by Paul Pipkin
one. I was amused to note that the big road’s mile markers were delineated with numerical dates.
One branch of the intricate cloverleaf ran downhill into a dark place, like a bad neighborhood or a seedy little town. Justine had turned her ankle, and I went back and carried her uphill, walking on a graveled grade, which I associated with unpaved roads of the past. At the intersection, the rising sun was illuminating a newly completed highway link converging with my dream highway. I felt exultant, like an Orpheus triumphant, bringing his love again into the land of the living.
Coming fully awake, I abruptly recalled another dream, possibly from the previous sleep cycle. The drums beat in the jungle. Africa? No, maybe Haiti, for I recognized the chant as the one Seabrook had transcribed, “Papa Legba, ouvrí barrière … open the gate …”
I lay utterly still, fully engaged with the lingering impressions, consolidating all the memory I could. I knew that Legba is the Voudon loa of the crossroads, whose Catholic manifestation is Lazarus. His title is Opener of the Gate Between the Worlds.
The dim illumination sang that it was blue twilight beyond the drawn blinds. I was alone in the room. Déjà vu à la Gulfport! Panicking, I jumped up and jerked open the guest-room door. I ran, fully naked, through the silent house toward a light from the kitchen, but it was vacant as well. Joe should have been gone to his second-shift job by then, I knew, but where the hell was everyone else?
I tried to reassure myself that I would surely have been awakened had there been a crisis. I hurried back to the bedroom and pulled on my trousers, then fumbled for the light to find my other things. Finding myself without her, I had again to fight down the eerie fear that she was of a separate reality, so easily lost from my world. I spied my written reassurance, but saw that it had been removed and repinned to the bedspread. I registered that there was an additional notation beneath my scrawl.
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GONE SHOPPING, IT READ, LOVED YOU LONGER,J2
Shopping? The image of young Justine the mall monkey collided with the elegant, almost Spenserian, penmanship in which the abbreviated lines were written. I’d seen that handwriting recently, on yellowed letters and envelopes, from long before. But what seized me with wonder was her initial, boldly and lavishly inscribed, and attached to it the superscript digit two.
The message was ironic and profound. Her mother had been known as JJ. Thus, she was now seeing herself as Justine squared, Justine multiplied by herself, complex-conjugate Justine! I had to regard it as assurance that she was successfully integrating her psychic contents rather than being overwhelmed by the greater volume from her antecedent self.
As I poured coffee, sounds came from the garage attached to the kitchen, and I peeked through the door window to see Justine2 helping Di with her crutches and several large plastic bags. They were laughing together about something, and I could see with a glance that Di had already adopted her. For some reason, I was reminded of the relationship between Linda and the elder Justine, nearly thirty years before, which had left me somewhat uneasy. Compared to that dark bond, this interaction came off decidedly healthy and wholesome.
I helped them through the kitchen door with the bags. Then Justine2 threw her arms about my neck in a fierce embrace. Sensing her to be just a bit unsteady on her feet, I held her long, feeling relief that things seemed well enough. Di surveyed us over the top of her glasses as she put things away, saying nothing.
Justine2 ran off to the bedroom with the bags containing her catch. Di had finished putting up and settled into the breakfast nook across from me when she returned, happily modeling a short skirt she’d found to match her leather vest. Her legs and midriff quite bare, the whip scratches were evident, and Di’s look hardened. Even so, I couldn’t conceive that as being a problem; Justine2 was an adult, after all. Like Seabrook, I’d never made any secret of my sexual tastes, so Di shouldn’t be surprised.
The girl pulled a chair over to the edge of the table and joined us. As she seated herself, I once again saw her palms sweep upward, lifting skirts that had not been there for decades. She looked down with confusion at her bare thighs, and an undeniable blush suffused all her exposed skin. She glanced at me almost furtively, and I had another revelation.
The antique patterns of acculturation in her mind would keep Justine2, the exhibitionist, in a constant state of stimulation when in modern dress based on the sensation that she was practically naked. Regaining her composure, she chatted for a while and, though she looked especially young when she crossed her bare legs beneath her, the expression “happy and poised” came to mind.
