The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook Read online

  “Hey,” she finally responded in a low monotone, her full lips barely parted. Her name tag, only grudgingly worn for admission, I estimated, labeled her with the conceit of a single name, Leiris. It brought to mind Michel Leiris, who had written an essay accompanying a photograph of William Seabrook’s redleather discipline hood for one of the Trocadero museums.

  If she displayed the slightest interest in the sexual proclivity inherent in Norman’s work, this remote association might make a useful gambit. The panel was starting up, obliging us to move inside. I was still standing between her and the room with my back to the doorjamb. On impulse, I offered my hand to her. What I might accompany the sideways handshake with, I’d no idea, something lame I would imagine. She looked at my hand, then up at me, and her lower lip seemed to quiver. Whatever does she think she’s seeing, I wondered. Do we have drugs involved here? Abruptly, she clasped my hand, but with her left palm downward onto my right, and didn’t release it.

  Without a clue of what passed for social protocol among such creatures, I drew her beside me into the meeting room, still holding her hand. Enjoying cheap gratification at various curious looks, I stopped beside an empty row near the front. She stepped past me and seated herself with another puzzling gesture, hands sweeping upward just before her butt connected with the seat. It was slight, but noticeable, like the quick shake of her head, as if clearing a fog.

  Slouching insolently down, she spread her elbows on the backs of the chairs and rested a booted ankle on her other knee. Is this baby stoned out of her mind? I wondered again. Am I trying to connect with a flake? She evidenced no uneasiness sitting beside me, elbow against my shoulder. Couldn’t possibly be an older man buff, could she? I couldn’t get that lucky!

  Norman quickly dominated, as it were, the discussion, though the chair, a writer heavily into egames named Sonia Lyris, made very good points. The women of science fiction are generally not slaves to political fashion. Sensing that Sonia didn’t want to tie it on with Norman, I mused as to whether she might catch hell from some self-appointed sisterhood if perceived soft on pigs.

  I seemed to surprise my companion by remarking on the chair sharing her name, rendered with an alternate spelling. She’d been looking at me when I turned to her, giving up a startled, flustered smile. Her posture had morphed again. She’d gradually drawn herself up from her slouch and was sitting with her knees together and hands clasped demurely in her lap.

  The panel concluding, she approached the chairwoman. I heard her say that she had read Sonia’s Web page. Maybe she hadn’t been attracted to the panel by Norman at all. I chatted with Norman and Lyris about the contradiction posed by Anne Rice. Female authors were allowed to explore erotic slavery, of both genders in every conceivable combination, without being subjected to ideological commentary. The girl just stood and listened—listened to me with seemingly rapt attention. She was certainly looking intrigued by something, so before she could escape, I quickly invited her for a drink.

  “Aw-hunh,” she leisurely drawled, “Marriott bar in an hour.” The punker persona was back in full bloom, and the decisiveness was startling. There are dangerous pitfalls in being my age and alone again. If a woman even so much as smiles at you, you may immediately conclude that you have something going!

  “You’re sure?”

  “You can be way sure when I say aw-hunh,” she threw over her shoulder, as she left me checking out a threadbare spot on the butt of her jeans. I’ll admit it, I was thrilled, try as I might to harness my imagination. I puttered around, understandably antsy. Checking the message board in the arcade, I found that my carefully printed notice, soliciting information regarding the life and work of William Seabrook, with my 800 number attached, had gone missing.

  As I’d not been unduly optimistic about obtaining fresh leads on the Seabrook source, I thought little about it. Even the older participants would be unlikely to recall a Lost Generation journalist whose writings had been of adventure and social concerns, with just a bit of the occult. Finally I’d killed enough time to walk the two blocks to the Marriott through the blazing Texas afternoon, calculating that a preliminary drink to loosen my tongue might be in order.

