Virtual Eternity (the Serialized Novel) Episode 43 - The Truck

This is Episode 43 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 5: Power over Death – In This World

The Truck

In which Jonathan’s new convictions about ETERNAL REALITY are challenged by the modern temptation to seize the experience of life in this world, which allows us to easily overcome our unrelenting fear of dying and losing the love and epiphanies of earthly life

I tried to sleep some more, getting only to the edges of unconsciousness.

I never worried about Paula raging or screeching or weeping – she was cool defined; cool, to a fault. This made rejecting her more difficult, because she displayed how much peace I had dismissed. She represented the second wave of feminism, uncaring about male rejection or male instability. Her coolness had even expanded as her wealth and allure expanded. Many girls now followed this style, but I wondered if this attitude would last in them, when they faced the mid-life loss of looks, reproduction, and money during economic down-cycles.

After a shower, I went to Harold Greely’s room late that morning. Surprisingly, the dwarfish man still slept. He required several minutes of fists on the door. He greeted me with sleep still garnishing his eyes and clownish hair.

“Oh,” he said as he yawned. “What time is it?”

“It’s nearly ten. Doesn’t the truck leave around 1 a.m. tonight?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? I thought you had this planned out.”

“Yes,” Greely said. “It does leave then. And we’ll take about six hours to drive to its distribution center. That means we can sleep more.”

“No, Harold. We have planning to do. What do I do when I get in the building?”

“Alright. Let’s order food. Let me take a shower.”

For the next two hours, Greely ate and prepared himself. I stared at

the droning television as if it was my mind’s final rest. My plane to the Caymans had left. I was sentenced to live earth’s life for survival. My plane to Florida had left. My lucrative job, my best means for survival, would be terminated.

Greely had few answers on how to meet Curcio. On the hotel notepad, he drew rough sketches of the nine-story building, which was also designed exactly like my glass tower in the south.

“His office and living quarters are here.” Curcio ruled the southern half of the top floor.

“What about security?”

“They secure the facility at the front parking lot gate and at the front door, which you must avoid. As for his wing, I’m not sure. He may have rigged some other measures. His work is vital. The French and the North Koreans have been lurking around. Even our military is trying to steal his secrets.”

“Why don’t they simply buy it?”

“He won’t sell it to them, and they don’t have enough money, until the wars start up again.”

“You have no idea what’s there? Are there motion detectors, heat sensors, or door access control?”

“Yes. Once you get there, we have a way to complete your job. This will help you out immensely.” He held a vial with a brownish pink liquid between his thumb and forefinger.

“What is it?”

“If you can put this in his drink, our problem is solved,” Greely said.

“I told you, I won’t kill him. How can you advocate that?”

“You’ll follow through. I’m sure of it. He’s a reprehensible man. His games have already killed the souls of tens of millions. It’s justified. You will see.”

I shrugged. Why did Greely believe I was capable of this atrocity? Were my sins that abominable? Why would one seeking redemption perform that act?

Greely and his people apparently could not defeat the games with debate. Greely’s only immediate means to victory was violent force. They had lawmakers trying to outlaw the games, but that would take years to complete. The legislative tactic was benign force, yet force nonetheless. If some law somehow passed, surely Curcio would continue to produce illicit images from some node on the World Wide Web. Soon the government would seek to imprison him. He would refuse to go. They would need to storm his wing and end his life. Either murder or laws would end the debate that Greely would lose without that force.

We plotted for the next two hours. Greely ate again and continued his bathroom preparations.

Around two o’clock, Greely started paging through the enormous phone book stuck in the drawer next to the bed.

“I need to make a call,” he said. “We’ve got time for Confession before we leave town.”

“We do?”

“We can’t take the chance otherwise.”

“Why not?”

“I saw that woman,” he said. “I’m surely not in a State of Grace.”

“You’re not?” I scratched my chin. “Somehow that feels like a good idea.” I paused. “And, no, Harold, I didn’t sleep with her.”

“You still need it.”

He started unwrapping another sandwich.

“Do you know anything about The Shroud?” I asked as I checked out the window. A dark snowstorm, the fourth record-breaker in these last thirty days, gathered in the west. “The Phase 4 game. Do you know about Groder hexafracal images?”

“Is that what they’re using in The Shroud? Oh my. A couple of years ago, I heard Mason’s people were developing the hardware and software, but I could never comprehend why. Now it becomes clearer.”

“What?”

“Obviously, the images have some effect on the viewer,” Greely said.

“Obviously. But what?”

“I don’t know.”

I groaned and rolled my eyes. We could dawdle no longer. In a small toiletry pack, I bundled my essentials: the disk, the vial, my company badge, a pen flashlight, and a large flask of water. I stuffed all this into the inner pockets of my leather jacket. I wore jeans and thermal long johns. My brown leather jacket and a hooded sweatshirt covered my torso.

