Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 41 - The Minneapolis Hotel Part One

This is Episode 41 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 at  Amazon.

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

Chapter 3: Power over the World - By Abundance

The Minneapolis Hotel Part One

In which Jonathan’s new conviction about CREATIVE PURPOSE is challenged by the modern temptation to wield human-centered knowledge about how the world works and why, which allows us to easily overcome our unrelenting fear of things not succeeding as we wish

On Monday, I finally spun my car back to the researchers’ facility. For another five days, I sat again at the cubicle desk that Mason had assigned me.

I left at the acceptable time, although no one else did. At 5:00, the lot of snowbound cars remained a pristine field of snow. I drove out in the falling flakes, unable to follow any tire ruts.

On Friday evening, hopeful of hearing from Maureen, I asked the hotel desk clerk if I had any messages. After being scolded for not checking the red light on my phone, I went to my room. As I expected, the light blinked.

“This is the front desk. We have a message for Jonathan Hannah in the lobby.”

This was unusual. When I sought out the message, the rude clerk agreed. Callers should leave messages on room lines.

“Apparently,” the clerk snapped, “this one insisted on giving a verbal message to the clerk who was on duty. I wasn’t here.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like my message.”

The clerk returned in about five minutes, in a huff since someone had circumvented his entire system.

The lined pink note was even more strange: “Jonathan: Request your presence at Roman’s, 9:00. An old friend.”

“Roman’s?”

“Ooo,” the clerk said. “Need a lift there?”

“No, thank you. I’ll find it.”

It must be Greely.

Three hours later, I arrived at the restaurant and lounge. This building specialized not in liquors or Midwestern cuisine, but in the presentation of women. Obviously, Greely had not asked for this encounter.

Loyal as I was to my “old friend,” I entered. Thirty or forty shirtless women wearing spiked heel shoes balanced on tables full of glasses and plates. Others danced on the laps of dazed, white faced men sitting in velvety chairs rimming the vast room. Waitresses ran from table to table on the ground, and buxom dancers leaped from table to table in the air. Men observed the ladies from their chairs, offering dollars upward to the airborne and grounded girls. When smitten, they asked for personal dances on the fringes so they could examine the fleshy wares more closely. I approached the hostess.

“Hi. I was supposed to meet someone here. My name’s Jonathan Hannah.”

“Oh yes, let’s see,” said the hostess, a Japanese girl. Being one who placed the men in the chairs, she was on the third level of the worshipped here. “We’re gonna seat you over here. Your party called. They’ll be along shortly.”

“Did they leave a name?”

“Oh, uh, I don’t know.”

The girl led me through the central tables where the dancers bounced around and where the aspiring dancers delivered drinks. She placed me in the middle of this circus of skin. I ordered a martini and even remembered Xavier. The image flew past as the ladies climbed on my table and performed their mock seductions. Their upper halves and most of their bottom halves were free from clothing.

I found it hard to condemn these women as sinners, but I did, and I condemned myself too. I desired them, and as I contrived experiences with them inside myself, I moved farther away from my focus and purpose. I constantly tried to push the thoughts away.

“We can get funding for it!” shouted the man at the table next to me.

“People will buy it!” I looked away from a ballooned waitress. The man wore a short-sleeve shirt and tie, obviously a researcher from the nearby facility.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “My business is marketing. What exactly have you invented?”

“Yes, let’s get your opinion. During my involuntary separation from a large computer game manufacturer, I invented a computerized device that will take an image of a woman’s chest and plot her shapes algebraically.”

“You’re here researching?”

“Exactly,” the scientist said. “I’m testing the temperature factor. Roman has lowered the temperature by ten degrees, as you can tell by the dancers’ figures. Would you like me to demonstrate the algebraic plot?”

“Not really.”

“Anyway, the theory is that brassiere manufacturers will be able to custom fit ladies based on their exact curves, allowing for variations in seasonal temperatures and monthly cycles. This gentleman here represents a bra maker. He is not yet convinced.”

“Wise choice.”

“Sir,” the Japanese hostess said to me. “You’ve been given a lap dance. Over there, if you please.”

