Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 29

"There's something I haven't told you," Jack said. They had just ordered lunch at an outdoor cafe.

Millie looked up at him with concern. "What"?

"My last week in Harrington, they had a party for me, and there was a lot of drinking, and in retrospect I know I shouldn't have tried driving home, but at the time it just didn't occur to me. I almost made it all the way, but then I got stopped by the police. I almost got a DUI, but instead the court ordered me to attend six AA meetings."

Millie seemed to be waiting for more. "And?" she asked.

"And . . . I've been going to those meetings the past couple of weeks and didn't tell you."

"That's all?"

"Well . . . yeah."

"Johnny, you scared me," Millie said reproachfully. "I thought you were going to say you ran over a dog or something. Jeez."

"I'm sorry, I--"

"You don't actually have a drinking problem, right?"

"No," Jack said. "Definitely not."

"So you made a bad decision, your friends didn't help matters much, and you had some bad luck. That's your big reveal?"

"I guess I was embarrassed to tell you."

"I understand," she said, patting his hand. "But when you decided to tell me -- which I appreciate -- you should have used an inverted pyramid lead on that story. Like: I have to attend a few AA meetings because I almost got a DUI. You were taking so long getting to your point that I had all kinds of time to worry that it was something worse."

Jack exhaled in relief. "Sorry about that. I guess I built it up in my mind."

"I forget -- did you order the chicken sandwich?"

"Yes."

"Trade me half? I ordered the BLT."

"Glad to."

Jack felt utterly happy simply watching Millie talk and eat and drink her iced tea in the sunshine. She told a funny story about a meeting she had with Max, doing a pretty good impression of him. Their food came, and they swapped half of each sandwich. They ate in silence for a few minutes and then Jack said, "So, the other day you were telling me about the Sentient Earth."

"You mean before you interrupted me by seducing my corporeal vessel?"

"Your corporeal vessel? I assume you mean your very amazing body."

"Yes, my body. And they really are amazing — human bodies — aren't they? The opposable thumb was a great idea, and just think of the engineering it took to achieve bipedal locomotion. Whether designed by God or Evolution, something certainly gave us good corporeal vessels to carry our consciousness around in."

"I can't resist your corporeal vessel, especially when it's naked."

"It wasn't naked when you interrupted me."

"But it wanted to be."

"Did you have a question?"

"I forget."

"About the Sentient Earth?"

"Oh yeah. I was wondering how that was related to what you said about The Spirit — where our consciousness gets shredded and randomly scattered after we die."

"Well, I don't actually know, of course," Millie said. "No one knows. It's all speculation."

"Granted, but when you start your new religion, the Church of Millie--"

"I might not call it that."

"--and you have millions of people around the world attending your churches and putting money in your collection plates, you'll have to tell them something."

"Well, for starters, I think we need to build the next religion from scratch instead of just tacking something on top of the previous religion the way we've been doing for at least two thousand years. So if we scrap all that baggage and start over, then I would also contend that the logical place to start is the Earth itself. It is our creator. It nourishes us, and its beauty is all around us."

"And you think the Earth is sentient."

"I don't know if it is or not. I'm saying if we're going to have religion at all, if we're going to decide to worship anything at all, it should start with the Earth. And if people are capable of believing in the God of the Bible, then it is no great leap to imagine instead that the Earth has gradually become conscious and self-aware. And this can be rationalized at least as well as the God of the Bible. Maybe it has to do with all of the fields and forces associated with being a celestial body, or maybe — I think probably — the Earth's consciousness would have emerged because of all the life energy that now covers its surface. Not just people, but all life, and not just while we are alive, but after our bodies wear out and die. All of that energy, I would propose, makes up The Spirit."

"So it sounds like The Spirit and the Sentient Earth are the same."

"Not exactly the same because the Earth is physical. It provides the nourishment for Life to exist at all, and Life in turn -- perhaps -- has enabled the Earth to achieve consciousness. So they are intertwined in a Trinity kind of way. At first, I was thinking it was a Duality, but lately I've been thinking of it as a Trinity."

"What's the third part?"

"We are. Currently living humans."

"We're part of God? Not just the lowly worshippers?"

"God doesn't need lowly worshippers. She needs active, mature partners."

"To do what?"

"To manage the Paradise she has given us. To nurture and protect this singularly beautiful place in the freaking cosmos. We're on this one planet in the vastness of space, totally alone. There are things that God can't do, but humans can. God can't pick up this glass -- or even make glass in this shape."

"So, we are God's hands and all that," Jack said.

"I know it sounds corny and trite because we've all heard that saying so many times. That's the challenge with any modern-day expression of spirituality -- all the good words are already taken. But the reason that expression seems meaningless is that it is usually said by people who also believe in an all-powerful God -- who could, presumably, perform any task we might do with a snap of his fingers."

