Bush's Messiah Complex by Molly Ivins

In homage to a fine writer who passed away very recently and much too young, an article of hers that appeared in The Progressive originally.

When George W. Bush ran for President in 2000, he said the United States must be "humble" in the world. Now he has cast humility aside and replaced it with hubris. Supremely confident in his gut instincts, wrapped up in a fundamentalist belief system, endowed with the most powerful, military of all time, and unchecked by Congress, Bush feels he can "rid the world of evil"--at the barrel of a gun.

A picture emerges from the President's public statements--and even from such adulatory accounts as Bob Woodward's Bush at War and David Frum's The Right Man--of a President on a divine mission.

Call it messianic militarism.

He may have discarded the word "crusade," but it's a crusade that he's on. As former Bush speechwriter Frum puts it, "War has made him ... a crusader after all."

While there's nothing wrong with a President trying to make the world a better place, when the man in the Oval Office feels divinely inspired to reshape the world through violent means, that's a scary prospect.

The grandiosity of Bush's vision can no longer be denied.

"Most Presidents have high hopes. Some have grandiose visions of what they will achieve, and he was firmly in that camp," Woodward writes. Bush told him, "I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals," adding, "There is nothing bigger than to achieve world peace."

And the way to achieve that, he believes, is often through war. "As we think through Iraq, we may or may not attack. I have no idea, yet. But it will be for the objective of making the world more peaceful," he told Woodward. Bush seemed to understand that this missionary policy might get him into trouble ("Condi didn't want me to talk about it"), but he persisted, invoking it again in the context of Afghanistan ("I wanted us to be viewed as the liberator") and North Korea.

Bush's now famous comment, "I loathe Kim Jong Il," which he uttered to Woodward, was in the context of the North Korean leader starving his people and torturing prisoners. "It appalls me," Bush said, adding that his reaction "is visceral. Maybe it's my religion, maybe it's my--but I feel passionate about this."

Though his Administration seems to be taking the diplomatic route toward the Korean nuclear crisis, Bush's eagerness to confront Pyongyang should not be underestimated. "I'm not foolish," he said, acknowledging North Korea's ability to inflict massive casualties on the South. But he downplayed the problems that an overthrow might cause. "They tell me, we don't need to move too fast, because the financial burdens on people will be so immense if we try to--if this guy were to topple. Who would take care of--I just don't buy that."

When Bush calls Kim Jong Il a "pygmy" and insists on North Korea's "axis of evil" status, such language reverberates all the way to Pyongyang. And it is not reassuring to hear Bush loosely suggest the possibility of war with North Korea. At a January press conference on Iraq and North Korea, a reporter started to ask, "If we do have to go to war ... "and Bush interjected, "With which country?" This is a flippancy about war not seen since the early Reagan years.

What we know about Bush is that he's a man who places an inordinate amount of trust in the seat of his pants. "I'm not a textbook player. I'm a gut player," he told Woodward, who added that Bush used similar phrases a dozen times in the course of the interview he had with the President.

In medieval times, the measurement of a foot depended on the size of the king's own foot. It was called the regal foot, and now we have the regal gut.

"Bush has an uncanny instinct for when to fight, when to concede, when to run, when to wait out, when to start a venture," writes Carolyn B. Thompson and James W. Ware in The Leadership Genius of George W. Bush. While his business failings don't seem to justify such praise, the authors keep pouring it on: "Much of Bush's success as a leader is explained by his willingness to trust his gut."

But what if Bush gets indigestion? What if his gut gives him bad advice?

Bush carries around two vast war writs, one from September 2001 and the other from October 2002. Combined, they give him unprecedented, unilateral power to throw around whenever his gut tells him to. To trust one man's instinct to be infallible is too much to ask of a democracy.

Writes Woodward: "It's pretty clear that Bush's role as politician, President, and commander in chief is driven by a secular faith in his instincts--his natural and spontaneous conclusions and judgments. His instincts are almost his second religion."

His first religion also comes into play here. Certainly, the President is entitled to practice whatever religion he believes in, and George W. Bush is not the first President to bandy about the name of God or to claim the United States is under the wing of providence. But when his religious fundamentalist beliefs spill over into his job, and when he uses religious rhetoric in inflammatory ways, we ought to take heed.

Since September 11, Bush has barely gone a day without using the word "evil" or "evildoers." His "axis of evil" speech may have so threatened North Korea that it decided to accelerate its nuclear plans. The phrase "axis of evil" did not happen accidentally, either, nor was it the original speechwriter's exact term. Frum came up with the term "axis of hatred" in the draft he sent on to chief speechwriter Michael Gerson. Says Frum: "Gerson wanted to use the theological language that Bush had made his own since September 11--so `axis of hatred' became `axis of evil.'"

Frum is quite open about the importance of fundamentalism in the Bush Administration. The first words he says he ever heard in the White House from George Bush were: "Missed you at Bible study." Frum writes, "Bush came from and spoke for a very different culture from that of the individualistic Ronald Reagan: the culture of modern Evangelicalism. To understand the Bush White House, you must understand its predominant creed."

Frum also cites the speech that Bush gave at his alma mater, Yale, on May 21, 2001. It was one Bush personally worked very hard on, and Frum said it was among the President's most self-revealing. Said Bush: "Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story. And along the way, we start to realize we are not the author."

Bush expressed the same feeling when he was governor of Texas. "I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans," he said.

When he was considering running for President, Bush attended church with his mother. The preacher talked about a reluctant Moses unsure of his leadership qualities. Barbara told George that he was that Moses figure. While running for President, he himself invoked the divine plan. "Together, we have a charge to keep," he wrote in his campaign book, which was not too subtly entitled A Charge to Keep.

That Bush believes he was assigned the Presidency from on high comes through in another passage of Frum's book. After Bush's September 20, 2001, speech to Congress, Gerson called up the President to compliment him: "Mr. President, when I saw you on television, I thought--God wanted you there," Gerson said, according to Frum.

"He wants us all here, Gerson," the President responded, according to Frum.

Bush seems to believe that he is carrying out God's will by waging war. In Woodward's book, he says, "There is a human condition that we must worry about in times of war. There is a value system that cannot be compromised--God-given values. These aren't United States-created values." To be fair, the values Bush was referring to were "freedom and the human condition and mothers loving their children." But still, the idea that the President believes he is doing God's bidding at war time is unsettling.

"There's this odd, personal religiosity about Bush," says Lou Dubose, co-author (with Molly Ivins) of Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush. "And the religious people he was connected with in Texas aren't anything like the mainstream--even the mainstream in Texas."

Dubose cites James Robison, a Fort Worth televangelist. "Bush appeared on Robison's Life Today television ministry and invited Robison to be the main speaker at the prayer breakfast in Austin on the day of Bush's second inauguration as governor," according to Shrub. During that prayer breakfast, Robison related a back-and-forth conversation he had with God while driving on the freeway between Arlington and Dallas. Bush is also an admirer of James Dobson of the rightwing religious group Focus on the Family.

"He's the most recklessly religious President we've seen," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, editor of Freethought Today, the publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, in Madison, Wisconsin. "He's on a religious mission, and you can't divorce religion from his militarism. He believes in fighting righteous war."

Chip Berlet, senior analyst for Political Research Associates in Somerville, Massachusetts, is an expert on rightwing religious groups. "Bush is very much into the apocalyptic and messianic thinking of militant Christian evangelicals," he says. "He seems to buy into the worldview that there is a giant struggle between good and evil culminating in a final confrontation. People with that kind of a worldview often take risks that are inappropriate and scary because they see it as carrying out God's will."

Others, like Frederick Clarkson, author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, doubt the depth of Bush's religious beliefs and see him invoking this rhetoric for political purposes. "Bush is playing to a base activist constituency," says Clarkson. "Many of these people believe that they're living in biblically inspired End Times."

Given that the United States is at war with Islamic fundamentalists in Al Qaeda, this may not be the most propitious time to be dragging God into the conflict. But that is what Bush has done, as when he said, "God is not neutral" in the war on terrorism. The mere use of such rhetoric is inflammatory, Clarkson believes. "At a time when fundamentalist Islam is on the march, the potential for flare-up is a dangerous thing," he says.

Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, believes what motivates Bush is "a combination of the empire and the messianic. He grasps the practical need to control oil, for which the Administration is willing to go to any lengths, and he fuses it with messianic fervor."

Like other Presidents before him, Bush believes the United States is the greatest country in the world, and he is not afraid to use theological language to justify the empire, says Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. "The ideology is there to cover the militarism," says Johnson.

"What I hear is a holy trinity of militarism, masculinism, and messianic zeal," says Lee Quinby, professor of American Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. "It does follow the logic of apocalyptic thought, which has a religious base but is now secularized in the militaristic mode. Apocalyptic thought always has an element of instilling helplessness and promising victory in the face of that powerlessness. In this instance, Bush plays up the vulnerability we feel because of terrorism or Saddam Hussein and then accentuates the military as the assurance that our helplessness will be transformed." This kind of thinking, says Quinby, is "dangerous because it prepares a nation for war without thinking about the impact on civilians and on the U.S. soldiers."

There's also the risk that Bush is so convinced that God's on our side that he may commit a blunder of horrifying proportions.

In a democracy, the fateful decisions of war and peace are not supposed to rest in the hands of one man. Today, they do. And what a man to entrust them with. Lacking intellectual curiosity, he boasts of an infallible gut. Desperate not to be trapped by "the vision thing" that ensnared his father, Bush embraces a huge global mission and couches it in fundamentalist language. And he has assigned the Pentagon the primary role in carrying out this mission.

This is way too much power to give to anyone, and George W. Bush has the arrogance that comes with such power. "I do not need to explain why I say things," he told Woodward. "That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

When his crusade goes terribly wrong, as it is likely to do, Bush will owe a lot of people an explanation. Meanwhile, we must do whatever we can, nonviolently, to oppose this military messianism.

Before the Dawn by Federico García Lorca

But like love
the archers
are blind

Upon the green night,
the piercing saetas
leave traces of warm
lily.

The keel of the moon
breaks through purple clouds
and their quivers
fill with dew.

Ay, but like love
the archers
are blind!

Weeping by Frederico Garcia Lorca

Weeping,
I go down the street
Grotesque, without solution
With the sadness of Cyrano
And Quixote.

Redeeming
Infinite impossibilities
With the rhythm of the clock.

Out Beyond by Rumi

Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other, doesn't make any sense.

Dream Song 14 by John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,

we ourselves flash and yearn,

and moreover my mother told me as a boy

(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored

means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no

inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Peoples bore me,

literature bores me, especially great literature,

Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes

as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag

and somehow a dog

has taken itself & its tail considerably away

into mountains or sea or sky, leaving

behind: me, wag.

Dream Song 1 by John Berryman

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

Avant-Gardening on My Weeping Knees by Sidney Wade

tending to the green
immargination of the plot

I tidy up the loose ends of my lines
while all about me twine

the scrollwork and fretwork
of intelligent and perverse design

wing-stroke and piston-stroke
play heartburn music

on the underside of sense
while I pursue

the noble and miserable hounds
of vernacular economics

turning over spadefuls of apparent earth
my fat and vocable wealth

the soil here is the soul
of intelligence

a miracle of steadfastness
in the windy mess

that splatters the whole as I range widely
and with complicated passion

in the dirty possibilities
of the fascinated ground

You May Forget by Sappho

You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us

Autumn Daybreak by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.

The Best Girlfriend You Never Had by Pam Houston

from Waltzing the Cat

A perfect day in the city always starts like this: My friend Leo picks me up and we go to a breakfast place called Rick and Ann’s where they make red flannel hash out of beets and bacon, and then we cross the Bay Bridge to the gardens of the Palace of the Fine Arts to sit in the wet grass and read poems out loud and talk about love.

The fountains are thick with black swans imported from Siberia, and if it is a fine day and a weekend there will be wedding parties, almost entirely Asian. The grooms wear smart gray pinstripe suits and the women are in beaded gowns so beautiful they make your teeth hurt just to look at them.

The roman towers of the Palace façade rise above us, more yellow than orange in the strengthening midday light. Leo has told me how the towers were built for the 1929 San Francisco World’s Fair out of plaster and papier maché, and even though times were hard the city raised the money to keep them, to cast them in concrete so they would never go away.

Leo is an architect, and his relationship to all the most beautiful buildings in this city is astonishing given his age, only five years older than me. I make my living as a photographer; since art school I’ve been doing magazine work and living from grant to grant.

The house Leo built for himself is like a fairy tale, all towers and angles, and the last wild peacock in Berkeley lives on his street. I live in the Oakland Hills in a tiny house on a street so windy you can’t drive more than ten miles per hour. I rented it because the ad said this: “Small house in the trees with a garden and a fireplace. Dogs welcome, of course.” I am dogless for the moment but it’s not my natural condition.

You never know when I might get overwhelmed by a desire to go to the pound.

It’s a warm blue Saturday in November, and there are five Asian weddings underway at the Palace of the Fine Arts. The wedding parties’ outfits do not match but are complementary, as if they have been ordered especially, one for each arch of the golden façade.

Leo reads me a poem about a salt marsh at dawn while I set up my old Leica. I always get the best stuff when nobody’s paying me to shoot. Like the time I caught a bride waltzing with one of the caterers behind the hedgerow, his chef’s cap bent to touch the top of her veil.

Then I read Leo a poem about longing in Syracuse. This is how we have always spoken to each other, Leo and I, and it would be the most romantic thing this century except that Leo is in love with Guenevere.

Guenevere is a Buddhist weaver who lives in a clapboard house on Belvedere Island. She makes cloth on a loom she brought back from Tibet. Although her tapestries and wall hangings have made her a small fortune, she refuses to use the air conditioner in her Audi, even when she’s driving across the Sacramento Valley. Air conditioning, she says, is just one of the things she does not allow herself.

That Guenevere seems not to know Leo is alive causes him no particular disappointment, and that she forgets—each time she meets him—that she has met him several times before only adds to what he calls her charming basket of imperfections. The only Buddha I could love, he says, is one who is capable of forgetfulness and sin.

Guenevere is in love with a man in New York City who told her in a letter that the only thing better than three thousand miles between him and the object of his desire would be if she had a terminal illness.

“I could really get behind a relationship with a woman who had only six months to live,” was what he wrote. She showed me the words as if to make sure they existed, though something in her tone made me think she was proud.

The only person I know of who’s in love with Leo (besides me, a little), is a gay man named Raphael who falls in love with one straight man after another and then buys each one a whole new collection of CD’s. They come, Leo says, as if from the Columbia House Record Club, once a month like clockwork, in a plain cardboard wrapper, no return address and no name. They are by artists most people have never heard of, like Cassandra Wilson and Boris Grebeshnikov; there are Andean folk songs and Hip Hop and Beat.

Across the swan-bearing lake a wedding has just reached its completion. The groom is managing to look utterly solemn and completely delirious with joy at the same time. Leo and I watch the kiss, and I snap the shutter just as the kiss ends and the wedding party bursts into applause.

“Sucker,” Leo says.

“Oh, right,” I say. “Like you wouldn’t trade your life for his right this minute.”

“I don’t know anything about his life,” Leo says.

“You know he remembered to do all the things you forgot.”

“I think I prefer it,” Leo says, “when you reserve that particular lecture for yourself.” He points back across the lake where the bride has just leaped into her maid of honor’s arms, and I snap the shutter again. “Or for one of your commitment-phobic boyfriends,” Leo adds.

“I guess the truth is, I can’t blame them,” I say. “I mean if I saw me coming down the street with all my stuff hanging out I’m not so sure I’d pick myself up and go trailing after.”

“Of course you would,” Leo says. “And it’s because you would, and because the chance of that happening is so slim, and because you hold out hope anyway that it might . . . that’s what makes you a great photographer.”

“Greatness is nice,” I tell him. “I want contact. I want someone’s warm breath on my face.” I say it as if it’s a dare, which we both know it isn’t. The flower girl across the lake is throwing handfuls of rose petals straight up in the air.

I came to this city near the ocean over a year ago because I recently spent a long time under the dark naked water of the Colorado River and I took it as a sign that the river wanted me away. I had taken so many pictures by then of the chaos of heaved-up rock and petrified sand and endless sky that I’d lost my balance and fallen into them. I couldn’t keep separate any more what was the land and what was me.

There was a man there named Josh who didn’t want nearly enough from me, and a woman called Thea who wanted way too much, and I was sandwiched between them, one of those weaker rock layers like limestone that disappears under pressure or turns into something shapeless like oil.

I thought there might be an order to the city: straight lines, shiny surfaces and right angles that would give myself back to me, take my work somewhere different, maybe to a safer place. Solitude was a straight line too, and I believed it was what I wanted, so I packed whatever I could get into my pick-up, left behind everything I couldn’t carry including two pairs of skis, a whole darkroom full of photo equipment, and the mountains I’d sworn again and again I couldn’t live without.

I pointed myself west down the endless two lanes of highway 50—The Loneliest Road in America say the signs that rise out of the desert on either side of it—all the way across Utah and Nevada to this white shining city on the Bay.

I got drunk on the city at first the way some people do on vodka, the way it lays itself out as if in a nest of madronos and eucalyptus, the way it sparkles brighter even than the sparkling water that surrounds it, the way the Golden Gate reaches out of it, like fingers, toward the wild wide ocean that lies beyond.

I loved the smell of fresh blueberry muffins at the Oakland Grill down on Third and Franklin, the train whistle sounding right outside the front door, and tattooed men of all colors unloading crates of cauliflower, broccoli and peas.

Those first weeks I’d walk the streets for hours, shooting more film in a day than I could afford in a week, all those lives in such dangerous and unnatural proximity, all those stories my camera could tell.

I’d walk even the nastiest part, the blood pumping through my veins as hard as when I first saw the Rocky Mountains so many years ago. One night in the Tenderloin I rounded a corner and met a guy in a wheelchair head on who aimed himself at me and covered me with urine. Baptized, I said to my horrified friends the next day, anointed with the nectar of the city gods.

I met a man right off the bat named Gordon, and we’d drive down to the Oakland docks in the evening and look out at the twenty-story hydraulic boatlifts which I said looked like a battalion of doberman pinchers protecting the harbor from anyone who might invade. Gordon’s real name was Salvador and he came from poor people, strawberry pickers in the central valley, two of his brothers stillborn from Malathion poisoning. He left the valley and moved to the city when he was too young by law to drive the truck he stole from his father’s field boss.

He left it double-parked in front of the Castro Theater, talked a family in the Mission into trading work for floor space, changed his name to Gordon, changed his age from 15 to 20 and applied for a grant to study South American literature at San Francisco State.

He had his Ph.D. before he turned twenty, a tenure-track teaching job at Berkeley by 21. When he won his first teaching award his mother was in the audience; when their eyes met she nodded her approval, but when he looked for her afterwards, she was nowhere to be found.

“Can you believe it?” he said when he told the story, his voice such a mixture of pride and disappointment that I didn’t know which was more unbelievable, that she had come or that she had gone.

“If one more woman I used to date turns into a lesbian,” Leo says, “I’m moving to Minneapolis.”

The wedding receptions are well under way and laughter bubbles toward us across the lagoon.

“It’s possible to take that as a compliment,” I say, “if you want to bend your mind that way.”

“I don’t,” he says.

“Maybe it’s just a choice a woman makes,” I say, “when she feels she has exhausted all her other options.”

“Oh, yeah, like you start out being a person,” Leo says, “and then you decide to become a car.”

“Sometimes I think it’s either that or Alaska,” I say. “The odds there, better than ten to one.”

I remember a bumper sticker I saw once in Haines, Alaska, near the place where the ferries depart for the lower forty-eight: Baby, it said, when you leave here you’ll be ugly again.

“In Alaska,” I say, “I’ve actually had men fall at my feet.”

“I bet a few men have fallen at your feet down here,” he says, and I try to look him in the eye to see how he means it, but he keeps them fixed on the poetry book.

He says, “Aren’t I the best girlfriend you never had?”

The last woman Leo called the love of his life only let him see her twice a week for three years. She was a cardiologist who lived in the Marina who said she spent all day with broken hearts and she had no intention of filling her time off with her own. At the start of the fourth year, Leo asked her to raise the number of dates to three times a week, and she immediately broke things off.

Leo went up on the Bridge after that. This was before they put the phones in, the ones that go straight to the counselors. It was a sunny day and the tide was going out, making whitecaps as far as he could see into the Pacific. After a while he came down, not because he felt better but because of the way the numbers fell out. There had been 250 so far that year. Had the number been 4 or 199 or even 274 he says he might have done it, but he wasn’t willing to go down officially with a number as meaningless as 251.

A woman sitting on the grass near us starts telling Leo how much he looks like her business partner, but there’s an edge to her voice I can’t identify, an insistence that means she’s in love with the guy, or she’s crazy, or she’s just murdered him this morning and she has come to the Palace of the Fine Arts to await her impending arrest.

