Next Stop, Heaven

By R W Jaeger

Welcome. You have found Next Stop, Heaven, which was named Winner at the Texas Association of Authors Book Awards, a contest open to international submissions.

Next Stop, Heaven is the third volume of the Trilogy of Light. This book stands alone and connects to the other two books by a theme: we all have genius, inner light, but we seldom bring it out in creative acts because we have been bludgeoned into conformity.

The Trilogy of Light is not religious. Nor is it an intellectual construct. Each book of the Trilogy has many powers. Here is the one I want to share with you now: each book builds a refuge in which you can connect to your own insights. When a new idea, which may be a solution to a problem, comes to you, close the book and write the idea down. Then it is up to you to give this idea life.

We live on a forbidden planet. We are forbidden to bring out our inner light. Next Stop, Heaven invites you to join Lena and David in breaking free of the matrix of darkness, known as life on planet Earth.

Lena, Number One in pharmaceutical sales in Dallas, moves to the more artsy Austin and there she seeks a life in soul. She lands a job at a newspaper that requires many talents, chief of which is to write an extraordinarily insightful relationship column. One morning, Lena wakes up to a transformation: her gorgeous brunette hair has turned white. Lena's heart and mind embark on a journey for the answer to the whitening.

David, president of a company that supports new light, lives a life parallel to Lena's in that he, too, had moved into a life of soul. It took only a single glance between David and Lena in busy downtown Austin to put them in search of each other. In converging upon each other days later, they join forces to defeat the beast that kills the good who die young.

The other two volumes of the Trilogy of Light are The Secret of the Bermuda Triangle, the great American adventure novel, and Sharing a Man (no, it's not a dirty book). Please remember: all three books of the Trilogy are not religious. Nor are they intellectual constructs. Each of the three books is an expression of the spirit that gives birth to, and sustains, civilization. A new civilization brimming with unlimited potential awaits you.

Two excerpts from Next Stop, Heaven:

A feeling came over her that she ruled the world. She walked with this new feeling for a while, but soon her mind chided her heart for its folly. Her heart insisted she was to rule the entire world. Forget fantasy, the mind said. The world, said the heart.

In a manner fitting the woman of light, Lena Lovitt, sculptor, scribe, accepted the world.

_______ ___ _______

This man, David Cruz, stood at the brink. Elizabeth didn't need to hear any more words from David, but she knew he knew he needed to hear more words from her. The animation of her spirit, blending into her words of conversation, would have to move to higher ground so that he might see, if that was possible at this time, the glory of life in light.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R W Jaeger
• Release date: Sep 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463711569

R W Jaeger

Ronald W Jaeger is the man of mystery. Nobody knows why he wears a black gambler's hat. Nobody knows, until now, that his award-winning poems and short stories and three novels all came unbidden. How his writings lead out of the matrix, which dictates what we should think and do, is more of the mystery. Here are the titles of the three novels that belong in your personal library: The Secret of the Bermuda Triangle: The Adventures of Troy as Told by Him [women luv this book] / Sharing a Man [no, it is not a dirty book!] / Next Stop, Heaven [Lena and David search for each other but don't know it]. The light in these books is not religious. Nor is the light an intellectual construct. If religion or the intellect didn't produce these books, what did? You are invited to solve this mystery. These stand-alone novels became the unintended Trilogy of Light. What makes the three books a trilogy is a theme they share: we all have genius, inner light, but we seldom bring it out in creative acts because we have been bludgeoned into conformity. The books themselves are the very expression of nonconformity, which is crucial to breaking out of the matrix. You will be well on your way to solving the mysteries of these novels if you start your read with a question: What do I need to know? After you have forgotten this question, a new and perhaps bold idea may come to you. Here's where you stop reading and jot down the idea. Then it is up to you to give the idea life. If you do this, then you will know how these novels came to be. In your reading of The Secret of the Bermuda Triangle, you may find where Troy hid the secret for how to live on planet Earth. In reading Sharing a Man, you will witness how a man, lost to two women, is resurrected. As for Next Stop, Heaven, here you will take separate journeys with Lena and David, who release their own genius, inner light, into a world that forbids it.

Book preview

Cover.jpg

A

LSO BY

R. W. J

AEGER

The Secret of the Bermuda Triangle 

Sharing a Man

This is a work of fiction. Names, people, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (present or past), events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Ronald W. Jaeger

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The author has worked without a steady income to produce this book. He, at last, would like to be paid for his work; hence, we ask that no one participate in the illegal acts of scanning, uploading, and distributing this book, in whole or in part, through the Internet or any other means.