  In the bar, I sipped my Scotch and surveyed the bottom of the huge atrium, which the next two floors overlooked from tiers. I’d been noticing how the curved ramps and stairs, even the two flights of escalators, worked into a general spiral motif. It all reminded me of one of the dreamscapes I’d often visited while keeping a dream journal. The bar was semiopen, only partially partitioned from the lobby, where she was chatting with a clique who looked presentable for the hospitality suite of Forever Knight or something else in the vampire venue.

  She’d seen me enter, and a girl with spiked hair beside her had scowled at me as I had passed them. Well, the peer group was a dream come true. I had begun to toy with the notion that the social conditions of our New Rome, limited job market, end of conscription and wars of attrition, et cetera, were even further extending adolescence.

  Should I infer bisexuality from the way the girls crawled on each other; “oh my God, I’ve not, like, seen you for an entire hour”? Who knew? I was playing farther out of my yard than usual here.

  Eventually she detached herself and came in to surprise me with her choice of a martini, which hardly seemed to fit with the display I’d just been watching. We commenced the awkward ritual of initial encounters. Though she presently lived near Atlanta, she’d grown up in San Antonio.

  As it was for myself, attendance at the Con had been a matter of convenience for her, since she would not be out for accommodations with family and friends in town. She’d been seeking escape in science fiction since she was a kid; a time that I’d been reminded was not far behind her.

  Maybe not so bad. She could talk about new work of which I was ignorant, and I could turn her on to the classics. I bounced a few of the older writers off her, being sure to mention Phil Dick. Likely he’d been spacey enough to appeal to the younger set. She retaliated with a barrage of names I’d only heard of, if at all—William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan. I parried with Dr. Gregory Benford’s coffee klatch where I’d been able to squeeze a few questions concerning the shadowy history of Hugh Everett in among the demands on his attention. She’d read more of his work than I, but was unfamiliar with his early triumph Timescape.

  “A fascinating read, though Benford’s paradoxes are exactly that.”

  ————————

  “ALLOW FOR ANY FORM OF TIME TRAVEL to the past and it requires an alternate world for self-consistency, a world in which the proposed transit, message, or mere observation from a possible future did occur,” I offered, shamelessly showing off. “This would be the case from the tiny time loops of Feynman’s backward particles, all the way to fishing a wormhole up from the quantum foam and expanding it to transfer macrocosmic bodies. Which seems to be the notion behind that television show…”

  “Sliders! Pathetic, much? Every week, they’re cramming their morality up the portal of another universe. Wouldn’t even watch it if Kari Wurher weren’t so totally hot.”

  Well, that sounded interesting. I omitted mentioning that Linda and I had been deep into the early Sliders, watching it weekly. In that connection, I was still able to work in a reference to my late wife—to tap any mileage emergent from widower status, though I’d no personal evidence of any properties that are so damned much fun. Against all my efforts to heighten interest, she was absently bobbing her shoulders to the bar’s background music and giving the distinct impression that time was at a premium. I was feeling hopelessly awkward and despairing of pulling this thing out, fundamentally clueless as to what sort of creature I was trying to connect with!

  Yet, all I could think to do was to reference back to Sliders, bringing up Fred Alan Wolf. In numerous books, he’d searched for alternate-world observations in everything from high-energy physics to artificial intelligence to dreams to shamanism. Without surrendering physical disciplin
e, he seemed to understand that science is not the totality of the life of the mind, or of life in general.

  “These tunes are so very tubular, they really are. So, that dude Wolf, what he said?” The vernacular, in addition to her distracted effort at continuing conversation, tended to bring the expression “space cadet” to mind. Nevertheless, I expressed my fondness for Wolf.

  “Wolf makes no secret of his subjective motivation. He lost a young son who, after many reversals, had only begun to realize his potential. No mystery there, Fred just wants to see his boy again, to see him smile and hear him laugh. Do I hear social workers out there declaring him delusional? You know what they can kiss?”

  She looked up abruptly at the unexpected vehemence with which I’d surprised and confused even myself, but I couldn’t interpret what briefly sparked behind the dark band across her eyes. What the hell? I just went on about Wolf, quoting his remarkable insight on the “complex-conjugate” waves, undulating back and forth across space-time:

  “‘Without any discernment between the details of future events, without any attempt to clarify where, what, when, et cetera, these events occur, the feedback… is from all of the future events. This results in the sense of destiny.’”2 While she had seemed to turn and listen closer, I was still afraid of losing her. Switching gears, I resolved upon another conversational gambit.