“The great thing about Californians,” Leo says when the woman has finally gotten up to leave, “is that they think it’s perfectly okay to exhibit all their neuroses in public as long as they apologize for them first.”

Leo grew up like I did on the East Coast, eating Birds Eye frozen vegetables and Swanson’s deep-dish meat pies on TV trays next to our parents and their third martinis, watching What’s My Line and To Tell the Truth on television and talking about anything on earth except what was wrong.

“Is there anyone you could fall in love with besides Guenevere?” I ask Leo, after he’s read a poem about tarantulas and digger wasps.

“There’s a pretty woman at work,” he says. “She calls herself The Diva.”

“Leo,” I say, “write this down. I think it’s a good policy to avoid any woman who uses an article in her name.”

There are policemen at the Palace grounds today handing out information about how we can protect ourselves from an epidemic of car-jackings that has been taking place in the city for the last five months. The crime begins, the flyer tells us, with the criminal bumping the victim’s car from behind. When the victim gets out of the car to exchange information, the criminal hits her—and it’s generally a woman—over the head with a heavy object, leaves her on the sidewalk, steals her car and drives away.

The flyer says we are supposed to keep our windows rolled up when the other driver approaches, keep the doors locked, and say through the glass, “I’m afraid. I’m not getting out. Please follow me to the nearest convenience store.” It says under no circumstances should we ever let the criminal drive us to crime scene number two.

“You couldn’t do it, could you,” Leo says, and slaps my arm like a wise guy.

“What do you think they mean,” I say, “by crime scene number two?”

“You’re evading the question because you know the answer too well,” he says.

“You’re the only person I know who’d get your throat slit sooner than admit you’re afraid.”

“You know,” I say to Leo, to change the subject, “you don’t act much like a person who wants kids more than anything.”

“Yeah, and you don’t act like a person who wants to be married with swans.”

“I’d do it,” I say. “Right now. Step into that wedding dress, no questions asked.”

“Lucy,” Leo says, “seriously, do you have any idea how many steps there are between you and that wedding dress?”

“No,” I say. “Tell me.”

“Fifty-five,” he says. “At least fifty-five.”

Before Gordon I had always dated the strong silent types, I think so I could invent anything I wanted to go on in their heads. Gordon and I talked about words, and the kind of pictures you could make so that you didn’t need them and I thought what I always thought in the first ten minutes: that after years and years of wild pitches I’d for once in my life thrown a strike.

It took me less than half a baseball season to discover my oversight: Gordon had a jealous streak as vicious as a heat-seeking missile and he could make a problem out of a paper bag. We were asked to leave two restaurants in one week alone, and it got to the point fast where if the waitperson wasn’t female, I’d ask if we could go somewhere else or have another table.

Car mechanics, piano tuners, dry cleaners, toll takers, in Gordon’s mind they were all out to bed me and I was out to make them want to, a honey pot, he’d called me once, and he said he and all other men in the Bay Area were a love-crazed swarm of bees.

When I told Guenevere how I’d fallen for Gordon she said, “You only get a few chances to feel your life all the way through. Before—you know—you become unwilling.”

I told her the things I was afraid to tell Leo, how the look on Gordon’s face turned from passion to anger, how he yelled at me in a store so hard one time that the manager slipped me a note that said he would pray for me, how each night I would stand in the street while he revved up his engine and scream please Gordon, please Gordon, don’t drive away.

“At one time in my life I had breast implants just to please a man,” she said. “Now I won’t even take off my bracelets before bed.”

Guenevere keeps a bowl of cards on her breakfast table between the sugar and the coffee. They are called Angel Cards and she bought them at the New Age store. Each card has a word printed on it: sisterhood or creativity or romance, and there’s a tiny angel with her body in a position that is supposed to illustrate the word.

That morning I picked balance, with a little angel perched in the center of a teeter totter, and when Guenevere reached in for her own word she sighed in disgust. Without looking at the word again, without showing it to me, she put the card in the trashcan and reached to pick another.

I went to the trashcan and found it. The word was surrender, and the angel was looking upwards with her arms outstretched.

“I hate that,” she said, her mouth slightly twisted. “Last week I had to throw away submit.”

Guenevere brought me a cookie and a big box of Kleenex. She said that choices can’t be good or bad. There is only the event and the lessons learned from it. She corrected my pronunciation gently and constantly: the Bu in Buddha she said is like the pu in pudding and not like the boo in ghost.

When I was twenty-five years old I brought home to my parents a boy named Jeffrey I thought I wanted to marry. He was everything I believed my father wanted: He had an MBA from Harvard. He had patches on the elbows of his sportcoats. He played golf on a course that only allowed men.

We spent the weekend drinking the wine and eating the paté Jeffrey’s mother had sent him from her fermette in the southwest of France. Jeffrey let my father show him decades worth of tennis trophies. He played the piano while my mother sang her old torch songs.

I waited until I had a minute alone with my father. “Papa,” I said—it was what I always called him—“How do you like Jeffrey?”

“Lucille,” he said, “I haven’t ever liked any of your boyfriends, and I don’t expect I ever will. So why don’t you save us both the embarrassment, and not ask again.”

After that I went back to dating mechanics and river guides. My mother kept Jeffrey’s picture on the mantel till she died.

The first time I was mugged in the city I’d been to the late show all alone at the Castro Theatre. It’s one of those magnificent old movie houses with a huge marquee that lights up the sky like a carnival, a ceiling that looks like it belongs in a Spanish Cathedral, heavy red velvet curtains laced with threads that sparkle gold, and a real live piano player who disappears into the floor when the previews begin.

I liked to linger there after the movie finished, watch the credits and the artificial stars in the ceiling. That Tuesday I was the last person to step out of the theater into a chilly and deserted night.

I had one foot off the curb when the man approached me, a little too close for comfort even then.

“Do you have any change you can spare?” he said.

The truth was I didn’t. I had scraped the bottom of my purse to put together enough quarters, nickels and dimes to get into the movie, and the guy behind the glass had let me in thirty-three cents short.

I said I was sorry and headed for the parking lot. I knew he was behind me, but I didn’t turn around. I should have gotten my keys out before I left the theater, I thought. Shouldn’t have stayed to see every credit roll.

About ten steps from my car I felt a firm jab in the middle of my rib cage.

“I bet you’d feel differently,” the man said, “if I had a gun in my hand.”

“I might feel differently,” I said, whirling around with more force than I intended, “but I still wouldn’t have any money.”

He flinched, changed the angle of his body, just slightly back and away. And when he did, when his eyes dropped from mine to his hand holding whatever it was in his jacket pocket, I was reminded of a time I almost walked into a female grizz with a nearly grown cub. How we had stood there posturing, how she had glanced down at her cub just that way, giving me the opportunity to let her know she didn’t need to kill me. We could both go on our way.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve had a really emotional day, okay?” As I talked I dug into my purse and grabbed my set of keys, a kind of weapon in their own right. “And I think you ought to just let me get in the car and go home.”

While he considered this I took the last steps to my car and got in. I didn’t look in the rearview mirror until I was on the freeway.

By mid-afternoon Leo and I have seen one too many happy couples get married and we drive over the Golden Gate and to Tiburon to a restaurant called Guymos where we drink margaritas made with Patron tequila and eat ceviche appetizers and look out on Angel Island and the city—whitest of all from this perspective, rising like a mirage out of the blue green bay.

We watch the ferry dock and unload the suburbanites, then load them up again for the twice-hourly trip to the city. We are jealous of their starched shirts and brown loafers, how their clothes seem a testament to the balance in their lives.

The fog rolls over and down the lanyard side of Mt. Tamalpais, and the city moves in and out of it, glistening like Galilee one moment, then gray and dreamy like a ghost of itself the next, and then gone, like a thought bubble, like somebody’s good idea.

“Last night,” I say, “I was walking alone down Telegraph Avenue. I was in a mood, you know, Gordon and I had a fight about John Lennon.”

“Was he for or against?” Leo says.

“Against,” I say, “but it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I was scowling, maybe crying a little, moving along pretty fast, and I step over this homeless guy with his crutches and his little can and he says, ‘I don’t even want any money from you, I’d just like you to smile.’”

“So did you?” Leo says.

“I did,” I say. “I not only smiled, but I laughed too, and then I went back and gave him all the money in my wallet, which was only eighteen dollars, but still. I told him to be sure and use that line again.”

“I love you,” Leo says, and takes both of my hands in his. “I mean, in the good way.”

When I was four years old and with my parents in Palm Beach, Florida, I pulled a seven-hundred-pound cement urn off its pedestal and onto my legs, crushing both femurs. All the other urns on Worth Avenue had shrubs in them trimmed into the shapes of animals, and this one, from my three-foot point of view, appeared to be empty.

When they asked me why I had tried to pull myself up and into the urn I said I thought it had fish inside it and I wanted to see them, though whether I had imagined actual fish, or just tiny shrubs carved into the shape of fish, I can’t any longer say.

The urn was empty, of course, and waiting to be repaired, which is why it toppled over onto me. My father rolled it off with some of that superhuman strength you always hear about and picked me up—I was screaming bloody murder—and held me until the ambulance came.

The next six weeks were the best of my childhood. I was hospitalized the entire time, surrounded by doctors who brought me presents, nurses who read me stories, candy stripers who came to my room and played games.

My parents, when they came to visit, were always happy to see me and usually sober.

I spent the remaining years of my childhood fantasizing about illnesses and accidents that I hoped would send me to the hospital again.

One day last month Gordon asked me to go backpacking at Point Reyes National Seashore, to prove to me, he said, that he could take an interest in my life. I hadn’t slept outside one single night since I came to the city, he said, and I must miss the feel of hard ground underneath me, must miss the smell of my tent in the rain.

Gordon borrowed a backpack, got the permit, freed the weekend, studied the maps. I was teaching a darkroom workshop in Corte Madeira on Saturday. Gordon would pick me up at four when the workshop ended; we’d have just enough time to drive up the coast to Point Reyes Station and walk for an hour into the first camp. A long second day would take us to the beach, the point with the lighthouse, and back to the car with no time again to spare before dark.

I had learned by then how to spot trouble coming and that morning I waited in the car with Gordon while first one man, way too young for me and then another, way too old entered the warehouse where my workshop was going to be held.

I got out of the car without seeing the surfer, tall and blond and a little breathtaking, portfolio under the arm that usually held the board. I kept my eyes away from his but his handshake found me anyway. When he held the big door open I went on through. I could hear the screech of tires behind me through what felt like a ton of metal.

That Gordon was there when the workshop ended at 4:02 surprised me a little. Then I got in the Pathfinder and saw only one backpack. He drove up the coast to Point Reyes without speaking. Stinson, Bolinas, Dogtown and Olema. The white herons in Tomales Bay had their heads tucked under their arms.

He stopped at the trailhead, got out, threw my pack into the dune grass, opened my door and tried with his eyes to pry me from my seat.

“I guess this means you’re not coming with me,” I said, imagining how we could do it with one pack, tenacious in my hope that the day could be saved.

What you’re thinking, right now, is why didn’t I do it, get out of that car without making eye contact, swing my pack on my back and head off down the trail. And when I tell you what I did do, which was to crawl all the way to the back of the Pathfinder, holding on to the cargo net like a tornado was coming, and let go with one ear-splitting head-pounding scream after another till Gordon got back in the car, till we got back down the coast, back on the 580, back over the Bridge, and back to Gordon’s apartment, till he told me if I was quiet, he’d let me stay, you would wonder how a person, even if she had done it, could ever in a million years admit to such a thing.

Then I could tell you about the sixteen totaled cars in my first fifteen winters. The Christmas Eve my father and I rolled a Plymouth Fury from meridian to guardrail and back four full times with nine complete revolutions, how they had to cut us out with chainsaws, how my father, limber from the Seagram’s, got away unhurt. I could tell you about the neighbor girl who stole me away one time at the sound of my parents shouting, how she refused to give me back to them even when the police came with a warrant, how her ten-year-old hand must have looked holding my three-year-old one, how in the end it became a funny story that both sets of parents loved to tell. I could duplicate for you the hollow sound an empty bottle makes when it hits formica, and the stove is left on and the pan’s started smoking and there’s a button that says off, but no way to reach.

I could tell you the lie I told myself with Gordon. That anybody is better than nobody. And you will know exactly why I stayed in the back of that Pathfinder, unless you are lucky, and then you will not.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I got mugged?” Leo asks me, and we both know he has but it’s his favorite story.

“I’d like it,” I say, “if you’d tell it again.”

Before Leo built his house on the street with the peacocks he lived in the city between North Beach and the piers. He got mugged one night, stepping out of his car fumbling for his house keys; the man had a gun and snuck up from behind.

What Leo had in his wallet was thirteen dollars, and when he offered the money he thought the man would kill him on the spot.

“You got a cash card,” the man said. “Let’s find a machine.”

“Hey,” I say when he gets to this part, “that means you went to crime scene number two.”

The part I hate most is how he took Leo’s glasses. He said he would drive, but as it turned out he didn’t know stick shifts, and the clutch burned and smoked all the way up Nob Hill.

“My name’s Bill,” the man said, and Leo thought since they were getting so friendly, he’d offer to work the clutch and the gear shift to save what was left of his car. It wasn’t until Leo got close to him, straddling the gear box and balanced against Bill’s shoulder, that he smelled the blood under Bill’s jacket and knew that he’d been shot.

They drove like that to the Marina Safeway, Bill’s eyes on the road and his hands on the steering wheel, Leo working the clutch and the shifter according to feel.

At the cash machine Leo looked for help but couldn’t get anyone’s eyes to meet his, with Bill and his gun pressed so close to his side.

They all think we’re a couple, he thought and laughter bubbled up inside him. He told Bill a lie about a hundred-dollar ATM limit, pushed the buttons, handed over the money.

They drove back to Leo’s that same Siamese way, and when they got there Bill thanked Leo, shook his hand, asked one more favor before he took off.

“I’m going to give you a phone number,” Bill said. “My girlfriend in Sacramento. I want you to call her and tell her I made it all right.”

“Sure,” Leo said, folding the paper.

“I want you to swear to God.”

“Sure,” Leo said, “I’ll call her.”

Bill put the end of the gun around Leo’s belly button. “Say it, motherfucker, say, I swear to God.”

“I swear to God,” Leo said, and Bill walked away.

Back in his apartment Leo turned on Letterman. When the shaking had stopped he called the police.

“Not much we can do about it,” the woman at the end of the line told him. “We could come dust your car for fingerprints, but it would make a hell of a mess.”

Two hours later Leo looked in a phone book and called a Catholic priest.

“No,” the priest said, “you don’t have to call her. You swore to God under extreme circumstances, brought down upon you by a godless man.”

“I don’t think that’s the right answer,” I had said when I first heard the story and I say it again, on cue, today. The first time we had talked about the nature of godlessness, and how if a situation requires swearing to God it is—by definition—extreme.

But today I am thinking not of Bill or even of Leo’s dilemma, but of the girlfriend in Sacramento, her lover shot, bleeding and hijacking architects, and still remembering to think of her.

And I wonder what it was about her that made her stay with a man who ran from the law for a living, and if he had made it home to her that night, if she stood near him in the kitchen dressing his wounds. I wonder how she saw herself, as what part of the story, and how much she had invested in how it would end.

“I’m so deeply afraid,” Gordon had said on the docks our first night together, “that I am nothing but weak and worthless. So I take the people close to me and try to break them, so they become as weak and worthless as me.”

I want to know the reason I could hear and didn’t hear what he was saying, the reason why I thought the story could end differently for me.

Things ended between Gordon and me in a bar in Jack London Square one night when we were watching the 49ers play the Broncos. It was Joe Montana’s last year in San Francisco; rumors of the Kansas City acquisition had already begun.

It was a close game late in the season; the Broncos had done what they were famous for in those days, jumped out to a twenty-point lead, and then lost it incrementally as the quarters went past.

The game came right down to the two-minute warning, Elway and Montana trading scoring drives so elegant it was like they shook hands on it before the game. A minute twenty-seven left, ball on the Niners’ twenty-two: Joe Montana had plenty of time and one last chance to shine.

“Don’t tell me you’re a Bronco fan,” a guy on the other side of me, a late arrival, said.

“It’s a tough job,” I said, not taking my eyes off the TV set. For about the hundredth time that evening the camera was off the action and on a tearful, worried or ecstatic Jennifer Montana, one lovely and protective hand around each of her two beautiful blonde little girls.

“Geez,” I said, when the camera came back to the action several seconds too late, “you’d think Joe Montana was the only football player in America who had a wife.”

The guy next to me laughed a short choppy laugh. Joe took his team seventy-eight yards in seven plays for the win.

On the way to his Pathfinder, Gordon said, “That’s what I hate about you sports fans. You create a hero like Joe Montana just so you have somebody to knock down.”

“I don’t have anything against Joe Montana,” I said. “I think he throws the ball like an angel. I simply prefer watching him to watching his wife.”

“I saw who you preferred watching,” Gordon said as we arrived at the car and he slammed inside.

“Gordon,” I said, “I don’t even know what that man looked like.”

The moon was fat and full over the parts of Oakland no one dares to go to late at night and I knew as I looked for a face in it that it didn’t matter a bit what I said.

Gordon liked to drive the meanest streets when he was feeling meanest, and he was ranting about me shaking my tail feathers and keeping my pants zipped, and all I could think to do was remind him I was wearing a skirt.

He squealed the brakes at the end of my driveway and I got out and moved toward the dark entryway.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he asked. And I thought about the months full of nights just like this one when I asked his forgiveness, when I begged him to stay.

“I want you to make your own decision,” I said over my shoulder, and he threw the car in second, gunned the engine and screeched away.

First came the messages taped to my door, the words cut out from ten different typefaces, held down with so many layers of tape it had the texture of decoupage. Then came the slit tires, the Kayro syrup in my gas tank, my box set of Dylan’s Biograph in a puddle at the foot of my drive. One day I opened an envelope from a magazine I’d shot for to find my paycheck ripped into a hundred pieces and then put back in the envelope, back in the box.

Leo and I trade margaritas for late-afternoon lattes, and still the fog won’t lift all the way.

“What I imagine,” I say, “is coming home one night and Gordon emerging from between the sidewalk and the shadows, a Magnum 357 in his hand, and my last thought being, ‘Well, you should have figured that this was the next logical thing.’”

“I don’t know why you need to be so tough about it,” Leo says. “Can’t you let the police or somebody know?”

I say, “This is not a good city to be dogless in.”

Leo puts his arm around me; I can tell by the way he does it he thinks he has to.

“Do you wish sometimes,” I say, “that you could just disappear like that city?”

“I can,” Leo says. “I do. What I wish more is that when I wanted to I could stay.”

The ferry docks again in front of us and we sit quietly until the whistles are finished and the boat has once again taken off.

“Are you ever afraid,” I say to Leo, “that there are so many things you need swirling around inside you that they will just overtake you, smother you, suffocate you till you die?”

“I don’t think so,” Leo says.

“I don’t mean sex,” I say, “or even love exactly, just all that want that won’t let go of you, that even if you changed everything right now it’s too late already to ever be full?”

Leo keeps his eyes fixed on the city which is back out again, the Coit Tower reaching and leaning slightly like a stack of pepperoni pizza pies.

“Until only a few years ago, I used to break into a stranger’s house every six months like clockwork,” he says. “Is that something like what you mean?”

“Exactly,” I say. A band of fog sweeps down, faster than the others and takes away the city, even the site of Leo’s mugging, even the apartment where Gordon now stays.

When I was eighteen years old I met my parents in Phoenix, Arizona to watch Penn State play USC in the Fiesta Bowl. I’d driven from Ohio, they’d flown from Pennsylvania, and the three of us—for the first time ever—shared my car.

My father wanted me to drive them through the wealthy suburbs, places with names like Carefree and Cave Creek. He’d been drinking earlier in the day than usual, they both had, and he got it into his head that he wanted to see the world’s highest fountain shoot 300 gallons of water per minute into the parched and evaporative desert air.

We were halfway through Cave Creek, almost to the fountain, when the cop pulled me over.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said, “but I’ve been tailing you for four or five minutes, and I have to tell you, I really don’t know where to start.”

The cop’s nameplate said Martin “Mad Dog” Jenkins. My father let out a sigh that hung in the car like a fog.

“Well, first,” Officer Jenkins said, “I clocked you going 43 in a 25. Then you rolled through not one but two stop signs without coming to a safe and complete stop, and you made a right hand turn into the center lane.”

“Jesus Christ,” my father said.

“You’ve got one tail light out,” Officer Jenkins said, “and either your turn signals are burned out too, or you are electing not to use them.”

“Are you hearing this?” my father said to the air.

“My I see your license and registration?”

“I left my license in Ohio,” I said.

The car was silent.

