Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 17 - The Surprise Deaths Number One and Two: Mourning such losses

This is Episode 17 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 Surprise Deaths Number One and Two: Mourning such losses

They sat on the couch, panting, staring, sometimes out the window, out at trees and cars, sometimes at Maureen’s furniture. Neither spoke for almost a half-hour. Maureen made Winnie tea and talked to a policeman on the phone.

He told her they couldn’t do anything without evidence of physical contact. He suggested a restraining order.

Maureen returned to the staring, and Winnie watched knickknacks and waved a string at the friendly cat.

Maureen remembered her prayer when she saw Klopp’s car. Had it been answered?

“I needed someone to talk to,” Winnie said, finally, answering the question from thirty minutes ago. “You’re the best one I know.”

“Really? That’s nice of you.” Maureen’s stomach gushed with warmth.

Winnie tilted her head up. The pupils of her golden-brown eyes constricted.

“What is it, Winnie?”

She sighed. “Kevin’s dead.”

“Oh my. How? When?”

Winnie restrained sobs. “This morning. They say he committed suicide.”

“Oh! Poor Kevin! That’s awful.” Looking upward helped Winnie keep the tears pooled in her eyes. She looked down and they flowed.

“Poor girl. I know how you feel.”

“Because of your mom. But I’m different though. I don’t care. I don’t miss him. I don’t feel bad that we didn’t talk in the last two months. Did I cause this? I even feel like he deserved it in some way. Why am I like this?” Winnie cried into her hands.

Maureen embraced her. Maureen’s shoulder soaked up tears. She was too confused to answer her question, and she knew she should only listen. She too experienced not loving someone whom she was supposed to love. To her and other non-lovers, death might seem a solace, a solution to an unsolvable puzzle.

She hugged Winnie as she wept, silent for several minutes, but Winnie needed words from her too, now, to help relieve the guilt.

“Sometimes it takes a while for it to sink in, Winnie. We don’t like to think about it, so it takes time to realize what actually happened.” The weeping settled as she spoke.

“I feel like such a cruel person,” Winnie said. “I’m almost relieved he’s gone.”

“We can’t help thinking how things will be for us, at first. That’s what we’re trained to do. It’ ll take a while before we remember what happened to him.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“You’re certainly not a bad person. You tried hard to reach out to him. I don’t know anyone as caring as you are.”

“I haven’t thought of him at all,” Winnie said. “You don’t think I’m callous?”

“No, I don’t. It’s normal to be numb. You two weren’t close for weeks.

Sometimes people fade out of our lives very quickly.”

They knotted their arms around the other’s back and placed their chins on the other’s shoulder. Maureen listened to and felt Winnie’s breathing and undulating chest. Thoughts of loss and love passed within and between them. Clocks ticked and the cat purred around them.

“I’m glad you don’t think I’m a heartless witch,” Winnie said into her ear. She made a sobbing laugh. “I must be okay, to have a friend like you.”

“Yeah, you’ ll be fine.” Maureen laughed. Her stomach tingled again at her friend’s gratitude. She petted her thick wavy hair in reassurance. “You’ ll be fine.”

Maureen held her until she knew some sadness had passed away.

***

Today was my 24th birthday.

Every morning as I passed through the tower’s glass doors, I remembered the dilemma I forgot every night: How could I possibly continue to work for Magic Theater? I only wanted it to flounder, somehow. I must leave. But would I miss more adventures with Lana?

The people rushed quietly up to their enclaves with their career aspirations in hand. But today they acted differently. They murmured to a partner. They creased their brows. One lady cried. On a Friday? Had the layoff begun? They always happen on Fridays, since the people were in better moods. Had business reports mistreated the company? I welcomed this variation, only because it interrupted our prolonged emptiness.

The night before, as always, my poems had elevated me above the dreary hours that now faced me. I still dreaded confronting Lana. I hurried up the stairs to her third-floor office during her daily status meeting. I put my latest verses in a brown envelope and left them on her chair, which engulfed her body for many hours a day.

What would it be like if only I could engulf her during the night? The absurdity of marrying Lana, and even someday having children with her, rippled my spine in a shudder. Then I went upstairs the rest of the way to my office.

At the front desk of my floor, the receptionist wept. At such an eruption of emotion from this typically surly woman, I interrupted her. “What’s the matter, Dee-Dee?”

She looked up with traces of her typical grouchiness. “Daniel passed away last night.”

The conclusiveness of her statement overwhelmed me. No modification was possible. He was gone.

I walked to my cubicle through the web of blue partitions and desks. I opened a useless, musty report and pretended to read it.

