Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 22

The next morning, Jack went to the library to research his first building facade. They had decided to start with the First National Bank building because it was planned to be one of the main entrances to the mall. Built in 1910, the bank had four massive pillars and was on a hill with broad stone steps leading up to it. Most of the bank's history was completely boring, but it did get robbed by John Dillinger in 1934. Jack had heard about it when he was a child in the 1960s. One of the bank's pillars had pockmarks in it that Mickey Wymer insisted (with the confidence of an eyewitness) had been made by the Dillinger gang's machine gun.

Jack remembered being skeptical of that claim even at age 12, and indeed this legend had been debunked several times over the years whenever the Morning Star had published a story on the famous robbery. No shots had been fired, and the pockmarks (still visible on the facade) were just from normal erosion of some weaknesses in the stone. Fortunately for Jack, it had been more than a decade since any story had been done on the topic, and so it would be a new tale to many readers. He went back to the original coverage on microfilm and found quotes from bank employees saying Dillinger had been "polite and charming," telling everyone they'd be just fine so long as nobody did anything stupid trying to protect somebody else's money.

Jack was working at the microfilm station, going back and forth between the 16mm reels containing the index cards written by long-ago-retired Morning Star librarians, and the wider 35mm microfilm reels that contained every page of every edition published since the paper was founded. As he did this work, Jack kept his eye on the front and back entrances of the library, and noticed when Millie came in and went to her office. He waited at least five minutes for her to get settled, and then he walked over and casually poked his head in her doorway.

"Hey there," he said. "Am I interrupting anything?"

"Of course you are, but that's okay," she said, giving him another of her radiant smiles. "Actually, I could use your input on something. I'm going to make a pitch to Corporate on what I think we should do on the World Wide Web. The v.p. officially in charge of "new media" will be visiting soon, and I've got a spot on his schedule. Come around and look at what I've got so far."

Jack went around behind her desk and looked over her shoulder at her computer screen. It was a wonderful place to be because his face was so close to hers, and he could just glance over and see her ear and her neck while the scent of her wafted into his nose.

"Okay, on the opening slide," she said, clicking open the presentation to show a chart, "I tell a story that is familiar to most people who work for newspapers, but it's my starting point. So I say that The Brayton Morning Star has more than 250,000 daily subscribers, plus additional circulation through newsstands, sidewalk boxes, etc. We have a newsroom of more than 300 reporters, editors, photographers, graphic artists, and of course, librarians. And every day those journalists fan out across the city and the state, finding out what's new. What crimes were committed? What did the government do from the state legislature down to town and village councils? What's happening in the schools? What are local businesses doing? What sporting events took place and who won?

"We gather all of this information and write dozens of stories, and then we add wire service stories from all over the world, and oh, by the way, here are some recipes, advice columns, your horoscope, a crossword puzzle, and also some comics! We package all this information together and when midnight comes, we print it all out — 300,000 copies — and in the middle of the night we send out an army of boys on bikes to deliver a copy directly to your door so when you wake up in the morning, there it is on your front porch."

"And all we ask in return is 50 cents," Jack added. "And the next day we'll do it all again."

"Exactly," Millie said. "That's the point. The next day we have to do 100% of that work all over again because that's always the way we've had to do it. Yesterday's paper is gone. You may still have it on your coffee table for a day or two, but it's disconnected from today's paper and in a week you won't even be able to find it. So all of that work kind of just goes to waste. But now we have the Internet, specifically the World Wide Web, where we could present our collected work differently."

"I think I know where you're going with this," Jack said.

"So then I click to the encyclopedia pages we've been making internally -- bios of famous local people, backgrounder files on public issues in the news, histories of local companies and sports teams. Basically, it's the collected knowledge we've gained from all that daily news reporting. I'm using the term 'knowledge reporting' for this because, unlike the daily news report, this doesn't become obsolete, and it grows bigger and bigger with each day's effort. But we're not just stacking up all the previous stories on a topic and expecting readers to slog through them all, because instead we have these succinctly written encyclopedia-style narratives that always stay current. Whenever we publish a new story, we take whatever new kernel of knowledge that story contributes and we add that bit to our narrative, linking to the story that supports it."

"It's a great project," Jack said, "and the internet could certainly use an encyclopedia."

"Which the news industry is uniquely positioned to build! We have the expertise, the capability – and most importantly the credibility." She clicked to another slide. "Here's an example. Five years ago, there was a huge accident just west of downtown when a construction crane fell across the railroad tracks and caused a train derailment in which a tanker car carrying gasoline exploded and destroyed several buildings. There were 18 people killed and lots of injuries."

