by Paul Pipkin
“Desperately seeking Justine,” she laughed. “What’s going on with troubling to hook up the time sequence of a fiction? Why’d you wanna retrieve her so badly? You knew all about his wives, about Katie and Marjorie—why the obsessing with this lost love? Me, I’d be into Wamba; more interesting, much?”
This was not to be the last time that I would have to dodge the shrapnel of my own words. “There’s another rub. It just doesn’t read like fiction! Reviewers questioned the believability of the characters, even though the cast of this roman à clef had to be wellknown to many of them. And Seabrook’s description of meeting Leah Hirsig is closely compatible with Greene’s introduction of a ‘Justine.’ These are the kinds of reasons that led me to conclude she was a composite character.” I hoped I had sneaked around any discussion of lost loves.
“Roman à clef ? Key to the romance?”
“The joke being that those critics should not have needed any key.”
“Composite characters can’t do this!” she teased, grabbing my crotch not so gently. I was promptly distracted from further literary education across the breadth of Texas. What the fuck? Maybe I should hold further detail of the other Justine’s psychic experiences, particularly the fascinating points of the street circus, as a zinger for later, if needed. I had no qualms about manipulation when it involved a matter of such importance.
V
Crossing the Styx
EVENTUALLY, EVEN JUSTINE’S PASSION FOR THE SAGA abated. The holiday traffic didn’t get too bad until Beaumont, from where we could begin to see a line of thunderclouds hanging weirdly just above the state line.
“Texas,” I sighed as we got out to eat in Louisiana and smelled the ozone of the storm ahead. “How can drought be that specific?”
I discovered that she loved Cajun food as much as I did and established that she at least understood French on a menu. Still in disbelief at what had entered my life, I watched her marauding through a huge platter of crawfish and asked if that thing through her tongue got in the way of her eating.
“It does leave a dent in the ice cream,” she snickered, and began a lurid description of the swelling when it had been clamped down for the first few days. God, I thought; part of her really is still such a kid!
“Do you think you can eat everything on your plate?” I teased back at her wicked grin.
“Do you?”
On the dimly lit parking lot, I unlocked the car and handed her back the keys. I was somewhat slowed and fatigued after the meal. More, I suspected that hogging the wheel might come off as tedious chauvinism. She was hugging and squirming against me as the thunder rolled off in the dark Louisiana night.
“The quai at Toulon,” she breathed in my ear, “it sounds so romantic and exotic, just the sound of the words; I wish I’d been there…” She was morphing again, and in the strangeness of her speech I fancied that I might hear the taste of New Orleans that Cris had alleged. Beyond the kitten, the happy and excited little girl, there was something else.
“Do you speak French?” I asked.
“Nay,” she whispered, “but I’d like to learn.”
“Maybe we can go there someday,” I offered. Was it my overheated imagination, or was there something fundamentally unquestioning in her green eyes, something one might legitimately interpret as love? If so, I could not imagine why. Look, the truth was that I had just gotten by in bed the previous night. Yes, I’d pulled it off, but not so as to make a young girl see stars. True enough that I was tickled shitless about it, if only because I’d stayed hard enough to do anal.
Still, instead of mounting up, Justine seemed more inclined to mount me. The spicy food, I mused; the ozone in the air? Clinging to my neck, thrusting her tongue between my lips, the exhibitionistic display seemed to arouse her punker persona, among other things. If I ignored the clicking of her silver post against my teeth, I could find myself being carried back to a time when grubbing on gravel parking lots had ranked with major sexual encounters.
However, the attention we attracted was from a pair of rough-looking Cajun boys in work clothes with colorful bandannas. Getting out of a beat-up pickup on the other side of the Del Sol, they halted by our front fender and began to hassle. “Old dudes with hot young babes,” one snotted off. “Sorta makes you wanna puke, don’t it?” I tried ignoring them, but he had propped his muddy boot on our bumper, studiedly violating the comfort zone. “Yo, hoochie-mama! Mine gez harder and staz up for-ev-er.”
