by Richard Bach
The wheels of the big fighter-plane floated a foot over the runway at Midland, Texas; then they touched. At once the left tire blew out and the airplane swerved toward the edge of the pavement, in a blink off the pavement into the dirt.
No time. Still moving fast enough to fly, I pressed full throttle and forced her back into the air.
Bad choice. Not moving fast enough to fly.
The airplane snarled its nose upward for a second or so, but that was the last it would do. Sagebrush flashed beneath us; the wheels settled and instantly the left main landing gear broke off. The monster propeller hit the ground, and as it bent, the engine wound up, howling, exploding inside.
It was almost familiar, time falling back into slow motion. And look who's here! My observer, with clipboard and pencil! How've you been, guy, haven't seen you in days!
Chats with observer while airplane gets torn to hell in sagebrush. May be worst pilot have ever seen.
Mustang-crashes, I knew full well, are not your everyday left-over-from-dinner airplane-wrecks. The machines are so big and fast and lethal, they go tearing through whatever happens to be in the way and blow up hi sudden pretty fireballs of flame-yellow and dynamite-orange and doom-black, detonating bolts and pieces a half-mile round impact center. The pilot never feels a thing.
Slewing toward me eighty miles per hour was impact coming up ... a diesel-generator shack out in the middle-of-nowhere desert, an orange-and-white checkerboard generator-house that thought it was safe from getting run over by huge fast airplanes crashing. Wrong.
A few more jolts along the way, the other landing gear disappeared, half the right wing was gone, the checkerboard slid huge in the windscreen.
Why is it that I have not left my body? All the books say ...
I slammed forward in the shoulder harness when we hit and the world went black.
For a few seconds, I couldn't see anything. Painless.
It is very quiet, here in heaven, I thought, straightening, shaking my head.
Completely painless. A calm, gentle hissing . . . What is it hi heaven, Richard, that could be hissing?
I opened my eyes to find that heaven looks like a demolished U.S. Government diesel-generator shack, flattened under the wreckage of a very large airplane.
Slow as toad to understand what is going on.
Just a minute! Could it be ... this isn't heaven? I'm not dead! I'm sitting inside what's left of this cockpit and the airplane hasn't blown up yet! It's going to go VOWNF! in two seconds and I'm trapped in here . . . I'm not going to be exploded to death I'm going to be burned to death!
Ten seconds later I was sprinting two hundred yards from the steaming wreckage of what had once been a handsome airplane, if not reliable or cheap or sweet. I tripped and threw myself face-down in the sand the way pilots do in movies just before the whole screen blows apart. Face down, covered my neck, waited for the blast.
Able to move with remarkable speed when finally gets picture.
Half a minute. Nothing happened. Another half.
I lifted my head and peeked.
Then I stood up, casually brushed the sand and sagebrush from the front of my clothes. For no reason, an antique rock-'n-roll tune began brassing my mind. I barely noticed. Trying to be nonchalant?
Son of a gun. Never heard of a '51 that didn't go up like a lit powderkeg, and here the one exception is the disaster scattered over there of which lately I was the pilot. Now there will be a stack of paperwork, reports to file ... it'll be hours till I can catch an airliner west from here. The tune clattered on.
Doesn't suffer much from shock. B-plus for cool when it's all over.
Flattered, whistling the tune, I walked back to what was left of the Mustang, found my garment-bag and shaving-kit, took them safely aside.
Strong cockpit, got to say that for the thing.
And of course! The airplane hadn't blown up because we were out of gas, landing.
Around that time the observer faded, shaking his head, and the fire-trucks hove into sight. They didn't seem particularly interested in what I had to say about being out of fuel, smothered the wreck in foam, just in case.
I was concerned about the radios, some of which were undamaged in the cockpit, each of which cost more than gold. "Try not to get any foam in the cockpit, please, fellas? The radios . . ."
Too late. As a precaution against fire, they filled the cockpit to its rails.
So what, I thought helplessly. So-what so-what so-what?
I walked the mile to the airport terminal, bought a ticket on the next airline out, filled in the minimum possible incident report, told the wreckers where to sweep the parts of the obstinate machine.
In that moment, writing my address for them, on a desk in the hangar, I remembered the .words to the tune that had been bebopping through my head since a moment after the crash.
Sh-boom, sh-boom . . . and a lot of ya-t-ta ya-t-tas.
Why should I be humming that song? I wondered. After twenty years, why now?
The song didn't care why, it rattled on: Life could be a dream/Sh-boom/If I could take you to paradise up-above/ Sh-boom ...
The song! It was the ghost of the Mustang singing, complete with sound-effects!
Life could be a dream, sweetheart . . .
Of course life is a dream, you tin witch! And you near did take me to paradise up above! Sh-boom, you shredded hulk!
Is there nothing goes through our mind that has no meaning? That airplane, it never could take me seriously.
The jetliner taxied past the sagebrush on its way to take-off. From the window by my seat I watched.
The foam-slopped Mustang body was already on a flatbed truck; a crane lifted torn wing-sections.
You want to play games, airplane? You like to have something break every flight, you want to have a clash of wills with me?
