The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

by Richard Bach

  Airborne a thousand feet, I took my hands from the controls. "You've got it."

  He flew with ease, cautious and smooth in a machine the likes of which he hadn 't imagined.

  I knew this was somehow my show, this dream, that he was waiting for me to tell him something. Still, the

  man was so sure that he had learned the last there was for him to learn! I could feel him spring-loaded to reject the very knowledge that would set Mm free.

  "Can we shut the engine down?" he asked over the wind.

  For answer I touched the kill-switch on the throttle. The propeller slowed and stopped and we turned into a glider.

  Airplane-lessons he didn't resist.

  "What a perfect little airplane!" he said. "How can I get one?"

  A few minutes flying and he was ready to run out and buy a Pterodactyl. He had the money to do it; he could have bought a hundred Pterodactyls, except of course that in his time it was an invisible idea, not even a sketch on paper.

  Buying wasn't the way he would get this one, and that was the avenue, 'there was my opening to talk through his defenses against change.

  I asked him to tell me what he knew, what this airplane was and who was this guy in the snowmobile suit, flying it. I wasn't surprised when he told me, he just needed to be asked.

  After a while, mixed in with the flying, I told him straight out that I had the answers he was looking for, and that I knew he wouldn't listen to what they were.

  "You sure I won't listen?" he said.

  "Will you?"

  "Who can I trust more than you?"

  Leslie, I thought, but he'd laugh at that, we'd get nowhere.

  "This is what you came here to learn. This is what you

  are going to do," I told him. "The answer you're looking for is to give up your Freedom and your Independence and to marry Leslie Parrish. What you'll find in return is a different kind of freedom, so beautiful you can't imagine. ..."

  He didn't catch anything after marry Leslie; he nearly fell from the plane, he was so startled.

  Such a long way he has to go, I thought, while he choked and gasped. And he'll go it in only five years. A stubborn closed son-of-a-bitch, but basically I like the guy. He'll make it, all right, I thought ... or will he? Might this one become the voice from the sailplane crash, or from the other turn to Montana? Is this one facing a future that failed?

  His very loneliness, so well defended, turned out to be my hope. When I talked about Leslie, he listened sharp, even swallowed and took some truth about his future. Knowing about her could make surviving easier for him, I thought, even if he forgets words and scenes. I turned the plane north.

  She was waiting when we landed, dressed as she did for private days at home. He jolted at the sight of her; the vision of her vaporized a ton of iron in less than a second. Such a power is beauty!

  She had something personal to say to him, so I stirred in my sleep, faded back, and woke up years later than he would wake from the same dream.

  Soon as I opened my eyes, the story evaporated, misted away like steam on air. A flying dream, I thought. How lucky am I to have so many flying dreams! Something special about this one, though . . . what was it? I was investing in uncut diamonds, was that it, was I flying somewhere with a box of diamonds or seeds or something, and they almost fell from the plane? An investment dream. Some part of my subconscious thinks it still has money? Maybe it knows something I don't.

  On a night-pad I put a note: Why not self-induced dreams, to travel and see and learn whatever we want to learn?

  I lay quiet, watching Leslie sleep, dawn glowing in that golden hair splashed careless about her pillow. For a moment, she was so still-what if she's dead? She breathes so lightly, I can't tell. Is she breathing? She's not!

  I knew I was kidding myself, but what relief, what sudden joy, when she moved softly in her sleep that instant, smiled the smallest of dream-smiles!

  I've spent my life looking for this woman, I thought. Told myself here's my mission, to be together with her again.

  I was wrong. Finding her wasn't the object of my life, it was an imperative incident. Finding her allowed my life to begin.

  The object is: Now What? What are you two going to learn about love? I've changed so much, I thought, and it's barely begun.

  Real lovestories never have endings. The only way to find what happens in happily-ever-after ;with a perfect mate is to live it for ourselves. There's romance, of course, and the sensual delight of lust fallen in love.

