Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single)
Page 6
“OK, Dan?”
“She’s your airplane,” he said. “Any time.”
Throttle wide open, in seconds Jenn was on the step, feathers of spray flying like summer snowflakes behind her. We were flying.
Ten months on the ground, a mind of fallen memories, worried once if I could ever walk again, fly again, here was the ground falling away beneath us, worries falling, too.
For all my concern, flying was home, same as ever it has been.
It wasn’t as if flying is a difficult skill, or that flyers love the challenge of the thousand tests it charms from them.
Pilots like the tests of instrument flying, aerobatic flying, soaring flying, seaplane flying, multi-engine flying, business flying, cross-country flying, airlines, formation flying, racing, homebuilts, antiques, ultralights, warplanes. Beyond each of those brings the sense that we are one in the art, touching the beauty of flight.
For all my worries, flying was home, same as ever it had been. I tried a few water landings, simple as always. A few landings on grassy runways, each one familiar. If anything, flying had become easier than it had been, months ago.
In a few weeks, I took my flying test, an hour of talk, an hour of flying. I was legal again, after the test, to fly by myself.
Why did I think it could have been difficult? The worlds we love, are they ever difficult?
Chapter 14
What would our lives be like without tests, odds against us, adventure, risk?
A few days later, word from Jim Ratte, the rebuilder. It had been eleven weeks, Puff’s body had been in his shop. All her wreckage had been lifted away, the broken silhouette, the shattered windshield, bent metal and fabric and fiberglass, the engine taken off for overhaul. Switches and wires had been replaced, looms of circuits had been tested, radios repaired. Puff’s gift of wings from Jennifer had been finished, painted, installed.
One day after her body had been rebuilt, Puff blinked again, her engine breathing, ready to fly! She had no memory of what had happened.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I saw her in a half-dream, sparkling new, her bow resting on the lakeshore sand. It was pure delight, to touch her again. No words, joy.
“She’s a pretty soul, little Puff.” Shimoda sat on the sand, watching the sunlights of the airplane.
“Do machines have souls, Don?” I knew she did, I had talked with her all our flying hours.
“Everything that reflects beauty, of course she has a soul.”
“She’s metal and fiberglass.”
He smiled. “You’re blood and bones.”
“Are you?”
He laughed. “I’m a thought-form, remember? Everything else you invented. We invented.”
“You have a soul, Donald, a spirit to express perfect Life, perfect Love. Puff didn’t?”
“Spirit overlies body,” he said. “Spirit heals all things.”
“Heals death.”
“Not required. Death is a different face of life. You saw…it’s love, shifting from one lifetime to another.”
He was right. Once we visit death, once we see the beauty waiting for us, our fear’s gone. Used to be never a book written, of our experience with dying. Now there are shelves, waiting to be read. The beliefs, the experiences of so many others, now.
“And Puff?”
“You saw for yourself. When she crashed, her body was lifeless, like yours was almost. Yet you could talk with her. She had no pain, no distress. You didn’t either, while you were out.”
“I wish I could have talked with her, then.”
“Ah, that belief of seven days when you think you remember almost nothing. What could have happened then? You didn’t talk with her, did you? How strange.”
“Something happened. I remember, it was desperately important for me to make Puff’s body ready, for her spirit to meet us again, in this world. I’d say I made a promise to her, that we would fly again.”
“Notice, Richard, that you’re beginning to remember. You think it’s a story you invented. It may be. The meaning is for you to say.”
I looked at him, a half-smile. “May I give you a word, and you can tell me a meaning?”
He looked at me, nodded.
“Valkaria.”
He laughed. “You’re learning your mythologies, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said. “What does Valkaria mean? I didn’t pick it. No game. It means…?”
“Valkaria are the daughters of the Norse god, Odin. They were Valkyries. They chose which of the warriors would die in battle. The Valkyries brought them home. They’d be heroes...or heroines, living again.” He smiled. “Is that what you need to know?”
I said nothing. Listening again to what he said.
“Richard?”
“Don. The place where we trucked Puff after the crash, the hangar where Jim Ratte rebuilt her to fly again, the name of the place?”
“Not a hint. Tell me.”
“The name of the airport is Valkaria.”
I looked again at Puff, asleep. Not a word, but she felt happy, ready to try a body again. Our story had come where we promised it would. No one would say, beside spirits and wise friends, that our story was fiction.
Chapter 15
How many of us count fictional characters, or those we've never met, among our closest friends?
My hand's up.
Thursday I flew with Dan and Jenn to Valkaria airport, we landed and taxied to Jim’s place. Outside in the sunlight, we saw Puff again, for the first time.
