In whatever state this is, out of body, questions come with answers. If we want to talk with them, we can. We can be with anyone to whom we have some bond, and who wishes to be with us.
I turned and looked back at the two, the woman and the cat, and noticed for the first time a silver thread from the cat. It led down through the dark to a basket on the floor, and a sleeping white fluff. Had I a heart, it would have skipped a beat.
-Leslie! Amber . . . Amber is Angel T. Cat!- As if on cue for a play we didn't know, at that moment our other cat Dolly burst down the hall at maximum wide-open top speed and leaped, a four-legged motorcycle, onto the bed.
The next instant we were cat-stomped, bashed awake, forgetting all.
"DOLLY!" I shouted, but she had caromed from bed to wall and was long gone down the hall again. Just her way of having fun.
"Sorry, wook," I said. "Sorry to wake you."
She switched the light on.
"How did you know it was Dolly?" she asked sleepily.
"It was Dolly. I saw her."
"In the dark? You saw Dolly who is a brown-and-black cat, running top-speed, in the dark?"
We both remembered, the same second.
"We were out, weren't we?" she said. "Oh, wookie, we were together, and we were up in the clouds!"
I grabbed my notebook, fumbled for a pen. "Quick, right now. Tell me everything you remember."
From that night forward, the practice gradually became less difficult, each success clearing the way for the next.
After the first year's practice, we could meet together out-of-body several times a month; the suspicion that we were visitors on the planet grew till we could smile at each other, interested observers, in the middle of the evening news.
Because of our practice, the death-and-tragedy we saw on Channel Five were not death and tragedy; they were the
comings and goings, the adventures of spirits of infinite power. The evening news turned for us from grim horror into a broadcast of classes, of tests to be taken, of social investment opportunities, challenges and gauntlets thrown down.
"Good evening, America, I'm Nancy Newsperson. Here's tonight's list of horrors around the world. Spiritual swashbucklers, you want advancement-through-rescue, listen up: in the Middle East today . . ." She reads, hoping rescuers are tuned in. "Next we have our list of Failures in Government! Anyone out there enjoy repairing bureaucratic disasters? After a brief commercial break, we'll open a crate of Assorted Severe Problems. If you've got solutions, be sure to watch!"
We had hoped from out-of-body practice to learn to be master and not victim of the body and its death. We hadn't guessed that thrown in with the lesson would come a perspective that would change everything else-when we turn from victim into master, what do we do with our power?
One evening after writing, as I poured cat-food and mini-marshmallows into a tray to set out for our nightly visit from Racquel Raccoon, Leslie came to supervise. She had left her computer early, to tune in the state of the world.
"See anything on the news," I said, "that you'd like to invest in?"
"Stopping the nukes, stopping war, as always. Space colonies, maybe; saving the environment, of course, and the whales, endangered animals."
The food tray looked delicious, when I squinted through raccoon-eyes.
"Too many marshmallows," she said, taking some off the heap. "We are feeding Racquel, not Hoggie."
"I thought she might like a few extra tonight. The more marshmallows she has, the less she'll want to eat little birds, or something."
Without a word, Leslie put back the extra marshmallows and went to make a place ready on the couch for us.
I put out the raccoon-food, then curled next to my wife in the living room.
"The best opportunity, I think, is Individual advancement," I said. "You and me, learning . . . there's something we can control!"
"Not out-of-body flitting off to other levels, did you notice that?" she teased. "Are we not quite ready to say goodbye to our little planet?"
"Not quite ready," I said. "It's enough to know we can leave it, now, whenever we want. We may be foreigners on Earth, wookie, but we've got seniority! Years of education in how to use the body, the civilization, ideas, the language. How to change things. Not ready to throw that away yet. I'm glad I didn't kill myself a long time ago, before I found you."
She looked at me, curious. "Did you know you were trying to kill yourself?"
"Not consciously, I don't think. But neither do I think my close calls were accidental. Loneliness was such a problem, back then, I wouldn't have minded dying, it would have been a new adventure."
"What would it have felt like," she said, "to have killed yourself and then found that your soulmate was still on earth, waiting for you?"
The words froze in the air. Had I come closer to that than
I knew? We sat together on our rented couch, twilight fading to dark outside.
"GRF!" I said. "What a thought!"
Suicide, like murder-uncreativel Anyone desperate enough for suicide, I thought, should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do what they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.
I took her hand, in the dark. "What a thought!" I said. "There I am, just having killed myself, separating from my dead body, and then realizing, too late ... I would have met you, by coincidence, on my way through Los Angeles to New Zealand, except I've just killed myself! 'Oh, no!' I would have said. 'What a goose I've been!'"
"Poor dead goose," she said. "But you could always start another lifetime."
"Sure, I could. And I'd be forty years younger than you."
