Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 11 - The Access Handoff: Giving the keys to Kevin

This is Episode 11 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!).

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

The Access Handoff: Giving the keys to Kevin

The days dragged, as they often do in mid-August, but Maureen developed a new gaiety to pass the time. Before this month, since graduating college, she had little money and little to do. The people she befriended long forgot the freshness her collegiate friends had. She lived in the mire of her birthplace, without any immediate family.

Before he ever saw Maureen, her father died in a car accident caused by a drunk. Her mother never remarried. The widow thanked God for having a daughter to rear, and she spent the rest of her short life doing so. Mrs. Kelly disliked work. She also believed that any mother, with or without a husband or financial resources, should devote nearly all attention to her child. Mrs. Kelly sacrificed her economic standing by placing her late husband’s small orange grove in the hands of her twin brother Pat and his laborers. The business declined under his management, which was hindered by a shattered leg he got in the Vietnam War. The widow and her daughter grew poor.

But Maureen benefited from her mother’s guidance. She provided Maureen with a parochial school education. Maureen could study traditional classroom lore as well as the history of the Church and its saints. She soared above material poverty by studying the abstract. She mastered the cello and studied music at her southeastern football-college, but after graduation, she lacked the credentials to find salaried work in the field. Anyway, she often loved the music more as an amateur. She returned to the property to care for her mother, who was enduring her painful cancer treatments in the last months of her life.

She kept vigil many nights near her mother’s bed, helping her as she could, but her mother slept and slept. To help her sleep too, Maureen read old books and even Catholic newspapers, some dating back twenty years, detailing stories about Masses changing styles and the grisly practices of abortions just being made aware to Catholics by new rulings and votes.

For a year, after graduation, she worked a part-time job near the orchard.

After her mother recovered then died, funeral and legal arrangements clobbered her finances. She also needed a used car and student loan repayments. She pursued and won a secretary position at an engineering department at Vincula, an hour south of her home. Before long, a manager there began to court her. She met Mr. Cyril Robert Klopp during a meeting he was leading.

She continued her clerical work, but sought a different way to experience life, without deciding. She could do that later. She must love. What else is there for life on earth? For the last nine months, Klopp had been her solution.

But Winnie, Gina, Lisa, and others began to enliven her subtropical summer. They invited her to lunches, mall trips, and beer parties, even a Tuesday night party during an almost-hurricane that just missed her uncle up north at the orange grove. She cherished the spontaneity of laughing with them, the thrill of pleasing them with her conversation, and the license of drinking wines. She allowed the warmth of the wines to flow within her and render its liberation. She dismissed some of the moderation she had practiced in college. She had no recitals to play, no texts to study, no men to impress with her poise, no mother to please, fewer religion rules to step through. The simplicity of her job permitted a hazy head during the mornings after their outings.

She was new to their traditions and attitudes, but she was almost an official member of their circle. When they excluded her, she hurt. She longed for Winnie’s kindness and Gina’s humor. They released her from the burden of repaying Klopp for his stable presence.

So, when Klopp asked to see her at his house, she confidently clanked his stained brass door knocker. She squinted for light as she entered his house from the sunshine and twitched as he slammed the door and slapped the bolt across.

“We need to talk,” he said. “Sit down, please.”

As she walked over to his brown corduroy sofa, she winced. Maybe controversy will redirect him.

“Did you hear about all the bickering in Congress over that new bill?” she asked.

“No. What new bill?”

“The Human Services Reform Bill. Nobody can agree on any part of it. It’s total confusion. They didn’t do anything for two months because of that monster, then they went on summer vacation.”

“Maureen, I know you don’t follow those things. I’ll get you something cold to drink.”

Maureen felt confined in this house, even more than in her own small rooms. This came not from the size of the place, nor entirely from Klopp’s manner, but from the things inside. Klopp had all the goods one was supposed to have, but Maureen still felt isolated. His entertainment center stacked device on top of device, in four columns. In the darkness, which was always present, the dozens of tiny lights blinked like a 1960s science fiction stage set, like a monolithic control panel in charge of lives. That was a means to reach outside, the only means this house gave, since the vertical blinds permanently twisted shut. The low rough popcorn ceiling added to a cave effect, with its tiny stalactites growing slowly downward as the eons passed. Klopp’s sofa was the only place to sit in his front room. It ingested its users; the low, backward tilting, overly spongy brown cushions took much effort to climb from.

“It’s time we set a date,” Klopp said as he plopped a dripping glass of cola on the coffee table.

“A date?”

“For the wedding. You’ve had months to think about it. I believe I’ve waited long enough.”

She folded her arms in an “L” and rubbed her forehead. She had dismissed the question for weeks. Klopp was now only a fragment of her life. She liked him better in the background, hiding from her friends in the weeds and repelling loneliness when it attacked, like last weekend. Her new clique had neglected to invite her on a city shopping trip. But she felt Klopp might soon drift away forever. She had hoped he would forget his proposal, although she knew she should accept.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’m just not ready.”

Klopp’s face reddened. “I’m not gonna wait any longer.” His one brow twitched over his right eye. “If this doesn’t happen soon, I gotta move on with my life!” He slammed his fist on the coffee table and stormed from the room.

