Communion, a short story

The last user of the ancient Chinese women's written language said "With writing so much pain disappears." I cannot say that I have had the same feeling and I did not have that at the end of Communion, reposted as one document below. 

The story is fictional; those who know me know that I was not 22 years old in 1962. The fiction is, as fiction should be, based in part on real life, in the case of Communion, of others, not me, and formed by imagination.

When I was asked to write this story it was intended by my commissioner to be a book. Once before I had been urged to write a book, years ago, based on my experiences with, and study of, China but I didn't feel that I had a China book in me. After repeated implorings in Communion I agreed on one condition: that I would write it from the female perspective. I told my commissioner and it is true, that men, even the best male writers, write women exceptionally poorly as a rule. The late Larry McMurtry was a singular exception and Charles Dickens and Ernest Hemingway, except in Garden of Eden, were the rule of putridness. I told the commissioner that I had one chance to write as great a book as I was able and I was going to give it my all. I accepted this ask with the condition mentioned. I spent two hours on the phone in a single conversation with the commissioner getting to know as much as I could about the female character, who I did not know, and several other conversations of lesser length. I thought, and I still think I have a pretty good handle on her. Rereading parts of Kristin Labransdatter was very helpful to an understanding of an archetypal strong woman.

Installment one, posted with the Roman numeral I on Feb. 20, was written very closely to what the commissioner read to me over the phone. He was thrilled with all that he read that I wrote, stopping at, I think, installment six, terming the whole “brilliant" on several occasions. Be that as it may, it was told from a male perspective. As commissionee, I am aware that it was conceived by my commissioner as an idealized male. I accepted and made David a more idealized character. It fit with Diotima’s ladder of beauty (or love as both of us interpreted it). 

As these loose, close commissions go this one got derailed by the commissioner's want of greater speed on my part. I could not comply and he began writing his own. I then put Communion out of my mind and off my bucket list....But he then wanted us to write in parallel and I agreed again. It was liberating for me and for him. I could now write as I wished and he as he wished. But I never did. To  write the story from the female POV would require re-writing everything, starting with installment one. I didn’t have it in me to do that. The POV changes only in the installments written today. On the whole it is not Maeve’s story but David’s and what happens to him with Maeve.

The idealization of David was, to me, and to my commissioner true, or true enough to a life really lived but it boxed me in on Maeve. Once again, this was very close to a lived box. In any event I wrote Maeve less idealized, more a “normal” human being of the female gender, which, anecdotally, is a human with earlier interest in the communions of the flesh than males of the same age. I believe that thet is true in fact, it is true to the real life of those on whom the characters were modeled, including lusty, strong-willed Kristin Labransdatter of historical fiction. Maeve would have some of Kristin’s traits.

I have read enough to know of the Big Stuff that gets noticed by literary betters. There are several Big Stuffs seeded in the first few installments. But then as the commission changed I just decided to let the thing write itself based on what I know of women and came to know of this woman and on what I wrote previously about David.

And that brings me back to the Chinese women's language. Starting with the installment where Maeve refuses David's wish to stop the 4-wheel drive I gave Maeve a strong character. It was not a kind character; it was not true to the life of any one woman but of many and the pain of writing its effect on David began rather than disappeared.

I decided last night in a phone call with my commissioner that I thought I was probably going to have to get rid of David to develop Maeve and to write from her perspective and I had a plan last night to do that. But having made that tentative decision, when I got up today I decided to just do it in the way I did in VII, VIII, IX, and X. I felt the need to bring this project to closure. 

Since I completed X, and with it the short story, I have felt bad all day. It is not a happy ending, some lives do not end happily. David the character was a young man of uncommon promise with an uncommon but realistic idea of what could be done by one individual and by a group of fellow communicants as, for example in Volodymyr Zelensky's Servant of the People. David’s intentions were as pure and as good as he explained to Maeve in the installment that ended at the service station. The remaining installments I took from the real life experiences of a few people and put them together as Maeve's and David’s. I think there is verisimilitude in the last few installments; I know that there is for I know what happened. 

I had the realization last night that David and Maeve were ill-matched as communicants, that an enduring relationship, which is what my commissioner intended, never would have worked. In the last installment Maeve rationalized her behavior and thoughts the same. And so the last parts of the story took a natural, I thought, course, a painful one for me, and although David Ranc is my creation I don't know what happened to him either and it truly winces me a bit lol.

