Ringing True

By Robert Morrow

It is the summer of 2005, the year of fear and loathing in America. Seattle resident Justin Raines wants to do something about the deplorable state of the human race. When his friend, Shelby Mirabeau, suggests launching a new world religion focused on accepting responsibility, Justin agrees only because he lacks a better idea. When their first laughable attempts at a launch fail, Shelby pushes Justin into an unholy alliance with Matthias Bender, the dark angel of American capitalism, who sells the idea of corporate religion to the skeptical founders.

Through guerrilla marketing techniques, Internet advertising, and unexpected support from one of Hollywoods leading ladies, the religionRinging True becomes a worldwide sensation. Still, the success is not exactly what Justin had in mind.

He finds himself tangled in a series of plots involving corporate politics, financial sleight-of-hand, and a porn star who wants a piece of the action. As their enterprise faces dramatic challenges, Justin and Shelby finally discover what really rings true for them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450268127

Robert Morrow

Robert was a member of the of the early four-person marketing team behind the Tim Horton's chain in Canada, and was instrumental in launching the "Roll up the Rim to Win" campaign in the early 1980s. He has also been a Taekwondo and Pilates instructor and has hosted the Canadian National TKD team. He is now a full-time author and his #1 bestselling real estate books have helped thousands of people profit from the largest investment they'll ever make. Robert's true passion is fiction, however, and his debut thriller, "New York Fried", introducing former CIA trainer turned chef, Artichoke Hart, was an instant hit. He created Sunao International Publishing in 2018 in order to assist other authors self-publish and, in that capacity, has collaborated in the creation of two romance series, as well as launching a handful of other independent authors, all of whom have reached #1 or #2 on bestseller lists, due to his unique marketing techniques. Robert currently lives in Southern Ontario where he continues to write fiction, assist other authors, and aid investors to realize their dreams in real estate. To join the mailing list and receive FREE titles, write [e-mail] with "I love FREE books!" as the subject.

Book preview

RINGING

TRUE

ROBERT MORROW

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

RINGING TRUE

Copyright © 2010 by ROBERT MORROW

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No similarity to any person either living or dead is intended or should be inferred.

iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6810-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6811-0 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-6812-7 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010915444

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 11/23/2010

For Theresa

Contents

PART ONE

Stirrings

CHAPTER 1

Pre-Dawn

CHAPTER 2

Realities

CHAPTER 3

The Companion

CHAPTER 4

Waiting for the Storm

CHAPTER 5

Birth

CHAPTER 6

Following

CHAPTER 7

Unity

CHAPTER 8

Weightlessness

CHAPTER 9

Freedom

CHAPTER 10

The Word

CHAPTER 11

Fitting the Veil

CHAPTER 12

The Unveiling

PART TWO

Possibility

CHAPTER 13

Revelations

CHAPTER 14

Savior

CHAPTER 15

Strategy

CHAPTER 16

Transformations

CHAPTER 17

Pre-Launch

CHAPTER 18

Wildfire

CHAPTER 19

Layers

CHAPTER 20

One Big Happy Family

CHAPTER 21

Reaching

CHAPTER 22

Secrets

CHAPTER 23

Light and Darkness

CHAPTER 24

Departure

CHAPTER 25

Power Play

PART THREE

Resolution

CHAPTER 26

Appearances

CHAPTER 27

Lessons

CHAPTER 28

The Summoning

CHAPTER 29

A Ringing Good Time

CHAPTER 30

Instinct

CHAPTER 31

Sanctuary

CHAPTER 32

Revival

CHAPTER 33

Salvation

EPILOGUE

PART ONE

Stirrings

CHAPTER 1

Pre-Dawn

It was a clear late-summer night in the Emerald City in the year 2005, and all across Seattle, from then-trendy Belltown to grungy Pioneer Square to the dark metallic venues in the industrial rehab of SoDo, the young were out in force for an evening of music, booze and bar food. Energized by a visible full moon and the rare appearance of clear sky, the lines jerked with the uncertainty of mating rituals, with aimless chatter into cell phones, with fingers dancing over keypads, and with nervous laughter far out of proportion to the quality of the conversation. Whatever one’s sexual persuasion, it was a night designed to help a person forget about the great cultural divide, dismiss all thoughts of two faraway wars and lose oneself in music, brew and commitment-free romance.

