----------------------- Page 1----------------------- ILLUSIONS The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah Notice! This electronic version of the book, has been released FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. You may not sell or make any profit from this book. And if you like this book, - buy a paper copy and give it to someone who does not have a computer, if that is possible for you. Richard Bach author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull ----------------------- Page 2----------------------- Reprinted in Arrow Books, 1998 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 Copyright © Creature Enterprises Inc 1977 Design copyright © Jean Stoliar 1977 Designed by Jean Stoliar The right of Richard Bach to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, t was a question I heard more than once, after by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent I in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is Jonathan Seagull was published. “What are you published and without a similar condition including this going to write next, Richard? After Jonathan, what?” condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in the United Kingdom in 1977 by William Heinemann Ltd I answered then that I didn’t have to write anything First published in the United Kingdom in paperback in 1978 by Pan Books Ltd next, not a word, and that all my books together said every- This edition first published in 1992 by Mandarin Paperbacks and reprinted 14 times thing that I had asked them to say. Having starved for a Arrow Books while, the car repossessed and that sort of thing, it was fun The Random House Group Ltd not to have to work to midnights. 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SWIV 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited Still, every summer or so I took my antique biplane 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney out into the green-meadow seas of midwest America, flew New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited passengers for three-dollar rides and began to feel an old 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand tension again - there was something left to say, and I Random House (Pty) Limited hadn’t said it. Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 I do not enjoy writing at all. If I can turn my back on an www.randomhouse.co.uk idea, out there in the dark, if I can avoid opening the door to A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library it, I won’t even reach for a pencil. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire ISBN 0 09 942786 9 ----------------------- Page 3----------------------- But once in a while there’s a great dynamite-burst of Maybe he wouldn’t be like the messiah on the oil- flying glass and brick and splinters through the front wall streaked grass-stained pages of my journal, maybe he and somebody stalks over the rubble, seizes me by the wouldn’t say anything this book says. But then again, the throat and gently says, “I will not let you go until you set things this one told me: that we magnetize into our lives me, in words, on paper.” That’s how I met Illusions. whatever we hold in our thought, for instance - if that is true, There in the Midwest, even, I’d lie on my back prac- then somehow I have brought myself to this moment for a ticing cloud-vaporizing, and I couldn’t get the story out of reason, and so have you. Perhaps it is no coincidence that my mind... what if somebody came along who was really you’re holding this book; perhaps there’s something about good at this, who could teach me how my world works these adventures that you came here to remember. I choose and how to control it? What if I could meet a super- to think so. And I choose to think my messiah is perched out advanced... what if a Siddhartha or a Jesus came into there on some other dimension, not fiction at all, watching us our time, with power over the illusions of the world because both, and laughing for the fun of it happening just the way he knew the reality behind them? And what if I could meet we’ve planned it to be. him in person, if he were flying a biplane and landed in the same meadow with me? What would he say, what would he be like ----------------------- Page 4----------------------- 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 ----------------------- Page 5----------------------- his trade as a mechanic be healed of their troubles of automobiles. and their many diseases. 3. But the Master had learnings 5. The Master believed that it from other lands and other is well for any man to schools, from other lives that think upon himself as a son he had lived. He remembered of God, and as he believed, these, and remembering became so it was, and the wise and strong, so that others shops and garages where he saw his strength and came worked became crowded and to him for counsel. jammed with those who sought his learning and his touch, 4. The Master believed that he and the streets outside had power to help himself with those who longed only and all mankind, and as he that the shadow of his believed so it was for him, passing might fall upon them, so that others saw his and change their lives. power and came to him to ----------------------- Page 6----------------------- 6. It came to pass, because 8. If a storm passed as of the crowds, that the he spoke, not a raindrop several foremen and shop touched a listener’s head; managers bid the Master the last of the multitude leave his tools and go heard his words as clearly his way, for so tightly as the first, no matter was he thronged that neither lightning nor thunder in he nor other mechanics had the sky about. And always room to work upon the he spoke to them in parables. automobiles. 9. And he said unto them, 7. So it was that he went “within each of us lies the into the countryside, and power of our consent to health people following began to call and to sickness, to riches him Messiah, and worker of and to poverty, to freedom miracles; and as they believed, and to slavery. It is we it was so. who control these, and not another.” ----------------------- Page 7----------------------- 10. A mill-man spoke and said, way, knowing only its own “Easy words for you, Master, crystal self. for you are guided as we are not, and need not toil 13. “Each creature in its own as we toil. A man has to manner clung tighty to the work for his living in twigs and rocks of the river this world.” bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting 11. The Master answered and said, the current what each had “Once there lived a village learned from birth. of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. 14. “But one creature said at last, ‘I am tired of clinging. 12. “The current of the river Though I cannot see it swept silently over them with my eyes, I trust that all - young and old, rich the current knows where it is and poor, good and evil, going. I shall let go, and the current going its own let it take me where it ----------------------- Page 8----------------------- will. Clinging, I shall die current lifted him free from of boredom.’ the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. 15. “The other creatures laughed and said, ‘Fool! Let go, and that 18. “And the creatures downstream, to current you worship will throw whom he was a stranger, you tumbled and smashed cried, ‘See a miracle! A creature across the rocks, and you like ourselves, yet he flies! will die quicker than boredom!’ See the Messiah, come to save us all!’ 16. “But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath 19. “And the one carried in did let go, and at once the current said, ‘I am was tumbled and smashed by no more Messiah than you. the current across the rocks. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare 17. “Yet in time, as the creature let go. Our true work is refused to cling again, the this voyage, this adventure.’ ----------------------- Page 9----------------------- 20. “But they cried the more, hilltop apart, and there he prayed. ‘Saviour!’ all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they 22. And he said in his heart, looked again he was gone, and Infinite Radian Is, if it they were left alone making be thy will, let this cup legends of a Saviour.” pass from me, let me lay aside this impossible task. 21. And it came to pass when I cannot live the life he saw that the multitude of one other soul, yet ten thronged him the more day on thousand cry to me for life. day, tighter and closer and I’m sorry I allowed it all fiercer than ever they had, to happen. If it be thy when he saw that they pressed will, let me go back to my him to heal them without rest, engines and my tools and and feed them always with let me live as other men. his miracles, to learn for them and to live their lives, he 23. And a voice spoke to him on went alone that day unto a the hilltop, a voice neither ----------------------- Page 10----------------------- male nor female, loud nor entertain it with his wonders, soft, a voice infinitely kind. he smiled upon the multitude And the voice said unto him, and said pleasantly unto them, “Not my will, but thine be “I quit.” done. For what is thy will is mine for thee. Go thy 25. For a moment the multitude way as other men, and was stricken dumb with be thou happy on the earth.” astonishment. 24. And hearing, the Master was 26. And he said unto them, glad, and gave thanks, and came “If a man told God that he down from the hilltop humming wanted most of all to help the a little mechanic’s song. suffering world, no matter the And when the throng pressed price to himself, and God him with its woes, beseeching answered and told him what he him to heal for it and learn must do, should the man do for it and feed it nonstop as he is told?” from his understanding and to ----------------------- Page 11----------------------- 27. “Of course, Master!” cried the ‘I COMMAND THAT YOU BE many. “It should be pleasure HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS for him to suffer the LONG AS YOU LIVE.’ What tortures of hell itself, should would you do then?” God ask for it!” 31. And the multitude was silent, 28. “No matter what those tortures, not a voice, not a sound nor how difficult the task?” was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where 29. “Honor to be hanged, glory they stood. to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that 32. And the Master said unto God has asked,” said they. the silence, “In the path of our happiness shall we 30. “And what would you do,” find the learning for which the Master said unto the we have chosen this lifetime. multitude, “if God spoke directly So it is that I have to your face and said, learned this day, and ----------------------- Page 12----------------------- choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please.” 33. And he went his way 2 through the crowds and left them, and he returned to the everyday world of men and machines. t was toward the middle of the summer that I met I 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 dol- lars 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 ----------------------- Page 13----------------------- engine loafing its propeller around. Goggles up to better watch the He was not a large man. Hair to his shoulders, blacker than the landing. Cornstalks a green-leaf jungle swishing close below, rubber of the tire he leaned against. Eyes dark as hawk’s eyes, the flicker of a fence and then just-cut hay as far as I could see. Stick kind I like in a friend, and in anyone else make me uncomfortable and rudder out of the slip, a nice little round-out above the land, indeed. He could have been a karate master on his way to some hay brushing the tires, then the familiar calm crashing rattle of hard quietly violent demonstration. ground under-wheel, slowing, slowing and now a quick burst of I accepted the sandwich and a thermos cup of water. “Who are noise and power to taxi beside the other plane and stop. Throttle you, anyway?” I said. “Years, I’ve been hopping rides, never seen back, switch off, the soft clack-clack of the propeller spinning down another barnstormer out in the fields.” to stop in the total quiet of July. “Not much else I’m fit to do,” he said, happily enough. “A The pilot of the Travel Air sat in the hay, his back against the left little mechanicking, welding, roughneck a bit, skinning Cats; I stay wheel of his airplane, and he watched me. in one place too long, I get problems. So I made the airplane and For half a minute I watched him, too, looking at the mystery of now I’m in the barnstorming business.” his calm. I wouldn’t have been so cool just to sit there and watch “What kind of Cat?” I’ve been mad for diesel tractors since I another plane land in a field with me and park ten yards away. I was a kid. nodded, liking him without knowing why. “D-Eights, D-Nines. Just for a little while, in Ohio.” “You looked lonely,” I said across the distance between us. “D-Nines! Big as a house! Double compound low gear, can “So did you.” they really push a mountain?” “Don’t mean to bother you. If I’m one too many, I’ll be on “There are better ways of moving mountains,” he said with a my way.” smile that lasted for maybe a tenth of a second. “No. I’ve been waiting for you.” I leaned for a minute against the lower wing of his plane, I smiled at that. “Sorry I’m late.” watching him. A trick of the light... it was hard to look at the man “That’s all right.” closely. As if there were a light around his head, fading the back- I pulled off my helmet and goggles, climbed out of the cockpit ground a faint, misty silver. and stepped to the ground. This feels good, when you’ve been a “Something wrong?” he asked. couple hours in the Fleet. “What kind of problems did you have?” “Hope you don’t mind ham and cheese,” he said. “Ham and “Oh, nothing much. I just like to keep moving these days, cheese and maybe an ant.” No handshake, no introduction of same as you.” any kind. I took my sandwich and walked around his plane. It was a 1928 ----------------------- Page 14----------------------- or 1929 machine, and it was completely unscratched. Factories “I have told you the truth, Richard,” he said. The name is don’t make airplanes as new as his was, parked there in the hay. painted on my airplane, too. Twenty coats of hand-rubbed butyrate dope, at least, paint like a “A person does not hop passengers for a month in a Travel Air mirror pulled tight over the wooden ribs of the thing. Don, in old- without getting a little oil on the plane, my friend, a little dust? One English gold leaf under the rim of his cockpit, and the registration patch in the fabric? Hay, for God’s sake, on the floor?” on the map case said, D. W. Shimoda. The instruments were new He smiled calmly at me. “There are some things you do out of the box, original 1928 flight