Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

  "Well, hell!"

  I never say hell or damn-carryover from an ego thing as a child. But I was truly puzzled, and there was nothing else to say. What was happening to my wrench: Donald Shimoda was sixty miles at least over some horizon from here. I hefted the thing, examine it, balance it, feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes. There had to be some simple reason . . .

  I gave up at last, annoyed, put it on the toolbag an lit the fire for my pan-bread. There was no rush to go anywhere. Might stay here all day, if I felt like it.

  The bread had risen well in the pan, was just ready to be turned when I hear a sound in the sky to the west.

  There was no way that the sound could have been Shimoda's airplane, no way anybody could have tracked me to this one field out of millions of midwest fields, but I knew that it was him an started whistling. . . watching the bread and the sky an trying to think of something very calm to say when he lane.

  It was the Travel Air, all right, flew in low over the Fleet, pulled up steep in a show-off turn, slipped own through the air an lane 60 mph, the speed a Travel Air ought to land. He pulled alongside an shut own his engine. I didn't say anything. Waved, but didn't say a word. I did stop whistling.

  He got out of the cockpit an walked to the fire. "Hi, Richard."

  "You're late," I said. "Almost burned the pan-bread."

  "Sorry-"

  I handed him a cup of stream water and a tin plate with half the pan-bread and a chunk of margarine.

  "How'd it go ?" I said.

  "Went OK," he said with an instant's half-smile. "I escaped with my life."

  "Had some doubts you would."

  He ate the bread for a while in silence. "You know," he said at last, contemplating his meal, "this is really terrible stuff."

  "Nobody says you have to eat my panbread," I said crossly. "Why does everybody hate my pan-bread? NOBODY LIKES MY PAN-BREAD! Why is that, Ascended Master?"

  "Well," he grinned, "-and I'm speaking as God, now-I'd say that you believe that it's good and that therefore it does taste good to you. Try it without deeply believing what you believe and it's sort of like . . . a fire . . . after a flood . . . in a flour mill, don't you think? You meant to put the grass in, I guess."

  "Sorry. Fell in off my sleeve, somehow. But don't you think the basic bread itself --not the grass or the little charred part, there-the basic pan-bread, don't you think . . . ?"

  "Terrible," he said, handing me back all but a bite of what I had handed to him. "I'd rather starve. Still have the peaches?"

  "In the box."

  How had he found me, in this field? A twenty-eight-foot wingspan in ten thousand miles of prairie farmland is not an easy target, looking into the sun, especially. But I vowed not to ask. If he wanted to tell me, he would tell me.

  "How did you find me?" I said. "I could have landed anywhere."

  He had opened the peach can and was eating peaches with a knife . . . not an easy trick.

  "Like attracts like," he muttered, missing a peach slice.

  "Oh-"

  "Cosmic law. "

  "Oh "

  I finished my bread and then scraped the pan with sand from the stream. That sure is good bread.

  "Do you mind explaining? How is it that I am like your esteemed self? Or did by 'like' you mean the airplanes are alike, sort of?"

  "We miracle-workers got to stick together," he said. The sentence was both kind and horrifying the way he said it.

  "Ah . . . Don: Referring to your last comment? Perhaps you'd like to tell me what you had in mind: we miracle workers?"

  "From the position of the nine-sixteenths on the toolbag, I'd say you were running the old levitate-the-end-wrench trick this morning. Tell me if I'm wrong."

  "Wasn't running anything! I woke up . . . the thing woke me up, by itself!"

  "Oh. By itself." He was laughing at me.

  "YES BY ITSELF!"

  "Your understanding of your miracle working, Richard, is as thorough as your understanding of bread-baking."

  I didn't reply to that, just eased myself down on my bedroll and was quiet as could be If he had something to say, he could say it in his own good time.

  "Some of us start learning these things subconsciously. Our waking mind won't accept it, so we do our miracles in our sleep." He watched the sky, and the first clouds of the day. "Don't be impatient, Richard. We're all on our way to learning more. It will come to you a little faster now, and you'll be a wise old spiritual maestro before you know it."

  "What do you mean, before I know it? I don't want to know it! I don't want to know anything!"

  "You don't want to know anything."

  "Well, I want to know why the world is and what it is and why I live here and where I'm going next . . . I want to know that. How to fly without an airplane, if I had a wish."

  "Sorry."

  "Sorry what:"

  "Doesn't work that way. If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore." He looked away from the sky. "You're like everybody else. You already know this stuff, you're just not aware that you know it, yet."

  "I don't recall," I said, "I don't recall your asking me whether I want to learn this thing, whatever it is that has brought you crowds and misery all your life. Seems to have slipped my mind." Soon as I said the words I knew that he was going to say I'd remember later, and that he'd be right.

  He stretched out in the grass, the last of the flour in its bag for a pillow. "Look, you don't worry about the crowds. They can't touch you unless you want them to. You're magic, remember: FOOF!-you're invisible, and walk through the doors."

  "Crowd got you at Troy, didn't it?"

  "Did I say I didn't want them to? I allowed that. I liked it. There's a little ham in all of us or we'd never make it as masters."