Across the lake in the more sedate suburb of Bellevue, the town had pretty much turned over and gone to sleep once the doors of the big downtown mall had closed and most of the young had fled the boredom for the bridges into Seattle. But there in Bellevue was at least one member of that generation who chose not to hang out anywhere at all. This unique apparition was at present stretched on his belly on the living room floor of a sterile apartment carpeted and painted in perfect neutral, staring blankly into the screen of a laptop computer. The face bathed in dim white point seemed utterly blank. It was a good-looking face with soft brown hair, a hint of a dimple on the left cheek and deep, dark eyes—but a face minus the sense of adventure that animated the faces of his peers across the water. Looking more intently, a careful observer would have noticed the right foot shaking at the end of a long, lanky body, a sign of something unresolved beneath the placid surface.

At random intervals a cell phone chimed, indicating incoming communication. The young man invariably yawned, picked up the phone, glanced at the message with something less than a sneer and put the phone back on the carpet. Turning from the face to the screen, one could count at least seven open chat windows; looking down at the keyboard, one could see the flash of dancing fingers working effortlessly in response to the short bursts of information. To the inexperienced observer the speed of those fingers might signify a passion and intensity, but to Justin Raines, the owner of those fingers, it was just what you did. It was automatic generational programming: speed was a part of the package.

It was a bit past midnight and Justin was holding those seven five-word conversations with two friends from high school, three from college and two with people who had sort of dropped in from the ether. The only common thread linking the conversations was that all of them were completely devoid of meaning, fulfilling the sole purpose of keeping total boredom at bay.

Justin really didn’t give a shit that one friend was unlucky in love or that a guy he knew in college had just sold his soul to go to work for an investment bank. He didn’t care that he hadn’t written a syllable of truth about what he was up to or what his plans were that evening. He was bored, pissy and felt entitled to be so. While he might have written instead of the existence of a profound dissatisfaction that had burrowed deep in his soul, he doubted that anyone cared, and anyway, the world he knew was not constructed to deal with soul-level issues. He had thought of spending the evening with a video game, but chose instead to adopt a passive aggressive persona to validate the self-pitying realization that no one gave a shit about him either.

Things were zipping along at a suitably mind-occupying pace when one of his ethermates signed out. Justin felt a sinking feeling in his tummy. Sooner or later all of the chat buttons would blink out, the cell phone would cease chiming and he would be left with nothing but empty screens and the great unidentifiable dissatisfaction inside. He had no plans for the inevitable then.

Justin was at the point where he was tired of figuring things out, in part because he never seemed to be able to figure anything out. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want a plan, he just wanted to let things go to hell. They were going in that direction anyway, so he thought he’d go along for the ride.

*****

This phase of Justin’s life had its origins in a decision made long ago, years before he was born. His parents had tied his destiny to college and he grew up with the idea that college was some sort of heavenly place where all the answers to all the mysteries of life could be found. College, college, college was drummed into his head ever since he could remember, and it was always, of course he’s going to college, as if the admission of any alternative would lead Jehovah or Zeus to strike the entire family with lightning bolts. His time and life were structured around getting into the best college possible, increasing the odds for a scholarship, and preparing for the various tests that marked the way. He hardly knew his parents as people—they were more like old-school football coaches constantly pushing, pushing, pushing for college, college, college. Both parents were successful, upper-middle class professionals who swore they owed it all to college. It struck him some time in high school that college was a lot more important to his parents than it was to him. It was their religion, not his.

His dad often cited statistics as part of the drumbeat of propaganda Justin had been hearing since grade school. College graduates earn 55% more than high school graduates, he would say when helping Little Justin with his story problems. Little Justin was always in awe of such proofs, but Pubescent Justin started to wonder a bit without being able to articulate the wonder. By the time he emerged as Teenage Justin, he came to the conclusion that his dad was full of crap.

