The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

  “Justine, my darling”—I stroked her hair—”if being him, being Willie, is what you will continue to need from me, then I want more than anything for that to be so. But it scares the shit out of me. I’m nobody’s hero, and neither was he! If I’m in any way ahead of him, it’s just that I learned that a little sooner.”

  “As if I didn’t know, back in the day, that you were full of baloney?” She had a new thought. “Tristan; a hero there?”

  “As in Tristan and Isolde? I’m only familiar with Wagner’s score. A lot of opera in old New York, right?” I conjectured.

  “New York, nothing. The University of Texas, Austin, 1994. Your cousin was there; she knew German, I didn’t.”

  “She’s colder than me.” I reflected, lighting my pipe, “I don’t like tragedy—it may be art, but I find no beauty in sadness. So I’m a wuss?”

  “Whatever.” She picked up her thread. “Tristan is clued that he’s condemned himself by loving Isolde, who’s betrothed to the king. His thing is, if by his death is meant the punishment, to be suffered if they’re discovered, he accepts it.

  “But,” she accentuated, “if by his death is meant everlasting torment in the fires of hell—a belief the people who created the saga really had going on—hey, he accepts that as well.” The green eyes burned like those same fires. “What do you think of that?” she virtually snarled.

  “Love with an attitude?”

  “Fuckin’ A! The cosmos of the Romantics is not for wussies. I shan’t get past putting attitude on JJ, don’t you know? How could it be other? I would welcome the tortures of the damned to be with you. You’d better believe I’ll get tacky on her ass.”

  “You’d probably enjoy hell, Justine.” She did not smile. “Babe, I’m not worth that. Of course you tempt me to play into it …” The sarcastic twist of her mouth told me I had better not be caught dissembling. “I just don’t know.”

  “For now, only one of us has to,” she sighed and squirmed against me. After a while, we returned to The Fan-Shaped Destiny, and Justine2 began to remember and locate notes from the continuing barn experiments, supplementing the narrative. Willie had remained centered on techniques for inducing pain and physical stress in female volunteers, never bothering to deny the sexually sadistic roots of his obsession.

  From the very outset, however, it had escalated into something more, due to his first subject having been Justine. The endorphin acceleration, sexual stimulation, and selective deprivation of the senses other than tactile had seemed to stimulate her brain chemistry, exciting her high psychic potential. The striking phenomena this generated, perhaps involving glimpses of alternate realities, brought him to appreciate the greater depths his practices touched upon.

  ————————

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1923, Willie had sent a young Russian emigrée, a Balieff singer who had known Rasputin, through a psychic “slit in time.” Distilling down Aleister Crowley’s baroque symbology, he added a few components to the torturous regimen. He’d focused her attention on a six-line kua from the ancient Chinese I Ching, known to him as The Changes of Chou. He had happened upon some tortoise-shell divining wands and, researching their use, came across a German translation of the book. At John Bannister’s studio in Washington Square, after hours in a painful kneeling position, she had “slipped across” to psychically visit an alternate reality where she was a wolf on the northern tundra.

  The hypnotic device was more evidence of Seabrook’s possible impact on science fiction. Phil Dick had credited no other source for his inspiration than Carl Jung, who would prepare a foreword to an English translation in 1949 (the same version I’d stumbled upon and stolen in Fort Worth in 1962). Richard Wilhelm had only been completing the German version in Peking during that same summer of 1923, so it was unlikely that could have been the German version Seabrook recalled. The point is: No one but Dick had employed the I Ching as a presumed conduit to alternate realities. No one except Seabrook.

  There was no equivocation about the foundation of Willie’s experiments having been torture, though this typically amounted only to extended periods of uncomfortable bondage. The next year, in the Middle East, he studied the more extreme techniques of the Rufai Dervishes. His adventures with the occult and the paranormal continued for a decade, until chronic alcoholism took him near to dementia.