“Give me a minute, then,” Officer Jenkins said, “and I’ll call it in.”

“What I don’t know,” my father said, “is how a person with so little sense of responsibility gets a driver’s license in this country to begin with.”

He flicked the air vent open and closed, open and closed. “I mean you gotta wonder if she should even be let out of the house in the morning.”

“Why don’t you just say it, Robert,” my mother said. “Say what you mean. Say daughter, I hate you. Her voice started shaking. “Everybody sees it. Everybody knows it. Why don’t you say it out loud.”

“Ms. O’Rourke?” Officer Jenkins was back at the window.

“Let’s hear it,” my mother went on. “Officer, I hate my daughter.”

The cop’s eyes flicked for a moment into the back seat.

“According to the information I received, Ms. O’Rourke,” Officer Jenkins said, “you are required to wear corrective lenses.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And you are wearing contacts now?” There was something like hope in his voice.

“No sir.”

“She can’t even lie?” my father said. “About one little thing?”

“Okay now, on three,” my mother said. “Daughter, I wish you had never been born.”

“Ms. O’Rourke,” Officer Jenkins said, “I’m just going to give you a warning today.”

My father bit off the end of a laugh.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“I hate to say this, Ms. O’Rourke,” the cop said, “but there’s nothing I could do to you that’s going to feel like punishment.” He held out his hand for me to shake. “You drive safely now,” he said, and he was gone.

When the Fiesta Bowl was over, my parents and I drove back up to Carefree to attend a New Year’s Eve party given by a gay man my mother knew who belonged to a wine club called the Royal Order of the Grape. My father wasn’t happy about it, but he was silent. I just wanted to watch the ball come down on TV like I had every year of my childhood with the babysitter, but the men at the party were showing home movie after home movie of the club’s indoctrination ceremony, while every so often two or three partygoers would get taken to the cellar to look at the bottles and taste.

When my father tried to light a cigarette he got whisked outside faster than I had ever seen him move. I was too young to be taken to the cellar, too old to be doted on, so after another half-hour of being ignored I went outside to join my father.

The lights of Phoenix sparkled every color below us in the dark.

“Lucille,” he said, “when you get to be my age, don’t ever spend New Year’s Eve in a house where they won’t let you smoke.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Your mother,” he said, as he always did.

“I know,” I said, even though I didn’t.

“We just don’t get love right, this family, but...” He paused, and the sky above Phoenix exploded into color, umbrellas of red and green and yellow. I’d never seen fireworks before, from the top.

“Come in, come in, for the New Year’s toast!” Our host was calling us from the door. I wanted more than anything for my father to finish his sentence, but he stabbed out his cigarette, got up, and walked inside. I’ve finished it for him a hundred times, but never to my satisfaction.


We pay the bill and Leo informs me that he has the temporary use of a twenty-seven-foot sailboat in Sausalito that belongs to a man he hardly knows. The fog has lifted enough for us to see the place where the sun should be, and it’s brighter yet out by the Golden Gate and we take the little boat out and aim for the brightness, the way a real couple might on a Saturday afternoon.

It’s a squirrelly boat, designed to make fast moves in a light wind, and Leo gives me the tiller two hundred yards before we pass under the dark shadow of the bridge. I am just getting the feel of it when Leo looks over his shoulder and says, “It appears we are in a race,” and I look too and there is a boat bearing down on us, twice our size, ten times, Leo tells me, our boat’s value.

“Maybe you should take it, then,” I say.

“You’re doing fine,” he says. “Just set your mind on what’s out there and run for it.”

At first all I can think about is Leo sitting up on top of the bridge running numbers in his head, and a story Gordon told me where two guys meet up there on the walkway and find out they are both survivors of a previous jump.

Then I let my mind roll out past the cliffs and the breakers, past the Marin headlands and all the navigation buoys, out to some place where the swells swallow up the coastline and Hawaii is the only thing between me and forever, and what are the odds of hitting it, if I just head for the horizon and never change my course?

I can hear the big boat’s bow breaking right behind us, and I set my mind even harder on a universe with nothing in it except deep blue water.

“You scared him,” Leo says. “He’s coming about.”

The big boat turns away from us, back toward the harbor, just as the giant shadow of the bridge crosses our bow. Leo jumps up and gives me an America’s Cup hug. Above us the great orange span of the thing is trembling, just slightly, in the wind.

We sail on out to the edge of the headlands where the swells get big enough to make us both a little sick and it’s finally Leo who takes the tiller from my hand and turns the boat around. It’s sunny as Bermuda out here, and I’m still so high from the boat race that I can tell myself there’s really nothing to be afraid of. Like sometimes when you go to a movie and you get so lost in the story that when you’re walking out of the theater you can’t remember anything at all about your own life.

You might forget, for example, that you live in a city where people have so many choices they throw words away, or so few they will bleed in your car for a hundred dollars. You might forget eleven or maybe twelve of the sixteen-in-a-row totaled cars. You might forget that you never expected to be alone at thirty-two or that a crazy man might be waiting for you with a gun when you get home tonight or that all the people you know—without exception—have their hearts all wrapped around someone who won’t ever love them back.

“I’m scared,” I say to Leo and this time his eyes come to meet mine. The fog is sitting in the center of the Bay like it’s over a big pot of soup and we’re about to enter it.

“I can’t help you,’ Leo says, and squints his eyes against the mist in the air.

When I was two years old my father took me down to the beach in New Jersey, carried me into the surf until the waves were crashing onto his chest and then threw me in like a dog to see, I suppose, whether I would sink or float.

My mother, who was from high in the Rocky Mountains where all the water was too cold for swimming and who had been told since birth never to get her face wet (she took only baths, never showers) got so hysterical by the water’s edge that lifeguards from two different stands leapt to my rescue.

There was no need, however. By the time they arrived at my father’s side I had passed the flotation test, had swam as hard and fast as my untried limbs would carry me, and my father had me up on his shoulders, smiling and smug and a little surprised.

I make Leo drive back by the Palace of the Fine Arts on the way home, though the Richmond Bridge is faster. The fog has moved in there too, and the last of the brides are worrying their hair-dos while the grooms help them into big dark cars that will whisk them away to the Honeymoon Suite at the Four Seasons, or to the airport to board planes bound for Tokyo or Rio.

Leo stays in the car while I walk back to the pond. The sidewalk is littered with rose petals and that artificial rice that dissolves in the rain. Even the swans have paired off and are swimming that way, the feathers of their inside wings barely touching, their long necks bent slightly toward each other, the tips of their beaks almost closing the “M.”

I take the swans’ picture, and a picture of the rose petals bleeding onto the sidewalk. I step up under the tallest of the arches and bow to my imaginary husband. He takes my hand and we turn to the minister, who bows to us and we bow again.

“I’m scared,” I say again, but this time it comes out stronger, almost like singing, as though it might be the first step—in fifty-five or a thousand—toward something like a real life, the very first step toward something that will last.

In the Company of Fishermen by Pam Houston

from A Little More about Me

I can’t remember the last time I envied a man, or, in fact, if I ever have. I have loved men, hated them, befriended them, taken care of them, and all too often compromised my sense of self for them, but I don’t think I have ever looked at a man and actually coveted something his maleness gave him. And yet envy was at least one of the surprising things I felt last spring when I found myself standing armpit deep in a freshwater stream at 2:00 a.m., near Interlochen, Michigan, fly-casting for steelhead with a bunch of male poets.

Winters are long in northern Michigan, and dark and frozen. Spring is late and wet and full of spirit-breaking storms. The landscape is primarily forest and water and has not been tamed like most of the Midwest. Both the wildness and the hardship show on the faces of the people who choose to live there.

When a man named Jack Driscoll first calls and invites me to Interlochen, he tells me about the Academy, a place where talented high-school students from forty-one states and fifteen countries are given a lot of time to develop their art. Although he makes it clear that I will be expected to read from my fiction and talk to the students about craft, every other time we speak on the phone, all he really wants to talk about is fishing.

For all the time I spend outdoors, I am not much of a fisherman. And fly fishing, like all religions, is something I respect but don’t particularly understand. If Jack bothers to ask me if I want to go fishing, I will say yes. I have always said yes, and as a result the shape of my life has been a long series of man-inspired adventures, and I have gone tripping along behind those men, full of strength and will and only a half-baked kind of competence, my goal being not to excel, but to simply keep up with them, to not become a problem, to be a good sport. It is a childhood thing (I was my father’s only son), and I laugh at all the places this particular insecurity has taken me: sheep hunting in Alaska, helicopter skiing in Montana, cliff diving in the Bahamas, ice climbing in the Yukon territory. Mostly I have outgrown the need to impress men in this fashion; in the adventures I take these days, I make the rules. But, as my trip to Michigan draws nearer, I feel a familiar and demented excitement to be back at the mercy of a bunch of lunatic outdoorsmen, a stubborn novice with something older than time to prove.

I fly up to Traverse City on what the woman at the United Express counter calls the “big” plane, a twin-engine that bumps between thunderstorms and patches of dense fog for an hour before skidding to a stop on a bleak and rainy runway surrounded by a leafless April woods.

I am greeted by what looks like a small committee of fit and weathered middle-aged men. Their names are Jack Driscoll, Mike Delp, Nick Bozanic and Doug Stanton. Their books are titled after the landscape that dominates their lives, collections of poetry called Under the Influence of Water, The Long Drive Home, and Over the Graves of Horses, and Jack’s award- winning collection of stories, Wanting Only To Be Heard. They fight over my luggage, hand me snacks and sodas and beers, and all but carry me to the car on the wave of their enthusiasm.

“Weather’s been good,” Mike says, by way of a greeting. “The lake ice is breaking.”

“It’s a real late run for the steelhead,” Doug says. “You’re just in time.”

“Any minute now, any minute now,” Jack says, his mind full of the long dark bodies of fish in the river, and then, “You’ve got a reading in forty-five minutes, then a dinner that should be over by ten, the president of the local community college wants to meet you. At midnight, we fish.”

By 12:25 a.m. I am dressed in my long underwear, Jack’s camouflage sweat clothes, Mike’s neoprene liners, Doug’s waders, and Nick’s hat. I look like the Michelin tire man, the waders so big and stiff I can barely put one foot in front of the other. We pile into Mike’s Montero, rods and reels jangling in the back. Jack and Mike and Doug and I. Nick, each man has told me (privately, in a quiet, apprehensive voice), is recovering from bursitis and a divorce, and for one or another of those reasons, he will not fish this year.

No one asks me if I’m tired, nor do I ask them. These men have had nine months of winter to catch up on their sleep, cabin fever reflecting in their eyes like exclamations. The steelhead will start running soon, maybe tonight, and there is no question about where they should be.

It takes almost an hour to get to the river with what I quickly understand is an obligatory stop at the Sunoco in the tiny town of Honor for day-old doughnuts and Coca Cola and banter with the cashier. Along the way we listen to what Mike and Jack say is their latest road tape, three Greg Brown songs recorded over and over to fill a ninety minute drive. “Gonna meet you after midnight,” say the lyrics repeatedly, “at the Dream Café.”

The rotating sign on the Honor State Bank says 1:51 a.m. and twenty-two degrees. The men have bet on what the temperature will be. They have also bet on how many cars we will pass on the two-lane highway, how many deer we will see in the woods between Mike’s house and the bridge, if it will snow or rain, and, if so, how hard (hardness gauged by comparison with other nights’ fishing). Doug wins the temperature bet, closest without going over, at twenty-one degrees.

The betting is all part of a long conversational rap among them, a rap that moves from Mike’s last fish to Jack’s latest fiction to concern for Nick and his lost house to the girl at the Sunoco to an in-unison sing-along to their favorite Greg Brown lyrics. The whole conversation is less like speaking really and more like singing, a song they’ve spent years and years of these cold spring nights together learning, nights anybody anywhere else in the world would call winter, nights filled with an expectation that can only be called boyish and shadowed by too much of the grown-up knowledge that can ultimately defeat men.

Sometimes they remember I am there; sometimes they forget I am a woman.

I feel, in those moments, like I’ve gone undercover, like I’ve been granted security clearance to a rare and private work of art. And though I have always believed that women bond faster, tighter, deeper than men could ever dream of, there is something simple and pure between these men, a connection so thick and dense and timeless that I am fascinated, and jealous, and humbled, all at the same time.

“Shit,” Jack says, “Look at ‘em all.” We have come finally out of the woods and to a bridge no longer than the width of the two-lane roadway. As impossible as it is for me to believe, at two a.m. the gravel areas on both sides of the bridge are lined with pickups, a counterculture of night stalkers, two and three trucks deep.

I can see by the posture of the men who line the bridge and look gloomily over the edge that they do not teach poetry at Interlochen Arts Academy. One of them staggers toward the truck, reeling drunk. A boy of nine or ten, dressed all in camouflage, tries to steady him from behind.

“They ain’t here yet,” the old man says, an edge in his voice like desperation. “It may be they just ain’t coming.”

“They’ll be here,” Jack says, easing himself out of the Montero and steering the man away from the broken piece of bridge railing. “It’s been a long winter for everybody,” Jack says, almost cooing, and the old man drunkenly, solemnly nods.

Mike pulls me out of the truck and hands me a flashlight. We creep to the edge of the bridge and peer over. “Just on for a second and off,” he whispers. Even to me it is unmistakable; the flashlight illuminates a long, dark shape already half under the pylon. “Don’t say anything,” Mike mouths to me soundlessly. Jack leaves the oldtimer to sleep in his car and joins us. Mike holds up one finger and Jack nods. “We’ll go downstream,” Jack says after some consideration. “Nobody’s gonna do any good here.”

We drive downriver while Mike points out all the sights as if we can see them—a place called the Toilet Hole, where Doug and Nick got lucky, the place Mike got his car stuck so bad four-wheel drive couldn’t help him, the place Jack caught last year’s biggest fish. We can see the headlights of people who are smelt-dipping out where the river empties into the lake, and a red and white channel marker lit up and looming in the darkness, its base still caked with lake ice and snow.

We drop Doug off at his favorite hole near the mouth of the river, drive back upstream a few hundred yards, park the Montero and step out into the night.

“It’s a little bit of a walk from here,” Mike says, “And the mud’s pretty deep.” It is impossible for me to imagine how I will move my stiff and padded legs through deep mud, how, at twenty-two degrees, I will step into that swift and icy river, much less stand in it for a couple of hours. I can’t imagine how, with all these clothes and pitch dark around me, I’ll be able to cast my fly with anything resembling grace.

Two steps away from the truck and already I feel the suction. The mud we are walking in ranges from mid-calf to mid-thigh deep. I’m following Jack like a puppy, trying to walk where he walks, step where he steps. I get warm with the effort, and a little careless, and suddenly there’s nothing beneath me and I’m in watery mud up to my waist. Mike and Jack, each on one arm, pull me out so fast it seems like part of the choreography.

Let’s try to cross the river,” says Jack, and before I can even brace for the cold, we are in it, thigh…hip…waist deep, and I feel the rush of the current tug me toward Lake Michigan. “One foot in front of the other,” Jack says. “The hole’s right in front of you; when you’re ready, go ahead and cast.”

I lift the rod uneasily into the night, close my eyes and try to remember how they did it in A River Runs Through It, and then bring it down too fast and too hard with an ungraceful splat. “Let out a little more line,” Jack says, so gently it’s like he’s talking to himself. A few more splats, a little more line, and I am making casts that aren’t embarrassing. Jack moves without speaking to help Mike with a snarl in his line. “This is your night, Delp,” Jack says, his shadowy form floating away from me, a dark and legless ghost.

What in the world are you doing here? a voice giggles up from inside me, and the answers sweep past me, too fast to catch: because I can’t turn down a challenge, because my father wanted a boy, because touching this wildness is the best way I know to undermine sadness, because of the thin shimmery line I am seeing between the dark river and the even darker sky.

Soon I stop thinking about being washed to Lake Michigan. I marvel at how warm I am in the waders, so warm and buoyant that I forget myself from time to time and dip some unprotected part of me, my hand or my elbow, into the icy water. A deer crackles sticks in the forest across the river; an angry beaver slaps his tail. In whispers we take turns identifying the constellations—Ursa Major, Draco, Cassiopea, Mars and Jupiter—and murmur at the infrequent but lovely falling stars.

When we are quiet I can hear a faint crashing—constant, reverberant—sounding in the dark for all the world like the heartbeat of the Earth. “Lake Michigan coming over the break-water,” Jack says to my unasked question. “There must be a big wind on the other side.”

My fishing is steadily improving: every fifth or seventh cast hangs a long time in the air and falls lightly, almost without sound.

“You know,” Jack says, “there aren’t too many people who could come out here like this and not hook themselves or me or the shoreline…isn’t that right Delp?” Mike murmurs in agreement, and my head swells with ridiculously disproportionate pride.

The constellations disappear, and a light snow begins falling. “God, I love the weather,” Mike says, his voice a mixture of sarcasm and sincerity, and for a while there is only the whisper of the line and the flies.

“Fish!” Jack shouts suddenly. “Fish on the line!” I am startled almost out of my footing, as if I’ve forgotten what we’ve come here for, as if the silence of the night and the rhythm of the flies hitting the water have become reason enough. We reel in our lines and watch Jack land his fish. It is long and thin and its speckled belly gleams silver as it thrashes in the tiny beam of the flashlight. Jack looks at us helplessly, delighted by his luck and yet wishing, simultaneously, that it had been me who caught the fish, wishing even harder, I can see, that it had been Mike.

We fish a little longer, but now there’s no need to stay. The spell has been broken; the first steelhead has been caught in its journey up the Platte.

“Let’s wade down river a little,” Jack says, when we’ve reeled in our lines, “to try to avoid the mud.” I take short rapid breaths as we move through the water. “This part is deep,” Jack says. “Take it slow.”

The water creeps up my chest and into my armpits; I’m walking, weightless, through a dark and watery dream. For a moment there is nothing but my forward momentum and the lift of water under the soles of my boots that keep me from going under. Then I feel the bank rise suddenly beneath my feet.

“No problem,” I say, just before my foot slips and I do go under, head and all into the icy current. I thrash my arms toward shore, and Jack grabs me. “Better get you home,” he says, as the cold I’ve ignored for hours moves through my body with logarithmic speed. “You’ve gotta meet students in a couple of hours.” Back at the truck Doug is curled under a blanket like a dog.

The next day Jack sleeps while Mike makes sure I meet my classes. The students are bright, skeptical, interested. My head buzzes with the heat of the all-nighter, a darkness, like the river dark, threatening to close in. Mike and I drink bad machine coffee in one of the tunnels that connects the English department to the other school buildings, tunnels to keep the students from getting lost in the storms that bring the blowing snow.

“It’s hard to explain how much I love these guys,” Mike says suddenly, as if I’ve asked him. “I don’t know what I’d do without what we have.”

The cement walls of this poor excuse for a lounge move in on us like the weather, and this poet who more resembles a wrestler looks for a moment as if he might cry.

It is late in the evening. I have met three classes, talked to at least thirty students, given another reading, signed books in Traverse City, and as part of an orgy of a pot luck, cooked elk steaks, rare, on the grill. Mike, in his other favorite role of DJ, plays one moody song after another on the stereo: John Prine, John Gorka, and early Bonnie Raitt. We are all a little high from the good food and tequila. Mike’s ten-year-old daughter Jamie and Jack dance cheek-to- cheek in their socks on the living room floor.

“So are we gonna do it?” Jack says when the song ends, a sparkle in his eye that says the river is always in him, whether he’s standing in it or not. This fish and fiction marathon is in its thirty-eighth hour, and I have moved beyond tired now to some new level of consciousness.

I have spent too much of my life proving I can be one of the guys, never saying uncle, never admitting I’m tired, or hurting, or cold. Tonight I am all three, but the thing that makes me nod my head and say yes I want to go back again and stand in that icy river has nothing, for a change, to do with my father, or my childhood, or all the things in the world I need to prove. It is the potent and honest feeling between these men that I covet, that I can’t miss an opportunity to be close to. I have stumbled, somehow, onto this rare pack of animals who know I am there and have decided, anyway, to let me watch them at their dance. I want to memorize their movements. I want to take these river nights home with me for the times when the darkness is even heavier than it is in this Michigan sky.

A flurry of rubber and neoprene, and we’re back inside the Montero. Greg Brown is singing the song about the laughing river. “This is your night, Delp,” Jack says, “I can feel it.” Around the next bend will be Honor’s scattered lights.

Illusions by Richard Bach

Preface

It was a question I heard more than once, after Jonathan Seagull was published. "What are you going to write next, Richard? After Jonathan, what?"

I answered then that I didn't have to write anything next, not a word, and that all my books together said everything that I had asked them to say. Having starved for a while, the car repossessed and that sort of thing, it was sort of fun not to have to work to midnights.

Still, every summer or so I took my antique biplane out in the green meadow seas of Midwest America, flew passengers for three-dollar rides and began to feel an old tension again–there was something left to say, and I hadn't said it.

