The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  From books to film. No surprise that she was a fan of the work of Tarantino and Rodriguez, still… Reality smirked at me when I mentioned Bogart and she volunteered her preferred “old dude” to be Mickey Rourke. Her full lips grew petulant, almost pouting. As I felt slipping from my grasp possibly the hottest chance I’d had with womanhood in years, she grew openly distracted and fished in her purse. She unfolded a sheet of paper and, as the card I’d given her tumbled from within, I recognized the paper as my notice that I’d posted on the message board.

  “This is you,” she stated, rather than asked, with abrasive flatness. “You down with cyberpsycho shit, or what?”

  There are moments when you know your life is about to change. Ordinarily, we know these divergent and convergent junctions only in hindsight. Sometimes, the path of destiny divides in full view, and you know that nothing is ever going to be quite the same again. Even as I framed the query, “You know Seabrook?” her earnest gaze told me that I might well be having one of those strange moments. “And, what’s cyberpsycho?”

  “There were some books I was s’pose to get, but they got lost,” she answered cryptically. “He’s all over the gamers’ Web sites, but his work is like, a little hard to find?” She went on to educate me that another subspecies of the cyberreality had woven Gothic sadomasochism together with various schools of dark mysticism. The fantasy scenarios of this virtual cult, including some based on the work of writers I’d mentioned to her earlier, even incorporated bits of Seabrook.

  I simply abandoned my intended come-on altogether; began to tell her the story of William Seabrook that I had thus far reconstructed. I gave her a synopsis of how the path of the branching worlds in fiction led back indisputably to Seabrook, weirdly paralleling developments in physics, which would ultimately confirm the literary notion. I observed how it was therefore ironic that some of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Seabrook were the temporal inconsistencies in his record.

  She watched me and listened intently as I went on and on for over an hour. Regarding his boyhood through postadolescence, if indeed that phase ever ended, his account was virtually the only source.

  “Seabrook was raised in Maryland’s spooky Pennsylvania Dutch country. One day his fey and maybe slightly demented grandmother, with possible assistance from a delightful little bottle, led the sad little boy into a clearing in a new wood he’d never seen before. There he saw beautiful bright-plumaged roosters, as tall as houses. He described their legs as like the pillars of cathedral aisles. Willie’s only happy escape was into that ‘other dreamworld’ until his grandfather smashed Grandmother Piny’s laudanum bottle. But it was too late to stop the hypnotic effects of her drugged mind on young William.

  “His earliest boyhood pleasures had included gazing at pictures of women in chains. One day Piny had shown him a throne on which sat a girl, robed in green, with her ankles bound by shining metal circlets joined by a gleaming chain. Willie remembered pressing his hands against her ankles until his own hands held and drew the chains tighter. From that time on, he had two ambitions—to be a writer like his grandfather, the editor of the American Sentinel—and to chain women. Growing up, he moved from lassoing little girls to spending his earnings on complicated gold and silver chains with which he fastened women to pillars and ceilings. Most of the women seemed to enjoy it, even went to dances with him, tightly chained.”

  Seabrook did not believe that he had ever ingested laudanum while in his “fairy godmother’s” care at age five. He was convinced that the visions were a form of telepathic communion presented by that numinous figure’s drugged mind. In his autobiography, he had chronicled his obsession with his girl-mother Myra and his guilty, ambivalent feelings for Charlie, his ill-fated younger brother. During the family’s exile to the Midwestern plains, in tow of his Lutheran minister father, his escape was by way of dreams of visiting fabled Samarkand or Timbuktu.

  ————————

  HE’D BEEN INVOLVED WITH “BLACK MAGIC” since “early manhood,” Seabrook would write later. What that life-stage designation might have connoted in his times was unclear. He had held a bachelor’s degree by nineteen, and completed his master’s a year later. Speculating that his dark fascinations may have been “in the blood,” he cited family lore holding his ancestor Peter Boehler, an old Moravian missionary and mentor to John Wesley, to have been deeply involved in the black arts.