"Since when have we started counting ages?" She was laughing at my antibirthday campaign.
"It's not the age, as much as we'd be out of sync. You'd say something about peace-marches or Banthas, and I'd sit there a dull rock and say, 'What?' And another lifetime would be so inconvenient! Can you imagine turning into a baby again? Learning . . . how to walk? Life as a teenager? How we survived adolescence in the first place, it's a wonder. But to be eighteen, to be twenty-four again? That's more sacrifice than I'm prepared to make for at least another thousand years; more likely never, thank you. I'd rather be a harp-seal."
"I'll be a harp-seal with you," she said. "But if this is our last Earth-life for centuries, we should make the very best we can of it. What do other lifetimes matter? Like things
we've done this lifetime-Hollywood, living in the trailer, fighting to save the forest-what will they matter in a thousand years, what does it matter tonight, except what we've learned? What we've learned is everything! I think we've got a nice start, this time. Let's not be harp-seals yet." She stirred, shivered. "Would you like a blanket, or a fire?"
I was thinking about what she had said. "Either," I murmured. "Do you want me to fix it?"
"No. Just needs a match. . . ."
The tiny light shed warm glows from the wood-stove into her eyes, her hair.
"For right now," she said, "if you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?"
"I CAN do anything I want."
"What would it be?" she insisted, curling down near me again, watching the fire.
"I'd want to say. what we've learned." My own words made me blink. Isn't that strange, I thought. Not finding answers anymore, but giving them away! Why not, when we've found our love, when we know at last how the universe works? Or how we think it works.
She looked from the fire into my eyes. "What we've learned is the only thing we have left. You want to give that away?" She turned back to the fire and smiled, testing me. "Don't forget you're the one who wrote that everything you say could be wrong."
"Could be wrong," I agreed. "But when we listen to somebody's answers, we're not really listening to the somebody, are we? We're listening to ourselves while they talk; it's ourself says this part's true and that part's crazy and that part's true again. That's
the fun of listening. The fun of saying is to be as little wrong as we know how to be."
"So you're thinking about giving lectures again," she said.
"Maybe. Would you be on stage with me, we'll say what we've found together? Not be afraid to talk about the bad times or the beautiful? Talk to the ones searching, the way we were, give them hope that happily-ever-after really can be? How I wish we could have heard that, years ago!"
She answered quietly. "I don't think I could do it with you. I can make the arrangements, I'll organize things for you, but I don't want to be on stage."
Something was very wrong. "You don't? There are things that we can say together that neither one of us can say alone. I can't say what you were going through as well as you can; the only way we can do it is together!"
"I don't think so," she said.
"Why not?"
"Richie, when I talked against the war, the crowds were so hostile I was terrified to stand up in front of them. I had to do it, but I promised myself when it was over I would never speak from a stage again. Ever. For any reason. I don't think I can do it."
"You're being silly," I told her. "The war is over! We're not talking about war, now, we're talking about love!"
Her eyes filled with tears. "Oh, Richie!" she said, "Love is what I was talking about then!"
forty-eight
"WHERE DO you get your crazy ideas?" asked the gentleman twenty rows back, the first question in the second hour of the lecture.
There was a mass low chuckle from the couple-thousand people in the Civic Auditorium ... he was not the only one curious about that.
Leslie sat lightly, looking cool and at ease, on the tall stool next to mine on the stage. For the moment I had walked to the footlights with a cordless microphone, choosing from among the hands raised, remembering to repeat the question so the balcony could hear, and so I could have time to think what to say.
" 'Where do I get my crazy ideas?' " I repeated. In half-seconds, an answer materialized, then the words I needed to say it.
"Same place I get the reasonable ones," I said. "Ideas
come from the sleep-fairy, the walk-fairy, and, when I'm irrevocably wet and unable to write notes, from the shower-fairy. What I've always asked from them is Please give me ideas that do no violence to my intuition.
"I know intuitively, for instance, that we are creatures of light and life, and not of blind death. I know that we are not bolted together out of space and time, subject to a million changing heres and nows, goods and bads. The idea that we are physical beings descended from primeval cells in nutrient soups, that idea does violence to my intuition, stomps all over it with football-shoes.
"The idea that we are descended from a jealous God who formed us out of dust to choose between kneel-and-praying or fires-of-damnation, that stomps me worse. No sleep-fairy ever brought me those for ideas. The whole concept of descent, for me, it's wrong.
"Yet no one place I could find, no one person anywhere who had my answers except the inner me, and the inner me I was afraid to trust. I had to swim through my life like a baleen whale, taking in great flooding seawater mouthfuls of what other people wrote and thought and said, tasting and keeping bits of knowing the size of plankton, that fit what I wanted to believe. Anything to explain what I knew was true, that's what I was looking for.