"I was in Harrington then," Jack said, "but that was a huge story statewide."

"At first, no one knew why the crane fell, so there were lots of rumors and crazy conspiracy theories. Our reporters investigated all of those rumors and every day we just kept reporting on what we knew, when we knew it, and we explained how we knew it. After several months, the cause was determined by several exhaustive investigations. Some mistakes made by the crane operators, and there was a weak spot in the ground where dirt had recently been moved around. Along the way, there were also several lawsuits, so by this point in time, we really do know exactly what happened – and this page compiles all of those answers. Granted, there will still be some boneheads in bars telling each other what they supposedly heard 'really' happened, but any sensible, normal, fair-minded person who reads this page would understand what's true and not true. And it's important that we, the nation's newspapers, perform this service because 90% of readers know that what we report is the truth. No one else has the credibility we have."

"Would this be free?"

"The encyclopedia pages would be freely available on the Internet, but they would each link to stories we've published, and presumably only our subscribers would have access to that."

"If I were the guy from Corporate, I'd ask about advertising."

"And I would have an answer for you, Mr. Corporate. We can easily design these pages with a vertical box on the right side of the screen, and then lower on the page, we can do the same thing several more times depending on how many ads have been sold."

"That's a really good point," Jack said. "Make sure you tell him that even if he doesn't ask. How about the possibility of scaling this up to a national product?"

"We can launch one of these in every city where we have a newspaper. It would need a bit of additional library staff hours, but each paper could get started with just a part-time slot and see how things go. The bigger papers in the chain could collaborate on national topics and all the papers could link to each other. Ultimately, I would hope that other newspaper chains do the same. After all, we're not really competing with them, so we could collaborate under the umbrella of the National Newspaper Association. Just imagine the resource we could build if we all agreed on some standardization and coordinate our efforts."

Millie looked at her watch. "I have a meeting with one of my staffers in a couple minutes, and I've been chattering away this whole time. What did you want to see me about?"

Jack was suddenly flustered, having forgotten what he intended to say to her. But as she gathered some files in her arms and stood up, he remembered his lines. "I owe you something," he said, having given significant consideration to deciding exactly how to say this. "I owe you a meal, and as I recall, you stipulated there should be wine involved."

"You are correct," she said, smiling. "Two glasses at least."

"I can accommodate that," Jack said, feeling a complicated sense of relief. "How about tonight? You pick the time and place."

"Well, I have an appointment late in the afternoon, so how about if we meet at Parnelli's at six? It's near the intersection of Shaw and Hulman. Want me to draw you a map?"

"Madam, I am an investigative business reporter," Jack said. "I can find a restaurant."

As she strode past him through the doorway, Jack was happy just to be in her wake but suddenly realized he had been so focused on executing his banter that his mind had not actually retained the name of the restaurant. He quickly wrote in his notebook "Shaw and Holeman" -- neither street name ringing any bells from his youth -- followed by "Petrelli's??"

He was going to go back downstairs to his desk, but saw that Millie had sat down at one of the tables with one of the other librarians, evidently to review some project. They were about 20 feet away and Millie was facing to the side so he could see her in full profile. She was having an animated conversation and not paying any attention in his direction, so he was free to just glance up at her from time to time as he did more work at the microfilm reader.

He was now researching the McQueen Building, which spent its last few decades as a series of department stores, but had been built by Albert McQueen in 1921 as an automobile showroom. McQueen did not deal in any specific model, but bought cars he liked from all of the independent manufacturers. There were Packards, Hudsons, Studebakers, and so on, all displayed in the giant plate glass windows of the first floor. A ramp was built inside so that cars could be driven up to the second-floor roof to be displayed out in the open. The ramp went all the way up to the third floor where there was room to park a single vehicle. McQueen's office took up what remained of the third-floor office space, and he would drive whichever car he preferred for himself -- often a Stutz Bearcat or Rolls Royce Phantom -- up the ramp to park next to his office.

McQueen was also a hot air balloonist and used one to promote his business by flying over cities trailing advertising banners. He died during one such event when his balloon was struck by lightning.

After a while, Millie's meeting concluded and she got up and walked away, seeming to take the light with her. Jack packed up his things and put the reels of microfilm in the "Returns" tray. Glancing around to make sure Millie was not coming back, Jack went to the City Directory and opened it to the green section where the pages were organized by street and number. Next to each address was the name of the resident or business at that address, and as the addresses crossed other streets, those intersections were noted. He found "Shaw" and traced down the list of addresses until he reached the intersection with "Hulman," keeping one finger on the spot as he scanned the rest of the way in case there was a "Holeman" also. Finding no similar name, Jack came back to the Shaw/Hulman intersection and read the names on either side. "Parnelli's" -- that was it -- 744 N. Shaw St. The City Directory only listed the addresses and did not have a map, so when Jack got back to his desk, he spread open his folding map to find the address again to figure out how to drive to it.

