Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 10

Jack's first job after college was as police reporter for the Carlisle Chronicle, a 30,000-circulation afternoon paper. Every morning, he stopped in at the city police department to look through the blotter cards describing police runs in the past 24 hours. He took notes in his reporter's notebook and asked a few questions of the desk sergeant. Then, he walked across the square to the Courthouse where the Sheriff's Department was located. When he got back to his desk in the newsroom, he'd make calls to the police departments of smaller towns in the Chronicle's circulation area, and also to the Highway Patrol. The news of the day was typically traffic accidents, burglaries and vandalism — along with the occasional homicide or bizarre tragedy. His first winter, a heavy fog was the cause of numerous minor traffic accidents, along with the deaths two uninjured motorists who stepped over a guardrail to get out of the way of traffic — not realizing in the fog that they were on a bridge 40 feet above a frozen river.

Jack's desk was one of about 20 clustered in groups for the various departments -- News, Business, Lifestyle and Sports. Each had an editor and a handful of reporters. It was the late 1970s, and reporters no longer banged out their stories on typewriters but on terminals connected to a mainframe computer. The screen was black and the letters were formed by a dot matrix of tiny green lights. When the editor approved a story, it would be printed out with the specific font and column width as seen in the paper. White-haired men who in youth had assembled lines of lead characters in reverse order now had only to paste the paper columns neatly in the layout sheets. This was no longer a highly skilled job, but the union was still strong, and the composing room was their turf where editors dared not touch anything but the coffee.

The newsroom was not unionized, and Jack's starting salary was only slightly higher than minimum wage. To get by, he rented a room and bath in a musty boarding house whose other residents were all senior citizens. But that meant the house was quiet at night, and he could sit on the metal fire escape outside his window and look up at the moon.

Jack was good at the job. He was dogged in covering his beat and had developed a strong writing style. He enjoyed learning something complicated and then explaining it in a way a casual reader could understand. He settled in and became comfortable, and time went by. Six years later, he was recruited by the Harrington Herald, a larger paper in another city

Starting over again at a new job, Jack had another opportunity to adjust his persona -- to act more like the person he wanted to become. He decided to be more social, going out for beers after work with other people from the paper. Sometimes there was a party. There was nearly always alcohol at Herald parties, and sometimes a joint discreetly being passed around. He liked the combination because it really made it easy to be Jack. He was no longer sure if he was still pretending to be Jack or if he had become Jack. Either way, the right quantity of alcohol made it feel more natural. When socializing, he was careful how much he drank. He wanted to be relaxed but in control, and he wanted to be able to remember what happened in the morning. He could always drink more when he was safely home and alone.

His new apartment was above a shoe store with large front windows overlooking downtown Harrington. In back, it had a balcony overlooking an alley where several bars were located. There were neon signs and plastic luminaria and music and laughter and the faint murmur of voices. A few years earlier, he would not have imagined himself being comfortable in the middle of such activity, but he found it didn't bother him because it was all outside of his perimeter. At night, if he left his porch light out, he could sit in the dark looking down the alley watching but not being seen.

He also now owned his own computer -- a TRS 80 with 5¼ - inch floppy disks hooked up to a small black and white TV. He had written several short stories, which he submitted to literary magazines, and had even gotten a couple of them accepted -- though the only compensation was a one-year subscription to the magazine. Each time he submitted a story, he would read it through carefully again and invariably would find some small changes he wanted to make. This had been laborious before because he had to retype an entire page or more. With the computer, he could simply edit one line and print the page out again -- a revolutionary improvement. He had also typed into his computer the stories he had hand-written in his sketchbook about Millie and his other fantasy girls. He knew there were "literary erotica" magazines that published such stories, but he had not submitted anything to them yet. If he ever did, he decided, he would do so under a pen name.

A few more years passed, and one afternoon, Jack was at his desk paging through the paper when he first saw Allison. From his desk, Jack could see down the hall to the elevator, and he tended to glance up whenever he heard the ping. This time, it opened to reveal a blonde with a short skirt and bright red lipstick. She made a move to step out of the elevator and then seemed to realize it wasn't her floor. She jabbed at the button combatively, and the doors began to close again, and in that last second, she looked up and saw him. And she smiled.

The Herald Building had four floors, so there were only so many departments where she could work. He guessed Advertising. For some reason, she looked like she'd be good at that. Circulation was on the first floor, the Newsroom on the second, Advertising on the third, and the publisher's office on the fourth. Jack had never been to the Advertising department and began puzzling over what excuse he could use for going up there. He was still mulling over the options when he suddenly realized someone was standing near his desk. It was her.

