Illusions (13 page)

  
         
"Everything's OK, is it?" the caller said into her telephone." There's no evil in this world, no sin going on all around us ? That doesn't bother you, does it?

  
         
"Nothing there to be bothered about, ma'am. We see just one little fleck of the whole that is life, and that one fleck is fake. Everything balances, and nobody suffers and nobody dies without their consent. Nobody does what they don't want to do. There is no good and there is no evil, outside of what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy."

  
         
None of it was making the lady on the phone any calmer. But she broke suddenly and said simply, "How do you know all these things that you say? How do you know what you say is true?"

  
         
"I don't know they're true," he said. "I believe them because it's fun to believe them."

  
         
I narrowed my eyes. He could have said that he had tried it and it works . . . the healing, the miracles, the practical living that made his thinking true and workable. But he didn't say that. Why?

  
         
There was a reason. I held my eyes barely open, most of the room gray, just a blurred fuzzy image of Shimoda leaning to talk into the microphone. He was saying all these things straight out, offering no choices, making no effort to help the poor listeners understand.

  
         
"Anybody who's ever mattered, anybody who's ever been happy, anybody who's ever given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living for his own best interest. No exceptions,"

  
         
It was a male caller next, while the evening fled by. "Selfish! Mister, do you know what the antichrist is?"

  
         
For a second Shimoda smiled and relaxed in his chair. It was as if he knew the caller personally.

  
         
"Perhaps you could tell me," he said.

  
         
"Christ said that we have to live for our fellow man. Antichrist say be selfish, live for yourself and let other people go to hell."

  
         
"Or heaven, or wherever else they feel like going."

  
         
"You are dangerous, do you know that, mister? What if everybody listened to you and did just whatever they felt like doing? What do you think would happen then?"

  
         
"I think that this would probably be the happiest planet in this part of the galaxy," he said.

  
         
"Mister, I am not sure that I want my children to hear what you are saying."

  
         
"What is it that your children want to hear?"

  
         
"If we are all free to do whatever we want to do then I'm free to come out in that field with my shotgun and blow your fool head off."

  
         
"Of course you're free to do that."

  
         
There was a heavy click on the line. Somewhere in town there was at least one angry man. The others, and the angry women too, were on the telephone; every button on the machine was lit and flashing.

  
         
It didn't have to go that way; he could have said the same things differently and ruffled no feathers at all.

  
         
Sifting, sifting back over me was the same feeling I had in
Troy
, when the crowd broke and surrounded him. It was time, it was clearly time for us to be moving along. The handbook was no help, there in the studio.

 
 
In order

 
to live free and happily,

  
you must sacrifice

  
    
boredom.

               
It is not always an easy

                   
sacrifice.

 
 
         
Jeff Sykes had told everybody who we were, that our airplanes were parked on John Thomas' hayfield on State 41, and that we slept nights under the wing.

  
         
I felt these waves of anger, from people frightened for their children's morality, and for the future of the American way of life, and none of it made me too happy. There was a half hour left of the show, and it only got worse.

  
         
"You know, mister, I think you're a fake," said the next caller.

  
         
"Of course I'm a fake! We're all fakes on this whole world we're all pretending to be something that we're not. We are not bodies walking around, we are not atoms and molecules, we are unkillable undestroyable ideas of the Is, no matter how much we believe otherwise . . ."

  
         
He would have been the first to remind me that I was free to leave, if I didn't like what he was saying, and he would have laughed at my fears of lynch mobs waiting with torches at the airplanes.

18

       
Don't be

         
dismayed at good-byes.

        
A farewell is necessary before

      
you can meet

            
again.

                
And meeting

             
again, after moments or

                        
lifetimes, is certain for

 
               
those who are

                  
friends.

 
 
         
Next
noon
, before the people came to fly, he stopped by my wing. "Remember what you said when you found my problem, that nobody would listen, no matter how many miracles I did?"

  
         
"No."

  
         
"Do you remember that time, Richard?"

  
         
"Yeah, I remember the time. You looked so lonely all of a sudden. I don't remember what I said."

