The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (29 page)

"Wookie," she said hopelessly, "do you ever get the feeling that we are not meant to live here? That it is time for us to move on?"

I put down the wrench I had clutched through the storm, my heart filled with warm agreement. "I was just about to ask you the same thing. I'm so tired of living in a little box on wheels! It's been more than a year! Can we stop? Can we find a house, a real house somewhere that isn't made of plastic?"

She looked at me strangely. "Do I hear Richard Bach talking about settling down, a permanent place?"

"Yes."

She cleared a spot in the sand on the chair and sat quietly.

"No," she said. "I don't want to put my heart into getting a house and fixing it up and then stop in the middle of it if you decide you're restless and the experiment didn't work. If you're still convinced the boredom will get us, sooner or later, we're not ready for a house, are we?"

I thought about it. "I don't know."

Leslie thought we were finding inner horizons, frontiers of the mind; she knew we were on our way to discovering pleasures that neither she nor I could find alone. Was she right, or merely hopeful?

We've been married more than a year, ceremony or not. Do I still bow to the old fears? Did I sell my biplane and go searching for a soulmate to learn how to be afraid? Have I not been changed by what we've done together, have I learned nothing?

She sat without moving, thinking her own thoughts.

I remembered the days in Florida, when I had looked at my life and it was dead in the river-lots of money and airplanes and women, zero progress living. Now there's not nearly so much money, and before long there may be none. The airplanes are most of them sold. There's been one woman, only one. And my life is moving swift as a racing-boat, so much I've changed and grown with her.

Each other's company our sole education and entertainment, our life together had grown like summer clouds. Ask a woman and a man sailing their boat over oceans, aren't you bored? how do you pass the time? They smile. Not enough hours in the year to do what needs be done!

Same for us. Delighted we had been, laughed sometimes till we could not stand, scared now and then, tender, desperate, joyous, discovering, passionate . . . but not one second bored.

What a story that would make! How many men and women go through the same rivers, menaced by the same sharp cliches, the same jagged dangers that had threatened us! If that idea stands up, I thought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How Richard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when we set off searching for a soulmate who doesn't exist, and find her?

" 'I don't know' isn't right, wook," I said after a while. "I do know. I want us to get a house where we can be still and quiet and alone together for a long time."

She turned to me once more. "Are you talking about commitment?"

"Yes."

She left her chair, sat down with me in the inch of desert settled on our floor, kissed me softly.

After a long time, she spoke. "Any particular place in mind?"

I nodded. "Unless you feel strongly otherwise, wook, I'd hope we might find a place with a lot more water and a lot less sand."

thirty-nine

M. T TOOK three months' soaking in a torrent of real-estate catalogs, maps and out-of-town newspapers; it took weeks of flying, looking down from the Meyers for the perfect place to live, towns with names like Sweet Home and Happy Camp and Rhododendron. But the day came at last when the trailer windows that had framed sagebrush and rocks and a seared crust of desert now looked out on flower-spangled spring-color meadows, steep green forests, a river of water.

The Little Applegate Valley, Oregon. From the top of our hill we could see twenty miles around, and scarcely another house in sight. Houses there were, hidden by trees and slopes, but here we felt alone and blessed quiet; here we would build our home.

A little home, first; one room with loft, while the IRS negotiations continued. Later, with the problem solved,

we'd build our permanent house alongside and call the little one a guesthouse.

The Revenue Service growled to itself, trying to unravel my new offer, while months slid into years. It was an offer a child might make, nothing denied. I felt like a visitor in a foreign country, unfamiliar with the money. I owed a bill, didn't know how to pay, so held out everything I owned and asked IRS to take whatever it wanted.

My offer passed to the desk of yet another agent in Los Angeles, who asked for a current financial statement. He got one. We heard nothing for months. The case was transferred. The new agent asked for an updated financial statement. She got one. More months passed. Another agent, another financial statement. Agents went by like leaves of a calendar, turning.