To me, Olson represented not only an advisor about work, but also the culmination of a life’s work in this profession. He was trained for it early, but he later detested it. He needed this work only to nurture a family. He had delayed his liberty, retirement, until the liberty was useless.

The occupation now seemed much more inconsequential. Even so, what had I done in it? They reimbursed me, but that only went to my survival and to my creditors to pay for the schooling used to perform the work itself. I helped develop the strategies to advertise, sell, and distribute computerized entertainment systems to millions, maybe hundreds of millions, worldwide. But had I helped? Could not others have planned without my efforts? What about the systems? Why had Daniel questioned them? Maybe he was a religious fanatic, or maybe his mind had deteriorated in his final months. But I remembered how the games had anesthetized me for so long.

“I heard Daniel left his family in good shape financially,” a nearby co-worker remarked from his cubicle later that morning.

“That’s good,” another said over the short fabric walls. “He was a good guy. How’d he die, anyway?”

“Heart attack. Widow-maker. Maybe it was because of stress or blood pressure. Heavy black men are at high risk for heart disease.”

“I heard his dad and brother died the same way.”

“Makes sense. He was a straight arrow, so it couldn’t have been drinking or smoking.”

“Yeah, he was severely religious. A Catholic. But he never tried to push it on us.”

“That’s good.”

“To work here this long and be on the layoff list must’ve really stressed him out. He was such a calm, peaceful, happy guy. He must’ve kept a lot of stress bottled up. No emotion should be restrained like that. All those chemical excretions from the stress will act on other parts of the body and make you sick.”

For the rest of the morning, I read the same page of the outdated analysis.

After lunch, six of us unlocked Olson’s windowed office as if it was a tomb. We entered.

“Man, this is spooky.”

“We need to go through all his stuff?”

“Someone has to pick out his personal effects. We also need to find his project data for Farrell. He’ll be taking over Olson’s responsibilities.” I looked around at Olson’s work and mementos. The greater part of his productive life resulted in the material between these walls. Books, notes, plaques, sales figures, and computer disks remained from 40 years, 2,000 weeks, 10,000 days, one life. They would toss it into the garbage or into the long-term file cabinets, only to be destroyed thirty years later. Subjective results also survived him: the scant morale of his subordinates, the few products he sold that consumers still bought, and his surviving family.

Olson had made decisions at my age that led to his career of frustration. In an instant, I too would be at Olson’s conclusion. I had heard the years pass in the final half as if they had never happened. I could blink and be sitting in my own window office with a sharp pain in my left arm.

We wrestled with his things: what was personal or company property. After a half-hour, Lana joined us. She often looked at me and spoke to the others. My exaggerated ideals of her were getting wiped out. I knew she was categorizing all my actions and words into four or five genera, imprisoning me as she did at our first meeting. She appraised me as if I were a jewel or plot of land. I was scientifically interesting to her. My poems could not change her early conclusions. This only punctuated my limits in her, my lack of freedom within her, and her predictions of my eventual death as a lonely, over-achieving, workaholic, phallic seducer. I left the tomb.

“We could use your help, Jonathan,” Lana said in the hall as I walked away. “You knew him better than we did.”

“I’m not feeling well.”

“Wait a minute. I want to talk to you.”

She followed me to my desk. “Jonathan? Excuse me. Could I please see you in here?” She pointed to a nearby empty conference room. A few heads looked over the partitions.

I followed her.

“Do you have a problem, Jonathan?” she asked as she shut the door.

“Sit down, please. What’s this frown you’ve had on your face ever since I entered that room? And what’s happened to your playing time the last few days?” She sat next to me and crossed her thighs between the fabric of her painfully short skirt.

“My playing time?”

“Yeah. Why have you stopped playing?”

“I guess I haven’t been in the mood to play the games. I’m also not in the mood to be going through that man’s things. And I’m certainly not in the mood to be analyzed.”

“You’ve got no reason to be hostile, Jonathan.”

“You’re making it worse by saying that.”

“Someone needs to clue you in, Jonathan. It’s easy to see why his passing away bothers you. You have an excessive fear of death.”

“Fear of death?”

“Of course. It’s another obvious example of your obsessive compulsiveness.”

“Sure.”

“I know this’ll be hard for you to do, but you simply need to calm yourself and listen to me. I can see this behavior in you. That’s why you haven’t played Magic Theater since your friend Kevin committed suicide.”

“What? Kevin? I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t?” Lana flushed. “Anyway, I see it in your obsession with being productive. I see it in your overriding need for acceptance, such as in your work and in your social habits.”