After she excused herself, a slight but audible hint of the Bronx tainting her speech, I turned to Di. “What?” I demanded, wondering if I might be required to explain who “Willie” was or something.
“You’re on probation with me, as of now.” I waited to hear what was coming. “It’s rare to meet a young woman that much in love, anymore, and with an old fart like you!” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine why, but even the more distasteful things about you fascinate her. What she believes about you, it’s just incredible.” I frowned, but she waved off my incipient inquiry.
“Another time, but you had better take good care of her, or you’ll deserve to go to hell.” Di is a religious woman, but not of the sort who invokes hellfire. However, it wasn’t the content of the conditional damnation that gave me sudden pause. It was the form, and I asked why she put it that way.
“I don’t know. It could be the feeling I get that she’s given up so much for you—so strong I have to speak my mind. Look, you’re always coming around here, whining about wanting another chance.” Her seriousness was frightening, “I think that somebody heard you.”
There are not many people who can ream me out. I looked at Di, with her leg braces and all the suffering she’d endured, and it triggered again that devastating sense of shame. There was absolutely no sarcasm when I promised to do the right thing. It was not moral intimidation but the certainty of how deeply Di really could see into things which got me out of the room in a hurry. I was about to spill the whole bizarre story, as I’d told her all about JJ a couple of years earlier, and was sure she’d think me way over the top.
Justine2 was at the guest-room vanity, outlining her lips in contemporary fashion. She had applied an eye mask, but instead of simply a dark band, it was composed of elaborate swirls and feathering with an art nouveau look. Her movements seemed more subdued, less bouncy; but she had been through a lot by any standard. I sat on the bed and watched, intrigued by the continuing merger of personas. “Does wearing next to nothing get you off? Not just your clit ring that keeps you horny, is it?”
“Please!” Her green eyes twinkled in the mirror. “Embarrassed much? Now I know why that’s always done it for me. Kewl,” she continued, “weird, yet cool.” She sat back, appraising her cosmetic art. I had no clue as to how to delve further. I was afraid of doing something to upset what might yet well be a precarious balance. “Hey, you didn’t do the bail thing”—she was smiling at me in the mirror, maybe a bit sadly—”when I showed my true colors.”
“Why would you expect that of me?” Di was one matter, but I now felt hurt and almost offended.
She didn’t answer. “So it’s like that.” It was a question, though you wouldn’t have known it through the flat punker assertiveness. “Di told me. The marriage thing?”
“You didn’t give me an answer,” I responded stiffly.
“You mean on the aeroplane, going to New York? That was a proposal?” She sighed. “I am sure I’ve only been waiting to hear one for eighty years, believe you me.”
Justine2’s speech varied, in part, with which sets of memories she was thinking about or associating. I didn’t know when I should be concerned or even how to deal with the continuing identification of me with Willie. I guess it showed, because she dropped her hands in her lap and glanced nervously about the top of the vanity.
“I know; I’m sorr
y. I’m being touchious.” She came to me and stood between my knees, and I pressed my lips against her shiny navel ornament. I took her hands and tried to explain my thoughts about the memories and integrating the personas, but was being distracted by her quivering belly. “Non, non. Arrête!” she teased when I pinned her wrists behind her back.
Emotion ran neck and neck with libido. I wanted her, yes, but as I was about to get on my knees anyway, I was moved to make an on-the-knees traditional proposal as well. She knew it, too.
“Babe, I can’t doubt who you are, you’re …” I was as unable to express anything as a teenager. “… you’re everything. But I have to learn how to relate, don’t you see? I’m terrified of even hearing how I looked through your eyes at The Château in sixty-nine. Whom do I know you as? Do you understand?”
“You know me. You’ve always known me,” Justine2 whispered, with a throaty hoarseness that struck a chord from those bygone nights. I knew then how stunned Roder must have been when a voice from the past had bade farewell to her “old friend.”
