by Richard Bach
“Please don’t.”
“There was another airplane landing toward me. We missed, when I turned.”
“The hand of God.”
“In the desert, 1958. I was going to hit the ground. There was…”
“…an updraft. Lifted your airplane…”
“Lifted? Sheared rivets, nine something G’s, blacked me out till I was in the air, safe again.”
“You heard, when I spoke.”
“I never understood. The desert was cold, early morning, I was going down at 350 knots in a gunnery range, I pulled up way late, knew I was going to hit the ground, and then this blackout, this explosion lifted the F-86 like a toy. I knew it couldn’t be an updraft. Never knew what happened. Never heard anyone explain.”
“I explained.”
“I told you then! Yes, I understand the hand of God! But how did it…”
I could tell she was shaking her head. “You still don’t get it, do you?”
I opened my eyes, saw an image of a lovely mist vaporizing. “When you got in trouble, we gave you a second or two to do something when you could,” she said. “Once, when you couldn’t, we changed space-time. The one time, call it an updraft.”
“But I was thirty degrees descending,” I said to where she had been. “Fifteen thousand pounds coming down at three hundred some knots, there’s no updraft…”
There was a laugh. “The hand of God,” she said.
“Where were you when Puff and I crashed?”
“You needed to learn about healing. There’s more to learn. Puff’s fine. The spirit of her is fine.”
“And me?”
“You’re a perfect expression of perfect Love, perfect Life, here and now.”
“Do you have to be invisible?”
There was no answer.
I turned back to Shimoda.
“She said don’t open your eyes,” he told me.
“What is so important about closing my eyes!”
“What’s so important about opening them? They tell you what’s true? Even when she doesn’t live in your world of space and time?”
“Well…”
“You’ll see her again. Remember you wrote about a crew of angels, aboard the ship of your life?”
“Yes. A navigator, a defender, a carpenter and a sailmaker who keep the ship sailing, topmen at the crosstrees, trimming the sails, furling them in storms…”
“She’s there, too. You’re the commander, she’s the captain’s mate. You’ll see her again.”
Captain’s mate, I thought. How I miss her now!
In the silence of the field I had time to think. “You didn’t like the Messiah-job. You told me so. Too many people, too many expecting magic, no one caring why. And the drama: someone had to kill you.”
“Ah, so true.”
“So what’s your job now?”
“Instead of crowds, I have one person. Instead of magics, maybe there’s understanding. Instead of drama, there’s…well, some. Your airplane crash was dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
More silence. There was the crash again. Why does he say that?
“Some of us tried Messiahing,” he said. “Nobody’s made it a success. Crowds, magic, suicide, murders. Most of us have stopped the work. All of us, I think. We never knew there would be so much resistance to a few simple ideas.“
“Resistance to what? What ideas?”
“Remember what she said: You are a perfect expression of perfect Love?”
I nodded.
“That’s one.”
Sabryna, too. “Yes. I felt healed, over here, like she said. No pain, no injury, thinking’s clear. But back there, in the hospital …something happened. The airplane crash?”
There were no customers for our flights, early in the morning.
“Why you, Richard?” he said. “You believe a crash ‘happened’ because you have no control over events?”
Not a word about his life, what had happened for him, who he was now.
“Tell me,” he said, “I’m curious. Why do you believe that you crashed your airplane.”
“I didn’t crash anything! They said I hit the wires, Don! I didn’t see them!”
“That explains it. You’re a master when things go well, you’re a victim when they go out of control.” He was laughing at me.
“I didn’t see…” Anyone else would have said he was crazy, not me.
“Why, I wonder,” he said, “did you convince everyone you crashed?”
I was determined not to be a victim, even if I were. “For the…for the first time, Don, I had…had to fight for my life. I never had to do that.”
“You will now. You know you’re going to win.”
I smiled at his certainty. “Right here, I’d say so. In this dream, I’ve already won. On the other side, something’s happened. I’m not sure.”
Is this a world of sides? I thought. This side I’m perfect. The mortal side, I can die?
“There are no sides,” he said. “You’re right. One’s a dream, so’s the other. There are beliefs. Here, you believe you’re fine, there you’ll believe you’ll fight for your life. What if you can’t?”
“Of course I can. I’m…I’m already perfect here and now.”
“Well said.”
“Nothing can hurt us, ever, can it?”
He smiled. “People die all the time.”
“But they’re not hurt. They come here, somewhere like this, they’re perfect again.”
“Of course,” he said. “If they want to. Dying, the end of life, that’s a belief.“ He frowned. “Hospitals, you don’t care for. Physicians are strangers to you. Yet all of a sudden they’re in your life. So what do you do with them, about them? Live, day by day, clawing your way back from your illusions of harm, to the belief of the person you thought you were. Another wrong belief. Yet it’s your belief.”
“You’re a thought form, aren’t you, Don? You’re not a real image. This is a dream, the hayfield, the airplanes, the bright sunlight?”