"From this writer over here, not one micro-shrimp could I keep, from as much as I could read of her books. From another over there, I understood nothing but this: 'We are not what we seem.' Hurray! That, intuitively I know, is TRUE! The rest of a book might be seawater, but the whale keeps that sentence.
"Little by little, I think we build a conscious understanding of what we're born already knowing: what the highest
inner us wants to believe, it's true. Our conscious mind, though, isn't happy till it can explain in words.
"Before I knew it, in just a few decades, I had a system of thinking that gives me answers when I ask."
I looked quickly to Leslie, and she waved a little wave to say she was still there.
"What was the question?" I said. "Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas? Answer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And in these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions I ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven't already, I'd suggest you want to find your soulmate, soon as you can. Next question?"
So much to say, I thought, and just one day to say it in each town that asks us to come and talk. Eight hours is not nearly enough. How do speakers tell people what they need to tell in one hour? Our first hour, we've barely outlined the framework of how we look at the world.
"The lady there, way back on the right side ..."
"My question is for Leslie. How do you know when you meet your soulmate?"
My wife looked at me splitsecond terror, lifted her microphone.
"How do you know when you meet your soulmate?" she repeated, calm as though she did this all the time. "I didn't know, when I met mine. It was in an elevator. 'Going up?' I said. 'Yes,' he said. Neither of us knew what those words would mean to the people we are now.
"Four years later we got to know each other and all at once we were best friends. The more I knew him, the more I admired him, the more I thought what a truly wonderful person he is!
"That's a key. Look for a love-aflair that gets better with
time, admiration brightening, trust that grows through storms.
"With this one man I saw that intense intimacy and joy were possible for me. I used to think those were my own special needs, my personal signs of a soulmate. Now I think they may be everyone's, but that we despair of finding them, we try to settle for less. How dare we ask for intimacy and joy when a lukewarm lover and mild happiness are the best we can find?
"Yet in our hearts we know that lukewarm will turn cold; mild happiness will become a kind of nameless sadness, nagging questions: Is this the love of my life, is this all there is, is this why I'm here? In our hearts we know there must be more, and we long for the one we never found.
"So often half a couple is trying to go up, the other half is dragging down. One walks forward, the other makes sure that for every two steps ahead they take three steps back. Better to learn happiness alone, I thought, love my friends and my cat, better wait for a soulmate who never comes than to make that dull compromise.
"A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life."
To her surprise, the crowd smothered her in applause. I had almost believed what she told me, that she might be less than perfect on the platform. She wasn't.
"Do you think the same way as he does," the next person called from the audience, "do you agree on everything?"
"Do we agree on everything," she said. "Most times. He turns up the radio, and I find that he's the only other person I've known who's enchanted by bagpipes. He's the only other who can sing 'Alone Am I' from Tubby the Tuba, word for word with me, from childhood memory.
"Other times," she said, "we couldn't have started farther apart ... I was a war-resister, Richard was an Air Force pilot; one man at a time for me, Richard's only woman was many women. He was wrong both times, and so of course he changed.
"But at the last it doesn't matter whether we agree or not, or who's right. What matters is what goes on between the two of us ... are we always changing, are we growing and loving each other more? That's what matters."
"May I add a word," I said.
"Of course."
"Thi
ngs around us-houses, jobs, cars-they're props, they're settings for our love. The things we own, the places we live, the events of our lives: empty settings. How easy to chase after settings, and forget diamonds! The only thing that matters, at the end of a stay on earth, is how well did we love, what was the quality of our love?"
At the first break, most of the people stood and stretched, some came to the front with books needing autographs.
Others met and talked, without formal introduction, at the place near the stage that we had set aside for them.
While the people were getting back to their seats for the fifth hour of the talk, I touched Leslie's shoulder. "How are you doing, little wook? Are you all right?"
"Just fine," she said. "It's nothing like before! This is wonderful!"
"You are so smart!" I said. "So wise and lovely you are. You could have your pick of any man out there."
She squeezed my arm. "I choose this one, thank you. Time to start again?"
I nodded, switched on my microphone. "Here we go," I said. "Let us continue. Any question ever asked since the dawn-of humankind, we promise you, we can answer it to our complete satisfaction!"
So much of what we said sounded crazy, yet none of it was false ... as if two theoretical physicists stood on stage to say that when we travel near lightspeed, we get younger than nontravellers; that a mile of space next to the sun is different from a mile of space next to the earth because the sun-mile space is curved more than the earth-mile.
Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?
"Ma'am," I said, nodding to a woman standing mid-audience, wondered where she'd take us next.
"Do you intend to die?"
Easy question; an answer to split between us.
We sailed that day with the wind of knowing that had changed and taught us, through a sea of questions: