Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

“If you can see them,” said the cross-breeze, “maybe you can see me, too.”

  The breeze took his hand, and he turned his eyes toward the moonlight.

  She was like steam over softly boiling water. Barely there.

  “Suzie,” he said, and they sat there by the fire for a while, holding hands, touching foreheads, leaning against each other as much as this was possible. Parts of them were like mist. These parts flowed through each other.

  It was the saddest joy Milo had ever known.

  “I’m not being dragged into the Big Whole,” she told him. “I’m getting the sidewalk treatment.”

  Goddamn them, Milo thought. Or it, or whatever.

  “It’s just reality, love,” she said. “Death isn’t a person. She’s Death. If she’s not Death, she’s nothing. Two plus two. You quit moping around out here in the Empty, and go back and live. Go do your Perfection thing.”

  A tunnel loomed. All along the spine of the train, the ghosts lay down side by side and held their breath against the smoke and steam of the engine.

  After the tunnel, the night itself seemed more clear. The train rolled and whistled down a long timbered trestle over a lake. It might have been Lake Michigan. It was endless.

  “I don’t know what to do,” croaked Milo. “If I go back.”

  The engine whistled and moaned, miles ahead.

  Suzie waved one ethereal hand, indicating the ghostly riders up and down the hundred boxcars.

  “No one knows what to do,” she said. “It’s a crapshoot. Haven’t you figured that out? Please let’s not have this conversation; we’re short on time.”

  WAAaaaaaAAAaaaaWOOooOoooOOOoo! moaned the train. “You do know what to do,” she said, “actually.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah. It’s like when you were trying and trying to figure out how to juggle more than three beanbags. You got tired of getting nowhere, and you went and asked somebody. Don’t act surprised; I’ve been digging around in your mind.”

  “A teacher,” said Milo.

  “A teacher.”

  “Like, the greatest teacher ever.”

  “Something like that.”

  Dawn touched the great lake. Up and down the train, the ghosts became hints of themselves. Milo held on to Suzie’s hand while the sun burned through the morning fog. Then he stood and performed a fairly credible swan dive off the train.

  It was a long way down, and it hurt. Jolted him unconscious when he hit the lake. But he wrestled himself awake and drifted down through the cold, searching images and shadows, searching possible lives, sinking through more than two thousand years.

  Kind of a shame you had to go that far back to find a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fine teacher.

  Milo had tremendous respect for learning.

  Learning was the most important thing a soul could do. There was an infinity of things to learn and to teach. There was an infinity of ways to get the learning and teaching done.

  —

  You could learn from mistakes, to begin with. That was pretty common. Milo’s first mistake, as a baby in India, had been to reach out and grab a Ghaasa spider. The Ghaasa spider bit him on the thumb, and part of his thumb turned black and fell off. And he screamed, and wisely let it go, and didn’t do that again.

  —

  You could learn to do things no one had ever done before, if you could imagine them being done. As a Moroccan inventor named Abass Ibn Firnass, Milo decided that it was time for his own species to conquer the air. Constructing himself a framework of wood and heavy paper, he flung himself from the highest roof in Andalusia, and damned if it didn’t work.

  For nearly ten minutes, to the wonder of crowds far below, he swooped and glided among the towers and minarets, until at last his momentum slowed and it came time to effect a landing. At this point, he realized that, in so thoroughly studying the elements of flight, he had neglected to develop a protocol for landing. Birds flew with their wings, so he had built himself wings. They land on their tails, however, and Abass had failed to provide himself with one. He survived a hard landing with considerable injury but no regrets.

  “You are an angel!” gushed a local poet.

  “You are kind,” answered Abass, “but I am a scientist and a friend to man, something a hundred times greater.”

  —

  He was an old copper miner whose job was to teach rookies how to drill holes and stuff them with dynamite and then get away before the dynamite was detonated.

  He took this teaching very seriously.

  So did his students.

  Teaching is more likely to be a fine art when a passing grade means you don’t get your ass blown off.

  —

  One of the most mysterious of Milo’s lives was lived as Rabbi Aben ben Aben, a revered Jewish mystic. All his life, he sat bent over scrolls and texts. One day he staggered to his feet, a wild look in his eye as if he had unlocked something unlockable, learned something unlearnable.

  “What is it, rabboni?” whispered his fellow scholars.

  “It’s a trap!” he cried, and fell down dead as a stone.

  This was probably an important teaching, except no one, including Milo, understood what it meant.

  —

  Milo learned about money and became a famous economist.

  He invented the field of “cryptoeconomics.”

  It was like the field of “cryptozoology,” which concerned itself with animals that weren’t real, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

  Some economists, Milo noted, went around saying that if you helped rich people get richer and didn’t make them pay taxes, eventually that would help out the poor people, too.

  “That’s the economic version of Bigfoot,” Milo said on TV.

  And he went around talking about cryptoeconomics and making a lot of rich people mad, until one day two strange things happened. One: A lot of economists (in the employ of big companies run by rich people) got together and said that Milo was full of shit. And then two: Milo was on a private-jet flight when the emergency door by his elbow blew out and popped him out of the plane. A farmer who saw him fall out of a clear blue sky did not see the jet, just this guy in an awesome suit who came down in his wheat field.

