Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 2 - The Onboarding: Starting and stopping the return to Meredith

This is Episode 2 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!).

Chapter 1(B): Reality – Analogous: In which Jonathan seeks to know the unchanging and eternal perfect essences, by means of perceiving them and conceptualizing them by analogy

Episode 2 - The Onboarding: Starting and stopping the return to Meredith

Excitement pumped through me as I raced to begin my career, or not. I chanted pounding, gloomy rock songs with the radio and accelerated through the flatlands, pushed by the winds of collegiate theory and liberation. Once I finished my plan to return, this freedom magnified. I felt released from the boys on whom I depended for social acceptance. I was even released from a career, for a while.

Despite a day of frenetic driving, my chronic insomnia gripped me at the motel. This time, I remembered the light that had bothered me the previous night. When I did sleep, it lit my dreams and woke me.

Why go back to Meredith? After all, Paula, not Meredith, was the crown jewel of my years of pleasure. Paula and I learned the art of human lovemaking together. And, as I once told my friends, I had conquered sluts and I had conquered virgins, but never had I sympathized. They caused their own actions, after all. What good would come from being with Meredith again? What did I find in her? What is this thing that never dies? Like my sister died.

Nonsense, I thought. Why did I even hesitate? I disliked uncertainty about these things. My pals felt no such worries. They followed any excitement that blew past them. Academic failure, debt, family, divorce, alcoholism, or legal problems plagued their lives, but they respected each other.

Often I questioned the values of my times, and wondered why I did. Was it the years we lived in, these last few of the 1900s? But I could not imagine youth at the start of this millennium stopping to consider their colossal task of ushering in these last thousand years. The numbering of years meant nothing to history, since humans set it arbitrarily. Why would it cause me to brood over my culture’s imprint on the next thousand years?

I knew I was unlike those youth at the onset of this second millennium. I once read a summary of a story written in the Middle Ages. Had I lived my current lifestyle then, in the wooden shoes of my Dutch ancestors or the kilts of my Scottish ones, I would have feared death. After I died, winds might buffet me eternally. Or I might forever pursue a wind-blown banner while enduring bee stings, choking for air, and bleeding. But in this last decade, punishment by a God seemed ridiculous. Why did I let this image form in me?

Then I returned to the puzzle that gnawed at me: Why did my sister, whom my mother rejected and aborted, die so I could live? Did others benefit from her death, as I did? How much pain did she bear when they killed her inside, washed her out, and borrowed her tissue?

As I sped across deserts, farms, and rivers, from the western mountains to the dark blue lakes of the Florida peninsula, I carried only a few boxes and a yearning to solve that question my sister had left me. I would never understand the reason for my living instead of her, until the end of the months-long journey that I now narrate.

I often considered my life unhappy. When I found contentment, I feared it would not last. I bounced between academic accomplishment and annihilation. I verged on my peers rejecting me. When academics or pleasures or the approval of my friends withered, I suffered insomnia. I fretted about the future. What should I accomplish? When, and with whom, could I continue my legacy with children?

Then the anguish would subside when the door to my room clicked, and Paula’s silhouette slinked across the blue neon beer sign in my window. I could worry later.

I remember debating the contrasting values of Paula and Meredith as I drove across the Florida border. Paula projected liberty, flawed with freedom and disproportionate chest and ignorance of morality. Meredith projected integrity, firmness, precision, honesty. She did not deserve to lose the tears I drew from her. I would return to her. Not only that, but she held things I needed to apprehend, things eternal and important, no longer just sensing them, but perceiving, although I was uncertain how they differed.

The next morning, in the shadowed parking lot of Vincula’s nine-story glass tower, I plotted how to leave. A herd of sleepy people strolled with me there, two days after I left Meredith’s sweet-smelling arms.

I slowed my pace. I knew little about my employers or the wares they hired me to sell. Vincula’s recruiter, some older woman with a gold Christian crucifix necklace and a nasally Northern accent, had hired me after only two on-campus interviews and a phone call with my upcoming supervisor. Given my grade point average, the offer surprised me. I owed thanks to my friend within the company, it seemed. Dozens of MBAs nationwide had pursued the opening. They were drawn to its subtropical location within this suburb north of Miami. They also wanted to sell its leading-edge technology. How can I decline this job? But something was telling me, someone from a forgotten encounter or a dream, that Meredith shouldn’t cry alone.