The short story is 21 pages long according to WordCounter, about normal length, I think, for a short story, perhaps too long for Blogger. With no more apologies or regrets than that this is the best I could do under the circumstances (as what Maeve and David did was the best they could do under their circumstances), this is Communion, the short story.

# 

Communion: The sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.

She opened the door into a dark auditorium.

Heads turned.

She was late. She had received a National Science Foundation award and had read an abstract of her paper on the behavior of biological organisms. At one point she mispronounced: orgasms. She left in mortification after getting her certificate. She fled into the nearest open classroom to hide her shame. She needed a break from science, she decided.

This was different. He was different. In the dark auditorium she sat transfixed. It was a revolution and it exploded before her in a flash of light in her mind in that darkened auditorium. He was a revolutionary and they, idea and man, obliterated all that she had come to accept, unquestioning, as reality. She could never go back to the science that had been normal to her. And she never did.

...

The young man was seated nearer the front to her right when she entered, his was one of many heads that had turned. When the lecture ended and the auditorium was illuminated again, she got up to leave and the young man got up to leave. He turned, as all heads turned then, towards the exit. He caught a glimpse of her going through the doors. "Long, shapely legs".  He couldn't help himself. He had not been looking for her, nor thinking about her, nor what her legs might be like, but she was there and her legs were long and shapely and he was a 22-year old he and she of the long shapely legs was a she. But he did not hurry after her. Thomas S. Kuhn's lecture had exploded in his mind also and it contained but one thought, the new structure of science .Until he saw the long, shapely legs. Then they were in his mind, too. He couldn't help it. But they were out of his mind by the time he got to the door. But then they were there again. 

The foyer was crowded with attendees, all talking, dazed as if zombies, in small groups and were leaving, more or less, aimlessly, and now he was standing next to her.They were not on his mind, the legs, they were there, they just were, it was hard physical fact but it was in spite of the legs rather than because of them that he said to her, who he had never seen before, "You were late." It was awkward. "Better late than never. It was just what I needed" was her reply, which mooted the young man's dawning awareness of awkwardness. For there was a communion of the mind right then and there. They had each experienced the revolution individually and now, the tall, handsome young man realized, they shared this revolution. It meant the same thing to her as it did to him and there was no going back, not for her, not for him, not for them. And they never did.

 

"I needed a break from science," she continued in the foyer amid the buzz of conversation as they slowly made their way toward the exit.

It was mid-afternoon in Chicago. February, 1962. It was cold and windy and she was tired and needed a break from science. "Would you like to meet for supper?" the young man asked. "I'm hungry", she replied affirmatively without affirming. It was biological instinct. She was hungry therefore she had to eat. It required no thought. "How about 5:30, here in the restaurant?" 

She had come from St. Mary's with her adviser Dr. Walsh. The young man had come, from where? She did not know. He was there on business with his father. What kind of business? She did not know. What was his name? She did not know even that. Nor did he know her name. It was all reaction: revolution-->dazed wandering; hunger-->eat. There was no call for formalities.

She went back to where she was staying; he went back to wherever he was staying and at 5:30 this communion of strangers reconvened in the Sheraton Blackstone restaurant for supper. 

It was a large round table. It was four of them, the young people, the chaperon-adviser Dr. Walsh and the young man's father. Instinctively they grouped by age, the two young people on one arc of the circle, the two older men on another. 

She was not a she with long, shapely legs then, he was not a tall, handsome young man then, they were two of the human species with the brains of the species which enabled minds and souls which were unique among species on this world, the only world that any of their species knew and their brains comprehended the lecture and their minds understood the change in their reality and their souls felt it.

They communicated. This was done orally. That is, they made sounds that their brains transmitted to their vocal cords and mouths to form sounds and to string those sounds into longer strands that communicated thoughts that formed in their minds that their brains transmitted electrically. That's all they had, that was their reality of communication. There was not much of this oral communication on the young arc of the circular table. There were these sounds, they were strung together into these strands but the strands were short as this method of communication goes in this species and the times when there were no sounds were longer. Their minds were communicating, though. Their souls, too. This communication had not the friction of mediation of electrical signals to the biological features of vocal cords and mouth. On the older arc of the table the men were practicing normal oral communication, unmelodious, complex, lengthy strings of sounds communicating facts. 

