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No shadow no color no heat no glare no body no sky no earth no space no time no things no people no words just
LIGHT!
I floated numb in glory. It isn't light, I knew, this immense unstopping brilliance bursting through what once had been me, it isn't light. The light, it merely represents, it stands for something else brighter than light, it stands for Love! so intense that the idea of intense is a funny feather of thought next to how huge a love engulfed me.
JAM!
YOU ARE! AND LOVE: IS ALL: THAT MATTERS!
Joy exploded through me and I tore apart, atom from atom, in the love of it, a matchstick fallen into sun. Joy too intense to bear, not another instant! I choked. Please, no!
The moment I asked, Love retreated, faded into the night of noontime Beverly Hills, northern hemisphere third planet smallish star minor galaxy minor universe tiny twist of one belief in imagined spacetime. I was a microscopic life-form, infinitely large, stumbled backstage of its playhouse, caught a nanosecond glance of its own reality and nearly vaporized in shock.
I woke in the Bantha, heart pounding, my face soaked in tears.
"AH!" I said aloud. "Al-ai-ai!"
Love! So intense! If it were green, it would be a green so transcendently green that even the Principle of Green couldn't have imagined . . . like standing on a huge ball of, like standing on the sun but not the sun, there were no ends, no horizons to it, so bright and NO GLARE, I looked eyes open into the brightest . . . and yet I had no eyes I COULDN'T STAND THE JOY of that Love. . . .It was as if I dropped my last candle in a black cavern and after a while a friend, to help me see, she lit a hydrogen bomb.
Next to the light, this world . . . ; next to that light, the idea of living and dying, it is simply . . . irrelevant.
I sat blinking in the car, gasping air. Lordy! It took ten minutes' practice, learning to breathe again. What . . . Why . . . Ai!
There a blonde-and-smile flash above the sidewalk, heads turning in the crowd to watch, and in a moment Leslie opened the door, piled envelopes on the seat, slid behind the wheel. "Sorry to be so long, wook. It was mobbed. Did you melt to death out here?"
"Leslie, I've got to tell you. The most . . . something just happened . . ."
She turned in alarm. "Richard, are you all right?"
"Fine!" I said. "Fine fine fine fine."
I stabbed at saying, told her in fragments and fell silent. "I was sitting here, after you left, closed my eyes . . . Light, but it wasn't light. Brighter than light, but no glare, no hurt from it. LOVE, not the fake broken syllable, but Love that IS! like no love I've ever imagined. AND LOVE! IS ALL: THAT MATTERS! Words, but they weren't words, or even ideas. Has this ever ... do you know?"
"Yes," she said. And after a long moment remembering, she went on. "Up in the stars, when I left my body. A oneness with life, with a universe so beautiful, a love so powerful the joy made me cry!"
"But why did it happen? I just, I was going to catch a quick hypno-nap, done it a hundred times! This time, POW! Can you imagine joy so much you can't stand it, you beg to turn it off?"
"Yes," she said. "I know. . . ."
We sat together, wordless for a while. Then she sta
rted the Bantha and we lost ourselves in traffic, already celebrating our time together.
eighteen
EXCEPT FOR chess between us, there's no action. We don't climb mountains together or run rivers or fight revolutions or risk our lives. We don't even fly airplanes. The most adventurous thing we share is a plunge into the traffic down La Cienega Boulevard after lunch. Why does she charm me so?
"Have you noticed," I asked as she turned west on Mel-rose for home, "that our friendship is completely . . . ac-tionless?"
"Actionless?" She looked at me as startled as if I had touched her. "Oh, you. Sometimes it's hard to know when you're kidding. Actionless!"
"No. Really. Shouldn't we be skiing cross-country, surfing to Hawaii, something energetic? Heavy exercise for us is lifting a chess-queen and saying 'Check' at the same time. Just an observation. I've never had a friend quite like you,
148
before. Aren't we awfully cerebral; don't we talk too much?"
"Richard," she said, "chess and talk, please! Not throwing parties, throwing money around, which is the preferred exercise in this town."