In the trailer, Leslie looked up sadly from the latest request for a new financial statement. I heard the same little voice that I had heard long-distance in Madrid, two and a half years before. "Oh, Richie, if only I had known you before you got into this mess! It wouldn't have happened. . . ."

"We met as early as we could have met," I said. "Earlier than that, you know it-I would have destroyed you or run away from you or you wouldn't have had the patience, you would have walked out on me, with good reason. It never would have worked; I had to learn my way through that mess. I'd never do it again, but I'm not that person anymore."

"Thank the Maker," she said. "Well, I'm here now. If we survive this, I promise you, our future is going to look nothing like your past!"

The clock ticked; the IRS neither noticed nor cared that our lives were stalled.

Bankruptcy, the attorney had said. Perhaps John Mar-quart's bizarre theory was right, after all. Not a pretty ending, I thought, but better than stalemate, better than making these same moves over and over through eternity.

We tried to consider it, but hi the end we couldn't. Bankruptcy. Such a desperate thing to do. Never!

Instead of a tour through Paris and Rome and Tokyo, we began construction at the top of the hill.

The day after the foundation was poured, buying groceries in town, my eye was caught by a new business on the mall: Custom Computer.

I walked inside.

"Leslie, I know that you are going to call me a silly goose," I said when I got back to the trailer.

She was covered with dirt, from back-filling water-pipe trenches for the solar panels on the hilltop, from running her Bobcat earth-mover mixing topsoils, carving gardens, from lavishing care and love into this final place we'd chosen to live.

So beautiful, I thought, as if the makeup department had streaked dust to accent her cheekbones. She didn't care. She was going to take her shower anyway.

"I know I went to town to buy us a loaf of bread," I said, "and to get milk and lettuce and tomatoes if I could find any good tomatoes. But do you know what I got instead?"

She sat down before she spoke. "Oh, no. Richard, you are not going to tell me you got . . . magic beans?"

"A gift for my darling!" I said.

"Richard, please! What did you get? We don't have room! Is there time to take it back?"

"We can take it back if you don't like it. But you will not not like it, you will love it. I predict: YOUR mind, and THIS machine . . ."

"You bought a machine? At the grocery-store? How big is it?"

"It's sort of a grocery. It's an Apple."

"Richard, your thought is very sweet but are you sure I need-an apple-at this time?"

"By the time you pop out of the shower, wook, you are going to see a miracle, right here in our trailer.' I promise."

"We have so much to do, already, and there isn't enough space. ... Is it big?" But I said not another word, and at last she laughed and went for her shower.

I hefted boxes down the narrow hallway, moved the typewriter off the shelf-turned-desk, put books on the floor, then lifted the computer from its foam packing and set it where the typewriter had been. I put the toaster and the blender in the broom closet to make room for the printer on the kitchen counter. In minutes, two disk drives were connected, the video-screen glowed softly.

Word-processing program inserted into one drive, I turned the machine on. The disk whirred, made whisking breathing sounds for a minute, then went still. I typed a message, scrolled it out of sight, till only a small square of light remained on the screen, blinking.

She came out of the bathroom fresh and clean, her hair gathered under a towel-turban to dry.

"OK, Richie, I can't stand the suspense! Where is it?"

I unveiled the computer from under the dish-towel. "Ta-da!"

"Richard?" she said. "What is it?"

"Your very own . . . COMPUTER!"

312

She looked at me, wordless.

"Sit you down right here," I urged, "and then press the key marked 'Control' and at the same time press the 'B.' That's called 'Control-B.'"

"Like this?" she said.

The light-square vanished, and in its place the screen filled with words:

GOOD AFTERNOON, LESLIE! I AM YOUR NEW COMPUTER. I AM DELIGHTED TO HAVE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MEET YOU AND TO SERVE YOU. YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE ME I THINK. YOUR NEW,

APPLE.

WON'T YOU TRY WRITING SOMETHING IN THE SPACE THAT FOLLOWS?

"Isn't that sweet," she said.

She typed.a tentative line: NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PERSONS TO CAME TO THE

"I made a mistake."

