any function apart from their specific fascinations.

  Her appearance did challenge all comers. The jeans nicely displaying the curves of her bottom looked actually worn through, as opposed to strategically ripped. Boots, tightly laced leather vest exposing her pierced navel, small silver Visigoth ax dangling from an ear, and the silver band molded about the lobe of a pierced nostril—I supposed she must have something stuck through her tongue as well. Any who were tempted to confront all this likely expected a surly rejection.

  Her only visible colors were her elaborately done nails with what appeared to be star bursts worked on electric blue, and brilliant, though remarkably naturallooking red hair, drawn back into a tail. Long red hair always exerts a gravitational tug on me, even after half the women in America had rediscovered henna.

  I would otherwise have been no more likely than the next middle-aged guy to get it up for initial moves in the face of all that. Yet, I felt an unaccustomed arousal as I fantasized what other piercings or scarifications might be among the mysteries of the strong, sturdy young body.

  I had stepped on past her into the doorway when I thought, What the hell? I stopped and looked back into her raised eyes, green enough to confirm her natural hair tone, though its highlights were likely cosmetic. She did not react to my nodded greeting for long moments. She had a wide face, JJ’s type of face, but with prominent cheekbones and lips that would be full and sensual even without the contemporary outlining. The burning pale green eyes within the black mask had a disturbing intensity. They were the kind that could demand answers, while yielding nothing of what lay behind them.