The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (33 page)

"What a cute little thing," Leslie had said when she first saw pictures of the Pterodactyl.

She said it again, in bigger letters, when ours stood completed on the grass, a giant edition of a child's model airplane, teetering like a silk-and-metal dragonfly on its lilypad.

It's so simple, I thought, why wasn't this machine invented forty years ago? No matter. It had been invented now, just in time for people shy of money and eager to get off the ground again.

With great respect for the unknown thing, and after much practice taxiing and many a ten-second flight skimming a borrowed pasture, I finally pushed full throttle and the power-kite launched up out of the grass, colors like a flame-and-sunshine Spirit of Flight, going home. Pterodactyl's president gave me a snowmobile suit to match the airplane . . . that season of year, without a cockpit, it was cold indeed.

There in the sky, the air! Wind and calm, mountains and valleys, grass and earth and rain and sweet ice air through me for the first time ever once again! I had stopped counting flying-hours at 8,000, stopped keeping record of the airplane-types I had flown at 125, yet this one gave me a pure pleasure of being in the air like no other I had flown.

It did require special cautions-by no means was it for flying in heavy weather, for instance-but in a calm there was nothing that could match it for delight. Flying done for the day, the Pterodactyl folded its wings, slipped into a long bag lifted on top of the car, came home to sleep in the yard.

The only thing wrong with the machine was that it carried one person only; I couldn't share the flying with Leslie.

"It's OK," she said. "I'm up there, too, when you fly. I can look down and see me waving when you fly over!"

She sat in the framework cockpit, ran its engine, tucked her hair into a crash-helmet and taxied the little kite around the pasture for fun, promising to fly it when she had time to learn.

It must have been the exhilaration of that first month's flying, but a night came not long after with a most unusual dream.

I flew the Pterodactyl, which had two seats instead of one, high over a misty silver bridge to land on a meadow-green slope by some huge meeting-place, an open-air auditorium. Wandered inside, still wearing the bright coveralls, sat down and waited, chin on my knees. I've never had a dream, I thought, in which I show up early for something that's not quite ready to happen. In a minute or two there was a sound behind me.

I turned, recognized him at once. Recognized me. An earlier me, looking lost, a me from five years gone, shelled around with yearnings turned to shields, wondering what this place could be.

An odd pleasure to see the man, I was swept with love for him. Yet I felt sorry for him at once; he was desperately alone and it showed. He wanted so much to ask and he dared so little to know. I stood up and smiled at him, remembering. He was a terror about time-contracts, never was he late.

"Hi, Richard," I said, off-handed as I could. "Not only punctual, you're early, aren't you?"

He was ill at ease, trying to place me. If you're not sure, I thought, why don't you ask?

I led him outside, knowing he'd be more at home near the airplane.
 

Every answer to his questions I had, answers to his pain and isolation, corrections for his mistakes. Yet the tools that worked enchantments in my hands, they'd be white-hot irons in his. What could I say?

I showed him the airplane, told him about the controls. Funny, I thought. Me telling him about flying, when I'm the one who hasn't flown anything beside the ultralight in years. He may be lonely, but he's a lot better airplane pilot than I am.

When he was settled in his seat, I called the propeller clear and started the engine. It was so quiet and different that for a moment he forgot why he had chosen to meet me, forgot the airplane was the background and not the focus of our dream.

"Ready?" I said, set for takeoff.

"Go."

How would I describe him? Game, I thought. The guy's going through the deceitful torture of sudden money, what it does to an innocent and his friends, and now the whole thing is blowing up around him, his world is coming apart. Yet this minute he's a kid with a toy, he likes airplanes so much. How easy it is to be compassionate, I thought, when it's ourselves we see in trouble.

Airborne a thousand feet, I took my hands from the controls. "You've got it."

He flew with ease, cautious and smooth in a machine the likes of which he hadn 't imagined.

I knew this was somehow my show, this dream, that he was waiting for me to tell him something. Still, the

man was so sure that he had learned the last there was for him to learn! I could feel him spring-loaded to reject the very knowledge that would set Mm free.