As she watched the particleboard table try to sop up the splashed cola, her eyes dampened.

She knew he had granted her an opportunity to leave. This would mark the end of her peace. The uncertainty of finding another patient lover would begin.

In the kitchen, Klopp cursed in fury. “How could this be escaping me,” he muttered, “after all the time I’ve invested?”

She closed her eyes as the thunder of his punch landing against a wall echoed to her, and jolted her from the sofa. At the door, she fumbled with the deadbolt.

“No!” he yelled. He rushed up, grabbed her wrist, and braced the door. “You owe me an explanation!”

She dropped her head and returned to the couch. She knew she misled him, maybe out of disrespect for him, or fear of being alone. She had simply dabbled in her Klopp. She had not respected his hopes. She had not committed to either love or aversion. She had not spared him her struggle. She could not explain why she should end their nine-month relationship. She thought of his reprisal, of her duplicity, of her loss of someone to whom she might project her love. She closed her eyes and asked Christ to forgive her. She should ask Klopp for his forgiveness too, and leave.

But when he sat next to her, she forgot the possibility of forgiveness. She also forgot the infinity of grace given in Marriage. She forgot her dislike for his need for power over her, his concealed face, and his angry thrust at her in the pool over two months ago. Maybe she could acquire a love for him later. He adored her in everyone else’s view.

“I need you now,” he said as he flapped his arm across her back. He pulled her toward him. “We haven’t seen that much of each other lately, and I haven’t enjoyed it. I feel like I’m losing you to your friends. You need to be with me. And I feel I’m ready for the sacrifices of marriage. With you, I know I can make them.”

The last two months with her friends had been her happiest in years. She would not be denied them if she married, right? She could have two lives in her leisure hours: free and adored. But what if the girls overlooked her afterward? They listened to the air conditioning fans in the musty, dark den on the brown sofa.

Klopp reached for her hand and placed the ring on her.

It sparkled on her finger and dwarfed her hand.

She wept in his arms. She wept for the lost days of college: youth and happiness nevermore. She wept for sinning, for deluding him. She wept for her unseemly desires, which she knew offended her Redeemer almost as much as acting out the desires. She wept for her lost music and lost emotion for the harmonies. She wept for her lost gift: love. She might never love him or anyone else.

She smiled at him and nodded.

He leaped up. He telephoned his parents and aunts in the middle of the country. “Yes, Mom, I knew she’ d say yes. We can finish those plans now. Date? Still October 14th.”

As the clouds announced their late afternoon victory over the sun with their drumbeats, he prepared every document, lined up every tailor, set up every meal, announced the plans to every relative, corroborated every pastry, and reserved every flower.

She watched him with blurred eyes. He had pre-arranged all the details, and now he confirmed them. He mastered her world. The afternoon storm’s lightning lit the den through the cracks in the drawn blinds. Maybe a shock would rip through the wires and the phone next to his head. She suppressed this as more evil planted in her mind, a mind drifting from grace and innocence.

*****

I flattened myself in bed. The first feeling of sleep emanated from the back of my head to my whole. Immediately, the emanations ripped away. Every blood cell shivered with cold. Their vessels constricted. My torso vaulted from the mattress. Cold! In a reflex, I wrapped my arms around myself and clutched my shoulders. Before the reflex could finish, the chill left. Warmth prickled through me. I felt a presence. Someone was with me in the blackness. “Who’s there?”

Then I believed I had merely awoken from yet another bizarre dream.

*****

To win Lana, I must accumulate hours playing Magic Theater Phase 3. But if I returned to the games, our moods would never coincide again. So, three nights after Lana and I had re-united, I went to Kevin’s apartment and offered him his dream. In the middle of the night, we exchanged our assigned smart cards, which held all the proper chips to allow the system of games to stream into only our own helmets. Kevin’s hours of playing would count as mine. Kevin explained that he had configured this system to tally hours played, not specific times. He reminded me that we violated several security rules and the recent business secrecy law.

As Sunday morning broke, I left Kevin hopping aboard Eric the Red’s sleek ship as Jonathan Hannah.

During the following days, Lana’s essence, that which rescued me from the electronic games, burned an image in my chest. I captured it. I wrung it out of myself and onto a piece of paper, for my memory and for Lana herself. To my surprise, the words formed rhymes, which helped turn them into concepts, exactly as I wanted from the start. I orchestrated them in lines and groups, and created verses. The old, structured style helped rein in my thoughts and harmonize them.

The next week, outside the tower, twice I braved the tobacco fog from the line of smokers, who were busy scratchily philosophizing on the nature of the people that walked by, a task that their habit seemed to empower. Here, I waited for Lana to go to her car at day’s end. Both times she left chatting with someone. Three times I went to her office. Twice she was meeting with someone. Once she was gone, so I left the poem in a brown envelope, without stopping to think how anachronistic my deed was. But a near-24-year-old frantic to know perfection knows no limits. I wanted at least one more romp, one in which I knew it was my last. I left two more poems the next day.

Next week: Episode 12 - The Saturday Morning Brunch: Philosophizing with Lana and Maureen