Greely and I departed the hotel for the frostbitten air. In a nearby mart, we bought thick gloves and boots and bits of snack food and beef jerky for me to carry.

Next, a Church. Since it was a Monday, Greely had asked its priest for dedicated time with us. After we parked and slogged through the fresh snow to the door of the old building, we saw the priest sitting in a chair near the back pews.

“You probably should go first,” Greely said.

I talked to him for fifteen minutes and told him everything that had happened since the day before my Marriage: the near-adultery with Paula, the loss of control over my eyes in the bars and strip club, the overdrinking, and the Sunday Masses I failed to attend. He listened, and told me to say a Rosary.

Soon after Greely’s Confession with the priest ended, I finished cycling through my fingers five times using the little prayers with Mary. I thought about how she had consented to her mission, which was carrying Christ within her, and her initiating His total victory for those who choose it.

We left the cities. The snowy wind was bending the trees we passed. We crept toward Curcio, past the staring drivers, through white forests that eventually became dark, gusty, barren farmlands. From dark cars, people glared stupidly, as if they hated me for wanting to destroy the salvation from their fears and boredom.

“Have you ever met Curcio?” I asked.

“I have never spoken to him, but we know each other. He knows everyone. It is his penchant to know everyone and to be aware of them. He, however, only mocks my people. Sometimes he speaks to nobody for weeks. But the workers adore him. They know he is the creator of their games. They know he saved their jobs and the jobs of those in all surrounding communities. Many remember their finest day as the day they sat in the same room with him. They go to great lengths to supply him with ideas, but seldom are they worthy of him. They line up--”

“I get the point.”

Hours later, after several turns and blunders because of Greely’s poor navigation, we stopped within view of the industrial park. I had little time. It was ten minutes until 1 am. In the distance, the front gate looked locked and guarded.

“You can get in, near that corner. I cut a hole in the fence.” Greely pointed away from the lighted gate off into darkness and snow.

“This operation will be difficult,” he said. “But it’s needed. I see why in my little battles to evangelize. I try so hard, so hard, to bring people to the liturgy. But when they do come, they’re back to reading their Sunday papers or playing their video games after a week or two. It doesn’t hold their imagination, their love, their fear. Not like the illusions and games. But this fight, for the minds of Westerners, must happen. Someone must fight for the memory of God. Someone must lead the way for others to find Him, or billions will never, ever seek Him.”

“Goodbye, Harold.”

I ran off across the icy chopped-down wheat fields. I tracked away from the car, toward the left of the gate. Trimmed wheat and ice crunched under my boots. A frightened flock of killdeer screeched and trailed away as I ran near them. The crunches beat beneath me in cadence with my breath. Trucks roared through the fenced area. Where was it? There, in a dark corner of the industrial park, was the broken cross-hatched fence. Greely’s hole in the fence was only big enough to fit my head.

I continued to crunch the frozen wheat around the fence. Where was that truck? Crunch, crunch. There! The words “Acro Shipping” emblazoned its side. My transit to Curcio was moving on without me. The old eighteen-wheeler rumbled away, loudly, from one of the square buildings. It appeared to have been made in the late 1950s. “Another Baby Boomer,” I whispered to the cold air. It turned and shone at me, from a hundred yards away. I hid from its light behind a building. The fence was almost two stories high. I climbed. My boots often slipped in the wire diamonds. At the top, barbed wire arched back out over the frozen wheat. I flung my legs over, and my body followed. I fell through the wind to the building roof below. My ankle turned, and I rolled on ice and asphalt. The truck rumbled below. It was passing. The exhaust of its engine drifted up against the light behind it. It passed. I ran, crashing my boots on the asphalt roof. Had it gone? I leaped blindly into the light and wind. My boots found the top of the truck. My fall continued and I groped for a handle. There! One hand held me on the side of the heaving monster. Then another hand and a boot secured it. The monster roared out as it moved by the guard gate. I flipped on top of the truck. It leaped into the air and shook me. I rebounded and slammed into the beast. I held there for many minutes in my sweat.

After a while, the wetness chilled me. The truck rammed into the snowstorm. Ice whisked in and stung my face. It pummeled me from the front of the truck, from the west. My wetness turned to frost.

I fumbled for better grips on the back of that monster. Every jolt disturbed me. I would surely freeze or be thrown from the truck onto the tundra below. I would not accept death this close to Curcio. I must see him and experience his handshake. My most profound regret would be to never talk with him about ideas and virtue.