  And then what?

  Then days and months of talking nonstop, catching up again after being centuries apart-what did you do then, what did you think, what have you learned, how are you changing?

  And then what?

  What are your most private hopes dreams wishes^ your most desperate if-onlys to bring true? What's the most impossibly beautiful lifetime you can imagine, and here's mine, and the two of them fit like sun and moon in our sky, and we together can bring them true!

  And then what?

  So much to learn together! So much to share! Languages and acting, poetry and drama and computer-programming and physics and metaphysics, and parapsychology and electronics and gardening and bankruptcy and mythology and geography and cooking and history and painting and economics and woodworking and music and music-history, flying, sailing and the history of sail, political action and geology, courage and comfort and wildplants and native animals, dying and death, archaeology and paleontology and astronomy and cosmology, anger and remorse, writing and metallurgy and snapshooting and photography and solar design, house construction and investing and printing and giving and receiving and wind-surfing and befriending children, aging and earth-saving and warstopping, spiritual healing and psychic healing and cultural exchange and film-making, photovoltaics, microscopy and alternate energy, how to play, how to argue and make up, how to surprise and delight and dress and cry, to play the piano and the flute and the guitar, to see beyond appearances, remember other lifetimes, past and future, unlock answers, research and study, collect and analyze and synthesize, serve and contribute, lecture and listen, see and touch, travel cross-time and meet the other we, to create worlds from dreams and dwell there, changing.

  Leslie, in her dream, smiled.

  And then what? I thought. And then more, always more

  for life-hogs to learn. To learn, to practice, to give back to other life-hogs, to remind them we're not alone.

  And then what, after we've lived our dreams, when we're tired of time?

  And then . . . Life, Is!

  Remember? Remember / AM! AND YOU ARE! AND LOVE; IS ALL: THAT MATTERS!

  That's and-then-what!

  That's why lovestories don't have endings! They don't have endings because love doesn't end!

  Then in the morning all at once, for the space of a hundred seconds, I knew how simply Everything-That-Is is put together. I grabbed the bedside notebook, slashed those seconds down felt-tip black, huge excited letters:

  The only real, is Life!

  Life sets consciousness free to choose no-form or infinite multiple trillions of forms, any form it can imagine.

  My hand trembled and flashed, words tumbled over the blue-ruled lines of the paper.

  Consciousness can forget itself, if it wants to forget. It can invent limits, begin fictions; it can pretend galaxies and universes and multiverses, black-holes white-holes big-bangs and steady-states, suns and planets, astral planes and physical. Whatever it imagines, it sees: war and peace, sickness and health, cruelty and kindness.

  Consciousness can shape itself three-dimension into a waitress turned prophet of God; it can be a daisy, a spirit-guide, a biplane in a meadow; it can be an aviator just wakened from a dream, loving the smile of his wife asleep; it can be the kitten Dolly in mid-spring to the bed impatient where PLEASE is the catfood this morning?

  And any instant it wants, it can remember who it is, it can

  remember reality, it can remember Love. In that instant
, everything changes. . . .

  Fluff-ball Dolly crouched, unseen blue eyes behind dust-chocolate mask, sprang, stunned that mouse-tail line of ink from my pen racing along, knocked it off the page.

  "Dolly, no!" I whispered ferociously.

  You don't feed me catfood? I'll eat your pen. . . .

  "Dolly! No! Go on! Get!"

  Not your pen? she glittered. I'll eat your HAND!

  "Dolly!"

  "What's going on, you two?" Leslie, wakened to the commotion, moved her fingers under the blanket. A hundredth of a second and the little creature whirled to attack, needle-teeth twenty claws rapidfire on the new threat to kittens.

  "Dolly The Kittalorium is suggesting that we start the day," I sighed over the storm of battle.

  Most of what I suddenly knew was safe in ink.

  "Are you awake, yet, wook?" I said. "I had the most remarkable idea just now, and if you're awake I want to tell you . . ."

