Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “Workdays are the same everywhere, Milo. As below, so above.”

  He fell asleep watching a documentary about sweaters.

  —

  In the morning, she wrapped them both in her long hair, which became wings, which became a wind and dry leaves, flying. It was wild and fun and also scary. Flying with Death was like being in a sleeping bag with a sensuous woman and a tarantula.

  The wind slowed and stopped, and his feet were back on the ground.

  He was in someone’s living room, where the only light was a flickering TV.

  The room was trashed. Pizza boxes. Dirty plates. Some magazines. Clothes that had been tossed aside. On the couch, like one more piece of trash, slouched a young man with dirty hair in a Hank 3 T-shirt.

  His eyes were dull. His skin matched his eyes, except where angry sores broke the skin. His mouth hung half open, like a wound that wouldn’t heal. At first, Milo thought the mouth was full of popcorn: some white kernels, some black kernels. Then he realized these were the man’s teeth.

  He heard Suzie next to him. She had a grip on his elbow.

  “Um,” said Milo, “this is the super-enlightened perfect life? This guy is about to go through the Sun Door and join the Oversoul?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” she said. “I’ve got some stops to make first.”

  A slab of broken tile lay on a coffee table in front of the man, half-covered in something that might have been powder or crushed glass.

  Suzie knelt in front of the man. He stirred.

  “Chris,” she whispered.

  The man coughed. His eyes began to close.

  “Christopher.” A little louder.

  “You let them see you?” asked Milo.

  “Sometimes. If they’re having a hard time letting go. Now shhhhh.”

  She reached up and laid a gentle hand on Christopher’s cheek, and his eyes opened wide. He glanced around, and when he first saw Suzie, he jerked. He acted as if he wanted very much to get off the couch and run away but couldn’t get his legs to work.

  He said, “Sucks,” foaming at the mouth a little, and was dead.

  “That’s it?” asked Milo.

  “Yeah. He’ll be waking up by the river any second now. We’re outta here. Hang on.”

  Dark and wind again.

  They stood beside a young woman in rags who sat on a wooden stool, nursing an infant. All around them, torrents of quick, barefoot children poured, chasing and playing.

  Suzie reached down over the woman’s shoulder and touched the baby on the forehead.

  “Oh, shit,” said Milo. “Are you kidding?”

  Suzie kissed the woman on top of her head and rested her own head there a second, eyes closed.

  Wind and dark.

  They stopped to take a fat man working at a computer.

  They took a big black dog.

  They took a lonely old woman in a bed in a half-dark room. The second she died, a cuckoo clock in the hall went bananas.

  Wind rushing, leaves flying. They landed in Mumbai, in India, at the edge of a buzzing neighborhood, on a street clip-clopping with donkeys and carts.

  A cow walked by. One of the city’s many sacred cows. It crossed the street, and traffic stopped. The cow might be someone’s grandmother.

  “Come on,” said Suzie, tugging at Milo’s hand.

  “We’re following the cow?”

  “You want to see Perfection or not?”

  He nodded.

  The cow walked through a marketplace, where a Brahmin hung a garland of magnolias around her neck. Milo could have sworn the cow bowed to the priest a little.

  They watched the cow do something very intelligent and surprising. She plodded around behind the bazaar tables, and when a shopkeeper was distracted by a possible deal, she stretched her neck, opened her mouth, and trotted away holding a butcher knife in her meaty, drooling lips.

  They followed the cow out of the market district, through a district where houses gave way to shacks and pavement gave way to dirt, to a place where people were living in trash. It was one of Mumbai’s many dumps. The ground itself was made of compressed refuse. People lived in huts made from trash, between towering hills of garbage. It smelled like putrid milk and sewage, beset by roaring clouds of flies. Children followed the cow, dancing.

  The cow stopped, poking its head through the door of a house made entirely of wholesale-cheese boxes. Milo and Suzie peered over the cow’s back. When his eyes adjusted, Milo gasped and withdrew.

  “What’s wrong with them?” he asked.

  “They’re starving,” said Suzie.

