Page 242 - Demo

%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK230 Jack Fritscherbe in Vietnam, with no Jack Kennedy to lead me. In seventeen months, my classmates would be ordained to the priesthood. I panicked. I missed Lock. I fantasized saying good-bye to him at Misery. No real good-bye. So no experience of a personal good-bye. An imagined good-bye no more real than a grade-B late show starring Lock and me.Lock: %u201cDid Karg give you his farewell sermon?%u201dRyan: %u201cI stopped him. I said the Jebbie Jesuit took care of anything that needed to be said.%u201d Close-up. Ryan. His face shows he remembers how he had lied to his father when his father had tried to explain the facts of life.Lock: %u201cGood. I heard it%u2019s terrible.%u201dThey look at each other as the swirling decked holiday halls of Misery empty around them. Carolers, far-off, sing, %u201cFa la la la.%u201dLock: %u201cPriests are like gypsies. We%u2019re always saying good-bye.%u201dRyan: %u201cLife is an endless succession of good-byes.%u201dThey begin to make dialog...Lock: %u201cEverything goes too fast, I guess.%u201d...to cover the end...Ryan: %u201cIt seems all my life I%u2019ve been standing in bus stations saying good-bye, leaving people.%u201d...of their friendship...Lock: %u201cOn cold platforms.%u201d...each never to see the other again...Ryan: %u201cIn clouds of blue exhaust.%u201d...like the movies...Ryan: %u201cBe a good priest, Lock.%u201dThe two young men shake hands like comrades parting in the trenches.Lock: %u201cA good person. That%u2019s what you%u2019ll be. A good man.%u201dClose up. Ryan. He wants, for all the warmth of ten years, to hug Lock shoulder-to-shoulder. But he cannot. There can never be special friendships, because special friendship never existed. Even at Christmas. Camera: medium shot. The walls of Misery press too close. The face of Rector Karg appears. Lock himself begins to fade to black.Ryan: %u201cRemember the spiritual autobiography Raissa Maritain wrote about her life with Jacques?%u201dLock: %u201cWe Have Been Friends Together.%u201dRyan: %u201cGood-bye, Lochinvar.%u201dI dissolved out to my real self, on a walk into the cold December, taunting the world to receive me newly arrived in the world, but not yet of it. No longer unlike other men. Other Christmases the bus out of Misery had roared past filling stations where grease-smudged young men stood