  In 1938, recovering, he observed the experiments at Duke University and began his activities in the barn, resolving to take the work of J.B. Rhine and put some hair on it. Much of this saga had been recounted in his autobiography, which mentioned the involvement of Walter Duranty in the activities at the barn. The manuscript before us suggested that Walter, knowledgeable of the workings of Crowley, had contributed much to the focusing symbolism of Willie’s rituals.

  The relationship of Willie, who remained an elitist Republican, with Walter, for decades the New York Times’s man in Moscow, continued to amuse me. “Babe, if I’m Willie, I certainly didn’t carry the politics along with me. Most of my life, I’ve been seen as something of a Red, more likely a ‘metem’ of Walter than Willie.” My little joke only served to open another door.

  “Pos that Walter hadn’t made his point? Say, you were an old Southerner, but you were never personally a bigot. By the twenties, you were a liberal on race and, hey, like Wamba? I’m way sure. Walter was your conscience, and Max as well.” She thought, “Do you believe in karma, like you said your friend Richard warned you?” Her anachronistic speech sounded pained, “Jimmy told off on that horrid little joke you played at the expense of a poor transient. Oh, I do remember it, unfortunately. You hotsy-totsy guys with all your money—for shame!”

  I held up my hand, and she broke off, “I’m sorry; I know,” her anger abated. “You can’t go there yet. But, the concept that you might’ve had some things to pay for? Process that!” She didn’t understand that was the notion from which I most recoiled.

  I attempted to get off the troubling identification and back to the subject at hand. “Why do you think he remarked later that he wished he’d never written Witchcraft?”

  “He was still living with Mink,” she quipped, “and I’m so sorry, but whatever her good points, she was not an ideal prescription for a man suffering from chronic guilt. Walter was better suited to handle her, much. You know that affair went on like, for-ev-er, after Willie was totally dead? Really and truly, I don’t know, unless it connected with his paranoia.”

  As we read further, she observed, “You’re so right; once he was way dead, it was open season on his work. Hey, what’s up with this? Here are the laced bondage gloves that were made along with the mask. Like you told me that dude used, when he described us in the restaurant, and gave me Katie’s name? Tell me there wasn’t something going on there?”

  A tedious, overly long treatise followed, declaiming on the scientific appropriateness of young, athletically fit females to endure prolonged torture. We looked at each other, and I kept a straight face. “Yeah, right.”

  She looked innocent. “He said that; yes, he really did. Fifty years ago it didn’t sound so absurd, it truly didn’t.”

  Late in the barn experiments, Willie had added, with Walter’s input, a final element to his eclectic witch’s brew. The unoffending hypercube, an octagonal figure, represents a cube extended into four dimensions. Each side of the eight constituent cubes is coterminous with another surface, a self-enclosed system with no “outside.”

  Willie had labored to designate I Ching kua to each set of intersecting corners, in relationships prescribed by the ancient book’s patterns of changes. In his extreme variation on psychic parlor games, it served as a mandala, on which his subjects focused while their endorphin levels rose. One rendering, very artistically shaded, enhanced the optical-illusion properties, so that the cubes seemed to extend off the paper.

  ————————

  THIS LATEST BIT OF WEIRD FAMILIARITY, I would identify only much later as related to a dream that had followed our night at The
Château. At that moment, I wondered at how it would feel to be inside such a figure. I likened it to a hall of mirrors, in which Justines watched Justines off into infinity, each somewhat different. I expressed my thoughts, as she watched me, watching it.

  “I was thinking that it feels like your bedroom in San Antonio, where there’s another room on every side. It’s the space betwixt the worlds, which Willie believed was the same as the dreamspace. I’m afraid I wasn’t much of a visionary those nights in the barn. I was either sexually aroused, or busy trying to manipulate, or”—she gave a little shrug—”I was distracted by pain. I was starting to get too old for the rough stuff, and when I tried to play like I once did, I would be hurting too much to concentrate.”

