Illusions (11 page)

  
         
"Shimoda sat down again by the fire. "Am I ever glad you don't mean what you say!"

  
         
I was still trembling with adrenaline, ready for my fight with a monster. "Don, I'm not sure I'm built for this. Maybe you'd better tell me what's going on. Like, for instance, what . . . was that?"

  
         
"Dot was a wompire from Tronsylwania " he said in words thicker than the creature's own "Or to be more precise, dot was a thought-form of a wompire from Tronsylwania. If you ever want to make a point, you think somebody isn't listening, whip 'em up a little thought-form to demonstrate what you mean. Do you think I 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 tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way. "

  
         
I was quiet for a long time, thinking about that. I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don't hurt another, and this didn't fit. There was something missing.

  
         
"The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him? That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices."

  
         
"When you look at it that way . . ."

  
         
"Listen " he said, "it's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do."

14

     
Every person,

    
all the events of your life

     
are there because you have

        
drawn them there.

                 
      
What you choose

                         
to do with them is

                        
up to you.

  
         
"Don't you get lonely, Don?" It was at the cafe in
Ryerson
,
Ohio
, that it occurred to me to ask him.

  
         
"I'm surprised you'd . . ."

  
         
"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 hamburgers were good. He ate in silence for a time and so did I, wondering what he would say.

  
         
"Well, Richard, we're magnets, aren't we? Not magnets. We're iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to magnetize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some things and leaves others untouched."

  
         
I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. "You left out one thing. How do I do it?"

  
         
"You don't do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well."

  
         
"But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty lonely."

  
         
He looked at me strangely over his hamburger "Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith What it takes is imagination.'' He swept the table between us clean, pushing salt and french fries out of the way, ketchup, forks and knives, so that I wondered what was going to happen, what would be materialized before my very eyes.

  
         
"If you have imagination as a grain of sesame seed," he said, herding an example seed to the middle of the clearing, "all things are possible to you.''

  
         
I looked at the sesame seed, and then at him. "Wish you Messiahs would get together and agree. I thought the thing was faith, when the world goes against me "

  
         
"No. I wanted to correct that, when I was working, but it was long uphill fight. Two thousand years ago, five thousand, they didn't have a word for imagination, and faith was the best they could come up with for a pretty solemn bunch of followers. Also, they didn't have sesame seeds."

  
         
I knew for a fact that they had sesame seeds, but I let this lie go past. "I'm supposed to imagine this magnetizing? I imagine some lovely wise mystical lady appearing in a hayfield crowd in Tarragon,
Illinois
? I can do that, but that's all that is, that's just my imagination."

  
         
He looked despairingly to heaven, represented for the moment by the tin-plate ceiling and cold lights of Em and Edna's Cafe. "Just your imagination? Of course it's your imagination! This world is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn't change the Is one whit, doesn't affect reality at all. But we are talking about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every second of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves."

  
         
He lined his fork and knife as though he was building a bridge from his place to mine. "You wonder what your dreams say: Just as well you look at the things of your waking life and ask what they stand for. You with airplanes in your life, every time you turn around.''

  
         
"Well, Don, yes." I wished he would slow down, not pile this on me all at once; mile a minute is too fast for new ideas.

  
         
"If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to you?"

  
         
"Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and setting myself free."

  
         
"How clear do you want it: The dream awake is the same: your will to be free of all things that tie you back--routine, authority, boredom, gravity. What you haven't realized is that you're already free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame seeds of this . . . you're already supreme lord of your magician's life. Only imagination! What are you saying ?"

  
         
The waitress looked at him strangely from time to time, drying dishes, listening, puzzling over who this was.

  
         
"So you never get lonely, Don ?" I said.

  
         
"Unless I feel like it. I have friends on other dimensions that are around me from time to time. So do you. "

  
         
"No. I mean on this dimension, this imaginary world. Show me what you mean give me a little miracle of the magnet. . . I do want to learn this."

  
         
"You show me," he said. 'To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there. "

  
         
"Like what ? Like my lovely lady ?"

  
         
"Anything. Not your lady. Something small, at first. "

  
         
"I'm supposed to practice now?"

  
         
"yes"

  
         
"OK. . . . A blue feather."

  
         
He looked at me blankly. "Richard? A blue feather ?"

  
         
"You said anything not a lady something little. "

  
         
He shrugged. "Fine. A blue feather. Imagine the feather. Visualize it, every line and edge of it, the tip, V-splits where it's torn, fluff around the quill. Just for a minute. Then let it go."

  
         
I closed my eyes for a minute and saw an image in my mind, five inches long, iridescent blue to silver at the edges. A bright clear feather floating there in the dark.

  
         
"Surround it in golden light, if you want. That's a healing thing, to help make it real but it works in magnetizing, too."

  
         
I surrounded my feather in gold glow. "OK."

  
         
"That's it. You can open your eyes now."

  
         
I opened my eyes. "Where's my feather?"

  
         
"If you had it clear in your thought, it is even this moment barreling down on you like a Mack truck."

  
         
"My feather? Like a Mack truck?"

  
         
"Figuratively, Richard."

  
         
All that afternoon I looked for the feather to appear, and it didn't. It was evening, dinnertime over a hot turkey sandwich, that I saw it. A picture and small print on the carton of milk. Packaged for Scott Dairies by Blue Feather Farms,
Bryan
,
Ohio
. "Don! My feather!"

  
         
He looked, and shrugged his shoulders. "I thought you wanted the actual feather."

  
         
"Well, any feather for openers, don't you think?"

  
         
"Did you see just the feather all alone, or were you holding the feather in your hand?"

  
         
"All alone."

  
         
"That explains it. If you want to be with what you're magnetizing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too. Sorry I didn't say that."

  
         
A spooky strange feeling. It worked! I had consciously magnetized my first thing! "Today a feather," I said, "tomorrow the world!"

  
"Be careful, Richard," he said hauntingly, "or you'll be sorry . . ."

15

   
The