The Loss of Innocence

Shifting her gaze onto an abandoned spider web in the corner by the ceiling, Sam thought that today the room felt terribly claustrophobic and depressing, even more so than usual. Its drab walls, the faded hardwood floor, the second-hand furniture all spoke to Sam's mood.

She rolled her head back and gave out a loud empty laugh. She heard nothing at first.

But the room trapped the sound, bounced it from wall to ceiling to floor to her desk and back to the wall, until it gained strength, and had become mad and deranged. It rang in her ears as only a foreign, outside sound could.

It had not come from her. Rather, someone was laughing at her. She shivered nervously. Was she losing her mind?

Her toes tingled, and she thought she could distinctly feel thin icy fingers move up her body, caress her knees, invade her thighs, then stroke her stomach and chest, until she could feel their chilling grip on her throat.

With a quick impulsive thrust she pulled the blanket over herself.

In complete darkness, her eyes were wide open, bulging out in fear. It was still cold, but now dark.

Sam rubbed her hands quickly against each other.

It didn't help.

On her desk across the room the phone rang. She let the machine get it. Without realizing it, she strained her body, listening intently.

She heard a beep. Then her greeting: "Hi. This is Sam. Talk." Another beep and the sound of tape being rewound. Then there was silence.

Several minutes passed and the ringing once more pierced the air.

One ring. Two. Silence.

One ring.

Sam ran to the phone.

"Hello?"

But the person on the other end had already hung up. She slammed the receiver back on the set angrily.

But anger was better than melancholy, she thought. And running for the phone was better than lying quivering in bed, hallucinating. She had to leave.

* * *

She went to the city, of course. What better place was there to lose oneself in the sea of expressionless faces and faceless expressions? She took public transportation straight into the downtown and by early afternoon she was there.

The streets were noisy, cluttered with the business people's frenzied cell phone chatter, with the homeless' begging and the clanking of change in their rusted tin cans, with the honking of cars, bikes, and mopeds. In the air one could smell the thick lustful energy of ambitious corporate ladder climbers, of greedy pickpockets, staking out their next prey, of married men running to their voluptuous mistresses for that lunch hour tumble between the sheets.

As though for the first time, Sam looked and saw. She saw the clouded over look of pain in the one working eye of an elderly man, leaning against the black glass wall of a bank. His walleye remained uncovered, and that, too, she saw, horrified at its grotesqueness. She saw the deep creases that age and hardship had carved into his features. His head, as though in mockery, was crowned with a wreath of dried spring flowers, lying atop an incoherent mop of tangled hair. He wore an old dirty T-shirt. Across his chest, Sam read the words in large colorful but already faded letters: Live to Love. Sam saw, too, that the man was barefoot, his soles hardened into rock-solid yellow calluses. As she passed him, he raised his head and with his one owl eye looked her straight in the face. The gaze seemed to pierce her with its intensity. For a second the cloudiness was gone. She stared back until once again the alertness was gone and the eye hazed over. The man lowered his head.

Sam walked on and looked. Now she fancied herself a professional looker. She would try to catch the eyes of the people walking towards her. She would take in their facial expressions, their movements, even their clothes. It was now lunch hour and she was fighting her way through a crowd of well-dressed, nice-smelling people with important expressions and emptiness in their eyes that looked straight through her.

Today Sam was a bystander at this ostentatious parade of human vanity. The self-important and the self-pitying alike were gathered before her in the microcosmic parody of that highly stratified, bipolar social order called corporate America. She remembered her father saying one time on their way to the Museum of Science that it was a unique feature of downtowns to converge the antipodes of society and she hadn't known what he meant, too timid to ask for an explanation. But now she understood.

Sam walked on and though what she saw horrified her, she could not condemn it. She too had once been an active participant here, marching proudly to the skyscraper prison by 9am every morning, balancing her bursting briefcase on one shoulder, and folders of legal cases under her other arm, looking through people, entirely oblivious of the existence of anyone with whom she didn't have a scheduled and confirmed appointment.

