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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK258 Jack FritscherWe listened for a while not speaking, she smoking, until the record finished Side Two. I said I had to go, and left her my manuscript. At her door, searching for ignition, I asked, %u201cMaybe, that is, if you%u2019re not busy or anything, we could go out Saturday night. To a movie or something.%u201d%u201cI%u2019m afraid not,%u201d she said.%u201cNot even a virgin to the Cinematheque?%u201d%u201cAnother time.%u201d %u201cOh, sorry...%u201d%u201cRyan, that%u2019s not a %u2018no.%u2019%u201dJune 20, 1964Summer struck with new classes and thunderstorms. Lake Michigan rose and fell with a week of seiche that ripped the beach raw, crashing waves against the huge boulders protecting Loyola%u2019s Lakeshore Campus. Huge walls of water rolled in every ten hours, big as tidal waves. Between bossa nova cuts from the new Getz/Gilberto Verve album with Astrud singing %u201cThe Girl from Ipanema,%u201d the radio warned everyone away from the beaches of Lake Michigan where lifeguards stood watch. Even the constant Chicago wind could not relieve the humidity. The suck and pull of barometric pressure, rising and falling, teetered always on the edge of cyclone and tornado.I retreated to Louisa%u2019s attic, studying late, feeling unloved and lost, listening to Stan Getz%u2019 saxophone mix %u201cDesafinado%u201d with the piano of Antonio Jobim and the guitar of Jo%u00e3o Gilberto. I hated the House of Lou Lou. She thought me like other men the way the priests had thought all vocations were the same. I hated me in her house. She was too personal. I wanted to escape from my past to my future. I stopped going to Mass. I thought of Ted in that grade-school nun%u2019s story, how he committed a sin with his girl and died in a car crash. The fires of hell got him, but at least he got the girl. The priests taught that girls were the main occasion of sin, but girls treated me almost formally, as if they and the world had not exactly been waiting for me to show up.Could the world feel what I could not feel? At Misery, I had felt compassion for the world, but in the world, I lost empathy toward everyone, victims in burning buildings and children with cancer and people in ghettos, slipping and sliding since Jack died in Dallas, six months out of Misery, having gained the world and lost my soul. I wrote in my yellow legal pads those old lines of Wordsworth that %u201cthe world is too much with