Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Illusions 2)

I looked at the Travel Air, floating in the air, thirty feet away. There was my teacher, once the Savior, now my friend. “Donald Shimoda,” I said. “You’re fictional, but you seem so real!”

“So do you.”

In the middle of the land below, there was a wide runway of grass. To one side, a wooden hangar, and a J-1 Standard biplane parked. I had flown from there!

“I’m going down,” I said. “I know this place!”

“Have fun,” he said. “You can only land here, they say, after your life on Earth is finished. Don’t know if that’s true or not.”

Of course he knew.

“Can I sneak down there, quiet?” I said.

“Try it if you want. Time is different here. You’ll see your dog Lucky when you land, meet some old friends.” He swept us together in a wide turn over the runway. “The spirits of mortals are already here, never left this place when a person decides to be born, a mortal.”

Such a pretty land. He knew about a me I can’t imagine, and about my dog. I so missed Lucky. He’s right. I’d stay there, if ever I saw Lucky again.

Time is different? We take only part of ourselves to Earth when we’re born? What does the other part do, while we’re mortals? Suggest ideas for us to think about, write about, ways to live? Part of ourselves is our own spirit guide?

“Are you, Donald, are you…?” Too complex right now. I don’t want to know. “Never mind.”

“Some things for later,” he said.

“I won’t land,” I said. “I need to see Sabryna again, finish my lifetime on earth. I owe it to her. She didn’t give her consent for me to die in a crash. She prayed her affirmation: You are a perfect expression of perfect Love, here and now.”

“Our highest prayers, affirmations,” he said. “They’re Love. You know that.”

His airplane vanished in the mist, or it was me who left, thinking about Earth-life.

The controls of the Fleet shimmered and dissolved, the world turned to an evening gray, the color of a hospital. I thought about what he had said, the creativity of our lifetime, our fictions come true, part of us waiting in an after-life, in heaven. Wolves on stilts.

A nurse entered, saw me smile. “Are you awake?” she said.

Chapter 5

A little time, a little perspective, we'll see what the leveling of this site has been making room for in our lives.

It didn’t hurt much, the days in the hospital, not much that I noticed.

A lot of time for thinking, for imagining.

Why does a hospital bring sterile television into patients’ rooms, when we need to meet fictional lives linked to our own? Spirit-friends awake in our mind, our walls of unbelief lowered for once, when we so much need to meet them!

The characters I wrote, Shimoda said, they didn’t stop when my words stopped. Their life goes on. I could meet them any time, in their forever-lives, in the midst of their unwritten adventures. They, all of them, are my teachers.

Bethany Ferret slipped into my life then, colors flashing in my half-sleep, the bright cherry-lemon colors of her rescue-boat’s flag and her matching crew-scarf.

What a delight, a celebration! to see her again.

She wore her duty hat, touched the cap with her paw. “Permission to come aboard?”

Mostly solemn, that request, yet a bit of a smile to see me again.

I laughed, silently. “Permission granted, Captain.” The bed, the images, shifted into the bright snowcolor of her rescue boat, J-

101 Resolute, clearing the jetty outbound, pitching gently on the sea waves west.

I blinked at her. “I’m the guest on your boat! I should have asked your permission, coming aboard.“