Published by

Austin, TX

First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012935484

ISBN: 978-0-9827042-0-2 (print)

Cover layout: Justine Shih

Ebook design/conversion: Lorie DeWorken

Manufactured in the United States of America

For the luminaries

and those yet to come

Contents

PART I: LENA

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART II: DAVID

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

PART III: LIGHT UNTO LIGHT

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

PART IV: THE BEAST

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

PART V: SONG OF THE STARS

CHAPTER 27

4 + 9 + 8 + 7

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

A Note from the Author

We live on a forbidden planet. We are forbidden to bring out our inner light. In every era men and women rebel against the invisible power that blocks their light. Time and time again the rebellion fails. The good die young has become the mantra of the oppressed. In the United States where I reside, depression has become the ruling mental illness. It seems we have lost the fight. It seems we have exhausted all our resources for defeating an enemy we can’t even see. Is there no future in light? Must we always live in a world of darkness?

The story you are about to read answers these questions and more. Here you will find new contemplations of darkness and light. These contemplations are not mine. They are yours. Next Stop, Heaven is your own journey in light.

R. W. Jaeger

Austin, Texas

PART I: LENA

CHAPTER 1

Fog everywhere. No, wait, an opening up ahead. Am I outside? Must be. There can’t be fog inside. No way. How silly. A flash. Off metal? No. Yes. Part of something larger. Jet? Yes. Yes, it’s a wing. A roar. The engine? Doesn’t sound right. There, the roar again.

The wingtip thrusts toward her. She backs away. The engine, the engine that doesn’t sound right, roars louder. She thinks it’s going to explode. She cuts through the fog. The wingtip pursues. She flees to an art museum. There she darts into a room.

She stands near a wall of paintings. The roar, the roar of the engine, pounds her. She covers her ears. The wingtip blocks the doorway.

She turns toward a painting. A van Gogh, one of his organic farmhouses with undulating eaves. She thinks the roar made them vibrate, and the artist caught them in a moment of oscillation. She steps into the painting. She runs to the house and slips inside. She closes the door. A musty smell greets her. All is quiet now. Quaint furnishings, earth tones everywhere, soothe her.

A sudden roar shakes the house. What is it? she screams. What do you want? Another roar. Residue from the thatched roof falls upon her head. She retreats into a sunlit room. Glittering particles float in the air. She stands by a desk pushed against a blank wall. The wingtip hovers outside the window. A hard light flashes from the metal. She leans back. Her hand plunges into keys of a typewriter. She hears the clack of a key on the cylinder.

Lena Lovitt woke up in a sweat. She smelled the sour scent of fear. Once again the nightmare had stalked her, chased her from the bliss of unconsciousness. Once again the attack came in the early hours, before sunrise. Lena lay on her side, the upper knee tucked over the lower, and contemplated, of all things, how the pooling of her sweat into gray clay greased the hands of the sculptor. She watched him shape her reclining nude body, larger than life, a soft match for his hard David.

This tuck of body into mind, of mind into body, continued, as it usually did, for an hour. Then Lena straightened her legs and swung them from under the covers. The move took her bare butt to the edge of the bed, and, using the gravity available to her in the room, she slid further out of bed until her feet touched the floor. In this, her patented exit, Lena grabbed the edge of the mattress, drew her feet toward the bed, and pushed herself into a standing position. And today that pushed her into a short one-sided conversation.

Michelangelo, the nightmare unmakes me. When will I be removed from this stone?

On this particular morning Lena chose from her closet of elegant fittings an ivory-colored pantsuit, each side of the jacket cut to a point in the front at the waist. The jacket bore a design of thin, black curlicues. A vertical row of three black buttons decorated each sleeve just above a slit of an opening in the cuff. When Lena pulled this outfit from the closet, she caught from the Nehru collar a whiff of Romance perfume with its hint of sungoddess rose. Silly, she thought, to mix that with this; for she had already dabbed on her skin the spicy potion, Poison, to give herself a boost in the new week. Notwithstanding the conflicting perfumes, she slipped into the suit with a brightening spirit until she looked in the mirror while she pushed the functioning buttons of the jacket into the holes hidden under the opposing seam. Her white hair flared in the glass. The suit should be black, she lamented aloud. But it had been the perfect color back when she, the pharmaceutical rep, had the money to buy expensive clothes. When she, the pharmaceutical rep, had auburn hair.