  The bondage motif to which Piny had introduced him, by whatever means, became a permanent fixture, influencing more than his sexual nonconformity alone. The writing on his foreign adventures, his forays into the occult and psychic phenomena, all were shaped by that early template. After becoming city editor of the Augusta Chronicle at twenty-one, he took off for a year in Europe, 1907 into 1908. Far from being out of character in itself, this first great escape presaged a lifelong pattern.

  I wondered, too, if Willie had been actualizing “somebody else’s dream” during the following seven years. In 1909, he broke into serious journalism on the Atlanta Journal, where he met Ward Greene. He married Katie Edmondson, the daughter of a CocaCola executive in 1912—in the days when the drink was still laced with cocaine. That was a year after he’d established a successful advertising agency. In his fiction based on Seabrook, Greene would have the ad agency doing the promotional work for the silent film classic Birth of a Nation.

  By late 1915, however, his pathological ennui was only partially relieved by a series of mildly scandalous affairs. Breaking his connection with the agency, to the horror of his wife, father-in-law, and acquaintances, he made for New York to attempt enlistment in the Lafayette Escadrille. Failing the vision test for the Lafayette Squadron, he had instead entered the American Field Ambulance Service.

  “Now that AFS has evolved into a student exchange program—my cousin went to Germany with them—it’s pretty much been forgotten that it was originally a unit of the French Army. It might, however, have had a kinship with scholars even then. That unit, in which Seabrook enlisted along with Dos Passos, Hemingway, and other future literary lights, has been described as college-extension courses for a generation of writers. The ambulance corps was a volunteer unit in the old sense. The enlistee had great discretion over his term of service. Seabrook was mustered out, after being gassed at Verdun, though he was never discharged. He returned to the United States after several months’ recovery.

  “That may well have been when he met Aleister Crowley, as he claimed. However, I found that Crowley did not occupy the Washington Square apartment that Willie described until a year later. Likewise, Willie indicated that he met there forthwith Crowley’s protégée, Leah Hirsig, ‘naked as a jaybird,’ although Crowley didn’t meet the Hirsig woman until late 1918, and she wasn’t in residence at Washington Square until early the next year…”

  We had moved to a table as the bar buzzed around us, but the noise seemed to recede as though we were in a world of our own making. The late sunlight through the louvered windows painted her with alternating bands of light and shadow. She shifted her chair around to avoid the sunset directly in her eyes, and I had a moment’s déjà vu of something far away. Had I been less deadened by life, I felt as though I might have been able to grasp and hold it.

  “As if, the ‘two-slit’ thing, like in high school?” she commented on the light. The incongruous association reminded me of Dr. David Deutsch. Without thinking, I immediately went off and started expounding.

  In Deutsch’s view, “the case that was already unanswerable” inhered in his very commonsense interpretation of this most elementary of quantum experiments. The two-slit (or more) experiment, in which an interference pattern creates dark bands across the target screen, used to be thought of as demonstrating the “wave nature of light.” But the results are the same even when the photons are released one at a time and clearly impact, particle fashion, on the target.

  Taking stock, Deutsch had found that when a photon passes through one of the slits, something then
interferes with it, deflecting it in a way dependent on which other slits are open. The interfering entities apparently have passed through some of the other slits, behaving exactly like photons—except that they can’t be seen.

  His bottom line was that the “interfering entities” are photons, which exist in a huge number of adjacent universes, similar in composition to the tangible one. Each obeys the same laws of physics, differing only in that the particles are in slightly different positions in each alternate reality.

  Were the worlds truly noninterfering, as had been supposed during most of the forty years following Everett? Deutsch had thought not, and given birth to quantum computing.