I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to it, I won't even reach for a pencil.

But once in a while there's a great dynamite burst of flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall and someone stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the throat and gently says, "I will not let you go until you set me in words, on paper." That's how I met Illusions.

There in the Midwest, even, I'd lie on my back practicing cloud vaporizing, and I couldn't get the story out of my mind...what if somebody came along who was really good at this, who could teach me how my world works and how to control it? What if I could meet a super advanced...what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into our time, with the power over the illusions of the world because he knew the reality behind them? And what if i could meet this person, if he were flying a biplane and landed in the same meadow with me? What would he say, what would he be like?

Maybe he wouldn't be like the Messiah on the oil streaked grass stained pages of my journal, maybe he wouldn't say anything this book says. But then again, the things this one told me: that we magnetize into our lives whatever we hold in our thought, for instance if that is true, then somehow I have brought myself to this moment for a reason, and so have you. perhaps it is no coincidence that your holding this book; perhaps there's something about these adventures that you came here to remember. I choose to think so. And I choose to think my Messiah is perched out there on some other dimension, not fiction at all, watching us both, and laughing for the fun of it happening just the way we've planned it to be.

Richard Bach

Chapter 1

1. There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne.


2. The Master learned of this world in the public schools of Indiana, and as he grew, in his trade as a mechanic of automobiles.


3. But the Master had learnings from other lands and other schools, from other lives that he had lived. He remembered these, and remembering became wise and strong, so that others saw his strength and came to him for counsel.


4. The Master believed that he had the power to help himself and all of mankind, and as he believed so it was for him, so that others saw his power and came to him to be healed of their troubles and their many diseases.


5. The Master believed that it is well for any man to think upon himself as a son of God, and as he believed, so it was, and the shops and garages where he worked became crowded and jammed with those who sought his learning and his touch, and the streets outside with those who longed only that the shadow of his passing might fall upon them, and change their lives.


6. It came to pass, because of the crowds, that the several foremen and shop managers bid the Master leave his tools and go his way, for so tightly was he thronged that neither he nor other mechanics had room to work upon the automobiles.


7. So it was that he went into the countryside, and people following began to call him Messiah, and worker of miracles; and as they believed, it was so.


8. If a storm passed as he spoke, not a raindrop touched a listeners head; the last of the multitude heard his words as clearly as the first, no matter lightning nor thunder in the sky about. And always he spoke to them in parables.


9. And he said unto them, "Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to sickness, to riches and to poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.


10. A mill-man spoke and said "Easy words for you Master, for you are guided as we are not, and need not toil as we toil. A man has to work for his living in this world."


11. The Master answered and said, "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.


12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all–young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.


13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.


14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my own eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'


15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'


16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.


17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.


18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah come to save us all.


19. "And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare to let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.'


20. "But they cried the more, 'Savior!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior."


21. And it came to pass when he saw that the multitude thronged him the more day on day, tighter and closer and fiercer than ever they had, when he saw that they pressed him to heal them without rest, and feed them always with his miracles, to learn for them and to live their lives, he went alone that day unto a hilltop apart, and there he prayed.


22. And he said in his heart, Infinite Radiant Is, if it be they will, let this cup pass from me, let me lay aside this impossible task. I cannot live the life of one other soul, yet ten thousand cry to me for life. I'm sorry I allowed it all to happen. If it be thy will, let me go back to my engines and my tools and let me live as other men.


23. And a voice spoke to him on the hilltop, a voice neither male nor female, loud nor soft, a voice infinitely kind. And the voice said unto him, "Not my will, but thine be done. For what is thy will is mine for thee. Go thy way as other men, and be thou happy on the earth."


24. And hearing, the Master was glad, and gave thanks and came down from the hilltop humming a little mechanic's song. And when the throng pressed him with its woes, beseeching him to heal for it and learn for it and feed it nonstop from his understanding and to entertain it with his wonders, he smiled upon the multitude and said pleasantly unto them, "I quit."


25. For a moment the multitude was stricken dumb with astonishment.


26. And he said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he should do, should the man do as he is told?"


27. "Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"


28. "No matter what those tortures, nor how difficult the task?"


29. "Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.


30. " And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I command that you be happy in the world, as long as you live.' what would you do then?"


31. And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.


32. And the Master said unto the silence, "In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime. So it is that I have learned this day, and choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please."


33. And he went his way through the crowds and left them, and he returned to the everyday world of men and machines.

Chapter 2

It was toward the middle of the summer that I met Donald Shimoda. In four years' flying, I had never found another pilot in the line of work I do: flying with the wind from town to town, selling rides in an old biplane, three dollars for ten minutes in the air.

But one day just north of Ferris, Illinois, I looked down from the cockpit of my fleet and there was an old Travel Air 4000, gold and white, landed pretty as you please in the lemon-emerald hay.

Mine's a free life, but it does get lonely, sometimes. I saw the biplane there, thought about it for a few seconds, and decided it would be no harm to drop in. Throttle back to idle, a full-rudder slip, and the Fleet and I fell sideways toward the ground. Wind in the flying wires, that gentle good sound, the slow pok-pok of the old engine loafing its propeller around. Goggles up to better watch the landing. Cornstalks a green-leaf jungle swishing close below, flicker of a fence and then just-cut hay as far as I could see. Stick and rudder out of the slip, a nice little round-out above the land, hay brushing the tires, then the familiar calm crashing rattle of hard ground under-wheel, slowing, slowing and now a quick burst of noise and power to taxi beside the other plane and stop. throttle back, switch off, the soft clack-clack of the propeller spinning down to stop in the total quiet of July.

The pilot of the Travel Air sat in the hay, his back against the left wheel of his airplane, and he watched me.

For half a minute I watched him, too, looking at the mystery of his calm. I wouldn't have been so cool just to sit there and watch another plane land in a field with me and park ten yards away. I nodded, liking him without knowing why.

You looked lonely," I said across the distance between us.

"So did you."

"Don't mean to bother you. If I'm one too many, I'll be on my way."

"No. I've been waiting for you.'

I smiled at that. "Sorry I'm late."

"That's all right."

I pulled off my helmet and goggles, climbed out of the cockpit and stepped to the ground. This feels good, when you've been a couple hours in the Fleet.

"Hope you don't mind ham and cheese," he said. "Ham and cheese and maybe an ant." No handshake, no introduction of any kind.

He was not a large man. Hair to his shoulders, blacker than the rubber of the tire he leaned against. Eyes dark as hawk's eyes, the kind I like in a friend, and in anyone else make me uncomfortable indeed. He could have been a karate master on his way to some quietly violent demonstration.

I accepted the sandwich and a thermos cup of water. "Who are you anyway?" I said. "Years, I've been hopping rides, never seen another barnstormer out in the fields."

"Not much else I'm fit to do," he said happily enough. "A little mechanicking, welding, roughneck a bit, skinning Cats; I stay in one place too long, I get problems. So I made the airplane and now I'm in the barn storming business."

"What kind of Cat?" I've been mad for diesel tractors since I was a kid.

"D-Eights, D-Nines. Just for a little while, in Ohio."

"D-Nines! Big as a house! Double compound low gear, can they really push a mountain?"

"There are better ways of moving mountains," he said with a smile that lasted for maybe a tenth of a second.

I leaned for a minute against the lower wing of his plane, watching him. A trick of the light…it was hard to look at the man closely. As if there were a light around his head, fading the background a faint, misty silver.

"Something wrong?" he asked.

"What kind of problems did you have?"

"Oh, nothing much. I just like to keep moving these days, same as you."

I took my sandwich and walked around his plane. It was a 1928 or 1929 machine, and it was completely unscratched. Factories don't make airplanes as new as his was, parked there in the hay. Twenty coats of hand-rubbed butyrate dope, at least, paint like a mirror pulled tight over the wooden ribs of the thing. Don, in old English gold leaf under the rim of his cockpit, and the registration on the map case said, D. W. Shimoda. The instruments were new out of the box, original 1928 flight instruments. Varnished-oak control stick and rudder-bar; throttle, mixture, spark advance at the left. You never see spark advances anymore, even on the best-restored antiques. No scratch anywhere, not a patch on the fabric, not a single streak of engine oil from the cowling. Not a blade of straw on the floor of the cockpit, as though his machine hadn't flown at all, but instead had materialized on the spot through some time warp across half a century. I felt an odd creepy cold on my neck.

"How long you been hopping passengers ?" I called across the plane to him.

"About a month, now, five weeks."

He was lying. Five weeks in the fields and I don't care who you are, you've got dirt and oil on the plane and there's straw on the cockpit floor, no matter what. But this machine…no oil on the windshield, no flying-hay stains on the leading edges of wings and tail, no bugs smashed on the propeller. That is not possible for an airplane flying through an Illinois summer. I studied the Travel Air another five minutes, and then I went back and sat down in the hay under the wing, facing the pilot. I wasn't afraid, I still liked the guy, but something was wrong.

"Why are you not telling me the truth?"

"I have told you the truth, Richard," he said. The name is painted on my airplane, too.

"A person does not hop passengers for a month in a Travel Air without getting a little oil on the plane, my friend, a little dust? One patch in The fabric? Hay, for God's sake, on the floor?"

He smiled calmly at me. "There are some things you do not know."

In that moment he was a strange other planet person. I believed what he said, but I had no way of explaining his jewel airplane parked out in the summer hay field.

"This is true. But some day I'll know them all. And then you can have my airplane, Donald, because I won t need it to fly. He looked at me with interest, and raised his black eyebrows. "Oh? Tell me."

I was delighted. Someone wanted to hear my theory! "People couldn't fly for a long time, I don't think, because they didn't think it was possible, so of course they didn't learn the first little principle of aerodynamics. I want to believe that there's another principle somewhere: we don't need airplanes to fly, or move through walls, or get to planets. We can learn how to do that without machines anywhere. If we want to."

He half-smiled, seriously, and nodded his head one time. "And you think that you will learn what you wish to learn by hopping three-dollar rides out of hayfields. "

"The only learning that's mattered is what I got on my own, doing what I want to do. There isn't, but if there were a soul on earth who could teach me more of what I want to know than my airplane can, and the sky, I'd be off right now to find him. Or her."

The dark eyes looked at me level. "Don't you believe you're guided, if you really want to learn this thing?"

"I'm guided, yes. Isn't everyone ? I've always felt something kind of watching over me, sort of. "

"And you think you'll be led to a teacher who can help you."

"If the teacher doesn't happen to be me, yes."

"Maybe that's the way it happens," he said.

A modern new pickup truck hushed down the road toward us, raising a thin brown fog of dust, and it stopped by the field. The door opened, an old man got out, and a girl of ten or so. The dust stayed in the air, it was that still.

"Selling rides, are you?" said the man.

The field was Donald Shimoda's discovery; I stayed quiet.

"Will if you want, won't if you don't."

"And you want the dear Lord's fortune, I suppose."

"Three dollars cash, sir, for nine, ten minutes in the air. That is thirty-three and one-third cents per minute. And worth it, most people tell me."

It was an odd bystander-feeling, to sit there idle and listen to the way this fellow worked his trade. I liked what he said, all low key. I had grown so used to my own way of selling rides ("Guaranteed ten degrees cooler upstairs, folks! Come on up where only birds and angels fly! All of this for three dollars only, a dozen quarters from your purse or pocket…"), I had forgotten there might be another.

There's a tension, flying and selling rides alone. I was used to it, but still it was there: if I don't fly passengers, I don't eat. Now when I could sit back, not depending for my dinner on the outcome, I relaxed for once and watched.

The girl stood back and watched, too. Blonde, brown-eyed, solemn-faced, she was here because her grampa was. She did not want to fly.

Most often its the other way around, eager kids and cautious elders, but one gets a sense for these things when it's one's livelihood, and I knew that girl wouldn't fly with us if we waited all summer.

"Which one of you gentlemen…?" the man said.

Shimoda poured himself a cup of water. "Richard will fly you. I'm still on my lunch hour. Unless you want to wait."

"No, sir, I'm ready to go. Can we fly over my farm?"

"Sure," I said. "Just point the way you want to go, sir." I dumped my bedroll and toolbag and cook pots from the front cockpit of the Fleet, helped the man into the passenger seat and buckled him in. Then I slid down into the rear cockpit and fastened my own seat belt.

"Give me a prop, will you, Don?"

"Yep." He brought his water cup with him and stood by the propeller. "What do you want?"

"Hot and brakes. Pull it slow. The impulse will take it right out of your hand."

Always when somebody pulls the Fleet propeller, they pull it too fast, and for complicated reasons the engine won't start. But this man pulled it around ever so slowly, as though he had done it forever. The impulse spring snapped, sparks fired in the cylinders and the old engine was running, that easy. He walked back to his airplane, sat down and began talking to the girl.

In a great burst of raw horsepower and flying straw the Fleet was in the air, climbing through a hundred feet (if the engine quits now, we land in the corn), five hundred feet (now, and we can turn back and land in the hay…now, and it's the cow pasture west), eight hundred feet and level, following the man's finger pointing through the wind southwest.

Three minutes airborne and we circle a farmstead, barns the color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in the back for food, sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing.

The man in the front cockpit looked down through the air as we circled the farmhouse framed between the wings and through the flying wires of the Fleet.

A woman appeared on the porch below, white apron over blue dress, waving. The man waved back. They would talk later of how they could see each other so well across the sky.

He looked back at me finally with a nod to say that was enough, thanks, and we could head back now.

I flew a wide circle around Ferris, to let the people know there was flying going on, and spiraled down over the hayfield to show them just where it was happening. As I slipped down to land, banked steeply over the corn, the Travel Air swept off the ground and turned at once toward the farm we had just left.

I flew once with a five-ship circus, and for a moment it was that kind of busy feeling…one plane lifting off with passengers while another lands. We touched ground with a gentle rumbling crash rolled to the far end of the hay, by road.

The engine stopped, the man unsnapped his safety belt and I helped him out. He took a wallet from his overalls and counted the dollar bills, shaking his head.

"That's quite a ride, son."

"We think so. It's a good product we're selling."

"It's your friend, that's selling!"

"Oh ?"

"I'll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I'll wager, can't he now?"

"How come you say that ?"

"The girl, of course. An airplane ride to my granddaughter, Sarah!" As he spoke he watched the Travel Air, a distant silver mote in the air, circling the farmhouse. He spoke as a calm man speaks, noting the dead twig in the yard has just sprouted blossoms and ripe apples.

"Since she's born, that girl's been wild to death about high places. Screams. Just terrified. Sarah'd no more climb a tree than she'd stir hornets barehand. Won't climb the ladder to the loft, won't go up there if the Flood was rising in the yard. The girl's a wonder with machines, not too bad around animals, but heights, they are a caution to her! And there she is up in the air."

He talked on about this and other special times; he remembered when the barnstormers used to come through Galesburg, years ago. and Monmouth, flying two wingers the same as we flew, but doing all kinds of crazy stunts with them.

I watched the distant Travel Air get bigger, spiral down over the field in a bank steeper than I'd ever fly with a girl afraid of heights, slip over the corn and the fence and touch the hay in a threepoint landing that was dazzling to watch. Donald Shimoda must have been flying for a good long while, to land a Travel Air that way.

The airplane rolled to a stop beside us, no extra power required and the propeller clanked softly to stop. I looked closely. There were no bugs on the propeller. Not so much as a single fly killed on that eight-foot blade.

I sprang to help, unshackled the girl's safety belt, opened the little front-cockpit door for her and showed her where to step so her foot wouldn't go through the wing fabric.

"How'd you like that?" I said.

She didn't know I spoke.

"Grampa, I'm not afraid! I wasn't scared, honest! The house looked like a little toy and Mom waved at me and Don said I was scared just because I fell and died once and I don't have to be afraid anymore! I'm going to be a pilot, Grampa. I'm gonna have an airplane and work on the engine myself and fly everywhere and give rides! Can I do that?"

Shimoda smiled at the man and shrugged his shoulders.

"He told you you were going to be a pilot, did he, Sarah ?"

"No, but I am. I'm already good with engines, you know that!"

"Well, you can talk about that with your mother. Time for us to be getting home. "

The two thanked us and one walked, one ran to the pickup truck, both changed by what had happened in the field and in the sky.

Two automobiles arrived, then another, and we had a noon rush of people who wanted to see Ferris from the air. We flew twelve or thirteen flights as fast as we could get them off, and after that I made a run to the station in town to get car gas for the Fleet. Then a few passengers, a few more, and it was evening and we flew solid back-to-back flights till sunset.

A sign somewhere said Population 200, and by dark I was thinking we had flown them all, and some out-of-towners as well.

I forgot in the rush of flying to ask about Sarah and what Don had told her, whether he had made up the story or if he thought it was true, about dying. And every once in a while I watched his plane closely while passengers changed seats. Not a mark on it, no oil-drop anywhere, and he apparently flew to dodge the bugs that I had to wipe from my windshield every hour or two.

There was just a little light in the sky when we quit. By the time I laid dry cornstalks in my tin stove, set them over with charcoal bricks and lit the fire, it was full dark, the firelight throwing colors back from the airplanes parked close, and from the golden straw about us.

I peered into the grocery box. "It's soup or stew or Spaghetti-O's," I said. "Or pears or peaches. Want some hot peaches?"

"No difference," he said mildly. "Anything or nothing."

"Man, aren't you hungry? This has been a busy day!"

"You haven't given me much to be hungry for, unless that's good stew."

I opened the stew can with my Swiss Air Officer's Escape and Evasion Knife, did a similar, job on the Spaghetti-0's, and popped both cans over the fire.

My pockets were tight with cash…this was one of the pleasanter times of day for me. I pulled the bills out and counted, not bothering much to fold them flat. It came to $147, and I figured in my head, which is not easy for me.

"That's…that's…let's see…four and carry the two…forty-nine flights today! Broke a hundred-dollar day, Don, just me and the Fleet! You must have broke two hundred easy…you fly mostly two at a time?"

"Mostly," he said.

"About this teacher you're looking for…" he said.

"I ain't looking for no teacher," I said "I am counting money! I can go a week on this, I can be rained out cold for one solid week!"

He looked at me and smiled. "When you are done swimming in your money," he said, "would you mind passing my stew?""



Chapter 3

Throngs and masses and crowds of people, torrents of humanity pouring against one man in the middle of them all. Then the people became an ocean that would drown the man, but instead of drowning he walked over the ocean, whistling, and disappeared. The ocean of water changed to an ocean of grass. A white-and-gold Travel Air 4000 came down to land on the grass and the pilot got out of the cockpit and put up a cloth sign: "Fly–$3–Fly".

It was three o'clock in the morning when I woke from the dream, remembering it all and for some reason happy for it. I opened my eyes to see in the moonlight that big Travel Air parked alongside the Fleet. Shimoda sat on his bed roll as he had when first I met him, leaning back against the left wheel of his airplane It wasn't that I saw him clearly, I just knew he was there.

"Hi Richard," he said quietly in the dark. "Does that tell you what's going on?"

"Does what tell me?" I said foggily. I was still remembering and didn't think to be surprised that he'd be awake.

"Your dream. The guy and the crowds and the airplane," he said patiently. "You were curious about me, so now you know, OK? There were news stories: Donald Shimoda, the one they were beginning to call the Mechanic Messiah, the American Aviator, who disappeared one day in front of twenty-five thousand eye-witnesses?"

I did remember that, had read it on a small-town Ohio newspaper rack, because it was on the front page.

"Donald Shimoda?"

"At your service," he said. "Now you know, so you don't have to puzzle me out anymore. Go back to sleep."

I thought about that for a long time before I slept.

"Are you allowed…I didn't think…you get a job like that, the Messiah, you're supposed to save the world, aren't you? I didn't know the Messiah could just turn in his keys like that and quit." I sat high on the top cowling of the Fleet and considered my strange friend. ''Toss me a nine-sixteenths, would you please, Don?"

He hunted in the toolbag and pitched the wrench up to me. As with the other tools that morning, the one he threw slowed and stopped within a foot of me, floating weightless, turning lazy in midair. The moment I touched it, though, it went heavy in my hand, an everyday chrome-vanadium aircraft end-wrench. Well, not quite everyday. Ever since a cheap seven-eighths broke in my hand. I've bought the best tools a man can have…this one happened to be a Snap-On, which as any mechanic knows is not your everyday wrench. Might as well be made of gold, the price of the thing, but it's a joy in the hand and you know it will never break, no matter what you do with it.

"Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing if you want to." He floated a Phillips screwdriver for his own amusement. "So I quit being the Messiah and if I sound a little defensive, it's maybe because I am still a little defensive. Better that than keeping the job and hating it. A good Messiah hates nothing and is free to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that's true for everybody, of course. We're all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of the Mind, or however else you want to say it."