  The big companies became the resource cartels that almost cannibalized the human race.

  There are things out there that certain people don’t want you to learn.

  —

  Milo had one of those lives where he just couldn’t get ahead. He worked at Subway, and made car payments, and paid rent, and had to buy food and pay the electric bill.

  You have to learn a trick or two to live like that. You almost get some money to put aside for school, and the car breaks down. You finally save enough to pay the electric bill, and you get pulled over for having a taillight out.

  Milo learned how to use thrift stores and learned how not to have any kids until he got his degree and—

  Pow! He had a kid. Happened just like that.

  Sometimes the things we learn, Milo noted, don’t help us very much.

  —

  Sometimes Milo learned simple things that were sort of like poetry.

  He was ten years old, and his gramma taught him how to take care of plants.

  “You get a rock,” she told him, shuffling around her greenhouse, “and you put it in the dirt beside where the plant sprouts up. And when you go to water the plant, you pour the water over the rock instead of straight into the soil. That way the water sprinkles gently all around inside the pot and doesn’t kick up the soil and disturb the roots.”

  “You water the rock,” said Milo.

  “You water the rock,” said Gramma.

  INDIA, 500 B.C.

  Long ago, there was a tiny Indian village called Moosa.

  Moosa was not an exciting or remarkable place in any way. In fact, the village and its people had a reputation for lacking any particular shining qualities. They
were honest enough, and good enough, but generally not too bright, ambitious, charismatic, or lucky.

  It was Milo’s fortune, good or bad, to be born in this place. He did not, predictably, stay there, and the thing that propelled him out into the world was a man named Horsa Chatturjee.

  Horsa Chatturjee, true to the spirit of Moosa, was not a scholar or an athlete or a great warrior. He was not an inspiring man in any way. He was a man who fell into a hole and broke his leg.

  This was a big, important event for the village.

  The local elders had gathered around, and were discussing how the hole had gotten there and why Horsa hadn’t been looking where he was going, when someone suggested they actually lift Horsa out of the hole and carry him someplace where he could be helped. And that voice came from little Milo Raj Ram, who had a habit of offering unwelcome advice to his elders (Milo already suspected that Moosa was not the seat of a future empire. As he stood by and watched the older men treating Horsa Chatturjee’s leg, this suspicion deepened).

  “Pull on his leg,” said the eldest, a shirtless old fart with a gray topknot, “until the bone slips back under the skin. Pull until it pops into place. Then pack goat shit around the torn flesh until the bleeding stops.”

  Milo was pretty sure that putting goat shit on an open wound was a terrible idea. He tried to say so but was boxed on the ear for his trouble.

  He went up a tree to sulk, as boys will do.

  While he was up in the tree, three things happened.

  One, some voices in his head told him not to mind the old men, who were foolish and stubborn. Milo had been hearing these voices for some time and understood that they were the voices of lives he had lived. He had great respect for them.

  Two, he began to feel short of breath. This wasn’t uncommon; he’d been having these little attacks all his life. They usually abated once he quit running around, climbing, or feeling upset.

  This time, however, he kept feeling worse and worse, until the world began to swim around and Milo fell out of the tree.

  That’s when the third thing happened.

  A traveling healer walked into the village.

  The healer, a holy man, wore a beard so long it had to be braided into ropes and tied off in six places to his belt.

  When Milo fell out of the tree and landed at his feet, the healer frowned and probed at him with a long, beaded stick. Milo stared up at him, blinking and catching his breath. At this same moment, a terrible cry arose from the eldest elder’s hut.

  “Aaaaaa­aaaaa­aaaaa­aaagaaaaah!”

  “What’s that?” asked the healer.

  “That’s Horsa Chatturjee,” Milo told him. “The elders put goat shit on his broken leg.”

  “Ah,” said the healer. “This must be Moosa.”

  By now others had noticed the healer and gathered around.

  “I will examine your friend,” offered the healer, “if you like. In exchange for supper.”

  “Aiiiii­iiiii­iiiii­iiiii­iiiii­iiiii­iiiii­iiiii­ii!” screamed Horsa Chatturjee.

  The healer was fed and made welcome.

  —

  Milo watched the procedure from outside the hut, peering over the windowsill.

  The healer washed away the goat shit, revealing a very red, angry, evil-smelling leg. He burned the wound with a torch, nearly sending Horsa into orbit. Then he knelt at Horsa’s feet and prayed, waving a torch. Milo hunched at the window, enraptured, thinking, This is the way they do things in the big city!

  He was still there when the healer shuffled out of the house and said, “Alas, a demon has been at work here. Someone fetch an ax. The leg will have to go.”

  They fetched him an ax, and he performed the surgery himself.

  After, the healer would accept no payment, taking only the goat that had produced the offending goat shit, saying, “I’m doing you good country people a favor.”

  “With a teacher like this,” Milo mused, enraptured, “a diligent student could launch a golden age!” And he swore that when he came of age, he would seek out such a master, if it meant he had to search the whole wide world.