It was only now that things were different. Her make-up was stashed in a box somewhere in her father's garage. Her wardrobe of five hundred plus dollar business suits had all been given away to friends and charity. Her car she had given to a younger cousin. It was all gone, in fact. Walking now along the sidewalk on Main Street, she was wearing on her most of what she owned. A pair of weather-beaten tennis shoes, worn gray sweats, a university pride T-shirt-a remnant from her Harvard days, and a visor someone pushed into her hands several years ago at a job fair, all relegated her to the lowest fringes of the social spectrum of downtown inhabitants. No one even asked her for spare change.

* * *

Sam didn't know where she was going. She didn't have a destination, not for this afternoon promenade, not for the rest of her life. With her own two hands a week ago she cut the rope securing her successful career, money, fame, fortune, anything that the American dream teaches us to aspire. Then, she jumped off the cliff of human ambition and ended up in that pit that was her rundown studio in the lowlands of civilization.

Sam didn't know whether her choice had been good. It was merely that she felt dirty. She felt dirty every morning walking into the office dressed impeccably, smiling cheerfully to her fellow employees who hated her and whom she hated equally in return. She felt dirty taking cases that she knew she couldn't win, but that were pushed on her by quotas and pressure from above. She felt that somewhere in that maddening rush for success she had lost her soul and in the process dirtied her body.

* * *

On the bus ride back Sam remembered.

It was six years ago. She was in her last year of law school, and by some lucky chance she had scored a year-long paid internship at one of the city's most prestigious corporate law firms. Not only that, she had the honor and privilege of working directly with one of the junior partners, Jack Ross, researching cases for him, taking depositions, writing legal arguments, everything short of presenting his cases in court.

One night, in December it must have been, though she couldn't remember any more, she found herself working late in the legal library at the firm. It was certainly past midnight, as she remembered hearing the city tower, just several blocks away. Besides her, in the entire building, there were probably only another two or three people.

Though Sam spent so much time at the office, she was practically living there, she still found it eerie to remain in the windowless library with its bright lights and shiny wooden interior so late into the night, that the only indication of the lateness of the hour was the complete silence that surrounded her. She was then understandably startled when she heard loud steps advancing down the hallway in her direction.

She looked up in expectation.

The footsteps stopped before the door.

Her heart beat faster.

The antique handle had finally lowered and the library door slowly opened.

"Ms. Wright, I am so sorry to disturb you. I didn't know anyone was in here."

"Oh Chris, it's you," Sam called out visibly relieved, giving the janitor a friendly smile. "I must admit I was rather curious who was wandering the hallways this late at night. What are you doing here?"

Chris seemed uncomfortable and was visibly fumbling for an answer. A light blush colored his smooth youthful cheeks. He looked no older than eighteen, Sam remembered noticing, and yet he must have been at least several years older than herself. She had once seen him at a holiday fair with his wife and two sons. The oldest was already a Cub Scout.

"Yes, indeed, Mr. Brown! What brings you here at this late hour?!"

Sam jumped at the startling sound of an unexpected third voice in the room. She had not noticed Jack come in quietly from an adjoining room, nor did she know he had been there in the first place. Chris seemed no less surprised. A nervous twitch ran across his face.

"I am sorry, Mr. Ross." Chris lowered his eyes and looked at the floor as he spoke. "I... I had forgotten something here."

"What did you forget?"

"A shirt... I mean a sweatshirt. I think I left it here, when I was cleaning... earlier."

Sam felt herself blushing. She couldn't watch other people lie so poorly. "Everything you do," her father had told her when he caught her lying about an essay she had plagiarized, "you should do well. I won't stand lying in this house, so if you want to lie, you'd better make sure you're so good at it, I can't tell!" And that was exactly what Sam did. She became good, exceptionally good, and now couldn't stand to see others fail at an art she had mastered.

But Jack was oblivious. He looked around impatiently. "I don't see it. Where is it?"

"I am so sorry, Mr. Ross," Chris kept lowering his head. "I completely forgot. I stopped to get a glass of water at the cooler and ..."

"That's sufficient explanation, Mr. Brown," Jack interrupted, his tone brusque. "Would you now be so kind as to leave this library and go about your business?"

Chris left the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Sam looked at Jack with surprise.

