"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 ?"