The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook

by Paul Pipkin

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Erotic & Steamy Romance; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

To the one who perhaps cared the most. In the twilight of the twentieth century, a young woman broods over a cryptic birthright, an inheritance addressed to her before she was born. Shaped by an abusive past, only the most intense sensations can unchain her heart. Meanwhile, a nameless, corroded sixties malcontent orbits the far point of his life. As his reason unravels, he pines for the redemption of an exhausted history. And in a darkening yesterday, William Seabrook, an all-but-forgotten writer of the Lost Generation - expatriate, explorer, suicide - wrestles with more remorse than one life can contain. Behind, and up ahead, and in-between these strange travelers, an old woman is dying in a decaying Victorian home. At the terminus of a full life, her memories warp and twist like the adjacent rooms, their doors remaining just a little bit ajar. In an odyssey that morphs extension and duration, blown upon storms of synchronicity, two improbable lovers bond in a sexual obsession with the dead, chasing the ghosts of fantasies become all-too-real. At the end of their quest - or is it the beginning - waits the fatidic document called The Fan-Shaped Destiny. The past has caught up with the present.

Release date: August 15, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 568

Sample

I

Happenstance

IN THE AUTUMN OF MY LIFE AND AT THE END OF A dark and bloody century, I had undertaken to make a final accounting of the strange odyssey of William Seabrook, a forgotten
literary figure of the Lost Generation. The twists and turns of events that followed from this eccentric project, infused
as it was with the dark energy of my personal sorrows, would come to beg expansion. The beginning? Such a discrete moment shifts within my grasp. It mocks me still.


For some years, I’d been working in the southern part of Texas as a union business agent, a vocation that had killed better
men than me. I was burning out under the pressures of the work and grief over my wife’s recent death, a result of chronic
alcoholism. I had paid for the ticket with my tears and taken that ride to the bitter end; and it had been so very bitter.
I’m not good at “moving on,” you see. Venture forth and my steps would only turn again, back toward Willie’s ever-receding far-away. When in Laredo, I would sit alone nights on the patio of a bar just beside the International Bridge, reviewing the contradictions
of my life. So much of it had been lived up and down the Interstate 35 artery, throbbing with the commercial invasion of the
South, that it would often appear in my dreams.


As I stared across the river into the vast mystery of Mexico, I-35 would become that dream highway. Along its dark axis, one
just might drive off some night into other times, other worlds. One ramp, four hundred miles and thirty-five years behind
me, would exit upon my adolescence and late-summer nights spent reading the pulp science fiction from decades more remote
still. Some of those old books and magazines had transfixed me with strange stories, which had worked to reinforce a childhood
fantasy. That the past might be only another room, a room which we have exited but whose door may have remained just a little
bit ajar.


Some of those boyhood nights had hosted inexplicable dreams, intense enough to linger as dim memories, for years and even
decades. One by one and without any other forewarning, they had come true. Such phenomena are not nearly so remarkable as
they may seem to those with no experience of them. But, by the time I had reached the far point of my life in that Laredan
bar, the last of my prescient dreams had been exhausted. Did that mean there was nothing left ahead? Was the future as dark
a void as the highway beyond my headlamps? Such thoughts would suggest that the miles home to San Antonio would also be measured
in milligrams, at least five milligrams, of Valium. Then occurred the first event that would shatter the conventional assumptions
on which I operated from day to day.


Many threads comprise a life. Worry one from its accustomed position and even the most elaborate tapestry may begin to unravel.
I was used to being in the news, from time to time, regarding various political and social issues. One morning I had been
quoted in some front-page coverage of a labor conflict. Such publicity always elicited phone calls, so I stayed in the office
to receive them. There was only one that mattered.


————————

“DO YOU REMEMBER ME?”


My boss stopped by as I was trying to manage the coffeepot with shaking hands and volunteered that I looked like I’d seen
a ghost. My laughter on the edge of hysteria, I retreated behind my office door where I could break down and cry.


Did I remember her? Did I remember that first meeting, at a teen dance in the shelter house of a North Texas lake? What we
were both wearing, where we were standing, the lights of the power plant across the lake, sounds of the ducks and wavelets
against the pier where we held each other amidst the smells of vanilla perfume and chewing gum?


Did I then recall the scented summer evenings that followed, or the blaze of her red hair in the amber glow of fall afternoons,
or loving her in the autumn leaves? Later, after she had gone to join the constellations in the night skies of my dreams,
she became the template against which all future involvements were to be measured. Do I remember you? Oh, maybe just to the extent of all the joys and hurts of my life exploding in me at once!


