Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) (3 page)

     “Others inspire us with their own adventures, we inspire them.

    “We are never separated, never left by Love.

   “One I got from you, Don: No mortal life is true. They’re imaginations, seems-to-be, Illusions. We write and direct and star in the life in our own stories. Fiction.” 

   The last drew me once again — I saw a misty picture, my body unconscious on its hospital bed on Earth, the world of dear mortals there on my right, the world of after-living and its hayfield on my left. The only reality was Love, no images, no dream, just Itself.

   I didn’t think it was a dream when it happened. I had been flying. Something happened, before the blackness and the room in the air, and now, the meeting with Shimoda. How could it happen, how could I be in a hospital when Puff had been safe, an inch from the land?

   I had a bright clear memory of what happened. Memories, my whole life, weren’t they true? My airplane was already on the ground. There were no wires on the ground. Nothing could happen. Yet how could I wake in this place, or in a hospital, if nothing happened? It couldn’t happen, I had such a clear image. Floating just above the grass.

   “Remember what you told me?” Shimoda said. “Illusions are seems-to-be. They aren’t real. You think your memories are real, but
nothing in this world is real!
”

   “How can I tell if it’s real?” I remembered when we flew. It wasn’t forty years ago, it was now. Sunlight warming us, the airplanes, the mowed hayfield. “Are you saying this world, us planning to fly some passengers here, wherever we land, isn’t real?”

   “Not a bit.”

   The hospital was my last dream. Now I had no tubes in me, I was well and happy to be with my friend, his Travel Air, my Fleet. The hospital, was it real?

   “The hospital…” he said. “It’s a dream, too. Us planning to fly passengers, that’s a dream. If it grows, shifts, if it’s subject to time and space, even here, it’s a dream. You disagree, don’t you? You think that’s true, the truth of airplanes, do you?”

   “Don, a minute ago I thought I was in a hospital. Then I blinked and here I am awake again with you and the airplanes!”

   He smiled. “So many dreams.”

   The smile changed me. Something was wrong.

   “My airplane. It’s here. But I don’t own the Fleet, any more. I sold it. Years ago.”

   He looked a question at me. “Ready to fly?”

   “No.”

   He nodded. “Good. Why not?”

   “This is a dream, too.”

   “Of course it is. None of it’s true, just dreams of lessons, till you let go of the school.”

   “The Dream School?”

   The quick smile, he nodded.

   The airplanes wavered, some sudden wind blurring their outline. Soon as we see something as an image, it begins to change, I thought. When I was with him before, the image of ground and water, of wrenches and vampires, all changed. Beliefs? Beliefs.

   “Your memory,” he said. “You had a clear image, landing?”

   “Clear as anything! The sound! I heard the grass whisking on the wheels…”

   “Is there any chance you thought the crash was too violent for you to see? Do you think that you might have created an image that never happened, for you to remember?”

   Maybe. It’s never happened before, I thought.

   He took a little book from his shirt pocket, opened it. He looked at me, not at the page, and told me what the words said
: “Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take ‘em on.”

   I hope not me, I thought. I’ll dodge this problem, please. “I have to take my memories for true.  Not an image, this is my memory! I was one inch from…” l blinked. “Your
Messiah’s Handbook!
It’s still with you?
”

   “You’ve promised to believe what you remember, even when it isn’t true? This is not the Handbook. It’s…” he closed the book, read the title: “…
Lesser Maxims and Short Silences.”

   “Lesser Maxims? Not as powerful as the
Handbook
?”

   He handed the little book to me,

Why you and why now? Because you asked it to be this way.

This disaster is the chance you prayed for, your wish come true.

   I prayed for this?  Nearly dying? I don’t remember praying for an airplane crash. Why was this event the one I prayed for? 
Why me?

   Because it was right on the edge of impossible, that’s why. Because it would require absolute determination, day after week, month after month, and then it could have a host of difficulties. I needed to know whether my beliefs would overcome every one of the problems.

   The doctors were required to talk about what could happen, how my life would never be the same again. I’d be required to smother every one of their beliefs with my own, beliefs I called true.

   They could call on all of the knowledge of material Western medicine, I could call on what I thought was spirit, hold to it even though it didn’t appear to my senses.

   I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.

   That mattered to me more than living in this world, this body. I didn’t know that, before.

   I shook my head, turned the page.

   *** 

   Unsuccessful Animal Inventions: 

     Wolves on Stilts. 

   ***

     “
Wolves on Stilts?
How does that affect my life, Don?”

   “It’s a Lesser Maxim. It may not affect your life at all.”

     “Oh. Who wrote this odd book? You keep it in your pocket.”

   “You.”

   “M.”

   “You don’t believe me, do you?”

   “N.”

   “Turn to the last page.”

   I did. I had written an introduction, my caring for the sheep of ideas never printed, signed my name to it.

   “
Wolves on stilts?”

   “You’re kind,” he said. “How many sheep would love to see the wolves practicing?”

   I smiled. “Some. Never published? I forget.”

   “Maybe you’ll change about forgotten memories, maybe you won’t.”

   “I want to remember what happened to me and Puff, Don, not what my mind put in its place!”

   “Interesting,” he said. “Do you want to see it again, the landing as it happened in the belief you prayed for, not as you remember?”

   “Yes!”

   “Will you know that whatever appears to you, it isn’t real?”

   “
I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.”

   He smiled, nodded, one time.

   and all at once, morning gone, I was aloft in a clear bright afternoon. I didn’t dream it, I was flying again, Puff turning toward the farm field. I was thinking nothing but the landing. Wheels are down, flaps are down. I was a quarter-mile from the land, didn’t need to see the instrument panel.

