Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

“Oh, God,” Milo whispered. The elephant’s trunk was half severed. The warm rain that had awakened him was blood misting in the air as the beast exhaled.

  A single tear welled in one great eye and rolled down its cheek.

  The surrounding forest looked as if it had been stepped on. Everywhere, broken trees, smashed people. Milo wondered what had happened to Ompati.

  Focus, said the old voices in his head.

  Milo pried a saber from a dead soldier’s hand and took a step toward the elephant.

  The elephant met him halfway. With a heavy grunt, it knelt in front of him.

  Milo patted its head. Then he cut the elephant’s throat.

  A sheet of blood covered him. The elephant gurgled, rolled its eyes, and died.

  Birds called out. Wounded soldiers moaned.

  Milo sensed eyes on him and slowly turned.

  A figure stood nearby. Slightly uphill, a silhouette against the morning sun.

  “That was compassionate,” said the silhouette.

  Milo nodded. He would have said something, but he hadn’t quite recovered his breath yet.

  A cloud passed over the sun, and Milo saw that the figure was an old man. He was bent like a gwaggi vine, with a beard like a whip. Like other old men, his skin hung loosely, but under the hanging skin, muscles stretched like old harp strings. His simple wrap, a worn robe, hung on him like a second skin.

  That was all Milo saw at first—a poor old man—until the eyes captured him.

  X-ray eyes, whispered his many voices.

  Milo didn’t know what an X-ray was (not in this life), but he got the idea. The old man looked at him as if he could see his naked bones and the atoms they were made of.

  “Namaste,” said Milo, bowing.

  The old man bowed in return.

  —

  A sudden chorus of shouting from the hilltop.

  “Bodhi!” someone cried, followed by a chorus of voices. “Bodhi! Here he is!”

  Milo looked uphill to see several young bald men in simple robes hurrying toward them through the trees, hopping over the dead and wounded.

  “Mmmmm,” murmured the old man. “Here we go again.”

  The young men arrived in a breathless little herd.

  “It’s okay,” the old man told them. “I’m having a good day.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the tallest, “if you’re having a good day or a bad day. You’re not supposed to wander off without telling Ananda.”

  “Shhh,” said the old man, kneeling to help a bleeding soldier. “Be useful.”

  He unwound his simple robe until he stood in their midst wearing a homespun loincloth, and he began to tear the robe into strips. His students—as Milo deduced them to be—did exactly as he did, without question or hesitation.

  “Buddha,” Milo whispered to himself.

  The old man heard him. Gave him an X-ray wink.

  Milo tore his uniform into bandages and went about the forest, binding wounds.

  —

  Milo found himself working with Balbeer, the oldest of the students. They rigged a series of tents at the top of the hill—the beginnings of a field hospital.

  Milo asked, “What does it mean when you said Buddha has good days and bad days?”

  “We don’t call him ‘Buddha.’ That’s a generic term for someone who’s enlightened. Buddha is something everyone has inside them, if they can get to it. So we just call him ‘Bodhi.’ Wise one. Teacher.”

  “And the good-days-and-bad-days thing?”

  Balbeer handed him some firewood. “Be useful,” he said.

  Milo went off to heat some water.

  —

  So, Milo thought, this is what it’s really like to be a healer.

  He put pressure on wounds that were bleeding. He tied splints around crooked arms. Once, he cut off a ruined leg. He gathered firewood. He cleaned things that needed cleaning.

  One day, Milo saw the Master making his way out of the hospital with a pail full of shit, going to dump it in a latrine that he himself had dug.

  “That’s the teacher I’ve been looking for,” Milo said to himself, “if he’ll have me.”

  “Could you at least take the arrow out of my throat,” coughed a soldier at his feet, “before you leave the third dimension?”

  Milo’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Ompati!” he cried. “I’m so pleased you’re not dead!”

  Ompati started to say something but gagged instead.

  Milo made him be silent.