  "But didn't you quit? Didn't I read... ?"

  "The way things were going, I was turning into the One-and-Only Full-Time Messiah, and that job I quit cold. But I can't unlearn what I've spent lifetimes coming to know, can I?"

  I closed my eyes and crunched a hay stem. "look, Donald, what are you trying to tell me? Why don't you come right out and say what is going on?"

  It was quiet for a long time, and then he said, "Maybe you ought to tell me. You tell me what I'm trying to say, and I'll correct you if you're wrong. "

  I thought about that a minute, and decided to surprise him. "OK, I'll tell you." I practiced then pausing, to see how long he could wait if what I said didn't come out too fluent. The sun was high enough now to be warm, and way off in some hidden field a farmer worked a diesel tractor, cultivating corn on Sunday.

  "OK, I'll tell you. First of all, it was no coincidence when I first saw you landed down in the field at Ferris, right?"

  He was quiet as the hay growing.

  "And second of all, you and I have some kind of mystical agreement which apparently I have forgotten and you haven't."

  Only a soft wind blowing, and the distant tractor-sound wafting back and forth with it.

  There was part of me listening that didn't think what I said was fiction. I was making up a true story.

  "I'm going to say that we met three or four thousand years ago, give or take a day. We like the same kind of adventures, we probably hate the same sort of destroyers, learn with about as much fun, about as fast as each other. You've got a better memory. Our meeting again is what you mean by 'Like attracts like,' that you said."

  I picked a new hay-stem. "How am I doing ?"

  "For a while I thought it was going to be a long haul," he said. "It is going to be a long haul, but I think there's a slim out side chance that you might make it this time. Keep talking."

  "For another thing, I don't have to keep talking, because you already know what things people know. But if I didn't say these things, you wouldn't know what I th
ink that I know, and without that I can't learn any of the things I want to learn." I put down my hay-stem. "What's in it for you, Don? Why do you bother with people like me ? Whenever some body is advanced as you are, he gets all these miracle-powers as byproducts. You don't need me, you don't need anything at all from this world."

  I turned my head and looked at him. His eyes were closed. "Like gas in the Travel Air?" he said.

  "Right," I said. "So all there is left in the world is boredom . . . there are no adventures when you know that you can't be troubled by any thing on this earth. Your only problem is that you don't have any problems!"

  That, I thought, was a terrific piece of talking.

  "You missed, there," he said. "Tell me why I quit my job... do you know why I quit the Messiah job.?"

  "Crowds, you said. Everybody wanting you to do their miracles for them."

  "Yeah. Not the first, the second. Crowdophobia is your cross, not mine. It's not crowds that wear me, its the kind of crowd that doesn't care at all about what I came to say. You can walk from New York to London on the ocean, you can pull gold coins out of forever and still not make them care, you know?"

  When he said that, he looked lonelier than I had ever seen a man still alive. He didn't need food or shelter or money or fame. He was dying of his need to say what he knew, and nobody cared enough to listen.

  I frowned at him, so as not to cry. "Well you asked for it," I said. "If your happiness depends on what somebody else, I guess you do have a problem."

  He jerked his head up and his eyes blazed as though I had hit him with the wrench. I thought all at once that I would not be wise to get this guy mad at me. A man fries quick, struck by lightning.

  Then he smiled that half-second smile. "You know what, Richard ?" he said slowly. "You . . . are . . . right!"

  He was quiet again, tranced, almost, by what I had said. Not noticing, I went on talking to him for hours about how we had met and what there was to learn, all these ideas firing through my head like morning comets and daylight meteors. He lay very still in the grass, not moving, not saying a word. By noon I finished my version of the universe and all things that dwelled therein.

  ". . . and I feel I've barely begun, Don, there's so much to say. How do I know all this - How come is that?"

  He didn't answer.

  "If you expect me to answer my own question, I confess that I do not know. Why can I say all these things now, when I've never even tried, before? What has happened to me ?"

  No answer.

  "Don ? It's OK for you to talk now, please."

  He didn't say a word. I had explained the panorama of life to him, and my messiah, as though he had heard all he needed in that one chance word about his happiness, had fallen fast asleep.

  7

  Wednesday morning, it's six o'clock, I'm not awake and WHOOM!! there's this enormous noise sudden and violent as some high explosive symphony; instant thousand voice choirs, words in Latin, violins and typani and trumpets to shatter glass. The ground shuddered, the Fleet rocked on her wheels and I came out from under the wing like a 400-volt cat, fur straight-out exclamation points.

  The sky was cold-fire sunrise, the clouds alive in wild paint, but all of it blurred in the dynamite crescendo.

  "STOP IT! STOP IT! OFF THE MUSIC, OFF IT!!"

  Shimoda yelled so loud and so furious I could hear him over the din, and the sound stopped at once, echoes rolling off and away and away and away. Then it was a gentle holy song, quiet as the breeze, Beethoven in a dream.

  He was unimpressed. "LOOK, I SAID OFF IT!!"

  The music stopped.

  "Whuf!" he said.

  I just looked at him.