He blinked at me, changing the talk. “Not a real image,” he said. “No such thing as a real image. The only real is Love. I’m a thought-form, like you.” A little smile from him. “We’re living our own stories, you and me, aren’t we? We give ourselves a story we think is difficult, we’ll finish it now or later. Doesn’t matter what others think of us, does it? It matters what we think of ourselves.”
I was caught by his words. “No such thing as a real image? No reality as thought forms, either?”
“It’s all beliefs, here, too. I can change it, you can change it, whenever you want. This field, the airplanes, you can make it shift any way you wish. Earth is harder for you. Earth, you’re convinced, takes time.”
He lifted a hay-stem, letting it float in the air. I knew I could do that, too, in this place.
“What’s true for you, Richard? What are the highest beliefs you know?”
In that place, coming as it did from almost-dying, it was easy to find what I wanted to believe. Not perfect, but a step ahead, for me.
“Whenever we think we’re hurt, we’re healed in mind, first.
“Holding ideas in our mind, that brings events to us, tests, rewards.
“What seems to be a terrible event, is for our learning.
“Others inspire us with their own adventures, we inspire them.
“We are never separated, never left by Love.
“One I got from you, Don: No mortal life is true. They’re imaginations, seems-to-be, Illusions. We write and direct and star in the life in our own stories. Fiction.”
The last drew me once again — I saw a misty picture, my body unconscious on its hospital bed on Earth, the world of dear mortals there on my right, the world of after-living and its hayfield on my left. The only reality was Love, no images, no dream, just Itself.
I didn’t think it was a dream when it happened. I had been flying. Something happened, before the blackness and the room in the air, and now, the meeting with Sh
imoda. How could it happen, how could I be in a hospital when Puff had been safe, an inch from the land?
I had a bright clear memory of what happened. Memories, my whole life, weren’t they true? My airplane was already on the ground. There were no wires on the ground. Nothing could happen. Yet how could I wake in this place, or in a hospital, if nothing happened? It couldn’t happen, I had such a clear image. Floating just above the grass.
“Remember what you told me?” Shimoda said. “Illusions are seems-to-be. They aren’t real. You think your memories are real, but nothing in this world is real!”
“How can I tell if it’s real?” I remembered when we flew. It wasn’t forty years ago, it was now. Sunlight warming us, the airplanes, the mowed hayfield. “Are you saying this world, us planning to fly some passengers here, wherever we land, isn’t real?”
“Not a bit.”
The hospital was my last dream. Now I had no tubes in me, I was well and happy to be with my friend, his Travel Air, my Fleet. The hospital, was it real?
“The hospital…” he said. “It’s a dream, too. Us planning to fly passengers, that’s a dream. If it grows, shifts, if it’s subject to time and space, even here, it’s a dream. You disagree, don’t you? You think that’s true, the truth of airplanes, do you?”
“Don, a minute ago I thought I was in a hospital. Then I blinked and here I am awake again with you and the airplanes!”
He smiled. “So many dreams.”
The smile changed me. Something was wrong.
“My airplane. It’s here. But I don’t own the Fleet, any more. I sold it. Years ago.”
He looked a question at me. “Ready to fly?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Good. Why not?”
“This is a dream, too.”
“Of course it is. None of it’s true, just dreams of lessons, till you let go of the school.”
“The Dream School?”
The quick smile, he nodded.
The airplanes wavered, some sudden wind blurring their outline. Soon as we see something as an image, it begins to change, I thought. When I was with him before, the image of ground and water, of wrenches and vampires, all changed. Beliefs? Beliefs.
“Your memory,” he said. “You had a clear image, landing?”
“Clear as anything! The sound! I heard the grass whisking on the wheels…”
“Is there any chance you thought the crash was too violent for you to see? Do you think that you might have created an image that never happened, for you to remember?”
Maybe. It’s never happened before, I thought.
He took a little book from his shirt pocket, opened it. He looked at me, not at the page, and told me what the words said: “Nobody comes to Earth to dodge problems. We come here to take ‘em on.”
I hope not me, I thought. I’ll dodge this problem, please. “I have to take my memories for true. Not an image, this is my memory! I was one inch from…” l blinked. “Your Messiah’s Handbook! It’s still with you?”
“You’ve promised to believe what you remember, even when it isn’t true? This is not the Handbook. It’s…” he closed the book, read the title: “…Lesser Maxims and Short Silences.”
“Lesser Maxims? Not as powerful as the Handbook?”
He handed the little book to me,
Why you and why now? Because you asked it to be this way.
This disaster is the chance you prayed for, your wish come true.
I prayed for this? Nearly dying? I don’t remember praying for an airplane crash. Why was this event the one I prayed for? Why me?
Because it was right on the edge of impossible, that’s why. Because it would require absolute determination, day after week, month after month, and then it could have a host of difficulties. I needed to know whether my beliefs would overcome every one of the problems.
The doctors were required to talk about what could happen, how my life would never be the same again. I’d be required to smother every one of their beliefs with my own, beliefs I called true.
