Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 5 - The Happy Hour Part Two: Analyzing the man

This is Episode 5 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. 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

Episode 5 - The Happy Hour Part Two: Analyzing the man

After Mike and Gina sped off, I found myself alone with Maureen.

“Do you still like our company after being here a few weeks?” she asked.

“The people are friendly, and the company’s got great benefits.” I paused. “I’m worried about this layoff. If we all need to defend our jobs, I’m in trouble. I’m not sure what I’m doing here." 

“From what I’ve heard, you’ve got an exciting job, once you figure out what it is.”

“My sentiments exactly.”

“You’re right about the people here. They’re nice, polite. But somehow they’re different from college people.” She looked up at me as we walked. “Don’t you think?”

“Yeah. It’s not because they party less or have more money. It’s an attitude. I can’t imagine myself on the corporate career path. I can’t see doing this work for the next forty years. At college, I spent all my time trying to get a degree. This is the best job anyone could get with my major, and I thought I was perfect for it. But I never thought about where I wanted it to go.”

“I feel the same way.” She stopped and jingled loose keys from her tiny purse. “You should try being a secretary and looking into the future. It’s a bleak picture.”

I could ask her to continue our talk at a coffee shop along the beach. “This is yours?” I asked. We leaned against the salt-air-rusted dents of a ten-year-old Japanese car.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“That’s mine there,” I said, pointing to a less-rusted identical model across the row.

After exchanging a few anecdotes of repair frustration, I returned to shop talk.

“How’d you get to be a secretary?” I asked.

 “That’s what music majors do. But I’ve gotten two awards this year. Impressive, huh?”

“But it’s low pressure, right?”

“You’re saying my job is trivial?” she said as she smiled.

“No, hmm, that’s not what I meant. 

“It’s okay. You’re right. I try to do things right for my bosses, but it’s not important to anyone else. My bosses procrastinate and unload surprise emergency tasks on me. Sometimes they lie and blame me to cover their being late. They have more serious jobs, and I feel expendable. I’m probably capable of more, but I’m surviving. To me, what I do for a living doesn’t mean as much as other things in life.”

I could only nod.

“And what led you here?” she asked.

“To Santiago’s?”

“No, I mean in life. What choices have you made, Jonathan?”

“Choices?” She was searching for what worried me, what distracted me, what drove me. At the time, my only talent was searching for her attractiveness. I had noticed she was not ugly, but plain. Her face looked pale when contrasted with her short dark brown hair. Her mouth was a bit small, her lips were a bit thin, her green eyes were too deeply set. But at that moment, she smiled, almost as a nurse would toward a diseased man, and her face delighted me.

I turned away to confront a distant light reflected on the wet asphalt.

“Let’s see. Choices?” We listened to a frog’s bleating in the ensuing silence.

“Yeah. I mean, what--”

“Looks like the party’s over early,” Lana said as she emerged from under a streetlight. Two rows away, her urban suitor skidded away in a BMW. 

“How’s Reggie?” I asked.

“He’ll survive. I’ve spent the last few hours explaining to him why we should stop seeing each other. We got loud a few times, and the bartender almost kicked us out. How are you guys?" 

“Good, but I need to get going,” Maureen said. She smiled at me with her tiny mouth.

“It was fun,” I said. “We’ll do this again sometime.” Maureen dipped into her front seat as we exchanged goodbyes.

Lana and I had lasted together through the night’s energy, alone. As we walked toward Lana’s car, Maureen flapped her hand at us and drove away.

“You’re in a good mood tonight,” Lana said.

“Am I?”

“Yeah, you surprised me. You were more sociable than usual.”

I had never heard such statements. “I appreciate your assessment. You’re not calling it a night, are you?”

“I’m a bit hungry. My usual café in town closes at nine. Know any all-night places?”

 “Sure.” I glowed. I would continue the night alone with Lana Schon. My new friends would surely idolize me for this. Most importantly, I had strange concepts of God to investigate. I explained directions to the shop as I followed her across the lot.

“Meet you there,” she said.

We drove east across the island, then a few blocks south on the beach highway to the national chain coffee shop, which I knew would be open because they all were. Only a police cruiser or two shared the road with us. The inhabitants of the beachside town had fallen asleep long ago.

After we both parked, sounds of crashing waves greeted us. A few Northerners’ cars lined the lot. Two license tags even read “North Dakota.” Inside, coffee and tobacco smoke permeated the air. The travelers resting from their journeys down the coast looked up at us. Their stares ruffled me, and I sat in the first empty booth I saw.