Jack Ross must have been in his late thirties, perhaps early forties, then. One could even say he was handsome for his age. He was tall, thin, with slightly graying hair and a distinguishingly upright posture. Although she had only seen him rarely, in her mind Sam had built him up to the status of a demi-god. His impeccable reputation with the company, his aura of competence and superiority, up till now at least, had only reinforced her opinion of him. Jack was married and had a two year old daughter, whose framed picture was his office's only personal decoration.

"Mr. Ross," Sam said, breaking the reinstalled silence. "I didn't realize you were here too. I have your research almost ready."

"No, no, that's fine. I wasn't here for that reason." Jack rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. "I am sorry. What was your name? I realize I should know it - you have been working for me for several months now, but we've had hardly any contact."

"Samantha Wright... Or Sam." She smiled at him. It had crossed her mind before that he may not know her name.

"Of course, Samantha. That's right." He seemed distracted.

He continued several minutes later. "Yes, where were we...? Ah, I was reading the most outrageous article when I heard voices in the library. I was rather agitated, and came out here... Would you like to come take a look at it? Simply outrageous!" He took a quick sip from a glass in his right hand. From the smell Sam knew it was brandy.

She could hardly believe her eyes. Jack, usually reserved and composed, was today visibly shaken. His face, normally closely shaven, bristled with several days worth of cosmetological neglect. Under his eyes, Sam noticed dark rings. It was with some curiosity, doubled with a sense of concern, that she followed Jack out of the library and into the small adjacent room of whose very existence she had previously been unaware.

This room, as Jack now explained to her, served as his hideout. It was here that he would, pacing rapidly from wall to wall and smoking one cigar after another, devise the strategies for his most difficult, most uncertain cases. It was here, too, that he had locked himself that night, distressed over the recent law suit against the company and the publicity it aroused in the local media.

Sam looked around with interest. The room was furnished sparsely yet tastefully. A plush leather loveseat stood opposite an antique mahogany desk. To its side was a small round coffee table, holding a tray with the half-empty brandy snifter and three crystal glasses. There were no windows in the room and the only lighting, coming from a tall thin floor lamp with a lacy green lampshade, wove mysterious patterns on the freshly polished oak parquet. By the desk stood a large reclining chair, into which Jack now fell, exhaling loudly.

Sam walked up to the desk. The latest issues of The Examiner, The Chronicle, and The Daily lay on it in a large messy pile. A highlighted article immediately drew her attention. "I had my secretary browse the newspapers this morning and mark all that was relevant to the case," she heard Jack say as she began reading.

When she was done and looked over to the recliner, Jack was no longer in it.

She turned around sharply, and saw him standing only several inches behind her, reading over her shoulder with an expression of deep consternation. She couldn't help but feel sorry for him. She was only an intern and the fate of the company bore little impact on her future or career. This recent law suit was an exciting game, an intrigue, but certainly little more. For Jack, she knew, the company was his life.

It was at this moment that Jack had caught her looking at him. For an instant their eyes met, and she immediately lowered hers.

What happened next she remembered with such lucidity that, though she now sat in a stuffy bus, she felt goose bumps, like thousands of little ants, crawl up her crossed arms and back. His lips had attacked hers with a passion of desperation. The strong taste of brandy on his breath had almost made her nauseous. Yet she had given in to him that night. Because she worshipped him. Because he was her boss. Because she forgot to say 'no'.

Later, reclining nude on the leather loveseat, he had spilt out his soul to her, cried like a baby about his wife's interminable breast cancer and about the $500,000 he had lost on the stock market in the past year. He mourned the loss of his youth, and she pretended to empathize though inwardly she was impassive. The act had made her feel cheap. It had also made her see Jack for who he was - a middle-aged, broken man, weak and helpless behind the façade of strength and self-assurance.

By next week she had an offer to stay on with the company, something she could have only dreamt about when she first obtained the internship, but felt entirely unenthusiastic about now. Jack had asked her out on several occasions, and each time she turned him down, politely but sternly. As much as she wanted to leave the company, she stayed until her internship ran out for fear of ruining her chances for a glamorous legal career. Needless to say, she received a glowing recommendation from her employer when she left, but somehow that, too, had failed to make her happy.