You lose! May you find someone who will forget your past and nail you back together someday a hundred years from now. May you remember this hour, and be nice to them! I swear, machine-for you I got no nails.
First the parachute failure, now an airplane-crash. I thought about those, flying west, and after a while decided that I had been divinely guided, protected without a scratch through moments turned a little more adventurous than I had planned.
Anybody else would have seen the opposite. The crash wasn't my protection at work, it was my protection running out.
nine
M. WAS drowning in money. People around the world were reading the book, buying copies of other books I had written. Money from every book-sale came from the publisher back to me.
Airplanes I can handle, I thought, but money it makes me nervous. Can money crash?
Palm fronds waved outside his office window, sunlight warmed the reports on his desk. "I can handle this for you, Richard. There's no problem here. I can do it if you want me to." He stood an inch over five feet tall; his hair and beard had turned from red to white over the years, changing a gifted elf to an all-knowing Santa.
He was a friend from my magazine-writing days, editor turned investment counselor. I had liked him from the first story-assignment he had given me, admired his calm sense of business from the first day we had met. I trusted him
completely, and nothing he had said all afternoon had flickered that trust.
"Stan, I can't tell you how glad ..." I said. "It's got to be done right, but I don't know what to do with money; and paperwork and tax-things, I don't know about it, I don't like it. Effective now, Financial Manager, it's your business, full-time, and I'm out of it."
"You don't even want to know about it, Richard?"
I looked again at the graphs of his investing performance. All the lines went straight up.
"Nope," I said. "Well, I want to know if I ask, or if there's any huge decision you're about to make. But so much of what you're doing is so far over my head ..."
"I wish you wouldn't say that," he said. "It's not magic, it's simple technical analysis of commodity markets. M
ost people fail in commodities because they don't have the capital to cover a margin call when the market moves against them. You-that is, we-don't have that problem. We start investing cautiously, with a large capital reserve. As we earn money with our strategies, we then become more speculative.
"When we walk into something as obvious as a head-and-shoulders in a commodity, we can move a lot of money and make a fortune. And we don't always go long, a lot of people forget that. There's just as much money to be made short." He smiled, noticed I was lost already.
He touched a graph. "Now you take this chart, which is plywood prices on the Chicago Board of Trade. You see right here's the head-and-shoulders starting, the warning that the bottom is about to fall out, this is last April. At that point we would have sold plywood, sold lots of plywood. Then when the price tumbles way down here, we would
have bought lots. Sell high and buy low is the same as buy low and sell high. See that?"
How could we sell . . . "How can we sell before we've bought? Don't we have to buy before we sell?"
"No." He was as calm as a college dean, explaining. "These are commodities futures. We promise to sell later at this price, knowing that before the future comes, when we have to do the selling, we will have bought plywood-or sugar, or copper, or corn-at a much lower price."
"Oh."
"Then we reinvest. And diversify. Off-shore investments. An off-shore corporation might be a good idea, as a matter of fact. But CBT will be the place to start, maybe a seat on the West Coast Commodity Exchange. We'll see. Buy a seat on the Exchange, your broker fees go to nothing. Later, diversification; controlling interest in a little company on its way up could be wise. I'll be doing research. But with the amount of money we have to work with, and a conservative strategy for the markets, it'll be pretty hard to go wrong."
I came away convinced. What a relief! In no way can my financial future get tangled, parachute-like.
I'd never be able to handle money the way Stan did. Not patient enough, wise enough, and I don't have charts that shoot moonward.
Yet wise enough am I to know my own weakness, to find a trusted old friend, and give him control of my money.
77
ten
LAY in the sun on the deck, Donna and me, the two of us on my becalmed sailboat, drifting with the current thirty miles north of Key West. "No woman in my life owns me," I told her quietly, patiently, "and I own not one of them. That's terribly important to me. I promise: never will I be possessive 'of you, never jealous."
"That's a nice change," she said. Her hair was short and black, her brown eyes closed against the sun. She was tanned the color of oiled teak from years of summer since a divorce far northward. "Most men can't understand. I'm living the way I want to. I'll be with them if I want to be with them, I'll be gone if I don't. That doesn't frighten you?" She moved the straps of her bikini, to keep the tan unstreaked.
"Frighten? It delights me! No chains or ropes or knots, no arguments, no boredoms. A present from the heart: I'm here
not because I'm supposed to be here, or because I'm trapped here, but because I'd rather be with you than anywhere in the world."
The water lapped gently. Instead of shadows, bright lights sparkled up on the sail.
"You will find me the safest friend you have," I said.
"Safest?"
"Because I cherish my own freedom, I cherish yours, too. I am extremely sensitive. If ever I touch you, do anything you'd rather no.t, you need whisper the gentlest 'No.' I despise intruders and crashers-into-privacy. You ever hint I'm one myself, you'll find me gone before you finish the hint."
She rolled on her side, head on her arm, and opened her eyes. "That does not sound like a proposal of marriage, Richard."
"It isn't."
"Thank you."
"Do you get a lot of those?" I asked.