“You should try the café near my house in town,” Lana said. “It’s got much more personality.”

We ordered coffee, a bagel, and a doughnut from a waitress whose shoes creaked as she walked.

“You broke up with Reggie?” I asked as I smiled and unfolded a napkin. “But he seemed like a pleasant guy.”

“You’re being sarcastic. He was good for me. And he’s an Adonis. He’s a model in Miami Beach. But I’ve wanted to do this for a long time. He’s such a perfectionist. He’s always been that way. And he’s choleric. He gets overly upset when things don’t go his way. He has this hostility in him.”

“Really? He was hostile to you?”

“Sometimes. He wanted things to be perfect. I couldn’t tolerate this neurotic need. It comes from his fear that people’ll think he’s not perfect. He constantly looked for his faults and hated himself." 

“But aren’t a lot of people like that? Aren’t they just trying to better themselves?”

“Reggie must’ve had problems in his childhood. He’s stingy with his things. He’s extremely aggressive. He’s anal-aggressive. You’re right - a lot of people are like that.”

“He was upset tonight, but he had good reason.”

“You think so? You’re on his side?” She smiled.

I paused as the waitress squeaked over and delivered our food. “No, I mean because he lost you.”

“Yes, he did. I admit that date was awkward. I actually thought that I might’ve tried to work things out if he could handle tonight. He’d always give me a lot of attention, although it’s an unresolved Oedipal conflict. We had personality clashes. He focused too much on what he could see and hear. Facts. He could only trust his senses." 

“What about you?”

“I’m more intuitive. I want to look at what’s possible, what I can create from a situation, and what I can learn that we can’t see. That’s why I want more from life than this place. Anybody can rise to the top of Vincula. But I want to rise up in a world-class company.” I forgot her many underlying contradictions until much later, because then she resumed forging my character. “You’re intuitive too.”

“Am I? How?”

“We actually have something in common. You don’t rely on your senses. For example, you ask questions that avoid details. And I’m sure you want bigger achievements.” She pulled off a corner of my doughnut. “But you don’t have a clue what they are.”

“Maybe not.” Without will, I focused on her lips as she ate and talked. Then silence interrupted her, and this dismayed me. I searched the room for a topic. The vacationers still glared at me.

“How long have you known Maureen?” she asked as she dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

“We just met. Do you know her?”

“She’s my friend’s secretary. I don’t know her that well. She’s a friendly person, but she’s dependent. I can’t divulge too much about her boyfriend, but I’m sure she’s in the wrong relationship for the wrong reason. Also, she’s too reserved, like yourself. You two would probably make a good couple.” She smiled.

“You do think you know her well. Actually, I’ve only had one person in mind lately.” I toyed with a salt shaker.

“Given all the girls you probably had out west, Jonathan, I doubt you have anything in mind at all, except to avoid strong women.”

“They don’t scare me. They challenge me.” I smiled as if she joked, but she appeared sincere. “Why do you say that?”

She paused to find words. “I bet you’ve gone out with dozens of girls. You’ve probably separated your dates into real girlfriends and sex objects. That’s a sign you fear strong women.” She sipped her coffee. “Of course, that includes me.”

“It does? You think I’m interested enough to fear you?”

“I know you’re that interested in me, Jonathan. You’re not like other guys, I can tell. I can feel you trying to capture me in your mind, but it’s not just…lust.” She sipped a water glass and smeared red on the edge.

“But can’t you see we have a poor chemistry?” she said. “And it’s because you’re quiet, and hesitant. You were more relaxed back with your friends at Santiago’s, but you’re still tense around me.”

“The beer’s wearing off.”

“I see problems with your quietness, Jonathan,” she said. “People who want such aloofness and independence are merely protecting themselves from rejection.”

Warmth enveloped me, again. She shackled me. I could not sway her. She might even relate her theories to others, as she had described Reggie to me.

“Don’t you often want to get away from people?” she asked. “Don’t you feel relieved when you’re alone? You need to look at the walls you build around yourself.”

“Okay." 

“You hardly ever talk about yourself, right?”

“What does it matter? And what does it have to do with the girls I’ve known in the past? What does it have to do with you?”

“Don’t worry, Jonathan. I see this often in men. They want to prove themselves to their friends, so they find weaker girls. Your reservedness comes from your fear of being found lacking. If you do a reality check, you’ll find you don’t need to be apprehensive at all. You’re very good-looking, and smart. You need to be more confident and less introverted.”

