Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  Reincarnation Blues is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Michael Poore

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780399178481

  Ebook ISBN 9780399178498

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art and design: Jim Tierney

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: The Wise Man of Orange Blossom Key

  Chapter 2: The Unlikely Joy of Being Catapulted into Vienna

  Chapter 3: Suzie

  Chapter 4: The Barbarian Problem

  Chapter 5: Your Soul Can Be Canceled Like a Dumb TV Show

  Chapter 6: The Eleanor Roosevelt of the Sea

  Chapter 7: The Time Milo Had to Come Back as a Bug

  Chapter 8: Holy Cow

  Chapter 9: The Secret Lover of Sophia Maria Mozart

  Chapter 10: The Looking Glass People

  Chapter 11: The Flood

  Chapter 12: The Day Iago Fortuno Died of Old Age

  Chapter 13: The Swami Who Could Not Be Poisoned

  Chapter 14: The Hasty Pudding Affair

  Chapter 15: Lifting Elephants, Juggling Water

  Chapter 16: The Green-Apple Game

  Chapter 17: A Real Thing, with Substance and Power

  Chapter 18: Slaughterhouse

  Chapter 19: The Most Amazing Girl You Knew in High School

  Chapter 20: The Discredited Economist Who Fell from the Sky

  Chapter 21: The Buddha in Winter

  Chapter 22: Escape to Chinese Heaven

  Chapter 23: Julie DeNofrio’s Impossibly Elaborate (and Strangely Hypnotic!) Tattoo

  Chapter 24: The Family Stone

  Chapter 25: The Sun Door

  Chapter 26: The Oversoul

  Chapter 27: Blue Creek, Michigan, and Other Lives

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Michael Poore

  About the Author

  FLORIDA KEYS, 2017

  This is a story about a wise man named Milo.

  It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark.

  The day didn’t begin badly. Milo woke up before sunrise, tucked his fifty-year-old self into a pair of shorts, and walked out to meditate on the beach. His dog, Burt—a big black mutt—followed.

  Milo sat down in the sugar-white sand, closed his eyes, and felt the warm salt breeze in his beard. He took note of his ponytail feathering against his back and seagulls crying. That’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated: notice things, without really thinking about them.

  Milo was not a particularly good meditator. He cracked open a beer and watched the sun come up. Meanwhile, as always, the more he tried to think of nothing, the more he thought of ridiculous, noisy shit like his big toe or France. Maybe he would get a new tattoo.

  He drank his breakfast, noticing the ocean, welcoming its ancient indifference. He tried to match its breath—the breath of time itself—and fell asleep, as usual, on the beach with his beer and his dog, until the tide rolled in far enough to wet the sand under his ankles.

  He was, perhaps, the crappiest meditator in the world. But he noticed this, accepted it, and let it humble him. Humility was one of the things that made him a wise man.

  He walked back to the house to open a new bag of dog food.

  —

  The shark that would eat Milo in a few hours was miles away at that particular moment. It patrolled the surf off St. Jeffrey’s Key, looking for manatees.

  The shark knew it was hungry. This required no thought. The shark lived in the moment, every moment, in a perfect equanimity of sense and peace, meditating its way through the sea without even trying.

  —

  Milo worked in his garden for a while.

  He played with his dog and read a book about fossils.

  He went online and spent twenty minutes watching dumb videos.

  Then he drove his old pickup truck to St. Vincent’s Hospital, because visiting the sick is an important part of a wise man’s job. He took Burt with him.

  Petting dogs was good for people; it was a scientific fact. Burt was a wise man, too, in his way. All animals are.

  —

  On this particular day, Milo and Burt visited Ms. Arlene Epstein, who was dying of being a hundred years old.

  She was asleep when Milo arrived, and he stood there looking at her for a minute.

  Hospitals had an unfortunate way of reducing people, he thought. Looking at Arlene Epstein in her bed, tissue-delicate, you’d never know that she had once been a legendary bartender, keeping rowdy tourists in line with a sawed-off hockey stick.

  Burt hopped up and rested his forepaws on the mattress.

  “Milo,” yawned Arlene. “Is it Thursday already?”

  “Saturday,” he answered, kneeling.

  “I always liked Saturdays,” mused Arlene. “I think I’ll die on a Saturday, if I can help it.”

  “Not today, though,” said Milo. “You look good.”

  “Fantastic,” she replied, sitting up and giving his beard a tug. “You can take me for a walk.”

  Arlene was not supposed to go for walks. There was a sticker on her door that said she was a fall risk. Milo ignored the sticker and stole a walker from a closet down the hall.

  Arlene took one step about every three seconds. Milo stuck casually by her side, ready like a hair trigger to catch her. Burt walked along the wall, sniffing like crazy. (Dogs love hospitals. Think of all the different smells you can never quite get rid of.)

  When they had traveled ten feet, Arlene asked, “Milo, do you know what happens when we die?”

  He was honest with her. He said, “Yes.”

  One step. Two steps.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “You come back as something else.”

  Arlene thought about that.