Giggling at my disconcertion, she squirmed in my grip. “No way it’s more gross than having to hear about that dried-up, perverted, old woman. Go and get me started, you know I’m insatiable. Swell gams, hunh?” I was pushed the rest of the way by a sweaty thigh thrown over my shoulder. “Gimme some sugar!” My face buried in her muff, I began to lick around her clit ring.
“It’s all, y’know, about accessing new pathways to memories? Last night I pulled a real brainstorm. Now it’s like Fibber McGee’s closet in here—everything before that night in ’45. The rest is defragmenting much more slowly, thank heaven. Oh,” she moaned, “I’m gonna have so many stories to tell you!” I thrust my tongue deep into her, savoring her distinctive taste. Everyone has her own and Justine2’s was slightly acerbic—it figured. Despite her heat, her attention was all over the place.
“Look it, think of me like a stroke victim or, play like I’ve been tortured with electroshock. That’s no fun either, but it’s farther up our alley. This feels like that, only the paths must be across time.” She paused the motion of her hips and giggled mischievously. “I think you had more hair, didn’t you?” As I lightly nipped at her navel, she switched channels again.
“Poor dear, don’t fret,” she cajoled, with the archaic inflection. “You’ve been so worried about being with a younger woman, and now it proves out that she’s nearly a hundred years old. No, wait. Let me see. Centenarians are at our sexual peak,” she laughed as I pinned her hips. “Better oughta get a cock ring …” She moaned as I sucked her clit between my teeth and worked on her with the tip of my tongue. “Or not!”
“Check it out. I would play like, a sex surrogate—for my girlfriends who were afraid of pregnancy, or flat afraid of sex, period? I would fuck their beaux so they didn’t have to. Ooh. You like that, hunh? Make me hurt, chéri, torturez-moi!” We made love, as gently as she would allow. While an aroused Justine2 heads directly for the edge, apart from more pinching and biting and fingernails in my butt, she was satisfied with “slow-processing.”
I discovered that “fantasy” was another term whose normal meaning had expired. “Many men have had me,” she moaned, “but only you did I wanna tell about it, to share everything.” In the calm afterglow, she luxuriated in her recollections, and her language assimilated even further. Which was more amazing, to be inflamed by lucid erotic memories from other times, or their identity with the unacknowledged history of our own?
Regarding her grand indifference to questions of hygiene, she chided, “Lighten up. HIV is scary, but so were smallpox and scarlet fever. Say, syphilis before penicillin? What’s the sense of immortality without some savoir-faire? Diphtheria? Been there, done that. Don’t expect me to bat an eye at herpes or a silly yeast infection.” There was nothing for it but to reinforce a state of mind that, all things considered, appeared healthy enough.
Neither of us could know whether she would experience a reversal. If I had any kind of handle on this, our trip to the barn had actualized a sort of psychic loop across time. She had plugged into that other Justine’s precognitive nightmare in a major way. Cleaving so tightly to the assumptions of that long-ago moment, struggling to be that woman, had provoked an anamnesis.
She had been reeling from a sudden deluge of the psychic contents that had constituted her antecedent self—up until the night of that event. Still, there remained a quarter century of experience, which she seemed to be accruing at a more measured pace, if not as slowly as her gradual assimilation of bits and pieces before our ill-advised excursion to the barn.
Spiriting her away from settings that stressed her identity had been for the best, she agreed. “Worlds had someway collided, my worlds. The feelings were so strong …” she began, but I stopped her. Revisiting those feelings so soon seemed imprudent. I suspected that a fully coherent treatment of the anamnesis itself was improbable in any event.
She insisted that we begin to read the manuscript. “Even the fractions I’ve started to recall are like any book read a long time past. You only remember the content in general terms, and gotta be refreshed.”
I asked if she could answer me as to whether she had foreseen meeting me, her book finding its way to me, any of the nexus of synchronicity. “Couldn’t prove it by me”—she looked at me piercingly—”but my testament reads as though it were all about finding you, does it not? After discovering you at The Château, I must’ve prayed very hard.”