"Do you guys have a copy machine down here?" she asked, holding up a manila file folder with papers sticking out. "Ours is down."

"Um, sure," Jack managed to say. "It's down at the end of that row of desks."

"Could you show me?" she asked with a cutely apologetic grin.

Feeling as lucky as a contestant pulled out of the audience in a game show, Jack hurriedly escorted her to the copy machine and gave her instructions as she copied several seemingly random papers from her manila envelope.

"I'm Allison, by the way" she said, putting out her small hand, her nails matching the red of her lips. "I just started in Advertising a couple weeks ago. And you are?"

For two seconds, his mind was blank, but then he remembered. "Jack," he finally said with a hint of question.

"Jack Goddard?"

"How did you know?"

"It's in the newspaper every day, or is that a different Jack?"

"It's me."

"I pictured you old and grizzled."

"That's me on the inside." She laughed and though it had been an impromptu comment, he made a mental note that he'd used the "that's me on the inside" joke on Allison from Advertising.

Having evidently run out of things to copy, Allison thanked him and sauntered away, glancing back at him as she turned the corner and disappeared.

In the days that followed, their paths seemed to cross more often than chance alone would warrant, and banter would ensue. Jack began spending his evenings reviewing his collection of witty turns of phrase so he would be prepared to seem spontaneous.

And then things happened very fast. His plan had been to ask her on a date, and he was reviewing the merits of several different ways of saying it -- all of them deprecatingly humorous. He was still hard at work on this when one night she caught up with him as he was leaving, and they walked out to the parking lot together. Now that the time came to use one of his clever lines, he could not remember any of them.

"So about that drink," she said as they reached her car.

Not having prepared for that question, he gave her one of Jack's easy grins. "And which drink was that?" he decided to say.

"The one you were about to ask me to," she said. "You were, weren't you? Because if you weren't, then this would be very embarrassing for me, and you wouldn't want me to go through that, would you?" It was the kind of line Lauren Bacall might have used in a Humphrey Bogart movie. Jack smiled because now he knew his next lines.

"Well, I sure wouldn't want that on my conscience," he said, then paused long enough for Bogart to take a drag from his cigarette. "So, about that drink."

They went to a quiet bar and talked. Allison was easy for him to relax around, and she seemed to be really . . . into him. Or at least she was into Jack, but that's who he was now -- or could be simply by deciding to be. Along the way, there was dinner and wine, and they got into a playful argument over whether it was in "Vertigo" or "Rear Window" that Jimmy Stewart's character was hanging from the creaking metal gutters of some old city building and so they decided to go to the video rental store and get both movies and a bottle of champagne, which they did. It was in the middle of Vertigo that they started taking off each other's clothes.

John was really excited and had an erection, but he knew he was excited and he knew he had an erection. He was not so excited that he was unable to think about being excited. He wasn't sure that had ever happened to him -- not even as a child playing. He had never run and giggled and squealed in delight as a child. He was not sure he had ever experienced "delight." He wondered how that was defined as he pulled down her panties and began to kiss her down there because he no longer had an erection. But they spent the night sleeping naked together, so at some point he got another one, and when he nudged her with it, she quickly responded and climbed on him. He was fully hard and felt so confident he scooted them the edge of the bed up and stood up while holding her inside of him with his hands under her butt and her arms around his neck. He bounced her a few times, but his passion of the moment was ultimately not as strong as his self-awareness, which worried into his ear that the erection might go away. He held her tight and let them fall back onto the mattress, where he soon gave the impression that he had come. Afterwards, as Alison fell asleep, the scorekeeper inside his head declared that it had gone pretty well, all things considered.

A year later, they were practically living together in Jack's apartment. She still had her own place, but they only spent a couple of nights a week sleeping apart. Jack would have preferred more time alone, but he had no idea how to tell her that without hurting her feelings. He did care for her, and he enjoyed being with her. She was funny and sexy and talkative enough for both of them. They seemed pretty compatible sexually as well. He still couldn't quite lose himself in the moment, so he didn't always have an erection when he knew he should, but he enjoyed giving her oral sex, and she always had orgasms. Afterwards, as they held each other in bed, he sometimes got hard enough for a few minutes of intercourse. He always faked his orgasms, but felt satisfied that at least he'd been able to perform.

When he was alone, he would sometimes look at the pictures in his sketchbook and take care of things himself. It was easier that way. He also continued writing stories on his computer about fantasy women who went casually naked. Sometimes he put a version of himself in the story, and there would be a romantic encounter between the fully clothed man and the naked girl . . . but they did not have sex. His fictional counterpart was virile and confident, his manhood bulging in his pants, but somehow the story ended before he unzipped.

