The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (17 page)

I patted her canopy-bow and thanked her for the flight, the custom of any pilot who's flown longer than he or she thinks they've deserved.

The other airplanes watched enviously. They wanted to fly, too; needed to fly. Here the poor Widgeon, oil leaking from the nose-case of her right engine. The seal had dried from being still for so long.

Could I listen to airplane's futures, as well as my own? Had I practiced and known her future then, I would not have felt sad. She would become a television-star airplane, opening each episode of a wildly popular TV series, flying to a beautiful island, landing on the water, taxiing to dock sparkling and pretty, no oil leaks anywhere. And she couldn't have that future without the present she lived right now, dusty in my hangar after flying her few hundred hours with me.

So was there some future ahead for me that could not possibly happen without my first having lived this free lonely present.

I climbed the stairs back to the house, absorbed in the possibility of contact with the other aspects of me, Richards-before and Richards-yet-to-be, the I's of other lifetimes, other planets, other hypnotic space-times.

Would any of them have looked for a soulmate? Would any of them have found her?

Intuition-the future/past always-me-whispered back, that moment on the stairs:

twenty-three

I. OPENED the cupboard, took out a soup-can and some noodles, planned me a fine Italian lunch in a minute. May not have been quite Italian. But hot and nourishing of the kind of inquiring I had to do.

Look around you this moment, Richard. What you see, is it the kind of life you most wish to have?

It's awfully lonely, I thought, putting the soup in a pan on the stove, forgetting to turn on the fire. I miss Leslie.

There was a rattling of armor, and I sighed.

Don't worry, I thought, don't bother; I know what you are going to say, I cannot fault your logic. Togetherness is drab destruction. I do not miss Leslie, I suppose. I miss what she represents for me at this time.

The warrior left.

There came another idea in its place, a thought altogether

kind: The opposite of loneliness, Richard, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.

The word floated loose, a silver bubble cut free from the floor of a dark sea.

That!

Is what I miss!

My many-bodied perfect woman is as warm as ice in the freezer. She's communication without caring; she's sex without love; she's friendship without commitment.

Just as she can't hurt or be hurt, so is she incapable of loving or being loved. She is incapable of intimacy. And intimacy . . . might that be as important to me as freedom itself? Is that why I stayed seven weeks with Leslie, when three days were too much to spend with any other woman?

I left the soup cold on the stove, found a chair and sat, knees pulled under my chin, looking out the window over the lake. The cumulus were full cumulonimbus now, blocking sunlight. Florida in summertime, you can set your clock by the thunderstorms.

Twenty minutes later I stared into a wall of rain, barely noticing.

I had somehow talked today with Dickie, so far in my past; somehow I had gotten a message through to him. How can I get in touch with a future Richard? What does he know about intimacy? Has he learned love?

Surely the other aspects of who we are, they must be closer friends than anyone . . . who can be closer to us than ourselves in other bodies, ourselves in spirit-forms? If we're each of us spun about an inner golden thread, which strand is it in me that runs to all the others?

I went heavier and heavier, sinking down into the chair and at the same time rising above it. What a curious feeling,

I thought. Do not fight it, do not move, do not think. Let it take you where it will. It would help so much, to meet . . .

I stepped from a bridge of quiet silver light into a huge arena, empty seats curving away in semicircles, vacant aisles like spokes raying out from centerstage. Not on the stage but near it, a single figure sat, chin on knees. I must have made some sound, for he looked up, smiled, unfolded, waved hi.

"Not only punctual," he said, "you're early!"

I couldn 't see the face clearly, but the man was about my height, dressed in what looked like a snowmobile suit, a black one-piece nylon coverall, bright yellow and orange across the chest and down the sleeves. Zippered pockets, zippered leather boots. Familiar.

"Sure enough," I told him back, casual as could be. "Doesn't look like the show will be starting for a bit." What was this place?

He laughed. "The show is started. Just now got its wheels up. Do you mind if we get out of here?"

"Fine with me," I said.

