Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Illusions 1)

"How do you do it ?"

"Richard, you don't do anything. You see it done already, and it is."

"Gee, that sounds easy."

"It's like walking. You wonder how it ever came hard for you to learn."

"Don walking through walls, it isn't hard for me now; it is impossible."

"Do you think that maybe if you say impossible over and over again a thousand times that things will come easy for you?"

"I'm sorry. It is possible, and I'll do it when it is right for me to do it."

"He walks on water, folks, and he is discouraged because he doesn't walk through walls."

"But that was easy, and this . . ."

"Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them," he sang. "Did you not week ago swim in the earth itself?"

"I did that. "

"And is not wall just vertical earth? Does it matter that much to you which direction the illusion runs ? Horizontal illusions are conquerable, but vertical illusions aren't?"

"I think you're getting through to me, Don."

He looked at me and smiled. "The time I get through to you is the time to leave you alone for a while."

The last building in town was a feed and grain warehouse, a big place built of orange brick. It was almost as if he had decided to take a different way back to the airplanes, turning down some secret shortcut alley. The shortcut was t rough the brick wall. He turned abruptly to the right, into the wall, and he was gone. I think now that if I had turned- at once with him, I could have gone through it, too. But I just stopped on the sidewalk and looked at the place where he had been. When I put out my hand and touched the brick, it was solid brick.

"Some day, Donald," I said. "Some day , . ." I walked alone the long way back to the airplanes.

"Donald," I said when I got to the field, "I have come to the conclusion that you just don't live in this world."

He looked at me startled from the top of his wing, where he was learning to pour gas into the tank. "Of course not. Can you tell me one person who does ?"

"What do you mean, can I tell you one person who does. Me! I live in this world!"

"Excellent," he said, as though through independent study I had uncovered a hidden mystery. "Remind me to buy you lunch today . . . I marvel at the way you never stop learning."

I puzzled over that. He wasn't being sarcastic or ironic; he had meant just what he said. "What do you mean? Of course I live in this world. Me and about four billion other people. It's you who..."

"Oh God, Richard! You're serious! Cancel the lunch. No hamburger, no malt, no nothing at all! Here I had thought you had reached this major knowing-" He broke off and looked down on me in angry pity. "You're sure of that. You live in the same world, do you, as . . . a stockbroker, shall we say? Your life has just been all tumbled and changed, I presume, by the new SEC policy-mandatory review of portfolios with shareholder investment loss more than fifty percent? You live in the same world as a tournament chess player, do you; With the New York Open going on this week, Petrosian and Fischer and Browne in Manhattan for a half-million-dollar purse, what are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You with your 1929 Fleet biplane landed on a farm field, with your major life priorities farmers' permission, people who want ten-minute airplane rides, Kinner aircraft engine maintenance and mortal fear of hailstorms . . . how many people do you think live in your world: You say four billion people live in your world? Are you standing way down there on the ground and telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds, are you going to put that across on me ?" He panted from his fast talking.

"I could almost taste that hamburger, with the cheese melting . . ." I said.

"I'm sorry. I would 'have been so happy to buy. But, ah, that's over and done now, best forgotten."

Though it was the last time I accused him of not living in this world, it took me a long time to understand the words where the handbook opened:

If

you will

practice being fictional

for a while, you will understand

that fictional characters are