They could call on all of the knowledge of material Western medicine, I could call on what I thought was spirit, hold to it even though it didn’t appear to my senses.
I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.
That mattered to me more than living in this world, this body. I didn’t know that, before.
I shook my head, turned the page.
***
Unsuccessful Animal Inventions:
Wolves on Stilts.
***
“Wolves on Stilts? How does that affect my life, Don?”
“It’s a Lesser Maxim. It may not affect your life at all.”
“Oh. Who wrote this odd book? You keep it in your pocket.”
“You.”
“M.”
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“N.”
“Turn to the last page.”
I did. I had written an introduction, my caring for the sheep of ideas never printed, signed my name to it.
“Wolves on stilts?”
“You’re kind,” he said. “How many sheep would love to see the wolves practicing?”
I smiled. “Some. Never published? I forget.”
“Maybe you’ll change about forgotten memories, maybe you won’t.”
“I want to remember what happened to me and Puff, Don, not what my mind put in its place!”
“Interesting,” he said. “Do you want to see it again, the landing as it happened in the belief you prayed for, not as you remember?”
“Yes!”
“Will you know that whatever appears to you, it isn’t real?”
“I am a perfect expression of perfect Love.”
He smiled, nodded, one time.
and all at once, morning gone, I was aloft in a clear bright afternoon. I didn’t dream it, I was flying again, Puff turning toward the farm field. I was thinking nothing but the landing. Wheels are down, flaps are down. I was a quarter-mile from the land, didn’t need to see the instrument panel.
The canopy was open, I could hear the airspeed. It sounded a little fast, I moved the throttle down, a few engine revolutions. A little high, want a nice smooth landing on the grass, what a beautiful day it is, we’re living a painting, aren’t we, Puff?
She didn’t answer. She just listened, told me through the sound of the wind, the sound of the engine, the picture of the tree tops to the left and right, the cleared space ahead on the approach.
At sixty feet above the ground, the tops of the treetops left and right were level with us, we sank softly toward the ground. The grass was mowed on the runway ahead, grown longer in the wild parts of the land around. Dry grass, the color of sunset.
I heard a quiet little ping from the right wheel, and next instant, in slow motion, the flight controls failed. Puff was all of a sudden out of control. Never happened in my life. I was no longer a pilot, I was a passenger, and Puff went down.
Do I really want to live this? I think I might better well just forget…
The electric wires scraped the steel of the right landing gear, sparks spraying a dense fireworks fountain, high voltage incandescent snow, spraying off the right side, pouring up for an instant, then turning the fountain slowly, white hot, the sound of a welder’s cutting torch, over the field.
Puff tumbled, as though someone had tripped her, on her run to the land. I was tumbled, too, sudden negative high-G, a whiplash that blurred and blinded me — all I could see was the color of blood. She was nearly upside down. In a fiftieth of a second the weight of Puff broke free from wires. Two telephone poles were falling behind us, the wires and the sparks trailing to the ground.
Next instant, Puff was free, and she rolled. If she had a few hundred feet, she would have dropped back to level flight. a little singed but flying.
But she was free at thirty feet above the ground. She rolled to the right as hard as she could, hoping at least to keep me alive.
Then her r
ight wing hit the ground. As though the ground was a huge spinning grindstone, the outer part of her wing disappeared.
My seat belt and the shoulder harness slammed across my chest, breaking ribs, kept my body from tumbling free from the cockpit.
The grindstone came ten feet closer, upside down, now, throwing us sidewise at five feet above the ground, stopped the propeller at three feet, then smashed the engine behind my head while it crushed us inverted, the shoulder harness broke something in my back.
Was gasoline pouring, with the gas tank over me now? The gas tank spraying over the hot engine, then exploding, would have been a flash of beautiful color.
But there was no fire in the cockpit. All at once, everything stopped. It was dead still in that scene. Nobody moving, not Puff, not me, upside down in her cockpit.
Thank you, dear Puf…
Then came the black plastic visor in front of my eyes. That was what happened. Seemed to happen. Nothing in space-time is real.
A while later, I was not with Shimoda again, but aloft in the dirigible over a different world. That wasn’t true, either.
Everything in space and time is a dream.
“Let’s go,” Shimoda said, knowing one dream was over, time for another. No engine start, no takeoff, all at once we were flying, I was a wingman, on his right side.
He looked across the chasm between our airplanes, not a word for the dream of the crash, watching me. “Close it up a bit,” he said.
Flying for a lifetime I flew first, no memories of dreams, nothing else mattered. I flew. I thought I was close in formation, five feet between the airplanes. I tucked it up to two feet from my wing to his, I could do this, with air as smooth as honey. That’s about my limit. I’ve never touched another airplane in flight.
“A bit more,” he said.
Shocked me. Closer? “You want me to touch your wing?”
“That’s affirmative. Touch it, please.”
I thought, for a minute, that this is a different world than the space and time on Earth. Two places here, I’ll bet can occupy one space, I thought they could. He would never have asked me to touch his airplane if I was going to destroy it.