Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 9

John’s second year of college went by much as the first. He lived alone in the same basement dorm room, and he went to his classes -- often doing so without exchanging words with anyone. But a couple of things were different. For one, he now worked at the university library. Also, he had sex.

The girl he had sex with was Julie Paxton, who worked with him at the library. She was a bit on the plump side, her hair bleached so blonde it was nearly white, contrasting with her dark eyebrows. She initiated each step -- from going out for a drink after work to kissing outside of her dorm to going to her room and necking on her bed. He had a major erection, and Julie was rubbing it through his jeans. Her hands went to work on his buttons and zipper, as his hands went to work on hers -- all of it seeming to take a great deal of time -- and by the time they were both naked, John realized he had lost his erection.

He kissed her some more, willing it to come back, but it didn’t. So he kissed down her body, pausing for some time on her breasts and again on her belly before settling between her legs. He had never done this before, but he had seen photos and even medical illustrations. With that knowledge, John quickly located Julie's clitoris, where he tried a variety of licking and sucking actions until her moans began telling him which ones were most effective. As always, he was a good student and learned quickly.

Afterwards, when they were just resting in each other’s arms, he felt an erection growing again. She noticed it, too, and wordlessly pulled him onto her again. He felt himself slip inside her, a perfect fit, and they made love. It was John’s first time at actual intercourse, and he enjoyed it -- but he was aware that he was enjoying it. He was still thinking about everything that happened instead of surrendering to pure feeling. He knew that was how it was supposed to work, but it was not happening to him. He tried concentrating harder on what he was feeling, and what he was feeling was not getting him closer to having an orgasm. In fact, he was starting to go soft, so he pumped rapidly and held his breath for what he hoped would pass as evidence of an ejaculation.

When Julie was asleep, he lay awake trying to figure out what he had done wrong. He even quizzed himself again on whether he might be a homosexual. That had been one of his fears growing up, that he might suddenly realize he was homosexual. Was he attracted to other males? No. Did he ever fantasize about males? No. But, if he wasn’t gay, then what was wrong with him? He definitely wasn’t normal. It was as if everyone else had the instruction book and he did not.

He really liked Julie, and in the weeks that followed, he managed to have random erections frequently enough that she didn’t seem to notice when he didn’t have one. As far as he could tell, Julie was satisfied with whatever he did with his mouth and fingers, and she always had orgasms. At least he thought she did. Maybe they were both faking it.

When summer came, Julie went back to her hometown to stay in the house she grew up in with her two still-living parents, and where she would reunite with friends from high school. John stayed at college, enjoying the quiet of summer term. Fall Semester came, and John presumed that Julie was back, but he didn’t try very hard to find her, and she evidently didn’t try very hard to find him, and that candle went out. He saw her once, across the campus plaza, but she turned and went another way. He could not tell if she’d seen him.

Life was simpler without a girlfriend. Even sex was simpler. He felt he had gotten pretty good at having sex with a woman, despite having unreliable equipment, but he was even more skilled at satisfying himself. He had his spiral notebook with the photos and stories of his imaginary women. And, of course, he imagined Millie — or whoever she had become. He still imagined her looking exactly like Millie, but now it was someone else — as if Millie had an identical twin from whom she had been separated at birth, and this twin was living her own separate life.

When he was not preoccupied with these thoughts, John was trying to decide on a major, and had started thinking about journalism. He had read "All the President's Men," recounting how Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had helped to bring down Richard Nixon. The movie version, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, had recently come out, and the profession of journalist looked like a good career.

John signed up for "Introduction to News Writing" and as part of the class, he was to write at least one real story for the university’s tabloid newspaper, The Pamphleteer. When John did his story, he was paired with a guy named Nick who was everything John wished he was himself. Nick was easy to talk to and had lots of friends, which was evident as they walked across campus to the interview for John's story. Nick seemed to know every fifth or sixth person coming the other way -- many of them being pretty girls.

When John's story was about to be published, the copyeditor -- a girl named Connie with a pencil behind her ear and no bra -- told him to type in his name the way he wanted his byline to appear in print. Some writers used their middle initials, or a guy who went by "Bill" in person might be "William" in print. John typed in his name as “Jack Goddard.” He was prepared to explain how he had been given that nickname -- a lie that he would make true by declaring it so -- but he did not need to because everyone just accepted it, and thereafter he was Jack.

As Jack, he suddenly had friends -- lots of them. His immersion became complete when Nick became his apartment roommate. People would show up at the apartment without warning, and suddenly, a party would be going on.