Jack did not share his fantasy characters with Allison, but he did try sometimes to get her to go naked around the apartment. After a few drinks, she would happily do so, but to her, it was foreplay, and soon she would be tugging at his belt and leading him into the bedroom.

Sometimes they went out to bars or to parties at the homes of friends. At one such party, he briefly met two women who, Allison whispered to him, were lesbians. Jack was astonished because both girls were so pretty and feminine. He had no idea lesbians came that way. One of them was even a redhead, but it was the blonde who most captivated him. She was giggly, girlish and stunningly beautiful, and she wore a tiny dress that exposed her suntanned shoulders and much of her chest. She was obviously braless, her hardened nipples pressing against the thin fabric, and Jack could not help but imagine her nude, right there amidst the party crowd.

The encounter was brief, and he did not even learn their names, but the next day, he started a new story about a cute little blonde lesbian that he named Libby, who would go naked at parties. At one such party, she met a red-haired woman named Mona. Amidst the bustling party crowd, the women flirted, one of them entirely nude, and by the end of the story, they were in a bedroom having sex. Jack did not know anything about lesbian sex, but he assumed it would be similar to how he made love to Allison when his equipment was not cooperating. But imagining the same scene with two women felt liberating because there was never a moment when an erection was expected of either of them, never a moment when the success or failure of their lovemaking was on the line, never a moment when one of them failed.

At work, Jack's job was going well. He was the paper's top business reporter and was good at interpreting company financial data. He had won several journalism awards and spoke at annual conferences.

His beat included electronics and the fast-growing personal computer industry, led by Apple and Microsoft. He had already written several stories about the technology and the various things people were doing with computers. Most recently, he was researching a story for the Sunday Business cover about the "Internet," a network of computer servers that enabled users to communicate and exchange information with other computer users all over the world. It sounded better than it actually was because, from what he could tell so far, unless you were a computer programmer, there really wasn't much useful information on the Internet that most people would care about.

For his story, Jack interviewed the local Internet Service Provider, which was a college-age guy named Jeremy who had set up the server in his parents' basement and was selling dial-up access for $15 a month. Jack bought a membership, and Jeremy walked him through the various ways one could access information across the Internet. Jeremy showed him how to query a server with Unix commands to see the directory of available files. On other servers, one could use Telnet or FTP to transfer files, or Gopher menus to navigate and drill down in directories. Although all of these files were plain text, one could download binary files of images. This was cumbersome, however, because one couldn't actually view the image until the download process was complete, which could take twenty minutes, and the user needed special software to view the image -- which, after all of that, could turn out to not be what the user actually wanted.

The newest platform, the World Wide Web, was an improvement over Gopher because instead of navigating by numbered menu items, one could click on a "hypertext link" of highlighted words on one page and the "browser" software would take you to another page that could be on the same server or perhaps another server located in a completely other country. Even more remarkably, the Web also had the functionality to display images right there on the screen along with the words. If the image was large, it would take a while for the page to load, and an empty box would be there in its place, but while you were reading the words on the page, the photo would eventually appear. The Web struck Jack as having great potential, but as yet it did not have much content, and it was hard to find Web pages unless you knew their specific Uniform Resource Locator. There were a few "search engines," inexplicably named for characters in the Archie comics, but these only searched for filenames, not actual content on the page.

One drawback to the World Wide Web, so far at least, was that most sites were not interactive in the way that Usenet newsgroups and BBS systems were. Web pages were static and only updated when the owner chose to do so. But anyone could post to a newsgroup or bulletin board simply by registering as a user. Some Usenet and BBS sites had begun mirroring their threads on the Web, but users still interacted only on the original platform.

Jeremy showed Jack the range of Usenet discussion groups. Most groups had moderators who approved or rejected posts and who often chimed in on a thread to remind users of the rules. The majority of discussion sites were about computer programming languages, but some were on topics like pollution, Buddhism or The Lord of the Rings. Still others were devoted to lifestyle and sex-related topics -- and these were mostly unmoderated. "Yeah, lotta sex sites," Jeremy laughed. "Whatever your kink may be, it seems like there's a place to talk about it. You got your gays, your transexuals, your fans of big tits, your fans of little tits, your nudists."

"Nudists?"

"Yeah, but no pictures except maybe some links to binary file downloads. Mostly just seems to be people talking about whatever it is they are into. I mostly go to the programming sites, but I think it's cool that all those sites exist. On the Internet, there's a place for everyone, man. You can be yourself. Hell, you can be somebody else entirely -- your secret self -- and no one would ever know!"