The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

By the time the airport was in sight, the little jet had forgiven me my neglects and we were friends again. It was harder to forgive myself, but so it usually is.

We slowed and entered the landing pattern, that same pattern that I had seen the day I got off the bus and walked to the airport. Can I see him now, walking there with his bedroll and news he was a millionaire? What do I have to say to him? Oh, my, what do I have to say!

As easy to land as it was tricky to take off, the BD-5 hushed down final approach, touched its miniature wheels

to the ground, rolled long and straight to the last taxiway. Then primly she turned and in a minute we were back at the hangar, engine-fire off, turbine spinning slower and slower and stopped at last.

I patted her canopy-bow and thanked her for the flight, the custom of any pilot who's flown longer than he or she thinks they've deserved.

The other airplanes watched enviously. They wanted to fly, too; needed to fly. Here the poor Widgeon, oil leaking from the nose-case of her right engine. The seal had dried from being still for so long.

Could I listen to airplane's futures, as well as my own? Had I practiced and known her future then, I would not have felt sad. She would become a television-star airplane, opening each episode of a wildly popular TV series, flying to a beautiful island, landing on the water, taxiing to dock sparkling and pretty, no oil leaks anywhere. And she couldn't have that future without the present she lived right now, dusty in my hangar after flying her few hundred hours with me.

So was there some future ahead for me that could not possibly happen without my first having lived this free lonely present.

I climbed the stairs back to the house, absorbed in the possibility of contact with the other aspects of me, Richards-before and Richar

ds-yet-to-be, the I's of other lifetimes, other planets, other hypnotic space-times.

Would any of them have looked for a soulmate? Would any of them have found her?

Intuition-the future/past always-me-whispered back, that moment on the stairs:

twenty-three

I. OPENED the cupboard, took out a soup-can and some noodles, planned me a fine Italian lunch in a minute. May not have been quite Italian. But hot and nourishing of the kind of inquiring I had to do.

Look around you this moment, Richard. What you see, is it the kind of life you most wish to have?

It's awfully lonely, I thought, putting the soup in a pan on the stove, forgetting to turn on the fire. I miss Leslie.

There was a rattling of armor, and I sighed.

Don't worry, I thought, don't bother; I know what you are going to say, I cannot fault your logic. Togetherness is drab destruction. I do not miss Leslie, I suppose. I miss what she represents for me at this time.

The warrior left.

There came another idea in its place, a thought altogether

kind: The opposite of loneliness, Richard, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy.

The word floated loose, a silver bubble cut free from the floor of a dark sea.

That!

Is what I miss!

My many-bodied perfect woman is as warm as ice in the freezer. She's communication without caring; she's sex without love; she's friendship without commitment.

Just as she can't hurt or be hurt, so is she incapable of loving or being loved. She is incapable of intimacy. And intimacy . . . might that be as important to me as freedom itself? Is that why I stayed seven weeks with Leslie, when three days were too much to spend with any other woman?

I left the soup cold on the stove, found a chair and sat, knees pulled under my chin, looking out the window over the lake. The cumulus were full cumulonimbus now, blocking sunlight. Florida in summertime, you can set your clock by the thunderstorms.

Twenty minutes later I stared into a wall of rain, barely noticing.

I had somehow talked today with Dickie, so far in my past; somehow I had gotten a message through to him. How can I get in touch with a future Richard? What does he know about intimacy? Has he learned love?

Surely the other aspects of who we are, they must be closer friends than anyone . . . who can be closer to us than ourselves in other bodies, ourselves in spirit-forms? If we're each of us spun about an inner golden thread, which strand is it in me that runs to all the others?