The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

xied the little kite around the pasture for fun, promising to fly it when she had time to learn.

It must have been the exhilaration of that first month's flying, but a night came not long after with a most unusual dream.

I flew the Pterodactyl, which had two seats instead of one, high over a misty silver bridge to land on a meadow-green slope by some huge meeting-place, an open-air auditorium. Wandered inside, still wearing the bright coveralls, sat down and waited, chin on my knees. I've never had a dream, I thought, in which I show up early for something that's not quite ready to happen. In a minute or two there was a sound behind me.

I turned, recognized him at once. Recognized me. An earlier me, looking lost, a me from five years gone, shelled around with yearnings turned to shields, wondering what this place could be.

An odd pleasure to see the man, I was swept with love for him. Yet I felt sorry for him at once; he was desperately alone and it showed. He wanted so much to ask and he dared so little to know. I stood up and smiled at him, remembering. He was a terror about time-contracts, never was he late.

"Hi, Richard," I said, off-handed as I could. "Not only punctual, you're early, aren't you?"

He was ill at ease, trying to place me. If you're not sure, I thought, why don't you ask?

I led him outside, knowing he'd be more at home near the airplane.

Every answer to his questions I had, answers to his pain and isolation, corrections for his mistakes. Yet the tools that worked enchantments in my hands, they'd be white-hot irons in his. What could I say?

I showed him the airplane, told him about the controls. Funny, I thought. Me telling him about flying, when I'm the one who hasn't flown anything beside the ultralight in years. He may be lonely, but he's a lot better airplane pilot than I am.

When he was settled in his seat, I called the propeller clear and started the engine. It was so quiet and different that for a moment he forgot why he had chosen to meet me, forgot the airplane was the background and not the focus of our dream.

"Ready?" I said, set for takeoff.

"Go."

How would I describe him? Game, I thought. The guy's going through the deceitful torture of sudden money, what it does to an innocent and his friends, and now the whole thing is blowing up around him, his world is coming apart. Yet this minute he's a kid with a toy, he likes airplanes so much. How easy it is to be compassionate, I thought, when it's ourselves we see in trouble.

Airborne a thousand feet, I took my hands from the controls. "You've got it."

He flew with ease, cautious and smooth in a machine the likes of which he hadn 't imagined.

I knew this was somehow my show, this dream, that he was waiting for me to tell him something. Still, the

man was so sure that he had learned the last there was for him to learn! I could feel him spring-loaded to reject the very knowledge that would set Mm free.

"Can we shut the engine down?" he asked over the wind.

For answer I touched the kill-switch on the throttle. The propeller slowed and stopped and we turned into a glider.

Airplane-lessons he didn't resist.

"What a perfect little airplane!" he said. "How can I get one?"

A few minutes flying and he was ready to run out and buy a Pterodactyl. He had the money to do it; he could have bought a hundred Pterodactyls, except of course that in his time it was an invisible idea, not even a sketch on paper.

Buying wasn't the way he would get this one, and that was the avenue, 'there was my opening to talk through his defenses against change.

I asked him to tell me what he knew, what this airplane was and who was this guy in the snowmobile suit, flying it. I wasn't surprised when he told me, he just needed to be asked.

After a while, mixed in with the flying, I told him straight out that I had the answers he was looking for, and that I knew he wouldn't listen to what they were.

"You sure I won't listen?" he said.

"Will you?"

"Who can I trust more than you?"

Leslie, I thought, but he'd laugh at that, we'd get nowhere.