"Can we shut the engine down?" he asked over the wind.

For answer I touched the kill-switch on the throttle. The propeller slowed and stopped and we turned into a glider.

Airplane-lessons he didn't resist.

"What a perfect little airplane!" he said. "How can I get one?"

A few minutes flying and he was ready to run out and buy a Pterodactyl. He had the money to do it; he could have bought a hundred Pterodactyls, except of course that in his time it was an invisible idea, not even a sketch on paper.

Buying wasn't the way he would get this one, and that was the avenue, 'there was my opening to talk through his defenses against change.

I asked him to tell me what he knew, what this airplane was and who was this guy in the snowmobile suit, flying it. I wasn't surprised when he told me, he just needed to be asked.

After a while, mixed in with the flying, I told him straight out that I had the answers he was looking for, and that I knew he wouldn't listen to what they were.

"You sure I won't listen?" he said.

"Will you?"

"Who can I trust more than you?"

Leslie, I thought, but he'd laugh at that, we'd get nowhere.

"This is what you came here to learn. This is what you

are going to do," I told him. "The answer you're looking for is to give up your Freedom and your Independence and to marry Leslie Parrish. What you'll find in return is a different kind of freedom, so beautiful you can't imagine. ..."

He didn't catch anything after marry Leslie; he nearly fell from the plane, he was so startled.

Such a long way he has to go, I thought, while he choked and gasped. And he'll go it in only five years. A stubborn closed son-of-a-bitch, but basically I like the guy. He'll make it, all right, I thought ... or will he? Might this one become the voice from the sailplane crash, or from the other turn to Montana? Is this one facing a future that failed?

His very loneliness, so well defended, turned out to be my hope. When I talked about Leslie, he listened sharp, even swallowed and took some truth about his future. Knowing about her could make surviving easier for him, I thought, even if he forgets words and scenes. I turned the plane north.

She was waiting when we landed, dressed as she did for private days at home. He jolted at the sight of her; the vision of her vaporized a ton of iron in less than a second. Such a power is beauty!

She had something personal to say to him, so I stirred in my sleep, faded back, and woke up years later than he would wake from the same dream.

Soon as I opened my eyes, the story evaporated, misted away like steam on air. A flying dream, I thought. How lucky am I to have so many flying dreams! Something special about this one, though . . . what was it? I was investing in uncut diamonds, was that it, was I flying somewhere with a box of diamonds or seeds or something, and they almost fell from the plane? An investment dream. Some part of my subconscious thinks it still has money? Maybe it knows something I don't.

On a night-pad I put a note: Why not self-induced dreams, to travel and see and learn whatever we want to learn?

I lay quiet, watching Leslie sleep, dawn glowing in that golden hair splashed careless about her pillow. For a moment, she was so still-what if she's dead? She breathes so lightly, I can't tell. Is she breathing? She's not!

I knew I was kidding myself, but what relief, what sudden joy, when she moved softly in her sleep that instant, smiled the smallest of dream-smiles!

I've spent my life looking for this woman, I thought. Told myself here's my mission, to be together with her again.

I was wrong. Finding her wasn't the object of my life, it was an imperative incident. Finding her allowed my life to begin.

The object is: Now What? What are you two going to learn about love? I've changed so much, I thought, and it's barely begun.

Real lovestories never have endings. The only way to find what happens in happily-ever-after ;with a perfect mate is to live it for ourselves. There's romance, of course, and the sensual delight of lust fallen in love.

And then what?

Then days and months of talking nonstop, catching up again after being centuries apart-what did you do then, what did you think, what have you learned, how are you changing?

And then what?

What are your most private hopes dreams wishes^ your most desperate if-onlys to bring true? What's the most impossibly beautiful lifetime you can imagine, and here's mine, and the two of them fit like sun and moon in our sky, and we together can bring them true!

And then what?

