Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 29 - The Call-Outs: Growing in Love

This is Episode 29 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 or from Amazon.

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

The Call-Outs: Growing in Love

For the next twenty hours, I brooded, sleeping for maybe two hours. Maureen was the one who knew me. She was the one who knew that which emanated from me freely, and maybe she even discounted that which determined me. She maybe discounted my innate natures, as she should. Maybe she would esteem my choices, my creations, and my ends, instead of my personality, my instincts, and my past. She knew my creations, and she delighted in them.

The next morning, the first day of the workweek, I arrived again at Winnie and Maureen’s apartment complex in the piney woods, before Maureen would leave for the tower. I went to her door over the pine needle trail, and knocked.

“Jonathan?” she said, spying me in the peephole. I gasped quietly as her voice made my heart punch my sternum.

“Hi, Maureen. Could I talk to you for a minute?”

“About what?”

“I have another poem I’d like to write for you.”

She opened the door. “Now? I need to go to work. We both do.”

“They won’t mind if we’re a little late.”

“Jonathan, don’t bother. I can’t handle this now. Don’t you understand how much you hurt me?”

“I’m sorry. But please listen to what I need to say.”

“I need to leave,” she said, frowning. “Goodbye.” She swung the door.

“I found out what love is.”

She stopped the door at a forty-five-degree angle. Her little face stared out around it.

“You haven’t read any of my poems in a while. But I want you to hear the thoughts I had last night. Can we sit?”

She stepped into the day. I looped my arm around her and guided her to the same wooden seat facing the forest. She was trembling. Her solid shoulders quivered as if she would spring away again. We sat. I kissed the top of her head, and she twitched it back.

“Wait, Maureen. I must tell you this. Ever since I went out with Lana, I’ve been on what seemed to be a search for beautiful women. I dated and dated.”

“Dated?”

“Okay, I slept around. I was searching for Beauty. But all I found was the vulgarity I was trying to escape from. I didn’t realize that, until the last few weeks.”

“What does it mean to search for Beauty?” she asked. “And what led you to look for it?”

I sighed, stalling to find words.

“Some people close to me died.”

“Who? Kevin? Daniel Olson?”

“Yes, and someone else. Two others, actually. Maureen, before I die too, I need to do something important. I must find the highest, most noble thing I’ll ever see, do, or experience. It’s something mysterious and vague, but I call it Beauty, for now. Where I sought this seems foolish now. I’m still not sure what Beauty is, but I need to uncover it. There’s no time to waste.”

“So, you wrote poems and seduced women,” she said.

“Sort of.”

“Why’d you read them your poems, if not to seduce them?”

“I was searching for beauty in women. I found it, but I also realized that I was searching for more than their bodies and faces.”

“Money?” she said with a laugh.

“No, I was trying to re-create and animate their minds, the ideas attached to their bodies. That’s where Beauty is. It’s in bodies and minds. In the past, the bodies always left me, eventually. All I was left with were cravings. But later, I was left with something more permanent. Eternal. So I wanted to create that. I first tried to accomplish that with Lana. That’s the reason I wrote the poems for her and others, why I created them. From nothing. And if my words could move them, then their minds had Beauty, something beyond only material bodies. I also recognized that they need to be moved not only by my ideas, but by ones such as truth, courage, delicacy, friendship, and peace. This is not dividing us into mind and matter. I discovered the soul, that which accompanies the body, inseparable from it. It’s what it means to love.”

“You loved someone?” she asked.

“Yes. I discovered Beauty in a soul. I’m still not totally sure what it is yet, but I know I found it.”

“With one of those girls? When?”

“Not until yesterday. Not until you.”

“Me? You think you love me?”

“Yes.”

She bolted up. “Me?” She glared at me. She stomped off toward the woods.

“I thought you had a poem to give me,” she said as she spun back.

“I didn’t need a poem. I knew what to say.”

“But you’re gonna hurt me. And you’re... you’re such a slut!”