Inside the building, a receptionist sent me up the elevator one floor. Fellow riders exhaled at my wastefulness. On the second floor, I found a secretary who looked like she had insight. “We usually don’t orient people on Tuesdays,” she said between telephone buzzes. As she spoke into the phone and rerouted calls, she gathered a stack of notebooks and folders.

“Will I be able to talk to Human Resources?”

“You mean ‘Human Development.’ Take these into that room over there. Start reading and filling out the forms. Other people’ll go in later to talk to you.”

In the empty conference room, I sat at the center table in front of a window that formed the entire wall. From time to time, the heads of programs rushed in to lecture about their realm. Each uttered words that I had never heard in person, though I recognized them from my interviews. “Critical mass.” “Risk mitigation.” “Network,” in terms of relationships with people. “Bleeding edge.” “Core competency.” “Positioning.” “Lean organization.” “Plug-and-play.” “Hit all the milestones on the way to project success.” “Leverage.” They spoke them to me over half-smiles and the gloss of the expansive conference room table, as if the magnitude of their work and love was worth this. The free coffee behind me that no one drank added to the rewards. They leaned back in one of twenty hard-spongy, adjustable-to-any-shape chairs in the room. They were all over forty, except for the one guy, younger than me, who flashed an image of my eye for some new security mechanism. They hurried through their sermons, one telling me about the triple set of meetings he was missing for this. One spoke about his customer demands with a laugh, but could not avoid sandwiching every negative with a “but…” and a positive that sounded rehearsed. They all gushed with too much enthusiasm for me to ask about opting out.

The morning lingered, and I struggled to stay awake. On the other side of the glass wall, palms lolled in gusts of wind. I noticed the strangeness of this new place: waving trees that seemed to be greeting me, clouds that created their odd shapes for the sake of the creation itself, a flatness dominated by green hammocks that obstructed the distance one could see.

As a boy in the Rockies, I could see forever. I climbed hills and ski slopes and looked down on all the inhabitants of the plains. In these places, I listened to my father’s stories of great men outrunning and overpowering even greater ones on athletic fields. From a house high up, I witnessed their historic deeds on television. To me, these smiling sportsmen lived with an easy excellence and a purpose. I developed athletic talents to emulate my heroes. But I soon forgot why I had glorified the athletes. My father left home. Then they sent me to live with him. Later they returned me to my mother and her new husband. I spent my weekends with my father or mother at an age when all involved were bored. I continued shuffling between parents until I finished high school and moved to the nearby college. Then, a week or so ago, they granted me a master’s degree in business, despite grades in the lower half.

In college, after I realized my athletic skills had faded, I decided to chase a more attainable goal. But what? Like the other young men and women of my age, I resolved to have no resolves and to explore many lifestyles. Unconstrained by parents or Church, everything was permitted. Nevertheless, in between jobs where nothing happened, like lifeguarding and mall retail, I hung out in societies that limited the possibilities I encountered.

After almost twenty-four years, the athlete’s purpose still eluded me. For the first time in many years, as I sat in that glass room, ready for an adulthood that I wanted to start somewhere else, I wondered if I could laugh as my heroes had.

A woman swung open the door and the room exploded with her.

“You must be Jonathan Hannah. I’m Lana Schon, Executive Director of Human Development.”

We touched hands. Ms. Schon sprouted several bits of small talk. She introduced me to the company’s policies, benefits, and organizations. She sketched hierarchies of people on a white wallboard with strong-smelling red felt markers.

I drifted from the idea of climbing the pyramid Lana depicted. As my baseness had trained me to do, I converged on mastering the exceptional woman before me, omitting my new career, omitting Meredith. I could hate myself later. Although she seemed to be in her late thirties, Lana’s appearance was without flaw: smooth tan skin, full lips, projecting chest, tiny waist, muscular thighs under a short skirt. She presented herself with all the correct body movements: triangled hands, smiles, gesturing arms, open palms, constant eye contact. When she looked at me, I noticed that the cheekbones supporting her blue eyes revealed her Germanic ancestry. Her left hand was naked, so I continued my study. As she wrote on the board, I watched her skirt and blouse fold and unfold, her necklace drape over the nape of her neck, and her blond hair settle down her back.