  He made himself useful.

  —

  The next few days passed in a blur. Milo worked in the makeshift hospital and did what the Buddha people around him were doing. He slept wherever there was space. Ate whatever came his way, which wasn’t much. Surprising, thought Milo, when it came right down to it, how little a person needed.

  The students seemed happy in a way Milo had trouble understanding. They weren’t like other people. Most people had a kind of unhappiness they carried around with them. You saw it in their eyes or heard it in the way they talked. They were always a little bit mad about something, or worried, or sorry. This nagging unhappiness was a way of living that most people had gotten used to.

  The Buddha people didn’t have this unhappiness. They seemed to have a way of doing rather than fretting. Doing what was in front of them at that moment, whether it was talking to you or stitching a wound or drinking a cupful of water.

  As he was noticing this, thinking about it, he realized that Balbeer was standing beside him. Balbeer put a friendly arm around his shoulder and said, “You’re already enlightened, Milo.”

  Milo blinked.

  “I don’t see how that could be,” he said. “I haven’t—”

  “You haven’t had an explosion of light inside your head, or seen the future, or had fire shoot out of your nose?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “That’s not what enlightenment is. It’s not some mystical explosion. It’s noticing what’s going on around you, here and now, and you do that.”

  “Not always.”

  “Well, you’re not always enlightened.”

  “So then basically everyone’s enlightened, probably, at least some of the time. Like this guy whose leg I had to cut off. He screamed so hard he was drooling, and his eyes rolled back in his head.”

  Balbeer squinted, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said.

  Milo was surprised. He had never heard a teacher or a serious student say “I don’t know.” It sounded frightfully intelligent.

  “Why does a rhino have horns on its face instead of up on top of its head?” Milo asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Balbeer.

  “That’s wonderful. How come wood burns? Why do our armpits stink? What does it mean if I dream about being naked in the marketplace?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I was the only one who had the ‘naked’ dream.”

  “I think everyone has it.”

  They went and got something to eat.

  —

  Not long after, there came a morning when all the Buddha people got up and started walking away, down the road. Milo and Ompati got up and went with them. Milo discovered suddenly that he had nothing in the world to his name. A primitive kind of robe, one set of underclothes, and a pair of leather sandals he’d borrowed from a dead mahout.

  Ompati picked up a stick from the side of the road.

  “It feels good to have something,” he said, “even if it’s just a stick.”

  They walked in silence for a time.

  “I haven’t seen the Master for a week,” Ompati said. “Is he even with us? Maybe he has gone on ahead.”

  “He’s old,” Milo answered. “They say he has good days and bad days.”

  “Doesn’t everybody have good and bad days? What does that mean?”

  Milo shrugged. He didn’t know.

  That night, they found out.

  They were sitting around a fire at twilight, cooking some b
eans they’d begged from a passing caravan, when Milo was struck with energy.

  “I’m going to go ask him,” he said.

  “Ask who what?” asked Ompati and a couple of pilgrims who had joined them.

  “About the dream I have, where I’m in the marketplace and I suddenly realize I’m naked.”

  “Everybody has that dream.”

  “Yeah, but I wonder what it means.”

  And he was up and gone among the many fires, looking for the Buddha.

  The Buddha didn’t have a huge, fancy tent or anything. He wasn’t easy to find, camped among his followers, because he slept on the ground just like the rest of them. But Milo reasoned that wherever the Master sat down and made his fire, a lot of his people would try to sit down near him. So he went where the fires and talking and laughter were thickest, and there, indeed, was the Master.

  Milo expected to find some of the elder disciples sitting in a circle, with the Master sitting in the middle, staring into the fire. But what he found was confusion. There were several disciples, older men Milo recognized from the Master’s inner circle, whispering loudly at one another. In the middle of them stood the Master, crying and looking pissed off.

  Other pilgrims, at fires nearby, busily pretended not to see.