My gloves held firm. My forearm was exposed and burned with the cold. I pulled myself close to the handle, then the truck jumped again. I lost my grip. I slid on the metal skin of the beast. Only gravity secured me. It must have a handle. The back of the truck went up. I left it for an instant, suspended above it. Again I bounced on it and slid off the back end. I seized the rods that ran down the rear of the truck and flipped my legs over. I held. It jumped again. I slipped my hands down the rods, and my feet rested on the step. The latch was unlocked. With one hand, I detached it from its clamp. With the culmination of my athletic skills, I burst open the core of the monster. It roared as if I wounded it. I clutched the inner handle and vaulted inside over boxes. The door closed and secured as the truck groaned again.

***

My sweat froze to me as I slept between the jolts of the rig. The chill inside the truck was equal to the outer, except no wind bit me. The darkness was stunning. How could I find the mettle to live for three days in this black cold, dejection, and tedium?

My sleep was too intermittent. Was it night or day? Which rotation did my watch make? Was it the second, the fourth, the third? How much longer in this pit of cold and blindness?

I used my penlight to find a 3-foot-cubed box marked for the Dakota facility. I merged its contents with another’s. The penlight weakened and died shortly after this.

The truck stopped several times. When I hid in my box, men passed me within inches. Only paper walls separated us. Once they even moved my box to reach others. Darkness still enclosed me. I should leave while the truck had stopped. But they would surely catch me. My pain would hinder me in fleeing them. I stayed. When the truck moved again, I burst from the box.

During each long, cold darkness, between stops, I shivered in the painful frost, vowing to jump at the next stop, although I did not know when that would happen. However, whenever it stopped, the pain or fear or sleep held me back, and the truck moved on. The unknown endless time between stops enraged me.

The aches came in waves, and I seemed to sleep for hours. I could not die. I must survive this cold truck at all costs. But should I risk dying to continue to Curcio?

I forgot the fortunes of my particular birth. I was selected from quadrillions of combinations; two of the appropriate people happened to unite, and two of their appropriate cells happened to unite. I might die at any time here, like Olson, Kevin, the baby in Meredith. My sister. My heart could, at any second, stop pushing blood along. This truck could swerve into another. Its heating unit could send poison gas to suffocate me while I slept.

The truck made one of its stops. Now I could burst from my box, elude the shippers, and live. I thought of my childhood. I started with my first memory: a monarch butterfly I chased. I remembered the athletes, who surpassed themselves on grassy plains, surrounded by the people and cameras who watched them. I had been certain that one day I could live as they did. My body, mind, and skills grew toward those lives. My early teenage years were filled with admiration from my peers. My actions on my own green fields in the thin air of the mountains were effortless. I starred. I glared at everyone with resilience, suspicion, and doubt. All their ways were mundane compared to my hero-like greatness and action.

Hours, or days, later, the truck made another stop. Again I could burst from my box, and live.

After my parents divided, my foundation of heroes rotted beneath me. My base from which to emanate skepticism, my rock from which my teenage strength came and to which I returned, fractured with a harsh crack. But a circle of friends from my teams and my schools nourished me. They became mercurial, or rose and fell with my fortunes on the fields. So I sought other foundations. Before I left my crumbled home and the fields where my skills got lost, I discovered a talent that exceeded others: securing the female. Maybe I should leave this beastly truck and return to that happy life where other men adored me for my deftness with girls and raw experience, emotions, and senses, my only success.

At the university, plenty of open-minded, ripened ladies suited my skills. My happiness rose and fell with the impressions of my circle, and the women I loved, especially Paula, were merely trophies, not humans. But what other source of contentment could top them? Knowing this splendor of the flesh must continue for me.

Another stop. I could live, and see those versions of Beauty again.

Then, on that last night in Colorado, I met the idea of my sister, my tortured, dissected sister. This idea pushed me to search for, and find so much, beyond what images flashed on my eyes or tingled my emotions or glands. But out of those emerged the eternal perfections, embodied and archetyped in Meredith. The notion of that which was perpetual and matter-less propagated to begin these ten months of upheaval. This life must continue.

A day later, another stop. Leave now.

Next, in the dusk of that past summer solstice, Lana appeared. I became ruled not by my friends’ impressions, but by her impressions on my retinas and fingertips. I learned to ignore the whimsical approvals and disapprovals of my group. Only her flesh and shape and smell commanded me. To win the one perfection was my only happiness, the life well-lived.

The truck quit shaking and moving, at another stop. Men passed by my box. In a few seconds, I could leave, for they had quieted and gone. I could live.

With Lana, I was free to explore the perfect, in the human form. Yet she imprisoned me, making my nature unchangeable, as defined in her and spoken to others. She tormented me with conflicts: my immutability against my freedom, my intellect against my emotions. But the discord within me stemmed from her wavering respect and her constant denouncements. This conflict agonized me, but my mind erupted.