“A slut?”

“Seriously. I’m small, poor, and have no earning potential. I have no body. How can I compete with Lana, Winnie, or that bleach-blond secretary on the fourth floor? What do I have to offer you, Jonathan? You must think I’d be a great conquest. A former maybe-bisexual and virgin.”

My laughter startled some nearby doves.

She stood in front of me. “How could I trust you? How could I know you won’t have another search someday?”

“Maureen, I’ll never stop searching.”

“What? Please explain.”

“I don’t think love is a noun.”

“I agree,” Maureen said. “It’s a verb. It might be incorrect for people to say ‘I have love for you’ or ‘I’m in love with you.’ But what does that have to do with your searching?”

“We only love what we don’t have, what we need, what we lack. Do you see?”

“So, by definition, you’ll never stop pursuing it,” she said.

“Right. I’ll always lack it. If we didn’t lack something, we wouldn’t pursue it. For me, that’s what loving is: constantly seeking what we lack.”

“My question is: What will you pursue?”

“Beauty. God, actually, I think. Even if we have Beauty before us, as I feel I do, we still need to keep it, enrich it, and strengthen it. Like God persists the world around us.”

“What happens when you become tired of my supposed Beauty?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But I know where to search for it. I’ll never stop pursuing it, but I’ll look for it in you, not in others. I see it not only in your face and your body, but also in your soul and your Goodness. Those only improve as time goes on.”

She looked away.

“Here’s another point,” I said. “Something led me here to you. I was trying to humble myself to, yet imitate, God, not for the sheer power, but to learn Him. To create like Him and love like Him. And doing that led me to you.”

Maureen’s face reddened, matching the red that had formed around her eyes.

“But I don’t deserve your trust yet. And I can’t promise you anything at this point. Can you promise me you wouldn’t fall in love with someone else, maybe even a woman?”

“Umm.”

“I can promise you this day, and maybe the next day, and if all goes well, the holidays. If all goes well, I can promise you a month, a year.”

“Jonathan, you need to realize that I hurt because of what happened between you and Winnie. And I’d have a tough time trusting you.”

“I understand.” I lowered my head. “Do you have any plans today?”

“Work.”

“Let’s call in sick,” I said, smiling up at her. “Get your scratchy, nasally voice ready.”

“No, I have a lot to do before the Christmas week shutdown. And this afternoon I need to sign a lease on an apartment I found yesterday.”

“Could I interest you in a lovely view of my parking lot?”

“No.”

“I was only kidding. Or maybe not. Could you wait on signing that lease? You might actually like me.”

“Do you have two bedrooms?” she asked.

“No, but I could use the sofa.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.” She smiled. “Okay. Let’s call work. I’m not calling in sick though. They’ll be okay with us taking vacation this late in the year.”

On that mid-December day, we attached ourselves to each other. My chest warmed as I viewed us from the outside or from a yesterday. Our hands clasped for the entire day. Her hand was small and soft in mine. I always reached for it. I required the touching as a connection to her. If our hands parted, I stared, in order to link with her eyes and to ensure her image remained in my mind.

We began with breakfast at a busy ocean hotel. We drank juices and put fruits, eggs, and meats on our plates. But my warming stomach felt filled already. We both ate only a few bites.

During our meal, she related her biography: the want of her childhood without a father, the fortune of having an indulgent mother, the thrill of her music, the liveliness of her college days, the anguish of her mother’s death, the drudgery of her work, the struggles with her religion and its rules and its God that seemed to allow so much pain to enter her life.

I related my biography: the inspiration of the mountains and heroes, the pain of a divided family, the liveliness of my college days, and the secret of my work.

“You made up the Cool Guys on the fly in the middle of a meeting?” she asked.

“Shh. You’ll expose the fact that I’m not a marketing genius. I made up some numbers about a five to ten percent decrease in a sales demographic, and they were spot on.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Sheer luck. Then I gave them some conventional wisdom about advertising on the World Wide Web, and then Cool Guys came to me. I was trying to lead-balloon it.”