Still, Justin said nothing and just went along, in part because he didn’t have a better idea and in part because he had no statistics to support an alternative position, something his father would have demanded, given his devotion to facts. The greater issue was that whenever he thought of an argument to defend his position or discovered something he thought he might like to explore, an overwhelming rush of self-doubt would rise inside him and choke off thoughts in their infancy. The only time Justin engaged in resistance was when his father pushed sports as a vehicle for scholarship, and even in that instance, the resistance was of the indirect variety. Rather than refuse to go out for the team and waste energy in pointless conflict, Justin would go to the tryout and display such thorough ineptitude that his father eventually backed off for fear he would be thoroughly embarrassed in front of the other parents. Justin was actually quite athletically gifted, but kept this a secret.

Eventually he did go to college, winding up at the University of Washington, which he chose for two reasons: one, he had heard Seattle was a cool place to be; and two, it was far out of driving range from the suburbs of Chicago, where his parents lived. His dad liked the idea because he was some kind of sales executive for the Mega Software Company, and his mom liked it because she was some kind of human resources person for the Mega Coffee Company, both with headquarters in the Seattle area. We can come visit you when we go to Corporate, they said, closing the deal.

Sure! said Justin. Since they were footing the entire bill, he supposed he could grant them visitation rights.

*****

The cause of his self-doubt and related aversion to conflict had to do with a mask Justin had adopted sometime during puberty. On the surface he seemed a pleasant, cooperative boy studying hard to validate the American Dream for people like his parents who believed in it as if it were gospel. However, beneath the mask was a very complicated person with millions of thoughts he had never shared with anyone, not even friends his own age.

Justin had concluded early in life that the world and practically all the people in it were insane to some degree, and as the only sane person on the planet, he had to work behind an elaborate façade to make it through each waking day. He viewed the world very differently than his obsessive parents or his I’ve-got-it-handled teenage friends, sensing that the reality on which they had based their lives and personalities was a very fragile reality indeed. He divined that all the pieces of wisdom shoved in his ears by teachers, broadcasters, entertainers, leaders and experts were astonishingly silly, even dangerous, and that their expert knowledge was anything but. These perceptions were accompanied by a profound sadness about the state of the world that he could not shake because he had no clue as to what to do about his sadness or with the world that was apparently causing it. The best he could come up with for the time being was a strategy to lay low, play the role handed to him and see how things turned out. Since no one seemed to want to hear anything that disturbed their sense of certainty and comfort—his parents with their success stories, his friends in their techno-driven universe, his teachers and their dogma—he stuffed all these impressions deep inside.

Later he would look back and wonder how he wound up with perceptions that differed so much from the norm. After dismissing the alien-from-another-planet theory, he concluded that it probably had to do with the realities of modern child-rearing. His workaholic parents regularly worked late and traveled constantly on business, setting up regrets they could enjoy later in life. During his pre-teens, he was always being dropped off somewhere, from school to day care to supplemental math lessons, according to the demands of parental schedules. Because he was constantly in motion, he never had the opportunity to truly connect with his parents, other children or the anonymous caregivers who viewed him more as a revenue stream than a human being. Faces and voices whizzed by him as if he were on a high-speed merry-go-round that never stopped. What he could not explain was why he never developed any sense of resentment toward his parents or why, despite the growing feeling that they and the others had lost all their marbles, he genuinely liked them all and wished them no harm. Perhaps that was due to the innate wisdom of a child; perhaps he was too busy to put much energy into victimization; or perhaps he was simply oriented to accept the hand he was dealt.

The mad whirl decelerated considerably when Justin became a latchkey kid at the age of thirteen. Justin welcomed the change wholeheartedly, for it gave him time and space to think, reflect and try to figure out what the hell was going on in the world around him. Although he didn’t think much of the learning that went along with college prep, he was passionate about learning when given the freedom to explore his own path. Mysteriously absenting himself from the ritual of hanging out with friends after school, he would rush home to throw himself onto his bed and into various books he checked out from the library. His secret studies primarily focused on human history, with occasional side journeys into philosophy, religion, psychology and literature. As it was not a particularly disciplined course of study, there were indeed holes in it, but Justin had always been more intuitive than most and used that intuition to form certain conclusions that partially satisfied his hunger. That hunger had to do with finding out why the people of his world had slipped into insanity and his readings gave him plenty of evidence that the insanity had been there for quite a long time.