That evening, Jack got to the restaurant 15 minutes early just to be sure. It had a separate bar area, so he went in there first to have a quick vodka tonic. He paid for that separately so it would not be part of the dinner check, and by 6:00, he was seated at a booth waiting for her, a nearly untouched glass of Chardonnay in front of him. When he saw her coming, he was pretty sure a medical exam at that moment would prove that indeed his heart skipped a beat. Maybe two. She had gone home to change and was wearing a summer dress that showed a lot of her arms and shoulders. She had pinned her hair up loosely and was not wearing jewelry, so her neck and earlobes were utterly exposed.

She caught him looking and blushed a little as she said, "Yes, I have even more freckles now than when we were kids."

"You look good in freckles," Jack said, pleased with himself for coming up with that line with no preparation. But then he worried that it sounded too flirtatious and he rushed on. "I didn't know what wine you like, and I thought it would be a bad idea to guess."

"You're right about that because I am very particular about wine. She studied the wine list and absently adjusted her hair with one hand, giving Jack another thrilling look at her underarm. Naturally, she had no freckles there and her skin was dazzlingly white. He managed to look away just in time before she lifted her eyes from the menu, and their eyes met. In that moment, he wanted to tell her how much he had missed her blue eyes the past 20 years, but he knew that would be a mistake.

Soon, Millie had a glass of Pinot Noir in front of her, and they had both ordered dinner. They chatted about a few small things, and then there was a moment of silence as they both took their first bites of their entrees. She had not mentioned his father, and he did not want to mention her pregnancies, so he carefully said, "So far, you've told me about things that happened last week at your conference and things that happened the year we last saw each other. I'd really like to learn what all has happened in between."

"Oh, nothing extraordinary," she said with a shrug. "Mostly I went to school and worked. I dropped out my second year of college when I got pregnant the first time, and by the time I split with Todd, I was 25 or 26. I moved back home with my parents, got a job, and went to college classes at night until I got my undergrad. By that time, I had started working here as an abstractor, and I decided I loved libraries, so I got my master's in library science, and when my old boss retired, they hired me in his place."

As she made this last statement, Millie bounced a little in her seat, which caused one of her string straps to fall halfway down her freckled shoulder. She absently pushed it back up, but this motion created a moment of cleavage in the v-neck of her dress. Jack had to absorb both of these details with his peripheral vision because they were making eye contact as she spoke.

"You do have a really great . . . library," he said.

"Thank you," she said, "and you're damned right it's great."

"So you're finally done with all of that schooling."

"Actually no," she said, laughing. "I'm working on another master's -- not related to my job but just something I'm interested in."

"What's that?"

"Theology. I'm working on a Master of Divinity -- or 'M-Div' as we call it in the biz. I just started last semester, and I'm only taking one class over the summer, so I'm really not very far along yet."

"So does that mean . . . you're going to be a minister?"

She laughed. "Oooh, did I detect a note of terror in your voice? No, I'm not doing it for that reason. I'd be good at that, though -- giving sermons and doing all the little blessings and rituals of a church service. I love liturgy. Sometimes I go to Catholic mass because nobody does liturgy like those Catholics."

"They've had a lot of practice. But you're not Catholic, right? Or did I miss that part of the story? I thought they were strict about that sort of thing."

"Some of them are, some of them aren't. I just made an office appointment with the parish priest and asked him if I could take communion. He said he didn't think it was his job to turn people away from God."

"So you still believe in God?" Jack asked and then immediately corrected himself. "I mean, not that there's anything wrong with--."

"I don't believe the way we did growing up, and not the Catholic way either," Millie said as the waiter brought them each a second glass of wine. "At lunch, you talked a little about that year your mom died and how you stopped believing in God after that." Jack nodded, and she went on. "As you know, that was a pretty shitty year for me too, and I went through a similar thing in which you suffer personal losses and you pray to God to not let that thing happen, but it does anyway and you don't know if God is punishing you or if he just isn't there."

"I'm pretty sure it's the latter."

"I felt that way too for a long time, and I still do -- in that, I don't believe there's an all-powerful God watching over me and keeping me from harm. Because harm came to me anyway and I will clobber anyone who tells me God's freaking master plan required me to experience that harm."