I worked at tightening the cylinder base nuts on the Kinner engine. A good power plant, the old B-5, but these nuts want to loosen themselves every hundred flying hours or so, and it's wise to stay one jump ahead. Sure enough, the first one I put the wrench to went a quarter turn tighter, and I was glad for my wisdom to check them all this morning, before flying any more customers.

"Well yes Don, but it seems as if Messiahing would be different from other jobs you know? Jesus going back to hammering nails for a living? Maybe it just sounds odd."

He considered that, trying to see my point. "I don't see your point. Strange thing about that is he didn't quit when they first started calling him Savior. Instead at that piece of bad news, he tried logic: 'OK, I'm the son of God, but so are we all; I'm the savior, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!' Anybody in their right mind understands that."

It was hot, up on the cowling, but it didn't feel like work. The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Satisfying, to know that I was keeping the cylinders from flying off the engine. "Say you want another wrench," he said.

"I do not want another wrench. And I happen to be so spiritually advanced that I consider these tricks of yours mere party games, Shimoda, of a moderately evolved soul. Or maybe a beginning hypnotist."

"A hypnotist! Boy, are you ever getting warm! But better hypnotist than Messiah. What a dull job! Why didn't I know it was going to be a dull job?"

"You did," I said wisely. He just laughed.

"Did you ever consider, Don, that it might not be so easy to quit, after all? That you might not just settle right down to the life of a normal human being?"

He didn't laugh at that. "You're right, of course," he said, and ran his fingers through his black hair. "Stay in any one place too long, more than a day or two, and people knew I was something strange. Brush against my sleeve, you're healed of terminal cancer, and before the week's out there I'm back in the middle of a crowd again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I came from or where I'm going next, which suits me pretty well."

"You are gonna have a tougher time than you think, Don."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, the whole motion of our time is from the material toward the spiritual…slow as it is, it's still a pretty huge motion. I don't think the world is gonna let you alone."

"It's not me they want, it's the miracles! And those I can teach to somebody else; let him be the Messiah. I won't tell him it's a dull job. And besides, 'There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.'" I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of them were loose, but some were. "You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?"

"I'll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you."

"You can't run away, Don! What if I start worshipping you right now ? What if I get tired of working on my engine and start begging you to heal it for me? Look, I'll give you every dime I make to sundown if you just teach me how to float in the air ? If you don't do it, then I'll know that I'm supposed to start praying to you, Holy One Sent to Lift My Burden."

He just smiled at me. I still don't think he understood that he couldn't run away. How could I know that when he didn't ?

"Did you have the whole show, like you see in the movies from India? Crowds in the streets, billions of hands touching you, flowers and incense, golden platforms with silver tapestries for you to stand on when you spoke?

"No. Even before I asked for the job, I knew I couldn't stand that. So I chose the United States, and I just got the crowds."

It was pain for him, remembering, and I was sorry I had brought the whole thing up.

He sat in the hay and talked on, looking through me. "I wanted to say, for the love of God, if you want freedom and joy so much, can't you see it's not anywhere outside of you? Say you have it, and you have it! Act as if it's yours, and it is! Richard, what is so damned hard about that: But they didn't even hear, most of them. Miracles--like going to auto races to see the crashes, they came to me to see miracles. First it's frustrating and then after a while it just gets dull. I have no idea how the other Messiahs could stand it,"

"You put it that way, it does lose some of its charm," I said. I tightened the last nut and put the tools away. "Where are we headed today?"

He walked to my cockpit, and instead of wiping the bugs off my windshield, he passed his hand over it and the smashed little creatures came alive and flew away. His own windshield never needed cleaning, of course, and now I knew his engine would never need any maintenance, either.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know where we're headed."

"What do you mean? You know the past and the future of all things. You know exactly where we're going!"

He sighed. "Yeah. But I try not to think about it. "

For a while, as I was working on the cylinders, I got to thinking wow, all I have to do is stay with this guy and there will be no problems, nothing bad will happen and everything will turn out fine. But the way he said that: "I try not to think about it" made me remember what had happened to the other Messiahs sent into this world. Common sense shouted at me to turn south after take off and get as far away from the man as I could get. But as I said, it gets lonely, flying this way alone and I was glad to find him, just to have somebody to talk with who knew an aileron from a vertical stabilizer.

I should have turned south, but after take off I stayed with him and we flew north and east into that future that he tried not to think about.



Chapter 4

"Where do you learn all this stuff, Don ? You know so much, or maybe I just think you do. No. You do know a lot. Is it all practice ? Don't you get any formal training to be a Master."

"They give you a book to read."

I hung a fresh-washed silk scarf on the flying wires and stared at him. "A book?"

"Savior's Manual. It's kind of the bible for Masters. There's a copy around here somewhere, if you're interested."

"Yes, yes! You mean a regular book that tells you…?"

He rummaged around for a while in the baggage space behind the headrest of the Travel Air and came up with a small volume bound in what looked like suede.

Messiah' s Handbook,

❧

Reminders for the Advanced Soul.

"What do you mean Savior's Manual? This says Messiah's Handbook."

"Something like that." He started to pick up things around his airplane as though he thought it was time to be moving on.

I leafed through the book, a collection of maxims and short paragraphs.

Perspective–
Use It or Lose It.
If you turned to this page,
you're forgetting that what is going
on around you is not reality.

Think about that.

Remember where you came from,
where you're going, and why you created
the mess you got yourself into in the first place.
You're going to die a horrible death, remember.
It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it
more if you keep the facts
in mind.

Take your dying with some seriousness, however.
Laughing on the way to your execution
is not generally understood by less-
advanced life-forms, and they'll
call you crazy.

"Have you read this, about losing your perspective, Don?"

"No."

"It says you have to die a horrible death."

"You don't have to. Depends on the circumstances, and how you feel like arranging things."

"Are you going to die a horrible death?"

"I don't know. Not much point in it, would you think, now that I've quit the job? A quiet little ascension ought to be enough. I'll decide in a few weeks when I finish what I came for."

I put him down for kidding, the way he did from time to time, and didn't know then that he was serious about the few weeks.

I went on into the book; it was the kind of knowledge a master would need, all right.

Learning
is finding out
what you already know.

Doing is demonstrating that
you know it.

Teaching is reminding others
that they know just as well as you.

You are all learners,
doers, teachers.

Your only
obligation in any lifetime
is to be true to yourself.
Being true to anyone else or
anything else is not only
impossible, but the
mark of a fake
messiah.

The
simplest questions
are the most profound.
Where were you born? Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?

Think about
these once in a while,
and watch your answers
change.

You
teach best
what you most need
to learn.

"You're awfully quiet over there, Richard," said Shimoda, as though he wanted to talk with me.

"Yeah," I said, and went on reading. If this was a book for Masters only, I didn't want to let go of it.

Live
never to be
ashamed if anything you do
or say is published
around the world even if
what is published
is not true.

Your friends
will know you better
in the first minute you meet
than
your acquaintances
will know you
in a thousand
years.

The
best way
to avoid responsibility
is to say, "I've got
responsibilities."

I noticed something strange about the book. "The pages don't have numbers on them, Don."

"No," he said. "You just open it and whatever you need most is there."

"A magic book!"

"No. You can do it with any book. You can do it with an old newspaper, if you read carefully enough. Haven't you done that, hold some problem in your mind, then open any book handy and see what it tells you?"

"No."

"Well, try it sometime."

I tried. I closed my eyes and wondered what was going to happen to me if I stayed much longer with this strange person. It was fun to be with him, but I couldn't shake the sense that something not fun at all was going to happen to him before long, and I didn't want to be around when it did. Thinking that, I opened the book with my eyes still closed, then opened them and read.

You are led
through your lifetime
by the inner learning creature,
the playful Spiritual being
that is your real self.

Don't turn away
from possible futures
before you're certain you don't have
anything to learn from them.

You're always free
to change your mind and
choose a different future, or
a different
past.

Choose a different past? Literally or figuratively or how did it mean…? "I think my mind just boggled, Don. I don't know how I could possibly learn this stuff."

"Practice. A little theory and a lot of practice," he said. "Take you about a week and a half."

"A week and a half."

"Yeah. Believe you know all answers, and you know all answers. Believe you're a Master, and you are."

"I never said I wanted to be any Master."

"That's right," he said. "You didn't."

But I kept the handbook, and he never asked for it back.



Chapter 5

Farmers in the Midwest need good land for their work to prosper, so do gypsy fliers. They have to be close to their customers. They must find fields a block from town, fields planted in grass, or hay or oats or wheat cut grass-short; no cows nearby to eat the fabric from their planes; alongside a road for cars; a gate in the fence for people; fields lined so that an airplane doesn't have to fly low over any house any here; smooth enough their machines aren't jolted to pieces rolling 50 mph over the ground; long enough to get in and out safely in the hot calm days of summer; and permission from the owner to fly there for a day.

I thought of this as we flew north through Saturday morning, the Messiah and me, the green and gold of the land pulling softly by, a thousand feet below. Donald Shimoda's Travel Air floated noisily off my right wing, bouncing sunlight all directions off its mirror paints. A lovely airplane, I thought, but too big for real hard-time barnstorming. It does carry two passengers at a time, but it also weighs twice as much as a Fleet, and so needs much more field to get off the ground and back on. I owned a Travel Air once, but traded it finally for the Fleet, which can get into tiny fields, fields the size you're a lot more likely to find close to town. I could work a 500-foot field with the Fleet, where the Travel Air took 1000, 1300 feet. You tie yourself to this guy, I thought, and you tie yourself to the limits of his airplane.

And sure enough, the moment I thought that, I spotted a neat little cow pasture by the town going past below. It was a standard 1320-foot-farm-field cut in half, the other half sold to the town for a baseball diamond.

Knowing Shimoda's plane couldn't land there, I kicked my little flying machine up on her left wing, nose up, power to idle, and sank like a safe toward the ball park. We touched in the grass just beyond the left-field fence and rolled to a stop with room to spare. I just wanted to show off a little, show him what a Fleet can do, properly flown. A burst of throttle swung me around for take off again, but when I turned to go, there was the Travel Air all set up on final approach to land. Tail down, right wing up, it looked like some glorious graceful condor turning to land on a broom-straw.

He was low and slow, so that the hair on my neck prickled. I was about to see a crash. A Travel Air, you want to hold at least 60 mph over the fence to land, slower than that with an airplane that stalls at 50 and you are going to wrap it up in a ball. But what I saw was this gold and snow biplane stop in the air, instead. Well, I don't mean stop, but it was flying no more than 30 mph, an airplane that stalls at 50, mind you, stop in the air and sort of sigh three-point onto the grass. He used half, maybe three-quarters the space I had used to land the Fleet.

I just sat in the cockpit and looked, while he taxied alongside and shut down. When I turned off my engine, still staring at him dumbly, he called "Nice field, you found! Close enough to town, hey?"

Our first customers, two boys on a Honda motorcycle, were already turning in to see what was going on.

"What do you mean, close to town?" I shouted over the engine noise still in my ears.

"Well, it's half a block away!"

"No, not that! WHAT WAS THAT LANDING? In the Travel Air! How did you land here?"

He winked at me. "Magic!"

"No, Don…really! I saw the way you landed!"

He could see that I was shocked and more than a bit frightened.

"Richard, do you want to know the answer to floating wrenches in the air and healing all sickness and turning water into wine and walking on the waves and landing Travel Airs on a hundred feet of grass ? Do you want to know the answer to all these miracles ?"

I felt as though he had turned a laser on me. "I want to know how you landed here…"

"Listen!" he called across the gulf between us. "This world? And everything in it, Illusions, Richard! Every bit of it, illusions! Do you understand that?" There was no wink, no smile; as though he was suddenly furious with me for not knowing long ago.

The motorcycle stopped by the tail of his airplane; the boys looked eager to fly.

"Yeah," was all I could think to say. "Roger on the illusions." Then they were on him for a ride and it was up to me to find the owner of the field before he found us and ask permission to fly out of his cow pasture.

The only way to describe the take offs and landings the Travel Air made that day is to tell you that it looked like a fake Travel Air. As if the plane were really an E-2 Cub, or a helicopter dressed in a Travel Air costume. Somehow it was a lot easier for me to accept a nine-sixteenths end-wrench floating weightless than to be calm watching that airplane of his lift off the ground with passengers aboard at 30 mph. It is one thing to believe in levitation when you see it, it is another thing entirely to believe in miracles.

I kept thinking about what he had said so fiercely. Illusions. Someone had said that before…when I was a kid, learning magic–magicians say that! They carefully tell us, "Look, this is not a miracle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an effect, it is the illusion of magic." Then they pull a chandelier from a walnut and change an elephant into a tennis racket.

In a burst of insight, I pulled the Messiah's Handbook from my pocket and opened it. Two sentences stood alone on the page.

There is
no such thing as a problem
without a gift for you
in its hands.

You seek problems
because you need
their gifts.

I didn't quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.

The name of the town was Troy and the pasture there promised to be as good to us as the hayfield in Ferris had been. But in Ferris I had felt a certain calm, and here was a tension in the air that I didn't like at all.

The flying that was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to our passengers was for me routine, overshadowed by that strange uneasiness. My adventure was this character I was flying with…the impossible way he made his airplane go and the odd things that he had said to explain it.

The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air's flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn't rung for sixty years…they didn't know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.

"Thanks for the ride!" they said, and, "Is this all you do for a living…don't you work somewhere?" and, "Why'd you pick a little place like Troy?" and "Jerry your farm's no bigger than a shoebox!"

We had a busy afternoon. There were lots of people coming out to fly and we were going to make a lot of money. Still, part of me began to say get out get out, get away from this place. I have ignored that before and always been sorry for it.

About three o'clock I had shut down my engine for gas, walked twice back and forth from the Skelly station with two five gallon cans of car gas, when it struck me that not once had I seen the Travel Air refuel. Shimoda hadn't put gas in his plane since sometime before Ferris, and I had watched him fly that machine for seven hours now, going on eight, without another drop of gas or oil. And though I knew that he was a good man, and wouldn't hurt me, I was frightened again. If you really stretch it, throttle back to minimum revolutions and mixture dead lean in cruise, you can make a Travel Air run five hours at the outside. But not eight hours of take offs and landings.

He flew steadily on, ride after ride, while I poured the Regular into my center section tank and added a quart of oil to the engine. There was a line of people waiting to fly…it was as if he didn't want- to disappoint them. I caught his, though, as he helped a man and wife into the front cockpit of his plane. I tried to sound just as calm and casual as I could.

"Don, how you doin' on fuel? Need any gas?" I stood at his wing tip with an empty five-gallon can in my hand.

He looked straight into my eyes and he frowned, puzzled, as though I had asked if he needed any air to breathe.

"No," he said, and I felt like a slow first-grader at the back of the classroom. "No, Richard, I don't need any gas."

It annoyed me. I know a little bit about airplane engines and fuel. "Well then," I flared at him, "how about some uranium?"

He laughed and melted me at once. "No thanks. I filled it last year." And then he was in his cockpit and gone with his passengers in that supernatural slow motion take off.

I wished first that the people would go home, then that we would get out of here fast, people or not, then that I would have the sense to get out of there alone, at once. All I wanted was to take off and find a big empty field far away from any town and just sit and think and write what was happening in my journal, make some sense out of it.

I stayed out of the Fleet, resting till Shimoda landed again. I walked to his cockpit there in the propeller-blast of the big engine.

"I've flown about enough, Don. Gonna be on my way, land out from towns and be a little less busy for a while. It's been fun flying with you. See you again some time, OK?"

He didn't blink. "One more flight and I'll be with you. Guy's been waiting."

"All right."

The guy was waiting in a battered wheelchair rolled down the block to the field. He was kind of smashed down and twisted into the seat as if by some high gravity force, but he was here because he wanted to go flying. There were other people around, forty or fifty, some in, some out of their cars, watching curiously how Don would get the man from the chair into the plane.

He didn't think about it at all. "Do you want to fly?" The man in the wheelchair smiled a twisted smile and nodded sideways.

"Let's go, let's do it!" Don said quietly, as though he was talking to someone who had waited on the sidelines a long while, whose time had come to go into the game again. If there was anything strange about that moment, looking back on it, it was the intensity with which he spoke. It was casual, yes, but it was a command, too, that expected the man to get up and get into the plane, no excuses. What happened then, it was as if the man had been acting, and finished the last scene of his crippled-invalid part. It looked staged. The high-gravity broke away from him as though it was never there; he launched off the chair at a half-run, amazed at himself, toward the Travel Air.

I was standing close, and heard him. "What did you do?" he said. "What did you do to me?"

"Are you going to fly or not going to fly?" Don said. "The price is three dollars. Pay me before take off, please."

"I'm flying!" he said. Shimoda didn't help him into the front cockpit, the way he usually helped his passengers.

The people in the cars were out of the cars–there was an odd murmur from the watchers and then shocked silence. The man hadn't walked since his truck went off a bridge eleven years before.

Like a kid putting on bed sheet wings, he hopped to the cockpit and slid down into the seat, moving his arms a lot as though he had just been given arms to play with.

Before anybody could talk, Don pressed the throttle and the Travel Air rolled up into the air, steep-turning around the trees and climbing like fury.

Can a moment be happy and at the same time terrifying? There followed a lot of moments like that. It was a wonder at what could only be called a miraculous healing to a man who looked like he deserved it, and at the same time, something uncomfortable was going to happen when those two came down again. The crowd was a tight knot waiting, and a tight knot of people is a mob and that is not good at all. Minutes ticked, eyes bored into that little biplane flying so carefree in the sun, and some violent thing was set to go off.

The Travel Air flew some steep lazy eights, a tight spiral, and then it was floating over the fence like a slow noisy flying saucer to land. If he had any sense at all, he would let his passenger off at the far side of the field, take off fast and disappear. There were more people coming; another wheelchair, pushed by a lady running.

He taxied toward the crowd, spun the plane about to keep the propeller pointing away, shut down the engine. The people ran to the cockpit, and for a minute I thought they were going to tear fabric from the fuselage, to get at the two.

Was it cowardly? I don't know. I walked to my airplane, pumped the throttle and primer, pulled the propeller to start the engine. Then I got into the cockpit and turned the Fleet into the wind and took off. The last I saw of Donald Shimoda, he was sitting on the rim of his cockpit, and the mob had him surrounded. I turned east, then southeast, and after a while the first big field I found with trees for shade and a stream to drink from, I landed for the night. It was a long way from any town.



Chapter 6

To this day I can't say what it was came over me. It was just that doom feeling, and it drove me out, away even from the strange curious fellow that was Donald Shimoda. If I have to fraternize with doom, even the Messiah Himself is not powerful enough to make me hang around.

It was quiet in the field, a silent huge meadow open to the sky…the only sound, a little stream I had to listen pretty hard to hear. Lonely again. A person gets used to being alone, but break it just for a day and you have to get used to it again, all over from the beginning.

"OK, so it was fun for a while," I said aloud to the meadow. It was fun and maybe I had a lot to learn from the guy. But I get enough of crowds even when they're happy…if they're scared they're either going to crucify somebody or worship him. I'm sorry, that's too much!"

Saying that caught me short. The words I had said could have been Shimoda's exactly. Why did he stay there? I had the sense to leave, and I was no Messiah at all.

Illusions. What did he mean about illusions? That mattered more than anything he had said or done. Fierce, he was, when he said, "It's all illusions!" as though he could blast the idea into my head with sheer force. It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn't know what it meant.

I got a fire going after a while, cooked me up a kind of leftover goulash of bits and pieces of soybean meat and dry noodles and two hot dogs from three days ago that boiling should have been good for. The toolbag was crushed alongside the grocery box, and for no reason I fetched out the nine-sixteenths and looked at it, wiped it clean and stirred the goulash with it.

I was alone, mind you no one to watch so for fun I tried floating it in the air the way he had done it. If I tossed it right straight up and blinked my eye when it stopped going up and started coming down, I got a half-second feeling that it was floating. But then it thunked back down on the grass or on my knee and the effect was shattered fast. But this very same wrench…How did he do it?

If that's all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real? And if this life is illusion, why do we live it at all? I gave up at last, tossed the wrench a couple more times and quit. And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn't the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.

When I'm alone sometimes I sing. "Oh, me and ol' PAINT!…" I sang, patting the wing of the Fleet in true love for the thing (remember there was nobody to hear), "We'll wander the sky…Hoppin' 'round hayfields till one of us gives in…" Music and words both I compose as I go along. "An' it won't be me givin' in, Paint…Unless you break a SPAR…and then I'll just tie yon up with baling WIRE…and we'll go flying on…WE'LL GO FLYIN' ON…"

The verses are endless when I get going and happy, since the rhyming isn't that critical. I had stopped thinking about the problems of the Messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that's what made me happy.

Long about ten o'clock the fire ran down and so did my song.