During these teenage years, he developed a working theory that the cause of the insanity was extreme self-interest—people doing what they wanted to do at the expense of other people, their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries, even their world. What made this development remarkable to Justin was that he could see as clear as day that self-interest was nearly always self-destructive. He watched his parents become shrunken people in their single-minded pursuit of success, economic partners instead of a couple. Justin could see very clearly that someday the loneliness would eat them alive. He watched celebrities pursue fame and money without regard for how it distorted their personalities, isolated them from the world and transformed them into caricatures out of touch with whatever ability that brought them fame in the first place. And worst of all, he saw people all over the world hurting and killing each other to advance a cause or personal agenda, in defiance of the age-old wisdom that violence begets violence. Justin felt certain that self-interest had placed the world on the path to self-destruction, but he was just as uncertain as to what he or anyone else could do to stop it.

Despite this unusual penchant for deep thinking, people who met Justin at the time would have described him as a fairly typical representative of his generation. When he hung out with his friends, they all watched music videos, played video games and engaged in sexual humor. Like all his friends, he took to new technology with fearless ease. Although he usually hung back from the center of the action and did nothing to draw attention, he would occasionally jump in and defend others from the sadistic teasing that often went on in high school. Whenever a friend needed help with his homework, Justin was The Man. His only unusual feature was a slight stoop, as if he wanted to subtract a couple of inches from his six foot frame by adopting an attitude of humility. The only differentiating label ever applied to him during high school was the painfully generic label of really nice guy, which wasn’t much.

Unlike others in his generation, he never sought to express himself in e-journals, blogs, Emo music or confessional poetry, privately likening those routes to the sound of babies beating their high chair trays for attention. Unlike most of his fellow Americans, he was strangely immune to hero-worship, considering the worshipped and the worshippers as indisputable evidence of mass insanity. He found the pursuit of fame particularly appalling, and had Justin rubbed the magic lamp to make the genie appear, fame certainly would not have been one of his three wishes. This resistance to exposure, combined with his distrust of celebrity and strategic aversion to conflict, made Justin quite unlikely to volunteer to be the poor dumb bastard who finally stood up in front of the world to explain to them that they were all a bunch of frigging loonies.

And yet, in a little more than a year, that same figure now stretched out on a colorless carpet in a sterile apartment in Bellevue, Washington would do just that—and in prime time, no less.

CHAPTER 2

Realities

Beyond the inner struggles and deep skepticism about his father’s propaganda, Justin was strangely optimistic about going to college. He thought the change of scenery might help him find a way to transform his picture of hopelessness for humanity into something positive and uplifting.

As things turned out, Justin chose to enter college in the fall of 2001. Two weeks after he had moved into the dorm, a group of very insane people flew three planes into buildings filled with their fellow human beings.

For weeks after 9/11, Justin would crawl into his bed in his dorm room; go online with a set of headphones plugged into his laptop and watch replays of the second plane hitting the tower. His eyes would tear up every time he heard the guy with his achingly human New York accent shout, Holy Fuck! when the windows of the tower exploded onto the streets of Lower Manhattan. Like everyone else, he was appalled by the experience, but from a different perspective that he of course kept to himself. Justin didn’t look at it as somebody is doing this to us. He looked at it as we are doing this to ourselves, and he was very, very sad about that.

Still, with the resilience of the young spirit, he found some relief in his studies. He was pleasantly surprised that learning could be a challenge, exhilarated to be in an environment where you could explore subjects in depth, and relieved to be free from high school where real learning was less important than passing entrance exams and finding a way to fit in. In his first two years at U-dub, he completed his general ed with a perfect 4.0.

Then the real world intervened.

*****

Before going to college, Justin had hated summers, and it had nothing to do with Midwest heat and humidity. Ever since he could remember, he had spent the summers buffing up his scholastic credentials—tutoring sessions when he was younger, college exam prep during his teens and summer internships with local companies where his parents knew people who knew people. While his friends seemed to have all the free time in the world, Justin had a packed schedule that never allowed him much in the way of playtime. It was the same kind of schedule his parents kept. Since they never questioned it, he went along with their version of normal.

