Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:
One
They go back in time – Bach discovers that Attila the Hun, apparently, is a distant ancestor, and he is horrified. No matter where they land, however different things look … they always encounter themselves – even if they look different, have different accents, whatever. This is Bach’s imaginary (although I’m sure he felt it was real at the time) world – where he and Leslie float through some astral plane, far above the muck of humanity … and he is convinced that they have known one another through multiple lifetimes. I don’t have an argument with his theory – I couldn’t prove it or disprove it if I tried. I wasn’t wacky about One when I first read it – maybe it was TOO disconnected from reality? One of the reasons I so responded to Bridge Across Forever was that it was a “real” love story. Yes, there were moments of new agey floaty stuff – but it was all in service of the “real” story – which was Richard and Leslie finding each other. One has no reality. And I myself never really bought the whole soulmate thing – even though I have certainly felt before that I have “known” someone before. You know that bizarre sense of deja vu (although you can’t really call it that) you have with some people. You feel they are “familiar”, even though you have no reason to think that. Anyway – for whatever reason – One just didn’t get under my skin. The next (and final) book in the “Leslie” series is Running from Safety and THAT one really affected me – I still really like that book. But One was boring. Everything seemed too NEAT. You know? Oh, look at us – here we are as futuristic beings … here we are in an alternate universe with no war …. here we are as medieval Huns … whatever. It’s too neat. I know that that is his theory, that is his belief – so he’s just expanding on it here … but I missed the mess of Bridge Across Forever. I missed the human-ness. It is interesting to contemplate though: If you could meet your younger self … what would you say? If you could give advice to your younger self … poised on the edge of making a huge decision … what would you say? Sometimes thinking about that stuff is dangerous for me – all I see are regrets – but sometimes it is interesting. That sort of time-travel moment. When you think: Okay, that person is about to have a huge adventure … one that will change her forever … is she ready? Is she aware?
And then there are moments – strange moments – where it’s almost as though life becomes a literary conceit. LIke, if you made it up – you would be accused of being simplistic. Like the first thing this man said to me was, “Are you waiting for someone?” He meant it in a very prosaic way, and he meant it literally. I was standing on a sidewalk, looking back and forth … and he wondered if I was waiting for somone. But in the context of what eventually happened between us – the fact that his first words to me were “Are you waiting for someone” – take on a huge meaning. I didn’t know him at all. We had never spoken. He came right up to me and said, “Are you waiting for someone?” Naturally, he just wanted to talk to me. That was his opening line. It’s weird, that’s all. Just weird. It turns out that I WAS waiting for someone, in a metaphorical way – I was waiting for HIM – and I actually (no word of a lie) had a sense of that in that moment. My impulse (and I have the diary entry of that moment to prove it) was to say, jokingly, “Yeah. You.” These things happen. And I do believe that in that moment we were tapping into the future – just a bit. Just a bit. It was prophetic.
Here’s an excerpt. Leslie and Richard, out for a normal flight, suddenly find themselves in an alternate universe … they wonder if they have died … they are not sure what has happened to them …
Excerpt from One
Leslie took my hand. “Richie,” she said, soft and sad, “do you think we’re dead? Maybe we hit something in the air, or something hit us so fast we never knew.”
I’m the family expert on death and I hadn’t even considered … Could she be right? But what’s Growly doing here? There’s nothing I’ve read about dying that says it doesn’t even change the oil pressure.
“This can’t be dying!” I said. “The books say when we die there’s a tunnel and light and all this incredible love, and people to meet us … if we went to the trouble of dying together, two of us at once, wouldn’t you think they’d find a way to meet us on time?”
“Maybe the books are wrong,” she said.
We descended in silence, swept with sadness. How could the joy and promise of our lives have ended so swiftly?
“Do you feel dead?” she asked.
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
We flew low over the parallel channels, checking for coral heads or floating logs before we landed. Even when you’re dead, you don’t want to tear your airplane apart setting down on some rock.
“What a dumb way to end a lifetime!” Leslie said. “We don’t even know what happened, we don’t even know how we died!”
“The gold light, Leslie, the shock-wave! Could it have been a nuclear …? Were we the first ones to die in the Third World War?”
She thought about it. “I don’t think so. It wasn’t coming toward us, it was going away. And we would have felt something.”
We flew in silence. Sad. So sad.
“It’s not fair!” said Leslie. “Life had just gotten so beautiful! We worked so hard, we overcame so many problems … we were just beginning the good times.”
I sighed. “Well, if we’re dead, we’re dead together. That part of our plans came true.”
“Our lives are supposed to flash in front of us,” she said. “Did your life flash in front of you?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Yours?”
“No. And they say everything goes black. That’s wrong, too!”
“How can so many books, how could we be so wrong?” I said. “Remember our out-of-body times at night? That’s what dying ought to be, just like that except we’d go on, we wouldn’t come back in the morning.”
Ever had I believed that dying would make sense, it would be a rational creative chance for new understanding, a glad freedom from the limits of matter, an adventure beyond the walls of crude beliefs. Nothing had warned us that death is flying over an endless technicolor ocean.
At least we could land. There were no rocks, nor seaweed nor school of fish. The water was smooth and clear, wind barely enough to ruffle the surface.
Leslie pointed the two bright paths to me. “It’s like those two are friends,” she said, “always together.”
“Maybe they’re runways,” I said. “It feels best lining up on them. Let’s touch down right where they join, OK? Ready to land?”
“I guess so,” she said.
I looked out the side windows, double-checking our landing gear. “We have the left main up,” I said, “nosewheel up, the right main is up, the wheels are up for a water landing, flaps are down …”
We began the last turn and the sea tilted graceful slow-motion to meet us. We floated for a long minute, inches above the surface, reflections spangling our white hull.
The keel skimmed wavelets and the seaplane turned racing-boat, flying on a cloud of spray. The whisper of the engine faded into the rush of water as I pulled the throttle back and we slowed.
Then the water vanished, the airplane disappeared. Blurring around us were rooftops, streaks of red tiles and palm trees, the wall of some great windowed building dead ahead.
“LOOK OUT!”
The next second we were stopped inside that building, giddy but unscratched, standing together in a long hallway. I reached to my wife, held her.
“Are you all right?” we said together, breathless, the same second.
“Yes!” we said. “Not a scratch! Are you? Yes!”
There was no shattered glass in the windows at the end of the hall, no hole in the wall through which we had rocketed. Not a person in sight, not a sound in the building.
I burst in frustration. “What in hell is going on?”
“Richie,” she said quietly, eyes wide with wonder, “this place is familiar. We’ve been here before!”
I looked around. A many-doored hallway, brick-red carpet, elevator doors directly across from us, potted palms. The hall window overlooked sunny tile rooftops, low golden hills beyond, a hazy blue afternoon. “It’s … it looks like a hotel. I don’t remember any hotel …”
Came a soft chime, a green arrowhead glowed above the elevator doors.
We watched as the doors rumbled open. Inside stood a rangy angular man and a lovely woman dressed in faded work-shirt under a surplus Navy coat, bluejeans, a spice-color cap.
I heard my wife gasp at my side, felt her body tighten. From the elevator stepped the man and woman we had been sixteen years before, the two we were on the day we met.