"Wherever you are, Donald Shimoda," I said, unrolling my blanket under the wing, "I wish you happy flying and no crowds. If that is what you want. No, I take that back. I wish, dear lonely Messiah, that you find whatever it is that you want to find."

His handbook fell out of the pocket as I took off my shirt, and I read it where it opened.

The bond
that links your true family
is not one of blood, but
of respect and joy in
each other's life.

Rarely do members
of one family grow
under the same
roof.

I didn't see how that applied to me and reminded myself never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under the blanket, and then I was out like a bulb turned off warm and dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure.

When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because something was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted wildly and nearly broke my hand…a nine-sixteenths end-wrench is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as eager to get at all those pesky nuts an bolts.

"Well, hell!"

I never say hell or damn–carryover from an ego thing as a child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. What was happening to my wrench: Donald Shimoda was sixty miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, examine it, balance it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be some simple reason…

I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag an lit the fire for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay here all day, if I felt like it.

The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be turned when I heard a sound in the sky to the west.

There was no way that the sound could have been Shimoda's airplane, no way anybody could have tracked me to this one field out of millions of Midwest fields, but I knew that it was him and started whistling…watching the bread and the sky an trying to think of something very calm to say when he landed.

It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pulled up steep in a show-off turn, slipped own through the air and landed 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled alongside and shut down his engine. I didn't say anything. Waved, but didn't say a word. I did stop whistling.

He got out of the cockpit and walked to the fire. "Hi, Richard."

"You're late," I said. "Almost burned the pan-bread."

"Sorry."

I handed him a cup of stream water and a tin plate with half the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine.

"How'd it go ?" I said.

"Went OK," he said with an instant's half-smile. "I escaped with my life."

"Had some doubts you would."

He ate the bread for a while in silence. "You know," he said at last, contemplating his meal, "this is really terrible stuff."

"Nobody says you have to eat my pan-bread," I said crossly. "Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?"

"Well," he grinned,"–and I'm speaking as God, now–I'd say that you believe that it's good and that therefore it does taste good to you. Try it without deeply believing what you believe and it's sort of like…a fire… after a flood…in a flour mill, don't you think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess."

"Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don't you think the basic bread itself–not the grass or the little charred part, there-the basic pan-bread, don't you think…?"

"Terrible," he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had handed to him. "I'd rather starve. Still have the peaches?"

"In the box."

How had he found me, in this field? A twenty-eight-foot wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he would tell me.

"How did you find me?" I said. "I could have landed anywhere."

He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a knife . . . not an easy trick.

"Like attracts like," he muttered, missing a peach slice.

"Oh…"

"Cosmic law. "

"Oh…"

I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from the stream. That sure is good bread.

"Do you mind explaining? How is it that I am like your esteemed self? Or did by 'like' you mean the airplanes are alike, sort of?"

"We miracle-workers got to stick together," he said. The sentence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it.

"Ah…Don, referring to your last comment? Perhaps you'd like to tell me what you had in mind…we miracle workers?"

"From the position of the nine-sixteenths on the toolbag, I'd say you were running the old levitate-the-end-wrench trick this morning. Tell me if I'm wrong."

"Wasn't running anything! I woke up . . . the thing woke me up, by itself!"

"Oh. By itself." He was laughing at me.

"YES BY ITSELF!"

"Your understanding of your miracle working, Richard, is as thorough as your understanding of bread-baking."

I didn't reply to that, just eased myself down on my bedroll and was quiet as could be. If he had something to say, he could say it in his own good time.

"Some of us start learning these things subconsciously. Our waking mind won't accept it, so we do our miracles in our sleep." He watched the sky, and the first clouds of the day. "Don't be impatient, Richard. We're all on our way to learning more. It will come to you a little faster now, and you'll be a wise old spiritual maestro before you know it."

"What do you mean, before I know it? I don't want to know it! I don't want to know anything!"

"You don't want to know anything."

"Well, I want to know why the world is and what it is and why I live here and where I'm going next…I want to know that. How to fly without an airplane, if I had a wish."

"Sorry."

"Sorry what?"

"Doesn't work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore." He looked away from the sky. "You're like everybody else. You already know this stuff, you're just not aware that you know it, yet."

"I don't recall," I said, "I don't recall your asking me whether I want to learn this thing, whatever it is that has brought you crowds and misery all your life. Seems to have slipped my mind." Soon as I said the words I knew that he was going to say I'd remember later, and that he'd be right.

He stretched out in the grass, the last of the flour in its bag for a pillow. "Look, you don't worry about the crowds. They can't touch you unless you want them to. You're magic, remember–POOF!–you're invisible, and walk through the doors."

"Crowd got you at Troy, didn't it?"

"Did I say I didn't want them to? I allowed that. I liked it. There's a little ham in all of us or we'd never make it as Masters."

"But didn't you quit? Didn't I read…?"

"The way things were going, I was turning into the One-and-Only Full-Time Messiah, and that job I quit cold. But I can't unlearn what I've spent lifetimes coming to know, can I?"

I closed my eyes and crunched a hay stem. "Look, Donald, what are you trying to tell me? Why don't you come right out and say what is going on?"

It was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "Maybe you ought to tell me. You tell me what I'm trying to say, and I'll correct you if you're wrong. "

I thought about that a minute, and decided to surprise him. "OK, I'll tell you." I practiced then pausing, to see how long he could wait if what I said didn't come out too fluent. The sun was high enough now to be warm, and way off in some hidden field a farmer worked a diesel tractor, cultivating corn on Sunday.

"OK, I'll tell you. First of all, it was no coincidence when I first saw you landed down in the field at Ferris, right?"

He was quiet as the hay growing.

"And second of all, you and I have some kind of mystical agreement which apparently I have forgotten and you haven't."

Only a soft wind blowing, and the distant tractor-sound wafting back and forth with it.

There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story.

"I'm going to say that we met three or four thousand years ago, give or take a day. We like the same kind of adventures, we probably hate the same sort of destroyers, learn with about as much fun, about as fast as each other. You've got a better memory. Our meeting again is what you mean by 'Like attracts like,' that you said."

I picked a new hay-stem. "How am I doing ?"

"For a while I thought it was going to be a long haul," he said. "It is going to be a long haul, but I think there's a slim out side chance that you might make it this time. Keep talking."

"For another thing, I don't have to keep talking, because you already know what things people know. But if I didn't say these things, you wouldn't know what I think that I know, and without that I can't learn any of the things I want to learn." I put down my hay-stem. "What's in it for you, Don? Why do you bother with people like me? Whenever somebody is advanced as you are, he gets all these miracle-powers as byproducts. You don't need me, you don't need anything at all from this world."

I turned my head and looked at him. His eyes were closed. "Like gas in the Travel Air?" he said.

"Right," I said. "So all there is left in the world is boredom…there are no adventures when you know that you can't be troubled by anything on this earth. Your only problem is that you don't have any problems!"

That, I thought, was a terrific piece of talking.

"You missed, there," he said. "Tell me why I quit my job…do you know why I quit the Messiah job.?"

"Crowds, you said. Everybody wanting you to do their miracles for them."

"Yeah. Not the first, the second. Crowdophobia is your cross, not mine. It's not crowds that wear me, its the kind of crowd that doesn't care at all about what I came to say. You can walk from New York to London on the ocean, you can pull gold coins out of forever and still not make them care, you know?"

When he said that, he looked lonelier than I had ever seen a man still alive. He didn't need food or shelter or money or fame. He was dying of his need to say what he knew, and nobody cared enough to listen.

I frowned at him, so as not to cry. "Well you asked for it," I said. "If your happiness depends on somebody else, then I guess you do have a problem."

He jerked his head up and his eyes blazed as though I had hit him with the wrench. I thought all at once that I would not be wise to get this guy mad at me. A man fries quick, struck by lightning.

Then he smiled that half-second smile. "You know what, Richard?" he said slowly. "You…are…right!"

He was quiet again, tranced, almost, by what I had said. Not noticing, I went on talking to him for hours about how we had met and what there was to learn, all these ideas firing through my head like morning comets and daylight meteors. He lay very still in the grass, not moving, not saying a word. By noon I finished my version of the universe and all things that dwelled therein.

"…and I feel I've barely begun, Don, there's so much to say. How do I know all this? How come is that?"

He didn't answer.

"If you expect me to answer my own question, I confess that I do not know. Why can I say all these things now, when I've never even tried, before? What has happened to me?"

No answer.

"Don? It's OK for you to talk now, please."

He didn't say a word. I had explained the panorama of life to him, and my Messiah, as though he had heard all he needed in that one chance word about his happiness, had fallen fast asleep.



Chapter 7

Wednesday morning, it's six o'clock, I'm not awake and WHOOM!! there's this enormous noise sudden and violent as some high explosive symphony; instant thousand voice choirs, words in Latin, violins and tympani and trumpets to shatter glass. The ground shuddered, the Fleet rocked on her wheels and I came out from under the wing like a 400-volt cat, fur straight-out exclamation points.

The sky was cold-fire sunrise, the clouds alive in wild paint, but all of it blurred in the dynamite crescendo.

"STOP IT! STOP IT! TURN OFF THE MUSIC, OFF IT!!"

Shimoda yelled so loud and so furious I could hear him over the din, and the sound stopped at once, echoes rolling off and away and away and away. Then it was a gentle holy song, quiet as the breeze, Beethoven in a dream.

He was unimpressed. "LOOK, I SAID OFF IT!!"

The music stopped.

"Whuf!" he said.

I just looked at him.

"There is a time and a place for everything, right?" he said.

"Well, time and place, well…"

"A little celestial music is fine, in the privacy of your own mind, and maybe on special occasions, but the first thing in the morning, and turned up that loud? What are you doing?"

"What am I doing ? Don, I was sound asleep…what do you mean, what am I doing?"

He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders helplessly, snorted and went back to his sleeping bag under the wing.

The handbook was upside down in the grass where it had fallen. I turned it over carefully, and read.

Argue
for your limitations,
and sure enough,
they're
yours.

There was a lot I didn't know about Messiahs.



Chapter 8

We Finished the day in Hammond, Wisconsin, flying a few Monday passengers, then we walked to town for dinner, and started back.

"Don, I will grant you that this life can be interesting or dull or whatever we choose to make it. But even in my brilliant times I have never been able to figure out why we're here in the first place. Tell me something about that."

We passed the hardware store (closed) and the movie theater (open: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and instead of answering he stopped and turned back on the sidewalk.

"You have money, don't you?"

"Lots. What's the matter?"

"Let's see the show," he said. "You buy?"

"I don't know, Don. You go ahead. I'll get back to the airplanes. Don't like to leave 'em alone too long." What was suddenly so important about a motion picture?

"The planes are OK. Let's go to the show."

"It's already started."

"So we come in late."

He was already buying his ticket. I followed him into the dark and we sat down near the back of the theater. There might have been fifty people around us in the gloom.

I forgot why we came, after a while, and got caught up in the story, which I've always thought is a classic movie, anyway; this would be my third time seeing Sundance. The time in the theater spiraled and stretched the way it does in a good film, and I watched awhile for technical reasons…how each scene was designed and fit to the next, why this scene now and not later on. I tried to look at it that way but got spun up in the story and forgot.

About the part where Butch and Sundance are surrounded by the entire Bolivian army, almost at the end, Shimoda touched my shoulder. I leaned toward him, watching the movie, wishing he could have kept whatever he was going to say till after it was over.

"Richard?"

"Yeah."

"Why are you here?"

"It's a good movie, Don. Shh." Butch and Sundance, blood all over them, were talking about why they ought to go to Australia. Why is it good?" he said.

"Why is it good?" he said.

"It's fun. Shh. I'll tell you later."

"Snap out of it. Wake up. It's all illusions"

I was irked. "Donald, there's just a few minutes more and then we can talk all you want. But let me watch the movie, OK?"

He whispered intensely, dramatically. "Richard why are you here?"

"Look, I'm here because you asked me to come in here!" I turned back and tried to watch the end.

"You didn't have to come, you could have said no thank you."

"I LIKE THE MOVIE…" A man in front turned to look at me for a second. "I like the movie, Don; is there anything wrong with that?"

"Nothing at all," he said, and he didn't say another word till it was over and we were walking again past the used-tractor lot and out into the dark toward the field and the airplanes. It would be raining, before long.

I thought about his odd behavior in the theater. "You do everything for a reason, Don?"

"Sometimes."

"Why the movie? Why did you all of a sudden want to see Sundance?"

"You asked a question."

"Yes. Do you have an answer?"

"That is my answer. We went to the movie because you asked a question. The movie was the answer to your question."

He was laughing at me, I knew it.

"What was my question?"

There was a long pained silence. "Your question, Richard, was that even in your brilliant times you have never been able to figure out why we are here."

I remembered. "And the movie was my answer."

"Yes."

"Oh."

"You don't understand," he said.

"No."

"That was a good movie," he said, "but the world's best movie is still an illusion, is it not? The pictures aren't even moving; they only appear to move. Changing light that seems to move across a flat screen set up in the dark?"

"Well, yes." I was beginning to understand.

"The other people, any people anywhere who go to any movie show, why are they there, when it is only illusions?"

"Well, it's entertainment," I said.

"Fun. That's right. One."

"Could be educational."

"Good. It is always that. Learning Two."

"Fantasy, escape."

"That's fun, too. One."

"Technical reasons. To see how a film is made."

"Learning. Two."

"Escape from boredom…"

"Escape. You said that."

"Social. To be with friends," I said.

"Reason for going, but not for seeing the film. That's fun, anyway. One."

Whatever I came up with fit his two fingers; people see films for fun or for learning or for both together.

"And a movie is like a lifetime, Don, is that right?"

"Yes."

Then why would anybody choose a bad lifetime, a horror movie?"

"They not only come to the horror movie for fun, they know it is going to be a horror movie when they walk in," he said.

"But why?…"

"Do you like horror films?"

"No."

"Do you ever see them?"

"No."

"But some people spend a lot of money and time to see horror or soap-opera problems that to other people are dull and boring?…" He left the question for me to answer.

"Yes."

"You don't have to see their films and they don't have to see yours. That is called 'freedom'."

"But why would anybody want to be horrified? Or bored?"

"Because they think they deserve it for horrifying somebody else, or they like the excitement of horrification or that boring is the way they think films have to be. Can you believe that lots of people for reasons that are very sound to them enjoy believing that they are helpless in their own films? No you can't."

"No, I can't," I said.

"Until you understand that, you will wonder why some people are unhappy. They are unhappy because they have chosen to be unhappy, and, Richard, that is all right!"

"Hm."

"We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we're hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we're victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad luck."

"Many lifetimes?" I asked.

"How many movies have you seen?"

"Oh."

"Films about living on this planet, about living on other planets; anything that's got space and time is all movie and all illusion," he said. "But for a while we can learn a huge amount and have a lot of fun with our illusions, can we not?"

"How far do you take this movie thing, Don?"

"How far do you want? You saw the film tonight partly because I wanted to see it. Lots of people choose lifetimes because they enjoy doing things together. The actors in the film tonight have played together in other films before or after depends on which film you've seen first' or you can see them at the same time on different screens. We buy tickets to these films, paying admission by agreeing to believe in the reality of space and the reality of time…Neither one is true, but anyone who doesn't want to pay that price cannot appear on this planet, or in any space-time system at all."

"Are there some people who don't have any lifetimes at all in space-time?"

"Are there some people who never go movies?"

"I see. They get their learning in different ways?"

"Right you are," he said, pleased with me. "Space-time is a fairly primitive school. But a lot of people stay with the illusion even if it is boring, and they don't want the lights turned on early."

"Who writes these movies, Don?"

"Isn't it strange how much we know if only we ask ourselves instead of somebody else? Who writes these movies, Richard?"

"We do," I said.

"Who acts?"

"Us."

"Who's the cameraman, the projectionist, the theater manager, the ticket-taker, the distributor, and who watches them all happen? Who is free to walk out in the middle, any time, change the plot whenever, who is free to see the same film over and over again?"

"Let me guess," I said. "Anybody who wants to?"

"Is that enough freedom for you ?" he said.

"And is that why movies are so popular? That we instinctively know they are a parallel of our own lifetimes?"

"Maybe so…maybe not. Doesn't matter much, does it? What's the projector?"

"Mind," I said. "No. Imagination. It's our imagination, no matter what you say."

"What's the film?" he asked.

"Got me."

"Whatever we give our consent to put into our imagination?"

"Maybe so, Don."

"You can hold a reel of film in your hands," he said, "and it's all finished and complete - beginning, middle, end are all there that same second, the same millionths of a second. The film exists beyond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, you know generally what's going to happen before you walk into the theater: there's going to be battles and excitement, winners and losers, romance, disaster; you know that's all going to be there. But in order to get caught up and swept away in it, in order to enjoy it to its most, you have to put it in a projector and let it go through the lens minute by minute…any illusion requires space and time to be experienced. So you pay your nickel and you get your ticket and you settle down an forget what's going on outside the theater an the movie begins for you."

"And nobody's really hurt? That's just tomato-sauce blood?"

"No, it's blood all right," he said. "But it might as well be tomato sauce for the effect it has on our real life…"

"And reality?"

"Reality is divinely indifferent, Richard. A mother doesn't care what part her child plays in his games; one day bad-guy, next day good-guy. The Is doesn't even know about our illusions and games. It only knows Itself, and us in its likeness, perfect and finished."

"I'm not sure I want to be perfect and finished. Talk about boredom."

"Look at the sky," he said, and it was such a quick subject-change that I looked at the sky. There was some broken cirrus, way up high, the first bit of moonlight silvering the edges.

"Pretty sky," I said.

"It is a perfect sky?"

"Well, it's always a perfect sky, Don."

"Are you telling me that even though it's changing every second, the sky is always a perfect sky?"

"Gee, I'm smart. Yes?"

"And the sea is always a perfect sea, and it's always changing, too," he said "If perfection is stagnation, then heaven is a swamp! And the Is ain't hardly no swamp-cookie."

"Isn't hardly no swamp-cookie," I corrected, absently. "Perfect, and all the time changing. Yeah. I'll buy that."

"You bought it a long time ago, if you insist on time."

I turned to him as we walked. "Doesn't it get boring for you, Don, staying on just this one dimension?"

"Oh. Am I staying on just this one dimension?" he said. "Are you?"

"Why is it that everything I say is wrong?"

"Is everything you say wrong?" he said.

"I think I'm in the wrong business."

"You think maybe real estate?" he said.

"Real estate or insurance."

"There's a future in real estate, if you want one."

"OK, I'm sorry," I said "I don't want a future. Or a past. I'd just as soon become a nice old Master of the World of Illusion. Looks like maybe in another week?"

"Well, Richard, I hope not that long!" I looked at him carefully, but he wasn't smiling.



Chapter 9

The Days blurred one into another. We flew as always, but I had stopped counting summer by the names of towns or the money we earned from passengers. I began counting the summer by the things I learned, the talks we had when flying was done, and by the miracles that happened now and then along the way to the time I knew at last that they aren't miracles at all.

Imagine
the universe beautiful
and just and
perfect,

the handbook said to me once.

Then be sure of one thing:
the Is has imagined it
quite a bit better
than you
have.

Chapter 10

The Afternoon was quiet…an occasional passenger now and then. Time between I practiced vaporizing clouds.

I have been a flight instructor, and I know that students always make easy things hard; I do know better, yet there was I a student again, frowning fiercely at my cumulus targets. I needed more teaching, for once, than practice. Shimoda was stretched out under the Fleet's wing, pretending to be asleep. I kicked him softly on the arm, and he opened his eyes.

"I can't do it," I said.

"Yes you can," he said, and closed his eyes again.

"Don, I've tried! Just when I think something's happening, the cloud strikes back and goes poufing up bigger than ever."

He sighed and sat up. "Pick me a cloud. An easy one, please."

I chose the biggest meanest cloud in the sky, three thousand feet tall, bursting up white smoke from hell. "The one over the silo, yonder," I said. "The one that's going black now."

He looked at me in silence. "Why is it you hate me?"

"It's because I like you, Don, that I ask these things." I smiled. "You need challenge. If you'd rather, I could pick something smaller…"

He sighed again and turned back to the sky." I'll try. Now, which one?"

I looked, and the cloud, the monster with its million tons of rain, was gone; just an ungainly blue-sky hole where it had been.

"Yike," I said quietly.

"A job worth doing…" he quoted. "No, much as I would like to accept the praise which you heap upon me, I must in all honesty tell you this: it's easy."

He pointed to a little puff of a cloud overhead. "There. Your turn. Ready? Go."

I looked at the wisp of a thing, and it looked back at me. I thought it gone, thought an empty place where it was, poured visions of heat-rays up at it, asked it to reappear somewhere else, and slowly, slowly, in one minute, in five, in seven, the cloud at last was gone. Other clouds got bigger, mine went away.

"You're not very fast, are you?" he said.