"Move the cursor to the right of the mistake, then type Left-Arrow." She did, and the mistake disappeared.

"Does it have instructions?"

"It teaches you itself. Press the Escape key twice, then the M key a few times, and follow what the screen tells you. ..."

That was the last I spoke with Leslie for the next ten hours. She sat tranced in front of the machine, learning the

313

system. Then she typed things-to-remember flies into it, building schedules, idea-lists; attacked correspondence.

The computer used no paper till the writing was finished and ready to print; no trees had to die to become paper thrown away for typing errors.

"Wookie," she said, after midnight, "I apologize to you. I am sorry."

"That's all right," I said. "What are you sorry for?"

"I thought you were being a silly gosling, I thought here's just what we need, a big electric toy in the trailer to put us right out in the rain, but I didn't say anything because it was your sweet gift. I was wrong! It's so ..." She looked up at me, searched the word and came down on it center-square: ". . . organized! It's going to change our lives!"

So enchanted was she with the powers of the computer that more than once in the days that followed I had to ask very courteously if it might be possible for me to have a few minutes at the keyboard. I wanted to learn, too.

"Poor dear," she said absently, as she typed. "Of course you want to learn. Just a few minutes more. . . ."

Minutes turned to hours, to days; interrupt her I refused to do. Soon I was back once again from the Apple store, a second computer in tow. For this one we had to set a drafting-table in the least-crowded corner of the trailer, making it the most-crowded corner.

Curiosities, the computers were, but they were compasses, too, through a forest of ideas and schedules and strategies demanding attention. In addition, they could whip out financial statements faster than the IRS could blink; pressing one key, we could bury them in financial statements.

By the time the little house was finished, we were both comfortably expert in driving our smart little machines. We

smoothed them to our personal design, switches set just so, extra memory-boards installed, electronics to link them by telephone to giant computers long-distance.

A week after we moved to the hilltop, the computers were running six hours a day, side by side on their desk in the bedroom-cornerrturned office.

Our vocabulary changed.

"I booted straight into a hang, wookie!" She showed me a screen full of frozen-ant lines. "Has that ever happened to you?"

I nodded in sympathy. "Yep. It's your disk or your drive," I said. "No. It's your 80-character board. Control-reset if you can, or re-boot on my disk. If it works on mine, it's not the board, it's your disk. Maybe your drive speed's off and it ate your disk I hope to God not but we can fix it."

"It wouldn't be the disk, or I would have gotten an I/O error," she said, full of frowns. "I have to be so careful about things that cause the whole program to blow up, or my computer to self-destruct. Like touching it, for instance ..."

Then we heard an impossible sound, the crunch of tires on gravel outside. Up our long steep forbidding drive, through five No Trespassing Keep Away At All Costs This Means You signs, had driven an automobile.

Out stepped a woman carrying a sheaf of papers, daring to invade our precious privacy.

I stormed from my computer out the door and met her before she had taken five steps.

"Good morning," she said politely, in a fine British accent. "I hope I'm not interrupting ..."

"You are," I barked. "Did you happen to notice the signst The NO TRESPASSING signs?"

She froze like a doe looking point-blank into the barrel of a hunting-rifle.

"I just wanted to tell you-they're going to cut all the trees and they'll never grow back!" She bolted for the safety of her car.

Leslie ran from the house to keep her from going.

"They're . . . who's they?" she said. "Who's going to cut all the trees?"

"The government," the lady said, looking nervously over Leslie's shoulder at me, "the Bureau of Land Management. It's illegal, but they're going to do it because nobody's going to stop them!"

"Come in," Leslie said to her, nodding a wordless Down, King, to me, as though I were the family attack-dog. "Please come in, and let's talk about it."

That was the way, hackles raised, I met Community Action-a meeting I had resisted since approximately the hour I had learned to walk.

forty

DENISE FINDLAYSON left us with a stack of documents, a dwindling drift of dust over the driveway and a dark sense of oppression. Did I not have enough troubles with the government that now it had to destroy the very land around us?