There was a laugh. “The hand of God,” she said.
“Where were you when Puff and I crashed?”
“You needed to learn about healing. There’s more to learn. Puff’s fine. The spirit of her is fine.”
“And me?”
“You’re a perfect expression of perfect Love, perfect Life, here and now.”
“Do you have to be invisible?”
There was no answer.
I turned back to Shimoda.
“She said don’t open your eyes,” he told me.
“What is so important about closing my eyes!”
“What’s so important about opening them? They tell you what’s true? Even when she doesn’t live in your world of space and time?”
“Well…”
“You’ll see her again. Remember you wrote about a crew of angels, aboard the ship of your life?”
“Yes. A navigator, a defender, a carpenter and a sailmaker who keep the ship sailing, topmen at the crosstrees, trimming the sails, furling them in storms…”
“She’s there, too. You’re the commander, she’s the captain’s mate. You’ll see her again.”
Captain’s mate, I thought. How I miss her now!
In the silence of the field I had time to think. “You didn’t like the Messiah-job. You told me so. Too many people, too many expecting magic, no one caring why. And the drama: someone had to kill you.”
“Ah, so true.”
“So what’s your job now?”
“Instead of crowds, I have one person. Instead of magics, maybe there’s understanding. Instead of drama, there’s…well, some. Your airplane crash was dramatic, wouldn’t you say?”
More silence. There was the crash again. Why does he say that?
“Some of us tried Messiahing,” he said. “Nobody’s made it a success. Crowds, magic, suicide, murders. Most of us have stopped the work. All of us, I think. We never knew there would be so much resistance to a few simple ideas.“
“Resistance to what? What ideas?”
“Remember what she said: You are a perfect expression of perfect Love?”
I nodded.
“That’s one.”
Sabryna, too. “Yes. I felt healed, over here, like she said. No pain, no injury, thinking’s clear. But back there, in the hospital …something happened. The airplane crash?”
There were no customers for our flights, early in the morning.
“Why you, Richard?” he said. “You believe a crash ‘happened’ because you have no control over events?”
Not a word about his life, what had happened for him, who he was now.