  I still didn’t know whether Leiris was a given name or surname. “Do you know you have the name of a famous French poet?” She looked up with that curious, startled smile again, seemingly her mode with certain questions about her personal self.

  “Mother’s birth name. I’ve reapplied it.” The explanation of her appropriation of a traditional name derailed her further, dismissing a despised stepfather with a string of choice obscenities. “Dead matrilineal, yea?” she snickered.

  Once initiated, her patter was nervous, nonstop, and only quasi-comprehensible. I wanted to get a word in edgewise, to tell her about the connection with Seabrook, hoping to segue from there into bondage. My attention wandered from a description of a prior encounter:

  “… so it’s a thing where I’m like from outta town, and this dude was like, ‘yea, cool,’ and I was like, ‘kewl,’ and he was like, ‘yea.’ So, we gotta put a wrap on this.” I was roused from a benumbed trance by her hand on my wrist. “Hey, so I’m outta here,” she announced directly. “Like, your digits? As if, we could hang later?”

  We agreed that we would both be at Dr. John Cramer’s panel the next day, but as she was leaving town a few hours later, there would be precious little time to “hang.” I held up my end, giving her my card with its 800 number, but my heart was sinking as she left.

  I sighed as I watched her stop in the lobby to talk with a sinewy blond kid who appeared to have been waiting. I say kid; he really looked a bit older than the rest of her group. At least he wasn’t the type you often see with a drop-dead babe; some skinny little ratlike thing in oversize clothes, turned-around cap, scraggly whiskers, and eyes slightly less intelligent than my malamute’s. I reined in my thoughts.

  All obvious insecurities aside, I’d been to enough conventions, labor, political, et cetera, to know that the chances against a liaison increase geometrically with every day after the opening. Expecting to score off a meeting this late in the game was pretty remote under the best of conditions.

  The blow-off was depressing nonetheless. I was irritated at the interruption of my game plan at a critical phase. I kicked myself for babbling my obsessions and delaying initiation of my agenda for too long. I considered leaving, calculating the price of drinks involved in hanging around for nothing. Even before then, I had been familiar with the convenient fantasy of the improbable pickup—a choice rationale for continuing to drink in bars.

  ————————

  BUT I KEPT ON SITTING THERE,watching her as she rode up the first long flight of the escalator. She turned slightly and looked back down at the bar, but the black eye mask hid her expression. Moving slowly away from me, as someone on the deck of a departing ship recedes from a lonely watcher on the shore, she held her clasped fingers to her lips in an attitude that looked like, well, like longing. On the second flight, she turned away and folded her arms about her middle, head lowered. I watched her until she was out of sight.

  Man, I grieved after she’d disappeared, that’s so desperate, it’s pathetic! I knew nothing whatsoever about her, whose room she was going to, or anything at all about her situation. I ordered another Scotch and moped further.

  I didn’t think I looked too bad for a half century, enough thinning hair to presentably wear long, tied back in the fashion of the courthouse lawyers I dealt with. I’d arrived at an all-purpose costume, sport jacket with collarless shirt and boots, which served for most meetings and after hours as well. My welltrimmed beard could pass muster for business in informal South Texas, and I fancied myself interesting, inclusive of mixing with younger people.

  Reviewing my conversation, around the panel and afterward, I was satisfied that I had come off exquisitely boring. And face it. Unless that young a girl has a proclivity for older men to begin with, nothing is going to be enough. Unless it’s a money deal, a thing I never had to rely on when younger and refused to do now, even on the rare occasions that I had it to spend. I thought about the blond boy and just couldn’t find the probabilities to see this thing other than as a blow-off.