"A few is too many," she said. "One marriage was enough. In my case, one marriage more than I should have had. Some people are better off married; I'm not."
I told her a little about the marriage I had ended, happy years gone hard and grim. I had learned exactly the lessons she had.
I checked the soft glass table of the Gulf for wind-ruffles. The sea was smooth as warm ice.
"What a shame, Donna, we can't disagree on something."
We drifted for another hour before wind caught the sails and the boat surged ahead. By the time we set foot on land once more we were good acquaintances, hugging farewell, promising to see each other again someday.
As it was with Donna, so with every other woman in my
79
life. Respect for sovereignty, for privacy, for total independence. Gentle alliances against loneliness, they were, cool rational love-affairs without the love.
Some of my women-friends had never married, but most were divorced. A few were survivors of unhappy affairs, beaten by violent men, terrified, warped by massive stress into endless depressions. Love, for them, was a tragic misunderstanding; love was an empty word left after meaning had been battered away by spouse-as-owner, lover-become-jailer.
Had I gone looking way far back in my thought, I might have found a puzzle: Love between man and woman isn't a word that works anymore. But Richard, is it a meaning?
I wouldn't have had an answer.
Months rippled by, and as I lost interest in love, what it is and isn't, so I lost the motive to look for my hidden soulmate. Gradually her place was taken by a different idea emerging, an idea as rational and flawless as those upon which my business affairs now turned.
If the perfect mate, I thought, is one who meets all of our needs all of the time, and if one of our needs is for variety itself, then no one person anywhere can be the perfect mate!
The only true soulmate is to be found in many different people. My perfect woman is partly the flash and intellect of this friend, she's partly the heart-racing beauty of that one, partly the devil-may-care adventure of another. Should none of these women be available for the day, then my soulmate sparkles in other bodies, elsewhere; being perfect does not include being unavailable.
"Richard, the whole idea is bizarre! It will never work!" Had the inner me shouted that, and it did, it would have had rags stuffed in its mouth.
"Show me why this idea is wrong," I would have said,
"show me where it won't work. And do it without using the words love, marriage, commitment. Do it bound and gagged while I shout louder than you can about how I intend to run my life!"
What do you know? The perfect-woman-in-many-women design, she won the contest hands-down.
An infinite supply of money. As many airplanes as I wish. The perfect woman for my own. This is happiness!
eleven
. HERE ARE no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.
I lay on the floor, sunk in thick cinnamon carpet, and thought about it. These three years have not been mistakes. I built every year carefully, a million decisions each, into airplanes and magazine interviews and boats and travels and films and business staff and lectures and television shows and manuscripts and bank-accounts and copper-futures. Daylight air displays in the new little jet, nighttime talks and touches with many women, every one lovely, none of them her.
I was convinced she didn't exist, yet she haunted me still.
Was she as sure that I didn't exist? Did my ghost disturb
her convictions? Was there a woman somewhere this moment lying on plush carpet in a house built over a hangar with five airplanes inside, three more on the lawn and a floatplane tethered at water's edge?
I doubted it. But could there be one alone in the midst of news stories and TV shows, lonely while surrounded by lovers and money, hired friends-become-staff and agents and lawyers and managers and accountants? That was possible.
Her carpet might be a different color, but the rest . . . she coul
d be on the other side of a mirror from here, finding her perfect man in fifty men, and still walking alone.
I laughed at myself. How hard the old myth of one love does die!
An airplane-engine started on the lawn below. That would be Slim, running up the Twin Cessna. A supercharger on the right side was leaking. Retrofit superchargers are retrofit problems, I thought, bolted onto what is otherwise a fine engine.
The Rapide and the motorglider are down there gathering dust. The Rapide is going to need rebuilding before long and that is going to be a monstrous job, a cabin biplane that size. Better sell the thing. I don't fly it enough. Don't fly anything enough. They're strangers to me, like everything else in my life. What is it I am trying to learn? That after a while, and in excess, machines begin to own us?
No, I thought, the lesson is this: To be handed a lot of money is to be handed a glass sword, blade-first. Best handle it very carefully, sir, very slowly while you puzzle what it's v for.
The other engine started on the twin. Ground checkout must have been OK, and he's decided to take it up for a check in the air. A windy blast of power while he got the
machine moving, then the sweet roar of engines faded as he taxied to the runway.
What else had I learned? That I hadn't survived publicity quite so unchanged as I had thought. I never would have believed, before, that anyone could stay curious about what I think and say and what I look like, where I live, what I do with my time and money; or that it would affect me the way it had, driven me back into caves.
Anyone fallen into camera or print, I thought, they didn't trip. Knowingly or not, they've chosen themselves to be examples for the rest of us to watch, they've volunteered as models. This one has marvels for a life; another is rolling wreckage, loose on deck. This one faces her adversity or her talent with calm wisdom, this one shrieks, this one leaps to his death, this one laughs.
Daily the world ties celebrities to tests and we watch fascinated, unable to turn away. Unable because the tests that our examples face are tests we all must face. They love, they marry, they learn, they quit and begin again, they are ruined; they transport us and they are transported, in plain sight of camera and ink.