The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

by Richard Bach

  I wrote that at high speed in dim light. Then closed my eyes, tested once more: / am the sorcerer . . . slowly opened my eyes again.

  Elbows on chess-table, face cupped in hands, I saw Leslie Parrish, eyes large and dark looking directly into my own.

  "What did the wookie write?" she said.

  I read it to her. "The little ceremony," I said, "is a way of reminding ourselves who's running the show."

  She tried it, "I am the sorceress ..." She smiled when she opened her eyes. "Did that just come to you now?"

  I nodded.

  "I created you?" she said. "I'm responsible for bringing you onstage? Movies? Sundaes? Chessgames and talks?"

  I nodded again. "Don't you think so? You're the cause of me-as-you-know-me. Nobody else in the world knows the

  Richard that's in your life. No one knows the Leslie that's in mine."

  "That's a nice note. Would you tell me some other notes, or am I prying?"

  I turned on a light. "I'm glad you understand that these are very private notes. ..." I said it lightly, but it was true. Did she know it was another ribbon of trust between us, first that she who respected my privacy would ask to hear the notes and next that I'd read them to her? I had a notion that she knew it well.

  "We have some book titles," I said, "Ruffled Feathers: A Birdwatcher's Expose of a National Scandal. Here's one could be a five-volume set-What Makes Ducks Tick?"

  I turned the page back, skipped a grocery list, turned another page.

  "Look in a mirror, and one thing's sure: what we see is not who we are. That was after your talk about mirrors, remember?

  "When we look back on our days, they've passed in a flash. Time doesn't last, and nobody's got long to live! SOMETHING bridges time-What? What? What?

  "You can tell that all of these aren't quite finished yet. . . .

  "The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.

  "The only thing that shatters dreams is compromise.

  "Why not practice living as though we were extremely intelligent? How would we live if we were spiritually advanced?"

  I reached the first page of the month's notes. "How do we save the whales? WE BUY 'EM! If whales were bought, and then made American citizens, or French or Australian or Jap-125

  anese, there's no country in the world dare lay a hand on 'em!"

  I raised my eyes to hers, over the notebook. "That's about it so far this month." "We buy 'em?" she said.

  "I don't have the details of that worked out. Each whale would carry the flag of the country it belongs to, a giant passport, sort of. Waterproof, of course. The money from the sale of citizenships goes to a big Whale Fund, something like that. It could work." "What do you do with them?"

  "Let 'em go where they want. Raise little whales . . ." She laughed. "I mean what do you do with your notes." "Oh. End of every month, I read them through, see what they're trying to tell me. Maybe a few will wind up in a story or a book, maybe they won't. To be a note is to lead a very uncertain life."

  "These notes tonight, do they tell you anything?" "I don't know yet. A couple of them are saying I'm not too sure this planet is home. Do you ever have the feeling you're a tourist on earth? You'll be walking down the street and suddenly it's like a moving postcard around you? Here's how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to keep off 'rain' and 'snow,' holes cut in the sides so they can see out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different colors, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture because each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a box called a 'body,' arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and tools, languages because they've forgotten how to communicate, eyes because they've forgotten how to see. Odd little planet. Wish you were here. Home soon. Has that ever happened to you?"

  "Once in a while. Not quite that way," she said.

  "Can I get you anything from your kitchen?" I said, "a cookie or something?" " -

  "No, thank you."

  I got up and found the cookie-jar, put a leaning tower of chocolate-chips on a plate for each of us. "Milk?"

  "No, thank you."

  I brought the cookies and milks to the table.

  "The notes remind. They help me remember that I'm a tourist on earth, remind me the funny customs they have here, how fond I am of the place. When I do that, I can almost recall what it's like where I came from. There's a magnet that's pulling on us, pulling us against the fence of this world's limits. I have this strange feeling that we come from the other side of the fence."

  Leslie had questions about that, and she had answers I hadn't thought of. She knew a world-as-it-ought-to-be, that I bet her was a warless world-as-it-is on some parallel dimension. The idea bemused us, melted the clock away.