Lena returned to the closet and selected by its sleeve a black suit striped with silver. She studied the sleeve for a moment then dropped it. She pulled from a shelf a black bowler hat, the black band above the rim sporting a silvery medallion that bore in relief the likeness of Rodin’s Thinker. This hat she lightly pressed onto her head with both hands. She checked herself in the mirror. She twisted strands of her hair around a forefinger. The dreams must mean more than this, she thought, her eyes focused on the white curl. Is there something about Austin that brings them on?

A yearning, actually two yearnings, had brought Lena to Austin. That’s not quite right. The yearnings stole her heart for Austin. It was something else altogether that brought her here.

In the fall of last year, at the peak of her money-gathering powers, boredom crept into Lena’s mind while she nailed one contract after another for her pharmaceutical company. She had set yet another annual record in sales. At the award ceremony in Dallas, the president presented her with a replica, about eighteen inches high, of the Goddess of Liberty that stood atop the state capitol building in Austin. Inasmuch as nearly all the reps were women, and all of them gorgeous, it seemed fitting to the corporate congregation that Lena should receive an award of this kind. Afterwards curiosity drove Lena south to see for herself the original Goddess of Liberty, who stood a good 300 feet from the ground, who held a star aloft in her hand. Four months later Lena quit her lucrative career and moved to Austin.

Lena’s Goddess of Liberty trip had spilled over into other venues, and it was those venues that had precipitated her yearnings to live in Austin. Of all the black metallic forms Lena saw at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, two reclining female nudes lay in her memory. There they had the substance of hollow chocolate bunnies. There they melted into an ooze that filled a cavity in her heart and pushed up a yearning to shape clay with her bare hands. This yearning, tied as it was to Austin, served as a proxy for shaping her new life in that city. Then there was the poetry reading Lena had attended. Subsequent memories of poems set in Central Texas twisted around the core of her being and squeezed until the idea popped out that Austin, not Dallas, would be the place she would feed her other yearning, to write bold thoughts for anyone prepared for boldness.

It’s not that Lena had never shaped clay or put words on a page. For years she dabbled in both arts—wrote poems worthy of print, created sculptures worthy of exhibit—but she had never put her stuff out there, never exposed her deepest thoughts and feelings. The time had come for exposure.

So Lena Lovitt, the goddess of selling mind and body drugs, removed herself from the corporate pedestal and moved her mind and body to Austin, to shape a new life in clay and word.

Each morning Lena parked near the state capitol. For the first few weeks after she landed a column in a local newspaper, 6th Street Press, she’d glance up to the Goddess of Liberty as soon as she stepped to the sidewalk along San Jacinto Boulevard. By a quirk of the cosmos, her colleagues at the small paper dubbed her the goddess without having any knowledge of the award she had won. The nickname came from Dancing Dan, editor of the paper, after Lena came to work her first day wearing a solid navy slinky dress and a gray scarf around her neck. Flung over one shoulder, the scarf bore a print of Greek ruins and was fastened by a brooch of a scooped out figure of a woman wearing a tunic. At that time Lena wore no hats. That came later. After the nightmare turned her hair white.

After the whitening, Lena still parked near the capitol, but she no longer gazed up at the crowning statue, which, for her, began to take on the significance of the number one. The executives in Dallas had called her Number One. Each year, for five years running, the name of Lena Lovitt stood at the top of the rankings for sales. Each year that number, one, summarized all her accomplishments. One day in the fourth year of being Number One, Lena asked herself, Number One for what? An answer came to her in the form of a short story. She never wrote it down. Instead she savored how it scintillated with light, her light. Only she could radiate her light. One woman, one light became her motto. In this manner the enlightenment of Lena Lovitt evolved until she took risk, which wasn’t risk to her innocence, and forsook the enterprise that paid her money, gobs of money, for being a number.

On this Monday morning, after parking and stepping to the sidewalk to head south, Lena felt the dream of the previous night break down into words. Fog came to her first. Then wing, jet, roar, engine. Other words dribbled into her mind as she walked over squares of cement. The words surprisingly brought her comfort, for they reduced her fears to a language she could contemplate. When cylinder, the cylinder of the typewriter, dropped in, Lena asked herself, what does that mean? The question carried her absently along.