  … If the complex motions of the shadow photons in an interference experiment were mere possibilities that did not in fact take place, then the interference phenomena we see would not, in fact, take place… In practice this means that interference is strong enough to be detected only between universes that are very alike.3

  The ring of truth was there. The proof was shown by an experiment conductible by schoolchildren in a darkened bedroom. It had been studied at various levels of sophistication for the entire duration of modern science. Proof had become indisputable with the technology to release the photons one at a time. I had been astonished by the simplicity.

  “It’s not been the many-worlders, but the scientific establishment that’s wasted decades, taking excursions through every form of mysticism rather than confront the obvious. Being an old radical, my amazement has its limits; just more of management’s crap!” I joked. “Richard Feynman had explained the iridescence on birds’ feathers, or even the beautiful colors on ugly oil slicks. They’re all merely complex combinations of interference patterns…”

  “Wait,” she interrupted. “Back in the day, I dug up this cool old Coke bottle from my grandmother’s yard.” I had to call time, for temporal-translation purposes. It seemed she was drifting into musings from her childhood.

  “Just substitute your ‘the day’ expression for ‘my day,’ and what once was old, is then new again.” I smiled indulgently, preparing to make one of those real long reaches that might contrive an illusion of relevance.

  “Du-uh?” The green eyes flared, coming right back at my condescension. “As if, ‘patina’? The iridescent colors? All those years underground, the glass exchanged particles with the minerals in the earth. Particulate interactions over years ’n years, and its composition morphed—filtering light, like a demonstration of the interference among space-times you said the dude was talking about?”

  I was chagrined. Far from drifting while I talked over her head, her feedback had been metaphorical, even poetic. She had consolidated my ramblings into images from her own experience—and carried the analogies a step further.

  ————————

  THE BAR, IN THAT DIFFERENT LIGHT, seemed indeed another reality. Her hair fanning out over her shoulders, she looked like a woman of another time, perhaps one of those remarkably neurosis-free femmes fatales of the forties. She finally lit a cigarette she had been long holding between her lips and held it in the European fashion, with her small finger extended affectedly. By God, I felt as if I were sitting in Rick’s Café Americain, or maybe on the quay at Toulon! I didn’t know what decade I was in, but it surely didn’t feel like century’s end.

  Returning to the safer and more promising ground of Seabrook, I feared that I had to be doing the man a further injury as I summarized his life, careful and comprehensive as I tried to be. The energy level was palpable. From time to time, her eyes would widen in the shadows, but she said little more—just asking me to specify a source or clarify the chronology.

  I ordered another round and began to explain the problems with the time frames, in terms of the composite character Justine, who appeared to be the only major figure in the whole combined saga who was purely fictional; or, more likely, a broad composite of a number of women Seabrook had known. Unlike the solid historical personages of Willie and his friends and lovers, even those whose identities he lightly concealed, identifying Justine was like chasing the grin on the Cheshire Cat.

  I came straight up about there being no question that the predilection of my partners and me for mildly sadomasochistic amusements, over the years, had led to my enchantment with Justine, alongside of the desire to resolve her kaleidoscopic reflections into the real-world personas on whom she was based.

  “I had wondered,” I was going on, “Willie had described a cool Greenwich Village sophisticate, who had made no appearance after 1931, though he had designated her a friend for life. Might she have been his Justine? Later, there was the business in what he called his ‘barn’…” I saw her hands distinctly shaking as she tried to light another cigarette.

  The time for artfulness had ended, and I wanted what was hovering between us to be made known. “Why did you take my notice?” I questioned. I had gradually put together the reason she was there with me. It must have involved some happenstance upstairs, when she’d noticed that the posting’s phone number was the same as on my card.

  She answered so softly I could barely hear, holding herself tightly, as if grasping for an elusive sense of control. “What are the chances?” she whispered half to herself, darting a glance at me before breaking off and turning her face away. She shivered visibly, though it was quite warm in the crowded bar, her chain tinkling like little bells. I was surprised by the track of a tear in the bar of light across her cheek, and her voice cracked slightly as she struggled for coherence, “I don’t… I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

  Yes, it’s true, I’m a pig. I moved to press whatever advantage her internal confusion had opened and hated myself for using the most elderly lines in the book. I placed my hand on her knee and recited, “It’s not an accident that we met here.”