  —

  The day after his coming-of-age ritual, still wearing his yellow prayer cord, Milo showed up at his parents’ breakfast table and said, “Goodbye. I’m going off into the world to seek knowledge. God knows I won’t find it here.”

  “Smart move, kiddo,” said his father, and sent him on his way with some bread and a new pair of sandals.

  Milo hiked for weeks, through villages and across bridges and rivers. He talked with fellow travelers and slept by the fires of kind strangers. Just as he’d anticipated, things got bigger and less pointless the farther he went. Along the way, he heard of armies lurking beyond the mountains. He heard of a strange mystagogue called the Buddha, whose disciples were so holy they didn’t need to eat or drink. He heard of great floods and seas and ships and women so beautiful and skilled that the men who bedded them died from pleasure. The more he traveled, the more he heard and saw and the bigger his world became, which was just as he had hoped.

  —

  One evening, Milo was enjoying the hospitality of a rich beet farmer and his field hands, and the farmer asked him if his wanderings had a particular purpose.

  “I am seeking a teacher,” Milo answered.

  “A teacher of what?”

  Milo shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters. Something new. Something wonderful or terrible.”

  A murmuring around the farmer’s table.

  “We can teach you about beets,” someone said. “That’s about it.”

  The tallest of the field hands—a thoughtful-looking fellow—spoke up.

  “I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “It’s something I want, also. Maybe the teacher you’re looking for isn’t a regular sort of teacher at all. Maybe he is, in fact, someone more like a farmer or a blacksmith.”

  Milo knew wisdom when he heard it.

  “I would like to come with you,” the field hand continued. “But I have promised my employer here to work through harvest time. Perhaps you could work with us until the beets are ready to pull, and then we can travel together and see what we find.”

  Milo accepted, and became a beet farmer for a while, and was thankful.

  —

  He learned.

  He learned about getting up early and carrying water. He learned about beets. Beets, beets, beets. He learned to fix things. He grew stronger.

  After the beets were in, he and the field hand—whose name was Ompati—set out to find a teacher, and it was one of the most pleasant times in Milo’s life. They hiked long roads, and met other travelers, and traded stories and songs. Once, they spent a night in a brothel, where Ompati was robbed of his wallet. Twice, bandits tried to rob them at knifepoint, but Milo and Ompati had done farmwork and had knives of their own. They swam in rivers. They slept under the stars. They saw strange and wonderful things: a leper with no legs, who had determined to crawl to Calcutta. They saw a magician who could separate himself from his shadow. Staying overnight with a holy man in a village called Moon Smoke, they drank the blood of a snake.

  Milo came to understand that a great many holy men and others who seemed wise were, in fact, just out to get your money.

  Don’t let that discourage you, said the old voices in his head. There are real teachers out there. Keep looking.

  “All right,” said Milo softly. “I will.”

  Once, Milo and Ompati marched alongside a mighty army for several days, trading jests with the soldiers and marveling at the great war elephants. On the fifth day, they began encountering men with shaved heads, in orange sashes, who laughed and waved at the soldiers as they passed.

  “Pilgrims,” Ompati explained.

  As the sun continued to rise, they saw more and more of these holy madmen.

  “Disciples of the Buddha are teaching nearby,” came the rumors and whispers, down through the ranks.

  That evening, the army came to a
n unexpected stop.

  News rushed like a weather front: not just disciples of the Buddha, but the Buddha himself! He and his entourage had met the army at a crossroads up ahead, and the army had stopped to let him pass.

  “I don’t understand all the excitement,” said Milo.

  “Maybe his teachings haven’t traveled as far as Moosa,” said Ompati, “but in places of consequence, they say he is the greatest soul that ever lived. They say he defeated the demon lord Mara in single combat, without even standing up. They say he just touched the earth with his hand and beat Mara back with pure wholeness.”

  “Which means what?”

  “I don’t know. No one does.”

  —

  Milo and Ompati got a nasty surprise the next morning when messengers came riding down the lines, shouting to the sergeants and marshals. They looked excited.

  The sergeants and marshals, in turn, screamed at their units.

  “Quick-march, forward!” shouted the marshals.

  Before them and behind them, soldiers, elephants, chariots, and armored horsemen all moved with purpose, looking tough.

  “I propose,” said Ompati, “that we will only be in the way here.”

  So they left the army behind and waded away between trees.

  Arrows started falling around them. One stuck in the ground, nudging Milo’s ankle.

  “We seem to have wandered toward the fighting,” observed Ompati.

  Milo struggled to breathe. Red-hot terror had a grip on him. He was pretty sure he’d peed himself. Up ahead, and all around, he heard battle cries and shrieks and brave little speeches.

  Soldiers rose out of the underbrush. Mean-looking guys in leather armor.

  Milo wheezed and blacked out facedown in some kind of Asian raspberry bush.

  —

  Warm rain.

  Milo came awake painfully, feeling sticky. Nearby, someone shuffled in the grass.

  Lifting his head and looking around, he discovered an elephant standing over him.

  Milo wasn’t startled or afraid. It was clear from the very first instant that the elephant wasn’t going to hurt him. In fact, it seemed sad and confused and stared down at Milo with a peculiar lost look in its eyes.