The old friend had arrived, apparently, though I recognized no one. I shrugged my shoulders. I followed her to a pillowy chair against the wall. There I waited. Through smoke across the room, the scientific man held up brassiere cups to a baffled dancer. Then, through rays of light and smoke, the female form approached. It was a head resting on broad shoulders over a concave waist, sloping downward to hips, and again sloping inward, long to calves. She emerged out of the haze, now three-dimensional, projecting toward me majestically. I once owned that shape.

“Paula?”

“Shh, Jonathan, relax.” She danced around me, flailing, thrashing, and bouncing. I trusted my vision to remember her face in the dim blue lights like my room at college. Her body had matured in less than a year. Her chest was even more inflated. Her stomach and arms were more solid and defined. She shook, meeting the beat of the music.

“You work here?”

“No. Shh, my dear.” She had said those words on nights in the mountains when she needed a bed to sleep in, and when my mind spun with confusion. Her poses grew familiar to me from our mad scenes in an epoch past. In those days, I was free in the earth, free to dance, free to relish bodies like hers, especially hers. For a second or two, I resented the chains I had, the chains that were more like a fire that pushed me toward art, toward Maureen, toward Curcio. The fire pushed me away from surrender to the material, a death.

I moved toward Paula, but she eased me back. She then cast me back to the past with merely her body movements and her smell. She writhed and twisted. Then she stood, swaying to the words of the song. I could see that her clothes were completely gone. I glanced at the rest of the bar, but their own performances occupied them.

Minutes and several positions later, the music stopped. Blue lights became white. Dancers hopped across tables, and attentions changed. Quickly everyone focused on the illegal dance in which Paula had entangled me. Bouncers approached. I flung my long coat on her. The focus turned away as the next song started, lights dimmed, and more dancers began to swing. I wrapped her in one arm and moved out of Roman’s.

We reached the snow in the parking lot, but Paula was barefoot.

“You’ll need to carry me.”

I lifted her, and trudged into the cold.

“Paula, what’s going on? You work there?”

“No, of course not. I arranged it to surprise you. I’ve been looking for you.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

I set her in my rental car. She covered herself up.

We drove down the suburban road across the interstate highway bridge.

“Where are you staying?”

“I don’t have a place,” she said. “I left my things at your hotel. That’s where I’ll be, I’m sure of it.”

“How did you know where I was?”

“Your secretary gave me your itinerary. I got here yesterday. I decided to shock you in a way only Paula could. Did you enjoy it? Did it bring back fond memories?”

“Yes, but why did you want to find me?”

“Did I surprise you? I arranged it with Roman himself.”

“Excellent, Paula, but what’s the deal?”

“Well, Jonathan, my life didn’t exactly turn out as I planned. I want to tell you all this in your room. Let’s wait.”

As is characteristic of edge cities, we arrived at our hotel a few moments later. In the lobby, I asked the gruff desk clerk to find a room for Paula, obviously naked under the jacket. The white-faced attendant struggled to unearth a free room, most likely to pester me. After five minutes, he managed. We secured her things. She had thirteen suitcases. The clerk failed to find a cart, so I toted every one up to her top floor room.

“I heard you were engaged,” I said in her room.

“I was married, Jonathan.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, to Clemson Hightower. You remember him?”

“He’s like the richest man in Colorado. How’d you get him?”

“You have to ask?”

“I guess not.”

She smiled. Her face was entirely allure. Gray eyes leaped out from her dark, olive face. Her ancestry was unrecognizable because of a mixture of parentage, but she acquired pleasing features from all her races. She once told me her great-grandparents were Italian, African, Russian, Norwegian, Filipino, German, Persian, and French.

“To meet Clemson, I was in the right chat room at the right time. Coincidence.”

“Sure. But what happened? You’re divorced?”

“He died suddenly.” She dropped the coat to the ground, exposing her entire light brown body. She bent over her eleventh suitcase. “He was actually trying out some video game, then, boom, stroke. So, for an entire two months, I thought he might’ve been the one for me, although he was like 40 years older. He was nice, and I thought we could make up the difference.” She stood, then slid silk shorts up over her thighs. She flipped her straight black hair over her bare chest as she sat. “And he had disowned his stupid environmentalist kids. Anyway, so be it. I’m over it.”

“When did all this happen?”