It wasn’t until the summer between his sophomore and junior years that Justin finally caught a break when he returned to the Chicago burbs. The post 9/11 recession was still going strong and jobs were hard to come by, even with his parents’ connections. A weekend job doing gofer work in a real estate office fell through, giving Justin an opportunity for more free time and space than he had ever had—time which he intended to use to work out this conflict between his perceptions and everyone else’s.

But first, there was this new RPG he just had to try out.

One weekday morning, only a week into his visit, Justin was curled up in front of the TV, a light blanket covering his near-nakedness, battling a particularly nasty mini-boss who had twice wiped out his characters. He was so engrossed in the battle that he not only forgot about breakfast, but only peripherally noticed a blurred figure bursting through the front door, rushing past the family room and zipping down the hall to the master bedroom. The event registered only when a door slammed, causing Justin to blow the timing on a combo move and doom his characters to oblivion one more time.

Justin put down the controller and waited in frozen anticipation. He realized that the blur was his father, and for his workaholic dad to come home early was big—and to barricade himself in the bedroom was even bigger. Justin had never seen his father behave like this.

After a few minutes his dad came out and stumbled into the family room in an agitated, jerky rush. Justin was shocked to see his father’s face: it sagged with a complete drain of that confident energy he had always shown to the world, and he seemed to have aged years overnight. Beneath that there was a strange combination of anger and embarrassment that caused his voice to sound as if it were pushing itself past a complex maze of baffles.

Jus—when your mother comes home—tell her—tell her—I’m in the bedroom. The strange figure spun and headed back down the hall.

The news that his mother was coming home categorized the event as a major crisis. Justin had a dim sense that the placid glass reflecting blue sky and sunshine he had known as life was about to explode into a million tiny shards.

Mom stormed in about an hour later, impeccably dressed as always, and strode past Justin down the hall to the master bedroom without acknowledging his existence. The bedroom door opened and slammed. Justin could hear shouting from both voices, but for some reason he knew they were not in conflict. He could hear ripples from the explosion and tried to piece it all together.

Goddamn dump job!

Who else … did you talk to …?

No goddamn way …

What did … offer?

Shove it up their asses!

I just can’t believe it!

Worked my ass off … twenty-four-seven … unbelievable!

There was more shouting, then the sound changed to what sounded like moans and whispers. After a few minutes, the door burst open and his mother marched by, dragging his father by the arm. Jus, we’re leaving, said his mom, heading for the door.

What’s going on? Justin shouted with definite anxiety.

We’ll talk later, said his mother with finality, and disappeared with father in tow.

Justin returned to the video game, holding onto fantasy for dear life.

*****

His parents came home early that evening. His dad went straight into the bedroom and closed the door. Justin’s mom came into the family room, tossed her designer purse onto the cocoa-colored leather couch and collapsed into a matching leather recliner.

I could use a drink, his mom announced.

Justin paused the game he had been playing now for nearly a third of a day, turned to her and asked with some trepidation, What’s going on, Mom?

Justin’s mother played the consummate professional who looked and acted the part. She dressed in the best clothes from name designers with a casual elegance that served to clarify her status in both the workplace and the numerous professional associations in which she was active. Of Spanish heritage, she had a cold, dark beauty made even more remote by the flawless application of makeup, which made her seem almost inhumanly perfect. His mother had complex feelings concerning her beauty; she resented the attention that men paid her, but she was realistic enough to see it as a competitive advantage in her climb up the career ladder.

At this moment, she was still very beautiful, but with a wavering determination in her eyes. For a short time, she looked at Justin as if she did not recognize him. When she had satisfactorily organized the message she wanted to deliver, she moved to the edge of the recliner and leaned forward to speak.

Mega Software has just announced a major restructuring and I’m afraid your father was impacted.

Justin didn’t have the faintest idea what his mom was talking about and apparently looked puzzled enough to catch his mom’s attention.

Your dad lost his job today, she explained in English.

Justin felt sad for his father because he knew how important his job was to him. Why? asked Justin.

Justin, it was nothing personal. From time to time, every company needs to realign their strategy and resources to ensure …

Suddenly his mother started to laugh—a weird, insane giggle that she was struggling to repress.