  “Like another person?” she said.

  “Or a dog. Or an ant. Maybe even a tree. Burt was a bus driver in his last life.”

  The old woman stopped.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” she said. “I’m going to die soon, on a Saturday, and I want to know.”

  Milo looked down at her with deep, honest eyes.

  “I’ve lived almost ten thousand lives,” he told her. “I am the oldest soul on the planet.”

  Arlene looked into one of his eyes, then the other. Seemed to like what she saw. She set the walker aside, took Milo’s hand with both of hers, and leaned on him some.

  They resumed walking.

  “Will I still be me?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said Milo. “More or less. Of course, you’re supposed to make improvements.”

  “Well, I don’t think I want to come back as a tree.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Arlene patted his hand and told him he was a good boy.

  Burt sniffed out something nasty on the floor and gave it a big, fat lick.

  If Milo had gone out swimming then and been eaten by the shark, it would have been a wonderful, generous note for his life to end on. But he didn’t.

  —

  The shark, always hungry, had eaten a mess of ocean perch and some floating garbage and now cruised the deeps be
tween islands, coming up slowly across the outer reefs of Orange Blossom Key.

  The shark had been an ocean perch in a former life. It had been food of all kinds. It had been the Strawberry Queen for the 1985 Strawberry Festival in Troy, Ohio. Sometimes, in dreams, it remembered these other lives.

  For now, though, it swam and was hungry, and swam and was hungry.

  —

  Milo still had his workday to look forward to. Part of being a wise man was knowing the importance of work.

  Milo did two things for a living.

  Thing One: He was a fisherman and a sport fishing guide.

  He owned a boat called the Jenny Ann Loudermilk and charged people a fortune to catch fish. You could charge tourists in the Keys practically anything.

  Today, Milo’s workday involved housecleaning aboard the Loudermilk. Maybe a customer would appear, but he kind of hoped not. He was hoping to go surfing, if the waves built up.

  He stood on the deck of his boat, wielding a garden hose, spraying away seagull shit and old fish guts. Burt curled up on the floor in the pilothouse and lay there watching the flies on the windshield.

  Milo thought about Arlene Epstein and wondered if she was scared.

  He hoped not. Death was a door. You went through it over and over, but it still terrified people. That’s what he was thinking about when something bright and colorful caught his eye, down on the dock.

  A tourist, in an ORANGE BLOSSOM KEY T-shirt. A chunky man of middle years, wearing a mustache, sunglasses, brand-new boat shoes, and a straw hat.

  Suddenly Milo didn’t feel like working that afternoon. Suddenly he just wanted to head for BoBo’s Pub and sit at the bar and drink beer.

  “Are you going out again today?” asked the tourist.

  Aw, great balls of shit.

  “The customer’s always right,” said Milo. “You want to go out, we’ll go out.”

  “How much?”

  Milo quoted his fee, which staggered the man. (O, shining hope…)

  “Listen,” said Milo, “you get three or four other fellas, it’s easier on your wallet, and we could go out and hit it tomorrow morning—”

  But the tourist seemed to be in the grip of some urgency.

  “No,” he said. “Let’s go ahead and go.”

  “Hop aboard,” said Milo, offering a strong, tanned, tattooed hand.

  The tourist introduced himself as Floyd Gamertsfelder.

  “I sell carpet,” he said.

  “That’s awesome,” said Milo, casting off.

  Burt jumped ship and trotted away down the dock, heading home. He didn’t belong out on the water, and he knew it.

  —

  Floyd Gamertsfelder didn’t give a shit about catching fish. This was something Milo knew the instant he saw him, the moment he heard that strange urgency in the carpet salesman’s voice. About half of Milo’s customers were like that; they paid heavy money for his time, fuel, and tackle, but they were there for something deeper and more difficult than amberjack or marlin.

  This was Thing Two, the second part of Milo’s job: professional wise man and counselor.

  People came to him because they had problems they couldn’t sort out on their own and they had heard of him. Just as people in cartoons climbed mountains to find wise men, real people traveled serious distances to consult Milo aboard his boat, upon the sea, for the price of a half-day charter.

  They were smart to do so. When you live almost ten thousand lives, after all, you can learn a great deal. Milo had squeezed so much learning and experience into his one, single soul that the knowledge had grown pressurized and hot and transformed into wisdom the way coal changes into diamonds. His wisdom was like a superpower.

  It showed in his eyes—like green fire in outer space—and in his tattooed skin, which was creased and furrowed as if his suntan had put down roots.

  “I really just want to talk to you about some stuff,” Floyd admitted as they motored out of the marina.

  “I know,” said Milo.

  Past the breakwater, a decent-sized swell lifted the Loudermilk. The kind that promised good surfing later. He hoped Floyd was a fast talker.

  Patience, his boa reminded him. Compassion.

  Milo nodded, formed the mudra with his thumbs and forefingers, goosed the throttle, and steered out to sea.

  —

  Floyd Gamertsfelder was not a fast talker.