On the grass of the park outside the arena was a spidery little aircraft that might have weighed two hundred pounds with its pockets full. It had a high wing covered in orange and yellow nylon, tall bright rudders at each wingtip, same-painted canard elevator perched on aluminum tubes ahead of the seats, a small pusher engine mounted behind. I knew a lot of airplanes, but never had I seen anything like this.

It wasn 't a snowmobile suit he was wearing, it was a flight suit, to match his airplane.

"Left seat, if you want." How courteous, how trusting of him, to offer me the pilot's place!

"I'll take the right," I said, and threaded my way into the passenger-spot. A snug fit, because everything about the airplane was small.

"Whatever. You can fly it from either side. Standard controls, but you see you've got no rudder pedals. It's all in the stick. Sensitive elevator, that canard. Pretend it's as sensitive as a helicopter cyclic stick, and you 'II have it down."

He called the propeller clear, reached to an overhead handle, pulled once and the engine was running, quiet as an electric fan. He turned to me. "Ready?"

"Go," I said.

He pushed forward on a throttle smaller than the baby jet's, and with no more sound than a softly rising breeze, the machine lunged ahead. In fifty feet it was airborne, tilted back, climbing like a big-engine uphill racer. Ground fell away, a wide green floor cut loose from us, falling clear a thousand feet per minute. He touched the control stick forward, eased the throttle back till the fan whisked quietly behind us in the wind. He took his hands off the controls, motioned that I could fly the airplane. "You've got it."

"Thank you."

It was like flying a parachute, except we weren 't dropping out of the sky. We were moving perhaps thirty miles per hour, judging by the wind, in a little delight of a machine more eight-dollar lawn-chair than airplane. Without walls or floor, it was so open-cockpit that biplanes were locked tombs, compared. I turned the

airplane, and climbed. It was as sensitive as he had warned.

"Can we shut the engine down? Can we soar this thing like a sailplane?"

"Sure." He touched a switch on the throttle and the engine stopped. We glided noiseless through what must have been rising air . . . there was no altitude loss that I could measure.

"What a perfect little airplane! This is lovely! How do I get one of these for my own?"

He looked at me strangely. "Haven't you guessed, Richard?"

"No."

"Do you know who I am?"

"Sort of." I felt a brush affright.

"Just for the fun of it," he said, "walk through the wall between what you know and what you dare to say. Do that, and tell me whose airplane this is and who you 're flying with."

I tilted the control stick to the right, and the airplane banked smoothly, turned toward a cumulus at the top of its thermal. It was second nature, engine off, to look for lift even though the featherweight machine wasn't losing height.

"If I had to guess, I would say that this airplane is mine from the future, and you're the fellow that I'm going to be." I dared not look at him.

"Not bad," he said. "I'd guess the same."

"You 'd guess? Don't you know?"

"It gets complicated if you think about it much. I'm one of your futures, you're one of my pasts. I think you're the Richard Bach in the midst of the money-

storm, aren't you? The new celebrity author? Nine airplanes, isn't it, and a flawless idea you've designed for a perfect woman? You're straight-arrow faithful to her, and still she leaves you cold?"

We touched the lift of a thermal with the right wing, and I banked steeply into it.

"Don't wrap it too tight," he said. "It's got such a small turning radius anyway, just a little bank will keep you in the lift."

"OK." This joy of an airplane would be mine! And he would be me. What things he must know!

"Look," I said, "I've got some questions. How far in my future are you? Twenty years?"

"More like five. Seems like fifty. I could save you forty-nine if you'd listen. There's the difference between us. I've got the answers you need, but there's not a prayer you'll listen before you get yourself flattened by the Great Steamroller of Experience."

My heart sank. "You think I'm scared of what you'll say, you're sure I won't hear you?"

"Will you?"

"Who can I trust more than you?" I said. "Of course I'll listen!"

"Listen you might; act you won't. We get to meet now because we're both curious, but I doubt you'll let me help."

"I will!"