Oh, God, I sound like such an asshole! is what finally burst out by way of explanation. She composed herself immediately and said to Justin, The bottom line is your dad lost his job, and given the economy and the fact that he’s over forty, it’s not going to be easy for him to find another one any time soon.

His mother turned her face from him and Justin wondered if she was crying, a rare event in his life. After a moment, she turned a perfectly composed face to her son and said, I need to be with him. Are you going to be okay?

Sure, Mom.

She rose and strode with great professionalism down the hall to the master bedroom.

*****

Justin did not see his father until the following day. He had woken up late and decided to eat his cereal outside before it got too hot. Stepping out onto the deck, he was surprised to see his father sitting on one of the deck chairs, gazing into the distance. He was dressed in a bathrobe, his light brown hair unbrushed, with a faint, speckled stubble of brown and silver spread across his face. The sight of his father in this condition further confirmed the significance of the event, for his father had taken as much care in assembling his appearance as his mother, an appearance Justin would label as crisp in contrast to his mother’s studied elegance. His father looked anything but crisp now, absentmindedly toying with a dead cell phone, a series of alternating expressions emerging on his face as if he were watching a private highlight reel of both victory and defeat.

Until this moment, Justin had known his father more as a placeholder than as a real person. Of his two caregivers, his dad was the more vocal about the whole what-you-need-to-succeed ethic—fitting for a man who had always fancied himself a super-salesperson. He would quote Dale Carnegie or Tony Robbins as if he were quoting gospel, always pointing at Justin and saying, Now, you remember that.

But that enthusiasm seemed to belong to a different era, for his father appeared to be completely lacking in the spirit his religion demanded of its adherents.

Did Mom tell you? he asked, in a blunt, surprisingly loud voice.

Yeah, said Justin, between spoonfuls. I’m sorry, Dad.

Justin thought he saw a flash of anger or defiance cross his dad’s face. Then he saw the face relax again into a bitter, ironic smile.

Well, I’ve always said that tough times make a person who he is, his dad responded, without the usual passion behind his workplace clichés.

What are you going to do, Dad?

Don’t worry about me. I know some people. I have connections. I’ll be back, you can be sure of that. He said it with forced enthusiasm, and Justin knew it didn’t square at all with what his mother told him.

His dad then started to say something, stopped, started again, stopped, and then stared down at his dead cell phone as if he were looking for a sign. Then he finally found a voice.

"Justin, listen. My number one goal in life—number one—has been to do for you what my parents weren’t able to do for me—put you through college—a real college. You know I had to work my way through college and I never really got to be part of it all—living in a dorm, staying up all night with my pals—but most importantly, being able to focus on learning, on learning—and education is a great thing, a great thing. We couldn’t afford that and I always felt left out—like I was a visitor but not part of it, you see? I didn’t want that for you."

Justin wasn’t sure where this was going.

His dad swallowed hard. But life has a way of throwing challenges at you, and we have to look those challenges square in the eye.

Justin still wasn’t sure where this was going.

The bottom line is—we lost a lot of money in your college fund when the market crashed, and yesterday we lost a couple hundred thousand a year in income—at least for a while.

The truth began its slow march across Justin’s receptors.

So—we—can’t afford (his dad’s lip trembled on that combination of words)—to—uh—well, you’re either going to have to come back home and go to a state school or get some loans—we just can’t— his dad went silent, and looked like he was about to cry.

It was to Justin’s everlasting credit that he didn’t think about the impact of the news on his present or future. He felt terrible for his father. His belief structure had collapsed around him and all the salesmanship, positive thinking and get-up-and-go attitudes could not change the situation one iota. Justin leaned over and touched his dad’s arm.

Don’t worry about it, Dad. It’s not your fault.

Justin’s dad looked at him as if he’d said something sacrilegious, but then relaxed his face a bit.

You’re so young, his dad said sadly. Then his voice turned crisp. You’d better go figure out what you want to do.

*****

Justin already knew what he wanted to do—or, more accurately, knew what he did not want to do. He did not want to live at home under any circumstances. He felt it would be a step backwards, and more importantly, he knew that his presence would be a constant reminder that his parents’ faith stood on shaky ground.