"And His Master Plan is unfolding regardless of what we do."

"Exactly. But the notion that we are God's hands would mean a lot more if instead we had a concept of God as not being all-powerful -- a deity who actually needs our help. So when we ask God the classic question, 'Why don't you do something about the bad stuff we see around us?' God says, 'I did the only thing I could do -- I put you here.'"

"But we can't stop the tornado or cure every sick person," Jack said.

"Nope, and apparently neither can God. But there are lots of other things we could be doing."

"Like what?"

"Well, we could start with the most basic thing ever -- taking care of our own crap. Stop making such a mess. Don't break stuff. Don't hog all the resources so the other participants in Creation can't get their reasonable share. Just don't be a dick."

"I like that motto for a religious movement: Don't be a dick. That could catch on."

"I wish it would."

They had finished eating, and when the waiter brought the check, Jack took it, but Millie snatched it out of his hand. "My turn," she said. "You can do it next time." Jack was happy to have a string of "next times" with Millie stretched out before him. They gathered their things and began walking in the breezy sunshine back towards the paper.

"So, if we're walking around on God's body," Jack said, "are we like fleas on a dog?"

"I don't think I would use that analogy."

"And some of the fleas believe in Dog, while other fleas don’t believe in Dog ..."

Millie elbowed him in the ribs.

"Sorry, I do have a real question. You also said our souls don't remain intact after we die — that we just get scattered into the vast Spirit Zone. If you're going to go to all the effort of creating a new religion, I was kind of hoping to get eternal life out of it."

"We do have eternal life — just not as the individuals that we currently think ourselves to be. Have you heard the thing about us being made of Stardust?"

"Yeah — that the atoms in our bodies come from the stars?"

"Right. Most of the atoms that make up our bodies were created by exploding stars billions of years before the Earth formed, and after we die, those atoms and molecules will become the building blocks of something else -— another person or a tree. So our physical bodies are immortal in that sense. That's a relatively new discovery. Science didn't used to know that.

"So I'm suggesting we might eventually also discover that our consciousness has a similar type of immortality -— that the energy that powers our minds actually does survive our bodies, but not as individual souls with nothing left to do for Eternity except sit around playing harps. Instead, perhaps our soul energy merges in with the whole of The Spirit, but it doesn't just stop there. As new Life blossoms on Earth, little bits of The Spirit go into that new Life and the human experience starts anew."

"So, like reincarnation."

"Sort of. But reincarnation assumes that your entire soul remains intact and then gets born into another person. I'm suggesting it's more like stardust — just random bits of us getting combined together to make someone or something else."

"I'm not sure that's what people are looking for in an afterlife."

"That's because we can only see Reality through the prism of our current selves, so not surprisingly, we focus on individual bodies and individual souls. Catholic theologians had to come up with ‘Limbo’ to explain to themselves what happens to the souls of babies who die before being mentally capable of committing their own sins. But there’s no need for that if individual ‘souls’ are no more immortal than the bodies they so temporarily inhabit. Perhaps we are indeed immortal, both physically and spiritually, but just not as the individual beings that we think ourselves to be."

"That might also simplify the abortion debate," Jack said. "If a fetus dies, either naturally or through abortion, whatever sparks from the Spirit it may have carried would just go back into the Spirit and get used again for some other life." Belatedly reminding himself of Millie's failed pregnancies, he quickly changed the subject. "But don't you think your potential followers want to believe that they will experience the afterlife as themselves?"

"Sorry, my religion doesn't do that. Feel free to shop elsewhere."

"Okay, okay. It's your religion. But given that you are designing this, why is it so important that the specific consciousness that I think of as 'me' must cease to exist when my corporeal vessel does?"

"Because it makes THIS life more important. It makes THIS planet more important. It makes THIS moment more important."

They had been standing at a corner and began to cross when the light changed, but a car ran a red light and several other cars came screeching to a halt in the intersection – in the middle of which a young man on a bicycle narrowly escaped being hit. No cars actually collided, so after a pause during which the bicyclist pedaled away, the cars began to cautiously resume their established pattern of movement.

"That guy was really lucky," Jack said. "He should take the rest of the day off to celebrate not being dead."

"I can never celebrate when I have a close call like that," Millie said. "Because there's some theory in physics that says when you almost had that accident, that would be the moment when the universes branch off, and a new one is spawned. In this universe, you did NOT have the accident, but in another one, you DID. I can't help but wonder how my life would be changed in that universe. I might be dead, or terribly injured, or go to jail for accidentally killing someone else. So, whenever I have a close call like that, I can't really celebrate that I was lucky and dodged a bullet, because I'm sad for that other me who wasn't so lucky. Why are you grinning? This is serious."