instruments. Varnished-oak con- not know.” trol stick and rudder-bar; throttle, mixture, spark advance at the In that moment he was a strange other-planet person. I be- left. You never see spark advances anymore, even on the best- lieved what he said, but I had no way of explaining his jewel restored antiques. No scratch anywhere, not a patch on the fabric, airplane parked out in the summer hayfield. not a single streak of engine oil from the cowling. Not a blade of “This is true. But some day I’ll know them all. And then you straw on the floor of the cockpit, as though his machine hadn’t can have my airplane, Donald, because I won’t need it to fly.” flown at all, but instead had materialized on the spot through some He looked at me with interest, and raised his black eyebrows. time-warp across half a century. I felt an odd creepy cold on “Oh? Tell me.” my neck. I was delighted. Someone wanted to hear my theory! “How long you been hopping passengers?” I called across the “People couldn’t fly for a long time, I don’t think, because they plane to him. didn’t think it was possible, so of course they didn’t learn the first “About a month, now, five weeks.” little principle of aerodynamics. I want to believe that there’s He was lying. Five weeks in the fields and I don’t care who you another principle somewhere: we don’t need airplanes to fly, or are, you’ve got dirt and oil on the plane and there’s straw on the move through walls, or get to planets. We can learn how to do that cockpit floor, no matter what. But this machine... no oil on the without machines anywhere. If we want to.” windshield, no flying-hay stains on the leading edges of wings and He half-smiled, seriously, and nodded his head one time. tail, no bugs smashed on the propeller. That is not possible for an “And you think that you will learn what you wish to learn by hop- airplane flying through an Illinois summer. I studied the Travel Air ping three-dollar rides out of hayfields.” another five minutes, and then I went back and sat down in the hay “The only learning that’s mattered is what I got on my own, under the wing, facing the pilot. I wasn’t afraid, I still liked the guy, doing what I want to do. There isn’t, but if there were a soul on but something was wrong. earth who could teach me more of what I want to know than my “Why are you not telling me the truth?” airplane can, and the sky, I’d be off right now to find him. Or her.” ----------------------- Page 15----------------------- The dark eyes looked at me level. “Don’t you believe you’re teed ten degrees cooler upstairs, folks! Come on up where only birds and guided, if you really want to learn this thing?” angels fly! All of this for three dollars only, a dozen quarters from your purse “I’m guided, yes. Isn’t everyone? I’ve always felt something or pocket...”), I had forgotten there might be another. kind of watching over me, sort of.” There’s a tension, flying and selling rides alone. I was used to “And you think you’ll be led to a teacher who can help you.” it, but still it was there: if I don’t fly passengers, I don’t eat. Now “If the teacher doesn’t happen to be me, yes.” when I could sit back, not depending for my dinner on the out- “Maybe that’s the way it happens,” he said. come, 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. A modern new pickup truck hushed down the road toward us, Most often it’s the other way around, eager kids and cautious raising a thin brown fog of dust, and it stopped by the field. The elders, but one gets a sense for these things when it’s one’s liveli- door opened, an old man got out, and a girl of ten or so. The dust hood, and I knew that girl wouldn’t fly with us if we waited all stayed in the air, it was that still. summer. “Selling rides, are you?” said the man. “Which one of you gentlemen...?” the man said. The field was Donald Shimoda’s discovery; I stayed quiet. Shimoda poured himself a cup of water. “Richard will fly you. “Yes, sir,” he said brightly. “Feel like flyin’, do you today?” I’m still on my lunch hour. Unless you want to wait.” “If I did, you cut any didoes, turn any flip-flops with me up “No, sir, I’m ready to go. Can we fly over my farm?” there?” The man’s eyes twinkled, watching to see if we knew him “Sure,” I said. “Just point the way you want to go, sir.” I behind his country-bumpkin talk. dumped my bedroll and toolbag and cook pots from the front “Will if you want, won’t if you don’t.” cockpit of the Fleet, helped the man into the passenger seat and “And you want the dear Lord’s fortune, I suppose.” buckled him in. Then I slid down into the rear cockpit and fastened “Three dollars cash, sir, for ten minutes’ flying in the air. That my own seat belt. is thirty-three and one-third cents per minute. And worth it, most “Give me a prop, will you, Don?” people tell me.” “Yep.” He brought his water cup with him and stood by the It was an odd bystander-feeling, to sit there idle and listen to propeller. “What do you want?” the way this fellow worked his trade. I liked what he said, all low “Hot and brakes. Pull it slow. The impulse will take it right out key. I had grown so used to my own way of selling rides (“Guaran- of your hand.” ----------------------- Page 16----------------------- Always when somebody pulls the Fleet propeller, they pull it I flew once with a five-ship circus, and for a moment it was too fast, and for complicated reasons the engine won’t start. But that kind of busy feeling... one plane lifting off with passengers this man pulled it around ever so slowly, as though he had done it while another lands. We touched the ground with a gentle rum- forever. The impulse spring snapped, sparks fired in the cylinders bling crash and rolled to the far end of the hay, by the road. and the old engine was running, that easy. He walked back to his The engine stopped, the man unsnapped his safety belt and I airplane, sat down and began talking to the girl. helped him out. He took a wallet from his overalls and counted the In a great burst of raw horsepower and flying straw the Fleet dollar bills, shaking his head. was in the air, climbing through a hundred feet (if the engine quits That’s quite a ride, son.” now, we land in the corn), five hundred feet (now, and we can turn “We think so. It’s a good product we’re selling.” back and land in the hay... now, and it’s the cow pasture west), “It’s your friend, that’s selling!” eight hundred feet and level, following the man’s finger pointing “Oh?” through the wind southwest. “I’ll say. Your friend could sell ashes to the devil, I’ll wager, Three minutes airborne and we circled a farmstead, barns the can’t he now?” color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in “How come you say that?” back for food: sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing. “The girl, of course. An airplane ride to my granddaughter, The man in the front cockpit looked down through the air as Sarah!” As he spoke he watched the Travel Air, a distant silver mote we circled the farmhouse framed between the wings and through in the air, circling the farmhouse. He spoke as a calm man speaks, the flying wires of the Fleet. noting the dead twig in the yard has just sprouted blossoms and A woman appeared on the porch below, white apron over blue ripe apples. dress, waving. The man waved back. They would talk later of how “Since she’s born, that girl’s been wild to death about high they could see each other so well across the sky. places. Screams. Just terrified. Sarah’d no more climb a tree than He looked back at me finally with a nod to say that was she’d stir hornets barehand. Won’t climb the ladder to the loft, enough, thanks, and we could head back now. won’t go up there if the Flood was rising in the yard. The girl’s a I flew a wide circle around Ferris, to let the people know there wonder with machines, not too bad around animals, but heights, was flying going on, and spiraled down over the hayfield to show they are a caution to her! And there she is up in the air.” them just where it was happening. As I slipped down to land, He talked on about this and other special times; he remem- banked steeply over the corn, the Travel Air swept off the ground bered when the barnstormers used to come through Galesburg, and turned at once toward the farm we had just left. years ago, and Monmouth, flying two-wingers the same as we ----------------------- Page 17----------------------- flew, but doing all kinds of crazy stunts with them. truck, both changed by what had happened in the field and in the I watched the distant Travel Air get bigger, spiral down over sky. the field in a bank steeper than I’d ever fly with a girl afraid of Two automobiles arrived, then another, and we had a noon heights, slip over the corn and the fence and touch the hay in a rush of people who wanted to see Ferris from the air. We flew three-point landing that was dazzling to watch. Donald Shimoda twelve or thirteen flights as fast as we could get them off, and after must have been flying for a good long while, to land a Travel Air that I made a run to the station in town to get car gas for the Fleet. that way. Then a few passengers, a few more, and it was evening and we The airplane rolled to a stop beside us, no extra power re- flew solid back-to-back flights till sunset. quired, and the propeller clanked softly to stop. I looked closely. A sign somewhere said Population 200, and by dark I was There were no bugs on the propeller. Not so much as a single fly thinking we had flown them all, and some out-of-towners as well. killed on that eight-foot blade. I forgot in the rush of flying to ask about Sarah and what Don I sprang to help, unshackled the girl’s safety belt, opened the had told her, whether he had made up the story or if he thought it little front-cockpit door for her and showed her where to step so was true, about dying. And every once in a while I watched his her foot wouldn’t go through the wing fabric. plane closely while passengers changed seats. Not a mark on it, no “How’d you like that?” I said. oil-drop anywhere, and he apparently flew to dodge the bugs that I She didn’t know I spoke. had to wipe from my windshield every hour or two. “Grampa, I’m not afraid! I wasn’t scared, honest! The house There was just a little light in the sky when we quit. By the time looked like a little toy and Mom waved at me and Don said I was I laid dry cornstalks in my tin stove, set them over with charcoal scared just because I fell and died once and I don’t have to be afraid bricks and lit the fire, it was full dark, the firelight throwing colors anymore! I’m going to be a pilot, Grampa. I’m gonna have an back from the airplanes parked close, and from the golden straw airplane and work on the engine myself and fly everywhere and about us. give rides! Can I do that?” I peered into the grocery box. “It’s soup or stew or Spaghetti- Shimoda smiled at the man and shrugged his shoulders. O’s,” I said. “Or pears or peaches. Want some hot peaches?” “He told you you were going to be a pilot, did he, Sarah?” “No difference,” he said mildly. “Anything or nothing.” “No, but I am. I’m already good with engines, you know that!” “Man, aren’t you hungry? This has been a busy day!” “Well, you can talk about that with your mother. Time for us to “You haven’t given me much to be hungry for, unless that’s be getting home.” good stew.” The two thanked us and one walked, one ran to the pickup I opened the stew can with my Swiss Air Officer’s Escape and ----------------------- Page 18----------------------- Evasion Knife, did a similar job on the Spaghetti-O’s, and popped both cans over the fire. My pockets were tight with cash... this was one of the pleas- 3 anter 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. hrongs and masses and crowds of people, torrents “About this teacher you’re looking for,” he said. T of humanity pouring against one man in the “I ain’t lookin’ for no teacher,” I said. “I am counting money! I middle of them all. Then the people became an ocean that would can go a week on this, I can be rained out cold for one solid week!” drown the man, but instead of drowning he walked over the ocean, He looked at me and smiled. “When you are done swimming whistling, and disappeared. The ocean of water changed to an in your money,” he said, “would you mind passing my stew?” 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 bedroll as he had when first I met him, leaning back against the left wheel of his airplane. It wasn’t that I saw him dearly, 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. ----------------------- Page 19----------------------- “Your dream. The guy and the crowds and the airplane,” he everyday wrench. Might as well be made of gold, the price of the said patiently. “You were curious about me, so now you know, OK thing, but it’s a joy in the hand and you know it will never break, no There were news stories: Donald Shimoda, the one they were be- matter what you do with it. ginning to call the Mechanic Messiah, the American Avatar, who “Of course you can quit! Quit anything you want, if you disappeared one day in front of twenty-five thousand eye- change your mind about doing it. You can quit breathing, if you witnesses?” want to.” He floated a Phillips screwdriver for his own amuse- I did remember that, had read it on a small-town Ohio news- ment. “So I quit being the Messiah, and if I sound a little defensive, paper rack, because it was on the front page. it’s maybe because I am still a little defensive. Better that than keep- “Donald Shimoda?” ing the job and hating it. A good messiah hates nothing and is free “At your service,” he said. “Now you know, so you don’t have to walk any path he wants to walk. Well, that’s true for everybody, to puzzle me out anymore. Go back to sleep.” of course. We’re all the sons of God, or children of the Is, or ideas of I thought about that for a long time before I slept. the Mind, or however else you want to say it.” I worked at tightening the cylinder-base nuts on the Kinner engine. A good powerplant, the old B-5, but these nuts want to loosen themselves every hundred flying hours or so, and it’s wise “Are you allowed... I didn’t think... you get a job like that, the to stay one jump ahead. Sure enough, the first one I put the Messiah, you’re supposed to save the world, aren’t you? I didn’t wrench to went a quarter-turn tighter, and I was glad for my know the Messiah could just turn in his keys like that and quit.” I wisdom to check them all this morning, before flying any more sat high on the top cowling of the Fleet and considered my strange customers. friend. “Toss me a nine-sixteenths, would you please, Don?” “Well, yes, Don, but it seems as if Messiahing would be differ- He hunted in the toolbag and pitched the wrench up to me. As ent from other jobs, you know? Jesus going back to hammering with the other tools that morning, the one he threw slowed and nails for a living? Maybe it just sounds odd.” stopped within a foot of me, floating weightless, turning lazy in He considered that, trying to see my point. “I don’t see your midair. The moment I touched it, though, it went heavy in my point. Strange thing about that is he didn’t quit when they first hand, an everyday chrome-vanadium aircraft end-wrench. Well, started calling him Saviour. Instead of leaving at that piece of bad not quite everyday. Ever since a cheap seven-eighths broke in my news, he tried logic: ‘OK, I’m the son of God, but so are we all; I’m hand I’ve bought the best tools a man can have... this one hap- the saviour, but so are you! The works that I do, you can do!’ Any- pened to be a Snap-On, which as any mechanic knows is not your body in their right mind understands that.” ----------------------- Page 20----------------------- It was hot, up on the cowling, but it didn’t feel like work. The to somebody else; let him be the Messiah. I won’t tell him it’s a dull more I want to get something done, the less I call it work. Satisfy- job. And besides, ‘There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away ing, to know that I was keeping the cylinders from flying off the from. ’” engine. I slid from the cowling down to the hay and began tightening “Say you want another wrench,” he said. the cylinder nuts on number three and four cylinders. Not all of “I do not want another wrench. And I happen to be so spiritu- them were loose, but some were. “You are quoting Snoopy the ally advanced that I consider these tricks of yours mere party Dog, I believe?” games, Shimoda, of a moderately evolved soul. Or maybe a begin- “I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you.” ning hypnotist.” “You can’t run away, Don! What if I start worshiping you right “A hypnotist! Boy, are you ever getting warm! But better hyp- now? What if I get tired of working on my engine and start begging notist than Messiah. What a dull job! Why didn’t I know it was you to heal it for me? Look, I’ll give you every dime I make from going to be a dull job?” now to sundown if you just teach me how to float in the air! If you “You did,” I said wisely. He just laughed. don’t do it, then I’ll know that I’m supposed to start praying to you, “Did you ever consider, Don, that it might not be so easy to Holy One Sent to Lift My Burden.” quit, after all ?That you might not just settle right down to the life He just smiled at me. I still don’t think he understood that he of a normal human being?” couldn’t run away. How could I know that when he didn’t He didn’t laugh at that. “You’re right, of course,” he said, and “Did you have the whole show, like you see in the movies from ran his fingers through his black hair. “Stay in any one place too India? Crowds in the streets, billions of hands touching you, flow- long, more than a day or two, and people knew I was something ers and incense, golden platforms with silver tapestries for you to strange. Brush against my sleeve, you’re healed of terminal cancer, stand on when you spoke?” and before the week’s out there I’m back in the middle of a crowd “No. Even before I asked for the job, I knew I couldn’t stand again. This airplane keeps me moving, and nobody knows where I that. So I chose the United States, and I just got the crowds.” came from or where I’m going next, which suits me pretty well.” It was pain for him, remembering, and I was sorry I had “You are gonna have a tougher time than you think, Don.” brought the whole thing up. “Oh?” He sat in the hay and talked on, looking through me. “I “Yeah, the whole motion of our time is from the material to- wanted to say, for the love of God, if you want freedom and joy so ward the spiritual... slow as it is, it’s still a pretty huge motion. I much, can’t you see it’s not anywhere outside of you? Say you don’t think the world is gonna let you alone.” have it, and you have it! Act as if it’s yours, and it is! Richard, what “It’s not me they want, it’s the miracles! And those I can teach is so damned hard about that? But they didn’t even hear, most of ----------------------- Page 21----------------------- them. Miracles - like going to auto races to see the crashes, they 4 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 here do you learn all this stuff, Don ?You know W needed cleaning, of course, and now I knew his engine would so much, or maybe I just think you do. No. never need any maintenance, either. You do know a lot. Is it all practice? Don’t you get any formal train- “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know where we’re headed.” ing to be a Master?” “What do you mean? You know the past and the future of all “They give you a book to read.” things. You know exactly where we’re going!” I hung a fresh-washed silk scarf on the flying wires and stared He sighed. “Yeah. But I try not to think about it.” at him. “A book?” “Saviour’s Manual. It’s kind of the bible for masters. There’s a 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 copy around here somewhere, if you’re interested.” problems, nothing bad will happen and everything will turn out “Yes, yes! You mean a regular book that tells you...?” fine. But the way he said that: “I try not to think about it,” made me He rummaged around for a while in the baggage space behind remember what had happened to the other Messiahs sent into this the headrest of the Travel Air and came up with a small volume world. Common sense shouted at me to turn south after takeoff bound in what looked like suede. 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 Messiah’s Handbook, have somebody to talk with who knew an aileron from a vertical stabilizer. printed in black letters. I should have turned south, but after takeoff I stayed with him Reminders for the Advanced and we flew north and east into that future that he tried not to Soul. think about. ----------------------- Page 22----------------------- “What do you mean, Saviour’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. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution Think about that. is not generally understood by less- Remember where you came from, advanced life-forms, and they’ll call you crazy. 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 “Have you read this, about losing your perspective, Don?” in mind. “No.” “It says you have to die a horrible death.” ----------------------- Page 23----------------------- “You don’t have to. Depends on the circumstances, and how you feel like arranging things.” “Are you going to die a horrible death?” Your only “I don’t know. Not much point in it, would you think, now obligation in any lifetime that I’ve quit the job? A quiet little ascension ought to be enough. is to be true to yourself. 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, Being true to anyone else or and didn’t know then that he was serious about the few weeks. anything else is not only I went on into the book; it was the kind of knowledge a master impossible, but the would need, all right. 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 Learning is finding out what you already know. Think about Doing is demonstrating that these once in a while, and watch your answers you know it. change. Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you. You are all learners, doers, teachers. ----------------------- Page 24----------------------- You teach best what you most need to learn. Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet “You’re awfully quiet over there, Richard,” said Shimoda, as than though he wanted to talk with me. your acquaintances “Yeah,” I said, and went on reading. If this was a book for will know you in masters only, I didn’t want to let go of it. a thousand years. Live The never to be ashamed if anything you do best way or say is published to avoid responsibility around the world - is to say, “I’ve got even if responsibilities.” what is published is not true. I noticed something strange about the book. “The pages don’t have numbers on them, Don.” ----------------------- Page 25----------------------- “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 You are led 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 some- through your lifetime thing not fun at all was going to happen to him before long, and I by the inner learning creature, didn’t want to be around when it did. Thinking that, I opened the the playful spiritual being book with my eyes still closed, then opened them and read. 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. ----------------------- Page 26----------------------- 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 an- 5 swers. 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. 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 anywhere; 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 sum- mer; 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 ----------------------- Page 27----------------------- mirror paints. A lovely airplane, I thought, but too big for real mean stop, but it was flying no more than 30 mph, an airplane that hard-times barnstorming. It does carry two passengers at a time, stalls at 50, mind you, stop in the air and sort of sigh three-point but it also weighs twice as much as a Fleet, and so needs much onto the grass. He used half, maybe three-quarters the space I had more field to get off the ground and back on. I owned a Travel Air used to land the Fleet. once, but traded it finally for the Fleet, which can get into tiny I just sat in the cockpit and looked, while he taxied alongside fields, fields the size you’re a lot more likely to find close to town. I and shut down. When I turned off my engine, still staring at him could work a 500-foot field with the Fleet, where the Travel Air took dumbly, he called, “Nice field, you found! Close enough to town, 1000, 1300 feet. You tie yourself to this guy, I thought, and you tie hey?” yourself to the limits of his airplane. Our first customers, two boys on a Honda motorcycle, were And sure enough, the moment I thought that, I spotted a neat already turning in to see what was going on. little cow pasture by the town going past below. It was a standard “What do you mean, close to town?” I shouted over the engine 1320-foot farm-field cut in half, the other half sold to the town for a noise still in my ears. baseball diamond. “Well, it’s half a block away!” Knowing Shimoda’s plane couldn’t land there, I kicked my “No, not that! WHAT WAS THAT LANDING? In the Travel little flying machine up on her left wing, nose up, power to idle, Air! How did you land here?” and sank like a safe toward the ball park. We touched in the grass He winked at me. “Magic!” just beyond the left-field fence and rolled to a stop with room to “No, Don... really! I saw the way you landed!” spare. I just wanted to show off a little, show him what a Fleet can He could see that I was shocked and more than a bit fright- do, properly flown. ened. A burst of throttle swung me around for takeoff again, but “Richard, do you want to know the answer to floating when I turned to go, there was the Travel Air all set up on final wrenches in the air and healing all sickness and turning water into approach to land. Tail down, right wing up, it looked like some wine and walking on the waves and landing Travel Airs on a glorious graceful condor turning to land on a broom-straw. hundred feet of grass? Do you want to know the answer to all these He was low and slow, so that the hair on my neck prickled. I miracles?” was about to see a crash. A Travel Air, you want to hold at least 60 I felt as though he had turned a laser on me. “I want to mph over the fence to land, slower than that with an airplane that know how you landed here...” stalls at 50 and you are going to wrap it up in a ball. But what I saw “Listen!” he called across the gulf between us. “This world was this gold and snow biplane stop in the air, instead. Well, I don’t And everything in it? Illusions, Richard! Every bit of it illusions! Do ----------------------- Page 28----------------------- 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 quick and get permission to fly out of his cow pasture. The only way to describe the takeoffs 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. There is Someone had said that before... when I was a kid, learning magic - magicians say that! They carefully tell us, “Look, this is not a mira- no such thing as a problem cle you are about to see; this is not really magic. What it is, is an without a gift for you in its hands. effect, it is the illusion of magic.” Then they pull a chandelier from a walnut and change an elephant into a tennis racket. You seek problems In a burst of insight, I pulled the Messiah’s Handbook from my because you need pocket and opened it. Two sentences stood alone on the page. their gifts. ----------------------- Page 29----------------------- I didn’t quite know why, but reading that eased my confu- seven hours now, going on eight, without another drop of gas or sions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed. oil. And though I knew that he was a good man, and wouldn’t hurt The name of the town was Troy, and the pasture there prom- me, I was frightened again. If you really stretch it, throttle back to ised to be as good to us as the hayfield in Ferris had been. But in minimum revolutions and mixture dead lean in cruise, you can Ferris I had felt a certain calm, and here was a tension in me air that make a Travel Air run five hours at the outside. But not eight hours I didn’t like at all. of takeoffs and landings. The flying that was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to our He flew steadily on, ride after ride, while I poured the Regular passengers was for me routine, overshadowed by that strange un- into my center-section tank and added a quart of oil to the engine. easiness. My adventure was this character I was flying with... the There was a line of people waiting to fly... it was as if he didn’t impossible way he made his airplane go and the odd things that he want to disappoint them. had said to explain it. I caught him, though, as he helped a man and wife into the The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the front cockpit of his plane. I tried to sound just as calm and casual as Travel Air’s flight than I would have been had some town bell rung I could. at noon that hadn’t rung for sixty years... they didn’t know that it “Don, how you doin’ on fuel? Need any gas?” I stood at his was impossible for what was happening to happen. wingtip with an empty five-gallon can in my hand. “Thanks for the ride!” they said, and, “Is this all you do for a He looked straight into my eyes and he frowned, puzzled, as living... don’t you work somewhere?” and, “Why’d you pick a lit- though I had asked if he needed any air to breathe. tle place like Troy?” and, “Jerry your farm’s no bigger than a “No,” he