Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 6 - The Happy Hour Part Three: Winning the first battle

This is Episode 6 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. You can buy the paperback version from Mike Church’s Crusade Channel Store (at a lower price than Amazon!).

Or you can start reading at the Table of Contents: here

Episode 6 - The Happy Hour Part Three: Winning the first battle

At one of the lounges in Ft. Lauderdale, the pillowy woman clings to him, perhaps at the bidding of the vendors. Missing the beat of the thumping music, she writhes and rubs her chilly buttocks against his hands, which he cannot take from his knees, by law. Other women had danced on him during other visits. They enslaved him, as he allowed. This one is the same as the rest. But her perfume: It is familiar. He slips her a bill and stares up at her face for another song.

Afterward, they return to the table of smiling vendors. She drapes an arm around him for several hours.

“Is your name Rita?” he asks.

“Yes, it is.” She lies.

He had loved Rita in high school from afar. Only the popular boys interested her. This Rita has an identical face and hair, but an increased body. Most powerful is the air her skin gives off. He pays her for another dance. Again she peels away her stringy panties and emits her aroma.

He meets her later, after the vendors leave. The smell on her body casts him back to the life he had wanted eighteen years ago. An instant after the release of almost two decades of tension, the guilt arrives. It also envelopes him as he drives home. The act is over, unrecoverable. He goes to Maureen.

To him, Maureen is his treasure. His peers and his directors respect him for dating her. He nears the age when no worthy woman will desire him, despite his money. He feels himself becoming old and filthy, verging on surrender. As time passes, he regrets his neglect of past relationships. They would have led to marriage in his early twenties, as everyone expected. One girl had been homely, yet she was his equal. They failed to promise themselves, then her career called her away. Another was dazzling, a younger, undereducated waitress. She accepted wedlock as he explained it, but she left him for a man her age before the agreed-upon day.

How can he withstand Maureen’s restraint? Why does she deny him? Surely she knows he verges on leaving her. Both are otherwise alone. Both are attracted to the other. Both need the other. She needs his wealth and protection. He needs her attachment. Could he have wasted hundreds of dollars in courting this unscented, featureless, plain Jane? Could he have wasted seven months of his escaping procreative life on a secretary?

But he cannot spoil Maureen tonight. He knows he can take her, but it would be bland. Anyway, he seldom desires her physically. Now he only needs her spiritually, to purify himself, to prove an undefiled woman can love him, the evil one. He agreed with his pastors from youth: his body was evil. But his proclamation of salvation covered over his body’s depravity. But it didn’t seem to work tonight. For this night, he cannot escape contamination. If he taints her now, he would condemn himself to evil even more.

By being near him, he thinks, Maureen cannot avoid her spoilage, one day. Why wait? She surely would enjoy his dance; they usually do. But after that, only a wedding could begin to purify him fully. He must ensure that marriage. He must figure out the cycles of her egg and put a life in her.

***

Lana’s red backlights never veered from my view, over the bridge, then into the old town, diverting to a side street, until she turned them off in her garage. They were red eyes, staring and winking and laughing at me, as if its being owned me. I peered back, daring them to constrain me in an idea of good and evil.

When she saw me get out of my car, she laughed and hit the garage door button. It rumbled downward. I twitched forward to get under it, while imagining the awkwardness of having to ring her doorbell. As I hit the cement and rolled through the remaining two feet of light, I forgot the freedom I would lose with her. I postponed my debate on whether I should succumb to her. I could loathe her later. I could loathe myself later. Access to her, and to the simulated world that Olson somehow despised, loomed before me.

In this moment, I grasped the need to know that Eternal, within that reality separate from the material beauty and psychological mystery Lana retained: God, and that which only God could allow me to know, imperfectly, somehow, if I humbled myself.

Inside the house, I barely saw her in the darkness from across a room. “Looks like you’re ready to prove yourself. I do know you, Jonathan. But I want to find out whether you can forget yourself, so you can know me, like you want.”

***

Maureen prepared for the peace of sleep in her tiny apartment bathroom. Her night had excited her with promise. But its end left an empty incompleteness. Friendship was so distant from the relating and bonding and chatter that night, except maybe for her talk with Winnie. Had those strangers enjoyed her company? Gina treated her as a freak, having guessed her virginity the first time they spoke. When this novelty wore off, would they invite her again? Had she been too quiet? Would she be able to entertain Winnie? She disliked shopping, but maybe her aura would be bright. She envied Kevin, but why? He should step away to his games so Winnie could befriend her freely. Winnie was in such pain, and Maureen sensed it was because of more than Kevin’s apathy.