  Milo advanced, anxious to see what was wrong. If someone had hurt the Master…

  “Why would you say something like that?” the Master was sobbing. “That’s cruel, is all. What’s wrong with you all?”

  Two disciples—one fat, the other short but thin, like a dormouse—were having a spat of some kind, off to the side.

  “Why did you argue with him?” asked the fat disciple. “You know you’re not supposed to contradict him when he’s like this! He doesn’t understand. It just upsets him.”

  “I know!” whispered the dormouse, looking pained. “But he was fine, that’s the thing. One second he was breezing along, saying mountains are like rivers, only slower, and he was having a great day. Then he said, natural as you please, ‘I must remember to ask Yi if he still has that bit of volcanic glass,’ and before I could catch myself, I said, ‘Master, Yi has been dead now for seven years. Remember the tiger?’ and he came unglued.”

  The fat disciple seemed to calm himself.

  “We have to be careful,” he said. “I know you would never upset Bodhi on purpose.”

  Strong hands grabbed Milo by the shoulders and spun him around.

  Fuck! The Buddha had goons! Who knew?

  Balbeer.

  “Milo,” said Balbeer, his eyes sad, “just go and eat. You can’t help here.”

  “But what’s wrong?” he sputtered.

  Balbeer steered Milo out of the woods. Behind them, the Master’s voice rose angrily.

  “He’s old,” said Balbeer. “Old people get confused sometimes.”

  “But he’s—”

  “He’s not a god.”

  Milo found his way back to his own fire and sat down.

  “Did he have an answer?” asked Ompati. “About the dream?”

  Milo sat with his shoulders hunched.

  “I couldn’t find him,” he said.

  —

  He tried to sleep, and couldn’t.

  Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the Buddha in tears, frightened of his own friends.

  He closed his eyes and tried to meditate. Maybe that would help.

  Meditation was something the Buddha people did. It seemed to help them be cool about things. He had been trying but without much luck.

  “See and listen to what’s happening in your mind,” Balbeer had told him.

  “My mind is noisy,” Milo had answered. “I can’t see or hear.”

  Balbeer had shrugged and closed his eyes and appeared to ignore him.

  Milo tried again now.

  Breathe in. Don’t think of anything. Breathe out. Notice that you are breathing.

  What’s wrong with the Master? his mind asked.

  Milo noticed the question.

  Do people live on the moon, wondered his mind. No matter how hard he tried, random shit just kept floating up.

  My ankle hurts. I haven’t had an asthma attack in a long time; maybe I’m cured? Do Buddhists have sex? What was that noise?

  Shut up, he thought. Shut up, shut up. Breathe! Stillness…breathe…

  I can feel my hair growing.

  “Fuck!” he roared.

  “Shhh,” admonished some nearby pilgrims. “We’re meditating.”

  —

  The next afternoon, the travelers reached a place called Sravasti.

  Sravasti was a town. The Master had been there many times. A long time ago, they had built a whole complex of monasteries there. It was one of the main places people went if they wanted to learn the Master’s teachings. Some of his best students and disciples taught there, and the town was sort of an ongoing Buddha-fest. You could hardly go downtown to buy bread without stumbling over meditating pilgrims.

  When the Master himself came to town, it was like Jesus entering Jerusalem, except Jesus hadn’t been invented yet.

  The traveling throng became a parade, showered with blossoms and song. They were all bowed to and knelt to and touched with reverence. Part of this was because the Sravasti crowd was primed to honor anything remotely associated with the Buddha, but it was also because they didn’t know which of the travelers was the Buddha.

  Like most people, these spirit tourists expected to know the Master on sight. He should be ten feet tall, with flames shooting from his eyes. This, they said, was the man who had made a rice bowl float upstream just by asking it to. This was the man who had slain a horrid jungle monster by permitting it to eat him and then burning his way out with Perfection rays. This was the man whose soul was one with all time and the universe.