A blast from a horn startled Lena. She had stepped into 6th Street against a red light. She turned wide-eyed to the driver and skipped to the nearby curb. She nearly fell over herself as a high heel caught in a cuff of a pant leg. In the moments that followed, Lena Lovitt, former Number One, laughed at herself and muttered, Number One Klutz. Upon saying these words, Lena felt naked on the streets of Austin. The clothes of the corporate goddess no longer belonged to her. She kicked off her shoes and left them where they fell on the sidewalk. She snatched the hat from her head and crushed it between her hands.

Something about the crush of the hat, something perhaps only the cosmos could understand, pulled Lena’s line of sight to a man looking her way. He stood across the street, catty-corner, at the Hard Rock Cafe. He wore a white gambler’s hat. Actually, it was more the color of ivory, much like the color of Lena’s pantsuit. The man raised a hand to the brim, clenched the slightly-rolled-up side between his thumb and forefinger, and saluted Lena by running his fingers forward. No emotion flickered on the man’s face. Lena broke off their mutual gaze and turned about. She tossed her hat into a trash receptacle and walked the corridor of poorly maintained one- and two-story buildings, typical for that section of town known to the locals simply as 6th Street. Here, on the second floor of a building situated between the Midnight Cowboy modeling parlor and the Blind Pig Pub, Lena Lovitt read letters from the confused, the loveless, the hopeful, and she answered them.

Lena passed through stench from a patch of vomit on the sidewalk. Her nylon-clad feet almost stepped in the mess because her vision had turned inward instead of outward while making a contemplation. The statuesque look on that man’s face had brought forth the image of David, carved in marble by the spirit that called itself Michelangelo. The image of the man on the corner fluttered in her mind. It wouldn’t hold steady. Is this a man to be forgotten? she wondered. What’s with the white hat? You don’t see that in Austin. Michelangelo, has your David ruined me for all men?

Lena opened a weathered door, the maroon paint peeling everywhere, especially around the one window pane. Before she stepped inside, she looked back toward the corner where she had left her shoes, where she had seen the man with the white hat. Who is that man? She carried this question all the way up the stairs to the office for 6th Street Press. When Lena opened the door, blonde Marley the intern looked up from the receptionist’s desk.

It’s our goddess, Marley said. Hey, what happened to your shoes?

Lena slouched against the doorjamb and held the door ajar. Tell me, do I look like a goddess? she asked with more than the characteristic volume in her voice.

Yeah, man, Reyna said without turning away from her computer. Reyna, a legal immigrant with raven-black hair, a woman as sharp in English as she was in Spanish, worked layout with her back to the door. She picked up a taco sheathed in waxed paper and swiveled her chair around. Want breakfast? Lena shook her head no.

A mustachioed man by the name of Mark stepped into the large workroom from the adjoining office of editor Dancing Dan. Mark was the lone wolf in the organization. He prowled the streets for advertising copy. With his camera he spotted unwary photo prey.

Mark rapped his knuckles on Marley’s desktop as he passed by. When he turned his gaze from Marley, he caught sight of Lena’s bare feet. Although he was on his way out for an appointment, he took a step back and leaned against a tall file cabinet. He tapped a knuckle against the metal. Lena cocked her head in his direction.

You ought to have my job, Mark said. You’d make a killing out there. But you might need some shoes.

Lena smirked. She flattened herself against the doorjamb to give Mark room as he left the office. His arm brushed against her breast. When he looked over his shoulder, Lena was gone.

Lena’s desk, pushed up to the one wall of windows, faced 6th Street. Marley’s desk sat behind Lena’s and faced the opposite way. Reyna’s desk, a sturdy and long librarian’s table, open underneath, sat against the long wall across from the door. Lena moved quickly to her desk and slipped into her chair. She intended to plunge into her work, but something told her it had to wait. Shucking the image of goddess on 6th Street had clothed her heart and mind with new vestments she wished to savor.

The savoring hardly got underway when the memory of Mark brushing against her breast intruded. Lena picked up a yellow wooden pencil and rolled it between her thumb and fingertips. The rolling of the wood failed to flatten the intrusion. Instead of nudging her computer mouse to bring life to the monitor, she picked up the mouse with her free hand and smacked it on the maneuvering pad. Lena stared at the pad, which bore a dull reproduction of Michelangelo’s God nearly touching forefingers with Adam. She visualized Mark in Adam’s place, but unlike Adam, Mark wore clothes. Lena’s God zapped Mark with a bolt of lightning. Smoke rose from his singed shirt and pants. His stringy brown hair, all frizzed out, resembled the filaments of the dandelion gone to seed.

Lena rubbed her feet on the hardwood floor. The friction precipitated the thought that she shall gain footing in her new world. She dreamed of selling her sculptures for a very high price and selling her column to syndication for the big papers. When her reverie placed her as Number One in syndication, she whispered to herself, None of that, and put the pencil down.

Meanwhile Reyna had glanced Lena’s way a few times. When one of Lena’s feet came to rest on a prong of the stand of her chair, Reyna said, What’s with the bare feet?

Yeah, Marley said, who looked over her shoulder toward Lena, what happened to your shoes?

Left them on the street.

On the street, Reyna said.

Yepper. That transvestite who wants to be mayor has probably picked them up by now.

The phone rang. Marley took the call. Reyna said yepper and returned to work. She had some captions to write.

Lena opened the middle top drawer of her desk and retrieved a wooden letter opener, its short blade topped by a carved male figure, robed in red, copied from the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. The figure, with arms outstretched above its head, had represented to Michelangelo’s eye the separation of light and darkness. After Lena closed the drawer and sliced open a stack of envelopes, she pulled a letter from the top envelope and read the following:

Dear Lena,

My boyfriend just left me. We had an argument about me having lunch with a former boyfriend. It was no big deal. Just lunch. I don’t get it. What’s the problem?

— Fed Up

Lena smiled. With her pencil she wrote an A in the upper right-hand corner and circled it. This meant the letter would be given top consideration for a response. Lena set the letter aside and picked up another envelope. She removed a letter and opened it. What’s the problem? echoed in her mind and distracted her. The distraction opened up a moment for her to glance across the street. In a window directly opposite hers, a man and woman were having sex. The woman leaned on a desk, her head down. The man had coupled with her from behind. He held her at the hips. In what seemed like a frenzy, he grabbed her long hair and pulled her head up. The woman’s mouth opened. She wants it, Lena thought. She wants it came inside her mind again and again.

Lena glanced at the open letter. Her eyes jumped to the signature from Too Tall for Love. Instead of reading the preceding words, Lena stole a long look at the love lock across the street. The letter fell from her hands. The woman in the window let out a silent cry.

Lena gathered up the letter, which had found its way to her lap, and released it in the direction of a pile of papers. She pinched the edge of her desk with both hands and pulled herself up snug. She straddled the keyboard with her elbows on the desk and rested her forehead against a tent of her hands, a shelter for her eyes, now closed. The image of the man riding the woman flared in her mind. The flare illumined a wretchedness that startled her. A dark place announced itself, all chaos.

Lena, eyes now open, scanned the jumbled alphabet of the keyboard. She fixed on the A and S keys as forming a word. This simple word grounded her, put the chaos out of mind. She searched for more words in adjacent letters. O-P, no. Y-U, no. Well, yes, if phonetics is allowed. Is that it? Yes. No, wait. There’s W-E.

Lena raised her head. The man and woman were no longer in the window. Who’s the we? Lena asked herself. In this dream of coupling, uncoupling, who’s my we? There’s the professional we. But the personal we—does it include a man who wears a white hat?

Lena glanced sideways at a nearby closed door. Its plain surface was painted an early-spring-leaf green, an alien statement for the polar bear white on the walls. Behind that door sat Dancing Dan, the editor, a member of Lena’s professional we. Lena speculated he was writing an editorial or feature article.

Lena stared absently at the closed green door. The engine of her mind idled at a crossroad. There was no turning back. Her future lay ahead or off to the left or the right. The same could be said for her present and past. There was no time in the time of the mind. Nevertheless, Lena created time by clutching to different tenses for her verbs. Her first clutch sent her into the past.

Lena traveled to a swanky corporate office. She saw a tall, burly, suited man swing a wooden baseball bat. Her pharmaceutical boss held the bat. Once again he was dreaming his dream to play major league baseball. He was too old to play.

A sudden U-turn takes Lena back to the crossroad and straight into Dan’s small office. Dan the UT baseball fan hefts a large metal bat. Let’s see what you got, Lena says. Dan takes a big swing. His follow-through clobbers the monitor of his computer. Plastic cracks and shatters. Lena wonders if Dan owns a typewriter for a backup.

Another sudden U-turn will take Lena back to the crossroad. There she’ll take a corner, hard. In a series of rapid shifts she’ll max out her 4-cylinder Honda. She’ll bounce in the driver’s seat as the wheels fly over the uneven dirt road. The rubber will throw up stones against the metal in rapid dings. Thuds will strip paint from the sides of the car. And Lena, the woman in pursuit of dreams, will call out, strip me clean, strip me bare. I shall be bare when he comes for me.

Lena rose from her chair and stepped around her desk to the window. Her side of the street came into view. Behind her she heard Marley on the phone and Reyna’s long fingernails clicking on the computer keys. They’re part of my we. So is hunk-o-Mark. But if he—

Lena saw the white gambler’s hat directly below. Something inside her snapped into gear. She put a brake on an impulse to run downstairs.

The white hat moved out of view toward her building. Lena pressed her forehead against the window. Where did he go? Wait a sec. Did he come inside?

Lena released the brake and spun away from the window. In that same moment the green door opened. Dancing Dan emerged. He wore cowboy boots and blue denim jeans, his second skin, and an old supple orange UT sweatshirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. Dan’s eyes were to the floor and straightaway he saw Lena’s bare stocking feet. He raised his gaze to the face of the office goddess.

Hey, now we’re the same height, he said. Wanna dance?

You already know the answer to that, Reyna said from across the room.

Dan looked Reyna’s way, then returned his gaze to Lena. I’ll teach you. Whatdya say?

Corporate policy—no fraternizing with the staff, Lena said with a smirk.

What corporate policy? Dan asked.

The one you haven’t written yet, Reyna said, her focus still on her computer monitor.

Dan snapped his fingers. Let’s stop everything while I write policy. Then we all can have staff meetings twice a week to discuss policy. Maybe I’ll hire a policy consultant. We can all start working for policy.

An image in her mind of the wandering white hat jolted Lena with anxiety. She excused herself and left the office. She checked out the stairs on her way to the ladies’ room. Empty. And no one in the doorway outside. Drop it, she thought. He’s just a man on the street. There’s a feature article to write. Proofreading. Cleaning up love scat in letters.

When Lena returned to the office, Dan and Reyna were discussing the latest movie poster Reyna had pinned to the wall. Marley was listening in. A friend of Reyna’s worked at a cinema, and he supplied her with the posters, some overlapping in collages suggesting love or war. This latest poster, a head and shoulders shot, showed Pierce Brosnan nuzzling auburn beauty Julianne Moore. Under the title of the movie, Laws of Attraction, sat a subtitle, Love always has the last word. Fitting words, Lena thought, for dueling attorneys.

Love comes through the unbidden word.

Lena took the bold thought as her own. For the shortest of split seconds she almost accepted the voice as that of a messenger.

Dan and Reyna’s chat reminded Lena of her job interview with Dan. She carried the remembrance of that interview to her desk and recalled after she sat down how Dan had snapped his fingers on both hands to announce she had been hired to work for 6th Street Press, the most philosophical newspaper in Austin. The snapping confirmed he expected her to write one feature article every week (after all, the paper was a weekly), proofread the forty-page paper, write one movie review every two weeks, and start a column dispensing relationship advice. She had agreed to the terms of employment and quipped the column could be called Love It, a poor pun on her last name but good enough to clinch the job. So here on 6th Street, in a bohemian colony just a few blocks from the spectacular capitol building, the power center of a state with a gross product that bested, in dollars, the entire production of all foreign countries save nine, here, Lena Lovitt, corporate exile, sought a new life, a life of light.

The office phone rang. Marley took the call. It’s for you, she said to Reyna. Dancing Dan moseyed Lena’s way. A better twist for the editorial he had been working on sprung into his mind. He silently disappeared behind his green door. That left Lena the only person not working. But Lena was working. Her mind and heart constructed a corridor through which she would meet the spirit of a man wearing a white hat.

CHAPTER 2

Lunchtime brought Lena, Reyna, and Marley to Barbie’s Café. There a Barbie doll dressed in a pink and yellow summery ensemble sat on the lectern of the hostess. There the three real women sat around a square table in an open area of the café. After they placed their orders, Lena asked Marley, How’s the second look coming?

A week ago, Lena had assigned the movie Matrix: Revolutions to Marley to review. After coming on board at the paper, Lena initiated Second Look, an innovative column that examined how certain movies could have done a better job in telling their stories. Marley had been a devotee of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Trek: Voyager, an odd combination in Lena’s mind, but a suitable background for Marley to tackle the third and final Matrix movie. Lena failed to take into account, however, that Marley, still a teenager, had not the depth needed to stand alone as an independent thinker. Marley excelled in following well-worn paths of the intellect, for that was the way of university learning. She had yet to master how to draw up her own blueprints, as in designing a better ending for a movie.

I’m working on it, Marley said.

Reyna and Lena