What were facts now?

The dinner over, the four parted, the young people without formalities.

"Breakfast?"

"7."

 

It was different in the morning.

One revolution around the sun had worked a completely new physical reality, as undeniable as a rock or long, shapely legs, and he noticed as he had the legs. The physical reality was comprised of puffy, red-outlined eyes and a red splotch on the arm. This was hard, sickening Newtonian fact, not the breathtaking ambiguity of Kuhn or the relativity of Einstein. It was just there, as the legs had been just there.

She felt different things than she had the day before. She had a new emotional reality, shaken, not self-assured. He noticed this too.

Their communication was normal now, in complete English sentences, not in half-articulated telepathy.

"What's the matter?", reading her new emotional reality with old-science certainty.

"I have a stapf infection on my arm," and she rolled up her sleeve and showed him her skin.

She was a pre-med student with a major in biology. Her father, a physician, had had the same red splotch on his neck weeks before and it had sent him to the hospital. So of course she had had it swabbed and cultured. Of course, she knew that the culture could come back positive--there were only two finite outcomes, negative and positive. She had known that as certainly as she knew her physical existence and her nominal identity. But she had not been emotionally prepared for a + result.

He was not a scientist. "Does it hurt?" he asked.

"No, it is not painful. But it can kill if it goes to the brain or the heart."

Now time accelerated, propelled on by urgency.

"I have to leave". The brain sent the electrical signal to her vocal cords and mouth to generate that sound fact but her eyes darted, her mind raced.

"I have to go home to daddy."

"Where is home?"...

..."I have to go to South Bend to pack...Barnesboro."

Of course, he did not know where Barnesboro was but he could see her mind racing in her eyes and did not ask. Nor did he ask what the treatment for staff was nor how long the regimen. He was not a scientist.

"How will you get there?"

"I don't know, rent a car, bus, train, I'll figure it out." Her mind raced, her eyes darted. I have to get home and get this treated stat.

"The roads are terrible, this is February in Chicago. You are in no..."

I'm in no shape to drive. She did not answer.

...He thought he had better preface that with, "I have no doubt you are capable of driving or taking a bus or train, but you must know that you are not in an optimal state to drive alone or be driven by somebody you do not know. How long will it take to get where you need to go? When you came down just now you instantly pressed the urgency of time: 'I have to leave.' Is treatment for staff not time sensitive?"

It's an hour and a half to South Bend and seven hours to Barnesboro. She did not answer.

"I see it in your eyes: You know that bus and train do not conquer time for you. What would your father recommend as a physician? 'I can take a series of buses and trains and be in Boonsboro'...

..."Barnesboro."


"How far is Barnesboro from South Bend?"...

"Seven hours."

Now, it was non-verbal again, musical, a circular canon.

..." 'I can be in Barnesboro tonight or tomorrow at the latest depending on the roads, or I can be there in three or four or five days; you know what your father would say? I will drive you to South Bend and then to Barnesboro."

She did not answer. He saw her pause and took that as a good sign.

"I'll take you."

At that moment she was not a young she with long, shapely legs and he was not a young he. She was a human being of irrelevant gender who was in need and he was a human being of irrelevant gender whose family business it was to serve humans of irrelevant ascriptive characteristics.

Now her eyes stopped dancing and bored into his. "No..." But it was a "No" elongated by uncertainty. "It is too much of an imposition." The logistics were daunting and time-consuming, overwhelming to her brain, and fatiguing. She was needful.

"I will rent a 4-wheel drive," he offered. "We can switch off driving."

What about Dr. Walsh? Her mind raced at the speed of light which slowed time which was her deadly enemy. Thought took time. She was on a circular track of thought that would never lead to linear action. There is no time for decision-by-committee. This guy is here now. She cut the circle of inaction abruptly.

"Let's go." She took him.

Her decisiveness took his breath away. He inhaled sharply.

"I will go up and pack...Thank you." She was not so preoccupied to forget her manners and she was deeply grateful and she reached out with her hand and touched his forearm for emphasis. "Will you get the car? I'll only be a few minutes."

