The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (2 page)

In spite of my miffment, her face was pleasant to see, lit with curiosity and the bravery to satisfy it. Deep brown eyes, hair a dark brushed waterfall.

"Read it to me," she said, unfrightened.

I did, the last paragraph to where it broke off.

"Is it true?"

"Name one thing you've loved," I said. "Liking doesn't count. What one driving obsessive uncontrollable passion . . ."

"Horses," she said at once. "I used to love horses."

"When you were with your horses, was the world a different color from other times?"

She smiled. "Yeah. I was queen of south Ohio. My mom had to lasso me and drag me out of the saddle before I'd go home with her. Afraid? Not me! I had that big horse under me-Sandy-and he was my friend and nobody was going to hurt me as long as he was there! I loved horses. I loved Sandy."

I thought she had stopped talking. Then she added, "I don't feel that way about anything, now."

I didn't answer, and she fell into her own private time, back with Sandy. I returned to my letter.

Without the power of that love, we're boats becalmed on seas of boredom, and those are deadly . . .

"How are you going to mail a letter to twenty years ago?" she said.

"I don't know," I told her, finishing the sentence on the page. "But wouldn't it be terrible, the day comes we learn how to ship something back in time, and we've got nothing to send? So first I thought I'd get the package ready. Next I'll worry about the postage."

How many times had I said to myself, it's too bad I didn't know this at age ten, if only I had learned that at twelve, what a waste to understand, twenty years late!

"Where are you headed?" she said.

"Geographically?"

"Yes."

"Away from winter," I said. "South. The middle of Florida."

"What's in Florida?"

"Not sure. I'm going to meet a friend of mine, and I don't quite know where she is." There, I thought, we have the understatement of the day.

"You'll find her."

At that I laughed and looked at her. "Do you know what you're saying, 'You'll find her'?"

"Yes."

"Explain, please."

"No," she said, and smiled mysteriously. Her eyes shone so dark they were almost black. She had smooth walnut-tan skin, no crease, not a mark to hint who she was; so young she hadn't finished building her face.

" 'No,' it is," I said, smiling back.

The bus boomed along the Interstate, farms rolling past, fall-colored palettes at the edge of the highway. The biplane could have landed in that field, I thought. Telephone-wires high at the edge, but the Fleet could have slipped right down. . . .

Who was this unknown beside me? Was she a cosmic smile at my fears, coincidence sent to melt my doubt? Could be. Anything could be. She could be Shimoda in a mask.

"Do you fly airplanes?" I asked casually.

"Would I be on this bus? Just thinking about it makes me nervous," she said. "Airplanes!" She shuddered, shook her head. "I hate flying." She opened her purse and reached inside. "Mind if I smoke?"

I shrank, cringed from reflex.

"Do I mind? A cigarette? Ma'am, please. . . !" I tried to

explain, not to hurt her feelings. "You don't mean . . . you're going to blow smoke into our little bit of air? Force me who has done you no harm to breathe smoke?" If she were Shimoda, she had just found out what I thought of cigarettes.

The words froze her stiff.

"Well, I'm sorry," she said at last. She picked up her purse, moved to a distant seat. Sorry she was, and hurt and angry.

Too bad. Such dark eyes.

I lifted the pen again, to write to the boy long ago. What could I tell him about finding a soulmate? The pen waited above the paper.

I had grown up in a house with a fence around it, and in the fence there was a white smoothwooden gate, two holes bored round and low together in the wood so the dog could see through. One night, the moon high, late for me home from the school dance, I remember that I stopped, hand on the gate, and spoke so quietly to myself and to the woman I would love that not even the dog could have heard.

"I don't know where you are, but you're living right now somewhere on this earth and one day you and I are going to touch this gate where I'm touching it now. Your hand will touch this very wood, here! Then we'll walk through and we'll be full of a future and a past and we'll be to each other like no one else has ever been. We can't meet now, I don't know why. But some day our questions will be answers and we'll be caught in something so bright . . . and every step I take is one step closer on a bridge we must cross to meet. Before too long? Please?"