said, and I felt like a slow first-grader at the back of shoebox!” the classroom. “No, Richard, I don’t need any gas.” We had a busy afternoon. There were lots of people coming It annoyed me. I know a little bit about airplane engines and out to fly and we were going to make a lot of money. Still, part of me fuel. “Well then,” I flared at him, “how about some uranium?” began to say get out get out, get away from this place. I have ig- He laughed and melted me at once. “No thanks. I filled it last nored that before, and always been sorry for it. year.” And then he was in his cockpit and gone with his passengers About three o’clock I had shut down my engine for gas, in that supernatural slow-motion takeoff. walked twice back and forth from the Skelly station with two five- I wished first that the people would go home, then that we gallon cans of car gas, when it struck me that not once had I seen the would get out of here quick, people or not, then that I would have Travel Air refuel. Shimoda hadn’t put gas in his plane since some- the sense to get out of there alone, at once. All I wanted was to take time before Ferris, and I had watched him fly that machine for off and find a big empty field far away from any town and just sit ----------------------- Page 30----------------------- and think and write what was happening in my journal, make it was never there; he launched off the chair at a half-run, amazed some sense out of it. at himself, toward the Travel Air. I stayed out of the Fleet, resting till Shimoda landed again. I I was standing close, and heard him. “What did you do?” he walked to his cockpit, there in the propeller-blast of the big engine. said. “What did you do to me ” “I’ve flown about enough, Don. Gonna be on my way, land “Are you going to fly or not going to fly?” Don said. “The price out from towns and be a little less busy for a while. It’s been fun is three dollars. Pay me before takeoff, please.” flying with you. See you again sometime, OK?” “I’m flying!” he said. Shimoda didn’t help him into the front He didn’t blink. “One more flight and I’ll be with you. Guy’s cockpit, the way he usually helped his passengers. been waiting.” The people in the cars were out of the cars - there was a quick “All right.” murmur from the watchers and then shocked silence. The man The guy was waiting in a battered wheelchair rolled down the hadn’t walked since his truck went off a bridge eleven years before. block to the field. He was kind of smashed down and twisted into Like a kid putting on bedsheet wings, he hopped to the the seat as if by some high-gravity force, but he was here because cockpit and slid down into the seat, moving his arms a lot as he wanted to go flying. There were other people around, forty or though he had just been given arms to play with. fifty, some in, some out of their cars, watching curiously how Don Before anybody could talk, Don pressed the throttle and the would get the man from the chair into the plane. Travel Air rolled up into the air, steep-turning around the trees and He didn’t think about it at all. “Do you want to fly?” The man climbing like fury. in the wheelchair smiled a twisted smile and nodded sideways. Can a moment be happy and at the same time terrifying “Let’s go, let’s do it!” Don said quietly, as though he was talk- There followed a lot of moments like that. It was wonder at what ing to someone who had waited on the sidelines a long while, could only be called a miraculous healing to a man who looked like whose time had come to go into the game again. If there was any- he deserved it, and at the same time, something uncomfortable thing strange about that moment, looking back on it, it was the was going to happen when those two came down again. The intensity with which he spoke. It was casual, yes, but it was a crowd was a tight knot waiting, and a tight knot of people is a mob command, too, that expected the man to get up and get into the and that is not good at all. Minutes ticked, eyes bored into that little plane, no excuses. What happened then, it was as if the man had biplane flying so carefree in the sun, and some violent thing was set been acting, and finished the last scene of his crippled-invalid part. to go off. It looked staged. The high-gravity broke away from him as though The Travel Air flew some steep lazy eights, a tight spiral, and ----------------------- Page 31----------------------- 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 6 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 o this day I can’t say what it was came over me. It was wind and took off. The last I saw of Donald Shimoda, he was sitting T just that doom feeling, and it drove me out, away on the rim of his cockpit, and the mob had him surrounded. even from the strange curious fellow that was Donald Shimoda. If I I turned east, then southeast, and after a while the first big have to fraternize with doom, even the Messiah Himself is not field I found with trees for shade and a stream to drink from, I powerful enough to make me hang around. landed for the night. It was a long way from any town. 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. ----------------------- Page 32----------------------- Illusions. What did he mean about illusions? That mattered compose as I go along. “An’ it won’t be me givin’ in, Paint... Unless more than anything he had said or done - fierce, he was, when he you break a SPAR... and then I’ll just tie you up with baling WIRE... and said, “It’s all illusions!” as though he could blast the idea into my we’ll go flying on... WE’LL GO FLYIN’ ON...” head with sheer force. It was a problem, all right, and I needed its The verses are endless when I get going and happy, since the gift, but I still didn’t know what it meant. rhyming isn’t that critical. I had stopped thinking about the prob- I got a fire going after a while, cooked me up a kind of leftover lems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or goulash of bits and pieces of soybean meat and dry noodles and what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that’s what two hot dogs from three days ago that boiling should have been made me happy. good for. The toolbag was crushed alongside the grocery box, and Long about ten o’clock the fire ran down and so did my song. for no reason I fetched out the nine-sixteenths and looked at it, “Wherever you are, Donald Shimoda,” I said, unrolling my wiped it clean and stirred the goulash with it. blanket under the wing, “I wish you happy flying and no crowds. I was alone, mind you, no one to watch, so for fun I tried If that is what you want. No, I take that back. I wish, dear lonely floating it in the air, the way he had done it. If I tossed it right messiah, that you find whatever it is that you want to find.” straight up and blinked my eyes when it stopped going up and His handbook fell out of the pocket as I took off my shirt, and I started coming down, I got a half-second feeling that it was float- read it where it opened. ing. But then it thunked back down on the grass or on my knee and the effect was shattered quick. But this very same wrench... How did he do it If that’s all illusion, Mister Shimoda, then what is it that is real The bond 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 that links your true family suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew is not one of blood, but what I knew even though it wasn’t the answer to all existence or of respect and joy in even a few illusions. each other’s life. When I’m alone sometimes I sing. “Oh, me and ol’ PAINT!...” I Rarely do members sang, patting the wing of the Fleet in true love for the thing (re- of one family grow up member there was nobody to hear), “We’ll wander the sky... Hoppin’ under the same ‘round hayfields till one of us gives in...” Music and words both I roof. ----------------------- Page 33----------------------- I didn’t see how that applied to me, and reminded myself I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag and lit the fire never to let a book replace my own thinking. I rustled down under for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay the blanket, and men I was out like a bulb turned off, warm and here all day, if I felt like it. dreamless under the sky and under several thousand stars that The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be were illusions, maybe, but pretty ones, for sure. 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 When I came conscious again it was just sunrise, rose light and started whistling... watching the bread and the sky and trying to gold shadows. I woke not because of the light but because some- think of something very calm to say when he landed. thing was touching my head, ever so gently. I took it for a hay- It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pul- stem, floating there. Second time I knew it was a bug, swatted led up steep in a show-off turn, slipped down through the air and wildly and nearly broke my hand... a nine-sixteenths end-wrench landed 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled is a hard chunk of iron to swat full speed, and I woke up fast. The alongside and shut down his engine. I didn’t say anything. Waved, wrench bounced off the aileron hinge, buried itself for a moment in but didn’t say a word. I did stop whistling. the grass, then floated grandly to hover in the air again. Then as I He got out of the cockpit and walked to the fire. “Hi, Richard.” watched, coming wide awake, it sank softly back down to the “You’re late,” I said. “Almost burned the pan-bread.” ground and was still. By the time I thought to pick it up, it was the “Sorry.” same old nine-sixteenths I knew and loved, just as heavy, just as I handed him a cup of stream water and a tin plate with half eager to get at all those pesky nuts and bolts. the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine. “Well, hell!” “How’d it go?” I said. I never say hell or damn - carryover from an ego thing as a “Went OK,” he said with an instant’s half-smile. “I escaped child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. with my life.” What was happening to my wrench? Donald Shimoda was sixty “Had some doubts you would.” miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, ex- He ate the bread for a while in silence. “You know,” he said at amined it, balanced it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot last, contemplating his meal, “this is really terrible stuff.” understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be “Nobody says you have to eat my pan-bread,” I said crossly. some simple reason... ----------------------- Page 34----------------------- “Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY teemed self? Or did by ‘like’ you mean the airplanes are alike, sort PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?” of?” “Well,” he grinned, “- and I’m speaking as God, now - I’d say “We miracle-workers got to stick together,” he said. The sen- that you believe that it’s good and that therefore it does taste good tence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it. to you. Try it without deeply believing what you believe and it’s “Ah... Don? Referring to your last comment? Perhaps you’d sort of like... a fire... after a flood... in a flourmill, don’t you like to tell me what you had in mind: we miracle-workers?” think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess.” “From the position of the nine-sixteenths on the toolbag, I’d “Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don’t you think the say you were running the old levitate-the-end-wrench trick this basic bread itself - not the grass or the little charred part, there - the morning. Tell me if I’m wrong.” basic pan-bread, don’t you think...?” “Wasn’t running anything! I woke up... the thing woke me “Terrible,” he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had up, by itself!” handed to him. “I’d rather starve. Still have the peaches?” “Oh. By itself.” He was laughing at me. “In the box.” “YES BY ITSELF!” How had he found me, in this field ?A twenty-eight-foot “Your understanding of your miracle-working, Richard, is as wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy thorough as your understanding of bread-baking.” target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he I didn’t reply to that, just eased myself down on my bedroll wanted to tell me, he would tell me. and was quiet as could be. If he had something to say, he could say “How did you find me?” I said. “I could have landed any- it in his own good time. where.” “Some of us start learning these things subconsciously. Our He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a waking mind won’t accept it, so we do our miracles in our sleep.” knife... not an easy trick. He watched the sky, and the first little clouds of the day. “Don’t be “Like attracts like,” he muttered, missing a peach slice. impatient, Richard. We’re all on our way to learning more. It will “Oh?” come to you pretty quick now, and you’ll be a wise old spiritual “Cosmic law.” maestro before you know it.” “Oh.” “What do you mean, before I know it? I don’t want to know it! I I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from don’t want to know anything!” the stream. That sure is good bread. “You don’t want to know anything.” “Do you mind explaining? How is it mat I am like your es- “Well, I want to know why the world is and what it is and why ----------------------- Page 35----------------------- I live here and where I’m going next... I want to know that. How to It was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Maybe you fly without an airplane, if I had a wish.” ought to tell me. You tell me what I’m trying to say, and I’ll correct “Sorry.” you if you’re wrong.” “Sorry what?” I thought about that a minute, and decided to surprise him. “Doesn’t work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it “OK, I’ll tell you.” I practiced then pausing, to see how long he works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called could wait if what I said didn’t come out too fluent. The sun was miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the high enough now to be warm, and way off in some hidden field a magician knows and it’s not magic anymore.” He looked away farmer worked a diesel tractor, cultivating corn on Sunday. from the sky. “You’re like everybody else. You already know this “OK, I’ll tell you. First of all, it was no coincidence when I first stuff, you’re just not aware that you know it, yet.” saw you landed down in the field at Ferris, right?” “I don’t recall,” I said, “I don’t recall your asking me whether I He was quiet as the hay growing. want to learn this thing, whatever it is that has brought you crowds “And second of all, you and I have some kind of mystical and misery all your life. Seems to have slipped my mind.” Soon as I agreement