And so they went.

 

The frisson of early morning lifted once they were in motion. They had acted; it was getting done. They were silent.

"I don't even know your name!" she suddenly exclaimed and they looked at each other in shock and then dissolved in laughter.

“Nor I yours! My name is David.”

"What do you do, David?“

"Oh, a leettle of zis and a little of zat,” he said playfully. “Seriously, my family are bankers, originally from Geneva..."

"...Swiss bankers, huh?”, and she laughed.

"Actually yes, stereotypical as that is. But we're not the hush-hush Swiss bank of stereotype. Truth is, I guess we were at one time. Pardon my sacrilege, but we have more money than God and it got to be embarrassing for my father and in his generation we morphed into a bank-cum-philanthropic foundation. Even the purest stream can source at a fetid muck oozing out of the ground.”

“I see”, she smiled at the metaphor. "You have a slight accent but I can't place it."

"Sacre bleu, mademoiselle! I do not know which accent you may be picking up on. Multilingualism is de rigueur in Switzerland--and in banking--and the emphasis was kept by my family when we immigrated to the States. I speak French, German, English and Spanish.."

"Your surname?”

"Ranc".

"How do you spell that, R-A-N-K?"

"Non, Mme, R-A-N-C. French. Actually, it was R-A-N-C-K, Germanized, at one time. We were Huguenots in Paris. Ran the country--French Protestants to this day run France financially--But then..."

"I know, the Massacre."

"Oui. Oui. Are you?..."

"Catholic."

"Oh, so your people ran my people out of Paris--out of the whole country!--and here I am giving you a lift to South Bend."

“…And Barnesboro."

"And Barnesboro." (He took that as a very good sign.) 

“And your name?”

“Maeve.”

"Like my accent, I cannot place that name."

"Irish."

"Ah, Irish.

Très catholique. I am safe with you, aren't I?", and they both laughed.

She did not answer.

"Your last name?"

“Ryan. And on whom does your Swiss bank ooze its philanthropic muck, Monsieur Ranc?"

"At the present time we are devoted to poor Irish immigrant girls in America."

 

 

 Maeve knew he was being deliberately light-hearted.

"Where is Boonsboro?"

"BARNESBORO!"

"Where is Barnesboro?"

"In Western Pennsylvania. It's about two hours northeast from Pittsburgh."

"Why were you at the Kuhn lecture?", she asked. David didn't want to go there.

"I go to school there."

"At the University?"

"Oui."

"I thought you said you were on business with your dad."

"I was. Both. Father was in town and I go to the University of Chicago."

What are you studying?"

"You know, I don't know how to answer that, Maeve. The school records would show 'Major: Liberal Arts.' What am I studying? People, I guess," it was out before he realized.

She didn't pick up on it.

"I just want to learn."

"Why are you doing this?"

"What?

"Driving a woman halfway across a strange country?"

"You're taking me!" he parried, and then decided to go there.

“The witch."

"Are you calling me a witch?"

"No, no, no. Plato, The Symposium, Diotima. Feeling for the witch."

"Which is the witch in Plato?"

"The highest form of beauty." Well, that is the meaning! Not what I mean by it but...blame the translation.

She thought he was being deliberately opaque with her now. He noticed.

"First rung on the ladder, one person's physical beauty, then the beautiful body archetype, then the beautiful soul, then the beauty of knowledge. The highest rung is 'Beauty itself', an eternal oneness. I'm on the third rung, I guess, knowledge."

Is this guy a hippie?

He had a panic as he listened to himself. She's going to think I'm some kind of flower child and conceded,

"I know it all sounds squishy. I'll explain.” He put on his turn signal and slowed down to pull off the road.

"What are you doing?", Maeve demanded, alarmed.

"I want to explain this to you and I want to look you in the eyes when I do." 

"There is no time for this. Just drive!"

He had lost himself and badly overstepped. It made him sick to his stomach and fluid leaked from his eyes, from the pores on his forehead and under his arms. He drove on. There was silence in the car but now they were approaching South Bend and he needed her to guide him on the city streets to St. Mary's and her dormitory.

"Do you need help or am I just dropping you off?

Dropped off, Maeve thought.