So much of my childhood is forgotten, yet that moment at the gate, word for word, stayed.

What can I tell him about her? Dear Dick: What do you know, twenty years have passed and I'm still alone.

I put the notebook down and looked out the window, not seeing. Surely by now my tireless subconscious has answers for him. For me.

What it had was excuses. It's hard to find the right woman, Richard! You're not so malleable as once you were, you've been through the open-minded stage. Why, things you've chosen to believe, things you'd die for, are to most people funny, or mad.

My lady, I thought, she'll need to have found on her own the same answers that I've found, that this world is not remotely what it seems, that whatever we hold in our thought comes true in our lives, that miracles aren't miraculous. She and I, we'll never get along unless ... I blinked. She'll have to be exactly the same as met

A lot more physically beautiful than me, of course, for I so love beauty, but she'll have to share my prejudice as well as my passion. I couldn't imagine myself falling into life with a woman who trails smoke and ashes everywhere she goes. If she needs parties and cocktails to be happy, or drugs, or if she were afraid of airplanes or afraid of anything, or if she weren't supremely self-reliant, if she lacked a taste for adventure, if she didn't laugh at the silly things I call humor, it wouldn't work. If she didn't want to share money when we have it and fantasy when we don't, if she didn't like raccoons . . . oh, Richard, this won't be easy. Without all of the above and more, you're better off alone!

In the back of the notebook writing forward, as we rolled in overdrive along Interstate 65 between Louisville and Birmingham, for three hundred miles, I made a list: The Perfect Woman. By the ninth page I was getting discouraged. Every

line I wrote was important, every line had to be. Yet no one could meet ... I couldn't meet those standards myself!

A burst of objectivity like cruel confetti around my head: I'm ruined as a mate even before I make it to advanced soulhood, and advancing makes it worse.

The more enlightened we become, the more we can't be lived up to by anybody anywhere. The more we learn, the more we'd better expect to live by ourselves.

I wrote that as fast as I could write. In the blank space at the bottom of the last page I added, barely noticing, Even me.

But change my list? Can I say it's wrong? It's OK if she smokes or hates airplanes or if she can't help gulping down a glass of cocaine now and then?

No. That is not OK.

Sunset had been on my side of the bus; now there was dark everywhere. Out in that dark, I knew, were little triangle farms, tiny polygon fields not even the Fleet could land in.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.

Ah, The Messiah's Handbook, I thought, wherever was it now? Plowed under, most likely, in the weeds where I had thrown it the day Shimoda died. With its pages that opened to whatever a reader most needed to know. I had called it a magic book once, and he had been vexed with me. You can get your answers from anywhere, from last year's newspaper, he had said. Close your eyes, hold any question in mind, touch anything written, and there's your answer.

The nearest printed paper on the bus was my own wrecked copy of the book I had written about him, the page-

proof last-chance that publishers give writers to remember that diesel is spelled with the i in front of the e, and was I sure I wanted this to be the only book in the history of English ever to end with a comma.

I put the book on my lap, closed my eyes and asked. How do I find the one most dear, most perfect woman for me? I held the question bright-lit, opened the book, put my finger down and looked.

Page 114. My finger rested on the word "bring": To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.

A flash of ice dropped down my back. I hadn't practiced this one for a long time; I had forgotten how well it works.

I looked in the window turned night mirror by the seat-light in the bus, watching for a reflection of what she might be. The glass was empty. I'd never seen a soulmate, I couldn't imagine how to imagine her. Should it be a physical picture I hold in my thought, as though she were a thing? Just this side of tall, is she, long dark hair, eyes seacolor skycolor enchantment knowing, a changing loveliness different every hour?

Or imagine qualities? Iridescent imagination, intuition from a hundred lifetimes remembered, crystal honesty and steel fearless determination? How do I visualize those?

Today, it's easy to visualize them; then, it was not easy. Images flickered and vanished, though I knew I had to hold images clear to make them appear alive around me.