  I picked a chocolate-chip cookie, imagined it warm, attacked it gently. Leslie sat back with a curious little smile, as though she cared about my notes, about the thoughts that I found so interesting.

  "Have we talked about writing before?" I said.

  "No." She reached for a cookie at last, her resistance broken by the patient ruthless proximity of her favorite morsel. "I'd love to hear. I'll bet you started early."

  How odd, I thought. I want her to know who I am!

  "Yep. Everywhere at home, when I was a kid, books. When I learned to crawl, there were books at nose-level. When I could stand, there were books that went on out of

  sight, higher than I could reach. Books in German, Latin, Hebrew, Greek, English, Spanish.

  "My dad was a minister, grew up in Wisconsin speaking German, learned English when he was six, studied Bible languages, speaks them still. My mother worked in Puerto Rico for years.

  "Dad would read stories in German and translate them for me as he read; Mom would chat with me in Spanish even when I couldn't understand, so I grew up sort of basted in words. Delicious!

  "I loved opening books to see how they'd begin. Writers create books the way we write lifetimes. A writer can: lead any character, to any event, for any purpose, to make any point. What does this writer do, or this one, I wanted to know, with a blank Page One? What do they do to my mind and my spirit, when I read their words? Do they love me or despise me or don't they care? Some writers are chloroform, I found out, but some are cloves and ginger.

  "Then I went to high school, learned to hate English Grammar, so bored with it I'd yawn seventy times in a fifty-minute class, walk out at the end slapping my face to wake up. Came my senior year at Woodrow Wilson High School, Long Beach, California, I picked Creative Writing to duck the torment of English Literature. Room four-ten, it was. Sixth-period Creative Writing."

  She moved her chair out from behind the chess table, listening.

  "The teacher of the class was John Gartner, the football coach. But John Gartner, Leslie, he was also a writer! In person, a real writer! He wrote stories and articles for outdoor magazines, books for teenagers: Rock Taylor-Football Coach, Rock Taylor-Baseball Coach. A bear, he was, stood

  about six-foot-five, hands this big; tough and fair and funny and angry sometimes, and we knew he loved his work and he loved us, too." All at once there was a tear in my eye, and I wiped it away, swiftly, thinking how strange. Haven't thought of Big John Gartner . . . he's been dead ten years and now there's this odd feeling in my throat. I hurried on, trusting she wouldn't notice.

  " 'OK, you guys,' he said the first day. 'I know you're in here so you don't have to take English Literature.' There was this guilty murmur you could hear among us, and the class kind of looked the other way. 'Let me tell you,' he said, 'the only way that anyone in this class gets an A on their report card is to show me the check from a piece of writing that you have written and sold this semester.' A chorus of groans and whines and howls . . . 'Oh, Mister GARTNER that's not fair, we're poor little high-school kids, how could you possibly expect-that's not FAIR, Mister Gartner!' which he silenced with a word that sounded like, 'GROWL.'

  " 'There's nothing wrong with a grade of B. B is Above Average. You can be Ab
ove Average without selling what you write, can't you? But A is Superior. Don't you agree that if you sell something that you have written it would be superior and you would be worth an A?' "

  I picked the second-to-last cookie from my plate. "Am I telling you more than you want to know?" I asked her. "Honest, now."

  "I'll say when to stop," she said. "Unless I ask you to stop, go on, OK?"

  "Well. I was highly grade-oriented, in those days."

  She smiled, remembering report-cards.

  "I wrote a lot and sent articles and stories to newspapers

  and magazines and just before the end of the semester sent a story to the Sunday supplement of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. It was a story about a club of amateur astronomers. They Know the Man in the Moon.

  "Imagine the shock! I come home from school, bring in the trash can from the street, feed the dog, and Mom hands me a letter from the Press-Telegram! Instant ice in all veins! I tremble it open, gulp through the words, start again and read from the beginning. They bought my story! Check enclosed for twenty-five dollars!