  
         
"You said that depending on people to care about what I say is depending on somebody else for my happiness. That's what I came here to learn: it doesn't matter whether I communicate or not. I chose this whole lifetime to share with anybody the way the world is put together, and I might as well have chosen it to say nothing at all. The Is doesn't need me to tell anybody how it works."

  
         
"That's obvious, Don. I could have told you that."

  
         
"Thanks a lot. I find the one idea I lived this life to find, I finish a whole life's work, and he says, 'That's obvious, Don. "'

  
         
He was laughing, but he was sad, too, and at the time I couldn't tell why.

19

 
 
The mark

 
of your ignorance is the depth

 
of your belief in injustice

    
And tragedy.

                 
What the caterpillar

     
calls the end of the world,

      
the master calls a

        
butterfly.

  
         
The words in the Handbook the day before were the only warning I had. One second there was the normal little crowd waiting to fly, his airplane taxiing in, stopping by them in a whirl of propeller-wind, a casual good scene for me from the top wing of the Fleet as I poured gas into the tank. The next second there was a sound like a tire exploding and the crowd itself exploded and ran. The tire on the Travel Air was untouched, the engine ticked over at idle as it had a moment before, but there was a foot-wide hole in the fabric under the pilot's cockpit and Shimoda was pressed to the other side, head slammed down, his body still as sudden death.

  
         
It took a few thousandths of a second for me to realize that Donald Shimoda had been shot, another to drop the gas can and jump off the top wing, running. It was like some movie script, some amateur-acted play, a man with a shotgun running away with everybody else, close enough by me I could have cut him with a saber. I remember now that I didn't care about him. I was not enraged or shocked or horrified. The only thing that mattered was to get to the cockpit of the Travel Air as fast as I could and to talk with my friend.

  
         
It looked as if he had been hit by a bomb; the left half of his body was all torn leather and cloth and meat and blood, a soggy mass of scarlet.

  
         
His head was tilted down by the fuel primer knob, at the right lower corner of the instrument panel, and I thought that if he had been wearing his shoulder harness he wouldn't have been thrown forward like that.

  
         
"Don! Are you OK?" Fool's words.

  
         
He opened his eyes and smiled. His own blood was sprayed wet across his face "Richard, what does it look like?"

  
         
I was enormously relieved to hear him talk. If he could talk, if he could think, he would be all right.

  
         
"Well, if I didn't know better, buddy, I'd say you had a bit of a problem."

  
         
He didn't move, except just his head a little bit, and suddenly I was scared again, more by his stillness than by the mess and the blood. "I didn't think you had enemies."

  
         
"I don't. That was . . . a friend. Better not to have . . . some hater bring all sorts of trouble . . . into his life . . . murdering me."

  
         
The seat and side panels of the cockpit were running with blood-it would be a big job just to get the Travel Air clean again, although the airplane itself wasn't damaged badly. "Did this have to happen, Don ?"

  
         
"No . . ." he said faintly, barely breathing. "But I think . . . I like the drama . . ."

  
         
"Well, let's get cracking! Heal yourself! With the crowd that's coming, we got lots of flying to do!"

  
         
But as I was joking at him, and in spite of all his knowing and all his understanding of reality, my friend Donald Shimoda fell the last inch to the primer knob, and died.

  
         
There was a roaring in my ears, the world tilted, and I slid down the side of the torn fuselage into the wet red grass. It felt as if the weight of the Handbook in my pocket toppled me to my side, and as I hit the ground it fell loose, wind slowly ruffling the pages.

  
         
I picked it up listlessly. Is this how it ends, I thought, is everything a master says just pretty words that can't save him from the first attack of some mad dog in a farmer's field ?

  
         
I had to read three times before I could believe these were the words on the page.

           
Everything

              
in this book

                     
may be

                            
wrong.

** end **

Epilogue

  
         
By Autumn, I had flown south with the warm air. Good fields were few, but the crowds got bigger all the time. people had always liked to fly in the biplane, and these days more of them were staying to talk and to toast marshmallows over my campfire.