Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 1 - The Last Night at College: Discovering Jonathan’s sister was aborted, allowing him to be born

This is Episode 1 of the serialized version of the novel, Virtual Eternity: An Epic 90s Retro Florida Techo-Pro-Life Love Story and Conversion Journey. These 52 episodes are presented here free for you every Friday. You can buy the paperback version from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store (at a lower price than Amazon!).

Part I: Truth

Chapter 1(A): Reality – Eternal: In which Jonathan seeks to know the nature of the most authentic and true reality, by means of sensing it and by perceiving it

Episode 1 - The Last Night at College: Discovering Jonathan’s sister was aborted, allowing him to be born

When my scandal and crime became known, as I stood before dozens of stinging lights and shouting reporters, I remembered my final night at my college…

That night was the last dinner with my father in my Colorado hometown, so I tried to memorialize my life to this point, using the only means I knew: experiences, feelings, sensings, bits of knowledge, memories.

“You’re asking a lot of questions tonight, Jonathan,” he said over the Saturday crowd and baseball games on the big televisions in the new format TV-and-curvy-waitress restaurant chain. “I’m just glad you were a boy. Did your mother tell you she had an abortion just before you were born?”

“Say that again?”

“She didn’t? Thought you knew. We were the first to get a legal abortion in the state of Washington, after the vote in December 1970. We’re pretty sure it was a girl. We were amazed to get pregnant with you so quickly afterward. About nine months later, you were born.”

“What the hell are you talking about? How do you know it was a girl?”

“Well, we were seniors trying to graduate when it happened. We were both worried about final exams in the spring. Then, about halfway through the pregnancy, your mom heard about this program through her nursing school. So, she went and donated the tissue to our college there in Seattle.”

“The tissue? Donated?”

“Yeah. Then, a couple years after you were born, we bumped into the doctor who we’d worked with, at some damnfool tennis tournament your mother got us into. Anywho, he referred to the abortion as a ‘she.’”

“He talked to you about the abortion?” A busty brunette waitress spun to me; white circled her brown eyes for an instant, then steeled back to sensual.

“Yep. He wanted to know if you turned out healthy, for some reason. He also said their work went well; it was a success. He told us they’d use it to make vaccines for decades to come. As far as I know, it’s still proceeding.”

“What is?”

“Whatever it is they’re doing. Something with the kidney cells. Pretty amazing stuff. I’m betting it’ll save thousands of lives, maybe millions, so it was all worth it.”

After those last words I heard my father say, I forgot everything else about our meeting.

Through college, I had constantly wondered how we should live and experience life. But now the question took new forms: Why did I live, not my sister? And first, what is life?

Maureen Kelly’s warm peace ended abruptly that same June night.

She and her boyfriend had just returned from a restaurant meal, celebrating her 24th birthday, three days after the real end-of-May date, on the weekend. As usual, they enjoyed others serving them. They took in her favorite view of the coastal river and its arched bridge. Later, she would speculate on whether this comfort sprang from foreknowledge of that bridge, on which she and her future love would become intertwined.

At the home of her boyfriend, Robert Klopp, they changed for a nighttime swim. The water, though warm, cooled her in the late spring Florida humidity as her perspiration could not. She knew the water could also push Robert near her. She did not mind some kissing in the water, for that was as close as her vow would let her go. The bleach-like smell of chlorine filled her, somehow mitigating her guilt. A wooden-slat fence, which held up a screen enclosing the entire cement backyard like a planetary pod, blocked them from any voyeuristic neighbors. But she trusted him, for he often talked about his church and its activities.

Her heart accelerated when Robert approached. No, we can’t! He knows my promise! His lunge forward in the water revealed that he had pulled off his shorts. He must know pools increase the temptation. The shimmering water smoothed out his hairiness and her fears of the act he wanted. Then he held her as if to shield her from the pain he himself would cause.

She twitched back. He snorted and rammed her spine against a pool step. “Stop, Robert!” He stopped. “I can’t do this. You know that!”

“Damnit, Maureen!” He rolled off and splashed. The waves fled their walls and slid down a drain. “What’s the matter with you?”

“I’m sorry.” She stretched for the nearest towel.

“How long’s this gonna go on?” he yelled. She jumped up and out of the pool.

Inside the house, away from the waves and the watery crashes against cement, she plopped down on his brown sofa. She heard him curse and splash again.

I shouldn’t put him through this. She suspected she would lose him if she kept on with her vow much longer. She must surrender it eventually. Why not now? Surely, mom’s in heaven by now. She fell back on her usual prayer, with her mother and the other saints. If you’re there, ask Him to help me get through this. But instead of a prayer for Robert, she added: there’s a husband somewhere for me; help him too.

Three times she rose and started to slide the back door, and three times she turned away.

I saw the girl, Meredith, on the other side of my fraternity house lawn in the Rockies. Then clues began trickling in to resolve those new questions: Why did I have life instead of my aborted sister, and is life real?

At college, my depravity sometimes measured up to my friends’ embellishments. That night, the guilt that often plagued me napped again. I reasoned with rare nostalgia: Since it was my last night there, I must render once more the spirit of my times, the middle year of the last decade of the 1900s, using every sense and memory and feeling possible.

Across the lawn bustling with students, I saw Meredith push her hand through her blond curls. In the dimness and dry breezes of the June evening twilight, she smiled. She had been staring through the wildness, at me.

Being almost twenty four, I was older than everyone there. And I was not exceptionally endowed with humor or wealth. But I was told repeatedly that girls always noticed my face and my sincerity about making their dreams come true. They all wanted to attach themselves to me, initially. The lowly character of those who ultimately loved me matched my own sinfulness. Except for this night.

At some point past nine, a pivotal swallow of alcohol punch killed any reluctance to bed younger girls. Meredith also drank one gulp beyond her limits. I moved next to her. I noted that my friends would nod and grin when they saw me.

“Is this really your last night here, Jonathan?” she asked as her hand again combed through her neck-length hair. The punch reddened her lips against her luminous face.

To me, this was hunting. It would be difficult, too, for I knew Meredith actually tried to practice Christianity.

Whenever she visited our fraternity as a community-college advanced class acquaintance of my usual lover, our house-girl, Paula, my roommates and I teased and wooed her. Meredith was buxom, firm, just-graduated high school, and eighteen. We suppressed any qualms about her age. I could avoid the cradle robbing stigma because I had bedded both postcollegiate and freshmen girls. Her baby-like face always grinned politely at our flirting. We all floundered. So I knew the fraternity would worship whoever won her first.

She was the only pretty girl around who stayed unblemished by college experiences. Most girls who wandered by the house immediately lost their virginity and gained lifetime membership to our league, until swept away by a steady guy. How could Meredith deny the certain exhilaration and popularity of the university life we knew? This fascinated us.

But that night, something interrupted my thoughts: Who was I to steal her innocence? At first, this seemed an easy decision. After all, I was leaving college. Maturity was creeping up on me. I might never meet such freshness again. For the next several hours, I applied all I had learned about pursuing women. But what is this haunting me?

In this moment, I grasped Meredith as having perfection in Beauty, and in contrast to everything around me, she had what I must seek to know – by experiencing it. Beauty was independent of her, but within her as well; she held it.

“When I first saw you tonight, I noticed something different in you, Jonathan. I don’t know what.”

After teasing, needling, and light touches, I overcame most of her usual restraint. Past midnight, as I gave her a tour of my room, we kissed.

“I need to go,” she said as she pushed away. From my window, I saw her friends, already late for their curfews, gather by a minivan outside. She left my room.

I dodged dozens of brothers and little sisters yelling and swaying to the banging flannel-clad band downstairs. In the foyer, she was almost out the door. I thrust my hand under her arm and spun her on the front steps. As we kissed, I opened one eye to see her friends drive away.

After an hour of kissing and touching over clothes, she insisted on leaving. Our alcohol was dissipating, so our cravings embered a bit.

We drove to her suburb in the foothills and parked near her house. I would settle for a doorstep goodbye.

But when we kissed again in my front seat, in her eyes I noticed a woman of wit and moderation, maybe forty years old, peering back at me. The eyes were her future eyes, but the glimpse was my future glimpse. She had changed. Before, she was a trophy to win, uncovered skin to caress and gaze upon; now, she was a being with whom I should blend. Where did these visions come from?

We left my car in front of a vacant lot, stumbled down the street and over noisy clipped grass, and entered her house. Her parents slept soundly, so we tiptoed downstairs to her basement room.

There we released demons and hormones from our skin. My friends and I held to the common knowledge that no one should suppress such healthy emotions. She would be better off for this, I assumed. Moreover, maybe I should discover the forty-year-old woman, maybe my future wife, within her, that kept looking back at me. She wriggled under the covers, but I peeled them back to gaze.

