Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “How come you’re home?” asked the boy, with his mouth full.

  “I’ll let you think that over,” Hay replied.

  The boy ate, and studied his father.

  You could see the wheels turning, the way boywheels had turned for a million years, like the minds of little poker players, judging whether to bluff or fold.

  “I’ve hidden the Froosian Goose in my closet,” said Milo, pausing to gulp his milk. “I was going to paint it blue or else with dots.”

  He licked away his milk mustache.

  The Barleycorns, a club of some twenty-five promising nineteen-year-olds, barely managed to get away with the goose each year without setting off alarms. Despite himself, Hay was impressed.

  “Tell me how you did it,” he said.

  “Am I in trouble?” asked the boy.

  “Naturally you’re in trouble. Don’t be foolish. How’d you manage it?”

  Hay kept watching for signs of the boy’s infant-onset asthma to show themselves. As a toddler, the boy would sometimes get red in the face and short of breath when he was placed under stress or if he was caught getting up to no good. The condition had been genetically muted since, but sometimes the boy still seemed to labor for breath, if called on his behavior.

  Not lately, though.

  “How did you know?”

  “Young man—”

  “I’ll tell you how I did it if you’ll tell me how you knew.”

  “Last night at dinner,” said Hay, “you asked why a goose was symbolic of fellowship, and I explained that geese never leave one of their own behind if he is injured. One of them will drop out of the flock and stay with him until he recovers or dies. You seemed to find it all funny, in your way. When I learned that the Damocles Society’s goose was missing, I put it together. It’s the sort of thing you’d do. Now. How?”

  “Sometimes they take it places. I was on my way home from school when one of the brothers brought it out and put it down beside his car. Then he went back in to look for his keys.”

  “You made it from the society clubhouse to our own door, carrying the Froosian Goose, without being stopped?”

  “I wasn’t carrying the goose. I was driving the car.”

  Hay dropped his sandwich.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It wasn’t hard.”

  “How did you manage to start the car, with the keys missing?”

  The boy suddenly seemed less plucky and cast his eyes down to the floor.

  “Did you start the car…yourself?”

  The boy nodded.

  Hay had forbidden Milo to use that particular talent. Not until he was older, until his brain was more completely formed. It was for his own good. There were studies—right there at King’s College—indicating that a kinetic could experience a decline in ability if that part of the brain was exercised too early.

  “Where is the car now?” Hay asked.

  “I left it on Braintree Street, by the war memorial.”

  Hay stood.

  “Tuck in your shirt,” he commanded, “and find your shoes.”

  When his son was presentable, Professor Hay drove him to the police station and saw that he confessed to his crimes.

  —

  Grand theft, for an eight-year-old, carried a penalty of one year’s probation. At Hay’s urging, the court also stipulated that Milo wear a Dawson mole, a tiny electronic bug that nulled his telekinetic abilities. Milo made sure to wear it right between his eyes whenever his father was around. If this made Hay feel guilty, it didn’t show.

  —

  For the next several years, Milo focused on school, setting a high bar for his own achievement. He read and learned, took tests and won prizes, and grew older. A lot of the energy he would have used moving things with his mind, he focused through the more-traditional lens of his intellect.

  This focus paid off. At the tender age of fifteen, he enrolled at King’s College on a faculty scholarship and blew the placement exams out of the water. He was permitted to major in subspace physics.

  His father raised his eyebrows and said, “Hmmph!” as if Milo had impressed him. Not made him proud necessarily but impressed him.

  He was not permitted to major in neuroapplications. Wearing a Dawson mole had rewritten his synapses, and those talents were gone. It was like losing a limb or a form of sight, but Milo swept the loss under his considerable mental rug and pressed on.

  A faint, ancient voice way down in Milo’s soul whispered, Oh, wow, we might actually make it this time.