  Milo was kind of hoping he’d open up and spit out whatever his mystery problem was before they got too far out, but no. Floyd made his remark about wanting to talk, and then he just clammed up, watching the horizon, looking glum.

  Milo wasn’t surprised. It took time, usually. The puzzles people brought were hardcore and personal. They had to ride the waves awhile before they opened up. They had to glimpse his outer-space eyes and hear the ocean roll in his seaworthy, biker-dude voice.

  Milo nearly always took his customers to the same place, the same coordinates. Out of sight of land, an hour over open water, to a place only he knew about. In ninety feet of water, he dropped anchor directly over a forgotten submarine wreck, an artificial reef that hosted almost every species in the Gulf.

  “A dead man could catch his limit here,” Milo told his customers.

  He and Floyd drifted around for two hours over the sub, catching bonito and sunfish.

  Floyd opened up a little cooler he’d brought, and they each had a beer.

  “Have you ever been married, Milo?” Floyd asked.

  Ah, a marriage problem. Marriage counted for 80 percent of the wise-man business.

  Milo said, “Yep.” (Nine thousand six hundred forty-nine times.)

  “Well,” said Floyd, “basically I don’t think my wife is very nice to me.”

  Milo made a sympathetic noise.

  “Not like cheating on me. I don’t mean that. Maybe this’ll sound dumb, but she doesn’t ever do nice shit like bring me a glass of lemonade when I’m mowing the lawn. Am I being old-fashioned? They say it’s the little things, right? Well, she doesn’t do any of the little things.”

  Milo reached behind him to damp the throttle, cutting the engine noise.

  “Do I do little things for her?” Floyd continued. “Hell yes. Last week I made spaghetti, and—whoa, something’s happening!”

  A nice amberjack had hit Floyd’s line, and they spent fifteen minutes reeling it in.

  The wind picked up a little. Down below, in the ribs of the old submarine, thousands of fish watched the shadow of the Jenny Ann Loudermilk as it lurked across the sea bottom. A mile away still, the shark that would eat Milo chased a school of mackerel and glided north along the drop-off.

  “Is your wife nice to other people?” asked Milo.

  “Not particularly,” said Floyd.

  “What do you think the problem is?”

  Floyd took a deep breath and said, “I pretty much think my wife is an unpleasant person. I think she doesn’t like me very much, or anyone else, either.”

  “Why don’t you leave her?” asked Milo.

  Floyd digested this question for five full minutes.

  “I’m trying to be mature about things,” he said at last. “I thought maybe we just needed time. Marriage is work. So what”—here, he finally turned to look straight at Milo—“so what I think I need to do is, I need to grow up and want things to get better. My parents didn’t raise quitters.”

  Milo didn’t meet Floyd’s eyes. He watched the sea, looking for something in particular.

  “ ’Scuse me a minute,” he said, and cast a tube lure waaaaaaay out, watched it splash down. Silently counted: Four, three, two, one—and then yanked back hard, cranked like mad, and dropped a giant angry barracuda onto the deck, right in front of Floyd.

  “Christ!” screamed Floyd. “What’s wrong with you?”

  The barracuda thrashed, all huge jaws and razor teeth, instantly making hash of the deck hose.

  Floyd exploded in panic, dancing and spinning.

  “Be mature about it
,” suggested Milo.

  The barracuda flipped into the air, snapping at Floyd’s hands.

  “Give it time,” added Milo. “Fishing is work.”

  The barracuda mowed through an empty beer can and went for Floyd’s ankles.

  The carpet dealer, like most people, was brave when he needed to be. He swallowed his panic, bent down and grasped the fish around the middle, and flung it out of the boat with something between a sob and a grunt.

  Then he stood there shaking, pumped full of adrenaline, trying to decide if he had enough courage left over to shout at Milo again.

  “The problem with a barracuda,” said Milo, “isn’t that you aren’t being mature. The problem is that it’s a barracuda. If you don’t like being in the boat with it, one of you has to go.”

  Floyd sat down in the fighting chair. After a minute, he said, “Yes.”

  He said it in the saddest way, but he looked happy.

  Milo mashed the throttle and sped for home, hoping to save the tail end of the afternoon.

  If he had died just then, it would have been a poetic and satisfactory end. But he didn’t.

  —

  He chose to get drunk at Bobo’s Pub.

  BoBo’s was famous across the Keys for BoBo himself: a stuffed baboon with exposed fangs and a life preserver, eternally crouched on his haunches, one paw wrapped around a healthy erection. The bartender had to take BoBo home at the end of each night; otherwise, kids would break in and steal him.

  For about a year, Milo had been shacking up with the weekday bartender, a forty-five-year-old former soccer pro named Tanya. After closing, he helped her stack chairs, and then they went back to her bungalow (BoBo rode in the back of the pickup), where they killed half a bottle of wine and made love.

  Outside the open bungalow window, waves hissed and crashed. Then, suddenly, one wave made a different kind of sound, a boom like a bass drum in a hollow log.

  It was a surfing sound.

  “Come surfing with me,” said Milo.