She said,

"My dorm friends have packed up most of my stuff and shipped it home. I only have a few personal items to get. Stay here with the car and I'll be just a few minutes."

And so he did.

 

 

Maeve recognized being “dropped off” as an emotional trigger in herself. She had been just “dropped off” at a private, Catholic high school in Western Pennsylvania; she had been just “dropped off” at St. Mary’s. It triggered feelings of powerlessness in her, of a lack of freedom, of resentment at both. But David knew nothing of this trigger when he asked if I needed help or was just to be “dropped off” while she packed her personal essentials. She knew that. But he was taking me and was just dropping me off and now I am starting on the very long second leg of the odyssey to Barnesboro with a man who I knew next to nothing about. But hadn’t he gotten me to South Bend without incident? Well, the wanting to pull over and “look into my eyes” thing. Which I maybe overreacted to. At least it turned out that way. But had I been too alarmed in the moment? On the first leg of a trip in a medical emergency? Maeve thought not. Was this though not an "imposition", her exact word at the aborted breakfast meeting, on David? He said it was not. Was it not a constraint on his freedom? He said it was not. Even if it was imposition and constraint can one not voluntarily give up one's freedom? Absolutely, you can. But had she not "taken" David in some meaningful sense? I at least took him up on his offer to drive me? What's in it for him? He paid for the 4-wheel drive. Oh God, he has his hook in me. Had Maeve taken advantage of him? Absolutely not. I now owe him money. You fool! He comes from a family of Swiss bankers, he says. Is that true? If it is true, and if the family “has more money than God”, which is what he also said, then bankers make money by lending money. That's what's in it for him. And sex. He may want me to pay him "in kind." "Ass, grass, or cash, nobody rides free! This witch thing, "highest level of beauty? Bullshit. As she gathered her things Maeve resolved to reassert her power and also to confirm David’s bio.

As he sat impotently like a chauffeur in the car waiting on Maeve, David began to have doubts. Maybe his vision had failed him. Maybe this mad Irishwoman was not cut from the cloth to be a communicant with him in his version of the family mission. He resolved to try explaining fully once, as he promised, and if it didn’t take he would just drop her off safely in Barnesboro as he had also promised.

"I'm driving", Maeve said as she re-entered the car. It was not a passive-aggressive offer ("Say No!, please."), it was a demand. David noticed the difference.

"I want to know what's going on."

"You're taking me to Barnesboro."

"Cut the debonair, Monsieur Ranc, let me see some id."

"What?" 

"I want to see some id, right now." He pulled out his school id and looked at her with questioning eyes.

Damn, University of Chicago.

"Okay, that's fine," she handed it back to him sheepishly.

"Do you see where it says," David pointed earnestly, "right under my picture, 'School of Arts and Sciences, Major Kidnapping?'"

She fell for it and had been studying the school id with him. That got her Irish up and she pulled off, tires screeching and sat silently with pursed lips.

Is there anything more oppressive than silence in a car? Both.

David's body started shaking with laughter. He couldn't hold it in.

"I'm sorry," and Maeve reached out and touched the ulnar side of David's left wrist with the fingers of her right hand. They both glanced at each other and then quickly away as if they had committed a murder and Maeve withdrew her hand like she had just touched a hotplate.

"Pay attention to the road!," David yelled. "Damn mad dogs and Irishwomen." 

Maeve was laughing so hard tears came to her eyes, seeing was like looking through a swimming pool, and she lowered her head over the steering wheel.

"MAEVE, you're going to get us both killed! Pull over, I'll drive this thing."

 She pulled over. 

"If we do something physical for a few minutes it'll release the silly tension we have and we'll be fine.” Maeve the scientist, the doctor-to-be, said.

Then the police officer pulled up to do a welfare check on the young man doing pushups and the young woman doing tuck jumps by the side of a major interstate freeway.

 

Communicant: A member of a fellowship.

After avoiding arrest, and time-wasting drug tests, Maeve and David resumed the 7-hour odyssey to Barnesboro so that Maeve could get treatment from her daddy for a staff infection.