Ideas and words streamed from me as I sought her honor. They spurted from her Beauty, from her imprisonment of me, from such dangerous strife in me. These words, not from stories for my friends, but from eternal human thought and poetry, held her image entire.

So far, any greatness I owned was only the pure enjoyment and expression of Beauty. So I searched for some elusive magnificence in this world that matched or even outshone Lana. The generation of ideas fed this search. The search fed the generation of ideas. I reported the ideas faithfully, learning the craft and trusting what I discovered. I learned to give birth to ideas for the use of others, to create others, to create life, in a way, and for the pure pleasure of the virtue itself.

But none of my subjects respected my expression or my efforts. None knew me as I was.

Except one. My hungry stomach churned for Maureen. I wept as I saw her lamenting if I died. Her green eyes should never have tears again. Initially, I thought she lacked some of the essential physical beauty of the rest. But only she cherished and knew me. She held Goodness and Beauty inside her, and when I observed her, her hidden bodily beauty began to surface. It was more than her Goodness. I lacked her, now, since we were physically separate. But this endless lacking and the longing to complete that lack constitutes loving, as I underwent with Maureen now. Loving is the human search for excellence. Maybe loving is nearest to completion when one’s physical center mingles with another’s. Lovemaking expresses the pure pleasure one brings another in symbol and existence. And life is created. And the search proceeds.

Love for another human is merely one expression of the lack of perfect Goodness. Perfect Goodness and Beauty must also exist in other things of the earth. One participates in that perfect Goodness in the infant’s smile and in the whisper of pine trees. Still, it dissipates. Humans are doomed to lack a perfect Goodness. That is the birthright of the race, its curse and its blessing. But these conflicts and this lack still impel us. We strive, we love, to obtain perfect Goodness, which always evades this mere striving. If one attained perfect Goodness, as children do, one would no longer strive and search. If adults do realize a perfect Goodness, it is fleeting. Humans want perfect Beauty and Goodness not momentarily, but forever, without death.

Endless bounding in the truck. Sleep, and crushing darkness and cold. The dark and cold and endless time spoke to me. “This is the answer to the fears that overwhelm you and everyone you know: The fear of dying. The fear of forgetting all the ecstasies, loves, comforts, successes, and excellences of life on earth. The fear of losing them, of never seeing Maureen again, or dogs, or football, or trees.”

The cold and the truck kept speaking. “Jonathan, now you will choose the life on earth, back to your senses and experience, back to safety and utility and good health at all costs, avoiding the death that would take away your earth from you.”

I shook my head and shivered myself warm.

“No, cold,” I said. “The religion of material immortality, or despair for the lack of it, is a distraction from the actual immortality we can experience, even on earth. Eternals exist as the reality, within us. We are more than this life. A higher, eternal, and perfect reality infinitely greater than experiences exists, all of which we can see the perfection of, one day. I know that God proves this real immortality permitted us, thus unveiling His love.”

Such love surpasses all human love combined. That earthly beauty, the ideas, actually exhibit and are bound together by that perfect Goodness there, by holy Love.

The truck undulated and roared, shaking me from these thoughts. My stomach pained again. For warmth, I lay on boxes crouched like a fetus. Time proceeded despite the darkness and cold. Each moment shortened the time to light, to warmth, to water and food, to Curcio, to Maureen, to my home, and to Christ.

Finally, the rumbling beast stopped again. The beast rested. Dazed, I concealed myself, in reflex. I continued to tremble with the truck. This time, no voices or light came. The leviathan was simply silent. Maybe at last, it had died. The life had drained from it. I must escape. It was not merely sleeping. It was dead.

I crawled over the few remaining boxes. I fell. Still silence. I groped for the door handle and lifted. At last, I saw the outside. The facility was structured the same as my building’s receiving zone in Florida. I could see the Dakota night wind scraping the wasteland, the land Curcio had created. Curcio. I was near him. I had outlasted the monster.

I rolled around the door, stumbled, and closed it. I jumped to concrete.

“You need something, sport?”

“What?” He was behind me.

“Whatcha doing out here? You don’t work on the dock, do you?” The man’s eyes bulged.

“Uh no. I work upstairs.”

“Where’s your badge?”

“Oh, here.” I groped through the pocket of my jacket, past the cold disk and vial. Where was it? There, plastic, the badge.

“Okay,” the man said. “Are you waiting on a shipment?”

“Yes.”

“You need to wait inside, eager beaver. Union rules is that we handle all this.”

No one had seen me leaving the truck. I went inside the glass building and passed three other dockworkers and their stares. Warmth overwhelmed me. I almost cried out with contentment.

Blessed are they that hunger for righteousness,

for they shall have their fill

Give us today our daily bread

Next week: Episode 44 - The Den of Curcio Part One

Copyright © 2022 Christopher Rogers.

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