Sam got off the bus and started walking home. On the bus she had finally remembered when she first started looking through people.

* * *

Mechanically Sam checked the mail when she got home. She hadn't expected to hear from anyone. No one even knew her address, except her father, that is, and she hardly expected to hear from him now.

Yet to her surprise there was an envelope in her mailbox. On the front, she recognized her father's neat handwriting specifying her forwarding address, but the letter wasn't from her father. Sam was intrigued. She turned the letter over, looking for the return address. "Westbank Publishing," the large Gothic-type letters read "New York, NY". She tore open the envelope to find a tax summary statement and a two hundred dollar check in her name.

When Sam was still in college, her third year in college, to be precise, she had written and published a collection of short stories entitled Growing Up in the '90. She had only really written it to see if she could, to prove to herself that she could finish a project she had started. Any project she had started. Then she was at what she considered a low point in her life, when she felt she could accomplish nothing and would amount to even less. Ever since David graduated she felt her life had lacked a purpose and she tried to give it one through writing. It had worked, and she had forgotten all about it since, as one often forgets the difficult process of recovery once fully recuperated.

Now Sam was surprised to find out she was still receiving royalty payments, but she explained to herself that the reason she hadn't noticed before was that they used to be directed-deposited to her account, while she still had an account, and for the past 5 or 6 years she has lived the kind of lifestyle where she hardly looked at her monthly bank statements. Yet now, having quit her job and emptied out her savings in a demonstrative rejection of her past, she found the extra $200 very handy. As it was, the fridge in her studio was empty and she needed money at least for the basic groceries.

Stopping at a bank on her way to cash the check, she headed for the supermarket.

* * *

"Hey, Sammy? Sammy, hold up!"

Sam was already nearing the store, when she heard her name being called by a short, round woman across the street, who was now running towards her, waving her purse wildly in greeting.

Amused at the spectacle, Sam stopped and observed the woman cross the street to much honking and hollering, of which, to be sure, the jubilant stranger seemed entirely oblivious. As soon as she had come close enough, she threw her arms around Sam's neck.

"Sammy, my God!!" she kept repeating, without, meanwhile, letting go of Sam's neck. "It's been ages, truly ages!! How've you been? My God!!"

She had finally released her grip and Sam had a chance to look at her face. Brown librarian glasses in square frames, revealed enormous gray eyes that now looked searchingly at Sam. Her cheekbones were set rather far apart, making her small snout of a nose and an even smaller mouth look lonely on the pancake-shaped face. Her flaming red hair matched the freckles on her forehead, nose, cheeks, even the part of her chest that was visible in the V-cut of her blouse.

"Meg?"

"Yes!" The woman was choking with excitement.

Ages indeed, Sam thought. Last time she had seen Megan was at their high school graduation, and as best she could remember, they weren't on speaking terms then. She was embarrassed to admit she hadn't thought of the girl since and barely even recognized her now, though her features were some of the most distinct she has ever seen.

Megan was a chatter-box, had been in high school and so remained to this day. But this didn't prevent her from being Sam's best friend for at least two or three years of their lives when they played Writers and Poets in a high school club they created by that name or when they organized book-readings by famous writers at their local elementary schools to foster the children's appreciation of literature.

"Let's go grab a bite to eat," Megan offered, as she pulled on Sam's sleeve, motioning in the direction of the mall. "It'll give us a chance to catch up. Plus, I'm just starving, you know!"

"You wanna eat in this neighborhood?" She laughed at Megan's naïveté. "Speaking of which, what are you doing in this neighborhood?"

"Children's shelter," Megan answered simply and shrugged her shoulders. "I eat here all the time. C'mon, there's a little Mexican place I know you should enjoy. I remember you like Mexican."

Sam allowed herself to be led, as Megan showered her with questions.

"So what do you do? Last I heard, someone told me you were a big-shot lawyer... 'That so?"

"Naw, I'm just a bum."

Megan laughed.

"You know, you haven't changed a bit. Not a bit!" She laughed again. "Sammy - a bum!! The same Sammy that was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed' and 'Mostly Likely to Make Her First Million Before the Age of 30'! Sammy, you're such a crack up." She stopped laughing. "But seriously, what do you really do?"