“Lead-balloon? What do you mean?”

“I wanted to make it a laughingstock. I tried to make it fail.”

“What? I don’t believe it. Are you telling me you’re not an opportunistic young salesman MBA who heartily believes his product will change society for the better? I never thought anyone’d try to hurt sales. Especially you.”

“I wanted to kill sales. I gave it my worst shot and became a marketing hero. I don’t think anyone can stop it.”

“You would know that. You have the only Phase 3 access in the company, right?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“It’s very sad,” she said. “Too many people are becoming hooked on it. Winnie was obsessed with it. Have you talked to Mike lately? He’s one of the zombies. The only people you see out anymore are the older people.”

I glanced around at the silver-headed retirees and Northeasterners.

“I thought people would catch on to my ad. I thought they’d see how conformist they were becoming.”

Her mouth folded up on the left. “Maybe if you wanted to kill it, you should’ve tried to sell the product.”

“What do you know? You’re only a secretary.”

The watermelon ball she lodged on my nose must have made me resemble a clown for an instant. Our laughing turned several gray heads.

We decided to spend the rest of the morning at a park on the mainland. The day’s crispness forced a change in clothes. At Maureen’s apartment, she dressed in jeans and a royal blue sweatshirt emblazoned with the orange name of her college. She prepared a picnic, although neither of us could foresee eating after filling our stomachs with a few eggs, one or two pastries, and a swelling infatuation.

“Remember the question I asked you?” she asked as we ate on the even grass. “The night we met, at Santiago’s?”

“‘What choices have you made?’”

“Yes. Well, I’m gonna need to know your answer.”

I hesitated, pretending to be distracted by an osprey carrying a fish. “Choices?”

The osprey screeched and dangled the moving fish in its talons and arched high into the air, across the pond to its box nest on a pole.

“Since that night, I chose to stay here in Florida. That night, I was close to going back to Colorado. I figured out some very concrete ideas, many about what I now see is God. I understood them by choosing to see them in analogies to real life. And I made choices, like staying in Florida and chasing after Lana, and writing poetry, to carry on those analogies so that I could know them better. And chasing after women. They were analogies, so they didn’t always fit, but that’s part of knowing and learning.”

“What ideas are you talking about?” she asked. “About God?”

“That’s the way it feels. Once these ideas surfaced in me, I couldn’t shake them. About what reality is. It’s so different from what we’re taught and what we’re brought up with. But the most basic and important reality is something eternal and awesome, and separate from the world, and from us. It’s behind it all. And we can’t know It directly, but only somewhat, only by metaphor.”

“That does sound like God,” she said. “The Holy Trinity.”

“What does that mean?”

“God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three persons, but one inseparable, Supreme, um, Being, inseparable. Like the shamrock.”

“Ah, St. Patrick. But I’ve read things lately, and talked to people. And I know that many religions don’t believe all that.”

“Only one does.”

“Okay. Then, once I saw what reality and life are, I started thinking about what purpose we have in it, and God’s purpose. God, the Holy Trinity, as the perfect, incomprehensible, necessary… entity, for lack of a better word, also had to be the Creator, and that which moved and caused everything, except Himself. And the best way to know more about that was for me to create, or add to, life, out of nothing, like He does. I can’t paint or sculpt, so I decided to write poetry. God also had to create the universe by a fixed design, and create us by a fixed design. That’s our human function and purpose to fulfill. And we know what that is. It’s embedded in us, like it’s our conscience. But we’re complete failures at meeting it. I know that I am. And, again, I know that many religions don’t believe all that.”

Maureen laughed. “Okay, Jonathan, feels like you’ve answered my question.”

“Sorry, I’m rambling. This is hard to put in words. I’ve tried before.”

“I know you have,” she said.