Distraction was then of a different order. Though fully nude, she remained nonetheless poised, addressing me like a well-bred lady in an early-century drawing room. “Then, if I was not a part of your plan,” I pressed, “how can you be sure I’m not just an interference, other than solely by your subjective feeling about the nature of our connection? And please, try to indulge me by distinguishing between Willie and me when you speak. It’s confusing.”
She nodded and slipped on her heels. It was evident that her unconscious impulse had not been toward the admitted sex appeal as she moved with what appeared a well-trained grace to get the big leather portfolio. She placed it on the bed and opened it, lifting out the distilled manuscript as though from among sacred relics.
“You … he,” she corrected, “thought that ‘coinkydinks’ are like lines of force in a field. Like metal shavings arranged around a magnet? As if, more like gravity? Effects of reciprocal histories interfering, or whatnot. Anytime you perceive them, or have the feeling of déjà vu, worlds have touched, or branched, on a scale visible in our lives, to say the least.”
She laid a finger beside the ring in her nose. “These should not be seen as isolated little happenings. They’re woven into the fabric of everything!” With that startlingly familiar pronouncement, she handed me the manuscript.
FRAGMENTS FROM
THE FAN-SHAPED DESTINY
August, 1945
… and so, I have been telling you thatI have lived before. Not as a serial trans-migration in a one-and-only universe, not in a “past” life, but the same one—in an otherworld, one which lies along another branch in the paths of my fan-shaped destiny. I believe that all of us may, now and again, slip just a bit off our well-beaten path. That is, unconsciously follow an adjacent route so nearly identical, on an incremental scale, as to remain beneath notice. From time to time, we might discover a discrepancy, which we promptly censor out as resulting from false memory.
Memories, and where they are stored, appear to be the ties which bind us to one actuality as opposed to another. This business of waking up at a prior moment and proceeding on a divergent course, a course determined in part by a substantial retention of my otherworldly memories, I believe that I could repeat almost never. Such a being would increasingly be set adrift from any particular actuality. I’ve had more than enough difficulty in sorting out the Brownie snapshots of moments from only two histories.
This is, perchance, the meaning of the waters of forgetfulness—that “draught of long oblivion” which the
Poet tells us must be quaffed by all souls whom the gods have destined to descend again to the land of the living. The same general rule probably applies to transports to future or parallel moments. The human survival trait of clear causal reasoning would decree that memory should be so washed.
But every rule has its exceptions. I can never know, and consequently cannot try to tell you, how it came about that I woke up in Ella Baxter’s boardinghouse in Augusta on that morning in 1907. It was as if a dirty film had been stripped away from the world. As if all things, visual and auditory, had been suddenly infused with an unearthly luminance. The colors on the quilt at my feet were abnormally vivid and made harmony. Why, I was almost afraid to lift my head or move, for fear it would all fade. You see, I had gone to sleep the night before, sunken in drink in my London rooms, in the deep December of 1940. At first, I thought I must have perished in that night’s bombing, by just saying the hell with it and going to bed, rather than sanely hunkering down in the shelters.
Mayhap I did. When that war raged again, here in my second-chance world, I wanted to go over, but that was not to be. Had the destruction been terrible as I remembered from that other night, or merely in my own, eccentric, deranged eye? Could I comb the details of the Blitzkrieg destruction … but time for seeking answers has run out, again.
Remember that my dual, memory-conscious nicks-of-time spring from a single trunk, prior to that bright morning in Augusta. I have sometimes thought that the twisting and changing of a child’s imageries and daydreams, by my faerie god-mother Piny, may have left me loosely connected to material reality. Late in the day, I believe once more, as I did before the gray walls of adulthood reared about me, that those eternal-in-the-now-hence-always-memory-lasting visions were no more dreams than these lives I have known. Surely, they must have been vestibules to otherworlds that my young grandmother opened, in love and pity, for another little soul who, like herself, found ordinary life unbearable.