“We’ll give you the opportunity to make a name for yourself and move up at Vincula, Jonathan,” she said as she sat behind the table. “You’ll have a very satisfying stay here. Our core products were military training applications and virtual reality games solutions. But this company’s on the verge of entering a huge commercial market, and we hired you to help us get into it. Essentially, your supervisors are looking for a sense of confidence in you. We train our managers to recognize each of their teammates’ positive traits and use them to the fullest, while downplaying their weaknesses.” Her hands formed a steeple. “The environment in this business has become extremely competitive. Rightsizing has been going on lately, Jonathan, so it’s important you maintain the appearance of being a valuable employee.”

“What do you think is the best way to do that?” I asked with my pen and pad poised. “What are they looking for?”

“Like it or not, Jonathan, the system demands a manner. It would be best if you kept up the appearance that you’re an aggressive part of the team. One thing you can do is smile.”

I laughed and set my pen down.

“We do evaluate people on their personalities because it makes our lives easier,” she said. “It helps us communicate. Whenever I enter a conversation with a particular person, I know I have certain rules to follow. So, I try hard to determine beforehand how that person will react to me and what I need to say.”

“Basically, I need to be clear about who I am,” I said as I tilted my chair back.

“Sort of. It’s important to show some personality.” She pointed her metal pencil at me. “This’ll be even more important when the job picture isn’t good, or when you want a higher position. When you network, Jonathan, you need an expressive personality. You’ll need to work on that, because you’re reserved.”

Her eyes crushed me. I had never felt as I did now. My disposition had become an object of scientific study. Maybe I needed to remain mysterious to her.

“You’re quiet, but different. I can see that already. It’s like you’re trying to delve into things. Like drill down into who I am.”

I grinned, but held back crudeness about drilling into her. “You could be right, but you’re not one of my bosses anyway.”

“Not yet,” she said. “Um, being quiet and shy is common in men. I’m only wondering how well you’ll sell.”

“In my past jobs, I’ve done fine if I sell something I believe in. When I try to sell bad products, I’m not a good actor.”

“Not the products,” she said. “You. Personality is important not only for communicating the product to potential customers, but also for giving yourself to management. And to me. I can’t emphasize enough the power of social skills in the marketplace. You’ll definitely need to develop yours more.”

“Maybe I need to talk about things I believe in. Maybe I need to sell myself to you.”

“I can’t afford you, Jonathan. And I’d be buying mostly packaging.” She smiled.

I reddened with the heat of failure. This setback differed from other times girls had rebuffed me. I could only sigh and attempt a grin.

“These deficiencies present a real problem, Jonathan. We hired you to sell Magic Theater, the company’s flagship product. To do that, Jonathan, you need an official high-level access to future products.”

“Access? To sell the games?”

“That’s why our employment application was so detailed. We’re complying with the Business Technology Information Secrecy Act passed this year. The technology in this market is expanding too rapidly for most foreign companies to keep up with. So, they resort to corporate espionage. We must know that you’re trustworthy. But we discovered certain activities in your past these companies could bribe you with.”

“What?”

“Also, we received your college transcript yesterday, finally, and I’m not impressed. More importantly, I’m concerned about your talent. All the other signatures on your access forms are here. But unfortunately, Jonathan, I can’t approve you yet.”

“Really? But what’ll I do here?”

“You’ll probably be assigned to another less vital market area. You’ll need to speak to your manager, Daniel Olson, about which area. He’s been out, on sick leave, for several weeks, so you might not see him for a while. I’m truly sorry, Jonathan, but it’s my job to check things like this. You need to prove yourself first. To me.”

“Prove what?”

“Don’t worry, Jonathan. You’ll get the opportunity here.” She nibbled her pencil eraser, then tapped it on the table. “Tell me, Jonathan, what do you do for fun? Did you leave a girlfriend up there in Colorado?”

“Yeah. Well, no, none.”

“No fun, or no girlfriend?” she said as she arranged her papers and rose to leave.

But I had learned little about her, except her shapes and her character judgment. Unlike previous girls, she had a firm confidence based on some unshakable aim.

“I need to run to a meeting,” she said. “But I’d like to meet with you again. Let’s follow up at lunch sometime. How about next Tuesday?”

“Okay, sure.”

“Great. And check with your secretary on the sixth floor. She’ll find you a cubicle. Also, Jonathan, I do realize this conversation might’ve affected your decision to join us. If you want to change your mind about working here, let me know. We could accommodate that.”

“No. I’ll be fine.”

So I paused my move back to Colorado.

Next Week: Episode 3 - The First Meetings: Accessing the corporate secret, Magic Theater

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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