which apparently I have forgotten and you haven’t.” said the words I knew that he was going to say I’d remember later, Only a soft wind blowing, and the distant tractor-sound waft- and that he’d be right. ing back and forth with it. He stretched out in the grass, the last of the flour in its bag for a There was part of me listening that didn’t think what I said pillow. “Look, you don’t worry about the crowds. They can’t touch was fiction. I was making up a true story. you unless you want them to. You’re magic, remember: FOOF! - “I’m going to say that we met three or four thousand years you’re invisible, and walk through the doors.” ago, give or take a day. We like the same kind of adventures, we “Crowd got you at Troy, didn’t it?” probably hate the same sort of destroyers, learn with about as “Did I say I didn’t want them to? I allowed that. I liked it. much fun, about as fast as each other. You’ve got a better memory. There’s a little ham in all of us or we’d never make it as masters.” Our meeting again is what you mean by ‘Like attracts like,’ that you “But didn’t you quit? Didn’t I read...?” said.” “The way things were going, I was turning into the One- I picked a new hay-stem. “How am I doing?” and-Only Full-Time Messiah, and that job I quit cold. But I can’t “For a while I thought it was going to be a long haul,” he said. unlearn what I’ve spent lifetimes coming to know, can I?” “It is going to be a long haul, but I think there’s a slim outside I closed my eyes and crunched a hay-stem. “Look, Donald, chance that you might make it this time. Keep talking.” what are you trying to tell me? Why don’t you come right out and “For another thing, I don’t have to keep talking, because you say what is going on?” already know what things people know. But if I didn’t say these ----------------------- Page 36----------------------- things, you wouldn’t know what I think that I know, and without He jerked his head up and his eyes blazed as though I had hit that I can’t learn any of the things I want to learn.” I put down my him with the wrench. I thought all at once that I would not be wise hay-stem. “What’s in it for you, Don? Why do you bother with to get this guy mad at me. A man fries quick, struck by lightning. people like me? Whenever somebody is advanced as you are, he Then he smiled that half-second smile. “You know what, gets all these miracle-powers as by-products. You don’t need me, Richard?” he said slowly. “You... are... right!” you don’t need anything at all from this world.” He was quiet again, tranced, almost, by what I had said. Not I turned my head and looked at him. His eyes were dosed. noticing, I went on talking to him for hours about how we had met “Like gas in the Travel Air?” he said. and what there was to learn, all these ideas firing through my head “Right,” I said. “So all there is left in the world is bore- like morning comets and daylight meteors. He lay very still in the dom... there are no adventures when you know that you can’t be grass, not moving, not saying a word. By noon I finished my ver- troubled by any thing on this earth. Your only problem is that you sion of the universe and all things that dwelled therein. don’t have any problems!” “... and I feel like I’ve barely begun, Don, there’s so much to That, I thought, was a terrific piece of talking. say. How do I know all this? How come is that?” “You missed, there,” he said. “Tell me why I quit my job... do He didn’t answer. you know why I quit the Messiah job?” “If you expect me to answer my own question, I confess that I “Crowds, you said. Everybody wanting you to do their mira- do not know. Why can I say all these things now, when I’ve never cles for them.” even tried, before? What has happened to me?” “Yeah. Not the first, the second. Crowdophobia is your cross, No answer. not mine. It’s not crowds that wear me, it’s the kind of crowd that “Don? It’s OK for you to talk now, please.” doesn’t care at all about what I came to say. You can walk New York He didn’t say a word. I had explained the panorama of life to to London on the ocean, you can pull gold coins out of forever and him, and my messiah, as though he had heard all he needed in that still not make them care, you know?” one chance word about his happiness, had fallen fast asleep. 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 what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.” ----------------------- Page 37----------------------- 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. 7 “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 ednesday morning, it’s six o’clock, I’m not fallen. I turned it over carefully, and read. W awake and WHOOM!! there’s this enormous noise sudden and violent as some high-explosive symphony; in- stant 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 Argue 400-volt cat, fur straight-out exclamation points. for your limitations, The sky was cold-fire sunrise, the clouds alive in wild paint, and sure enough, but all of it blurred in the dynamite crescendo. they’re “STOP IT! STOP IT! OFF THE MUSIC, OFF IT!!” yours. 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. There was a lot I didn’t understand about messiahs. ----------------------- Page 38----------------------- “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.” 8 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 about 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 thea- ter spiraled and stretched the way it does in a good film, and I watched awhile for technical reasons... how each scene was de- e finished the day in Hammond, Wisconsin, fly- signed and fit to the next, why this scene now and not later on. I W ing a few Monday passengers, then we walked tried to look at it that way, but got spun up in the story and forgot. to town for dinner, and started back. About the part where Butch and Sundance are surrounded by “Don, I will grant you that this life can be interesting or dull or the entire Bolivian army, almost at the end, Shimoda touched my whatever we choose to make it. But even in my brilliant times I shoulder. I leaned toward him, watching the movie, wishing he have never been able to figure out why we’re here in the first place. could have kept whatever he was going to say till after it was over. Tell me something about that.” “Richard?” “Yeah.” We passed the hardware store (closed) and the movie theater (open: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and instead of answer- “Why are you here?” ing he stopped, turned back on the sidewalk. “It’s a good movie, Don. Sh.” Butch and Sundance, blood all “You have money, don’t you?” over them, were talking about why they ought to go to Australia. “Lots. What’s the matter?” “Why is it good?” he said. “Let’s see the show,” he said. “You buy?” “It’s fun. Sh. I’ll tell you later.” ----------------------- Page 39----------------------- “Snap out of it. Wake up. It’s all illusions.” that even in your brilliant times you have never been able to figure I was irked. “Donald, there’s just a few minutes more and then out why we are here.” we can talk all you want. But let me watch the movie, OK?” I remembered. “And the movie was my answer.” He whispered intensely, dramatically. “Richard, why are you “Yes.” here ” “Oh.” “Look, I’m here because you asked me to come in here!” I “You don’t understand,” he said. turned back and tried to watch the end. “No.” “You didn’t have to come, you could have said no thank you.” “That was a good movie,” he said, “but the world’s best movie “I LIKE THE MOVIE...” A man in front turned to look at is still an illusion, is it not? The pictures aren’t even moving; they me for a second. “I like the movie, Don; is there anything wrong only appear to move. Changing light that seems to move across a with that?” flat screen set up in the dark?” “Nothing at all,” he said, and he didn’t say another word till it “Well, yes.” I was beginning to understand. was over and we were walking again past the used-tractor lot and “The other people, any people anywhere who go to any movie out into the dark toward the field and the airplanes. It would be show, why are they there, when it is only illusions?” raining, before long. “Well, it’s entertainment,” I said. I thought about his odd behavior in the theater. “You do every- “Fun. That’s right. One.” thing for a reason, Don?” “Could be educational.” “Sometimes.” “Good. It is always that. Learning. Two.” “Why the movie? Why did you all of a sudden want to see “Fantasy, escape.” Sundance?” “That’s fun, too. One.” “You asked a question.” “Technical reasons. To see how a film is made.” “Yes. Do you have an answer?” “Learning. Two.” “That is my answer. We went to the movie because you asked a “Escape from boredom...” question. The movie was the answer to your question.” “Escape. You said that.” He was laughing at me, I knew it. “Social. To be with friends,” I said. “What was my question?” “Reason for going, but not for seeing the film. That’s fun, There was a long pained silence. “Your question, Richard, was anyway. One.” ----------------------- Page 40----------------------- Whatever I came up with fit his two fingers; people see films people are unhappy. They are unhappy because they have chosen for fun or for learning or for both together. to be unhappy, and, Richard, that is all right!” “And a movie is like a lifetime, Don, is that right?” “Hm.” “Yes.” “We are game-playing, fun-having creatures, we are the otters “Then why would anybody choose a bad lifetime, a horror of the universe. We cannot die, we cannot hurt ourselves any more movie?” than illusions on the screen can be hurt. But we can believe we’re “They not only come to the horror movie for fun, they know it hurt, in whatever agonizing detail we want. We can believe we’re is going to be a horror movie when they walk in,” he said. victims, killed and killing, shuddered around by good luck and bad “But why?...” luck.” “Do you like horror films?” “Many lifetimes?” I asked. “No.” “How many movies have you seen?” “Do you ever see them?” “Oh.” “No.” “Films about living on this planet, about living on other “But some people spend a lot of money and time to see horror, planets; anything that’s got space and time is all movie and all illu- or soap-opera problems that to other people are dull and bor- sion,” he said. “But for a while we can learn a huge amount and ing?...” He left the question for me to answer. have a lot of fun with our illusions, can we not?” “Yes.” “How far do you take this movie thing, Don?” “You don’t have to see their films and they don’t have to see “How far do you want? You saw the film tonight partly be- yours. That is called ‘freedom.’” cause I wanted to see it. Lots of people choose lifetimes because “But why would anybody want to be horrified ?Or bored?” they enjoy doing things together. The actors in the film tonight “Because they think they deserve it for horrifying somebody have played together in other films - before or after depends on else, or they like the excitement of horrification, or that boring is the which film you’ve seen first, or you can see them at the same time way they think films have to be. Can you believe that lots of people on different screens. We buy tickets to these films, paying admis- for reasons that are very sound to them enjoy believing that they sion by agreeing to believe in the reality of space and the reality of are helpless in their own films ?No, you can’t.” time... Neither one is true, but anyone who doesn’t want to pay “No, I can’t,” I said. that price cannot appear on this planet, or in any space-time sys- “Until you understand that, you will wonder why some tem at all.” ----------------------- Page 41----------------------- “Are there some people who don’t have any lifetimes at all in “Got me.” space-time?” “Whatever we give our consent to put into our imagination?” “Are there some people who never go to movies?” “Maybe so, Don.” “I see. They get their learning in different ways?” “You can hold a reel of film in your hands,” he said, “and it’s all “Right you are,” he said, pleased with me. “Space-time is a finished and complete - beginning, middle, end are all there that fairly primitive school. But a lot of people stay with the illusion same second, the same millionths of a second. The film exists be- even if it is boring, and they don’t want the lights turned on early.” yond the time that it records, and if you know what the movie is, “Who writes these movies, Don?” you know generally what’s going to happen before you walk into “Isn’t it strange how much we know if only we ask ourselves the theater: there’s going to be battles and excitement, winners and instead of somebody else? Who writes these movies, Richard?” losers, romance, disaster; you know that’s all going to be there. But “We do,” I said. in order to get caught up and swept away in it, in order to enjoy it to “Who acts?” its most, you have to put it in a projector and let it go through the “Us.” lens minute by minute... any illusion requires space and time to be “Who’s the cameraman, the projectionist, the theater man- experienced. So you pay your nickel and you get your ticket and ager, the ticket-taker, the distributor, and who watches them all you settle down and forget what’s going on outside the theater and happen? Who is free to walk out in the middle, any time, change the movie begins for you.” the plot whenever, who is free to see the same film over and over “And nobody’s really hurt? That’s just tomato-sauce blood?” again?” “No, it’s blood all right,” he said. “But it might as well be to- “Let me guess,” I said. “Anybody who wants to?” mato sauce for the effect it has on our real life...” “Is that enough freedom for you?” he said. “And reality?” “And is that why movies are so popular? That we instinctively “Reality is divinely indifferent, Richard. A mother doesn’t care know they are a parallel of our own lifetimes?” what part her child plays in his games; one day bad-guy, next day “Maybe so... maybe not. Doesn’t matter much, does it good-guy. The Is doesn’t even know about our illusions and What’s the projector?” games. It only knows Itself, and us in its likeness, perfect and “Mind,” I said. “No. Imagination. It’s our imagination, no finished.” matter what you say.” “I’m not sure I want to be perfect and finished. Talk about “What’s the film?” he asked. boredom...” ----------------------- Page 42----------------------- “Look at the sky,” he said, and it was such a quick subject- just as soon become a nice old Master of the World of Illusion. change that I looked at the sky. There was some broken cirrus, way Looks like maybe in another week?” up high, the first bit of moonlight silvering the edges. “Well, Richard, I hope not that long!” “Pretty sky,” I said. I looked at him carefully, but he wasn’t smiling. “It is a perfect sky?” “Well, it’s always a perfect sky, Don.” “Are you telling me that even though it’s changing every sec- ond, 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. “Per- fect, 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 ----------------------- Page 43----------------------- 9 he days blurred one into another. We flew as always, T but I had stopped counting summer by the names of towns or the money we earned from passengers. I began count- ing 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 Then be sure of one thing: the universe beautiful the and just and Is has imagined it perfect, quite a bit better than you the handbook said to me once. have. ----------------------- Page 44----------------------- “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?” 