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

by Richard Bach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Oh,” I said. “No hospitals here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’re a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now,” he said. “Believe it first, understand it next, your material body is healed.”

  “And doctors say the reason for healing is their craft,” I said, “their surgeries, their medicines!”

  “Sometimes they do. Sometimes they realize their own love, their own beliefs do their healings.”

  My body was locked in a bed in that grey concrete place in my lifelong belief of space and time. Yet we flew now over a land as beautiful as Earth’s.

  What a teacher, Shimoda was. Change my mind, teach me to fly my spirit-self over the beautiful lands of spirit… I’m already healed.

  “I’m not your only teacher,” he said.

  “Oh? Tell me another.”

  His airplane dropped over the fields, soaring over the slopes of color. “You tell me. Every life you imagined, every one you’ve written, they’re not fiction. You saw their spirit, writing, and when you saw, they came alive in your world. And those teachers will ever be with you.”

  “All my characters?”

  “All yours and others that you loved.”

  “Bethany Ferret, Boa, Cheyenne, Stormy?”

  “More.”

  “Jonathan Seagull?” I said. “Tink? My little Idea Fairy?”

  “Of course. And Fletcher, and Connie Shak Lin and the Little Prince, Nevil Shute and Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Ray Bradbury. Think of them, ask for them, and the belief of an image will appear for you. And they’ll surprise you. You know that.”

  Yes. Secretly. I talk with my beloved authors. “Nevil Shute and Antoine de Saint-Exupery,” I said, “my friend Ray Bradbury, they’re not fictional.”

  “Let me guess,” he said. “They’re living within you, aren’t they? Same as you live in a few of your own readers. Do you think that you have only one life, tied with your idea of a body?”

  “Oh, come on. You’re kidding me.”

  “Am I? You’re fictional, too, Richard, even though you’re having a dream of life that seems non-fiction.” He laughed. “Same as, you will forgive me, same as my own fictional life.”

  I looked at the Travel Air, floating in the air, thirty feet away. There was my teacher, once the Savior, now my friend. “Donald Shimoda,” I said. “You’re fictional, but you seem so real!”

  “So do you.”

  In the middle of the land below, there was a wide runway of grass. To one side, a wooden hangar, and a J-1 Standard biplane parked. I had flown from there!

  “I’m going down,” I said. “I know this place!”

  “Have fun,” he said. “You can only land here, they say, after your life on Earth is finished. Don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  Of course he knew.

  “Can I sneak down there, quiet?” I said.

  “Try it if you want. Time is different here. You’ll see your dog Lucky when you land, meet some old friends.” He swept us together in a wide turn over the runway. “The spirits of mortals are already here, never left this place when a person decides to be born, a mortal.”

  Such a pretty land. He knew about a me I can’t imagine, and about my dog. I so missed Lucky. He’s right. I’d stay there, if ever I saw Lucky again.

  Time is different? We take only part of ourselves to Earth when we’re born? What does the other part do, while we’re mortals? Suggest ideas for us to think about, write about, ways to live? Part of ourselves is our own spirit guide?

  “Are you, Donald, are you…?” Too complex right now. I don’t want to know. “Never mind.”

  “Some things for later,” he said.

  “I won’t land,” I said. “I need to see Sabryna again, finish my lifetime on earth. I owe it to her. She didn’t give her consent for me to die in a crash. She prayed her affirmation: You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.”

  “Our highest prayers, affirmations,” he said. “They’re Love. You know that.”

  His airplane vanished in the mist, or it was me who left, thinking about Earth-life.

  The controls of the Fleet shimmered and dissolved, the world turned to an evening gray, the color of a hospital. I thought about what he had said, the creativity of our lifetime, our fictions come true, part of us waiting in an after-life, in heaven. Wolves on stilts.

  A nurse entered, saw me smile. “Are you awake?” she said.

  Chapter 5

  A little time, a little perspective, we'll see what the leveling of this site has been making room for in our lives.

  It didn’t hurt much, the days in the hospital, not much that I noticed.

  A lot of time for thinking, for imagining.

  Why does a hospital bring sterile television into patients’ rooms, when we need to meet fictional lives linked to our own? Spirit-friends awake in our mind, our walls of unbelief lowered for once, when we so much need to meet them!

  The characters I wrote, Shimoda said, they didn’t stop when my words stopped. Their life goes on. I could meet them any time, in their forever-lives, in the midst of their unwritten adventures. They, all of them, are my teachers.

  Bethany Ferret slipped into my life then, colors flashing in my half-sleep, the bright cherry-lemon colors of her rescue-boat’s flag and her matching crew-scarf.