  “A long damn way from the polite parlor telepathy of Mr. and Mrs. Upton Sinclair.”

  “Oh, they were so over by then! They didn’t come around, nay. Huxley, yea. You can be so sure he was there.”

  The visions observed and reported by numerous suffering “research girls,” through many dark nights in the Rhinebeck barn, had begun to lead Willie in the direction he felt he would ultimately have to go—to find the “older magic” that he believed represented what had happened when he had awakened in Augusta in 1907. But late in the game, he had abandoned his approach through subjects, beginning to experiment on himself. He seemed to be looking for a new application, a view of attacking the problems from a different angle.

  “That was the take the mambos had on it when I told them I’d found you again, back in ’69. Wamba, by-the-by, had become a legendary figure in the West African sorcerer societies. Her words were known even ‘across the sea,’ in America. And, she had kept her promise.” She paused and took my hand.

  “Dearest, they knew of Willie’s life when Santolina first took me to them. What was truly strange, they knew of mine, too, and our little girl’s, in detail that Santolina couldn’t have given them. When I laid my plans, they warned me that such fine-tuning was barking up the wrong tree. Like anything else in life, you’re apt to opt for whatever you can access. Oft-times, it may be like ‘any port in a storm.’”

  “What was the role of Voudon in all this, for you?” I revisited my earlier queries, sensing that she might then be prepared to deal with them. “For all of his background, collection of witch dolls and all that, Willie didn’t seem to incorporate it in his technique.”

  “He knew its power, and was a bit afraid of it, as Mink described in her little book.89 They know something about finding points of convergence. The rituals they performed seemed, to me, as a giant transformer, boosting the power of my purpose, someways helping to direct it. Coolest thing was, the initiation of metem, if I may use your word for the process itself, into one’s own genetic line was not unknown to them, commonsensical, even.”

  I’d not had time to properly digest Deutsch’s intriguing chapter “The Significance of Life,” in which he visualized the DNA codons bearing their information in a self-replicating pattern across the worlds. In a perhaps not so remote association, I described how various New Age thinkers regarded the I Ching’s sixty-four kua as representing a pattern in the woof and warp of the cosmos. They had also correlated the kua with the DNA codons. That thought led back around to Phil Dick’s use of the I Ching.

  “For argument’s sake”—I resolved to confront the implications—”let’s have Willie’s ‘self’ reborn as me, only months after his death in this world, though he may have spent an indeterminate period in yet another reality. I understand that, according to your scenario, we don’t attach any particular significance to the timing. You met me years later, and thought you knew whom he had become. So, what did you try to do, then?”

  “It was way harsh, meeting you and Linda, when I was already ill and it was far too late for me? What I wished for, ever so much, was a world where I was JJ. If only I were she, then we could all be together again, our partie de trois. Don’t you see? If I could remember enough to avoid JJ’s mistake, then seek out our Katie as well …”

  “But that’s not what happened,” I interrupted with another reach for humorous relief. “And I’m confident that you were not at all deterred by possible Freudian implications.” It was such a subtle, yet bizarre, juxta-position for her to acerbically flip me off without breaking stride.

  “The mambos had their own way of looking at things,” she continued. “They didn’t much relish the idea of retrograde transits. It may be that, since you—Willie, I mean, had gone to meet Wamba, they saw me going back to change things as someway an interference with her. They were more supportive of sequential schemes that moved me, more or less, ‘forward.’ Semilinear!”

  She looked reflective. “They bade me scan for such a location. There was a vision of a little girl playing in front of the house where JJ was raised. Shown where I must go, it never even occurred, at first, that the little redheaded girl might be other than her. Later I learned that it was her little girl.” Tears welled up, and she dropped her head. I touched her in a silent query.

  “We must go by there, please?” She peeked up tentatively, “I didn’t realize till just now. Why that visit to my grandparents’ house, that is to say, Mother’s step-parents, is one of my few good childhood memories? I was so deliriously happy, because I must’ve been touched by the other part of myself, and knew I had succeeded! Say, it’s a powerful, but hardly exact, science.”