“My social habits?”

“Yes, Jonathan. Your college girlfriends. I see it in your writing all this poetry. I see it in your inability to form opinions, in your fear of making a mistake with a decision, and in your desire to please everyone. I see it right now in your incredible sensitivity to criticism. It’s hardest when it comes from someone like me, who many people happen to respect.”

I stared at her. I wanted to refute her and plead my case, but I also wanted to concede and apologize for the weaknesses she saw. I had sought her acceptance, but how could she denounce that? I had almost loved her. Was I concerned too much with winning her, with pleasing her, or with lowering myself, in order to know this higher one, or the eternal she held similar to what God was? All this confounded me.

“And now you’re brooding,” she said. She leaned closer and exposed a white roundness bulging over a red bra.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re not seeing each other anymore.”

“I agree.” She angled back in her chair. “You have some evolving to do.”

“I don’t care if you’re right about me, but I can’t bear your judgments anymore. Letting you know me has hurt.”

“I was not judging you. That wouldn’t be ethical. I should’ve known you’d think that.”

I rubbed my whole face with one hand, as if to ward off the insanity that almost drowned me. “I do care what you think about me, for obvious reasons. I wanted to change your opinions, but I failed.”

“You need to change first.”

“Maybe if you’d have read my poems, you would’ve seen that I’ve changed.”

We both rose. She offered her palm.

“And by the way, happy birthday.”

In an instantaneous burst of contempt, lunacy, and desire, I pulled her hand to me and wrapped my arm around her waist. We paused, close. I kissed her full lips as if to repel the theories that came from them. Her mouth pushed back at mine and opened. We both broke away.

I sighed and left the room.

My phone was ringing in my cubicle. I jogged with weak legs, then grabbed it on the last ring.

“Hello, this is Jonathan.”

“Jonathan?” The female voice hesitated a moment. I thought she might disconnect.

“Yes? Hello?”

“Jonathan, it’s me. Meredith.”

“Oh, hi. How are you?”

“You remember me? I’m down here with my family on vacation.”

As the scene with Lana faded, Meredith’s memory gradually blossomed in me from the mountains, a lifetime away. It felt like years had passed since college. My thoughts of her were from a different consciousness. I remembered her image from the last time I saw her, the instant before I bolted under her bed. She stood before me: undressed, her chalky skin, her rumpled curly blond hair, her blue eyes incredulous as they looked at the site of our deed, her open mouth and doll-like face.

“I’m right outside Miami,” she said. “We saw the Everglades today. We’ve been going to the attractions up in Orlando all week.”

“Who’s here? Your mom and dad?”

“Yeah, and my little brother.”

“When do you start college? Are you excited?”

“Yeah, I leave in two weeks. This is our last fam-damily vacation. We’re getting on each other’s nerves, but it’s been a lot of fun. How do you like it here? How’s the new job?”

“It’s been quite an experience.”

Our pleasantries soon depleted. As the awkward pause erupted, I felt as if a summer’s distance compressed into ten seconds.

“How’d you find my number? Not that I mind you calling. I’m only curious.”

“We didn’t exactly have time to exchange addresses, did we?”

I laughed, but she was quiet.

“I knew what company you worked for,” she said. “So I simply called their main number.”

“Right. That was easy. Have you talked to any of the guys lately?”

“No, I haven’t seen them. It wasn’t an exciting summer.”

“It’s great to hear from you. How long will you be there?”

“We’re heading back tomorrow. Orlando airport.”

Soon the conversation ended, and we hung up. Her voice still resonated within me. It cast me back to my days in the mountains, when I directed every spoken word to affect my social appearance. It threw me back to her.

I still stared at that smelly report written by some researcher who had left the company long ago.

The employees in their cubicles spoke upward over the walls or down into their phones. The energy of the weekend approached to negate Olson’s death. It was taboo to exert effort on Friday afternoons, as if a modern Sabbath was starting. I ignored the murmur. I wanted to join them, but their conversations were too petty. How could they banish Olson, and Kevin, from their minds this soon?

A half-hour later, the telephone sang out again.

“Hello, this is Jonathan.”

“It’s Meredith again. Do you think we could see each other tonight? I can get my dad’s car and meet you somewhere. You probably have plans, but I’d like to see you.”

“No. I mean, yes. I don’t have plans. Yes, we could meet for dinner. I’m a couple hours away. But I can leave work early.”

We made arrangements.

Next week: Episode 18 - The Surprise Death Number Three: Reuniting with Meredith

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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