  But I couldn’t bear to murder hope when I was startled to recognize her coming back down. It took a second because she’d lost the black eye mask, and her makeup generally seemed more conventional. You could hardly say her appearance was muted, though. She’d changed into one of those two-piece suit-things with padded shoulders, otherwise closely molded to her alluring little shape. Her skirt was very short, and bare legs had deliciously come into fashion that summer.

  On her left thigh, like a garter, she wore some sort of dark band. Her half-open jacket suggested that the heavy-looking silver chain she had coiled around her neck draped across her breasts inside it. The chain had a barbaric look, which complemented her silver bracelets and contrasted with the modern suit. All that, crowned with the pyrotechnic hair now brushed out and spilling in waves over her shoulders, turned out stunning. Heads began to turn while she was still a story and a half above.

  Blond Muscles, who was still waiting, scurried for her as she reached floor level. He appeared to comment uncertainly on her outfit, sickening me as always with those of my gender who are so fearfully insecure as to actively resist a woman looking her best. Her back to my view, her shape was further accentuated as she planted her high heels apart and gestured, palm upward, clearly explaining herself. Oh babe, I thought, any male who doesn’t like that is due no explanation.

  They were far too distant for me to hear anything, yet I was glued to the tableau, chiefly to the curves of her ass and the fierce cut of her leg muscles. The back of her other hand lay, elbow crooked, against her hip, fingers spread to accentuate still another odd pose. Her posture was reminiscent of something that eluded me, and I wondered at her eclectic combination of mannerisms.

  She ceased gesturing and laid her hand placatingly on the young man’s chest. Yes, it’s true; I’d reached the point that it built my ego when I could so much as get a girl like her to sit down with me! The blond’s broad shoulders seemed to sag, as with disappointment, and the girl with the spiked hair entered the scene, taking her arm, and drawing her toward the clique of young Goths.

  She recoiled into a rigid stance, ankles together, clenched fists against her hips, in obvious anger. What I saw next I could hardly believe, when she actually stamped her foot. Then, as if in unbelievably slow motion, she turned and strode purposefully, high heels clicking, toward the bar.

  The young man had turned red in the face, but it was Spiked Hair who ran after, catching her at the entrance to the bar area. I still couldn’t hear what was being said, but her annoyed dismissal was audible to the whole room, “Bite me, twice!” The other wom
an stared with disbelief as she came ahead, tossing her hair, and perched on the stool she had vacated earlier, next to me at the corner of the bar.

  ————————

  EVEN THE CLOCK STOPPED FOR A MOMENT.

  I don’t mind telling you that this pumped me up like nothing I’d experienced for a long time. Breaking a date is one thing, but a young woman blowing off peer-group demands is quite another. Even so, the green eyes that seemed lit by a pale fire from within were intensely appraising me. Heads up! Somehow I’d been teleported to first base, but it was a long way to home. Like a drink “mark” in a hustle bar, I already had my wallet out, ordering her another martini.

  Seen close-up, the chain and bracelets were as captivating as the woman they adorned. They were real silver; old, old hand-beaten stuff—no doubt hammered over some base metal. With a smirk, she crossed her bare legs in a blatant tease. She was showing off the thigh band to be of braided leather thongs, twisted so tightly that they must have bitten painfully into her smooth flesh. So that’s the deal, I thought. She really is into Norman’s slave mystique.

  Joe and I had recently laughed over a West Coast sex posting on the Net that hilariously proclaimed, “Once you’ve experienced true Gorean slavery, nothing else will suffice.” Well, I could do this, so I promptly set into a discussion of Norman’s books and how an erotic publishing house was bringing his suppressed series back out. I was trying to waste no more time, yet come off as both intellectual and titillating. Become a master of the art of dominance and submission; not to sound frightening were she a novice, nor boring if she were heavily involved. A thin line, but I knew how to do it, I hoped.

  Something was still not connecting. While my conversation didn’t seem to be repelling her, her interest was tepid. If I had read this wrong, what were the chain and thong signals all about? Without the punker mask her features would have been almost sweet—were it not for the whiff of something primeval, as if her heritage led back to some wild, remote place that couldn’t be defined by geography.