  What I was witnessing was both awesome and chilling. Her perspective was attaching to first one then the other of the symbiotic selves, but the cycles seemed incrementally channeling down toward unity. “At the least, you’re looking at the basis for a whole new school of psychology here.”

  “Nay, some have played with this, they really have. Like, in grief therapy? ‘Healing the dead,’ imaging a world where things went down better is all about an intuitive grasp of this. But the profession won’t permit it to be pushed very far. There are over three hundred separate schools of psychology as it is.”

  I couldn’t resist. “They’ve got that right. We need another about like we need more lawyers.”

  The chilling component was more personal. How many times over the years, before my ill-fated reunion with JJ, had I driven by that same old house whose specter had just revisited Justine2, dreaming of a different outcome? How often, after we’d finally met and failed again, had I tortured myself for failing to inquire after her in those earlier years before it was too late?

  ————————

  HOW WIDE MIGHT A PHASE-ENTANGLED GHOST have cast her net? Whose body and soul had I missed so dearly? Had my “little red-haired girl” been JJ, after all? By God, I thought; I could even have seen Justine playing in that yard as a child. My mind recoiled from the numinous images, but the suspicions they incited only ran on, into other areas.

  What if this was all true? How profoundly might it have affected my life? Other thoughts encroached, which I realized I’d been driving back. While the main objectives of such experiments would remain unprovable and untraceable, the accompanying synchronicity storms could be quite visible, affecting the outcome of many observations.

  “Jung had a clue, early on, that analytical psychology couldn’t ignore those effects,” she agreed. And that was not the only arena where avoidance could not be practiced.

  I described to her the weird circumstances following the murder, in the summer of 1967, of my friend George. His death had early influenced my continuing interest in the nature of reality. The circumstances had been widely believed a political assassination. An investigation had followed the inadvertent arrest of the triggerman, some fourteen years later, on other charges. It had revealed a network of remote associations among the principals in the case, defying all laws of probability. It had gone to the point of the DA’s Office calling a halt, demanding simplification of the case sufficient to be credible to a jury.

  The perpetrator had been convicted in an unusual courtroom drama which included, among other things, the first successful use of hypnotically
retrieved memories in witness testimony. Though he received an effective life sentence, the jurors never had any idea of the complexities surrounding the evidence they had examined. That was another story, however. The germane point, which struck me with the same quality as Justine2’s experience at her mother’s old home, was one that had returned to haunt the back of my mind months before. While doing the Seabrook research, I had been transfixed by an impression of Walter Duranty’s Moscow days.

  After George’s murder, the things we had seen made his young widow Mariann and me, like many of our contemporaries, despair of our country. In the fall, we had journeyed to the then–Soviet Union for a few months. One November evening, we had stopped for a drink at the Metropol Hotel, across the square from the Bolshoi. I noticed a balding man in a black overcoat, either an American or a Brit, who occasionally spoke in English, declaiming loudly to a group of Muscovites. Those were the days of the Brezhnev reforms, but old habits were still in place, and the Russians seemed nervous at his forthrightness on whatever issue he was debating.

  We’d met many more American expatriates in Soviet Russia than our press would have had us believe existed and had been curious about the man, but it had been time to leave for the ballet. On the way out, I’d been startled as he emphasized a point, striking the floor with an ornate cane.

  Returning from the ballet about midnight, we crossed the square just as a light snow began to fall. I remembered we were having a fine time, whistling “Midnight in Moscow,” a big hit not many years before. As with Willie refraining from discussing Constance, what was between Mariann and me, I will hold to myself. The world does not need to know.

  Then, across the square, an apparition in a dark overcoat and fur hat, the like of which only foreigners and peasants were still wearing, exited the Metropol. Walking with the stiff gait that characterizes a prosthetic limb, it was immediately recognizable as our loud friend by the ornate stick with which he assisted himself.