  “Lots of people are starving. They don’t look like that.”

  “They’ve been too sick to look for work or even to beg. If they don’t eat very soon, they’ll die.”

  Suzie followed the cow into the hovel. Milo followed Suzie.

  Inside, a man, a woman, an old woman, and four tiny children all expressed surprise that a cow had invited itself inside. But they didn’t have the strength for a greeting or a protest. Their flesh stretched like drum skins over sharp bones. Their heads resembled skulls. The old woman hinted that maybe the cow was an incarnation of death, come to bear them out of this miserable life.

  “I doubt it,” said the man. “We’re not that lucky.”

  The cow lowered her head, placed the knife on the floor, and said, “Please eat me.”

  “Whoa!” Milo whispered.

  Other exclamations followed. Expressions of surprise. Expressions of gratitude.

  The cow was kind enough to accept the father’s thanks and to exchange bows.

  Suzie reached out and stroked the cow’s forehead. It knelt down and quietly died.

  The family prayed before they began cutting.

  “Suzie,” said Milo, feeling shaky.

  “Mmm?”

  “What just happened?”

  “You have just seen a soul achieve Perfection.”

  “Because it sacrificed itself?”

  “Not just that.”

  On the floor before them, the cutting had begun. Slowly at first. Respectfully.

  “That cow wasn’t just a cow. She was formerly lots of other things, including a famous bodhisattva named Aishwarya. She gave herself to this family out of a perfect understanding that they could use her flesh to live and get better. And she was neither proud nor afraid. That’s important.”

  Between them, a young woman with wonderful eyes had appeared, happily watching the family butcher the cow. She and Suzie bowed to each other. Then the woman vanished.

  Milo stroked his chin. “I could do the sacrifice part,” he said. “I think.”

  Suzie looked thoughtful. “You and this cow-person-soul have a lot in common,” she said. “You’re about people, one way or another. That’s why I brought you.”

  It was getting pretty bloody down there on the floor. The old woman was especially fierce, ripping gristle with her bare hands.

  “We need to go,” said Suzie.

  Wind and dark.

  —

  They stood by a river, in the afterlife, in the middle of a tremendous crowd. The crowd wore bright colors and waved banners of yellow silk.

  Airships and balloons crowded the sky.

  The bodhisattva and former cow, Aishwarya, strode to the river, wearing a beatific smile. The crowd parted for her, and she waded into the river.

  The air itself turned golden around her. The gold flared and boiled, and then flashed out in a ring of cosmic light, casting a moment of unmistakable Perfection over everything, over thousands of souls and stones, the airships and the wind itself.

  And then it faded.

  And everyone turned and went off to do their own thing, as if someone had gotten on a loudspeaker and said, “The magic, perfect cow-woman has left the building. There’s nothing more to see here.”

  —

  Back at Milo’s apartment, Suzie collapsed across the living-room sofa, and Milo occupied a beanbag chair. Some Styrofoam pellets po
pped out through a wound in one side.

  “If a cow can do it,” he said, “I can do it. If I can perform some kind of great sacrifice, then I will have achieved something perfect, and maybe I can have bargaining power to not go into the Everything?”

  “It’s not just sacrifice, Milo. If a wolf chews its leg off to get out of a trap, that’s sacrifice, too, but it’s also desperation. It’s not Perfection. There has to be love.”

  “I have love!” protested Milo. “I’m in love with you.”

  “ ‘Love’ ” said Suzie, “and ‘in love’ aren’t always the same thing. ‘In love’ is a human thing. Chemicals. ‘Love’ is cosmic. I love you, too.”

  She took his hand, and some love traveled up his arm and burst inside him like a galaxy. For a moment, he contained wonders and stars and time, and could speak Spanish, and existed in twenty dimensions. He also began to explode a little.

  “Babe,” he wheezed.

  “Oh. Sorry, sorry.”

  Kiss on the cheek. He fizzled back down to his usual self.

  They sat in silence for a while. The light in the window began to change.

  “Hungry,” said Suzie.