  Yet he passed before them, a hunched old man like any other old man. He had the X-ray eye thing, true, but that was hard to see if he wasn’t looking straight at you.

  “They don’t recognize him,” muttered Ompati, picking magnolia petals from his hair.

  Milo nodded.

  “It’s just as well,” whispered one of the travelers, walking nearby. “He’s been asking about the wedding preparations all day, especially the belly dancers.”

  Milo frowned. “Whose wedding?”

  “His own.”

  “He’s getting married?”

  “He got married. It didn’t work out.”

  “Oh,” said Milo. “Sorry.”

  “Also,” added the disciple, “it was sixty years ago.”

  —

  That night, amid the soft lawns and simple walls of the monastery complex, torches were lit. The thousands came and sat, waiting to hear the Buddha, buzzing excitedly.

  It’s like an outdoor rock concert, said a voice in Milo’s head (the voice was from a future life).

  The elder disciples emerged from the central monastery, plopped a big, fancy pillow on the grass, and sat around it in a semicircle, looking nervous.

  Out came the Master. One step at a time, assisted by Balbeer.

  The crowd hushed. Insects chirped. Bats zipped between torches.

  The Master sat on the pillow, forming the mudra with his fingers.

  Some time passed.

  The moon rose.

  The Buddha looked up. His eyes were bright but distant, like faraway fires. Milo recognized the lost look.

  Oh, no!

  The Master started talking about the wedding.

  “I’m getting married,” he announced softly, with a slippery kind of grin. “It will be at my father’s palace, to my love and my destiny, my cousin Yasodhara. There will be belly dancers.”

  Looking around, Milo saw the crowd nodding to itself, to one another. They listened and tried to follow.

  “You have to admire a good belly dancer,” the Master continued. “They don’t dance so much as they flow. They’re like truth, or a river. Like a wave. Think about that. We’re going to ask them to wear emeralds in their bell
y buttons.”

  The crowd ate it up. Truth! A river! Unity! Impermanence! No idea that the Buddha was wandering the undiscovered country of his own memory.

  His closest disciples watched him with genuine love and awe. But their glances shared a question they dared not voice.

  How much longer, they were thinking, can we get away with this?

  —

  That night, the first of the monsoon rains arrived.

  The Buddha’s thousands rolled up their mats and crowded into the huts and monasteries. In the morning, several young pilgrims woke everyone with a great shouting: “Come quick! Something wonderful! Something strange! The Master has to see!”

  So the Buddha and his thousands followed the young men down to the shore of a nearby river. The Master wasn’t hobbling, Milo noticed. He looked sharp and quick.

  The river had swelled, like a boa constrictor swallowing a horse. It plunged and thrashed, gripping whole trees and great branches.

  “Look!” cried the young pilgrims, pointing, jumping up and down.

  They all looked.

  “A monster!” they cried.

  Some distance from shore, a single jujube tree stood against the flood, its branches beaten and stripped, and in its highest reaches something awful crouched. Something wet and bad. Something toothy and glaring but also, clearly, something frightened.

  “A devil,” murmured some.

  “A demon!” said others.

  “Nonsense,” said the Buddha. “It’s a tiger.”

  So it was.

  Soaked and muddy, baring its teeth at the flood, it looked ready to fight, if only something attackable would present itself. As Milo watched, it took a big green terrified shit.

  Everybody looked at the Master, expecting something.

  “Someone bring me a rope,” he said. “The longest rope you can find. Long enough to reach the top of the tree.”

  A hundred pilgrims pelted back to the monastery and into downtown Sravasti, without hesitation or a single question.

  Milo leaned closer to Balbeer and asked, “What…?”

  Balbeer shook his head, frowning.

  Noise and shouting—they were back with the rope! A hundred ropes! The Master selected one and tied it into a wide, lazy lasso.

  “No way!” said Ompati. His sentiments were echoed up and down the shore.

  Even the tiger took an interest. He watched the Buddha without blinking, licking his chops.