  —

  College was a turbulent time for Milo. It’s a turbulent time for most people, but Milo had to contend with being far younger than his fellow freshmen, as well as with being a faculty brat. Most of the King’s College student body were smart kids from wealthy families, whereas Milo was merely smart. Fortunately for him, his intellect won him respect, and he was still somewhat legendary for stealing the Froosian Goose.

  He faced the same challenges that bedevil every adolescent schoolboy. He struggled to be cool and handsome and to not go touching his penis every five minutes. There were girls at King’s College, but not the girly kind he knew from middle school. College girls terrified him.

  College girls terrify me! he appealed to his older, wiser self, a self he was getting to know and depend on.

  His wiser self was no help with the college girls. The voices were afraid of them, too.

  His fortunes became more interesting the day he tried to show off by challenging Professor Basmodo Ngatu in Literature 232, the Poetry of Colonial Resistance.

  Professor Ngatu, a thin black man with a ponderous, imperial head, was not a lecturer. He was a discusser and a question-asker.

  “Why,” Ngatu asked one day, pacing before the chalkboard, “do you suppose Zachary Heridia wrote his attack on the oxygen cartel in verse rather than in an epistolary form? Was he trying to fly under the radar by having his attack appear where allies of the cartel were unlikely to stumble on it?”

  Most students peered into their books, while their fish levitated slightly above their left shoulders, recording notes.

  It was dangerous to make eye contact with Ngatu. But Milo did.

  “Mr. Hay?”

  “Sir, I wonder if Heridia’s choice of form was more of an artistic decision. What if he wrote in verse and published in a literary forum not as a rhetorical tactic but simply because it was more beautiful?”

  Ngatu strode up into the gallery, his own gold-plated fish swooping behind him, and peered down at Milo over antique glasses.

  “ ‘The Suffocation of Emeline K,’ ” said Ngatu, “was written three days after the oxygen embargo against the Ganymede terraformers and published a week after that. Four thousand people died in that embargo. Six hundred were shipped downplanet to the Europa prison islands. But you suggest that Heridia, whose own sister died in the Jovian monoxide ‘accident,’ was more concerned with art than with raising consciousness?”

  The other students had their heads out of their books now.

  Milo shook his head. “That’s a false choice,” he answered. “Art can encompass both social responsibility and questions of beauty. ‘Themself are one,’ to quote Emily Dickinson. And I think that’s where Heridia was, at this decision point. He realized he could make the most of his message by making it beautiful and by presenting it to an audience who would appreciate that irony and be grieved by it.”

  “Grieved?” asked Ngatu, eyes narrowing. “You believe this writer chose to elicit an emotional response rather—”

  “People are complicated,” someone interjected.

  All heads turned. The speaker was a female student, Ally Shepard.

  “Miss Shepard?” asked Ngatu.

  Ally Shepard shrugged. “Heridia might have written in verse for more than one reason. I think that’s where…he…was going.”

  She waved her hand in Milo’s direction. A wonderful hand! Ally Shepard was like an island girl, imported from the tro
pics. She fit into her King’s College uniform like so many sleeping kittens. There was no place on her body that Milo didn’t imagine his hands, petting. Indeed, the wide majority of King’s College males and a number of females shared these imaginings. Ally Shepard was both president and premier talent of the Hasty Pudding Club, the vaunted campus theater organization. She was perhaps the closest thing King’s College had to a celebrity.

  A brainy celebrity at that.

  “It’s dangerous,” Ally was saying, “applying hindsight to something as complex as why someone wrote a poem, because the temptation is to try and make it make sense. We can apply reason, but what we can’t do is apply the storms and variations that govern a human mind moment to moment.”

  She looked Milo’s way and winked.

  “I would say,” said Ngatu, descending again to his chalkboard, “that your point bears consideration. So let’s hear about that. How did the artist affect the political chess player within the same mind, and vice versa?”

  Milo barely listened. His entire universe was nailed to Ally Shepard—he didn’t dare look. Hard as he tried to be cool, to be more than the sum of fifteen years, he could only sit there blushing, with a vacant look in his eyes and growing discomfort in his pants.