It is not necessary, I will just drop you off in Barnesboro, David had thought to answer coolly if she asked again about his work after she had demanded his identification in the car in South Bend. Her a communicant?, he had laughed bitterly in his mind. From Boonsboro? "Have to get home to daddy" A cloistered Catholic girl all her life traipsing all over the world after the witch? I’ve got too much to do for this. And David was busy. It looked like his sixth sense had failed him with Maeve. The press of her time had perhaps not given him sufficient time to “look her in the eyes” and simultaneously into her soul, and properly assess her. David hated wasting time and once he was convinced he snipped that circle of unpromise and moved on to the next prospective communicant. He smoldered in the car waiting on this Irish-American princess.

But that was before the laughter on the identification; before the comic road side exercises and the police welfare check. It had been a fun adventure so far, little spicy in a couple places.

"We have a long trip. Could you fill in the blanks in your bio 'without looking me in the eyes'"?, Maeve asked solicitously although she knew as soon as it was out that she shouldn't have added that last dig. 

David almost went "It's not necessary” on her. He was  this close to giving up. "Without looking me in the eyes." Bitchy thing to say. Alright, you owe her that much. One time. He needed to reset the tone if this had any chance.

"Maybe we could do without the sarcasm."

"Maybe we could," Maeve acknowledged, abashed.

David started fresh, glad to have that concession.

"Everything I have told you so far about my family is totally true."

"...But not the total truth."

"Stop."

Maeve stopped.

"The total truth and totally true both...Well, I guess not totally true if you want all the biographical details, like I have three brothers who manage their branches here and there and are responsible for gaining knowledge of their regions. And I have the usual relatives. We did emigrate from Switzerland in my father's generation. I was born in the States. We do have...You know what I told you about the money. (He didn't want to talk about it.) All true. Father did change the family mission from wealth accumulation without much conscience to wealth accumulation and dispensation with conscience. I am with this reconfigured family mission totally, conceptually. Everything I have told you so far about myself is totally true...But not the total truth."

"I do go to the University of Chicago, of which as you now have confirmation. My father was in town on business, the business is as I told it to you truthfully; we were at Professor Kuhn's lecture as part of the third, language, rung on Diotima's ladder."

"What I have not told you previously is that my personal mission differs significantly from my father's. I don't remember if I told you: Peace, prosperity, education, health?"

"No."

"Okay, those are the four legs of my father's mission. I differ with father on the peace leg on both practical and philosophical grounds. Practical: Father cannot get it through his head that we are one family, we are not a nation-state. We cannot go around practicing foreign policy for real nations. You can get arrested by your country and sometimes executed by the "beneficiary's" country for doing that. It produces resentment. I cannot make father see that, I think because wealth has been such carte blanche for us over the generations. It is in our DNA almost and father cannot see money for what it is, a tool, one tool, with limits on it."

"That concrete difference--to go back to the metaphor of the chair, I cut one leg off and now had a three-legged chair. That led to the realization that there was a grave philosophical difference between us. The whole model, like a three-legged chair, was unstable. Parenthetically, I have kept this ‘total truth’ from my father. He does not know that I so fundamentally, and on different levels simultaneously, reject the peace leg of his conceived mission, the scope of his mission, and hence his mission. Nations make peace, not family foundations, the world has a United Nations body now; capitalism generates prosperity for the greediest and potentially at least for the neediest but the latter is the realm of politics of which we, of Swiss descent, avoid as a third rail. There are colleges and universities in every country of the globe to provide mass education, and we have the Red Cross and the Scandinavian model and so on for health. We also have philanthropic organizations for all, and even for peace theory, although, of course, none of the philanthropic organizations can practice peace-making. Where is our niche?"

It was a rhetorical question and Maeve did not answer.

"Well, it is not going to be doing any one thing much less all of those things at the macro level. It is impossible in the one and redundant in the others. It is also, and this is my deepest fundamental disagreement, immodest. Immodest," David repeated for emphasis. Rather, it's imperial.

"One of the things I like about America is its modesty of reach. I should say Maeve, I am not enamored of all that is America but for our purposes that is neither here nor there. My father thinks like George III or Milner or Rhodes, he was born on third base, thinks he hit a triple, and thinks he could teach North American colonists, Indians on the subcontinent, Egyptians, and black Africans in Rhodesia and South Africa how to hit triples--when they don't know what baseball is and have no interest when you teach them."