The last time I saw her, she was unloaded from the truck, mostly wreckage. Now, one year, 3 weeks, 3 days after our crash, Puff was the same as she had been, all the days before.
As though the crash had never happened, as though Time knew the whole thing had been a mistake, disappeared every bit of the evidence that anything had happened. Jenn stopped at Jim’s hangar of Valkyries, to meet the brave one, the heroine who gave her life for me, reborn again.
I touched her gently, walked slowly around her. She was asleep, covered with her cockpit cover, embroidered now, her name stitched in the color of an afternoon sky.
“Sorry,” said Time, who had slipped and now recovered, this minute the error was brushed away.
I walked to her, put my head on the soft fabric of her cover, and all at once sobbed for the sadness and the joy of this moment. That she had been through so much, and I had been through it, too, and now it, the two of us both, alive again! No proof there had ever been any crash.
There was no need to grieve for Puff, I thought, for she was with me this minute, space and time had caught up with the affirmation we had said so often: You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.
There had never been such a time in my life: someone destroyed for certain, whether I liked it or not. It was proved time and again that Puff was dead, histories written, photos taken. Yet came this morning and all at once she was alive again, and I was, too. The wreckage was an image on film. I do not live in paper images, nor does she. Puff was here today, ready to fly!
I would have gone on, sobbing, but stopped, wiped tears away. I’ll cry if I must in some private place with her, not here.
I walked again around her, tears drying. There was no pile of wreckage. Not in the hangar, not anywhere. Did not exist. Puff was here as always she had been, her body perfect, her spirit gently asleep.
She didn’t speak. Could have been my imagination. I sensed a half-language from her…Who are you? Where am I? Leave me alone!
Puff, it’s me! We’re alive again, both of us!
No response, not even half-language. She’s an airplane now, a machine with no recollection of her spirit, not a dream yet of what we’d lived through. Did she have a false recollection, as I had? Did she forget what she had done, to save my life?
My body had been a machine too, not remembering: What is this room? Who are you? Where am I? Can we leave now?
Her spirit had told me: “Take it slowly, Richard, till I remember,
till I know who you are.”
It took me a while, too. She’d be the same. Time, I can give her.
After a long saying of hello again, maybe my imaginations, it was time to leave. My friend Dan was silent.
“Time to go,” I said.
He nodded, slipped into Jenn’s cockpit.
For the first time, in a year, I pressed the master switch ON, the boost pump ON, the choke lever ON, and turned the magneto switch to BOTH. How did that feel for Puff?
Like nothing. She remembered being an airplane, not a spirit. Her propeller spun at once, the engine fired, settled down, the engine instruments swinging up, oil pressure, oil temperature, tachometer humming at 2000 RPM. All of this happening, but Puff was not awake as she had been before. Seemed she was an airplane.
Her instruments were calling good news. Everything’s ready.
I said goodbye to Jim, no way to tell him what he had done in our lives, how much of my spirit he had fixed with his Valkyries, while bringing Puff into sudden perfect condition. He knew. He knew.
We taxied the long taxiways to the end of the main runway. Dan lined up to the left of the centerline, Puff and me behind on the right.
Engines good, flaps down, boost pump on.
He signaled Ready to go?
I nodded.
He looked ahead, his engine coming up to full power, his airplane moving.
I did the same for Puff: full throttle, brakes off, Here we go, Puff!
Not a word from her, not from Shimoda, Lucky, Bethany Ferret. She surged ahead submerged us under the sound of her engine. I held a hundred feet behind Dan, in case Puff’s engine quit. It didn’t. She felt like a powerful new machine, everything working just as Jim had said it would.
If Puff wasn’t awake, I sure was. First flights, you expect anything to happen, that’s when you can expect something to fail. Nothing did. When Dan leveled at less than a thousand feet, I pulled the throttle back to cruise. The engine slowed into a soft quiet hum, barely a sound to be heard for the fields and rivers beneath us.
The wetlands of Florida stretched out ahead of us. There is so much more of wetlands in the state, than people-land here! Gradually I relaxed, everything I worried about was the opposite, just what I hoped to see.
Dan dropped down over a lake, “Wheels up,” he said. He was going to splash now, I’ve got five minutes flying time and he suggested that we’d land on the water.
“Wheels up,” I echoed, worried again. Slowed down, not thinking whether Puff would say a word, flaps down, double-check the wheels up, while the world rose up to meet us. The water was kind, in front of us, no birds, no alligators, just the water and us. Leveled inches from the water, eased the airplane slowly down. Hope nothing breaks apart, I thought, her first touch of the water.
Next sound, hull touching water, a little skip, and touched again. A storm of spray as we slowed and stopped, floating there. Dan and Jenn had landed first, watched us land.