I felt Justine begin to tense up. “Get in the car and open my bag,” I whispered to her, then growled, “Why don’t you walk away before you’re having to explain how you let an old man kick your ass?” As we commenced this ritual of male violence, I did have some worries. Out of state, my Texas carry permit was only an arguing point, but, more importantly, my gun was stupidly packed in my bag. Instead of doing as I told her, Justine turned and stepped between the aggressors and me.
“What he said. So let’s have a react now, shall we?” She moved slowly toward them, hands in the pockets of her studded jacket. The loudmouth straightened up in surprise as she spread open her jacket to display her haltered breasts. “So, you’re all that? Wanna try some things?” she inquired huskily. I seized the moment to reach in and quickly unzip my bag, wondering if she were buying time or was she maybe heavier than even I wanted to get?
“You like this?” she teased. Closing on the loudmouth, she showed him her pierced tongue, and his mouth cracked in a leer. “You can have one dead like it.” Her hand slipped out of her pocket with a sinister metallic click, and the young punk dropped back in shock at the flash of the ancient stiletto knife. “Don’t you wanna play?” she purred in a voice that conveyed a rather appalling confusion of sexual stimulation with something like a craving to wallow in carrion.
Her tone then changed into an eerily haughty chastisement, “You are so insipid! If you had been nice, we could’ve played. I don’t like people who aren’t nice to us.” The weird scene, laced with its twisted sexuality, had allowed me plenty of time to free up my revolver. I’d held it but had not brought it up and, fortunately, a Louisiana State Police car pulled into the lot before we might have been obliged to press the advantage.
“Bummer”—she sighed—”you’d of liked it.” When they didn’t move she continued, “So what are we thinking, as if they’re gonna believe you?” Her voice returned to kittenish innocence, “I am so sure, when I wiggle my butt, tell how you were gonna throw down on poor little me and my daddy… last chance now, before I do help-screamage here.”
They glanced nervously at the troopers, who had parked and were looking our way, and began to back off. “Goddamn sick pervs,” the loudmouth spat with disgust. “Bitch!” Justine snickered with evil delight.
“Intense. That,” she emphasized, “was Gothic!” She would not have been the first violence-prone personality I had met that could exercise total control, until nominally justified in an outburst out of all proportion to the injury. As we pulled back onto the interstate, I interrupted her giggling to ask about the knife.
“Aren’t those antiques still highly illegal in most states?”
“Moot,” she answered, stretching herself with an isometric push against the wheel, visibly coming off an adrenaline rush. “This hot young babe has always been able to rely on the kindness of Southern policemen.” She threw me a wicked glance, “And I’ve only had to give it up once.” When I didn’t bite, she added, “Like, fun?”
Straight-faced I asked, “Referencing putting out, or only once?”
“Busted,” with a guilty grin. “Uniforms do push my buttons.”
Apparently pleased that I neither overreacted to the incident, nor compensated with machismo, she coaxed me over beside her, becoming in seconds a happy little girl again. Why worry about my virility, I reflected? There was some part of her that had enough testosterone for both of us. What part of the things that came out of her mouth represented the real Justine? Ahead of us, the lightning performed a v
iolent ritual of its own.
The storm had a fortuitous dimension, for I was soon to learn that Justine does not slow down unless she’s forced to—regarding anything. When, between the storm and our bladders, we had to pull over at a rest area, I temporarily finessed back the wheel.
Being eastbound, it was well that we didn’t have Texas plates. Texas cars are primary drug-search targets on the presumption of being a conduit of drugs to the casinos, and who needs the hassle? This topic opened a channel for me to inquire into her tastes in chemicals, presuming that she had smoked some grass, anyway. Having taken the plunge into this thing, I might at least start educating myself to that with which I was going to have to deal. I found out.