I tried, tried again to see her, but only got shadows, ghosts barely slowing through the school-zone of my thought. I who could visualize the smallest details of anything I dared imagine, could not vaguely picture the one that I wanted to be the most important person in my life.

One more time I tried to see her, imagine her there.

Nothing. Lights from a broken looking-glass, shifting darks. Nothing.

I can't see who she is!

After a time I gave up.

Psychic powers, you can bet on it: when you want 'em, they're out to dinner.

No sooner had I fallen asleep in the bus, tired as death from the ride and the effort to see, a mind-voice shook me, startled me awake:

"YO! RICHARD! If it'll make you feel any better, listen! Your one woman in all the world? Your soulmate?" it said. "You already know her!"

three

M. GOT off the bus at 8:40 A.M., in the middle of Florida, hungry.

Money was no concern, as it would not be for anyone with so much cash tied into their bedroll. What troubled me was, What happens now? Here's warm Florida. Not only no soulmate waiting at the bus-stop, but no friend, no home, no nothing.

The sign in the cafe, when I entered, said that it reserved the right to refuse service to anyone.

You reserve the right to do absolutely anything you want to do, I thought. Why put up signs to say so? Makes you look frightened. Why are you frightened? Rowdies come in here, break things up? Organked-criminals? In this little cafe?

The waiter looked at me and then at my bedroll. My blue-denim jacket had one little torn place on the sleeve where

the string was coming loose from my mending, the bedroll had a few tiny spots of grease and clean oil from the Fleet's engine on it, and I realized that he was asking himself if now was the time to refuse service to someone. I smiled hello.

"How you doin', there?" I said.

"Doin' all right." The place was nearly empty. He decided I'd pass. "Coffee?"

Coffee for breakfast? Aak! Bitter stuff . . . they grind it out of bark, or something.

"No thank you," I said. "Maybe a piece of that lemon pie hotted up for a half-minute in the microwave? And a glass of milk."

"Sure thing," he said.

Once I would have ordered bacon or sausage for this meal, but not lately. The more I had come to believe in the indestructibility of life, the less I wanted to be a part of even illusory killings. If one pig in a million might have a chance for a contemplative lifetime instead of being skrockled up for my breakfast, it was worth swearing off meat. Hot lemon pie, any day.

I savored the pie, and looked out the window into town. Was I likely to meet my love in this place? Not likely. No place is likely, against odds in the billions.

How could I already know her?

According to the wisest souls, we know everyone everywhere without having met in person-not much comfort when you're trying to narrow your search. "Hi, there, miss. Remember me? Since consciousness isn't limited by space or time, you'll recall that we're old friends. . . ."

Not a likely introduction, I thought. Most misses know that there are a few strange folks in the world they want to

be a little cautious with, and that is definitely a strangefolk introduction.

I brought to mind every woman I had met, going back years. They were married to careers or to men or to different ways of thinking from mine.

Married women sometimes unmarry, I thought, people change. I could call every woman I knew . . .

"Hello," she'd say.

"Hello."

"Who's this?"

"Richard Bach."

"Who?"

"We met at the shopping center? You were reading a book and I said that's a terrific book and you said how do you know and I said I wrote it?"

"Oh! Hello."

"Hi. Are you still married?"

"Yes."

"Well, it's certainly been nice talking to you again. Have a nice day, OK?"

"Ah . . . sure will . . ."

"Bye."

There is better guidance, there has to be, than going through that conversation with every woman . . . When the time is right I'll find her, I thought, and not a second before.

The breakfast came to seventy-five cents. I paid it and strolled into the sun. It was going to be a hot day. Probably lots of mosquitoes tonight. But what do I care? Tonight I sleep indoors!

With that I remembered I had left my bedroll on the seat of the breakfast-booth in the restaurant.

A different life, this staying on the ground. One doesn't just tie things up in the morning and toss them in the front cockpit and fly off into one's day. One carries things around by hand, or finds a roof and stays under it. Without the Fleet, without my Alfalfa Hilton, I was no longer welcome in hayfields.