Nothing fell off, thank you Jim. She taxied slowly, a boat on the lake. Then we were off again, two jungle birds launched into the sky.
I breathed. Everything was working as it should. She was a young Puff again, flying perfectly! Over and over, I thought of it. Puff’s alive! Me, too, by the way! We’re flying!
My worries wondered why Puff wasn’t talking. Not to worry. She said to give her time while she gets used to consciousness again. Airplanes don’t need to talk. This one used to chat with me, she would again. Patience.
An hour later we saw our home, a blue sheet of water, the wind quieter than it had been.
A gentle slide down to the water. When the spray of landing settled, when Puff stopped, I lowered her wheels and followed Jenn, touched the shore rolling up from the beach, and we were home. No problems at all, not In the air, not in the water, not on the land.
Engines idled, and in seconds the engines of the two sisters stopped. Silence.
It was quiet for a minute, and I laughed. This was an altogether new feeling. Now that I wasn’t checking Puff’s instruments, now that Puff had an hour and a half in the air again…everything worked! All these last months, hoping Jim could make her fly. He did. And Dan had said we’d fly together, two airplanes, this afternoon. We did.
Dan laughed, too. Something about having some impossible hopes, not possible when we hope them, yet believing, step by step, they came true. Impossible. True. Funny.
We each sat in our cockpits, a few feet away from each other. “Fantastic, Dan! Puff’s flying again!”
“She’s beautiful, flying. I waited, for this flight.”
“Amazing. Just amazing. When a year’s dream comes true…”
He slipped out of his airplane, touched Puff’s wing. “What did she say, flying again with you?”
“Nothing. Not a word.”
“Not a word? Odd.”
“She told me…her spirit told me, months ago, that she’ll need a while before she remembers who she is, and maybe talks again.”
“Good,” he said. “I believe in Puff.”
There were things to do with her, little things. Install a yaw-string, painted anti-corrosion grease next day on all the new…
“Dan,” I said then, “Jim didn’t use one bolt from the old fuselage, from the wings and tail. Not one! Now I have to coat a million brand new bolts with par-al-ketone.”
“Good for him,” he said.
A day later, Dan and I flew our two airplanes, more water-landings, and climbing out from the lake after her last landing, Puff said,
Hi.
Not a word for the rest of that flight. Puff the spirit was right about her reborn life.
It’s all there in space and time, the crash, news articles around the world, and not a story about us flying once again. No account of the first word from Puff.
That night, a dream, I flew alone with Puff, with my friend Donald Shimoda.
“Will they ever end?” I asked, “Illusions?”
“Of course. The instant we believe we’re separated from Love, we’re in the world of Seems-to-Be, for an instant or a billion years. Every world, every after-world; every possibility of hells and heavens, dance to the music of our beliefs. Far as I know, beliefs play only one language: illusions. Let illusions go, beliefs vanish. Love is with you instantly, the way it’s ever been.”
“You’re not there, one with Love?”
“Nope. I’m a spirit guide, same as you.”
“Same as you? Sorry to say, Donald, I think you may be wrong. I’m a wolf practicing on stilts. I crash often.”
“Maybe. What matters to mortals, is that you finished the story that was so important from the day you and Puff lived the illusion of your crash. You didn’t die, Puff didn’t. You survived it whole, you learned, you practiced the way our spirit changes the belief of our bodies.”
“Well, I had to try it. It worked for me. Is it true for everyone?”
“No. It’s not true when we’re convinced that belief can’t change bodies.”
I thought about that. I listened to the affirmation of my dear friend Sabryna. So many thousands of times I had said it, the last year!
Then I whispered the one sentence of my story that’s forever true for you, dear reader and for me, too:
"I am a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now."
— end —
Puff and me flying together, touching the water in wilderness Florida: 1 year, 2 months and 22 days after our near-death event.
(photo by Dan Nickens)
Other Books by Richard Bach
Stranger to the Ground
Biplane
Nothing by Chance
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
A Gift of Wings
Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah
There’s No Such Place as Far Away
The Bridge Across Forever
One
Running from Safety
Out of My Mind
Messiah’s Handbook
; Hypnotizing Maria
Curious Lives: Adventures from the Ferret Chronicles
Rescue Ferrets at Sea
Air Ferrets Aloft
Rancher Ferrets on the Range
Writer Ferrets: Chasing the Muse
The Last War: Detective Ferrets & the Golden Deed
Thank Your Wicked Parents
Travels with Puff: A Gentle Game of Life and Death
Table of Contents
Half-title
Title
Copyright © 2013
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 0
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Puff and Me
Other Books by Richard Bach