  "There is a time and a place for everything, right ?" he said.

  "Well, time and place, well . . ."

  "A little celestial music is fine, in the privacy of your own mind, and maybe on special occasions, but the first thing in the morning, and turned up that loud ? What are you doing?"

  "What am I doing ? Don, I was sound asleep . . . what do you mean, what am I doing?"

  He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders helplessly, snorted and went back to his sleeping bag under the wing.

  The handbook was upside down in the grass where it had fallen. I turned it over carefully, and read.

  Argue

  for your limitations,

  and sure enough,

  they're

  yours.

  There was a lot I didn't about Messiahs.

  8

  We Finished the day in Hammond, Wisconsin, flying a few Monday passengers, then we walked to town for dinner, and started back.

  "Don I will grant you that this life can be interesting or dull or whatever we choose to make it. But even in my brilliant times I have never been able to figure out why we're here in the first place. Tell me something about that.

  We passed the hardware store (closed) and the movie theater (open: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), and in stead of answering he stopped turned back on the sidewalk.

  "You have money, don't you?"

  "Lots. What's the matter?"

  "Let's see the show," he said. "You buy ?"

  "I don't know, Don. You go ahead. I'll get back to the airplanes. Don't like to leave 'em alone too long." What was suddenly so important about a motion picture?

  "The planes are OK. Let's go to the show."

  "It's already started."

  "So we come in late."

  He was already buying his ticket. I followed him into the dark and we sat down near the back of the theater. There might have been fifty people around us in the gloom.

  I forgot why we came, after a while, and got caught up in the story, which I've always thought is a classic movie, anyway; this would be my third time seeing Sundance. The time in the theater spiraled and stretched the way it does in a good film, and I watched awhile for technical reasons. . . how each scene was designed and fit to the next, why this scene now and not later on. I tried to look at it that way but got spun up in the story and forgot.

  About the part where Butch and Sundance are surrounded by the entire Bolivian army, almost at the end, Shimoda touched my shoulder. I leaned toward him, watching the movie, wishing he could have kept whatever he was going to say till after it was over.

  "Richard ?"

  "Yeah."

  "Why are you here?"

  "It's a good movie, Don. Sh" Butch and Sundance, blood all over them, were talking about why they ought to go Australia. Why is it good?" he said.

  "Why is it good?" he said.

  "It's fun. Sh. I'll tell you later."

  "Snap out of it. Wake up. It's all illusions"

  I was irked. "Donald, there's just a few minutes more and then we can talk all you want. But let he watch the movie, OK?"

  He whispered intensely, dramatically. "Richard why are you here?"

  "Look, I'm here because you asked me to come in here!" I turned back and tried to watch the end.

  "You didn't have to come, you could have said no thank you."

  "I LIKE THE MOVIE . . ." A man in front turned to look at me for a second. "I like the movie, Don; is there anything wrong with that?"

  "Nothing at all," he said, and he didn't say another word till it was over and we were walking again past the used-tractor lot and out into the dark toward the field and the airplanes. It would be raining, before long.

  I thought about his odd behavior in the theater. "You do everything for a reason, Don?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Why the movie? Why did you all of a sudden want to see Sundance ?"

  "You asked a question. "

  "Yes. Do you have an answer?"

  "That is my answer. We went to the movie because you asked a question. The movie was the answer to your question."

  He was laughing at me, I knew it.

  "What was my question ?"

  There was a long pained silence. "Your question, Richard, was that even in your brilliant times you have never been ab
le to figure out why we are here."

  I remembered. "And the movie was my answer. "

  "Yes "

  "Oh "

  "You don't understand," he said.

  "No "

  "That was a good movie," he said, "but the world's best movie is still an illusion, is it not? The picture' aren't even moving; they only appear to move. Changing light that seems to move across a flat screen set up in the dark?"

  "Well, yes." I was beginning to understand.

  "The other people, any people anywhere who go to any movie show, why are they there, when it is only illusions?"

  "Well, it's entertainment," I said.

  "Fun. That's right. One."

  "Could be educational."

  "Good. It is always that. Learning Two."

  "Fantasy, escape."

  "That's fun, too. One. "

  "Technical reasons. To see how a film is made."

  "Learning. Two. "

  "Escape from boredom . . ."

  "Escape. You said that."

  "Social. To be with friends," I said.

  "Reason for going, but not for seeing the film. That's fun, anyway. One."

  Whatever I came up with fit his two fingers; people see films for fun or for learning or for both together.

  "And a movie is like a lifetime, Don, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  Then why would anybody choose a bad lifetime, a horror movie ?"

  "They not only come to the horror movie for fun, they know it is going to be a horror movie when they walk in," he said.

  "But why ? . . ."

  "Do you like horror films ?"

  "No."

  "Do you ever see them ?"

  "No."

  "But some people spend a lot of money and time to see horror or soap-opera problems that to other people are dull and boring? . ." He left the question for me to answer.

  "Yes."

  "You don't have to see their films and they don't have to see yours. That is called 'freedom. "'

  "But why would anybody want to be horrified ? Or bored ?"