  But the uncommonly growing sense of familiarity seemed to let her find comfort in the moss-encrusted move. I felt ashamed. “Let’s back off from Mr. Seabrook for a bit. Let’s talk about Ms. Leiris. I don’t know, I feel a need to address you a bit more personally?”

  There was another long pause while she studied me, as though I were the puzzle. It has to be rare for it to be that difficult for someone to say her own name, and never so incredible for another to hear it. Abruptly, she laughed, just a bit hopelessly—giving a little shrug that said everything had become just too overwhelming, anyway. “As if you’d believe—Justine?”

  Moving right along… I would make no more journal entries attempting to tabulate synchronistic events. Even had the twists and turns not followed upon each other in such hot succession as to make it impossible to keep up, at that point I had already hit synchronicity overload.

  Justine had attended the University of Texas at Austin, as had I many years earlier. I’ve always found it amusing to hear the Legend of the Sixties as interpreted by the students of “Generation X.” Given what I’d just heard, I was only mildly surprised to discover that she had met my young cousin, who was currently in attendance there. By that point, my only reaction was: sure, of course, why not? Beneath the Goth affectations was an educated young woman. She’d followed up a psych degree with some graduate study, then briefly worked for an airline before moving to Atlanta only a few months earlier.

  The move had been to take possession of properties bequeathed to her by a great-grandmother who had died before Justine was born. As per the will, the inheritance had been held in trust for decades. Suggesting that some unspecified aspects of the estate had proven trying, she’d decided to take a break and come home for the science fiction convention. Of the details that she did choose to confide at this early stage, two stood forth, one being that the bequest included Seabrook memorabilia, notably an item that sounded like a notorious painting from the Seabrook story.

  Early in 1940, the novelist Marjorie Worthington, a woman who became one of Willie’s great loves, had painted an elaborate wall panel on wood, limning John Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father” and illustrating the chapters
in Seabrook’s life, including the outré ones. Unsuspecting that the mural would ever be seen publicly, Marjorie let go of her typical inhibitions and included nudes, girls peeking out of cages, and a hanging figure in a red-leather mask. Could the naked woman in the mask have been the elusive “Justine”?

  Willie had rather cynically described the final segment, which featured his immortal soul absurdly rendered as a toy-sized white woolly lamb, scampering away toward a field of daisies. I supposed that I might once have reacted similarly. Remarkable enough to locate objects of my quest in this fashion. More bizarre was that, in the Seabrook saga I’d capsulated for her, my companion suspected that she could identify her ancestress as none other than a historical Justine!

  It seemed that I was reaching under the table to touch flesh and blood engendered by the one figure in the story whom I had taken to be fictional, or at least an elaborate composite. Around the time this child had been born, Kris Kristofferson had brought out a song whose refrain laughingly wafted through my mind: “… A WALKIN’ CONTRADICTION, PARTLY TRUTH AND PARTLY FICTION.”

  ————————

  I did not let go of her knee. Soon wonder reawakened libido, and I reached higher to touch the twisted leather thongs. I pushed the band a bit from where it had cruelly bitten into her thigh. She flinched as I gently kneaded the line that appeared, a comfort that only increased the localized pain as the circulation returned. Leaning forward, she grasped my other forearm and pressed my hand inside her jacket between her naked breasts. I fingered the chain, marveling that it might well have been one acquired by Seabrook on his fabled trip into the old Arabian domain. I drew its links slowly across a nipple and felt it harden.

  She gasped slightly and spoke again in the near whisper. “I’m thinking that I’m not welcome, much, to use my friend’s room.” Beyond the obvious, I felt a crucial decision being made, slipping between us like the passing of a spirit. At that moment, I could have no clue as to the consequences.