  —

  In the week that followed, Milo suffered a sort of identity crisis.

  Was he a cute little phenomenon, like an ornament the freshman class wore with quiet amusement? Or had he made his age immaterial? Was he, in fact, a brooding future Lord Byron? He imagined himself being photographed in black and white or filmed without his knowledge.

  Soon enough, he would know which of these was his true self. Any day, the intramural clubs would issue their fall invitations, and that would tell all. At King’s College, future greatness was invited into clubs; mediocrity and cuteness were not.

  The invitations—actual ancient-style paper messages—arrived under doors one wet, leafy October morning.

  Milo did not receive an invitation from the Damocles Club. He did receive warm greetings from the Barleycorns, the Tycho Fellowship (a science organization), the Harrisons (a literary circle, publishers of the Ilion), the Harrow Intramural Team, and—what, ho!—the Hasty Pudding Club.

  Just as he was thinking that he needed parental permission to join anything, his fish buzzed.

  “Milo?” growled his father’s voice. “Listen: If you haven’t got plans already—oh. How have you been?”

  Milo could vaguely hear Mom in the background, reminding him to “show an interest.”

  “Fine, Dad. You and Mom?”

  “Good, fine. Your mother wanted to know if you’d care to stop by for dinner, Friday? She hasn’t seen you for a while.”

  Dammit. Lord Byron didn’t want to have dinner with his mom and dad.

  “I’d be happy to,” he said.

  “Well, good. Come by around five, dinner at six. Have a good day.”

  The fish went dark.

  “By the way,” said Milo, “I need your permission to join the Tychos and the Harrisons and the Harrow Intramurals and the Barleycorns and the Hasty Pudding Club, you fucker.”

  Milo didn’t rush right over to his parents’ house on Friday.

  When his classes let out at noon, he wandered the campus. The future scientist and author, hands in his pockets, windswept and poetic. Across the quad, through its forest of giant chestnuts. Down the cobblestone road between Stowe Hall and the pitch. Down along the canal, and there he stopped.

  He watched the usual scattering of college men trying to impress college women by navigating the canal, standing in the stern of narrow wooden barges, steering with long wooden poles. Most of them were city boys who had never done anything of the kind before, and the rest were country boys whose whole boating experience involved no more skill than it took to yank a motor to life. Most of them went careening around the water at the very precipice of capsizing, their dates trying to keep a brave face.

  Milo, on the other hand, had been paddling around on that canal since he was a baby—usually with his mother, on Wednesday evenings. He was in just the mood to get out there and show the older boys a thing or two.

  “ ’Lo, young Hay,” said the supervisor at the launch, Mr. LeJeune. “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s fine, sir. I’d like to take a boat out. Is it still three?”

  “It is, Mr. Hay. But you still got to have your majority. Are you eighteen, then?”

  “Mr. LeJeune, you know I can paddle one of these—”

  “Like the devil himself, sir. But I’d lose my situation here if something was to—”

  “I’ll sign,” said a familiar and awful voice. “Pay him, Milo.”

  Ally Shepard.

  He wished he were dead.

  “I don’t think—” he began, but then she touched his arm, and it was all warm kittens. Oh, did she smell nice.

  She sat down in the bow of the nearest gondola, looking up at him through designer shades. And Mr. LeJeune handed him a receipt and an oar, and just like that he was master of King’s College again.

  Expertly, he stepped onto the stern and drove her into the channel. They might have been riding on glass, so smoothly did he steer. And it was just as he would have daydreamed. He cut through the rest of them like a shark through a lot of clownfish, pivoted to starboard, and made speed for the castle bridge. And, oh, did the young blades glare! And, oh, did their dates raise their eyebrows, impressed!

  “You’re good at this,” she told him.

  He shrugged, giving his hair a rakish flip.

  They passed between stone walls, under two stone bridges, where Milo had to duck. The vast green plain of St. Martin’s yard opened up on the port side of the canal. Beyond, the cliffs and spires of St. Martin’s itself.