  What a delight, a celebration! to see her again.

  She wore her duty hat, touched the cap with her paw. “Permission to come aboard?”

  Mostly solemn, that request, yet a bit of a smile to see me again.

  I laughed, silently. “Permission granted, Captain.” The bed, the images, shifted into the bright snowcolor of her rescue boat, J-
101 Resolute, clearing the jetty outbound, pitching gently on the sea waves west.

  I blinked at her. “I’m the guest on your boat! I should have asked your permission, coming aboard.“

  “You didn’t know, coming from the hospital,” she said. “Permission granted.”

  I watched the salt-colored wake, fanned wide and high astern. “This is a practice run?”

  “No. A couple squirrels a half-mile off shore. They’re adrift in their sailboat, halyard’s parted aloft. They called for help. We’ll tow them to the shore, near the forest.”

  “A lot of squirrels at sea?”

  She smiled. “Not many.”

  “Mice and rats,” I said, “when a human’s ship goes down.” I knew this, as I had written about it.

  She nodded. “Plenty of those, and a few ferrets. The adventurous ones. Kits, mostly. We’ve never… we’ve rarely had to rescue an adult animal.”

  A voice from the interphone loudspeaker on her bridge. “Starboard High has the squirrel’s boat in sight, Captain, bearing zero one four.”

  She acknowledged Kimiko’s voice. “Zero one four.” She eased the helm a few degrees to the right. “Excuse me,” Bethany said, spoke to the interphone. “Boa, a quarter ahead.”

  “One quarter aye.”

  The engines slowed, Resolute eased off the step, her diagonal colors waving gently at low speed.

  “Forward lookout, stand by the starboard boarding ladder.”

  “Starboard ladder aye.”

  There was the little sailboat, the mainsail furled as best the two squirrels could tie it. The two were vastly relieved that a Ferret Rescue Boat had found them.

  “Port High, secure the boat for towing.”

  “Port High, aye.”

  A slim ferret ran down the ladder from his post, stood by as Bethany turned her boat alongside.

  “Engines idle, Boa.”

  ”All idle, aye.” The pulse of the twin screws ceased.

  Bethany steered to ghost alongside the sailboat. Vincent gave the squirrels a paw to the ladder, Harley caught a line from the sailboat’s forward cleat, walked it as she floated down the starboard side, belayed the line to the towing cleat.

  “Line’s clear the screws,” Harley called.

  “Boa, all ahead a quarter.”

  “Quarter ahead, aye.” The engines dropped a few revolutions as the screws engaged, increased up a quarter.

  “That’s it,” I said. “You go on with this long after the book about you was published.”

  “The book wasn’t about me,” she said. “It was about the Ferret Rescue Service. There was no history of them before, but you wrote, and there it was, years of service, our whole history imagined and done, when you wrote.”

  “Years, came true when I wrote? The book changed your past?”

  “It did. Your words, your imagination, made it so. Our time, the time of invented stories, came true. May I say thank you?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “The book is around the world, now. People who read it, now, they know the story, too. Not just us, but all the Ferret Chronicles, they have a quiet little history which can change many of us, the fiction ferrets, the mortals, too. You didn’t know, did you?”

  “I love the stories. I love you, all of you.”

  “We love you, too, Richard. Your stories told of the Ferret Code, told that there was never an evil ferret, that we live always to our highest right. Maybe that’s never been done, never been written, but now it is, and nothing can erase the power of our kindness, one to another, and to humans, too.”

  She pressed the interphone. “Starboard High, Resolute’s your boat. Take her ten paws from the beach by the forest, release the sailboat and crew to the shore.”

  “Command, aye.” Down the steps like lightning on fur, Kimiko entered the bridge. “Command at your request, ma’am.”

  “Command aye,” Bethany said, and Kimiko took the wheel from the touch of her paw, a quick glance for me.

  The captain walked me down to the deck. Those stories are written love, you know that, do you?”

  “Of course.”

  “And love is the only power in the universe. You made us real when no one had done that before. Do you know the influence you’ve had?”

  “No. I write about adventures.” I smiled for the captain. “And a little love, too.”

  “Go back to your mortal life, Richard. Our lives are entwined. We’re your students, we’re your teachers too. We will never die. Nor will you.”

  She took her scarf, the colors of her boat and her crew, reached it up to me, turned it around my neck.

  “Bethany…”

  “From the crew. From every one of us. We’ll carry your love as long as we live.”

  I saluted the ship’s flag, and the captain, a ferret custom, leaving the boat.

  “Thank you, dear Bethany.”