  "Can not sleep, can not wait for school to open in the morning. Finally it opens, finally sixth period, I whomp it dramatically on his desk, WHOMP! 'There's your check, Mister Gartner!'

  "His face ... his face lit up and he shook my hand so I couldn't move it for an hour. Announced to the class Dick Bach sold an article, to make me feel about a quarter-inch high. Got my A in Creative Writing, no further effort required. And I figured that was the end of the story."

  I thought about that day . . . twenty years ago or yesterday? What happens to time, in our minds?

  "But it wasn't," she said.

  "It wasn't what?"

  "It wasn't the end of the story."

  "Nope. John Gartner showed us what it was to be a writer. He was working on a novel about teachers. Cry of September. Wonder if he finished it before he died. ..." Again, a queer tightening in my throat; I thought it best to press on and finish this story and change the subject.

  "He'd bring in a chapter every week from his book, read it aloud and ask us how we'd write it better. It was his first novel for grown-ups. It had a lovestory in it, and his face

  would get bright red, reading parts of it, he'd laugh and shake his head in the middle of a sentence he thought was a little too true and tender for a football-coach to be sharing with his writing class. He had a terrible time writing women. Whenever he got too far from sports and the outdoors, we could hear it in his writing; telling about women was creaking along thin ice. So we'd criticize gleefully; we'd say, 'Mister Gartner, the lady doesn't seem quite as real to us as Rock Taylor does. Is there some way you can show her to us instead of tell her to us?'

  "And he'd bellow with laughter and pat his handkerchief over his forehead and he'd agree, he'd agree. Because always Big John drove it into us, he'd pound his fist on the table: 'Don't TELL me, SHOW me! INCIDENT! and EXAMPLE!' "

  "You loved him a lot, didn't you?"

  I smashed away another tear. "Ah ... he was a good teacher, little wookie."

  "If you loved him, what's wrong with saying that you loved him?"

  "I never thought of it that way. I did love him. I do love him."

  And then before I knew what I was doing, I was kneeling in front of her, arms around her legs, head down in her lap, sobbing for a teacher whose death I had heard fifth-hand without a blink, years before.

  She stroked the back of my head. "It's all right," she said softly, "it's all right. He must be so proud of you, and your writing. He must love you, too."

  What a strange feeling, I thought. This is what it's like to cry! It had been so long since I had done more than clench my jaw and bring down steel against sorrow. The last time I

  had cried? I couldn't remember. The day my mother died, a month before I became an aviation cadet, off to earn my wings in Air Force pilot training. From the day I joined the military, intensive practice in emotional control: Mr. Bach, henceforth you will salute all moths and flies. Why will you salute all moths and flies? You will salute all moths and flies because they have their wings and you do not. There is a moth on yonder window. Mister Bach, Laiuff: FACE! Fo-wurd: HAR! And: HALT! Face moth: FACE! Hand: SALUTE! Wipe that smile off your mouth, Mister. Now step on that smile, kill that smile, KILL IT! Now pick it up and carry it outside and bury it. You think this program's a joke? Who's in control of your emotions, Mister Bach!"

  That was the center of my training, that's what mattered: who's in control?

  Who's in control? I am! I the rational, I the logical, screening and weighing and judging and picking the way to act, the way to be. Never did I-the-rational consider I-the-emotional, that despised minority, never allowed him to take the wheel.

  Until tonight, sharing a sliver of my past with a best-friend sister.

  "Forgive me, Leslie," I said, straightening, wiping my face. "I can't explain what happened. Never done that before. I'm very sorry."

  "Never done what before? Never cared about someone's dying or never cried?"

  "Never cried. Not for a long time."

  "Poor Richard . . . maybe you should cry more often."

  "No, thank you. I don't think I'd approve of me if I did too much of that."

  "Do you think it's bad, for men to cry?"