When I met her for lunch and she raised her lips to mine without reservation, I was lost. You’ve heard of old girlfriends
coming back? Well, get behind this one: Try your first, not seen or heard of in over thirty years. She’d been living on the
north side of San Antonio for twenty, and later I would learn of so many probable near misses that I would rage against fate.


Time had not been especially gentle with JJ. I would hold the dear countenance between my hands and hate what years and battery
had done. She could never be other than beautiful to me, and I swear that I took no satisfaction. Whatever rejection I may
have suffered, I had truly wanted to believe that she was having a wonderful life somewhere.


Yet, when we would make love, before my eyes occurred a phenomenon of which I’d read in romantic literature, never believing
it to exist as an actual, literal experience. I sought after rational explanation, blood suffusing the capillaries or whatever,
to no avail. The fact remained that, in those intimate hours, I seemed physically to hold in my arms the same young girl I’d
known over thirty years before.


During the months of the late-life affair that followed, I allowed myself to believe that some deity, for reasons known only
to itself, had taken pity. It’s very hard to lose someone twice, to take that second hurt that revives the first—and all the
hurts and rejections that have been hung on it in the meantime, like evil ornaments on a malignant Christmas tree.


————————

IN FACT, IT STILL HURT LIKE BLOODY HELL, even months later when my good friend Joe, being tolerantly familiar with my obsessions, had persuaded me to attend the upcoming
Fifty-fifth World Convention of Science Fiction. It was being held in San Antonio over the Labor Day weekend. For all my early
reading in the genre, I’d never been attracted to formal “fandom,” or thought of attending such events. This being the convocation
that names the recipients of the Hugo Awards, there might be authors present whose brains I could pick.


While Seabrook had never written in the genre himself, I was by then obsessively focused on him as the unacknowledged source
of an inexplicably ignored anomaly in the evolution of a particular theme. At the WorldCon, I might hope to pick up unexpected
details of the past or current usage of that alternate-realities theme, which had become pervasive in film as well as literature.
Internet postings and other queries had been turning up zip, so no avenue had preferred probability over any other. Short
of serious literary and historical research that I was without the opportunity or resources to pursue, I’d reached an impasse.


Certainly the proposed diversion of the WorldCon portended an ideal setting for mad speculation. The event was held at the
convention center named for Henry B. Gonzalez, the last of the real Democrats, and two Marriott hotels on the adjacent Riverwalk.
I was consoled that I could spend hours prowling the booksellers who, among the hawkers and hucksters, jammed the exhibit
hall. I attended the panel discussions and presentations at whim, with no particular order or system.


I’d hoped that the venerable L. Sprague de Camp might be present, so that I could ask about an early reference he’d made to
Seabrook, but he had become too frail to journey from his Plano home. Likewise, I was more than curious about Jerry Pournelle’s
recollections of H. Beam Piper’s claim to have been born on another timeline. It seemed that Jerry was a no-show as well.


Of course, I’d been aware that the old writers I’d grown up on were all gone—but had not confronted the fact that the subsequent
generation, like Larry Niven and Dr. Gregory Benford, whose coffee klatches I attended, would all be men my age or older.
The truly new writers, particularly the women, were doing some exceptional stuff of which I’d been entirely unaware.


I valiantly endeavored to comprehend Dr. Catherine Asaro’s exposition of super-relativistic speeds without being completely
distracted by its brilliant author being, unimpeachably, the Babe of Physics as well. Asaro had it all: a scientist and novelist
with the kind of leg musculature maintained only by accomplished dancers. That thought, of course, could only make me think
of my wife Linda, and the big nothing of a life I would be returning to in a couple of days.


Joe, down from his home in Dallas–Fort Worth, had been helping to man the convention suite in one of the hotels, so I spent
a lot of time there, having mildly interesting conversations. While I still looked forward to hearing Dr. John Cramer on Monday
and, more immediately, John Norman on Sunday afternoon, the WorldCon would soon be over.


As typical, I was gravitating more often to the bar. “I’m wondering what I’m doing here with all these ‘geeks,’ anyway,” I
responded to a query from Joe. Culturally, I was a fish out of water with most of the crowd. “Am I just trying to get next
to old guys like Benford and Cramer because I wanted to write sci-fi and couldn’t?”


Joe, whose appetite for the personal lives of his friends is normally limited, had made an exception in my case. “I’d hoped
to do a little redirect on your obsession,” he confessed. “I began to notice that this story you’re fixated on has an uncomfortable
abundance of suicides.” I was surprised and secretly gratified by the concern. Lately, I’d thought that I could drive off
into a ditch and no one would notice. It was true that I wondered if the good times were not all in the past—of a world where
I was only marking a time that had become my enemy.


Still, I did get slightly hot. I regarded myself as a most unlikely candidate for outright self-annihilation. I told him that
I was too fearful of death and too little at peace with myself. “I’d just like to be sure I’m going to get laid again before
I die!”


Overall, I’d found the Con an at least acceptable expenditure of time and money. While it had held no particularly great revelations
for me, it beat the alternative. Gritting my teeth and coughing up the substantial late registration fee, I’d reminded myself
how miserable long weekends always were. Couldn’t get any business done, everything being closed, and most people I knew would
be involved with family. My only human contacts would be the odd page from workers ticked off that they’d been tapped out
to work the Labor Day holiday.


Candidly, another consideration in my decision to attend the WorldCon was the presence of John Norman, author of an infamous
male-dominant fantasy series. Linda and I had found light escape in the Gor books for years. Were she still living, she would have given me no peace had John Norman been in town and we’d failed to
attend. The success of his novels in the seventies had resulted in his later suffering years of blacklisting. You see, the
Gor stories feature female sex slavery. Now, you have to understand the way this worked in late-century America, forever pining
for the comforts of rigid dogma, which it is too pluralistic to be capable of enforcing.


The recent catechism held that male submission for sexual pleasure fell, along with homosexuality, within the parameters of
politically correct orthodoxy. Whereas female submission, like adolescent sexuality, was tantamount to rape, anathema to the
thought police who monitor social discourse as well as behavior. Even portions of the generally libertarian science fiction
community had conspired to silence Norman.


He had turned out to be a pleasant, distinguished gentleman with silver hair, who looked every inch the philosophy professor
that he was in actual fact. I remarked to Joe, who had known Linda well, how sorry I was that she wasn’t here to meet him.
When we were introduced to Norman’s wife, I mused whether she trusted her husband around the coterie of chain-bedecked young
women who flocked to his appearances. There were always at least a few whose affects ran toward tight black clothing and body
jewelry.


Joe had laughed, “Probably, but she knows very well not to trust the Lindas of the world.”

On Sunday, Norman was doing a panel entitled, “Are There Any Taboos Left?” Just one or two, surely… It was a bit late convening,
and I was standing outside the meeting room, well, brooding—actually—upon the assembling crowd, roughly divided between “geeks”
and “mundanes,” with a few unattached women.


————————

IN THE STRANGE LIGHT of what was about to fall on me during the coming days, it would be easy enough to look back and decide that I sensed something
untoward at that very moment. But such was not the case.


She was standing by the door, looking at the program posted for the John Norman panel with a severe expression, insofar as
could be discerned through the exaggerated makeup that turned her eye sockets into black pits. My quick glance about seemed
to verify that the other lone males did not yet have the scent. They were probably intimidated by her social mask and armor.


Goth. An entire subgenre of the literature aimed at this rather nihilistic ethos. While they were not really that rowdy, Con
dynamics had them and the other gamers more or less quarantined in a computer arcade. Frequent sadomasochistic drag notwithstanding,
it was unusual to meet one at any function apart from their specific fascinations.


Her appearance did challenge all comers. The jeans nicely displaying the curves of her bottom looked actually worn through,
as opposed to strategically ripped. Boots, tightly laced leather vest exposing her pierced navel, small silver Visigoth ax
dangling from an ear, and the silver band molded about the lobe of a pierced nostril—I supposed she must have something stuck
through her tongue as well. Any who were tempted to confront all this likely expected a surly rejection.


Her only visible colors were her elaborately done nails with what appeared to be star bursts worked on electric blue, and
brilliant, though remarkably naturallooking red hair, drawn back into a tail. Long red hair always exerts a gravitational
tug on me, even after half the women in America had rediscovered henna.


I would otherwise have been no more likely than the next middle-aged guy to get it up for initial moves in the face of all
that. Yet, I felt an unaccustomed arousal as I fantasized what other piercings or scarifications might be among the mysteries
of the strong, sturdy young body.


I had stepped on past her into the doorway when I thought, What the hell? I stopped and looked back into her raised eyes, green enough to confirm her natural hair tone, though its highlights were
likely cosmetic. She did not react to my nodded greeting for long moments. She had a wide face, JJ’s type of face, but with
prominent cheekbones and lips that would be full and sensual even without the contemporary outlining. The burning pale green
eyes within the black mask had a disturbing intensity. They were the kind that could demand answers, while yielding nothing
of what lay behind them.


“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 discipline, 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, calculat