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JUSTINE PRODUCED A SMALL, ORNATE SNUFFBOX from her purse and snapped open the stiletto. Thrusting its tip into the box, she offered innocently, “Nose candy?” This on the heels of the display on the parking lot, with legal intervention hovering in the wings. Oh shit, I thought. What did we have here? I hoped the powder was cocaine. I’d heard that pharmaceuticalgrade meth had returned for the first time since the Vietnam War. Please don’t let her be all cranked up! She glanced up. “That’s right, we’re doing crime here.”
While she fixed her nose, I was doing a quick reevaluation of her recent performance. Then she shook her hair and informed me, “It’s sort of an apéritif, like speedball?” She misread, in part, my silence and laughed nervously. “So, it’s like that. This really surprises me, it really does…”
Oh yeah. Tight-assed old fart. How many more stereotypical traps was I bound to fall into? Of course, I immediately went to work on making matters worse by trying to explain myself, but she seized the moment. “My bad. You don’t gotta go there. I know it’s about Linda. And this was special—that’s why, with the snort? It goes away. Reefer is cool, yea?”
I let matters lie, agreeing to the part of my disconcertion that she had seen through. I would study on the rest. I was not up to speed on the new youth, and certainly not about the drug culture. But I was willing to bet that the cocaine and heroin “cocktail” she had snorted was as uncommon today as in the opium days of the early century. Then it had been the chic poison of choice in the circle around Aleister Crowley, and among a few fashionable Parisians.
“At least baby’s not a big stoner, yea?” she pressed, seemingly concerned that she might have alienated me. She went on about drugs, and I found myself intrigued by her view that a society might be analyzed through its drug habits. The recurrent return of amphetamines, for example, presumably presaged warfare. She opined at length on the unpublicized renewal of interest in acid.
Given my generation, it was she who expected extensive drug experience on my part, and I had little to tell her beyond some good peyote stories from my college days. Before long, I realized that she had smoothly led me into the story of my life. I was even unsure whether, for her part, the drug interlude might not have been a calculated distraction.
Willing to go with it, I then told her some more of JJ, of memories, and anomalies. One noteworthy feature following from the magical night at the lake had been the archetype of The Ring that I had given to JJ when we were fresh and new. The reappearance of a cherished gift often figures in testimonials of rekindling, but mine had a little extra twist.
Long years before, I’d searched diligently but vainly for a ring with two symbolic pearls. I’d not told JJ I’d had to settle for one with but a single pearl for fear of degrading the gift. After she had sadly returned it, amidst the rest of our adolescent tragedy, I’d bickered with a pawnbroker over the value of a single cultured pearl. How little could he have known we haggled over the value of a piece of my soul.
“Well, this was big business for me back then, and I’d clearly recalled it all those years. When we got back together, she wanted a ring like I’d given her before, even bringing me a catalog page with an illustration. I tell you, I just about shit when I recognized exactly what I had sought for her, but failed to find, all those years ago—a ring with two pearls!”
“You mean…”
“The ring she remembered receiving and wearing had two pearls. But, the ring I remembered purchasing, giving, and finally selling had only one.
“The circumstances of our first breakup are nothing special. They involved peer pressure, the cruelty of an ignorant and insular community, possibly an odd but pervasive rumor that we were somehow related. Not that it would have been any large thing to me; in my family, one’s first sexual experience was more than likely to have been with a cousin…
“With the aid of the regression techniques, I was satisfied that there had been no confabulation, on my part, of the memory of the ring. But I had no reason to doubt her either. More than one writer has styled amorous convergence as the spilling of realities into one another. You have to wonder.”
Finding significance, Justine pressed me for details of a memory I had touched upon, which both JJ and I clearly held. We were sitting in a car on a parking lot near my old family home in east Fort Worth. I had offered to marry her because she was pregnant, a grand gesture, you see, because the child was not mine. But the memory as we recalled it was impossible, for when she had conceived her first child, we were entirely out of touch.
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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AMBER 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.”