  "Tell me." She fluffed a pillow under her head, avoiding a trouncing for that from Dolly on the sheer chance that Angel The Other Kitten walked innocent into the room at that moment, a new target for Dolly to stalk and pounce.

  I read from the notebook just as I had written, the sentences bounding over each other, gazelles over high fences. In a minute I finished and looked up to her from the paper. "Years ago, I tried writing a letter to a younger me, Things I Wish I Knew When I Was You. If only we could hand THIS to the kids we were!"

  "Wouldn't it be fun to sit on a cloud," she said, "and

  watch them find a notebook from us, everything we've learned?"

  "Be sad, in a way," I said.

  "Why sad?"

  "So much good, waiting to happen, and they can't find each other till now, or till five years ago. . . ."

  "Let's tell them!" she said. "Put in the notebook, 'Now, Dick, you call Leslie Maria Parrish, she's just moved to Los Angeles, under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox, and her telephone number is CRestview six, two nine nine three.

  "And what?" I said. "And tell him to say, 'This is your soulmate, calling'? Leslie was a little star already! Men saw her pictures and fell in love with her! Is she going to invite him to lunch, a kid about to run away from his only year in college?"

  "If she's smart, she'll say let's get out of Hollywood fast!"

  I sighed. "It would never work. He's got to join the Air Force and fly fighter planes, get married and divorced, unfold who he's starting to be and what he's starting to know. She's got to get her own marriage over and done, learn for herself about business and politics and power."

  "Then let's get a letter off to her," she said. " 'Dear Leslie you'll be getting a call from Dick Bach, he's your soulmate so be nice to him, love him always. . . .' "

  " 'Always,' wook? Always is . . ."

  I looked at her in mid-answer and froze, knowing.

  Pictures from forgotten dreams, fragments from lifetimes lost in pasts and futures shone like color slides behind my eyes, -clik, -clik, -clik. . . .

  The woman on the bed this moment, this person whom I could right now reach a hand to, touch her face, she's the

  one killed with me in the massacre in colonial Pennsylvania, the same woman, she's the dear mortal to whom I've been spirit-guide a dozen times, and who's been guide for me; she's the willow-tree whose branches twined into mine; she the fox and I the vixen, fangs bared, snapping lashing outnumbered, saving the kits from wolves; she the gull who led me higher; she the living light on the road to Alexandria; she the silver lifeform of Bellatrix Five; the starship engineering officer I'd love in my distant future; the flower-deva from my distant past.

  -clik and -clik and -clik; frame and frame and frame.

  Why my weakness for, my joy in the singular turn of this one mind, in the singular curve of this face and breast, in the singular merry light in her eyes when she laughs?

  Because those unique curves and sparkles, Richard, we carry them with us, lifetime to lifetime, they're our trademarks, stamped deep in what each of us believes, and without knowing, we remember them! when we meet again!

  She looked at my face, alarmed. "What's wrong, Richard? What's wrong?"

  "OK," I said, thunderstruck. "I'm all right, I'm fine. . . ."

  I grabbed for paper, dashed words down. What a morning!

  Time and again and again we had drawn ourselves to each other, because we had most to learn together, hard learnings and happy ones, too.

  How is it that I know, why am I so utterly convinced that dying does not separate us from the one we love?

  Because this one I love today . . . because she and I have died a million times before, and we're this second, minute, hour lifetogether again! We're no more separated by death

  than we're separated by life! Deep within us, every one of us knows the laws, and one of the laws is this: we shall forever return to the arms of those we love, whether our parting be overnight or over-death.

  "Just a minute, wook. Got to get this down. . . ."

  The only thing that lasts, is love!

  The words ripped out fast as ink could dash.

  At the start of the universe . . . Before the Big Bang, was us!

  Before all the Big Bangs in all of time, and after the echo of the last has faded, is us. We, dancers in every form, reflecting everywhere, we're the reason for space, the builders of time.