Had she delved too deep in her talk with Jonathan? Would he consider her too serious? He had an idealism in him, but he misdirected it. She lacked the energy to contest him, and Lana would certainly defeat her. In the mirror, she checked herself. She knew few considered her attractive. Unfortunately, that mattered to them.

But what if he had seduced her, and what if he waited in her bed now? She would refuse this. But maybe it could happen. If he had escorted her there, and if all were permitted in the world, she might allow him. She stopped erasing her makeup and stripped for bed. She found her emerald camisole and draped it over her pale, small, barren body. She stared in the mirror then closed her emerald eyes to imagine what she wanted to be done to her body by... someone. Then she remembered. She forbade it, for the hundredth time, it seemed. She flew to her bed, then fell asleep while offering her worry to God.

A bell rang. It was her alarm clock. 3:44 a.m.? No, it was her door. She rose in a flurry and flung a coat over her camisole. The bell still rang. Her cat dashed out of sight.

She looked through the peephole. “Robert?”

“Could I come in?” he said.

She exhaled. She would be with someone tonight. The years of self-control might end now. She peeled off her coat, inflated her chest, and opened the door.

He brushed past her with a cheek kiss. His cologne lagged behind him.

As he showered behind the bathroom door, she waited in her bed, dreading his entry.

Most likely, his junket with the vendors had meandered to the lounges of bare women dancing on tables and laps. He would have drunk to form a hazy bacchanalia of flesh. But since she had never been undressed with him, she could not regulate what else he saw. He always justified it as “business.” He was, after all, a churchgoing man, even though they were from different Christian denominations. And she knew he valued her. Besides, she reasoned, maybe her rejection had caused him to go to these bars, perhaps as any normal man would.

After a month or two of loss, other men had always drifted away from her silently. Cyril Robert Klopp had lasted about seven months. This she attributed to the religion, of which he often spoke. She knew, however, his recent setback in the pool probably portended weeks of conflict unless she gave in soon. She had no one else.

She pictured a past boyfriend, his hairless chest poised over hers, heaving, then denied. What if they had made love then? It was the closest she had ever come, in her second year of college. But she could only think of Klopp. He had dark thinning hair and a beard. No one within a radius of seven hundred miles had ever seen his jaw or chin. He hid the rest of his face with glasses that shrank his colorless eyes to the size of peas. She must put him off.

Her mother once guessed that she was still a virgin. Mrs. Kelly was thrilled. Her spirits almost rose high enough to defeat her breast cancer. Three months later, it struck Mrs. Kelly again. To rejuvenate her mother, Maureen promised to remain pure until her wedding night. But that only seemed to hasten Mrs. Kelly: She could die content. The following week, she did.

However, the vow did not explain why Maureen kept herself untouched for almost 23 years before that. Her heart rattled as she remembered the more consequential promise she had made. She knew keeping the vow helped her mom, and later other dead souls, reach heaven and Christ. But who was He, anyway?

Klopp shuffled to her, feeling his way, still not adjusted to the dark. She saw he wore only briefs. He lay down. The shower had dampened and boosted the strange cologne, which he had never worn before. Had he put on more for her? As he rolled, she closed her eyes, remembering a hairless chest and stomach.

After a few minutes, he breathed with the rhythm of sleep.

Tonight, there would be no touching, no hairiness. She was free. Next time, she must insist he sleep in the other room. But she also questioned this turn. Their lack of intimacy had before enraged him. What had changed? She could not even draw this man to pursue her. But she was elated he did not.

“He must afterwards consider, that the beauty of outward form, that which he admires so highly in his favorite fair one, is sister to a beauty of the same kind, which he cannot but see in some other fair. If he can then pursue this corporeal beauty, and trace it wherever it is to be found, throughout the human species, he must want understanding not to conceive, that beauty is one and the same thing in all beauteous bodies. With this conception in his mind, he must become a lover of all visible forms, which are partakers of this beauty.”

-- Plato, Symposium (210B)

Next Week: Episode 7 - The Department Strategy Meeting: Strategizing Magic Theater market penetration

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual events or localities or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.