"No, really, I'm a bum."

Sam took a certain pleasure in saying this. Not that she truly believed it... But to an extent, an extent that Sam perhaps did not even want to admit to herself, this was true.

"Alright, you are a bum, Sammy," Megan gave up, "and I am a rocket scientist, but we are still human, you will concede me that, I hope, and human's've got to eat. I'll even treat you, seeing as you are a bum." She grinned.

They ordered a couple of burritos and as they were walking away from the counter Megan asked, conspiratorially nodding in the direction of the waiter: "Cute, eh?"

Sam laughed and waved her off. "Just like high school, Meg. Just like high school. How is it now that I used to respond: 'Eew! Not my type!'"

The two women laughed remembering their high school silliness.

* * *

But Sam had lied. He was her type. She just didn't want to remember, but now that she saw this boy, she couldn't get David out of her mind. It wasn't so much the boy's actual features that made her think of David, as his smooth tanned skin and dark brown eyes, glowing mysteriously from under the thin half-covered eye lids.

David was a mix, a beautiful mix of blue aristocratic English blood on his mother's side and vermilion Sikh blood on his father's. His upbringing was as flawless as was paramount his utter disdain of even the hint of high society. He was beautiful to a point of distraction and, as she described to her friends "tall, dark and handsome didn't nearly do him justice!" But she knew that his outward beauty was really based on his personality, which shone, it seemed, from every pore of his skin. It came out in the small dark seductive dimples on his cheeks, in the playful sparkle of his eyes when he would look at her with reproach for acting selfishly or speaking unkindly of her peers, in the petite nose that would twitch in anticipation of a smile any time the sun was out.

Sam met David her first year in college. He was several years older, but his younger sister was Sam's year, Sam's roommate in fact, and he would frequently come by the dorms to visit her. Little by little they had become friends. Excellent friends. His eyes implied knowledge of things otherworldly, things Sam thought she was too young to contemplate. He meditated daily with his sister and tried to get Sam into the habit. Reluctant at first, Sam had finally given in. David had an absolutely irresistible charm.

But meditation had never done much for Sam. She was trying too hard, or maybe not hard enough, but it never worked. So she became frustrated and mad. In her diary, which incidentally she only kept for the first two years of college, she wrote: "Enlightenment is like an orgasm. You keep repeating the procedure, night to night, and you wait for the miracle to happen, but it doesn't. It doesn't until the right person comes along." She was certain that David held the key to the door that would not open for her, and no matter how frequently he assured her that it could take one many lifetimes of meditation to reach the final climax, she didn't believe him. She wanted it all right away. She could succeed at everything else, why not this?

David wasn't enlightened. He was quite human, in fact, with very human feelings, longings, and desires. He would spend hours talking to Sam out on the bench in Harvard Yard in front of the Memorial church. He was in love with her, but Sam would not let the relationship develop past a friendship.

She was in love with him, too, there was no question about it, at least now, in retrospect. But she refused to acknowledge it then. And then it was too late. He graduated and left for India, where he was to live in an earth hut somewhere in a remote village, working for an international Heal the Sick organization. She scoffed at his ambition, or rather his lack of ambition as she saw it. What a waste of talent, she couldn't help thinking. Deep down she never forgave him for leaving and tried to blot his memory out of her mind.

She never knew why she refused to date him. She wasn't prudish, nor terribly selective in her dating repertoire for that matter. The entire two years she was at Harvard with David she was seeing other people, many other people. She filled her life with superficial relationships that took neither energy nor attention. Perhaps she had been afraid to let men interfere with her career. Certainly David had tried and this may have been why soon after she felt the force of his large hazel eyes pierce her with their intensity and probe her sole, she shut the door and closed the latch on any possibility of romance between them.

David tried to read to her verses from the Tao Te Ching. She remembered one in particular that he always returned to. The words were like David's eyes - they enraptured her and with their magic awoke in her the spirituality she rejected and embraced all at once:

David's bane had been that he tried to rediscover the part in her that she had killed in high school. He wanted her to once again to read and write poetry!

* * *