   The canopy was open, I could hear the airspeed. It sounded a little fast, I moved the throttle down, a few engine revolutions.  A little high, want a nice smooth landing on the grass, what a beautiful day it is, we’re living a painting, aren’t we, Puff?

   She didn’t answer. She just listened, told me through the sound of the wind, the sound of the engine, the picture of the tree tops to the left and right, the cleared space ahead on the approach.

   At sixty feet above the ground, the tops of the treetops left and right were level with us, we sank softly toward the ground. The grass was mowed on the runway ahead, grown longer in the wild parts of the land around. Dry grass, the color of sunset.

   I heard a quiet little ping from the right wheel, and next instant, in slow motion, the flight controls failed. Puff was all of a sudden out of control. Never happened in my life. I was no longer a pilot, I was a passenger, and Puff went down. 

   Do I really want to live this? I think I might better well just forget…

   The electric wires scraped the steel of the right landing gear, sparks spraying a dense fireworks fountain, high voltage incandescent snow, spraying off the right side, pouring up for an instant, then turning the fountain slowly, white hot, the sound of a welder’s cutting torch, over the field.

   Puff tumbled, as though someone had tripped her, on her run to the land. I was tumbled, too, sudden negative high-G, a whiplash that blurred and blinded me — all I could see was the color of blood. She was nearly upside down. In a fiftieth of a second the weight of Puff broke free from wires. Two telephone poles were falling behind us, the wires and the sparks trailing to the ground.

   Next instant, Puff was free, and she rolled. If she had a few hundred feet, she would have dropped back to level flight. a little singed but flying.

   But she was free at thirty feet above the ground. She rolled to the right as hard as she could, hoping at least to keep me alive.

   Then her right wing hit the ground. As though the ground was a huge spinning grindstone, the outer part of her wing disappeared.

   My seat belt and the shoulder harness slammed across my chest, breaking ribs, kept my body from tumbling free from the cockpit.

   The grindstone came ten feet closer, upside down, now, throwing us sidewise at five feet above the ground, stopped the propeller at three feet, then smashed the engine behind my head while it crushed us inverted, the shoulder harness broke something in my back.

   Was gasoline pouring, with the gas tank over me now? The gas tank spraying over the hot engine, then exploding, would have been a flash of beautiful color.

   But there was no fire in the cockpit. All at once, everything stopped. It was dead still in that scene. Nobody moving, not Puff, not me, upside down in her cockpit.

   Thank you, dear Puf…

   Then came the black plastic visor in front of my eyes. That was what happened. Seemed to happen. Nothing in space-time is real.

   A while later, I was not with Shimoda again, but aloft in the dirigible over a different world. That wasn’t true, either.

Everything in space and time is a dream.

   “Let’s go,” Shimoda said, knowing one dream was over, time for another. No engine start, no takeoff, all at once we were flying, I was a wingman, on his right side.

   He looked across the chasm between our airplanes, not a word for the dream of the crash, watching me. “Close it up a bit,” he said.

   Flying for a lifetime I flew first, no memories of dreams, nothing else mattered. I flew. I thought I was close in formation, five feet between the airplanes. I tucked it up to two feet from my wing to his, I could do this, with air as smooth as honey. That’s about my limit. I’ve never touched another airplane in flight.

   “A bit more,” he said.

   Shocked me. Closer? “You want me to touch your wing?”

   “That’s affirmative. Touch it, please.”

   I thought, for a minute, that this is a different world than the space and time on Earth. Two places here, I’ll bet can occupy one space, I thought they could. He would never have asked me to touch his airplane if I was going to destroy it.

   I nodded to him. Here goes. If I’m wrong I’ll be leaving pieces falling back through the air behind us.

   My wings slowly moved ahead, the leading edge inches from his aileron.

   The flying surfaces, the rush of air over them when I nearly touched his wings, became a suction, dragged my set of wings suddenly into the Travel Air’s.  They flew together all at once melted there, a foot of the wings, colors pulsing.

   “Nice,” he said. “This world, there’s no such thing as a midair collision, do you notice? You can go ahead, it’s spirits and minds, no laws of space and time here. None you can’t break.” He smiled. “You don’t want to do this on Earth, OK?”

   Reckless, I came closer, not a word spoken. My propeller spun into his wings. No rainbow-burst of fabric and wood flying into the sky. No loss of control of my plane into his. Two separate airplanes, half of them in one place.

   When I slid back into clear air, my wings and his were untouched. It was not two airplanes here, but the idea of two airplanes, each one perfect, untouched by the destruction that mortals insisted when airplanes touched each other, or hit buildings, or the earth itself. You could fly your airplane through a mountain, in the after-life world, if you wanted.

   Was it the same for us, too. When we’re the idea of perfect expressions of love, are we untouched by collisions or accidents or disease?

   “Oh,” I said. “No hospitals here.”

   He could have said, “Nope.” He didn’t. “We have hospitals. Hospitals are thought-forms, dreams, for people who believe in death-by-sickness.”

   What a strange idea, I thought. I felt that anyone, dying out of illness, would instantly feel well when they left the world of mortals. I did, in my coma.

   The two airplanes were safe. I was so used to the feeling, if I dare touch another machine in the air, we’re dead! Not at all. We blend a bit, nobody’s hurt.

He turned away, a steep left bank, and I pushed the power up and matched my wings’ angle of bank to his.

   “An idea, an expression of love, can’t be destroyed,” he said. “Why wasn’t Puff hurt? You’ll see. Her spirit’s untouched, even when her body, in Earth-time, is wreckage.”

   I’ll see it? My future? Good news! I thought it all, keeping the Fleet up with him, easing the bank down to level flight as he did, touching back the power. What a pleasure it is, flying with him!