This happened a little too fast for John, but he knew he had to deal with it. The apartment was in his name so he couldn’t just leave -- and he didn't want to walk away from his newfound friendships. He had a lock on his bedroom door, and when he could not bear being around people, he could lock himself inside, pretending to be too busy with his schoolwork to socialize. He didn’t mind the noise of the party coming through the walls. Nick had great taste in music and had stacks of 8-track tapes on which he had recorded all the best albums of his network of friends.

Because Nick was cooler than most college students, instead of drinking beer, he had bottles of whiskey, vodka and tequila. Some nights, when John was feeling awkward in the group, he would make himself a stiff drink and disappear into his room for a little while, gradually transforming into the relaxed and gregarious Jack.

One of the required classes in the journalism program was black and white photography, including how to develop film and make prints. John immediately took to the science of it. The technical side of photography was all physics and math. It was like baking a cake: Follow a cake recipe and you get a cake. He had a feel for the art of it too, going back to that one summer at church camp when he’d taken so many surreptitious pictures of Millie (even including her journal, an ethical violation that John still felt guilty about).

As he had that long-ago summer, John now took his 35mm camera with him everywhere. Sometimes he happened across something newsworthy, like a demonstration or traffic accident, but he also looked for arty shots capturing a little moment -- a dog catching a frisbee, a street musician, a couple kissing in the shadows a doorway. The newspaper office had a darkroom where he processed his own film and made enlargements of a few for the editors to choose from.

One night, when he was using the 8x10 enlarger to zoom in on a small portion of the frame, something occurred to him. That night after deadline, when everyone else went across the street to the Stone Jug, John went back to the apartment where a dozen of Nick’s friends were sprawled in the living room amid a cloud of marijuana smoke. He recognized the voice of Becky, the green-haired art major, rising above one of Nick’s jazz albums. “So imagine you visit another planet,” she was saying, “where everyone is just like us but missing one of our five senses -- oh, hi Jack -- and it doesn’t matter which one you pick.”

“Don’t let me interrupt a profound theological moment,” he said, waving hello to everyone good-naturedly -- because that’s how Jack would do it. As he sauntered with Jack’s unhurried walk, he could hear Becky asking the group, “How would you describe the missing sense to them?”

In his room, door locked, he dug through the upper shelves of his closet to find a familiar box. In it were artifacts of his former lives, including the copy of Millie’s diary that he made with his camera. Holding the negatives up to the ceiling light, he remembered Millie’s loopy cursive that seemed to vary in size with her moods. On several pages, the handwriting was too small for him to read -- at least on the 5x7 prints he’d gotten at the drug store when he was 15. Now, he could enlarge the image twice that size.

As he deftly locked his bedroom door, he could hear Becky still talking. “And all the molecules in our bodies,” she was saying, “are left over from stars that exploded billions of years ago -- oh, bye, Jack. Were we making too much noise?”

“Nope, I’m on a mission,” Jack said, waving the envelope containing his negatives. “Secret agent stuff. Can’t talk about it.”

Becky laughed, and he made a mental note that he had now used the “secret agent stuff” line on Becky, the green-haired art major. Jack was witty, so John had to collect witty things for him to say, but he also had to keep track of who had already heard which clever line. He did not want to repeat himself. As he closed the door, he heard her saying, “So that means we’re all made of Stardust!”

It was nearly 2 a.m. when Jack made it back to the Pamphleteer’s offices. The doors were never locked and it would not have surprised him to find someone else there, but he was alone. Skipping to the numbered frames he had selected, Jack expanded the diary pages as much as he could in the 8x10 enlarger. As he watched the floating prints change from white blankness to full exposure, fishing them out and hanging them to dry, he could see that the smaller handwriting was now legible.

One of the passages was the continuation of Millie's story about being in the locker room drying her hair after basketball games. Jack had been able to read most of it before, except for the last paragraph.

The next sheet was a paragraph that started off talking about a new counselor she was seeing.

The third was a few lines all alone on an otherwise blank page, and it shocked him.

Jack's instinct was to immediately call someone, to do something. But what? Call her parents and tell them that Millie was thinking about suicide five years ago? And that he knew this because he had stolen her journal way back then and had just now used high-end photographic equipment to invade the privacy of her deepest personal thoughts?

Taking the three entries, Jack compared them to the full journal to see where they fit. He was somewhat relieved to see that the reference to suicide had been early on, just a few pages into the journal, while the section on getting on medication was later. So, that must have helped. The Millie he remembered was a giggling, effervescent girl who lit up every room she entered, but now he also remembered the many times she had been absent from church and “not feeling well.”

He wondered how she was now, but he told himself she was likely fine. She had a husband and probably two or three kids to look after, so she was probably too busy for weighty introspection. Although he no longer believed in a God who answered prayers, John said one anyway. He didn’t pray to be with Millie or even to meet her again. He just asked the Universe to be kind to her.