“A couple months ago. I flew here directly from my lawyer’s office. Jonathan, I’m so unbelievably rich. I’ll never need to work again in my life. I’ll never need to go to school. I’ll never need to get married. My account’s set up in Switzerland. I’ve got an appointment with a real estate agent in the Caymans on Monday.”

“Why’d you come here? Do you want me to leave with you?”

“Absolutely, Jonathan. Who else? I need a lover. I need a bud. And you’re the best of both. We don’t need to get married. We’d have too much fun together.”

“Paula, I’m married.”

“Is your wife here? No? Then let’s leave tomorrow. If you only knew how much money I have.”

“How much?”

“A lot. You can look at copies of my financial statements. They’re right here.” She hopped over to the sixth suitcase and glided the papers to me.

“Aren’t they wonderful?” she asked as I paged through the spreadsheets.

“Yeah, I see. You’re worth nine figures.”

“No, I mean my breasts. They’re textbook erotic.”

“I’ll need to look at these more closely later.”

“I hope so.”

“No, I mean the statements. Do you mind if I take them?”

“Sure, check them out,” she said. “You have such a good job. It’d be tough to leave it without knowing you’re set. But the numbers don’t lie. I can live like a queen or a rock star. You have no idea what it’s like. People respond to money like you’re a goddess. Man! I thought it was easy being pretty.” She swung around and grabbed my head to kiss me, but I jumped up behind my chair.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Scared of a life of pleasure and of having every need met?”

“Paula, I can’t. I need to go back to my wife. I love her.”

“Love? You’ll forget that. This is real, Jonathan. We’ll have nothing but fun. What is it you want to do? Windsurfing? Lying out at the nude beaches? Scuba diving? We’ll do it all. And the sex. Oh, I miss you.”

“Paula, I’ve changed. I write poetry, for crying out loud.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of that. It’d bore me. You’ll have nothing to write about. You’ll learn to simply enjoy life, instead of thinking about it all the time. Not only that, I don’t need that stuff from you. You know me: I’m as low maintenance as they come. Have I ever demanded anything from you, like emotional connections, or poetic words, or… love?”

“No.”

“Also, they have some great doctors down there. With all that money, we’ll never need to grow old. The doctors will do wonders for us. We’ll keep our bodies sculpted with lots of exercise and sex. We won’t look old ‘til we’re dead. C’mon, my Greek god. You’re the only one who ever fulfilled Paula. Remember all those positions? Jonathan, this is the answer to the fears that overwhelm you and everyone you know.”

“What fears?”

“The fears of missing out, on all the pleasures life offers. Missing the best sex you’ve ever had, or never again having that best body, mine, in bed, and those most erotic positions. Or the most food. The best drinks. The most freedom; no one telling you what you can’t do, what you don’t have a right to do. You’ll never feel that fear, that regret deep inside, that distraction, ever again.”

“But, in the Caymans?”

“Yes! Tax-free, they say. I’m buying a beachfront house. We’ll take morning swims in the surf, and then get served breakfasts. No cooking or cleaning dishes. We’ll bathe each other in our enormous hot tub, then we’ll spend the days biking or surfing. Then we’ll go out with our friends until dawn. You like to drink. It feels so good. We’ll drink until we fall over. Every day could be like that. No work, cutting grass, washing cars, and schmoozing with clients or supervisors. No waking up early. In fact, no alarm clocks will be allowed.”

“I see your point.”

She edged nearer to me. “This could all be yours, Jonathan.” She pushed down her shorts and pressed herself against me while wrapping her leg around my waist. She put her lips on my mouth. “I know you want me.” My legs weakened and buckled. We sprawled onto the bed. I leaped up and stood above her.

“I’m sorry, Paula. I shouldn’t. I do want to. Except I love Maureen. Can I have some time to think about it?”

“That’s cool. I’ll wait. But not too long. My flight’s Monday morning.”

“Okay, um, let’s meet for dinner tomorrow, okay?”

“Yea, sure. I don’t understand you, Jonathan. This is the perfect life.” She was so cool, as always.

“Tomorrow, Paula. Thanks for understanding. And it’s good to finally talk to someone under forty. Good night.”

I hurried out of the room with her papers folded in my pocket. My entire body ached from the resistance. I ran to my room on the lower floors.

The message light was dark.

Next week: Episode 42 - The Minneapolis Hotel Part Two

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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