"Couldn't agree more," Jack said, lifting his glass in toast. "And yet . . . you go to church -- Catholic mass, no less -- and you're getting a divinity degree."

"Just because I rejected the specific construct of the Divine that you and I grew up with doesn't mean no other construct can be true."

"Spoken like someone getting a divinity degree."

"I think you and I just reacted differently to the realization that the God we had been taught to believe in could not be true. I stopped believing too, but I wasn't angry. In a weird way, I was sort of relieved that there was no God because that meant what happened to me was just random chance and not some punishment or failure on my part. And I got really curious about how religion came to be at all, so I started reading non-religious, scholarly books about religion. For the most part, my interest is just academic, but I do have spiritual experiences-- not with an omnipotent lord and savior, but sometimes in church I feel a rush of connection to others who are experiencing the mass with me and with humanity in general. And not just with humanity but all life. With this planet. With Creation."

"Creation? Don't you need a Creator for that?"

"Actually, no, you don't. Creation does not require an intentional Creator, nor does a Gift require an intentional Giver. We can't know whether a deity is involved, and we don't need to in order to appreciate Creation and that our moment in it is a great Gift. I get blessings all the time, but I don't believe a deity gave them to me. I receive them through Grace, meaning I didn't earn or deserve them, but they came to me anyway."

"That is either really profound or clever semantics; I can't tell."

"Think what you want. I'm not trying to convert you to anything. But studying religion without being mentally stuck inside a particular religion can be really illuminating. I've read a bunch of books on the historical Jesus, and in one of them this scholar made a list of all the sayings of Jesus and counted up how many times each saying was repeated in different sources -- because in historical research, finding multiple attestations increases the likelihood that the person actually said it."

"Like the camel through the eye of a needle thing being in three different gospels!" Jack exclaimed. "I've used that one a lot."

"I'll bet you have. But there are more sources than just the books that got officially included in the Bible -- which didn't happen until 300 years after Jesus died. There were dozens of other gospels and other writings about Jesus that didn't get chosen for canon. So this scholar looked at every source and counted up the number of multiple attestations of the sayings of Jesus -- and guess which one was quoted most."

"I haven't a clue."

"'This is the Kingdom of God'."

"Okay, so that means . . ."

"Well, maybe Jesus was talking about this world that we live in, not Heaven. THIS is the kingdom of God. Look around you, he said. Don't you SEE it all around you??

"Is that what he meant?"

"We don't know what he meant. I just think it's interesting that this particular phrase ends up being the most likely thing he actually said. Sure, he might have meant Heaven, or maybe the spiritual realm you enter on Earth when you believe in him. That's what Christianity says. But I like to think he might have meant that THIS life that you have NOW is what matters. You don't know if there's an afterlife, so don't be so focused on that. Focus on the gift of This Moment!"

Jack almost made another glib comment about her being good at sermons, but he didn't want to trivialize what she was saying. He was saved by the arrival of the waiter, who had apparently been waiting for the right moment. Jack gave him a credit card, and he and Millie looked around to see that most of the other tables were now empty.

Millie giggled. "Sorry, I got a little carried away. I do that sometimes."

"Don't apologize," he said. "I think it's really interesting. Kind of a 'Be Here Now' philosophy, right?"

"Exactly. Have you read that?"

"Well, no."

"Don't bother. It's kind of a slog, and besides, the whole point is right there in the title."

"That sort of thing seems hard to actually do," Jack said. "It's like when people say to live each day as if it were your last day, but if we actually did that, we would quit our jobs and spend all our money."

Millie laughed. "I agree, but there's another way of conceptualizing that idea. Suppose you are an old man on your deathbed and you make a wish that you could just experience one day again, back when you were young and healthy. Maybe you were granted that wish and today is that day."

"That one does work better, but seems a bit unlikely."

"I'm just saying that none of us really knows whether there is a God or what happens after this life. All we know is that we're here -- right now -- and if God put us here intentionally, then he probably wants us to appreciate this experience. And if NO ONE put us here intentionally and there is NO afterlife, well then by golly we REALLY need to appreciate the time we have here."

They left the restaurant and parted near their cars in the parking lot. She hugged him and kissed his cheek, saying, "I'm so glad you came back, Johnny. It's just like old times."

"Except the sermons are a lot more fun."

"Thank you."

"And not as scary."

Driving back downtown, Jack went over the conversation in his head. He was thrilled that he got to spend time with her, but he knew he had to control his feelings. She said it was 'just like old times,' which clearly meant she didn't think of him as someone she would date. He was just a friend, like the many, many other friends she had.