“But not only in my poems. I’m also trying to organize all this in plain old words. It’s not easy.”

“Actually, all this isn’t as strange as you think.”

Later, we walked around the park’s lake. The very old and the very young gathered there. Crows lined the sky and filled it with their caws in their daily commute to the cornfields.

She jumped in front of me as we circled a playground set filling up with kids and parents. “Will you write a poem tonight?”

“Sure, Maureen. I’ve been thinking of one. But on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Stay with me tomorrow too.”

“Another vacation day?” She laughed. “Jonathan, we only have a few more days til Christmas break.”

“Okay. If I write another poem today, will you stay out?”

“Hmm. Only if it’s good enough.”

“Agreed, then.” I moved to seal the pact with a kiss. She leaned away.

“I’m sorry.” She walked on.

For the next several hours, I followed her and watched her. With all her words and movements, I remembered her distress. She had left her college friends and her music to be near her dying mother and their property. After that, for many months, she had tolerated an inhibiting lover because of the confusion of unknown and underestimated career potential. The hollowness of work inflicted her in the same way it inflicted me. Then I caused her suffering: I shattered her love for Winnie.

The living one beside me endured early the unavoidable: her parents’ deaths. How much did she weep then? I thought of her crying by herself. Does justice allow such a lovely girl to suffer enough to elicit tears? I shivered.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

She emitted such humor and happiness, and beauty. Her words, her hands, and her thoughts were the most delicate I had ever known. Her eyes, her footsteps, and her smile were gentle. Her laughs and her opinions were poignant. All this remained after her suffering. She might offer all this Goodness to me in her generosity, despite her pain.

“Actually, I was thinking how frightful losing your parents must’ve been for you. And losing Winnie. And trying to love Robert. Maureen, I wish you didn’t need to go through that much sadness. You don’t deserve it.”

She looked up at me and squinted.

“Thank you. But don’t pity me. I’m simply surviving. We need to find things to make up for whatever we suffer.”

“What could? It’d be hard to carry on as well as you have. Few could overcome that.”

“In fact, the suffering strengthens,” she said. “My priest said I could offer my grief to God to help the sick kids I’d see at the hospital where my mother stayed. At first, he angered me by suggesting that. Out of desperation, I tried it, and it helped me immensely. I’m sure it helped the kids, too. But I did hurt, and I still do. The point is that many people persevere in things like that, and grow. You must have. You didn’t become a hermit after Lana dumped you.” She smiled.

“Yeah. I kept looking for Beauty more than ever.”

“Jonathan, you’re so right that life gives more than only bodies. Life gives even more than minds. Life gives the Tchaikovsky that keeps playing in my head. Look around us. Life gives the lake and the ducks and the grass. Look at that blue jay up there. He’s beautiful. See that old man and his wife walking along the edge of the pond. And that family here.”

A man and woman walked toward us, pushing a baby in a stroller. The mother stopped the buggy and bent over the baby, who smiled and gurgled.

I leaned closer and nudged the infant’s velvety cheek. She cooed and grinned.

“Look, Jonathan, she’s smiling.”

“You two should have one,” the mother said.

Maureen laughed. “We’re not married.”

“Yeah, you look too much in love to be married,” the man said.

“Be nice,” the woman said.

We spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the trails of the park and chatting. All this time, our hands joined. Finally, we became hungry. We ate the rest of Maureen’s picnic lunch in the playground of a vacationing elementary school.

During this late lunch, the sun dipped below the trees lining the southwestern horizon. “That’s sad,” she said.

“What is?”

“The days end so fast now. When it gets dark, there’s less to see and hear. It was a fantastic day.”

I nodded.

“I’m drained,” she said. “Let’s go to my place. I have paper for you.”

“Paper?”

“For you to write. You slut! Did you think I was inviting you over for sex?” She smiled.

“Nah. I hardly know you.”

Next week: Episode 30 - The Great Disappointment: Ending Mike’s secret

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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