He put his hand, gently, on the broken deck. “I can rebuild her if you want. You’ll need to put everything in a closed van, broken wings and tail, of course, drive to my shop. She’s not as bad as you think. We’ll have her flying again, a few months, perfect shape.”
For the first day since the wires, since the crash, I was glad for Puff. By the time I had taken the test to regain my own flying license, by the time I traveled back to Florida, she’d be ready to fly, herself!
Simple. Instead of a dead end road for her, Jim Ratte all of a sudden appeared in the hangar. “I can rebuild her.”
In seconds, quick as the crash, a weight lifted from my heart.
Puff and I, the way we’d promised, we’d fly!
Chapter 12
If this world is a fiction, then soon as we discover what's fact, we've found our power over appearances.
“What’s going on, Don? My last seconds of the crash, it was a perfect landing. But now I know what happened … my own memory, it was fiction!”
“All lifetimes are fiction, Richard.”
“Are you fiction, too?”
He laughed. “The me you see, the you I see, we’re all of us fiction.”
“I’m not so sure…”
“Let me tell you a little story,” he said. “Once, before anyone thought of time, there was a single force in all the universe. Love. It was, and it is and it will always be, the only Real, the only principle of all life. It does not change, it does not listen to anyone. You can call it God or Demon, nonexistent, cruel, or loving, it doesn’t hear, it doesn’t care. It is All. Period.
“When we came to appear to be,” he said, “our worlds of form and fantasy, our universe shifting changing images of stardust, it did nothing. Love is the only Is, beyond space, beyond time, anywhere, everywhere.”
He stopped.
I listened to the silence. “And?” I said. “What did it do?”
“Nothing.”
“Go on with your story. I want to hear what happened.”
“You did. The story’s over.”
“What about us?”
“Nothing. We’re fiction. Does reality have anything to do with dreams?”
“What can we do to be real?”
“Nothing. We already are. The deepest life within us is love. There is nothing else. Reflecting that reality, we cannot die. We don’t live here in the world of spacetime. Nothing does. Nothing lives, anywhere, except love.”
“What’s the purpose of life here?” I said.
“Where?”
“In spacetime. There’s some reason for it.”
“No. Reality doesn’t talk with beliefs, doesn’t listen. Reality does not take form, for forms are limits, and the real is All, unlimited.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said, “if we’re good or bad?”
“No. What’s good to one is bad to another. Words mean nothing to the All. It is indestructible, it is forever, it is pure Love.”
“We are nothing to the…the All?”