  —

  They found a smokehouse down on the river. A woodsy joint called the Bucket. The piano player was drunk and loud, the air thick, the meat hot, and the beer, a local favorite called “Skeeter,” was black. It was the kind of joint not frequented by Mama-types or Nan-types or other representatives of the universal mind.

  “No Nan or Mama tonight,” said Suzie, over her first beer and her first basket of wings. “All they do is watch. Watch people live their lives, watch people do everything that matters, while they sit off to the side and make their judgments.”

  She had insisted on wearing a disguise if they were going to go out. Baseball cap and a fake mustache. Otherwise, people pointed at her and whispered. Death was the original celebrity.

  “You’re one of them, you know,” Milo pointed out.

  “I know,” she answered. “Shut up.”

  Like most conversations between people who have been together for eight thousand years, it was a conversation they’d had before.

  “Goddammit!” Suzie tore off her fake mustache. She kept getting garlic sauce in it.

  Milo struggled to get a rebellious chicken leg down before it fell apart in his hands.

  You couldn’t really eat and talk a lot at that particular joint.

  —

  Later, they walked along the riverbank.

  “I may be one of them,” said Suzie, “but I’m not like them. They’ve got a lot of nerve, getting all critical of us for, you know, being together.”

  “It’s not like it doesn’t make sense,” Milo said. “You’re like a god, and I’m just—”

  “I am not a god. I’ve explained this a million times.”

  Milo decided not to say anything else for a while. They walked in silence. A dragonfly buzzed them and flew out over the river.

  “I’m going to quit,” said Suzie.

  Huh? Milo thought. Was she serious? And was she crying? She hardly ever cried.

  “What do you mean, ‘quit’?”

  “You know,” she said, waving her arms. “Quit. Stop doing my job. I’m sick of this shit, always having to worry about whether I’m rocking the cosmic canoe.”

  “Can you do that?” Milo asked. “Quit being Death the way you quit waiting tables or teaching biology?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Out over the river, a dragonfly flew complicated loop-de-loops.

  A fish jumped up and ate the dragonfly.

  Milo put his arm around Suzie.

  “A question,” he said. “When a fish in the afterlife eats a dragonfly, does the dragonfly go to the afterlife?”

  “It was already in the afterlife, Milo.”

  “Well, exactly, see? So?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You say that about everything.”

  “Everything’s fucking complicated.”

  Another dragonfly zoomed between them. It looked a lot like the same dragonfly.

  “I want to open a candle shop,” she said.

  He looked at her with one eye closed. A shop?

  What would it mean, operating a business in the afterlife? People did, of course. But Milo had never quite understood how money worked up here. You could earn money if you wanted, but at the same time, if you needed something from a store, you could go get it, whether you paid for it or not. By the same token, if you went to a bank and asked for some money, they’d give it to you. Like everything else in the afterlife, it was change-y and shifty and unclear. (“I don’t get it,” he had once said to Mama, trying to understand. “Money in the afterlife might as well be air!” Mama had replied, “It’s an Ideal Form, remember? It’s the idea of money.”)

  Dealing with money sounded like an enormous pain in the ass. He raised an eyebrow at Suzie.

  “A shop? You want to be a shopkeeper?”

  “It’s more about being an artist,” she said. “I’d make the candles. In different shapes.”

  “Are you just saying that, off the top of your head, or—”

  “Nope. I have wanted to make candles since they were invented. I mean, it’s the greatest kind of sculpture. Say you made a candle of Michael Jackson, and it would be all cool and look just like him, and you’d show it to people, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the cutest thing I ever saw,’ and then you could light it and watch his head melt. Candles are awesome.”

  Twilight deepened into night. Something in the river jumped and splashed.

  Milo said, “And that’s what you’d rather do instead of being Death.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  Hell yeah! Milo thought. “Hell yeah!” he said.

  —

  In the middle of the night, Milo woke up and decided to go get reborn.

  Suzie woke up, too. And knew.

  “You just got here!” she protested.

