The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

What it had was excuses. It's hard to find the right woman, Richard! You're not so malleable as once you were, you've been through the open-minded stage. Why, things you've chosen to believe, things you'd die for, are to most people funny, or mad.

My lady, I thought, she'll need to have found on her own the same answers that I've found, that this world is not remotely what it seems, that whatever we hold in our thought comes true in our lives, that miracles aren't miraculous. She and I, we'll never get along unless ... I blinked. She'll have to be exactly the same as met

A lot more physically beautiful than me, of course, for I so love beauty, but she'll have to share my prejudice as well as my passion. I couldn't imagine myself falling into life with a woman who trails smoke and ashes everywhere she goes. If she needs parties and cocktails to be happy, or drugs, or if she were afraid of airplanes or afraid of anything, or if she weren't supremely self-reliant, if she lacked a taste for adventure, if she didn't laugh at the silly things I call humor, it wouldn't work. If she didn't want to share money when we have it and fantasy when we don't, if she didn't like raccoons . . . oh, Richard, this won't be easy. Without all of the above and more, you're better off alone!

In the back of the notebook writing forward, as we rolled in overdrive along Interstate 65 between Louisville and Birmingham, for three hundred miles, I made a list: The Perfect Woman. By the ninth page I was getting discouraged. Every

line I wrote was important, every line had to be. Yet no one could meet ... I couldn't meet those standards myself!

A burst of objectivity like cruel confetti around my head: I'm ruined as a mate even before I make it to advanced soulhood, and advancing makes it worse.

The more enlightened we become, the more we can't be lived up to by anybody anywhere. The more we learn, the more we'd better expect to live by ourselves.

I wrote that as fast as I could write. In the blank space at the bottom of the last page I added, barely noticing, Even me.

But change my list? Can I say it's wrong? It's OK if she smokes or hates airplanes or if she can't help gulping down a glass of cocaine now and then?

No. That is not OK.

Sunset had been on my side of the bus; now there was dark everywhere. Out in that dark, I knew, were little triangle farms, tiny polygon fields not even the Fleet could land in.

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.

Ah, The Messiah's Handbook, I thought, wherever was it now? Plowed under, most likely, in the weeds where I had thrown it the day Shimoda died. With its pages that opened to whatever a reader most needed to know. I had called it a magic book once, and he had been vexed with me. You can get your answers from anywhere, from last year's newspaper, he had said. Close your eyes, hold any question in mind, touch anything written, and there's your answer.

The nearest printed paper on the bus was my own wrecked copy of the book I had written about him, the page-

proof last-chance that publishers give writers to remember that diesel is spelled with the i in front of the e, and was I sure I wanted this to be the only book in the history of English ever to end with a comma.

I put the book on my lap, closed my eyes and asked. How do I find the one most dear, most perfect woman for me? I held the question bright-lit, opened the book, put my finger down and looked.

Page 114. My finger rested on the word "bring": To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there.

A flash of ice dropped down my back. I hadn't practiced this one for a long time; I had forgotten how well it works.

I looked in the window turned night mirror by the seat-light in the bus, watching for a reflection of what she might be. The glass was empty. I'd never seen a soulmate, I couldn't imagine how to imagine her. Should it be a physical picture I hold in my thought, as though she were a thing? Just this side of tall, is she, long dark hair, eyes seacolor skycolor enchantment knowing, a changing loveliness different every hour?

Or imagine qualities? Iridescent imagination, intuition from a hundred lifetimes remembered, crystal honesty and steel fearless determination? How do I visualize those?

Today, it's easy to visualize them; then, it was not easy. Images flickered and vanished, though I knew I had to hold images clear to make them appear alive around me.

I tried, tried again to see her, but only got shadows, ghosts barely slowing through the school-zone of my thought. I who could visualize the smallest details of anything I dared imagine, could not vaguely picture the one that I wanted to be the most important person in my life.

One more time I tried to see her, imagine her there.

Nothing. Lights from a broken looking-glass, shifting darks. Nothing.

I can't see who she is!

After a time I gave up.

Psychic powers, you can bet on it: when you want 'em, they're out to dinner.

No sooner had I fallen asleep in the bus, tired as death from the ride and the effort to see, a mind-voice shook me, startled me awake:

"YO! RICHARD! If it'll make you feel any better, listen! Your one woman in all the world? Your soulmate?" it said. "You already know her!"

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