"That was my first time! I'm just beginning! Up against the impossible…well, the improbable, and all you can think to say is I'm not very fast. That was brilliant and you know it!"

"Amazing. You were so attached to it, and still it disappeared for you."

"Attached! I was whocking that cloud with everything I had! Fireballs, laser beams, vacuum cleaner a block high…"

"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there it to it. "

A cloud does not know
why it moves in just such a
direction and at such
a speed,

was what the handbook had to say.

It feels an impulsion…this is
the place to go now. But the sky knows
the reasons and the patterns
behind all clouds,
and you will know, too, when
you lift yourself high enough
to see beyond
horizons.

Chapter 11

You are
never given a wish
without also being given the
power to make it true.

You may
have to work for it,
however.

We had landed in a huge grazing place next to a three acre horse-pond, away from towns, somewhere along the line between Illinois and Indiana. No passengers; it was our day off, I thought.

"Listen," he said. "Don't listen. Just stay there quiet and watch. What you are going to see is not a miracle. Read your atomic-physics book…a child can walk on water."

He told me this, and as though he didn't notice the water was even there, he turned and walked out some yards from shore, on the surface of the horse-pond. What it looked like, was that the pond was a hot-summer mirage over a lake of stone. He stood firm on the surface, not a wave or ripple splashed over his flying boots.

"Here," he said. "Come do it."

I saw it with my eyes. It was possible, obviously, because there he stood, so I walked out to join him. It felt like walking on clear blue linoleum, and I laughed.

"Donald, what are you doing to me?"

"I am merely showing you what everybody learns, sooner or later," he said, "and you're handy now."

"But I'm…"

"Look. The water can be solid," he stamped his foot and the sound was leather on rock, "or not." He stamped again and water splashed over us both. "Got the feel of that? Try it."

How quickly we get used to miracles! In less than a minute I began to think that walking on water is possible, is natural, is…well, so what?

"But if the water is solid now, how can we drink it?"

"Same way we walk on it, Richard. It isn't solid, and it isn't liquid. You and I decide what it's going to be for us. If you want water to be liquid, think it liquid, act as if it's liquid, drink it. If you want it to be air, act as if it's air, breathe it. Try."

Maybe it's something about the presence of an advanced soul, I thought. Maybe these things are allowed to happen in a certain radius, fifty feet in a circle around them…

I knelt on the surface and dipped my hand into the pond. Liquid. Then I lay down and put my face into the blue of it and breathed, trusting. It breathed like warm liquid oxygen, no choking or gasping. I sat up and looked a question at him, expecting him to know what was in my mind.

"Speak," he said.

"Why do I have to speak?"

"For what you have to say, it's more precise to talk in words. Speak."

"If we can walk on water, and breathe it and drink it, why can't we do the same to land?"

"Yes. Good. You will notice…"

He walked to the shore easily as walking a painted lake. But when his feet touched the ground, the sand and grass at the edge, he began to sink, until with a few slow steps he was up to his shoulders in earth and grass. It was as though the pond had suddenly become an island, and the land about had turned to sea. He swam for a moment in the pasture, splashing it about him in dark loam drops, then floated on top of it, then rose and walked on it. It was suddenly miraculous to see a man walking on the ground!

I stood on the pond and applauded his performance. He bowed, and applauded mine.

I walked to the edge of the pond, thought the earth to liquid and touched it with my toe. Ripples spread into the grass in rings. How deep is the ground ? I nearly asked aloud. The ground will be as deep as I think it will be. Two feet deep, I thought, it will be two feet deep, and I'll wade.

I stepped confidently into the shore and sank over my head, an instant drop off. It was black underground, scary, and I fought to the surface, holding my breath, flailing out for some solid water, for the edge of the pond to hold on to.

He sat on the grass and laughed.

"You are a remarkable student, do you know that?"

"I ain't no student at all! Get me out of here!"

"Get yourself out."

I stopped struggling. I see it solid and I can climb right out. I see it solid...and I climbed out, caked and crusted in black dirt.

"Man you really get dirty doing this!"

His own blue shirt and jeans were without spot or mote of dust.

"Aaaa!" I shook the dirt out of my hair, flapped it out of my ears. Finally I put my wallet on the grass, walked into the liquid water and cleaned myself the traditional wet way.

"I know there's a better way to get clean than this. "

"There's a faster way, yes."

"Don't tell me, of course. Just sit there and laugh and let me figure it all out for myself."

"OK."

I finally had to walk squishing back to the Fleet and change clothes, hanging the wet stuff on the flying wires to dry.

"Richard, don't forget what you did today. It is easy to forget our times of knowing, to think they've been dreams or old miracles, one time. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream."

"The world is a dream, you say, and it's lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky."

"No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?"

I nodded, almost understanding. Later I sneaked a look in the handbook.

The world
is your exercise-book, the pages
on which you do your sums.

It is not reality,
although you can express reality
there if you wish.

You are also
free to write nonsense,
or lies, or to tear
the pages.

Chapter 12

The original sin is to
limit the Is.
Don't.

It was an easy warm afternoon between rain-showers, sidewalks wet on our way out of town.

"You can walk through walls, can't you, Don?"

"No."

"When you say no to something I know is yes, that means you don't like the way I said the question."

"We certainly are observant, aren't we?" he said.

"Is the problem with walk or with walls?"

"Yes, and worse. Your question presumes that I exist in one limited place-time and move to another place-time. Today I'm not in the mood to accept your presumptions about me."

I frowned. He knew what I was asking. Why didn't he just answer me straight and let me get on to finding out how he does these things ?

"That's my little way of helping you be precise in your thinking," he said mildly.

"OK. You can make it appear that you can walk through walls, if you want. Is that a better question?"

"Yes. Better. But if you want to be precise..."

"Don't tell me. I know how to say what I mean. Here is my question. How is it possible that you can move the illusion of a limited sense of identity, expressed in this belief of a space-time continuum as your 'body', through the illusion of material restriction that is called a 'wall'?"

"Well done!" he said. "When you ask the question properly it answers itself, doesn't it?"

"No, the question hasn't answered itself. How do you walk through walls?"

"RICHARD! You had it nearly right and then blew it all to pieces! I cannot walk through walls…when you say that, you're assuming things I don't assume at all, and if I do assume them, the answer is, 'l can't'."

"But it's so hard to put everything so precisely, Don. Don't you know what I mean?"

"So just because something is hard, you don't try to do it? Walking was hard at first, but you practiced at it and now you make it look easy."

I sighed. "Yeah. OK. Forget the question."

"I'll forget it. My question is, can you?" He looked at me as though he hadn't a care in the world.

"So you're saying that body is illusion and wall is illusion but identity is real and that can't be hemmed by illusions."

"I'm not saying that. You're saying that."

"But it's true."

"Naturally," he said.

"How do you do it?"

"Richard, you don't do anything. You see it done already, and it is."

"Gee, that sounds easy."

"It's like walking. You wonder how it ever came hard for you to learn."

"Don walking through walls, it isn't hard for me now; it is impossible."

"Do you think that maybe if you say impossible over and over again a thousand times that things will come easy for you?"

"I'm sorry. It is possible, and I'll do it when it is right for me to do it."

"He walks on water, folks, and he is discouraged because he doesn't walk through walls."

"But that was easy, and this…"

"Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them," he sang. "Did you not a week ago swim in the earth itself?"

"I did that. "

"And is not wall just vertical earth? Does it matter that much to you which direction the illusion runs? Horizontal illusions are conquerable, but vertical illusions aren't?"

"I think you're getting through to me, Don."

He looked at me and smiled. "The time I get through to you is the time to leave you alone for a while."

The last building in town was a feed and grain warehouse, a big place built of orange brick. It was almost as if he had decided to take a different way back to the airplanes, turning down some secret shortcut alley. The shortcut was through the brick wall. He turned abruptly to the right, into the wall, and he was gone. I think now that if I had turned at once with him, I could have gone through it, too. But I just stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the place where he had been. When I put out my hand and touched the brick, it was solid brick.

"Some day, Donald," I said. "Some day…" I walked alone the long way back to the airplanes.

"Donald," I said when I got to the field, "I have come to the conclusion that you just don't live in this world."

He looked at me startled from the top of his wing, where he was learning to pour gas into the tank. "Of course not. Can you tell me one person who does?"

"What do you mean, can I tell you one person who does. Me! I live in this world!"

"Excellent," he said, as though through independent study I had uncovered a hidden mystery. "Remind me to buy you lunch today…I marvel at the way you never stop learning."

I puzzled over that. He wasn't being sarcastic or ironic; he had meant just what he said. "What do you mean? Of course I live in this world. Me and about four billion other people. It's you who..."

"Oh God, Richard! You're serious! Cancel the lunch. No hamburger, no malt, no nothing at all! Here I had thought you had reached this major knowing…" He broke off and looked down on me in angry pity. "You're sure of that. You live in the same world, do you, as…a stockbroker, shall we say? Your life has just been all tumbled and changed, I presume, by the new SEC policy-mandatory review of portfolios with shareholder investment loss more than fifty percent? You live in the same world as a tournament chess player, do you? With the New York Open going on this week, Petrosian and Fischer and Browne in Manhattan for a half-million-dollar purse, what are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You with your 1929 Fleet biplane landed on a farm field, with your major life priorities farmers' permission, people who want ten-minute airplane rides, Kinner aircraft engine maintenance and mortal fear of hailstorms…how many people do you think live in your world? You say four billion people live in your world? Are you standing way down there on the ground and telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds, are you going to put that across on me ?" He panted from his fast talking.

"I could almost taste that hamburger, with the cheese melting…" I said.

"I'm sorry. I would have been so happy to buy. But, ah, that's over and done now, best forgotten."

Though it was the last time I accused him of not living in this world, it took me a long time to understand the words where the handbook opened:

If
you will
practice being fictional
for a while, you will understand
that fictional characters are
sometimes more real than
people with bodies
and heartbeats.

Chapter 13

Your
conscience is
the measure of the
honesty of your selfishness.

Listen to it
carefully.

We are all free to do whatever we want to do," he said that night. "Isn't that simple and clean and clear? Isn't that a great way to run a universe?"

"Almost. You forgot a pretty important part," I said.

"Oh?"

"We are all free to do what we want to do as long as we don't hurt somebody else," I chided. "I know you meant that, but you ought to say what you mean."

There was a sudden shambling sound in the dark, and I looked at him quickly. "Did you hear that?"

"Yeah. Sounds like there's somebody…" He got up, walked into the dark. He laughed suddenly, said a name I couldn't catch. "It's OK," I heard him say. "No, we'd be glad to have you…no need you standing around…come on, you're welcome, really…"

The voice was heavily accented, not quite Russian, nor Czech, more Transylvanian. "Thank you. I do not wish to impose myself upon your evening…"

The man he brought with him to the firelight was, well, he was unusual to find in a midwest night. A small lean wolf like fellow, frightening to the eye, dressed in evening clothes, a black cape lined in red satin, he was uncomfortable in the light.

"I was passing by," he said. "The field is a shortcut to my house..."

"It is?" Shimoda did not believe the man, knew he was lying, and at the same time did all he could to keep from laughing out loud. I hoped to understand before long.

"Make yourself comfortable," I said. "Can we help you at all?" I really didn't feel that helpful, but he was so shrinking, I did want him to be at ease, if he could.

He looked on me with a desperate smile that turned me to ice. "Yes, you can help me. I need this very much or I would not ask. May I drink your blood? Just some? It is my food, I need human blood…"

Maybe it was the accent, he didn't know English that well or I didn't understand his words, but I was on my feet quicker than I had been in many a month, hay flying into the fire from my quickness.

The man stepped back. I am generally harmless, but I am not a small person and I could have looked threatening. He turned his head away. "Sir, I am sorry! I am sorry! Please forget that I said anything about blood? But you see…"

"What are you saying?" I was the more fierce because I was scared. "What in the hell are you saying, mister? I don't know what you are, are you some kind of VAM--?"

Shimoda cut me off before I could say the word. "Richard, our guest was talking, and you interrupted. Please go ahead sir; my friend is a little hasty."

"Donald," I said, "this guy…"

"Be quiet!"

That surprised me so much that I was quiet, and looked a sort of terrified question at the man, caught from his native darkness into our firelight.

"Please to understand. I did not choose to be born vampire. Is unfortunate. I do not have many friends. But I must have a certain small amount of fresh blood every night or I writhe in terrible pain, longer than that without it and I cannot live! Please, I will be deeply hurt–l will die–if you do not allow me to suck your blood…just a small amount, more than a pint I do not need." He advanced a step toward me, licking his lips, thinking that Shimoda somehow controlled me and would make me submit.

"One more step and there will be blood, all right. Mister, you touch me and you die…" I wouldn't have killed him, but I did want to tie him up, at least, before we talked much more.

He must have believed me, for he stopped and sighed. He turned to Shimoda. "You have made your point?"

"I think so. Thank you."

The vampire looked up at me and smiled, completely at ease, enjoying himself hugely, an actor on stage when the show is over. "I won't drink your blood, Richard," he said in perfect friendly English, no accent at all. As I watched he faded as though he was turning out his own light…in five seconds he had disappeared.

"Shimoda sat down again by the fire. "Am I ever glad you don't mean what you say!"

I was still trembling with adrenaline, ready for my fight with a monster. "Don, I'm not sure I'm built for this. Maybe you'd better tell me what's going on. Like, for instance, what…was that?"

"Dot was a wompire from Tronsylwania," he said in words thicker than the creature's own. "Or to be more precise, dot was a thought-form of a wompire from Tronsylwania. If you ever want to make a point, you think somebody isn't listening, whip 'em up a little thought-form to demonstrate what you mean. Do you think I overdid him, with the cape and the fangs and the accent like that? Was he too scary for you?"

"The cape was first class, Don. But that was the most stereotyped, outlandish…I wasn't scared at all."

He sighed. "Oh well. But you got the point, at least, and that's what matters."

"What point?"

"Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if…"

"He was going to suck my blood!"

"Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way."

I was quiet for a long time, thinking about that. I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don't hurt another, and this didn't fit. There was something missing.

"The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him? That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices."

"When you look at it that way…"

"Listen," he said, "it's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do."



Chapter 14

Every person,
all the events of your life
are there because you have
drawn them there.
What you choose
to do with them is
up to you.

"Don't you get lonely, Don?" It was at the cafe in Ryerson, Ohio, that it occurred to me to ask him.

"I'm surprised you'd…"

"Sh," I said. "I haven't finished my question. Don't you ever get just a little lonely?"

"What you think as..."

"Wait. All these people, we see them just a few minutes. Once in a while there's a face in the crowd, some lovely star bright woman who makes me want to stay and say hello, just be still and not moving and talk for a while. But she flies with me ten minutes or she doesn't and she's gone and next day I'm off to Shelbyville and I never see her again. That's lonely. But I guess I can't find lasting friends when I'm an unlasting one myself."

He was quiet.

"Or can I?"

"May I talk now?"

"I think so, yes." The hamburgers in this place were wrapped half-over in thin oiled paper, and when you unwrapped them you got sesame seeds everywhere useless little things, but the hamburgers were good. He ate in silence for a time and so did I, wondering what he would say.

"Well, Richard, we're magnets, aren't we? Not magnets. We're iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to magnetize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some things and leaves others untouched."

I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. "You left out one thing. How do I do it?"

"You don't do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well."

"But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty lonely."

He looked at me strangely over his hamburger. "Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith What it takes is imagination.'' He swept the table between us clean, pushing salt and french fries out of the way, ketchup, forks and knives, so that I wondered what was going to happen, what would be materialized before my very eyes.

"If you have imagination as a grain of sesame seed," he said, herding an example seed to the middle of the clearing, "all things are possible to you.''

I looked at the sesame seed, and then at him. "Wish you Messiahs would get together and agree. I thought the thing was faith, when the world goes against me."

"No. I wanted to correct that, when I was working, but it was long uphill fight. Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers. Also, they didn't have sesame seeds."

I knew for a fact that they had sesame seeds, but I let this lie go past. "I'm supposed to imagine this magnetizing? I imagine some lovely wise mystical lady appearing in a hayfield crowd in Tarragon, Illinois? I can do that, but that's all that is, that's just my imagination."

He looked despairingly to heaven, represented for the moment by the tin-plate ceiling and cold lights of Em and Edna's Cafe. "Just your imagination? Of course it's your imagination! This world is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn't change the Is one whit, doesn't affect reality at all. But we are talking about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every second of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves."

He lined his fork and knife as though he was building a bridge from his place to mine. "You wonder what your dreams say: Just as well you look at the things of your waking life and ask what they stand for. You with airplanes in your life, every time you turn around.''

"Well, Don, yes." I wished he would slow down, not pile this on me all at once; mile a minute is too fast for new ideas.

"If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to you?"

"Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and setting myself free."

"How clear do you want it: The dream awake is the same: your will to be free of all things that tie you back–routine, authority, boredom, gravity. What you haven't realized is that you're already free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame seeds of this…you're already supreme lord of your magician's life. Only imagination! What are you saying?"

The waitress looked at him strangely from time to time, drying dishes, listening, puzzling over who this was.

"So you never get lonely, Don?" I said.

"Unless I feel like it. I have friends on other dimensions that are around me from time to time. So do you."

"No. I mean on this dimension, this imaginary world. Show me what you mean give me a little miracle of the magnet…I do want to learn this."

"You show me," he said. 'To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there."

"Like what? Like my lovely lady?"

"Anything. Not your lady. Something small, at first."

"I'm supposed to practice now?"

"Yes."

"OK…A blue feather."

He looked at me blankly. "Richard? A blue feather?"

"You said anything not a lady something little."

He shrugged. "Fine. A blue feather. Imagine the feather. Visualize it, every line and edge of it, the tip, V-splits where it's torn, fluff around the quill. Just for a minute. Then let it go."

I closed my eyes for a minute and saw an image in my mind, five inches long, iridescent blue to silver at the edges. A bright clear feather floating there in the dark.

"Surround it in golden light, if you want. That's a healing thing, to help make it real but it works in magnetizing, too."

I surrounded my feather in gold glow. "OK."

"That's it. You can open your eyes now."

I opened my eyes. "Where's my feather?"

"If you had it clear in your thought, it is even this moment barreling down on you like a Mack truck."

"My feather? Like a Mack truck?"

"Figuratively, Richard."

All that afternoon I looked for the feather to appear, and it didn't. It was evening, dinnertime over a hot turkey sandwich, that I saw it. A picture and small print on the carton of milk. Packaged for Scott Dairies by Blue Feather Farms, Bryan, Ohio. "Don! My feather!"

He looked, and shrugged his shoulders. "I thought you wanted the actual feather."

"Well, any feather for openers, don't you think?"

"Did you see just the feather all alone, or were you holding the feather in your hand?"

"All alone."

"That explains it. If you want to be with what you're magnetizing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too. Sorry I didn't say that."

A spooky strange feeling. It worked! I had consciously magnetized my first thing! "Today a feather," I said, "tomorrow the world!"

"Be careful, Richard," he said hauntingly, "or you'll be sorry…"



Chapter 15

The
truth you
speak has no past
and no future.

It is,
and that's all it
needs to be.

I lay on my back under the Fleet, wiping oil from the lower fuselage.

Somehow the engine was throwing less oil now than it had thrown before. Shimoda flew one passenger, then came over and sat on the grass as I worked.

"Richard, how can you hope to impress the world when everybody else works for their living and you run around all irresponsible from day to day in your crazy biplane, selling passenger rides?" He was testing me again. "There's a question you are gonna get more than once."

"Well, Donald, Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in a way that will make me happy."

"OK. Part Two?"

"Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel like doing, for a living.

Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one person we have to answer to, of course, and that is…?"

"…ourselves," Don said, replying for the imaginary crowd of seekers sitting around.

"We don't even have to answer to ourselves, if we don't feel like it…there's nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most of us find it more interesting to know why we act as we do, why we make our choices just so–whether we choose to watch a bird or step on an ant or work for money at something we'd rather not be doing." I winced a little. "Is that too long an answer?"

He nodded. "Way too long."

"OK…How do you hope to impress the world…" I rolled out from under the plane and rested for a while in the shade of the wings. "How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow me to live as I choose."

He threw a happy proud smile at me. "Spoken like a true Messiah! Simple, direct, quotable, and it doesn't answer the question unless somebody takes the time to think carefully about it."

"Try me some more." It was delicious, to watch my own mind work, when we did this.

"'Master'," he said, "'I want to be loved, I'm kind, I do unto others as I would have them do unto me, but still I don't have any friends and I'm all alone.' How are you going to answer that one?"

"Beats me," I said. "I don't have the foggiest idea what to tell you."

"WHAT?"

"Just a little humor, Don, liven up the evening. A little harmless change-of-pacer, there."

