"I'll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you."
"You can't run away, Don! What if I start worshipping you right now ? What if I get tired of working on my engine and start begging you to heal it for me? Look, I'll give you every dime I make to sundown if you just teach me how to float in the air ? If you don't do it, then I'll know that I'm supposed to start praying to you, Holy One Sent to Lift My Burden."
He just smiled at me. I still don't think he understood that he couldn't run away. How could I know that when he didn't ?
"Did you have the whole show, like you see in the movies from India? Crowds in the streets, billions of hands touching you flowers and incense, golden platforms with silver tapestries for you to stand on when you spoke?
"No. Even before I asked for the job, I knew I couldn't stand that. So I chose the United States, and I just got the crowds."
It was pain for him, remembering, and I was sorry I had brought the whole thing up.
He sat in the hay and talked on, looking through me. "I wanted to say, for the love of God, if you want freedom and joy so much, can't you see it's not anywhere outside of you? Say you have it, and you have it! Act as if it's yours, and it is! Richard, what is so damned hard about that: But they didn't even hear, most of them. Miracles--like going to auto races to see the crashes, they came to me to see miracles. First it's frustrating and then after a while it just gets dull. I have no idea how the other messiahs could stand it,"
"You put it that way, it does lose some of its charm," I said. I tightened the last nut and put the tools away. "Where are we headed today?"
He walked to my cockpit, and instead of wiping the bugs off my windshield, he passed his hand over it and the smashed little creatures came alive and flew away. His own windshield never needed cleaning, of course, and now I knew his engine would never need any maintenance, either.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know where we're headed."
"What do you mean? You know the past and the future of all things. You know exactly where we're going!"
He sighed. "Yeah. But I try not to think about it. "
For a while, as I was working on the cylinders, I got to thinking wow, all I have to do is stay with this guy and there will be no problems, nothing bad will happen and everything will turn out fine. But the way he said that: "I try not to think about it" made me remember what had happened to the other Messiahs sent into this world. Common sense shouted at me to turn south after take off and get as far away from the man as I could get. But as I said,
it gets lonely, flying this way alone and I was glad to find him, just to have somebody to talk with who knew an aileron from a vertical stabilizer.
I should have turned south, but after take off I stayed with him and we flew north and east into that future that he tried not to think about.
4
"Where do you learn all this stuff, Don ? You know so much, or maybe I just think you do. No. You do know a lot. Is it all practice ? Don't
you get any formal training to be a Master."
"They give you a book to read."
I hung a fresh-washed silk scarf on the flying wires and stared at him. "A book?"
"Savior's Manual. It's kind of the bible for masters. There's a copy around here somewhere, if you're interested."
"Yes, yes! You mean a regular book that tells you . . ?"
He rummaged around for a while in the baggage space behind the headrest of the Travel Air and came up with a small volume bound in what looked like suede.
Messiah' s Handbook,
Reminders for the Advanced
Soul.
"What do you mean Savior's Manual? This says Messiah's Handbook "
"Something like that." He started to pick up things around his airplane as though he thought it was time to be moving on.
You
teach best