"Wait," Jack said. "After everything we just talked about, you're telling me there are multiple dimensions too??"

Millie turned up her nose. "Theoretical Ontology is a complex discipline."

Jack caught her hand and pulled her aside on the sidewalk, and said, "Millie, there's something else I need to tell you. I should have told you this before."

"What is it? And don't bury the lead this time."

"I love you, "he said.

"Oh, Johnny, I love you too!" Millie cried, throwing her arms around him.

That week, Jack and Millie went to lunch together every day, and spent every evening together except when she had a class or there were other conflicts. Most evenings they were either at his apartment or her house, depending on the weather. His place was more convenient, but if rain was in the forecast, Millie always wanted to be at her house. Jack had at first assumed that her "rain appreciation dance" had only been because the weather had been so hot and dry and the rain was needed, but he soon came to realize that Millie just liked getting rained on.

On evenings that they went to his place, they walked over together, but when it was at her place, they drove separately. Jack learned to be a little slow so that she would beat him there by 10 or 15 minutes. When he did that, and knocked on her front door, she would open the door nude and remain that way the whole evening. If it was a rainy evening, she would go out in it for a few minutes intermittently so her skin was constantly wet with beaded raindrops that trickled in rivulets down her body as they cooked dinner or slow-danced on her back porch. Sometimes she would lead him into her bedroom to "practice," while other times he liked to just hold her in front of a mirror and watch her as she came.

As they became more comfortable with each other, Millie said she wanted to experiment with a little penetration. They started with Jack's finger, but she only let him go to the second knuckle. When he had a solid erection, she would sometimes straddle him and have him put just the tip of it inside her. Although he hoped to someday feel what it was like to be all the way in, Jack was comfortable with the gradual approach. He felt no pressure or urgency to maintain his erection, and the voices in his head were largely quiet on the subject -- at least for now. He knew that when they reached the point where she said she was ready that he might still psych himself out under that key moment. But he didn't fear that because they could just keep doing what they'd been doing, and whenever his body decided to cooperate, then they could do something else.

In addition to his bed, they enjoyed making out and making love on the elevated chair facing the window. Jack put a sheet over it to make it more comfortable on bare skin. One time, he was sitting on the chair with Millie straddling him as they made a game of putting his erection a little inside and then rubbing it upwards against her clitoris. It was wildly arousing for both of them, and Jack began to feel he was going to come any second. Caught up in the moment, he was pushing his feet against the floor to arch upwards against her when one of the back legs of the chair slid over the edge of the platform and the chair fell backwards, their bodies tumbling with it. In that moment of falling, which seemed to happen in slow motion like in the movies, Jack felt himself go all the way inside her. It was the best feeling he had ever experienced, but it all happened in the span of time before the back of the chair hit the floor. They rolled together onto the carpet, and he slid out of her again, his erection spent.

"Are you OK?" Jack asked with concern, but the answer seemed clear because Millie was laughing.

"That was fun!" she said when she caught her breath.

"I hope this doesn't count as one of those near-miss accidents that spawn another universe," Jack said. "Because then we would have to be sad for our other selves."

"Probably not," she said. "I don't think we could've killed ourselves doing that."

They had actually landed in a fairly comfortable position, with the back of the couch, under their heads and shoulders, and the white sheet hanging over them. Millie pulled the sheet down so that it covered them, and she kissed him.

"We did two seconds of actual fucking there," she whispered into his ear.

Jack laughed. "I do not think I have ever heard you use that word before," he said in pretend shock." But yes, I noticed that. I liked it, but . . . did that moment cause you anxiety?"

"No, it happened too fast for my brain to freak out. But don't take that as a suggestion to surprise me in the future."

"Understood," he said. "But we were doing pretty good before that happened, don't you think?"

"I guess we'll just have to keep practicing."

Jack always invited her to spend the night, but Millie said she didn't want to do that on work nights; only weekends. So every evening at 8:30 or 9:00, he would walk her back to the Morning Star parking garage and watch her drive away. Back in his apartment, he made a drink, but didn't feel the need for more than that.

He still needed to bring Molly's story to an end, but he knew how he wanted to do it.

Jack took a break to stretch and freshen his drink. He put on a Miles Davis album, but kept the volume low in case he had neighbors by now. He wrote a little more, but left it in draft mode before going to bed. In the morning, he skimmed over it, trying to decide whether to delete the last exchange. That had been part of his original outline, leading to a next chapter, but it wasn't helpful now if he was trying to bring the story to a close.

He took his shower and got dressed. He grabbed his briefcase and, before heading to the door, he stood in front of his computer and clicked the send button.