  Ally slipped out of her loafers. And her stockings, too. Then she spun around on the bench, hiked her skirt halfway up her thighs, threw one leg over each side of the bow, and let her exquisite feet trail in the water.

  Milo yanked his shirttail out of his khakis, anticipating an erection.

  She tucked her head around one shoulder, looking at him upside down. How could he meet her eyes, when the rest of her was hiked up and spread out like that?

  Be bold, advised Milo’s ancient selves in the depths of his head.

  Milo did what Lord Byron would do. He looked at her legs, gave the rest of her a burning stare, then turned the burning stare on her eyes.

  In my biography, he thought, when they write about my women, they will say I was mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

  She laughed, righted herself, and turned again to face the canal.

  Milo bumped into another gondola. Oh, way to go.

  “Jackass!” said the older boy.

  “It’s okay,” said Ally. “Practice makes perfect.”

  What a bitch. He was her slave.

  “Go to the castle,” she said.

  The canal proper ran to the end of East Green, where it opened up into a wide pool, a convenient turnaround. But you could, if you liked, continue upstream all the way to the Brandy River itself. Just short of the river, the canal wound like a moat around the walls of a castle. This was the automated gatehouse between the river and the canal, really, but it was part of King’s College, so they built it like a castle and called it a castle.

  “You don’t seem like fifteen,” said Ally. She leaned forward now, feet and hands trailing in the water, embracing the prow like a lover. It looked like something she was doing by accident, just relaxing. Was it an accident? (Hell no, it’s not an accident! roared the old voices down inside him.) Did she know what it was doing to him? He could stare all he liked, after all, with her head turned away. Did she know that?

  “How old did you think I was?” he asked, ducking beneath the castle bridge, steering them into the wilderness portion of the canal.

  Plop plop!—turtles, startled, slid off logs and vanished in the water.

  Ally sat upright, scanning the shore.

&nb
sp; “I want a turtle,” she said. And she slid sideways into the canal, almost without a splash.

  Underwater, gone.

  Splash!—bursting from the water hard by the shore and snatching blindly at a sycamore log there.

  Damned if she didn’t catch a turtle. A small painted turtle. She held it aloft in triumph, tossing her head to clear the hair from her eyes.

  She half-stood, half-floated, half out of the water, drenched and running like a waterfall. And quite translucent, Milo noted with wonder. Her King’s College uniform had all but become one with her pink skin.

  “Shit,” she said. “I lost my sunglasses.”

  But she didn’t much care, it seemed. She swam out to the gondola, which Milo steadied while she climbed back in.

  “See?” she said, holding up the turtle for his inspection.

  “Painted turtle,” he declared. “Watch it. They bite.”

  Ally snapped her teeth at him and let the turtle go in the waist of the boat, where it scratched desperately at the wood, crawling under the middle bench.

  “He wasn’t much fun,” she said, pouting. Then she lost the pout and squinched her eyes at him, saying, “How about you, Milo Hay? Can you be fun?”

  “I invented fun,” he said, wondering what he meant. Wondering what she meant.

  The woods opened up to port, revealing the castle. Tall stone walls, dripping with moss. Moat still and black, with leaves floating. Between tree branches, great spiderwebs caught the sun.

  He let the gondola glide in, stopped her gently with a touch of the oar on the bottom, then shipped the oar and sat down on the stern bench. Let her float. He leaned back like Lord Byron, wicked and casual.

  They didn’t say anything for a few minutes. She seemed absorbed by the image of the castle and by the way the sun danced through the leaves. Milo, too, let the quiet fall over him.

  “How do you know you’re not a ghost?” asked Ally, still watching the castle. “They say ghosts don’t know. So how would you know?”

  “Maybe you don’t,” said Milo. “Maybe we are.”

  “I think ghosts go around thinking of all the things they didn’t do,” she said. “You know. Regrets. Like if you died right now, your ghost might go around regretting never being kissed.”