"You won't," he said. "It's like this airplane. In your time, it doesn't have a name, it hasn't been invented yet. When it is invented, it'll be called an ultralight, and it's going to revolutionize sport aviation. But you're not going to buy this machine finished, Richard, or hire anybody to

build it for you. You're going to build it yourself: piece by piece, Step One, Step Two, Step Three. Same with your answers, exactly the same. You can't buy them finished, you won't take them if I give them to you free, if I tell you word for word what they are."

I knew he was wrong. "You've forgotten," I said, "how fast I learn! Give me an answer and watch what I do with it!"

He tapped the control stick, a signal that he wanted to fly our kite for a while. We had gained a thousand feet in the thermal, nearly to cloudbase. Fields meadows forests hills rivers away down below us, lime and rolling velvet. No roads. Softfuffling whisper, the gentlest of winds about us while we glided upward.

With the calm smile of a gambler calling a bluff: "You want to find your soulmate?"

"Yes! Since always, you know that!"

"Your armor," he said. "It shields you from any woman who would destroy you, sure enough. But unless you let it go, it will shield you as well from the only one who can love you, nourish you, save you from your own protection. There is one perfect woman for you. She is singular, not plural The answer you're looking for is to give up your Freedom and your Independence and to marry Leslie Parrish."

It was well he had taken the controls before telling me.

"You're saying . . . WHAT?" I choked on the thought. "You . . . You're saying . . . MARRY? I cannot possibly . . . Do you know what I think about marriage? Don't you know I say in lectures that after War and

Organized Religion, Marriage brings more unhapp . . . you think I don't believe that? Give up my FREEDOM!! My INDEPENDENCE? You are telling me that my answer is to GET MARRIED? Are you ... I mean . . .
 
WHAT?"

He laughed. I saw nothing funny. I looked away to the horizon.

"You're really scared, aren't you?" he said. "But there's your answer. If you'd listen to what you know instead of what you fear ..."

"I don't believe you."

"Maybe you're right," he said. "I'm your most probable future, not your only one." He turned in his seat, reached back to the engine, pulled a mixture-enrichment lever. "But it's pretty likely, I think, that my wife Leslie is one day going to be yours. She's asleep, right now, in my time, as your friend Leslie is asleep in your time, a continent away from you. Each of your many women, what you 've learned from them, gives you the gift of this one woman, do you understand that? Do you want more answers?"

"If that's a taste," I said, "I'm not sure that I do. Give up my freedom? Mister, you have no idea who I am. Answers like that I can do without. Please!"

"Don't worry. You'll forget this flight; you won't remember till much later."

"Not me," I said. "Memory like a steel claw."

"Old friend," he said quietly. "I know you so well. Don't you ever get tired of being contrary?" .
   
"Deathly tired. But if that's what it takes to live my life the way I want to live it, contrary shall I be."

He laughed, and let our flying machine slide off the

thermal-top. We coasted slowly cross-country, more balloon than aircraft. I didn't care for his answers, they threatened and frightened and angered me. But the details of the ultralight, the aluminum tube and fittings, the reflex curve of the wing, the attachment of stainless-steel cables, even the curious pterodactyl insignia painted on the canard I printed in memory, to build from nothing if I had to.

He found some sinking air and rode it down in circles as we had ridden the rising air upward. The meeting was not going to last much longer.

"OK," I said. "Hit me with some more answers."

"I don't think so," he said. "I wanted to warn you, but now I don't think so."

"Please. I'm sorry I was contrary. Remember who I am."

He waited a long moment, decided at last to talk.

"With Leslie, you'll be happier than you've ever been," he said. "Which is fortunate, Richard, because everything else is going straight to hell Together, the two of you will be hounded by the government for money your managers have lost. You will not be able to write, lest the Internal Revenue Service seize the very words you put on paper. You will be wiped out, bankrupt. You will lose your airplanes, every one; your house, your money, everything. You'll be stuck on the ground year after year. Best thing that ever happened to you. That will ever happen to you."

My mouth went dry, listening. "That's an answer?"

"No. Out of that will come an answer."

He broke off over a meadow on the crest of a hill,

looked down. Waiting at the edge of the grass was a woman. Watching us, waving at the sight of the airplane.