So he returned to Seattle immediately, or sort of immediately. Needing time to think and wanting to save his parents a few dollars, he insisted on traveling by bus. This turned out to be a fortunate choice, for the experience convinced Justin that a minimalist existence wasn’t half-bad. Nourished by day-old sandwiches gobbled down at random meal stops and all-night conversations with wannabe poets and other drifters, Justin discovered that he could survive on very little. He arrived at the dingy Seattle bus station two days later with confidence that he would somehow figure it out.

With only two months before the start of the fall quarter, Justin focused most of his energy on winning the struggle to survive. Living temporarily on the living room floors of apartments rented by various classmates, he focused first on financing his education. His grades helped him win a few stray scholarships and he learned that the banks were more than willing to put young students in debt for the rest of their adult lives. Problem solved.

The next problem was the age-old mystery of how to provide food, clothing and shelter, and that meant finding a job. His friend Shelby, who had grown up in Seattle and knew the score, told him that the best way to get a job in Seattle was by knowing somebody who knew somebody. This was good news for Justin, since his mother worked at the Mega Coffee Company, and they were forever hiring. Within a week he was running a register and fetching scones for grumpy people on their way to work.

The issue of living quarters was temporarily resolved when Shelby said he could stay in a room in her parents’ basement. She couldn’t guarantee how long the arrangement would last, but it would buy him some time while he saved a little money and figured out a next step.

*****

At the end of the summer, the hospitality of Shelby’s parents ran out, so Justin wound up renting an apartment on the fringes of the U-District with Matthias and Theo, two dorm mates who wanted to live off-campus. Although Justin didn’t realize it, the new experience of having bills to pay added another shade to his personality. People respond to working for a living in all kinds of ways, but the one thing they share is the feeling that whatever they make, it’s never enough and is never going to be enough. While Justin was not particularly materialistic, he found that once he settled down from the frantic search for means, simple math told him that he was looking forward to a future that seemed to offer little but paying back loans and eating Top Ramen night after night. As time went on, the dreariness of an obligation-heavy reality limited his perspective, and consequently, limited the number of options he believed were available. Justin felt a sense of personal desperation and hopelessness that overwhelmed his concern about a world bound for self-destruction. The world would have to go to hell for now—he needed to eat. Up to his neck in the struggle to survive, he felt slightly embarrassed for having ever giving it much thought.

Consequently, the last two years of college were no fun at all. Justin worried constantly about money, volunteered to work every available quarter-hour of overtime and budgeted his money down to the nickel. His life was work and study, leaving very little time for reflection or fun. After living a relatively secure existence as the only child of upper-middle-class professionals, Justin had lost much of what he had known as normal in a fairly short period of time. He missed the old fragile reality where fear was only an ingredient in a bad movie.

The change in circumstance also affected his choice of a major, a choice he had resisted until the start of his junior year. Justin was philosophically opposed to specialization, for he believed with all his heart that specialization was one of the reasons the world was insane. He had seen how his specialized parents had become truncated people, sliced into little pieces to fit into an economy with no other purpose than to make money. Now he put all that empty philosophizing aside and concluded that if specialization was the answer, he would not waste any more time with the question. Before the change, he favored the Comparative History of Ideas as his major; the new-and-improved Justin did a 360 and decided he needed something more suitable to survival. While he couldn’t quite bring himself to go whole hog on a business degree, he decided that majoring in Economics with a minor in Spanish seemed a reasonable solution for coping with the global economy.

Since he did not care for Economics in the slightest, college became less about mind expansion and more like swallowing medicine. He learned what he needed to learn to pass exams and write papers, and then promptly deleted the information from his memory. Occasionally the other world Justin used to care about would intrude on his consciousness with headlines of greed and violence, but he avoided specifics and behaved as a pedestrian passing by the open windows of an insane asylum would have behaved—he lowered his head and moved quickly past. He was fortunate that Matthias and Theo were both comfortable with things as they were, relatively unconcerned with a world falling apart and looking forward to taking their respective places in the great American economic engine.

Justin, gritting out his last year of college, dreaded the same fate, but for lack of a

Reviews for Ringing True

[croknot1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I think Mr. Morrow has something here. I've never read a book like it. Smart, funny, and the characterization is superb.A new religion, indeed. I want to read more from him.There is no drivel here, just pure entertainment.