I trembled. Her image of me had become more engraved than it was before.

“Because of your personality, I know you couldn’t handle my dating others,” she said. “I don’t think we’re ready.”

“You mean you don’t think I’m ready,” I said with a shaking voice.

“But I think you’ve misjudged me.”

Her rejection flustered me, validating her presumption. Was it irrevocable, a life sentence? Still, I craved her secret certitude, her neck, her drawn cheeks, her lips, and, as usual, her excellence.

“Jonathan, you don’t need to react this way.”

“Do you think I fear your rejection because of the rejection itself?”

She paused to peer into my cell. “Yes.”

She would carry out the sentence. She would deny me knowing her. My eyes held her golden face once more, then I smiled at her, dropped a ten on the table, and slid out of the booth. “Go for a walk?”

I turned and headed out.

I heard her legs unstick from the vinyl seats as I pushed outside.

I walked on, careful to outpace her, behind the diner and down the wooden sandy steps to the beach. She followed, and we plodded along the soft sand in the fishy breeze.

The idea of returning to Colorado tucked itself away forever. So now, the loneliness of the workweek loomed two days away. To live without her during five more days of that vacuous activity was unthinkable. I stopped and sat on the beach, returning the stare of the ship lights strung along the horizon.

She sat next to me on the clammy sand.

The surf slammed the earth a dozen times. She held her knees and said nothing.

Then, from the tumult before us, a black shape emerged. The barrel-sized object crawled up the softer and softer earth to our right. Recognizing the mother turtle, Lana jumped up. The turtle dragged her seafaring body toward the soft sand. She stopped and rested, and soon she began to flip dirt away. Lana touched the phosphors on the expectant turtle’s back, and they glowed.

“Look, it’s magic,” she said.

I went up and grasped Lana’s hand. She pulled my arm, and we sat down again, taking care not to disturb the prolific mother.

For the next hour, the travail of the tide, pushed onto the land by a dark moon somewhere facing the earth, surrounded us. The energy of the sea, its breezes, and new life appeared in front of us. Using these, I tried to wash her consciousness into mine, to know her overwhelming being. What was she demanding? Why do I need to lower myself, not to degradation, but to her power, which would bring me a corresponding power?

I imagined the freedom of the courtship in her college years returning. Those days must be like a childhood to her, distant in the past, someone else’s life. Back then, she probably bedded the few men she admired on first impression. This night brought her memories of the unprovoked kisses, the unfamiliar touches, and the fleeting euphoria she caused. Her control then was momentary, but that instant must have been wonderful. Then, I imagined, she must have met the unavoidable: men who looted that body. She gave it only for the conquests of lying scoundrels. She ended the free frolic. To her, now it seemed either a servitude or a mastery. I hoped she longed for the freer times. Maybe tonight’s drinking, its shattering relations with men, and its array of youth at the late hour, recalled her past from almost half a life ago.

I rubbed the sand with my feet and scratched an unfulfilled pleasure somewhere in my stomach.

“When you stare at me like that, what is it you want?” she asked as the turtle scooped another clump.

“I want to know you.”

We leaned over to look at the eggs dropping. Slimy ping pong ball eggs plunked into a sandy pocket and reflected the shore lights. Nearly all the babies inside would probably die, eaten by raccoons or gulls. But mother turtle fulfilled her life goal, enduring the clawing mating, the long swim, the uphill climb up the beach, and this delivery. All this so that one or two could survive her to do the same as she.

Soon the turtle began to cover the hole.

“Jonathan, do you have the courage I’m looking for? Do you have the devotion?”

“Devotion?" 

“Yes. Devotion!” She yelled the word as a wave smashed the sand. “The access you want requires a certain passion for success, for the company. These games are years ahead of our competitors. That means you need to agree to stay with Vincula for a long time.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And you need to prove you can focus for a very long time. You need to prove you’re devoted, not only to the company, but to me.”

“Why you?”

“Prove your courage and loyalty, Jonathan. Can you prove your devotion?”

After another quarter-hour, the turtle crept back toward the surf. Soon a wave engulfed her; she reveled in it, reappeared for a breath, and vanished.

Lana pulled my arm back toward the dunes. 

In the diner parking lot along the empty coastal road, I ducked into my car without looking at her, still dazed by her words. I started the engine.

Next Week: Episode 6 - The Happy Hour Part Three: Winning the first battle

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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