In this moment, I grasped that separate thing Beauty, which made possible Meredith’s beauty, and my ability and need to experience it, to know it.

Afterward, we slept. Later, after the alcohol had fully drained away, she clutched me and cried. I stroked her. The sobs changed to purrs, and again we danced in her childhood sheets, which I again pushed off the bed.

“You,” she whispered, “you, you keep staring at me. Why?”

During my next doze, a light flashed within her room. Morning already? Did I sleep that long? The light grew, like a fiery bundle bursting inside. What is it? The brightness filled the entire room, then dimmed again to night. Sleep took me, and I forgot that light.

Hours later, the sun and her scents roused me. I slithered beneath a runaway blanket to appease the alcohol still in my blood. The blanket smelled like bodies, as if we expelled an entire hormonal stench into it. I nuzzled Meredith’s taut skin, which smelled like a baby I once knew. I groped for more, and she rolled to face me.

Knocks thumped at the door.

She leaped from the bed. “Oh God!” she rasped. “You’ve got to hide.” I captured her image. A lost breath. “Hurry!” The white-blond hair and milky skin, illuminated by the sunlight through the small basement window.

In this moment, I grasped that Beauty was that object there, and Meredith held the paramount instance of it then; it had moved her to that point, and had enabled me to know it.

The image froze; I must have rolled off. I slid through the dust ruffle and under the bed, knocking over several stuffed animals.

What have I done? I must see her again.

“Meredith, wake up now. Why’s your door locked? Can I come in?”

“Not yet, Mom! I’ll be out in a minute!”

“Stay here ‘til we leave for church,” she whispered to me. I clutched a furry hippo and tried to contain my gasping.

Deflower an 18-year-old that I may have loved, then descend to a hell of carpet fibers and discarded toys: Such a fate was a fitting end to my discouraging college career.

I suspected that this six-year stint at my Colorado college had only prepared me to memorize theories and pass exams, not to survive the global marketplace. Nevertheless, if I could creep from the house without a father beating me in the skull, I was supposed to attempt a career selling the latest entertainment technology for Vincula, Inc., of Peyton Beach, Florida.

I learned little about marketing or business, but I did learn to obtain stories of pleasure. This morning I had planned to deliver to my housemates a final treasure: the legend of my encounter with the teenage Meredith in her parents’ house.

Meredith’s mother entered and circled the room. Each carpet shuffle crawled up my spine. She sniffed, maybe stumped by the smell of melting bodies, then added a puzzled grunt. Does she see my clothes bundled on the chair? The motion stopped. Is she gone? I saw the open door. My heart thundered against the carpet, like drumbeats, echoing with the family eating breakfast above me.

I knew the situation was not very admirable. Would the heroes I knew in my youth hide under a teenage girl’s bed in her parents’ home? Maybe I should spring up and reveal the gratification their daughter had discovered. Release poor Meredith from her guilt. But they would only chase me and yell. No, that was not hindering me. I was hiding from a remorse and shame, delivered by a power that, before this, only seemed to limit the senses and feelings and whatever we can experience.

After hearing the front door slam and all voices stop, I crawled out from under the bed. I itched all over from the carpet, then I dressed. I peeked out from behind Meredith’s door and crept around it to the stairs. They creaked under me. At the top, I looked for hiding places then walked through the hall. I timed my steps to a ticking clock, but other footsteps tapped on tile and broke the tempo. A beagle faced me and barked. I stopped. It growled and turned away.

In the den, elementary school photographs and framed artwork advertised the childhood I had robbed and would destroy when I told my roommates. Why do I care? Why can’t I forget her crying? I escaped the house, completing the plot of my tale, which could ensure my friends’ lasting admiration. I could not restore her innocence anyway.

I might never kiss Meredith again, but I knew I’d spend the next few days figuring out how to return to her. I left wondering why I couldn’t leave her as easily as the dozens of others I had pretended to love. What was disturbing this victory with... compassion?

In this moment, I grasped that the most important thing I sought was unseen - unchanging, an eternal, beyond this world: Beauty and other perfections like that, as separate from, but residing in, Meredith.

“But if, in his further and deeper search, he has the good fortune to meet with the inward and hidden beauty of a wellnatured and generous soul, he then entirely attaches himself.” Plato, Symposium (209B)

[Next week] Episode 2 - The Onboarding: Starting and stopping the return to Meredith

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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