Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  The Master whirled the lasso over his head…slowly at first…and cast it like an arrow over the water. It settled neatly over a broken branch just behind the tiger.

  He tugged the lasso tight and pulled.

  He meant, it became obvious, to pull the jujube tree down to the shore, allowing the tiger to leap to safety. But he was, after all, an eighty-year-old man, and…

  The tree started to bend.

  The thousands muttered and gasped.

  The tiger knew something was up, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. He shifted, glaring.

  The Master’s hands began to quiver.

  “Please be useful,” he said to those around him.

  Disciples and pilgrims piled onto the rope. Balbeer began a chant, which got them all pulling together. “Ahn!” they chanted, and pulled. “Bastei!” they chanted, and pulled, and the tree bent closer, until at last the roots tore free and its top branches hovered just ten feet from the bank.

  At this point, a couple of things happened very quickly.

  The tiger leaped through the air.

  Everyone saw the tiger flying toward the shore and let go of the rope and ran.

  Everyone but the Master, who had secured the rope around his wrist.

  The tiger flashed its teeth and fangs and went crashing away through the trees without eating anyone.

  The jujube tree came loose and went rolling downstream with the flood, yanking the Master off his feet, into the raging river, and out of sight.

  As fast as this happened, Milo was faster. He was in the water before he even knew he was going to go, reaching for the Buddha’s old bare feet, the last part of the Master to vanish.

  The water swirled around him. Branches and gravel and floating dreck scraped at him, but his groping hands found what they were looking for, and down the river they went, the tree and the Master and Milo.

  Milo pulled himself up the Master’s body, almost climbing him like a tree, until he reached the old man’s wrist. Once he had the wrist in his grip, he did what the Master could not, which was to use both hands to unwind the rope.

  The tree rolled away toward the ends of the Earth.

  Milo and the Buddha bobbed up into the air, gasping. They fought together for the shore, grabbing for weeds or branches, clawing at the mud.

  A tall figure splashed toward them. Big, strong beet-farming hands grasped Milo—Ompati!—pulling him, pulling the Master free of the current, until all three of them beached themselves and lay there with their legs in the water, gulping air.

  Pilgrims and disciples came running, surrounding them, shouting with joy.

  Milo realized then that the flood had yanked their clothing away. He and the Master lay there naked before the growing crowd.

  “I’ve had dreams like this,” said Milo.

  “Everyone has that dream,” said the Buddha.

  —

  The Great Tiger Rescue had predictable results.

  The story of the Buddha’s supernatural strength and compassion flashed across the jungles and villages. Within hours more pilgrims started thronging into Sravasti. A new fable! A new miracle!

  The story of how the Buddha had been dragged into the river and had to be fished out did not flash anywhere. It was hushed up, on a solemn and voluntary basis.

  You can’t blame them, said one of Milo’s past-life voices. Imagine if Jesus had been eaten by ferrets. It wouldn’t work well, fable-wise.

  The disciples and pilgrims didn’t even want to talk about it that day. As they sat around in the thousands with their rice bowls, eating the midday meal in a light, cool rain, Ompati said, “Man, I thought it was all over. You guys were underwater for a long time—”

  And everyone around them got up and left.

  “They don’t want to hear it,” said Milo.

  “You saved his life,” insisted Ompati.

  “We saved his life, I suppose. That doesn’t change the fact that he isn’t like a normal person. He’s more like a story that lives and breathes. Sometimes the story has to be edited.”

  “You’re starting to sound like a wise man,” Ompati remarked.

  Balbeer approached and knelt beside Milo.

  “He wants you to come and see him,” he said. “Both of you.”

  Oh. Cool.

  Balbeer led them through the crowd to the Master’s central hut. It was a modest home with a brick foundation and a roof of fresh green pwaava leaves, as if the Master lived beneath a huge salad.

  Inside, the Master sat cross-legged, eyes closed. When Milo and Ompati sat across from him, his eyes opened.

  “Thank you,” said the Buddha, patting Milo on the knee, nodding at Ompati.

  “You’re welcome,” they whispered.

  “Of course,” said the Master, “a life is like a wave in the river. It rises and then disappears back into the river. It rises again somewhere else. The rising and falling doesn’t make a lot of difference.”

  “You mean it doesn’t matter,” said Ompati, “if Milo saved your life.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the Master, fixing his eyes on Ompati, “to the river.”

  Ompati looked at the ground, corrected.

  “Now,” said the Master, “meditate with me.”

  Eyes closed again.

  Milo closed his own eyes and tried.

  Tried not to think about chickens, and why rocks were hard, and a bare-breasted woman he had glimpsed once, and string, and his belly button, and snow…

  —

  The Buddha and his traveling disciples left Sravasti in the middle of the night.

  “We’re going,” whispered Balbeer, awakening Milo. “Before he has another bad day.”

  “I don’t think they’ll talk about it,” yawned Milo, “even if he does. They don’t want to see it, so they don’t.”

  “They’ll see it,” said Balbeer, “if it happens enough.”

  They were on the road for days and days, begging food along the way. Every night, Milo and Ompati joined the Master in quiet talk and meditation. The rest of the Buddha world might want to forget the almost-drowning, but the Master himself obviously considered the young men to be good and worthy friends.

