The Five Lives of John and Jillian

by Greg Krehbiel

  Gathering as much dignity as he could muster, he chatted briefly with Ed while waiting for an opportunity to catch Jillian alone. He quickly excused himself, grabbed Jillian gently by the elbow and tried to kiss her goodbye as if everything was normal. She pulled away.

  On the drive home everything started to fall into place. He began to piece together the clues that his subconscious mind had been analyzing. And then suddenly he realized that he had a hidden resource. His dreams.

  * * *

  “Hi Doug,” John said across the office kitchen as the two of them prepared their morning cups.

  Doug turned and looked at him for a moment.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Doug said.

  “Sorry?” John asked, trying to be cheerful.

  “I can hear it in your voice,” Doug said, “and I can see it in the way you’re standing. You’ve learned it the hard way, but ... at least you’ve learned it.”

  John wanted to pretend ignorance. He wanted to make a snide, rude comment. He wanted to defend his dignity. But in the final analysis John was an honest man, and he wasn’t up to a deception. Not today.

  “Yeah,” was all he managed to say.

  “Hey,” Doug said, “I have something for you. I just finished a book I think you’d like. It’s called The Rational Male. I’ll drop it by your office later.”

  John simply nodded and headed back to his office.

  * * *

  Jillian didn’t call the entire week, and neither did John. He spent some of this time at the library, and hours upon hours on the Internet, working the problem. His agnostic, logical, scientific mind screamed revolt and rebellion, but something drove his mind onto a path he never thought he would take. His dreams had become more and more lucid, and while he couldn’t explain how he could rely on an interpretation of a dream, there was a clear pattern forming, and his strategy emerged ever more plainly as he labored away each night.

  He was working several problems at once, but one was as ordinary as his first cup of coffee. Every morning he experimented with a new mixture, and every night he reviewed what he had learned and tested his plans.

  If he could step back and look at his life objectively for even an instant he would have realized that his former self had died. He was a different man. He no longer doubted that tarot cards could reveal things the conscious, rational mind couldn’t, or that hidden messages might lie beneath the vague images of a dream. He began to record his dreams and analyze them, after a fashion, and he began to trust his intuition.

  When his mind tempted him to stray back to his former ways of thinking, he saw it all in a new light, and he began to create a new synthesis. His old perspective seemed a cold, hard, and thoroughly inadequate way to view the world. But he tried to keep the best of it.

  He didn’t believe in spirits or fate or God. But he knew that his worldview needed to adapt to this new-found intuitive approach.

  Logic had its place, but only in the service of the whole man. And that was the mantra of his new attitude. He was a whole man now. Ready to love and be loved, and feel the pain and anguish of the lover’s heart. The senses he had suppressed for so many years were bursting forth in their own spring, in mockery of the season. His mind was drunk with a new sense of insight into his surroundings. And all of it was focused on one event. A trap, carefully laid, in which he would exact his vengeance and free his spirit.

  * * *

  Late Saturday night he had realized a flaw in his plan. He had no way to be sure Jillian would come on Monday night. If he was right, and she intended to leave him completely, she might just skip it.

  So he sent her an email.

  Jillian,

  I’m so glad I’ll be seeing you on Monday. I just got back from the doctor, and there’s something we ought to discuss. Privately, if you know what I mean.

  John

  When Monday evening finally came he stopped and marveled at the work he had done. He couldn’t explain all he had learned in a week’s time, but he knew that it was there at the ready. He was eager, like a runner spoiling for the gun to start the race. Long passages seemed to come to his mind at the slightest bidding. Complicated arguments he’d toiled over in the night now rolled off his tongue like a familiar address. But most important of all, the mixture was ready. He opened the glass jar and smelled the rich aroma. This would be a night to remember.

  * * *

  A predictable tension hovered over the meeting. The conversations were uninspired, and brief, and despite good food and plenty of wine, the book club at John’s apartment was an obvious failure. Things wrapped up early and people headed home.

  John slipped into a back room to make a quick call, then came back into the living room. As expected, Sean and Jillian were waiting for him.

  John poured them the last of the coffee they had been drinking that evening. Jillian and Sean looked nervous.

  “So what did you want to talk about?” Jillian asked.

  John nodded, preparing himself for the carefully rehearsed script.

  “I liked your coffee so much, I decided to experiment with a few ideas myself. But after drinking several different concoctions, I thought I’d better ask the doctor if I was doing myself any harm with the ingredients.”

  As John expected, Sean and Jillian seemed to relax at the news. Only that? he imagined them thinking.

  “He told me I was okay, being a man. You see, several ingredients had a very nice flavor — the chicory and the blue cohosh combined very well, I thought — and they have no effect at all on men, but the blue cohosh can cause spontaneous abortion in women.”

  Jillian and Sean both went as white as a sheet, and Jillian put her hand on her stomach.

  “Yes, I know all about your scheme,” John said. “I know that Sean is infertile, and that you needed a father for the child, and I know that you trusted the cards to pick the right man. But even though Sean believes in the Goddess, he couldn’t help checking on things himself. You wanted good genes for your child, after all, so he hacked into my doctor’s system to look at my medical records.”