  We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and LOVE!,

  I lifted the pen, sat out of breath on the bed, looking at my wife.

  "You're alive!" I said.

  Her eyes sparkled. "We're alive together."

  It was quiet for a while, till she spoke once more. "I had stopped looking for you," she said. "I was happy by myself in Los Angeles, with my garden and my music, my causes and my friends. I liked living alone. I thought I'd do that for the rest of my life."

  "And I would have been happily strangled on my freedom," I said. "It wouldn't have been bad, it would have been the best that each of us knew. How could we miss what we never had?"

  "But we did miss it, Richie! Once in a while, when you

  were alone, whether or not there were people around, did you ever feel so sad you could cry, as if you were the only one of your kind in the world?" She reached to touch my face. '

  "Did you ever feel," she said, "that you were missing someone you had never met?"

  forty-six

  HAD stayed up late, the two of us. Leslie was submerged on page 300-something of The Passive Solar Energy Book: Expanded Professional Edition.

  I closed A History of the Colt Revolver, put it on the Finished stack and took the top volume from my To-Read-Next pile.

  How our books describe us, I thought. At Leslie's bedside: Complete Poems of RE. Cummings, The Global 2000 Report to the President, Muddling Toward Frugality, Carl Sandburg's Abraham Lincoln, Unicorns I Have Known, This Timeless Moment, The Lean Years, Baryshnikov At Work, American Film Directors, 2081.

  At mine: The Dancing Wu Li Masters, The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Airman's Odyssey, The Aquarian Conspiracy, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Western Edible Wildplants, The Trimtab Factor. When I want to

  understand someone swiftly, I need only look at their bookshelf.

  The sound of the book change caught her at the end of a calculation. "How was Mister Colt?" she said, moving her solar charts into better light.

  "Oh, he's doin' just fine. Do you know that without the Colt Revolver there would be forty-six states in this country today, instead of fifty?"

  "We stole four states at gunpoint?"

  "That's pretty crass, Leslie. Not stole. Defended some, liberated others. And not we. You and I had nothing to do with it. But a hundred-some years ago, to those people then, the Colt was a fearsome weapon. A repeating handgun faster than any rifle and straighter-shooting than most. I've
always wanted an 1851 Navy Colt. Silly, isn't it? Originals are expensive, but Colt does make a replica."

  "What would you want with something like that?"

  She didn't mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter nightgown couldn't hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow my simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to choose for her body? Never, I thought.

  "Something like what?" I said absently.

  "Animal," she growled. "Why would you want an old pistol?"

  "Oh. The Colt. Funny feeling about it, as long as I can remember. When I realize I don't own one, I feel sort of undressed, vulnerable. It's a habit to be within arm's-reach of one, but I've never even touched a Colt. Isn't that odd?"

  "If you want one, we can start saving for it. If it's that important to you."

  How often we're led back to our other pasts by bits and pieces of hardware, old machines, buildings, lands that we

  passionately love or fiercely hate without knowing why. Does anyone live who hasn't felt magnetic yearnings toward other places, an easy at-home-ness with other times? One of my pasts, I knew, held the brass-and-blue-iron of a Colt's Patent Revolver. Be fun to track that one down, someday.

  "I guess not, wookie. Silly thought."

  "What are you going to read now?" she said, turning her book sideways to study the next chart.

  "It's called Life at Death. Looks like some pretty careful research, interviews with people who nearly died, what it felt like, what they saw. How's your book coming along?"

  Angel T. Cat jumped onto the bed, six pounds of white longhair Persian, walked heavily as six tons to Leslie, collapsed on the pages in front of her, purred.

  "Fine. This chapter is especially interesting. It says fur fur fur EYES NOSE EYES fur fur fur claws and tail. Angel, do the words you are in my way have any meaning to you? The words you are sitting on my book?"

  The cat looked at her drowsily no; purred the louder.

  Leslie moved the fluffy weight to her shoulder, and we read in silence for a while.