  “I suck at meditating,” Milo blurted one evening. He wanted to meditate so badly, the failure was giving him stomach cramps.

  The Master raised a quieting hand.

  “Meditating is mostly breathing,” he said. “Breathing is our most intimate contact with the world outside ourselves. We bring it in”—the Master inhaled—“and we push it out”—and exhaled. “When we do that, the world outside becomes part of us.”

  They breathed together, the three of them. In, out. In, out.

  “So,” said Milo, “it doesn’t matter that I can’t help thinking about monkeys or my big toe?”

  “The mind can’t help being noisy. Last night, trying to meditate, all I could think of was cats.”

  “Oh,” said Milo, surprised. “What about them?”

  “Nothing. Just cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats.”

  “Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats,” repeated Milo. Ompati joined in.

  “We’re meditating, aren’t we?” asked Milo.

  “We were,” said the Master.

  “I don’t get it,” said Ompati. “You’re supposed to clear your mind, but it’s okay to think about cats. You’re meditating if you think about cats, but not if you think about meditating.”

  The Master closed his eyes and appeared to weigh this.

  They waited awhile for him to continue, until he began to snore softly.

  —

  Sitting with Ompati at their own fire, later, Milo was silent for a long time.

  Not meditating silent, just silent. Thinking.

  “They say the Master has achieved Perfection,” said Milo eventually.

  “It’s kind of obvious,” Ompati replied. “You know it when you see it.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not what you’d expect. I mean, sure he’s
all spiritual and everything, but he also has the practicality thing going on. He has trouble meditating, like me. But he makes a success of it. His mind is falling apart, but he makes a success of that, too. And then things like the tiger. That was amazing!”

  The fire popped. Sparks rose, whirled, and died.

  “Is there a point?” asked Ompati.

  “There is. It’s this: I want Perfection.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I think most people want a little bit of it but not the whole package, where they leave the cycle of life. I think—no, I know—that I have lived thousands of lives. I may be the worst meditator ever, but I’m beginning to know things. Almost like my other lives are slipping me notes. Don’t look at me like that. Anyhow, they have been telling me—I think—that until now I never wanted real Perfection, because I never saw it in the flesh. Not like this. It’s something I’ve been rebelling against for a long time.”

  “Rebelling? Against Perfection?”

  “Yes. But not anymore. It’s necessary somehow. I can feel it. I’ve been fighting against becoming part of the Oversoul. But now I want that more than anything.”

  Milo could hear the voices in his head dancing around and singing.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Ompati. “You’ve been rebelling against Perfection, but now you’ve changed your mind because the Master is perfect but in practical, groovy ways you can understand?”

  “Yeah. That’s what a teacher does, right? Gets you to understand? Well, I understand.”

  The voices in his head presented him with some cool dancing lights and sitar music.

  Milo hadn’t known they could do that.

  “Wow,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  He reached down and touched the Earth. For a moment, he could feel it turning beneath him.

  “What in hell are you doing?” asked Ompati.

  “I’m not sure. Something wonderful. It’s making me have to go to the bathroom.”

  And this felt quite Buddha-like to him, and quite perfect, and maybe it was.

  —

  After that, a string of bad days.

  If you weren’t part of the Master’s inner circle, you might not even know. If you were one of his old disciples or one of his new friends, though, it meant more work.

  Balbeer dropped back through the ranks of marching pilgrims and took both Milo and Ompati by the arm. “Can you do something for the Master? He’s not at his best today.”

  “Anything,” said Ompati.

  “We’ll reach a village soon. Take his food bowl, and when you beg for food, fill his bowl, as well.”

  They bowed. “Happily,” they said.

  At the edge of the village, the disciples stood in a tight circle around the Buddha and smiled at the pilgrims as they passed with their food bowls.

  “All is well,” said those smiles.

  “We’re going to be late for the elephant races,” called the Master, from inside the circle.

  The villagers were generous. They were always generous. Especially when Milo raised the Master’s bowl and said, “One more, if you please, for the Buddha himself.”

  Afterward, he and Ompati sat among the disciples around the litter. The Master crawled out on his hands and knees to join them. They passed him his food bowl, and he ate without relish, as if eating were an afterthought. His eyes, Milo noticed, seemed far away but not empty or lost. He was working on something in that brain of his.

  After a while, the Master turned to Balbeer.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if you would do something for me?”

  “Of course,” said Balbeer.

  “When we have finished eating, will you go upstairs and tell my mother I wish to see her?”

  Milo’s heart sank and took his appetite with it.

  “Of course, Master,” said Balbeer, looking as if he might cry.

  —

  They rested all day at the village. Milo found a dignified old bo tree to sit under and meditated his ass off for three hours.

  Cats. Rain. Trees. Love. Dogs. His penis. Night.

  His mind was noisy. Nothing he could do about it. But the breathing part, that he could manage.

  In. Out. Be aware of the air and the world coming in, going out.

  There was something familiar about the exercise. Not because he’d been breathing all his life but because he had breathed this way before. Expertly. Consciously. He had a mental flash of his naked body floating in space….

  Perfection. In some other life. But he had lost it. He didn’t recall how.

  Groovy. And tragic. This time he wouldn’t lose it.

  He opened his eyes. There was a noise but not a jungle noise. Voices in distress, from the outskirts of the village. Milo jogged out of the woods, to find the Master’s disciples fluttering around like panicked storks.

  “What is it?” he called. “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s missing,” answered Ompati, appearing at his elbow.

  “Maybe Heaven has taken him!” one of his elderly disciples was saying, nearby. “Look, his robes are here. All his things are here. I tell you, he has been taken up.”

  “Let’s go,” said Milo, tugging Ompati’s sleeve, and they joined a number of pilgrims to spread out through the village, searching.

  It didn’t take long to find him, and, again, noise was their clue. Raised voices from down the road, from the village center. Milo and Ompati ran and discovered a small crowd gathering in the marketplace.

  Peace, thought Milo. He feels better and has come to the village to teach.

  The crowd parted. Milo excused his way through and found the Master standing at a market stall. He held a pomegranate in one hand, inspecting it closely.

  He was stark naked.

  The crowd, now that Milo glanced around, didn’t look awed or spiritual or even curious. They wore the faces of a schoolyard crowd, the faces of children who have found an injured bird to torture.

  “Perhaps it is wash day,” someone suggested.

  Laughter.

  “It’s awfully hot,” said someone else, and someone said, “He is in the market for a tattoo!” and then someone threw a stone at him. It bounced off his shoulder.

  Milo didn’t see who had thrown the stone, but Ompati did. He grabbed the young man’s arm and threw him to the ground.

  Several other young men stepped forward.

  Milo, who had raised his hands, lowered them.

  “Peace, friend Ompati,” he said. “This isn’t what we’ve learned. It isn’t what we teach.”

  He breathed in. He breathed out. The air and the crowd and the town were part of him.

  He turned to the Buddha and took him by the arm, saying, “Our friends are waiting, Father.” He didn’t call him “Master.” Maybe the crowd didn’t know. They didn’t need to know. This wasn’t a story the future needed.

  “I want this pomegranate,” griped the Master.

  “I don’t have any money,” Milo whispered in the Buddha’s ear. “Neither do you. I’ll bring you one later.”

  The Master subsided. “This one,” he said, putting the pomegranate back. “I want that one.”

  “Fine. But for now we have to go.”

  Ompati took the Master’s other elbow, and they steered through the crowd. The young men noticed the look in Milo’s eyes, which was a look of peaceful power he had gained, like an ocean wave, and they parted before him. Some even bowed and looked ashamed. They noticed the look in Ompati’s eyes, as if he wanted an excuse to kick someone in the balls, and they made way for that, too.

  —

  After they dropped the Master off with his old friends, Milo went back into the trees, alone. He found the bo tree again and sat down to think.

  You wouldn’t call it meditating. Meditating didn’t look like this, with the furrowed brow and the dark eyes. It was the look of a man who is trying to find courage.

  The Master needed help.

  The kind of he
lp he needed was so, so difficult. He needed an act of Perfection.

  Milo meditated on that for a while.

  Part of meditating was knowing when to put meditation aside and get up and go do something.

  So he got up. He left the trees, carrying his food bowl. He asked Balbeer for the Master’s food bowl and walked into the village.

  “Wait up,” called Ompati, running behind him.

  They begged enough food for themselves and the Master. Milo made a pitch for some coins, too, and their last stop was the marketplace, where they bought the Buddha his pomegranate.

  —

  Sitting around the litter an hour later, Milo noticed a brighter look in the Master’s eye.

  “How do you feel, Master?” he asked.

  The Master didn’t answer right away. He looked at Milo for a long time, without blinking. Then he looked at the sky.

  “I feel good, Milo,” he said. “Thank you. It is an excellent evening.”

  They all felt good. The evening was warm and filled with birdsong. Flying clouds laced the sky like shredded cotton, turning gold at the edges as the sun slipped away.

  “I won’t preach tonight,” said the Buddha. “Let’s have music instead.”

  So they had music. Villagers came with rudra veena and lyre.

  The sunset colors spun from gold into pink and purple and dark. The stars brightened and began to turn, and the Master ate his pomegranate. Half of it, anyway. The other half he handed off to Ompati.

  Green eyes surrounded them, glowing in the brush. They moved and came closer. Shadows like tiny people.

  “Monkeys,” whispered Ompati. As soon as he said this, an old grandmother baboon walked out of the dark and sat gazing at him in the firelight. She reached out with a thin dark paw and let her fingers rest on his knee.

  The stars turned. The rudra veena sang.

  “It’s okay, friend Ompati,” said the Master. “You’ve taken no vow of celibacy that I recall.”

  The disciples’ laughter drowned the music for a time.

  —

  In the morning, the Master felt unwell.

  “I think we will stay here another day,” Balbeer announced.

  At noon, the Master felt worse.

  “Say prayers,” asked Balbeer. To Milo, he said, “Take the Master’s bowl and see if you can bring back some kale, some aloe, and some didi juice. Something bad has got into him. We need to get it out.”