10 “It’s because I like you, Don, that I ask these things.” I smiled. “You need challenge. If you’d rather I picked 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 he afternoon was quiet... an occasional passenger to accept the praise which you heap upon me, I must in all honesty T now and then. Time between I practiced vapor- tell you this: it’s easy.” izing clouds. He pointed to a little puff of a cloud overhead. “There. Your I have been a flight instructor, and I know that students always turn. Ready? Go.” make easy things hard; I do know better, yet there was I a student I looked at the wisp of a thing, and it looked back at me. I again, frowning fiercely at my cumulus targets. I needed more thought it gone, thought an empty place where it was, poured teaching, for once, than practice. Shimoda was stretched out under visions of heat-rays up at it, asked it to reappear somewhere else, the Fleet’s wing, pretending to be asleep. I kicked him softly on the and slowly slowly, in one minute, in five, in seven, the cloud at last arm, and he opened his eyes. was gone. Other clouds got bigger, mine went away. “I can’t do it,” I said. “You’re not very fast, are you?” he said. “Yes you can,” he said, and closed his eyes again. “That was my first time! I’m just-beginning! Up against the ----------------------- Page 45----------------------- 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 is 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. ----------------------- Page 46----------------------- 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. e had landed in a huge grazing place next to a W 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 any 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.” ----------------------- Page 47----------------------- I saw it with my eyes. It was possible, obviously, because there “For what you have to say, it’s more precise to talk in words. he stood, so I walked out to join him. It felt like walking on clear Speak.” blue linoleum, and I laughed. “If we can walk on water, and breathe it and drink it, why can’t “Donald, what are you doing to me?” we do the same to land?” “I am merely showing you what everybody learns, sooner or “Yes. Good. You will notice...” later,” he said, “and you’re handy now.” He walked to the shore easily as walking a painted lake. But “But I’m...” when his feet touched the ground, the sand and grass at the edge, “Look. The water can be solid” - he stamped his foot and the he began to sink, until with a few slow steps he was up to his sound was leather on rock - “or not.” He stamped again and water shoulders in earth and grass. It was as though the pond had sud- splashed over us both. “Got the feel of that? Try it.” denly become an island, and the land about had turned to sea. He How quickly we get used to miracles! In less than a minute I swam for a moment in the pasture, splashing it about him in dark began to think that walking on water is possible, is natural, loam drops, then floated on top of it, then rose and walked on it. It is... well, so what was suddenly miraculous to see a man walking on the ground! “But if the water is solid now, how can we drink it?” I stood on the pond and applauded his performance. He “Same way we walk on it, Richard. It isn’t solid, and it isn’t bowed, and applauded mine. liquid. You and I decide what it’s going to be for us. If you want I walked to the edge of the pond, thought the earth to liquid water to be liquid, think it liquid, act as if it’s liquid, drink it. If you and touched it with my toe. Ripples spread into the grass in rings. want it to be air act as if it’s air, breathe it. Try.” How deep is the ground? I nearly asked aloud. The ground will be Maybe it’s something about the presence of an advanced soul, as deep as I think it will be. Two feet deep, I thought, it will be two I thought. Maybe these things are allowed to happen in a certain feet deep, and I’ll wade. radius, fifty feet in a circle around them... I stepped confidently into the shore and sank over my head, I knelt on the surface and dipped my hand into the pond. an instant dropoff. It was black underground, scary, and I fought to Liquid. Then I lay down and put my face into the blue of it and the surface, holding my breath, flailing out for some solid water, for breathed, trusting. It breathed like warm liquid oxygen, no chok- the edge of the pond to hold on to. ing or gasping. I sat up and looked a question at him, expecting him He sat on the grass and laughed. to know what was in my mind. “You are a remarkable student, do you know that?” “Speak,” he said. “I ain’t no student at all! Get me out of here!” “Why do I have to speak?” “Get yourself out.” ----------------------- Page 48----------------------- 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 The world clothes, hanging the wet stuff on the flying wires to dry. is your exercise-book, the pages “Richard, don’t forget what you did today. It is easy to forget on which you do your sums. our times of knowing, to think they’ve been dreams or old mira- It is not reality, cles, one time. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a although you can express reality dream.” there if you wish. “The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. You are also Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” free to write nonsense, “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the or lies, or to tear difference?” the pages. I nodded, almost understanding. Later I sneaked a look in the handbook. ----------------------- Page 49----------------------- “That’s my little way of helping you be precise in your think- ing,” he said mildly. 12 “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 The question. How is it that you can move the illusion of a limited sense original sin is to of identity, expressed in this belief of a space-time continuum as limit the Is. your ‘body,’ through the illusion of material restriction that is called a ‘wall’?” Don’t. “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?” t was an easy warm afternoon between rain-showers, “RICHARD! You had it nearly right and then blew it all to I sidewalks wet on our way out of town. pieces! I cannot walk through walls... when you say that, you’re “You can walk through walls, can’t you, Don?” assuming things I don’t assume at all, and if I do assume them, the “No.” answer is, ‘I can’t.’” “When you say no to something I know is yes, that means you “But it’s so hard to put everything so precisely, Don. Don’t you don’t like the way I said the question.” know what I mean?” “We certainly are observant, aren’t we?” he said. “So just because something is hard, you don’t try to do it “Is the problem with walk or with walls?” Walking was hard at first, but you practiced at it and now you make “Yes, and worse. Your question presumes that I exist in one it look easy.” limited place-time and move to another place-time. Today I’m not I sighed. “Yeah. OK. Forget the question.” in the mood to accept your presumptions about me.” “I’ll forget it. My question is, can you?” He looked at me as I frowned. He knew what I was asking. Why didn’t he just though he hadn’t a care in the world. answer me straight and let me get on to finding out how he does “So you’re saying that body is illusion and wall is illusion but these things identity is real and that can’t be hemmed by illusions.” ----------------------- Page 50----------------------- “I’m not saying that. You’re saying that.” The last building in town was a feed and grain warehouse, a “But it’s true.” big place built of orange brick. It was almost as if he had decided to “Naturally,” he said. take a different way back to the airplanes, turning down some se- “How do you do it?” cret shortcut alley. The shortcut was through the brick wall. He “Richard, you don’t do anything. You see it done already, and turned abruptly to the right, into the wall, and he was gone. I think it is.” now that if I had turned at once with him, I could have gone “Gee, that sounds easy.” through it, too. But I just stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the “It’s like walking. You wonder how it ever came hard for you place where he had been. When I put out my hand and touched the to learn.” brick, it was solid brick. “Don, walking through walls, it isn’t hard for me now; it is “Some day, Donald,” I said. “Some day...” I walked alone the impossible.” long way back to the airplanes. “Do you think that maybe if you say impossible over and over again a thousand times that suddenly hard things will come easy for you?” “I’m sorry. It is possible, and I’ll do it when it is right for me to “Donald,” I said when I got to the field, “I have come to the conclu- do it.” sion that you just don’t live in this world.” “He walks on water, folks, and he is discouraged because he He looked at me startled from the top of his wing, where he doesn’t walk through walls.” was learning to pour gas into the tank. “Of course not. Can you tell “But that was easy, and this...” me one person who does?” “Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them,” he “What do you mean, can I tell you one person who does. ME! I sang. “Did you not a week ago swim in the earth itself?” live in this world!” “I did that.” “Excellent,” he said, as though through independent study I “And is not wall just vertical earth? Does it matter that much to had uncovered a hidden mystery. “Remind me to buy you lunch you which direction the illusion runs? Horizontal illusions are con- today... I marvel at the way you never stop learning.” querable, but vertical illusions aren’t?” I puzzled over that. He wasn’t being sarcastic or ironic; he “I think you’re getting through to me, Don.” had meant just what he said. “What do you mean? Of course I He looked at me and smiled. “The time I get through to you is live in this world. Me and about four billion other people. the time to leave you alone for a while.” It’s you who...” ----------------------- Page 51----------------------- “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 - man- datory 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 melt- If ing...” I said. you will “I’m sorry. I would have been so happy to buy. But, ah, that’s practice being fictional over and done now, best forgotten.” for a while, you will understand Though it was the last time I accused him of not living in this that fictional characters are world, it took me a long time to understand the words where the sometimes more real than handbook opened: people with bodies and heartbeats. ----------------------- Page 52----------------------- 13 Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. e are all free to do whatever we want to do,” W 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?” ----------------------- Page 53----------------------- “Yeah. Sounds like there’s somebody...” He got up, walked small person and I could have looked threatening. He turned his into the dark. He laughed suddenly, said a name I couldn’t catch. head away. “Sir, I am sorry! I am sorry! Please forget that I said “It’s OK,” I heard him say. “No, we’d be glad to have you... no anything about blood! But you see...” need you standing around... come on, you’re welcome, really...” “What are you saying?” I was the more fierce because I was The voice was heavily accented, not quite Russian, nor Czech, scared. “What in the hell are you saying, mister? I don’t know what more Transylvanian. “Thank you. I do not wish to impose myself you are, are you some kind of VAM-?” upon your evening...” Shimoda cut me off before I could say the word. “Richard, our The man he brought with him to the firelight was, well, he was guest was talking, and you interrupted. Please go ahead, sir; my unusual to find in a midwest night. A small lean wolflike fellow, friend is a little hasty.” frightening to the eye, dressed in evening clothes, a black cape “Donald,” I said, “this guy...” lined in red satin, he was uncomfortable in the light. “Be quiet!” “I was passing by,” he said. “The field is a shortcut to my That surprised me so much that I was quiet, and looked a sort house...” of terrified question at the man, caught from his native darkness “Is it?” Shimoda did not believe the man, knew he was lying, into our firelight. and at the same time did all he could to keep from laughing out “Please to understand. I did not choose to be born vampire. Is loud. I hoped to understand before long. unfortunate. I do not have many friends. But I must have a certain “Make yourself comfortable,” I said. “Can we help you at all?” small amount of fresh blood every night or I writhe in terrible pain, I really didn’t feel that helpful, but he was so shrinking, I did want longer than that without it and I cannot live! Please, I will be deeply him to be at ease, if he could. hurt - I will die - if you do not allow me to suck your blood... just a He looked on me with a desperate smile that turned me to ice. small amount, more than a pint I do not need.” He advanced a step “Yes, you can help me. I need this very much or I would not ask. toward me, licking his lips, thinking that Shimoda somehow con- May I drink your blood? Just some? It is my food, I need human trolled me and would make me submit. blood...” “One more step and there will be blood, all right. Mister, you Maybe it was the accent, he didn’t know English that well or I touch me and you die...” I wouldn’t have killed him, but I did didn’t understand his words, but I was on my feet quicker than I want to tie him up, at least, before we talked much more. had been in many a month, hay flying into the fire from my quick- He must have believed me, for he stopped and sighed. He ness. turned to Shimoda. “You have made your point?” The man stepped back. I am generally harmless, but I am not a “I think so. Thank you.” ----------------------- Page 54----------------------- The vampire looked up at me and smiled, completely at ease, I was quiet for a long time, thinking about that. I had always enjoying himself hugely, an actor on stage when the show is over. believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don’t hurt “I won’t drink your blood, Richard,” he said in perfect friendly another, and this didn’t fit. There was something missing. English, no accent at all. As I watched he faded as though he was “The thing that puzzles you,” he said, “is an accepted saying turning out his own light... in five seconds he had disappeared. that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We Shimoda sat down again by the fire. “Am I ever glad you don’t choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us mean what you say!” who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he’d be hurt if I was still trembling with adrenalin, ready for my fight with a you didn’t let him? That’s his decision to be hurt, that’s his choice. monster. “Don, I’m not sure I’m built for this. Maybe you’d better What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; tell me what’s going on. Like, for instance, what... was that?” ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he “Dot was a wompire from Tronsylwania,” he said in words doesn’t want the holly stake, he’s free to resist, in whatever way he thicker than the creature’s own. “Or to be more precise, dot was a wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices.” thought-form of a wompire from Tronsylwania. If you ever want to “When you look at it that way...” make a point, you think somebody isn’t listening, whip ‘em up a “Listen,” he said, “it’s important. We are all. Free. To do. What- little thought-form to demonstrate what you mean. Do you think I ever. We want. To do.” 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 say we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.” ----------------------- Page 55----------------------- 14 Every person, all the events oft your life are there because you have drawn them there. Don’t you get lonely, Don?” It was at the cafe in Ryerson, Ohio, that it occurred to me to ask him. What you choose to do with them is “I’m surprised you’d...” up to you. “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 ----------------------- Page 56----------------------- hamburgers were good. He ate in silence for a time and so did I, “No. I wanted to correct that, when I was working, but it was wondering what he would say. a long uphill fight. Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they “Well, Richard, we’re magnets, aren’t we? Not magnets. We’re didn’t have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to mag- could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers. Also, netize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, they didn’t have sesame seeds.” we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious I knew for a fact that they had sesame seeds, but I let this lie about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some go past. “I’m supposed to imagine this magnetizing? I imagine things and leaves others untouched.” some lovely wise mystical lady appearing in a hayfield crowd in I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. “You left out one thing. Tarragon, Illinois? I can do that, but that’s all that is, that’s just How do I do it?” my imagination.” “You don’t do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts He looked despairingly to heaven, represented for the mo- like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, ment by the tin-plate ceiling and cold lights of Em and Edna’s Cafe. as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what “Just your imagination? Of course it’s your imagination! This world I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automati- is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, cally that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and well.” profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn’t “But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty change the Is one whit, doesn’t affect reality at all. But we are talk- lonely.” ing about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every sec- He looked at me strangely over his hamburger. “Humbug on ond of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the faith. Takes zero faith. What it takes is imagination.” He swept the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves.” table between us clean, pushing salt and french fries out of the way, He lined his fork and knife as though he was building a bridge ketchup, forks and knives, so that I wondered what was going to from his place to mine. “You wonder what your dreams say? Just as happen, what would be materialized before my very eyes. well you look at the things of your waking life and ask what they “If you have imagination as a grain of sesame seed,” he said, stand for. You with airplanes in your life, every time you turn herding an example seed to the middle of the clearing, “all things around.” are possible to you.” “Well, Don, yes.” I wished he would slow down, not pile this I looked at the sesame seed, and then at him. “Wish you Mes- on me all at once; mile a minute is too fast for new ideas. siahs would get together and agree. I thought the tiling was faith, “If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to when the world goes against me.” you?” ----------------------- Page 57----------------------- “Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and five inches long, iridescing blue to silver at the edges. A bright clear setting myself free.” feather floating there in the dark. “How clear do you want it? The dream awake is the same: “Surround it in golden light, if you want. That’s a healing your will to be free of all things that tie you back - routine, author- thing, to help make it real, but it works in magnetizing, too.” ity, boredom, gravity. What you haven’t realized is that you’re al- I surrounded my feather in gold glow. “OK.” ready free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame “That’s it. You can open your eyes now.” seeds of this... you’re already supreme lord of your magician’s life. I opened my eyes. “Where’s my feather?” Only imagination! What are you saying?” “If you had it clear in your thought, it is even this moment The waitress looked at him strangely from time to time, drying barreling down on you like a Mack truck.” dishes, listening, puzzling over who this was. “My feather? Like a Mack truck?” “So you never get lonely, Don?” I said. “Figuratively, Richard.” “Unless I feel like it. I have friends on other dimensions that All that afternoon I looked for the feather to appear, and it are around me from time to time. So do you.” didn’t. It was evening, dinnertime over a hot turkey sandwich, that “No. I mean on this dimension, this imaginary world. Show I saw it. A picture and small print on the carton of milk. Packaged for me what you mean, give me a little miracle of the magnet... I do Scott Dairies by Blue Feather Farms, Bryan, Ohio. “Don! My feather!” want to learn this.” He looked, and shrugged his shoulders. “I thought you “You show me,” he said. “To bring anything into your life, wanted the actual feather.” imagine that it’s already there.” “Well, any feather for openers, don’t you think?” “Like what? Like my lovely lady?” “Did you see just the feather all alone, or were you holding the “Anything. Not your lady. Something small, at first.” feather in your hand?” “I’m supposed to practice now?” “All alone.” “Yes.” “That explains it. If you want to be with what you’re magnetiz- “OK.... A blue feather.” ing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too. Sorry I didn’t say He looked at me blankly. “Richard? A blue feather?” that.” “You said anything not a lady something little.” A spooky strange feeling. It worked! I had consciously mag- He shrugged. “Fine. A blue feather. Imagine the feather. netized my first thing! “Today a feather,” I said, “tomorrow the Visualize it, every line and edge of it, the tip, V-splits where it’s world!” torn, fluff around the quill. Just for a minute. Then let it go.” “Be careful, Richard,” he said hauntingly, “or you’ll be I closed my eyes for a minute and saw an image in my mind, sorry...” ----------------------- Page 58----------------------- 15 The truth you speak has no past and no future. It is, and that’s all it needs to be. lay on my back under the Fleet, wiping oil from I 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 irre- sponsible 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?” ----------------------- Page 59----------------------- “Part Two: Everybody else is free to do whatever they feel like “Just a little humor, Don, liven up the evening. A little harm- doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able to Respond, able less change-of-pacer, there.” to answer for the way we choose to live. There’s only one person “You’d best be plenty careful how you liven up the evenings. we have to answer to, of course, and that is...?” Problems are not jokes and games to the people who come to you, “... ourselves,” Don said, replying for the imaginary crowd of unless they are highly advanced themselves, and that sort know seekers sitting around. they’re their own messiah. You are being given the answers, so “We don’t even have to answer to ourselves, if we don’t feel speak them out. Try that ‘Beats me’ stuff and you’ll see how fast a like it... there’s nothing wrong with being irresponsible. But most mob can burn a man at the stake.” of us find it more interesting to know why we act as we do, why we I drew myself up proudly. “Seeker, thou comest to me for an make our choices just so - whether we choose to watch a bird or answer, and unto thee I do answer: The Golden Rule doesn’t work. step on an ant or work for money at something we’d rather not be How would you like to meet a masochist who did unto others as he doing.” I winced a little. “Is that too long an answer?” would have them do unto him? Or a worshiper of the Crocodile He nodded. “Way too long.” God, who craves the honor of being thrown alive into the pit? Even “OK.... How do you hope to impress the world...” I rolled the Samaritan, who started the whole thing... what made him out from under the plane and rested for a while in the shade of the think that the man he found lying at the roadside wanted to have wings. “How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I oil poured in his wounds? What if the man was using those quiet allow me to live as I choose.” moments to heal himself spiritually, enjoying the challenge of it?” I He threw a happy proud smile at me: “Spoken like a true mes- sounded convincing, to me. siah! Simple, direct, quotable, and it doesn’t answer the question “Even if the Rule was changed to Do unto others as they want to unless somebody takes the time to think carefully about it.” be done to, we can’t know how anybody but ourselves wants to be “Try me some more.” It was delicious, to watch my own mind done to. What the Rule means, and how we apply it honestly, is work, when we did this. this: Do unto others as you truly feel like doing unto others. Meet a “‘Master,’” he said, “‘I want to be loved, I’m kind, I do unto masochist with this rule and you do not have to flog him with his others as I would have them do unto me, but still I don’t have any whip, simply because that is what he would want you to do unto friends and I’m all alone.’ How are you going to answer that one?” him. Nor are you required to throw the worshiper to the croc- “Beats me,” I said. “I don’t have the foggiest idea what to odiles.” I looked at him. “Too wordy?” tell you.” “As always. Richard, you are going to lose ninety percent of “WHAT ” your audience unless you learn to keep it short!” ----------------------- Page 60----------------------- “Well, what’s wrong with losing ninety percent of my audi- ence?” I shot back at him. “What’s wrong with losing ALL my au- dience? 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 Here is it,” he said. a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t. ----------------------- Page 61----------------------- 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 16 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 somebody 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?” ardware stores are always long places, shelves Shimoda put the guitar back in its place and walked out into H going back into forever. the sunlight with me. “Or if somebody came by who spoke Russian In Hayward Hardware I had gone hunting back in the dim, or Persian, do you think any master worth his aura would not needing three-eighths-inch nuts and bolts and lockwashers for the know what he was saying? Or if he wanted to skin a D-10 Cat or fly tailskid of the Fleet. Shimoda browsed patiently as I looked, since an airplane, that he couldn’t do it?” of course he didn’t need anything from a hardware store. The “So you really know all things, don’t you?” whole economy would collapse, I thought, if everybody was like “You do too, of course. I just know that I know all things.” him, making whatever they wanted out of thought-forms and thin “I could play the guitar like that?” air, repairing things without parts or labor. “No, you’d have your own style, different from mine.” At last I found the half-dozen bolts I needed and journeyed “How do I do that?” I wasn’t going to run back and buy the with them back toward the counter, where the owner had some guitar, I was just curious. soft music playing. Greensleeves; it was a melody that has haunted “Just give up all your inhibitions and all your beliefs that you me happily since I was a boy, played now on a lute over some can’t play. Touch the thing as though it was a part of your life, hidden sound system... strange to find in a town of four hundred which it is, in some alternate lifetime. Know that it’s all right for you souls. to play it well, and let your nonconscious self take over your fingers Turned out it was strange for Hayward, too, for it wasn’t a and play.” ----------------------- Page 62----------------------- I had read something about that, hypnotic learning, where He didn’t reach into his pocket or bring out his wallet. He just students were told they were masters of art, and so played and opened his right hand and there was a flying license, as though he painted and wrote like master artists. “That’s a hard thing, Don, to had been carrying it around, waiting for me to ask. It wasn’t faded let go of my knowing that I can’t play a guitar.” or bent, and I thought that ten seconds ago it hadn’t existed at all. “Then it will be a hard thing for you to play the guitar. It will But I took it and looked. It was an official pilot’s certificate, take years of practice before you give yourself permission to do it Department of Transportation seal on it, Donald William Shimoda, right, before your self-conscious mind tells you that you have suf- with an Indiana address, licensed commercial pilot with ratings for fered enough to have earned the right to play well.” single- and multi-engine land airplanes, instruments, and gliders. “Why didn’t it take me long to learn how to fly ?That’s sup- “You don’t have your seaplane ratings, or helicopter?” posed to be hard, but I picked it up pretty fast.” “I’ll have those if I need to have them,” he said, so mysteri- “Did you want to fly?” ously that I burst out laughing before he did. The man sweeping “Nothing else mattered! More than anything! I was looking the walk in front of the International Harvester place looked at us down on clouds, and the chimney-smoke in the mornings, going and smiled, too. right straight up in the calm and I could see... Oh. I get your point. “What about me?” I said. “I want my airline transport rating.” You’re going to say, ‘You never felt that way about guitars, did “You’re gonna have to forge your own licenses,” he said. you?’” “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.” ----------------------- Page 63----------------------- 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, 17 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!” n the Jeff Sykes radio talk show, I saw a Donald “The people who work for a living are doing what they most O Shimoda I had never seen before. The show began want to do,” Shimoda said. “Just as much as the people who play at 9:00 p.m. and went till midnight, from a room no bigger than a for a living...” watchmaker’s, lined about with dials and knobs and racks of “Scripture says by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy tape-cartridge commercial spots. bread, and in sorrow shalt thou eat of it.” Sykes opened by asking if there wasn’t something illegal “We’re free to do that, too, if we want.” about flying around the country in an ancient airplane, taking “‘Do your thing!’ I get so tired of people like you saying do people for rides. your thing, do your thing! You let everybody run wild, and they’ll The answer is no, there is nothing illegal about it, the planes destroy the world. They are destroying the world right now. Look are inspected as carefully as any jet transport. They are safer and at what is happening to the green living things and the rivers and the oceans!” stronger than most sheet-metal modem airplanes, and all that’s needed is license and farmer’s permission. But Shimoda didn’t say She gave him fifty different openings to reply, and he ignored that. “No one can stop us from doing what we want to do, Jeff,” he them all. “It’s OK if the world is destroyed,” he said. “There are a said. thousand million other worlds for us to create and choose from. As Now that is quite true, but it had none of the tact that is called long as people want planets, there will be planets to live on.” ----------------------- Page 64----------------------- That was hardly calculated to soothe the caller, and I looked at “Anybody who’s ever mattered, anybody who’s ever been Shimoda, astonished. He was speaking from his viewpoint of happy, anybody who’s ever given any gift into the world has been a perspectives over lots of lifetimes, learnings only a master can ex- divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest. No excep- pect to recall. The caller was naturally assuming that the discussion tions.” had to do with the reality of this one world, birth is the beginning It was a male caller next, while the evening fled by. “Selfish! and death is the end. He knew that... why did he ignore it Mister, do you know what the antichrist is?” “Everything’s OK, is it?” the caller said into her telephone. For a second Shimoda smiled and relaxed in his chair. It was as “There’s no evil in this world, no sin going on all around us ?That if he knew the caller personally. doesn’t bother you, does it?” “Perhaps you could tell me,” he said. “Nothing there to be bothered about, ma’am. We see just one “Christ said that we have to live for our fellow man. Antichrist little fleck of the whole that is life, and that one fleck is fake. Every- says be selfish, live for yourself and let other people go to hell.” thing balances, and nobody suffers and nobody dies without their “Or heaven, or wherever else they feel like going.” consent. Nobody does what they don’t want to do. There is no “You are dangerous, do you know that, mister? What if every- good and there is no evil, outside of what makes us happy and body listened to you and did just whatever they felt like doing what makes us unhappy.” What do you think would happen then?” None of it was making the lady on the phone any calmer. But “I think that this would probably be the happiest planet in this she broke suddenly and said simply, “How do you know all these part of the galaxy,” he said. things that you say? How do you know what you say is true?” “Mister, I am not sure that I want my children to hear what you “I don’t know they’re true,” he said. “I believe them because are saying.” it’s fun to believe them.” “What is it that your children want to hear?” I narrowed my eyes. He could have said that he had tried it “If we are all free to do whatever we want to do, then I’m free and it works... the healings, the miracles, the practical living that to come out in that field with my shotgun and blow your fool head made his thinking true and workable. But he didn’t say that. Why off.” There was a reason. I held my eyes barely open, most of the “Of course you’re free to do that.” room gray, just a blurred fuzzy image of Shimoda leaning to talk There was a heavy click on the line. Somewhere in town there into the microphone. He was saying all these things straight out, was at least one angry man. The others, and the angry women too, offering no choices, making no effort to help the poor listeners were on the telephone; every button on the machine was lit and understand. flashing. ----------------------- Page 65----------------------- 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, Jeff Sykes had told everybody who we were, that our airplanes you must sacrifice were parked on John Thomas’ hayfield on State 41, and that we boredom. slept nights under the wing. It is not always an easy I felt these waves of anger, from people frightened for their sacrifice. 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. ----------------------- Page 66----------------------- 18 Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before ext noon, before the people came to fly, he stop- you can meet N ped by my wing. “Remember what you said when again. you found my problem, that nobody would listen, no matter how And meeting many miracles I did?” again, after moments or “No.” lifetimes, is certain for “Do you remember that time, Richard?” those who are “Yeah, I remember the time. You looked so lonely, all of a sud- friends. den. 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. ----------------------- Page 67----------------------- 19 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 sabre. I remember now that I didn’t care about him. I was not The mark enraged or shocked or horrified. The only thing that mattered was of your ignorance is the depth to get to the cockpit of the Travel Air as fast as I could and to talk of your belief in injustice with my friend. and tragedy. It looked as if he had been hit by a bomb; the left half of his What the caterpillar body was all torn leather and cloth and meat and blood, a soggy calls the end of the world, mass of scarlet. the master calls a His head was tilted down by the fuel primer knob, at the right butterfly. 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 he words in the Handbook the day before were the only wet across his face. “Richard, what does it look like?” T warning I had. One second there was the normal little I was enormously relieved to hear him talk. If he could talk, if crowd waiting to fly, his airplane taxiing in, stopping by them in a he could think, he would be all right. whirl of propeller-wind, a casual good scene for me from the top “Well, if I didn’t know better, buddy, I’d say you had a bit of a wing of the Fleet as I poured gas into the tank. The next second problem.” there was a sound like a tire exploding and the crowd itself He didn’t move, except just his head a little bit, and suddenly I exploded and ran. The tire on the Travel Air was untouched, the was scared again, more by his stillness than by the mess and the engine ticked over at idle as it had a moment before, but there was a blood. “I didn’t think you had enemies.” foot-wide hole in the fabric under the pilot’s cockpit and Shimoda “I don’t. That was... a friend. Better not to have... some hater was pressed to the other side, head slammed down, his body still bring all sorts of trouble... into his life... murdering me.” as sudden death. ----------------------- Page 68----------------------- 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 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. end ----------------------- Page 69----------------------- Epilogue y autumn, I had flown south with the warm air. Good B 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. ----------------------- Page 70----------------------- Still, one river of time had stopped for me that summer noon “Hi, fella,” he said. when Shimoda had been shot. It was an ending I could neither I couldn’t see for tears. There is no dying, there is no dying at believe nor understand; it was stalled there and I lived it a thousand all, and this man was my friend. times again, hoping it might somehow change. It never did. What “Donald!... You’re alive! What are you trying to do?” I ran and was I supposed to learn that day threw my arms around him and he was real. I could feel the leather One night late in October, after I got scared and left a crowd in of his flying jacket, crush his arms inside it. Mississippi, I came down in a little empty place just big enough to “Hi,” he said. “Do you mind? What I am trying to do is to land the Fleet. patch this hole, here.” Once again before I slept, I thought back to that last moment - I was so glad to see him, nothing was impossible. why did he die? There was no reason for it. If what he said was “With the dope and fabric?” I said. “With dope and fabric true... you’re trying to fix...? You don’t do it that way, you see it perfect, There was no one now to talk with as we had talked, no one to already done...” and as I said the words I passed my hand like a learn from, no one to stalk and attack with my words, to sharpen screen in front of the ragged bloody hole and when my hand my new bright mind against. Myself? Yes, but I wasn’t half the fun moved by, the hole was gone. There was just pure mirror-painted that Shimoda had been, who taught by keeping me always off- airplane left, seamless fabric from nose to tail. balance with his spiritual karate. “So that’s how you do it!” he said, his dark eyes proud of the Thinking this I slept, and sleeping, dreamed. 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 bal- He was kneeling on the grass of a meadow, his back to me, patch- anced over it. “You’re cooking something, Don! You know, I’ve ing the hole in the side of the Travel Air where the shotgun blast never seen you cook anything. What you got?” had been. There was a roll of Grade-A aircraft fabric and a can of “Pan-bread,” he said matter-of-factly. “The one last thing I butyrate dope by his knee. want to do in your life is show you how this is done.” I knew that I was dreaming, and I knew also that this was real. He cut two pieces with his pocket knife and handed me one. “DON!” The flavor is still with me as I write... the flavor of sawdust and old He stood slowly and turned to face me, smiling at my sorrow library paste, warmed in lard. and my joy. “What do you think?” he said. “Don...” ----------------------- Page 71----------------------- “The Phantom’s Revenge,” he grinned at me. “I made it with appearances, and unsaddened by them,” he added heavily, “you plaster.” He put his part back in the pan. “To remind you, if ever could use some gory appearances for your training. And fun for you want to move somebody to learn, do it with your knowing and me, too. Dying is like diving into a deep lake on a hot day. There’s not with your pan-bread, OK?” the shock of that sharp cold change, the pain of it for a second, and “NO! Love me, love my pan-bread! It’s the staff of life, Don!” then accepting is a swim in reality. But after so many times, even “Very well. But I guarantee - your first supper with anybody is the shock wears off.” going to be your last if you feed them that stuff.” After a long moment he stood. “Only a few people are in- We laughed and were quiet, and I looked at him in the silence. terested in what you have to say, but that’s all right. You don’t tell “Don, you’re all right, aren’t you?” the quality of a master by the size of his crowds, remember.” “You expect me to be dead? Come now, Richard.” “Don, I’ll try it, I promise. But I’ll run away forever as soon as I “And this is not a dream? I won’t forget seeing you now?” stop having fun with the job.” “No. This is a dream. It’s a different space-time and any differ- Nobody touched the Travel Air, but its propeller turned, its ent space-time is a dream for a good sane earthling, which you are engine spouted cold blue smoke, and the rich sound of it filled the going to be for a while yet. But you will remember, and that will meadow. “Promise accepted, but...” and he looked at me and change your thinking and your life.” smiled as if he didn’t understand me. “Will I see you again? Are you coming back?” “Accepted but what? Speak. Words. Tell me. What’s wrong?” “I don’t think so. I want to get beyond times and spaces... I “You don’t like crowds,” he said. already am, as a matter of fact. But there is this link between us, “Not pulling at me, no. I like talk and ideas back and forth, but between you and me and the others of our family. You get stopped the worship thing you went through, and the dependence... I by some problem, hold it in your head and go to sleep and we’ll trust you’re not asking me... I’ve already run away...” meet here by the airplane and talk about it, if you want.” “Maybe I’m just dumb, Richard, and maybe I don’t see some- “Don...” thing obvious that you see very well, and if I don’t see it will you “What?” please tell me, but what is wrong with writing it down on paper? Is “Why the shotgun? Why did that happen? I don’t see any there a rule that a messiah can’t write what he thinks is true, the power and glory in getting your heart blown out by a shotgun.” things that have been fun for him, that work for him? And then He sat down in the grass by the wing. “Since I was not a maybe if people don’t like what he says, instead of shooting him front-page Messiah, Richard, I didn’t have to prove anything to they can bum his words, hit the ashes with a stick? And if they do anybody. And since you need the practice in being unflustered by like it, they can read the words another time, or write them on a ----------------------- Page 72----------------------- 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,