  “I know,” he said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “But I can’t help thinking I ought to get it done with. I’ll perform my great act of Love and Sacrifice, and when I get back we can be together.”

  “Don’t fuck it up.”

  “Love and Sacrifice are pretty straightforward.”

  “There are subtleties, babe.”

  “I know,” he answered. (What subtleties?)

  She kissed him. Then she turned away and pulled the covers over her head.

  She never accompanied him to the river. It didn’t seem right to have Death on your arm when you were going off to get born.

  At the river, he didn’t undress. You didn’t have to. He just waded through the mucky shallows and cattails into knee-deep water and the cooler, faster current.

  Images flashed in the water. Possible scenes and faces, snapshots of lives he might live.

  This one? No. That one? Interesting. Chances for Love and Sacrifice. Big chances.

  When he finally chose, the choice frightened him. But he steeled himself and dove.

  There was a brief shock, a pause, a Nothingness, and then he was being squeezed like toothpaste into the world again.

  If anyone was going to perform an act of perfect cosmic love, it was probably Milo.

  He had been in love sixty-eight thousand five hundred and four times.

  The first time he fell in love—really, really in love—he was an Iron Age farmer in middle Europe. He and his wife, Hyldregar, were married by a druidic shaman. By the time they were in their twenties, both were stooped from heavy work. They had ten children, two of whom lived to be grown-ups.

  The tenth childbirth killed Hyldregar. After that, Milo aged even faster and died when he was thirty-two. His neighbors during the last seven years of his life called him gragn luc moesse, which meant “the sad old stargazer.”

  “Love means being torn in two,” he was known to tell young people on their wedding day. You shouldn’t say things like that to young people. He had
to live a penalty life as a catfish, after that.

  —

  In future times, Milo and his lover Brii were born aboard a vast, world-sized generation ship on its way to Aurelae Epsilon, during the earliest colonization of the stars. Most of the passengers had forgotten that they were even on a ship. “This is the shape of the universe,” they declared, “these halls and tunnels and great machines.”

  Milo and Brii attempted to reach the outer shell of the ship, passing through engine rooms the size of continents. They saw graveyards, artificial forests, and the great gravity gyros themselves. They passed through war zones. They saw a wasteland, where everyone had been dead for two thousand years. On the far side of this apocalypse, they found the hull of the ship, at last, and witnessed space passing by at one-tenth the speed of light. Then they went back down, back home, with their stories. Milo got a job in radio, and Brii published a magazine. They told the story of their journey to the edge of the ship and became famous.

  The ship traveled for a thousand more years before reaching Aurelae Epsilon. Milo and Brii were the ship’s great love story and became the first great love story of the new world.

  —

  In some lives, love is like a movie.

  In Renaissance Vienna, Milo was a young musketeer who fell in love with Sophia Maria Mozart, a great beauty (and the composer’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt).

  Sophia Maria was the wife of Maximilian VanFurzelhaas, a minister to King Ferdinand and a notoriously angry man who was always off traveling. Every time Maximilian would go away, Milo would slip into the garden beneath Sophia Maria’s window and sing funny songs to her. Eventually, he got her to come down into the garden and play Adam and Eve with him. He brought Venetian masks.

  VanFurzelhaas was gone so often that his household staff became quite familiar with Milo and catered to him on his visits as if he, not VanFurzelhaas, were lord of the house. Even outside the household, the affair became well known. Milo’s fellow scholars made up a tavern song—titled, with a refreshing absence of subtlety, “Milo Heidelburg Is Fucking Maximilian VanFurzelhaas’s Wife, Tra-La”—which became popular enough that VanFurzelhaas himself finally heard it and came roaring home to bury his sword in Milo’s throat. Milo, the superior swordsman, contrived to wound the aristocrat and escape to Salzburg. From then on, however, Sophia Maria was required to accompany her husband on his travels. This only broadened her pantheon of amours, which included some of the foremost heroes of the age, including the sculptor Leonard Duesel, the architect Zeinsfisthoffen, and the pope, once, quite by accident, in the dark.