So much to learn together! So much to share! Languages and acting, poetry and drama and computer-programming and physics and metaphysics, and parapsychology and electronics and gardening and bankruptcy and mythology and geography and cooking and history and painting and economics and woodworking and music and music-history, flying, sailing and the history of sail, political action and geology, courage and comfort and wildplants and native animals, dying and death, archaeology and paleontology and astronomy and cosmology, anger and remorse, writing and metallurgy and snapshooting and photography and solar design, house construction and investing and printing and giving and receiving and wind-surfing and befriending children, aging and earth-saving and warstopping, spiritual healing and psychic healing and cultural exchange and film-making, photovoltaics, microscopy and alternate energy, how to play, how to argue and make up, how to surprise and delight and dress and cry, to play the piano and the flute and the guitar, to see beyond appearances, remember other lifetimes, past and future, unlock answers, research and study, collect and analyze and synthesize, serve and contribute, lecture and listen, see and touch, travel cross-time and meet the other we, to create worlds from dreams and dwell there, changing.

Leslie, in her dream, smiled.

And then what? I thought. And then more, always more

for life-hogs to learn. To learn, to practice, to give back to other life-hogs, to remind them we're not alone.

And then what, after we've lived our dreams, when we're tired of time?

And then . . . Life, Is!

Remember? Remember / AM! AND YOU ARE! AND LOVE; IS ALL: THAT MATTERS!

That's and-then-what!

That's why lovestories don't have endings! They don't have endings because love doesn't end!

Then in the morning all at once, for the space of a hundred seconds, I knew how simply Everything-That-Is is put together. I grabbed the bedside notebook, slashed those seconds down felt-tip black, huge excited letters:

The only real, is Life!

Life sets consciousness free to choose no-form or infinite multiple trillions of forms, any form it can imagine.

My hand trembled and flashed, words tumbled over the blue-ruled lines of the paper.

Consciousness can forget itself, if it wants to forget. It can invent limits, begin fictions; it can pretend galaxies and universes and multiverses, black-holes white-holes big-bangs and steady-states, suns and planets, astral planes and physical. Whatever it imagines, it sees: war and peace, sickness and health, cruelty and kindness.

Consciousness can shape itself three-dimension into a waitress turned prophet of God; it can be a daisy, a spirit-guide, a biplane in a meadow; it can be an aviator just wakened from a dream, loving the smile of his wife asleep; it can be the kitten Dolly in mid-spring to the bed impatient where PLEASE is the catfood this morning?

And any instant it wants, it can remember who it is, it can

remember reality, it can remember Love. In that instant, everything changes. . . .

Fluff-ball Dolly crouched, unseen blue eyes behind dust-chocolate mask, sprang, stunned that mouse-tail line of ink from my pen racing along, knocked it off the page.

"Dolly, no!" I whispered ferociously.

You don't feed me catfood? I'll eat your pen. . . .

"Dolly! No! Go on! Get!"

Not your pen? she glittered. I'll eat your HAND!

"Dolly!"

"What's going on, you two?" Leslie, wakened to the commotion, moved her fingers under the blanket. A hundredth of a second and the little creature whirled to attack, needle-teeth twenty claws rapidfire on the new threat to kittens.

"Dolly The Kittalorium is suggesting that we start the day," I sighed over the storm of battle.

Most of what I suddenly knew was safe in ink.

"Are you awake, yet, wook?" I said. "I had the most remarkable idea just now, and if you're awake I want to tell you . . ."

"Tell me." She fluffed a pillow under her head, avoiding a trouncing for that from Dolly on the sheer chance that Angel The Other Kitten walked innocent into the room at that moment, a new target for Dolly to stalk and pounce.

I read from the notebook just as I had written, the sentences bounding over each other, gazelles over high fences. In a minute I finished and looked up to her from the paper. "Years ago, I tried writing a letter to a younger me, Things I Wish I Knew When I Was You. If only we could hand THIS to the kids we were!"

"Wouldn't it be fun to sit on a cloud," she said, "and

watch them find a notebook from us, everything we've learned?"

"Be sad, in a way," I said.

"Why sad?"

"So much good, waiting to happen, and they can't find each other till now, or till five years ago. . . ."