Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 8

The sun had gone behind dark clouds some time ago, and now Jack felt raindrops on the wind that swirled through the graveyard. It was time to go.

"I'll visit you again, Mom," Jack said to his mother's tombstone. "And you too, Grandma," he added to the neighboring stone. "Say hi to Bertie for me." Carrying his crumpled fast food bag, Jack walked back to his car and put up the top as fat raindrops splashed on his windshield.

Because his mother had made such a modest income at her secretarial job, Johnny had qualified for generous grants and scholarships from both the federal and state governments that fully paid for his tuition, room and board at a state university. On top of this, his mother had $10,000 in life insurance, so when he was orphaned at 18, Johnny suddenly had more financial security than he had ever had growing up. Because he had the choice, Johnny opted for a single room to avoid having a roommate. He could imagine having a roommate in an apartment situation where they both had their own bedrooms, but in a dormitory, he would have no privacy at all if he had to share a room. He would pay anything to avoid that.

It quickly occurred to him that going to college, where he knew no one, was an opportunity to reinvent himself again. Although ever since junior high school, he had been introducing himself as "John," people from grade school or church kept calling him "Johnny." But now, in college, he would finally be able to leave that nickname behind because no one knew he had ever been "Johnny." More importantly, no one knew he had been such a painfully shy boy who had been made fun of because he was so incompetent at sports. No one knew he had almost zero experience with girls. No one knew he had no parents and that he had no home to go back to on the holidays. No one would know anything about him except what he told them, and he could be a different person just by acting like one.

When Christmas break approached, all the boys in his dorm were packing up to go home, and he let them assume he was doing the same. Instead, he hid out in his room as the sounds of activity in the hallway gradually diminished to nothing. By Friday afternoon, the floor was entirely quiet. He wandered the hallways on all floors and went down to the lobby. Other than himself, the dorm was completely empty. As he walked past a mirror and caught a reflection of himself, John almost thought it was some other guy. He stopped at the full-length mirror and looked at his reflection. Together, they put their hands in their pockets and grinned at each other. He liked this guy.

The next morning, John walked to the grocery store and bought eggs, baloney, cheese, potato chips and assorted Hostess brand desserts that he stocked in the kitchenette on his floor. It was his kitchen for now. The next night, he ordered a pizza and ate the whole thing himself in the TV room, watching a Star Trek rerun. He had only seen a few episodes when the show originally aired because it was on opposite Bewitched, which was one of his mother's favorite programs. But now Star Trek was on one of the local TV stations every night, and John became absorbed in it. Although Kirk was the muscular ladies' man captain, John identified more with Spock, who was logical and unemotional -— as well as being physically and intellectually superior. And Spock had another advantage John envied — because he was an alien, everyone knew he was different from them, and so they didn't expect him to be like them.

John was also encouraged by the show's hopeful vision of the future of humanity. Most of his childhood had played out against the backdrop of the late 1960s, but by 1974, when he went to college, it seemed that Society was making real progress on many fronts -- civil rights, environmental protection, efforts to eradicate poverty and more. Even Watergate and President Nixon's resignation seemed proof that the country was advancing and there were limits to what a corrupt person in power could do. John felt confident that he was living in a special time and that things would continue to progress towards the ideals envisioned by Star Trek.

Somehow mixed in with those liberalizing trends, John could not help but notice that some girls in college wore very little clothing. Before the weather got cold, he had regularly seen girls in his classes wearing halters or tube tops with low-riding bluejean cutoffs, leaving a vast expanse of exposed female skin from just under their breasts to several inches below their belly buttons. John pondered -- quite rationally, he thought -- that perhaps in the increasingly civilized future, women would feel more comfortable wearing skimpy clothing -- perhaps even nothing at all. Millie had imagined such a possibility in her journal, and John had written a few stories based on that in his sketchbook.

Outside of his sketchbook and his imagination, however, he was not having any more romantic success than he had in high school. Throughout the fall semester, he had gone to class and to the library, and then back to his room -- often without speaking to anyone. Spending Christmas break alone in the empty dormitory felt like a relief because, with no one else around, he did not feel guilty for not being more social. With no girls around, he could not be a failure for being unable to talk to them.

That Christmas, a blizzard swept through, blanketing the campus with deep snow. John's dorm room was at the basement level, and the snow drifts covered its windows. For a couple of days, he was confined to the dorm. During the daytime, he could go up to the upper floors and look out across the silent white landscape. At night, he was back in his buried basement room with a single light on as he read any book he could find. Up in one of the common rooms, there was a shelf of popular books, including Tolkien's "Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings." John devoured all of them. A local radio station played a complete album every Sunday night, and John recorded them on his 8-track. As it happened, they played Steely Dan's "Aja" album most recently and as he read Tolkien he listened to his tape over and over again -- clunking in the middle of songs as it changed tracks. For years afterwards, whenever he heard songs from that album, John would also think of hobbits and wizards -- and anticipate the moment in certain songs when the clunk would occur.

The university library remained open during break, though without evening hours, and John spent much of his time there as he had at the public library of his childhood. He browsed the aisles, occasionally picking out volumes because he recognized the author or just because he liked the binding. In the poetry section, he stopped to read Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" -- both of which he remembered from high school English class.

He was surprised when he noticed a volume of poetry by Steven Crane, because he only knew Crane from the novel "Red Badge of Courage." He pulled the book of poetry off the shelf and flipped through it, stopping with a start when he saw:

John was astonished. He had never heard anyone address God so defiantly, but it resonated with him. Although he was angry at God for letting his mother die and had given up trying to be "saved" himself, it had not occurred to him to question God's authority or His competence or His very existence. He still assumed that God had some secret master plan that somehow required not only his own mother's death but the continual suffering of people all around the world for thousands of years. Since her death, he had mostly just avoided thinking about it, but he was getting tired of that. He flipped through the pages, reading other poems.