"You'd best be plenty careful how you liven up the evenings. Problems are not jokes and games to the people who come to you, unless they are highly advanced themselves, and that sort know they're their own Messiah. You are being given the answers, so speak them out. Try that 'Beats me' stuff and you'll see how fast a mob can burn a man at the stake."

I drew myself up proudly. "Seeker, thou comest to me for an answer, and unto thee I do answer: The Golden Rule doesn't work. How would you like to meet a masochist who did unto others as he would have them do unto him? Or a worshiper of the Crocodile God, who craves the honor of being thrown alive into the pit: Even the Samaritan, who started the whole thing…what made him think that the man he found lying at the roadside wanted to have oil poured in his wounds? What if the man was using those quiet moments to heal himself spiritually, enjoying the challenge of it?" I sounded convincing, to me.

"Even if the Rule was changed to Do unto others as they want to be done to, we can't know how anybody but ourselves wants to be done to. What the Rule means, and how we apply it honestly, is this: Do unto others as you truly feel like doing unto others. Meet a masochist with this rule and you do not have to flog him with his whip, simply because that is what he would want you to do unto him. Nor are you required to throw the worshiper to the crocodiles.'' l looked at him. "Too wordy?"

"As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of your audience unless you learn to keep it short!"

"Well, what's wrong with losing ninety percent of my audience?" I shot back at him. "What's wrong with losing ALL my audience? I know what I know and I talk what I talk! And if that's wrong then that's just too bad. The airplane rides are three dollars, cash!"

"You know what?" Shimoda stood up, brushing the hay off his blue jeans.

"What?" I said petulantly.

"You just graduated. How does it feel to be a Master?"

"Frustrating as hell."

He looked at me with an infinitesimal smile. "You get used to it," he said.

Here is
a test to find
whether your mission on earth
is finished:

If you're alive,
it isn't.

Chapter 16

Hardware stores are always long places, shelves going back into forever.

In Hayward Hardware I had gone hunting back in the dim, needing three eighths-inch nuts and bolts and lock washers for the tail skid of the Fleet. Shimoda browsed patiently as I looked, since of course he didn't need anything from a hardware store. The whole economy would collapse, I thought, if everybody was like him, making whatever they wanted out of thought-forms and thin air, repairing things without parts or labor.

At last I found the half-dozen bolts I needed and journeyed with them back toward the counter, where the owner had some soft music playing. Greensleeves; it was a melody that has haunted me happily since I was a boy, played now on a lute over some hidden sound system…strange to find in a town of four hundred souls.

Turned out it was strange for Hayward, too, for it wasn't a sound system at all. The owner sat tilted back on his wooden stool at the counter, and listened to the Messiah play the notes on a cheap six string guitar from the sale shelf. It was a lovely sound, and I stood quiet there paying my seventy-three cents and being haunted again by the tune. Perhaps it was the tinny quality of the cheap instrument, but it still sounded far misty other-century England.

"Donald, that's beautiful! I didn't know you could play the guitar!"

"You didn't? Then you think someone could have walked up to Jesus the Christ and handed him a guitar and he would have said, 'I can't play that thing'? Would he have said that?"

Shimoda put the guitar back in its place and walked out into the sunlight with me. "Or if somebody came by who spoke Russian or Persian, do you think any master worth his aura would not know what he was saying? Or if he wanted to skin a D-10 Cat or fly an airplane, that he couldn't do it?"

"So you really know all things, don't you?"

"You do too, of course. I just know that I know all things."

"I could play the guitar like that?"

"No, you'd have your own style, different from mine."

"How do I do that?" I wasn't going to run back and buy the guitar, I was just curious.

"Just give up all your inhibitions and all your beliefs that you can't play. Touch the thing as though it was a part of your life, which it is, in some alternate lifetime. Know that it's all right for you to play it well, and let your nonconscious self take over your fingers and play."

I had read something about that, hypnotic learning, where students were told they were masters of art, and so played and painted and wrote like master artists. "That's a hard thing, Don, to let go of my knowing that I can't play a guitar."

"Then it will be a hard thing for you to play the guitar. It will take years of practice before you give yourself permission to do it right, before your self-conscious mind tells you that you have suffered enough to have earned the right to play well."

"Why didn't it take me long to learn how to fly? That's supposed to be hard, but I picked it up pretty fast."

"Did you want to fly?"

"Nothing else mattered! More than anything! I was looking down on clouds, and the chimney-smoke in the mornings, going right straight up in the calm and I could see…Oh. I get your point. You're going to say, "You never felt that way about guitars, did you?"

"And this sinking feeling I have right now, Don, tells me that is how you learned to fly. You just got into the Travel Air one day and you flew it. Never been up in an airplane before."

"My, you are intuitive."

"You didn't take the flying test for your license? no, wait. You don't even have a license, do you? A regular flying license."

He looked at me strangely, the whisper of a smile as though I had dared him to come up with a license and he knew that he could do it.

"You mean the piece of paper, Richard? That kind of license?"

"Yes, the piece of paper."

He didn't reach into his pocket or bring out his wallet. He just opened his right hand and there was a flying license, as though he had been carrying it around, waiting for me to ask. It wasn't faded or bent, and I thought that ten seconds ago it hadn't existed at all.

But I took it and looked. It was an official pilot's certificate, Department of Transportation seal on it, Donald William Shimoda, with an Indiana address, licensed commercial pilot with ratings for single- and multi-engine land airplanes, instruments, and gliders.

"You don't have your seaplane ratings, or helicopter?"

"I'll have those if I need to have them," he said so mysteriously that I burst out laughing before he did. The man sweeping the walk of the International Harvester place looked at us and smiled, too.

"What about me?" I said. "I want my airline transport rating:'

"You're gonna have to forge your own licenses," he said.



Chapter 17

On the Jeff Sykes radio talk show, I saw a Donald Shimoda I had never seen before. The show began at 9:00 p.m. and went till midnight, from a room no bigger than a watchmaker's, lined about with dials and knobs and racks of tape-cartridge commercial spots.

Sykes opened by asking if there wasn't something illegal about flying around the country in an ancient airplane, taking people for rides.

The answer is no, there is nothing illegal about it, the planes are inspected as carefully as any jet transport. They are safer and stronger than most sheet-metal modern airplanes, and all that's needed is a license and a farmer's permission. But Shimoda didn't say that. "No one can stop us from doing what we want to do, Jeff," he said.

Now that is quite true, but it had none of the tact that is called for when you are talking with a radio audience that is wondering what is going on, these airplanes flying around. A minute after he said that, the call-director telephone began lighting up on Sykes' desk.

"We have a caller on line one," Sykes said. "Go ahead, ma'am."

"Am I on the air?"

"Yes, ma'am, you are on the air and our guest is Mr. Donald Shimoda, the airplane flier. Go ahead, you are on the air."

"Well, I'd like to tell that fellow that not everybody gets to do what they want to do and that some people have to work for their living and hold down a little more responsibility than flying around with some carnival!"

"The people who work for a living are doing what they most want to do," Shimoda said. "Just as much as the people who play for a living…"

"Scripture says by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread, and in sorrow shalt thou eat of it."

"We're free to do that, too, if we want."

"'Do your thing!' I get so tired of people like you saying do your thing, do your thing! You let everybody run wild, and they'll destroy the world. They are destroying the world right now. Look at what is happening to the green living things and the rivers and the oceans!"

She gave him fifty different openings to reply, and he ignored them all. "It's OK if the world is destroyed," he said. "There are a thousand million other worlds for us to create and choose from. As long as people want planets, there will be planets to live on."

That was hardly calculated to soothe the caller, and I looked at Shimoda, astonished. He was speaking from his viewpoint of perspectives over lots of lifetimes, learnings only a Master can expect to recall. The caller was naturally assuming that the discussion had to do with the reality of this one world, birth is the beginning and death is the end. He knew that…why did he ignore it?

"Everything's OK, is it?" the caller said into her telephone." There's no evil in this world, no sin going on all around us ? That doesn't bother you, does it?

"Nothing there to be bothered about, ma'am. We see just one little fleck of the whole that is life, and that one fleck is fake. Everything balances, and nobody suffers and nobody dies without their consent. Nobody does what they don't want to do. There is no good and there is no evil, outside of what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy."

None of it was making the lady on the phone any calmer. But she broke suddenly and said simply, "How do you know all these things that you say? How do you know what you say is true?"

"I don't know they're true," he said. "I believe them because it's fun to believe them."

I narrowed my eyes. He could have said that he had tried it and it works…the healing, the miracles, the practical living that made his thinking true and workable. But he didn't say that. Why?

There was a reason. I held my eyes barely open, most of the room gray, just a blurred fuzzy image of Shimoda leaning to talk into the microphone. He was saying all these things straight out, offering no choices, making no effort to help the poor listeners understand.

"Anybody who's ever mattered, anybody who's ever been happy, anybody who's ever given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest. No exceptions."

It was a male caller next, while the evening fled by. "Selfish! Mister, do you know what the antichrist is?"

For a second Shimoda smiled and relaxed in his chair. It was as if he knew the caller personally.

"Perhaps you could tell me," he said.

"Christ said that we have to live for our fellow man. Antichrist say be selfish, live for yourself and let other people go to hell."

"Or heaven, or wherever else they feel like going."

"You are dangerous, do you know that, mister? What if everybody listened to you and did just whatever they felt like doing? What do you think would happen then?"

"I think that this would probably be the happiest planet in this part of the galaxy," he said.

"Mister, I am not sure that I want my children to hear what you are saying."

"What is it that your children want to hear?"

"If we are all free to do whatever we want to do then I'm free to come out in that field with my shotgun and blow your fool head off."

"Of course you're free to do that."

There was a heavy click on the line. Somewhere in town there was at least one angry man. The others, and the angry women too, were on the telephone; every button on the machine was lit and flashing.

It didn't have to go that way; he could have said the same things differently and ruffled no feathers at all.

Sifting, sifting back over me was the same feeling I had in Troy, when the crowd broke and surrounded him. It was time, it was clearly time for us to be moving along. The handbook was no help, there in the studio.

In order
to live free and happily,
you must sacrifice
boredom.

It is not always an easy
sacrifice.

Jeff Sykes had told everybody who we were, that our airplanes were parked on John Thomas' hayfield on State 41, and that we slept nights under the wing.

I felt these waves of anger, from people frightened for their children's morality, and for the future of the American way of life, and none of it made me too happy. There was a half hour left of the show, and it only got worse.

"You know, mister, I think you're a fake," said the next caller.

"Of course I'm a fake! We're all fakes on this whole world we're all pretending to be something that we're not. We are not bodies walking around, we are not atoms and molecules, we are unkillable undestroyable ideas of the Is, no matter how much we believe otherwise…"

He would have been the first to remind me that I was free to leave, if I didn't like what he was saying, and he would have laughed at my fears of lynch mobs waiting with torches at the airplanes.



Chapter 18

Don't be
dismayed at good-byes.
A farewell is necessary before
you can meet
again.

And meeting
again, after moments or
lifetimes, is certain for
those who are
friends.

Next noon, before the people came to fly, he stopped by my wing. "Remember what you said when you found my problem, that nobody would listen, no matter how many miracles I did?"

"No."

"Do you remember that time, Richard?"

"Yeah, I remember the time. You looked so lonely all of a sudden. I don't remember what I said."

"You said that depending on people to care about what I say is depending on somebody else for my happiness. That's what I came here to learn: it doesn't matter whether I communicate or not. I chose this whole lifetime to share with anybody the way the world is put together, and I might as well have chosen it to say nothing at all. The Is doesn't need me to tell anybody how it works."

"That's obvious, Don. I could have told you that."

"Thanks a lot. I find the one idea I lived this life to find, I finish a whole life's work, and he says, 'That's obvious, Don."'

He was laughing, but he was sad, too, and at the time I couldn't tell why.



Chapter 19

The mark
of your ignorance is the depth
of your belief in injustice
And tragedy.

What the caterpillar
calls the end of the world,
the Master calls a
butterfly.

The words in the Handbook the day before were the only warning I had. One second there was the normal little crowd waiting to fly, his airplane taxiing in, stopping by them in a whirl of propeller-wind, a casual good scene for me from the top wing of the Fleet as I poured gas into the tank. The next second there was a sound like a tire exploding and the crowd itself exploded and ran. The tire on the Travel Air was untouched, the engine ticked over at idle as it had a moment before, but there was a foot-wide hole in the fabric under the pilot's cockpit and Shimoda was pressed to the other side, head slammed down, his body still as sudden death.

It took a few thousandths of a second for me to realize that Donald Shimoda had been shot, another to drop the gas can and jump off the top wing, running. It was like some movie script, some amateur-acted play, a man with a shotgun running away with everybody else, close enough by me I could have cut him with a saber. I remember now that I didn't care about him. I was not enraged or shocked or horrified. The only thing that mattered was to get to the cockpit of the Travel Air as fast as I could and to talk with my friend.

It looked as if he had been hit by a bomb; the left half of his body was all torn leather and cloth and meat and blood, a soggy mass of scarlet.

His head was tilted down by the fuel primer knob, at the right lower corner of the instrument panel, and I thought that if he had been wearing his shoulder harness he wouldn't have been thrown forward like that.

"Don! Are you OK?" Fool's words.

He opened his eyes and smiled. His own blood was sprayed wet across his face "Richard, what does it look like?"

I was enormously relieved to hear him talk. If he could talk, if he could think, he would be all right.

"Well, if I didn't know better, buddy, I'd say you had a bit of a problem."

He didn't move, except just his head a little bit, and suddenly I was scared again, more by his stillness than by the mess and the blood. "I didn't think you had enemies."

"I don't. That was…a friend. Better not to have…some hater bring all sorts of trouble…into his life…murdering me."

The seat and side panels of the cockpit were running with blood–it would be a big job just to get the Travel Air clean again, although the airplane itself wasn't damaged badly. "Did this have to happen, Don?"

"No…" he said faintly, barely breathing. "But I think…I like the drama…"

"Well, let's get cracking! Heal yourself! With the crowd that's coming, we got lots of flying to do!"

But as I was joking at him, and in spite of all his knowing and all his understanding of reality, my friend Donald Shimoda fell the last inch to the primer knob, and died.

There was a roaring in my ears, the world tilted, and I slid down the side of the torn fuselage into the wet red grass. It felt as if the weight of the Handbook in my pocket toppled me to my side, and as I hit the ground it fell loose, wind slowly ruffling the pages.

I picked it up listlessly. Is this how it ends, I thought, is everything a Master says just pretty words that can't save him from the first attack of some mad dog in a farmer's field?

I had to read three times before I could believe these were the words on the page.

Everything
in this book
may be
wrong.

❧❧❧

Epilogue

By Autumn, I had flown south with the warm air. Good fields were few, but the crowds got bigger all the time. people had always liked to fly in the biplane, and these days more of them were staying to talk and to toast marshmallows over my campfire.

Once in a while somebody who hadn't really been much sick said they felt better for the talking, and the people next day

would look at me strangely, move closer, curious. More than once I flew away early.

No miracles happened, although the Fleet was running better than ever she had, and on less gas. She had stopped throwing oil, stopped killing bugs on her propeller and windscreen. The colder air, no doubt, or the little fellas getting smart enough to dodge.

Still, one river of time had stopped for me that summer noon when Shimoda had been shot. It was an ending I could neither believe nor understand; it was stalled there and I lived it a thousand times again, hoping it might somehow change. It never did. What was I supposed to learn that day?

One night late in October, after I got scared and left a crowd in Mississippi, I came down in a little empty place just big enough to land the Fleet.

Once again before I slept, I thought back to that last moment–why did he die? There was no reason for it. If what he said was true…

There was no one now to talk with as we had talked, no one to learn from, no one to stalk and attack with my words, to sharpen my new bright mind against. Myself? Yes, but I wasn't half the fun that Shimoda had been, who taught by keeping me always off-balance with his spiritual karate.

Thinking this I slept, and sleeping, dreamed.

❧❧❧

He was kneeling on the grass of a meadow his back to me, patching the hole in the side of the Travel Air where the shotgun blast had been. There was a roll of Grade-A aircraft fabric and a can of butyrate dope by his knee.

I knew that I was dreaming, and I knew also that this was real. "DON!"

He stood slowly and turned to face me, smiling at my sorrow and my joy.

"Hi, fella," he said.

I couldn't see for tears. There is no dying, there is no dying at all, and this man was my friend.

"Donald!…You're alive! What are you trying to do?" I ran and threw my arms around him and he was real. I could feel the leather of his flying jacket, crush his arms inside it.

"Hi," he said. "Do you mind? What I am trying to do is to patch this hole, here."

I was so glad to see him, nothing was impossible.

"With the dope and fabric ?" I said. "With dope and fabric you're trying to fix…? You don't do it that way, you see it perfect, already done…" and as I said the words I passed my hand like a screen in front of the ragged bloody hole and when my hand moved by, the hole was gone. There was just pure mirror-painted airplane left, seamless fabric from nose to tail.

"So that's how you do it!" he said, his dark eyes proud of the slow learner who made good at last as a mental mechanic.

I didn't find it strange; in the dream that was the way to do the job.

There was a morning fire by the wing, and a frying pan balanced over it. "You're cooking something, Don! You know, I've never seen you cook anything. What you got?"

"Pan-bread," he said matter-of-factly. "The one last thing I want to do in your life is show you how this is done."

He cut two pieces with his pocket knife and handed me one. The flavor is still with me as I write…the flavor of sawdust and old library paste, warmed in lard.

"What do you think ?" he said.

"Don..."

"The Phantom's Revenge," he grinned at me. "I made it with plaster." He put his part back in the pan. "To remind you, if ever you want to move somebody to learn, do it with your knowing and not with your pan-bread, OK?"

"NO! Love me, love my pan-bread! It's the staff of life, Don!"

"Very well. But I guarantee–your first supper with anybody is going to be your last if you feed them that stuff."

We laughed and were quiet, and I looked at him in the silence.

"Don, you're all right, aren't you?"

"You expect me to be dead? Come now, Richard."

"And this is not a dream? I won't forget seeing you now?"

"No. This is a dream. It's a different space-time and any different space-time is a dream for a good sane earthling, which you are going to be for a while yet. But you will remember, and that will change your thinking and your life."

"Will I see you again ? Are you coming back?"

"I don't think so. I want to get beyond times and spaces… I already am, as a matter of fact. But there is this link between us, between you and me and the others of our family. You get stopped by some problem, hold it in your head and go to sleep and we'll meet here by the airplane and talk about it, if you want."

"Don…”

"What ?"

"Why the shotgun? Why did that happen? I don't see any power and glory in getting your heart blown out by a shotgun."

He sat down in the grass by the wing. "Since I was not a front-page Messiah, Richard, I didn't have to prove anything to anybody. And since you need the practice in being unflustered by appearances, and unsaddened by them," he added heavily, "you could use some gory appearances for your training. And fun for me too. Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There's the shock of that sharp cold change, the pain of it for a second, and then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even the shock wears off."

After a long moment he stood. "Only a few people are interested in what you have to say, but that's all right. You don't tell the quality of a Master by the size of his crowds, remember."

"Don, I'll try it, I promise. But I'll run away forever as soon as I stop having fun with the job. "

Nobody touched the Travel Air, but its propeller turned, its engine pouted cold blue smoke, and the rich sound of it filled the meadow. "Promise accepted, but…" and he looked at me and smiled as if he didn't understand me.

"Accepted but what? Speak. Words. Tell me. What's wrong ?"

"You don't like crowds," he said.

"Not pulling at me, no. I like talk and ideas back and forth, but the worship thing you went through, and the dependence…I trust you're not asking me…I've already run away…"

"Maybe I'm just dumb, Richard, and maybe I don't see something obvious that you see very well, and if I don't see it will you please tell me, but what is wrong with writing it down on paper? Is there a rule that a Messiah can't write what he thinks is true, the things that have been fun for him, that work for him? And then maybe if people don't like what he says, instead of shooting him they can burn his words, hit the ashes with a stick? And if they do like it, they can read the words another time, or write them on a refrigerator door, or play with whatever ideas make sense to them? Is there something wrong with writing? But maybe I'm just dumb."

"In a book?"

"Why not?"

"Do you know how much work…? I promised never to write another word again in my life!"

"Oh. Sorry," he said "There you have it. I didn't know that." He stepped on the lower wing of the airplane, and then into the cockpit "Well. See you around. Hang in there, and all that. Don't let the crowds get to you. You don't want to write it, you're sure?"

"Never," I said. "Never another word."

He shrugged and pulled on his flying gloves, pressed the throttle forward, and the sound of the engine burst and swirled around me until I woke under the wing of the Fleet with the echoes of the dream still in my ears.

I was alone, the field was as silent as green-autumn snow soft over the dawn and the world.

And then for the fun of it, before I was fully awake, I reached for my journal and began to write, one messiah in a world of others, about my friend:


1. There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana,

❧❧❧