  I moved back to my chair. "Other men can cry, if they want. I don't think it's right for me."

  "Oh," she said. I felt that she was thinking about that, judging me. What kind of person would judge against another for wishing to control his emotions? A loving woman might, one who knew a lot more about emotions and how to express them than I did. After a minute, no verdict returned, she said, "So what happened then?"

  "Then I dropped out of my first and only waste-of-a-year in college. Wasn't wasted. Took a course in archery, and there met Bob Keech, my flight instructor. The college was a waste, the flying lessons changed my life. But I stopped writing, after high school, till I was out of the Air Force, married, and discovered that I couldn't hold a job. Any job. I'd go wild with boredom and quit. Better starve than live with the staml of the time clock, twice a day.

  "Then at last, I finally understood what John Gartner had taught us: This is what it feels like to sell a story! Years after he died, I got his message. If the high-school-kid can sell one story, why can't the grown-up sell others?"

  I watched myself, curious. Never had I talked this way, to anyone.

  "So I started collecting rejection slips. Sell a story or two, earn a mass of rejections till the writing-boat sank and I was starving. Find a job letter-carrying or jewelry-making or drafting or tech-writing, hold it till I could stand it no longer. Back to writing, sell a story or two, rejections till the boat sank again; get a diflEerent job. . . . Over and over. Each time the writing-boat sank slower, until finally I was barely able to survive, and I never much looked back. That's how I got to be a writer."

  She had a stack of cookies left on her plate, I had crumbs.

  I licked my fingertip and touched the crumbs, eating them in neat order, one after the other. Without comment, listening, she moved her cookies to my plate, saving only one for herself.

  "I had always wanted an adventurous life," I said. "It took a long time to realize that I was the only one who was going to make an adventurous life happen to me. So I did the things I wanted to do, and wrote about them, books and magazine stories."

  She studied me carefully, as though I were a man she had known a thousand years before.

  I felt suddenly guilty. "On and on I go," I said. "What have you done to me? I tell you I'm a listener and not a talker and now you won't believe it." , "We're both listeners," she said, "we're both talkers."

  "Better finish our chess-game," I said. "Your move."

  I had forgotten my elegant trap, took me as long to remember what it was as it took her to consider her position and move.

  She did not make the pawn advance that was essential for her survival. I was sad and delighted. At least she would see m
y marvelous satin trap spring shut. That's what learning is, after all, I thought, not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning. ,

  Even so, part of me stayed sad for her. My queen moved and lifted her knight from the board, even though the knight was guarded. Now her pawn would take my queen, for the sacrifice. Go ahead and take the queen, you little devil, enjoy it while you can. . . .

  Her pawn did not take my queen. Instead, after a moment, her bishop flew from one corner of the board to the other, her night-blue eyes watched mine for response.

  "Checkmate," she whispered.

  I turned to ash, unbelieving. Then studied what she had done, reached for my notebook and wrote half a page.

  "What did you write?"

  "A nice new thought," I said. "That's what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning."

  She sat lightly on the sofa, shoes off, her feet drawn cozily beneath her. I sat on the chair opposite and placed my shoes carefully on the coffee-table, not to leave marks on the glass.

  Teaching Horse-Latin to Leslie was like watching a new water-skier stand up on her first tow. Once through the principles of the language, she spoke it. Days, it had cost me as a kid, learning this, neglecting algebra to do it.

  "Wivel, Liveslivie," I said, "civan yivou ivundiverstivand whivat ivl'm sivayiving?"

  "Ivi civerti . . . Ivi civerti . . . vanlivy civan!" she said. "Hivow divo yivou sivay 'Fuzzalorium' ivin Hivorse Liva-tivin?"

  "Whivy, ivit's 'Fivuzz-iva-livor-ivi-ivum,' ivof civorse!"

  How swiftly she learned, what a pleasure of mind she was! The only way to keep up with her was to have studied something she had never seen, to invent new rules of communication, or to lean way out on sheer intuition. I leaned, that night.