  He let that hang for a moment. Sean didn’t deny it.

  “I know you desperately want to keep this child, and I know what part I was supposed to play. But … I’m sorry … I won’t be used like that, ...” he continued, but Jillian cut him off.

  “What right do you have to poison me?” Her voice was venomous and her eyes blazed. Sean set a hand on her shoulder to calm her down. “How dare you ...”

  “How dare I?” John interrupted angrily. “How dare I decide whether or not you’ll have my child? Weren’t you doing exactly that to me? Isn’t turn about fair play? Or, as the Wiccans like to say, don’t curses come back to roost fourfold?”

  Sean looked at Jillian with dread, as if all his sins and inadequacies had been laid bare, and he had no excuse. He couldn’t father a child for her, and now his scheme for a surrogate had gone horribly wrong. Jillian was on that bubble between fierce anger and desperate sobs.

  John let them stew in their fear for several minutes, then he rose from the table and opened the outer door to the hallway.

  “You can come in now, officer,” he said in a quiet voice. A uniformed police officer followed him in, and two others waited in the hallway outside.

  John turned to Sean and said, “hacking into a doctor’s computer is illegal, and we have all the evidence we need to put you behind bars for several years.”

  Sean looked around in a panic, but the officer placed a firm hand on his shoulder.

  “Sean Kerrigan,” he said, “you’re under arrest for hacking into the computers of the Laurel Medical Center.” He continued with the court-mandated language as John, Jillian and Sean stared at one another. When all the words were said and the officer cuffed Sean’s hands behind his back, Sean looked at John with a hard expression.

  John laughed at him, and shook his head in disbelief. Then he turned to the cop.

  “Please get this trash out of my apartment.�
�

  The officer pulled Sean out of his chair and took him outside. The entire time Jillian sat still, staring into her lap, seemingly in shock.

  “Relax,” John eventually said. “There was nothing dangerous in the coffee. I would never hurt a baby like that.”

  Jillian fell back into her chair and sighed deeply, but she still looked at John with daggers in her eyes. Slowly the hatred there was replaced by tears, and a plea for mercy.

  “John,” she eventually said, “we never meant for this to be difficult for you. I had hoped it could be .... Well, I hoped it would be pleasant for you, and no harm done. But things didn’t work out the way we expected. I’m very sorry. But this child .... He’s done nothing wrong, and Sean and I were going to raise him together. Now he’ll have no father.”

  John stared at her coldly, then shook his head and tried not to laugh. Jillian looked shocked, as if she expected that he would always be under her thumb.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done,” she continued. “My house belongs to Sean, and I can’t afford the payments. If he’s in jail, I’ll lose it.”

  “Don’t come crying to me,” John said with contempt. “I’ve already shown you more mercy than you deserve. If I felt any personal responsibility towards this child, then even now, after everything you’ve done, I would offer to marry you and raise the kid. But all you wanted was my sperm, so you took it in the middle of the night while I was drunk. How would you react if a man did something like that to a woman?”

  Jillian’s face turned a shade whiter as she thought about that.

  “A friend encouraged me to press charges against you for rape,” John said. “And I’ve talked to an attorney about it. But for the sake of the child I’m not going to pursue that. That’s all the mercy you’re going to get from me, and more than you deserve. Get out.”

  Jillian hung her head in shame.

  “Sean drove me here,” she said quietly, staring at the floor. “I don’t have the keys.”

  “Call a cab, but get out of my house.”

  * * *

  Two months later John and Doug were having lunch downtown, comparing notes.

  “You did the right thing,” Doug said as John explained the whole situation with Jillian and Sean. “She used you, and she deserved what she got.”

  “Well, as my friend Al likes to tell me, I have a mean streak,” John said. “Maybe I over-compensated.”

  “One thing I don’t get,” Doug asked. “Why didn’t she just take you to bed early on? You say she’s a good-looking woman. If all she wanted was to get pregnant, it sounds like that would have been easy.”

  John shook his head and laughed.

  “She had to get pregnant by me, for one thing, because that’s what the cards told her. And in some ways she’s more traditional than you would think, being a witch. She believes a child has a special blessing when the parents love each other. She gave me this line about making it easy on me, and that she never intended for me to fall in love with her, but that was a lie, whether she knew it or not. She wanted me to fall in love with her because she thought it would be better for the baby somehow.”

  “In a way she’s right,” Doug said with a shrug. “You’ve been a lot easier on her than I would have been. So in that sense, at least, the child is blessed.”

  “Yeah. I’ve made sure things don’t go too badly for them,” John said, somewhat apologetically. “I’ve helped them find a good lawyer, and I think Sean will end up paying a fine and not going to jail. At first I wanted revenge and I wanted them to suffer. I was Hellishly mad. And to some extent I wanted to knock them off their moral high horse and show them how rotten they were being. But after I thought about it for a while, what does all that matter? I don’t want that kid to grow up poor, with no dad. Sean was a jerk to me, but … honestly, he’s not that bad of a guy.”

  Doug shook his head and smiled. “It’s your call, man. But now all that’s in the past. You’ve learned your lessons and it’s time to move on. You’ve got a lot of life ahead of you. What did you think of that book I loaned you?”

  “In a word, it was amazing,” John said. “I had to read it three times before all the concepts started to sink in, but in the last month I’ve had more dates than I’ve had since college. I’m never going to be the cold player you are, Doug. I’m not like that. But I’ve learned my lessons about women.”

  “We’ll see,” Doug said with an unreadable expression. “It takes more than reading one book.”

  John laughed. “Fair enough. But I’m sure you’ll be around to give me advice.”

  “Maybe,” Doug said with the same cold face. “I’ve got my own life to live, dude. So, no more witches for you?”

  “I don’t know,” John said. “I’m not sure I care one way or the other. But I won’t be fooled next time.”

  With that John nodded his head towards the bar and Doug turned to take a look. An attractive blonde looked lonely.

  * * *

  You won’t find it easy now, it’s only fair.

  He was willing to give to you, you didn’t care.

  You’re waiting for more but you’ve already had your share.

  The witch’s promise is turning, so don’t you wait up

  for him, he’s going to be late.

  - The Witch’s Promise, by Jethro Tull

  The Witch’s Bastard

  Jillian sat alone, cross-legged on her bed with the cards in front of her. A single candle burned on the night stand. She blinked away tears as she tried to concentrate on the cards. It was a long, slow reading, but it seemed to be leading inexorably to one conclusion. She turned over the last card.

  Judgment.

  * * *

  Playing racquetball against a large man with long arms is a challenge. Al’s size and wing span allowed him to simply station himself in the middle of the court and force John to run around him – or to challenge him for the space, which wasn’t easy. Since John was not the type to run around like a rabbit, it made for a vigorous and rather rough game.

  “One thing I still don’t get,” Al said while trying to catch his breath before a serve, “is how that priest knew that Sean was doing a tarot reading. It seems uncanny.”

  They had been discussing John’s strange experiences with Jillian Collins, the attractive but deceitful witch who had tricked John into fathering her child. Jillian’s mate Sean was shooting blanks, so the two of them agreed that Jillian would do a tarot reading to find the right man for the job. She had picked John.

  Sean had a slightly different agenda. He thought it was important for the father of their child to be a full-fledged pagan, so he tried to get John into the tarot card scene while they were having a beer at a local restaurant. A priest somehow sensed what was going on and convinced Sean to cut it out.

  John shrugged. “Weird things happen, Al. Maybe that’s just what he does – wander around looking for the devil. Or maybe he can sense that stuff.”

  “So do you believe that spiritual flap?” Al asked, knowing that John had been a pretty hard-headed skeptic for most of his adult life.

  “No,” John replied, but he said it with no conviction. A moment later he added. “I don’t disbelieve it either.”

  Al grinned and shook his head at him. “You’ve changed, John.”

  John bent over to catch his breath, and then he started to laugh.

  “You might expect me to. I had a prophetic vision right there in the liquor store. And I fathered a kid on a witch. You’re darned right I’ve changed. I’m sure I could come up with some half-baked materialist explanation for everything if I wanted to. Or I could start to believe in the spookies. But I’d rather just withhold judgment.”

  “Back to the game,” Al said, checking his watch after noticing a face peering in through the small window in the door. “We’ve only got five more minutes.”

  John nodded and hit a low, hard serve that came back just over the line, and landed right in the seam between the wall and the floor
. Al got it on the bounce, but he crashed into the wall in the process. His volley went high, giving John an easy set-up for a killer shot.

  When their court time was over at 9:00, they were both soaked in sweat. John could feel several spots on his arms and legs that would be sore for days. They gathered their things, limped back to the locker rooms to shower, then headed over to Red, Hot and Blue in Laurel for some ribs and a few beers.

  John tried to keep the conversation light. He was pretty sick of thinking about Jillian. But Al insisted on hearing more about how John dealt with all the weird experiences he’d had among the pagans.

  “I don’t understand how you can do this,” he said as their second beers arrived. “Can you really just let it go and not try to explain it? I’ve always thought of you as the quintessential rational man.”

  “Ordinary things happen every day that I can’t explain,” John said, somewhat defensively, and somewhat out of character. “Life continues anyway. I don’t see why I need to explain the weird stuff.”

  Al nodded his head in reluctant agreement.

  “I guess you’re right about that, but .... It’s just so damned interesting.”

  John’s phone suddenly buzzed. He would have put it away – he considered it rude to answer the phone while you’re out with a friend – but he was expecting an update on his mom’s cataract surgery.

  “Anything important?” Al asked.

  “Just Jillian again,” John said as he deleted the message.

  “What?” Al asked, incredulous. “What does she want? I thought the whole program was that she and Sean couldn’t have a kid, so they borrowed your studly self for a while and then got back together. Aren’t you out of the picture now?”

  “Yes,” John said definitively. “I am out of the picture. Only she doesn’t seem to think so.”