Letter from Money, Roberta Grimes [unputdownable books .TXT] 📗

get into it enough, and perhaps develop his mind enough, he would see how little consolation there was in having money in that desolate world where money was even necessary. Without it, he had the chance to live in a place where people had the infinite wealth of never having heard of money.

The buildings of Steve’s old Farm were right below the cliff that was a little to the south of where Liz was sitting. Having seen what personal freedom could do, Jack’s childhood friend Steve Symington had long ago conducted an experiment in freedom using thirty-odd hippies and hangers-on. Steve had meant well, but he never had thought through the fact that just removing all constraints without grounding people in spiritual unity would leave them rudderless. So Steve’s Farm had ended badly, with the men there turning on the natives in a way that had sealed in these folks’ minds the certainty that the people of the rest of the earth were in every way inferior to the people of this little world. Surely the Farm’s buildings would still be down there. Liz was glad that from where she sat, she couldn’t see them.

Farther out on the promontory beyond Steve’s Farm was Darakan, a village of a thousand people that looked from here like just a few roofs floating in a sea of branches. The harbor would be there beyond the village. When Jack was still coming here, he had used an Argentine company to maintain a manmade channel through the outer reef to the pilings where he moored his yacht. That he came and went in a yacht that was nearly three-hundred feet in length and required a crew of forty people had been something that never had mattered to Liz, although she later understood that perhaps it should have mattered.

Sunlight shimmered fiercely on an expanse of ocean so vast that from where Liz sat it seemed not even to meet the horizon, but the ocean eventually became the sky. There used to be a couple of dozen windmills maybe twenty feet tall on the sloping part of the cliff to Liz’s right, but most of them were broken now. A few still clacketed slowly. Until the communications tower had been taken out by a storm, it had been important to maintain the windmills so Liz and Jack could stay in touch. Otherwise, electricity was useless here. And while he was here, Jack also had seemed to see electricity as useless. For a long time, there appeared to be a kind of switch in his mind that would let him come and go easily, so he lived with Liz and their son each spring and fall in a place so far beyond civilization that he had taken to calling it post-civilization. A place where human life finally worked. But then he would be able to step back on his yacht and spend each winter and summer in what he had been willing to admit was a civilization that really didn’t work at all.

That gunship was slowly beginning to emerge from the shadow of the Darakan promontory, so close to the village that the nasty mind-energies of the men it carried must be troubling the villagers.

Liz and Jack had had such fun together! It wasn’t only the friendly people and the healthy lifestyle that had made their lives together so perfect, but also it was the fact that everything that happened to them here was more or less funny. Jack used to say he never really laughed except when he was with Liz. One year, they even wrote a book together. What was it called? Strange Dogs and Their Masters. That was it. It was a book about fixing failing businesses that was based on notes Jack had been keeping, and over a year’s time when Relandela was tiny, he had dictated it to Liz in clipped sentences that she wrote out in more creative longhand.

Because everything they did together was more or less funny, their book had ended up humorous, too, and it had been a bestseller in fourteen languages. That someone so famous for being wealthy had finally been willing to tell some secrets would likely have dictated that it would sell well. But Jack had been sure that its success was due to what he called its “Lizzie voice,” full of what read like a hard-won sense that life was so tough that our only rational approach to it was basic silliness. Even the cover was silly, with a ceramic Cerberus whose three heads displaying three different moods were arguing with one another. The title was above the dog, and below it was “Jack Richardson as told to Elizabeth Lyons beneath a tree” as the authors. It surprised Liz to find her name there at all, and astonished her that their names were in equally large letters, with the rest of that foolishness in small script. Jack had told her at the time that there was a lot of curiosity about who this woman was, and he had variously answered questions about her by saying that she was his secretary, then that she was his business partner or his lover, and then finally – when he was tired of being asked – that she was his secret wife on a secret island where she was raising their secret family. The truth was the only answer no one believed.

 

ROBERTA GRIMES is a business attorney who had two experiences of light in childhood. She majored in religion at Smith College, and she spent decades studying afterlife evidence, quantum physics, and consciousness theories in order to understand the fundamentally spiritual nature of reality. She uses fiction to explore human nature and the ways in which spirituality affects our lives.

 

To learn more visit: http://robertagrimes.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Publication Date: 03-03-2014

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