  And she was gone. That moment, the Resolute, Harley, Kimiko, Boa, Vincent, Bethany, gone. A book. Yet for me the ferret world, and their gentle Code, lives.

  How can I forget their stories?

  Chapter 6

  Oh, the different consciousness between the grieving and the dying!

  One sees midnight, the other joyful sunrise.

  One sees death, the other Life as never before.

  It was prison, the hospital.

  How to escape? Our eyes, when they’re closed, they see differently, hear differently.

  The hangar was dim, shadows and silence. There was the wreckage of Puff, my little seaplane. All neatly laid on the concrete floor. It seemed like death: the wreckage of the right wing, struts bent and severed, the whole top of the fuselage, all of it, from the rudder to the bow, twisted, smashed, crushed from her landing inverted. Seemed like death.

  I cried out, “Oh, Puff!”

  A sleepy voice. “Richard?”

  “Are you all right?” My voice and hers, the same words.

  “I’m fine, Puff. Just a scratch or two. But it looks…that you took it all, the crash.”

  “No. You’re looking at my mortal body. I guess I’d say ‘Oh,’ if I saw your body just now.”

  I laughed. “I’m not my body, Puff. Neither are you.“

  “You’re OK.”

  “I don’t remember the crash. Some said it should have killed me, except for what you did in the last two seconds.”

  “I did the best I could, Richard. I’m fine. Indestructible.”

  There she was, the image of her perfect form, perched high in the hangar, atop an engine traveler. The chain of the mortal world passing through her fuselage, no damage, of course. What a beautiful symbol for her, not a single scratch on her colors.

  “I’m glad it worked. I liked having a body. This sense of danger, though, I’m not sure I liked thinking my life depended on such a delicate body, frail, here on Earth. Winds, collision, the wires. Yet there’s a reason for that.” Was she smiling? “I don’t know what it is, but there’s a reason.”

  What a thought. If we’re spirits, indestructible, why do we bother with bodies?

  “We don’t have bodies, Puff. We imagine them, for the fun, for the stories, for the drama. You did, too. Your story was that you would die to protect your pilot in a crash on Earth.”

  A long quiet time. Her voice soft, in the silence, “I did my best. Better me than you. My wing took a lot of the impact.” She was quiet for a minute, reliving. “You’re done flying, too?”

  “Not likely! I’ve flown most of this lifetime, and maybe on Earth it may take time, a bit, but I’ll fly again. A few months, maybe. If I don’t do it, I’ll die, Puff. No point living here, if I can’t fly.”

  She was no reason for the crash. It was not a problem for her. It was for me, not seeing the wires, and somehow needing a challenge to live.

  “I’m sorry, Puff. My fault. I didn’t see the wires.”

  “No. My fault too. I saw the wires, for a second, I thought we’d fly through. Wrong.”

  “You’ll
be rebuilt,” she said. “You don’t want to leave Earth yet, do you?”

  “I have a mission, I think. I’ll do what I have to do, rebuild my old self back. I will not live to stay on the ground!” The next words I said as though I had said them in the lost places of my memory. “You will, too, Puff. You saved my life! We’ll rebuild the both of us.”

  “I will, too?” A flicker of hope. “You’re still in the hospital, and you’re thinking about rebuilding me?”

  “Rebuilding us. Isn’t that what the spirit requires, when we climb over the wreckage of our lives, sometimes, we go on to make our lives our own affirmation? We are perfect expressions of perfect Love, here and now. There is no permanent injury.”

  “Really? You’ll rebuild me, too?”

  The suggestion that I wouldn’t do it, unthinkable. Whatever I had to do, I would do, and I knew I had said that before, some meeting during the coma. I didn’t remember what happened, but I had promised. If anyone told me I couldn’t, today, they were part of our wreckage. We would fly again. “Yes, I will. I’m no rebuilder, Puff, but I know the man who is…”

  “In Florida.”

  “In Florida. Valkaria, the airport where you were born in space-time.”

  “How…”

  “I’ll see him somehow. We’ll truck your body, Puff, your wings, your engine, 3,000 miles to his hangar.”

  “I’d be… privileged… to fly with you again.”

  I had her promise, she had mine.

  There was light and life in the hangar, so drear the hour before. The light of it brushed Puff’s broken struts the color of sunshine. She would fly again.

  “Thank you, Richard.”

  “You knew, didn’t you? You were listening, at the meeting. You wondered if I would remember.”

  “You weren’t supposed to remember.”

  “I don’t. The certainty, though, that I would live, and you would, too, it’s not an intellectual remembering, it’s an emotional memory. I don’t recall words, if words were used, but it was important to me, that we’d fly again.”