"I. Am. Not. Doing. That." When my father finds this out he could cut me loose from the family wealth, I don't think he will, but he could, and I am prepared to go my own way.

“Not to be immodest and certainly not to be ingratiating, just full disclosure I am rebellious, it seems a lot of us our age are, and I am a guerrilla rebel, keeping this to myself. And now sharing with you."

"Taking you home is an example of what I do and what I envision doing.  It so happened that I ran into you but it could have been anybody, of either gender, of any race or creed, and it has been others. The way that I was raised I envision myself being everywhere and nowhere and I have been a lot of places and none in particular. New York and Geneva I call homes and I have been to the capitals of several European, Eurasian, and Asian countries, to Tel Aviv, Cairo, Tehran, Salisbury and Johannesburg, everywhere we have branches. I have seen the fallacy of father's British Empire emulation. So when you protested that it was too much of an imposition, this is what I meant. This is not imposition but mission. And when I do these things, Maeve, it is the most intensely pleasurable feeling I have ever experienced, better than an orgasm. It is what I mean by the witch."

"When I do what I am doing now with you I am not only looking for opportunities but also communicants: people who can do the same for others. I am not looking for the Hope Diamond, I am looking for acres of diamonds, which will then seed more acres and so on."

"So I didn't know, but I was looking at you as a potential communicant."

An hour had passed. David was speaking with such passion that his voice was rising. He had never shown Maeve this side of him.

He took his eyes off his vision and noticed the gas gauge. "Hey, we have to stop for gas."

And so they stopped.

 

 

They had been at the service station for fifteen minutes. Both had used the facilities and David had pumped the tank full of gas.

"I'll relieve you," Maeve said and took over the driving. 

She pulled back onto the freeway but didn't even get the car up to cruising speed before putting her turn signal on and slowing down.

"What are you doing?" David asked.

Maeve did not answer. She pulled off the road and onto the berm and shut the engine off. She turned her body squarely toward David and took his face between her hands and kissed him full on his shocked, open mouth. She released him and laid back on the long bench seat.

"Can we have sex now?"

David was struck mute. 

And so they did.

 

 

A half hour later, after they were on the road again, Maeve said, "I bet you think I trapped you. But I really wanted you."

David did not respond.

On the remainder of the six hour drive to Barnesboro they did not communicate except for directions and the hazards of the weather. When they pulled into Dr. Ryan's 171-acre estate outside town it was after 7 p.m. David stopped under an illuminated lamp in the driveway close to the front door.

"I don't think we should see each other again," Maeve said, consumed with religious guilt and shame and too prideful to admit it. David did not respond. He got back in the 4-wheel drive and drove back to Chicago.

And they never did. 

 

 

Maeve did not go back to St. Mary's after her stapf cleared, nor to any other university, nor to Temple University Medical School where she had been accepted. She did not become a doctor.

She thought of David often in the days and weeks after. The lamp light outside the home would not turn off after that. The cold had damaged it somehow, freezing it in the on position. It was a reminder in the first few days but eventually it burned out. She wept a few times but it had been only three days, three Days of David, three revolutions around the sun. The tears dried, the bruise faded. The guilt and shame too. She rationalized. It never would have worked. He was a revolutionary. Me, a Johnny Appleseed missionary? She didn't tell anyone about the side of the road. Only two people knew, she and David, and now they were 1,000 miles apart.

She had not told her parents David's name. She had told them that a school friend was driving her. Another young woman from St. Mary's, she implied. That was why she had not even introduced David to her parents when they arrived under the lamp light at home in Barnesboro.

In the summer of 1963 Maeve met Dr. Emmitt Kovalchak, nine years her senior, and they began seeing each other. She never thought of David then. Maeve lived at home until she was married two years later. She bore Dr. Kovalchak three children. They lived in Barnesboro.

She never heard again from David. At first it bothered her a little bit--woman's pride. Why didn't he write? He didn't want me. Pride became resentment on a few occasions, the few that she thought of him. For a few years as she and her husband were having their family she did not think of David at all.

Two decades later, after the computer revolution Maeve, curious, googled David to see if she could learn anything about what had become of him. She could not find any trace of him. Had time turned the real into a dream? Or had her mind turned a dream into something real? She googled David a few times more over the years but could never learn anything.

And she never did.