YES, John thought. That was exactly what people in the church did. They accepted that God could allow terrible things to happen to innocent people and it was okay because He was God and He had a plan. But what if we were wrong about God?

John checked out the book and stomped back to his dorm across the nearly deserted campus. When he was alone in the middle of a field, he stopped and looked out at the horizon where diffused moonlight lit the undersides of dark clouds. It seemed a brooding image of God, and he pointed at it, and said out loud, "I fear you not!" He waited for a long moment, half-expecting to be struck dead by a lightning bolt. When that didn't happen, he added, more quietly and through gritted teeth, "What good are you?" He stalked onward, holding his breath and still expecting the bolt of lightning that never came.

Emboldened, John began looking for other books at the library and bookstores that questioned traditional Christian belief or pointed out glaring inconsistencies in the Bible (despite it being supposedly dictated word for word by God himself). He started hanging out on the periphery of Campus Ministries events and getting into debates with unsuspecting Christians. For a person who sometimes went whole days without speaking, he could talk plenty on this subject.

"So let me get this straight," he would say, pretending to be working it out in his own mind. "God is all-powerful and knows everything that is going to happen because it is all part of his plan, but he created billions of people knowing all along that He would ultimately send most of them to Hell for not worshipping him exactly the right way. If he just wants to reward all the true believers with eternal life, that's one thing, but why is it necessary to torture the nonbeliever? Why not let them just be dead?"

John's victim would say something about Free Will and Sin, and that everyone had an opportunity to be saved.

"But what if you are driving in a car with someone you love -- your best friend or maybe your sister -- and she tells you she is not a Christian anymore because she thinks Buddhism makes more sense. And you start having a discussion about this, trying to help her come back to the fold, and then bang, there's a car accident, and you are both dead. Now, you both stand before God at judgment, and He says to you, 'You're fine; you can go on up those golden stairs to heaven, but your sister here has to go to Hell and burn for all eternity.' Would you be okay with that? Would you stand there and watch him push her screaming into the pit and then scamper happily up the stairs because at least YOU made it?"

By this point, the other person would be stammering and -- ideally -- other people hearing the conversation would gather around them. Someone would say that everyone faces God alone and would not see the sister's judgment, and someone else would say that maybe in Heaven, you wouldn't remember those who were lost.

"And that's okay with you?" John would demand. "Your sister would still be suffering for eternity, but YOU think that's okay just so long as your serenity in Heaven is not disturbed by knowing about it? What kind of God would DO such a thing, and what kind of person must YOU be to accept salvation at such a cost?"

It was a pretty good speech, and John got to give it a few times before everyone at Campus Ministries started recognizing him and fleeing whenever he approached.

In his first year of college, John took classes that were required for most majors -- History 101, Psychology 101, etc. -- and he loved all of them because he just wanted to understand the world. However, he had no idea what he wanted to major in, and had never quite pictured what he might do as a career. Lawyer, doctor, accountant? None of those careers resonated with him. He was interested in what was going on in the world and started reading the New York Times with black coffee in the Student Center cafeteria. Maybe he would work for the State Department and be part of the Foreign Service?

In Spring Semester he was taking a required Freshman English class that focused on creative writing. The prof would assign them a story prompt, like "the story behind a scar," or "discovering a suitcase filled with money," and they would each write a story based on that prompt. John had by this time read hundreds of novels and had become discerning of quality writing. Although by some measures he knew his life of experience had been very limited, somehow the life of his imagination was not. He did well in the class, and the prof wrote effusive compliments in the margins of his stories. John began imagining himself in the future as a novelist, banging away at his typewriter in a book-lined study as he smoked a pipe. There was a used bookstore in town, and he started buying hardcover copies of classic novels. He was amazed to find really old books from the 1800s selling for a few dollars.

When the school year ended, most students went home to their families. John stayed on campus, taking one summer class, so he could retain his dorm room where he read books. The summer student population was sparse, but he preferred it that way -- and girls were wearing halter tops and hot pants again!

In the evenings, John tried writing stories on his own without prompts. He tried a detective story with a main character who bantered cleverly with the beautiful redhead who hired him. Eventually, they had sex, but John -- who had no sexual experience of his own -- handled that scene the way he'd seen it done in movies. His characters started kissing and frantically unbuttoning each other's clothing, but then time passed, and in the next scene, they were in bed smoking cigarettes as their conversation turned back to the plot.

Although his fantasies often focused on a redhead who looked very much like Millie Jenkins, it wasn't really her anymore. On the day she told him she was getting married and having a baby -- the same day his mother died -- John had let her go mentally. He no longer pined for her as someone he might actually be with someday. He had given that up as an offering to God, who took it without thanks and without providing any benefit in return. His mother still died, on top of which Millie was forever gone to him.

The fact that he still imagined someone who looked like her no longer had anything to do with the real Millie. His mind was just using her as a starting point for the countless imaginary women who populated his fantasies -- the carrot-top red hair, blue eyes and millions of freckles across her otherwise white skin. He had recently learned the term "archetype" in one of his classes. That's what Millie had become. He still wished the best for real-life Millie. She was a good person who deserved to be happy, and he hoped she was. He had moved on, he told himself, though it remained a fact that every time he caught a glimpse of a carrot-top redhead on campus a part of his brain always leaped to the possibility that somehow it actually was her. But it never was.