Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  They made love so slowly—how else can mist make love?—that they fell half-asleep, the way you do lying in warm grass. She was like a shadow, or warm water, moving against him. Somehow, making love was still making love, whether both were completely there or not. Making love was powerful shit.

  One morning, Milo was sitting in the stern, washing socks in a bucket and watching game shows on a tiny battery-operated TV, when he saw a phalanx of universals walking down the pier. Walking toward them with a purposeful stride, bearing quarterstaves.

  “We should go,” Milo called down into the galley, where Suzie was taking her turn at cooking.

  He didn’t have to say anything more.

  She gave an exhausted sigh but did what needed doing.

  Whir! Rustle! Whoosh! They left.

  —

  They lived up on a mountainside for a while.

  Not a long while. Milo had a feeling that their time and their luck were both running short.

  The souls who lived on the mountain harvested tea every day, and Milo and Suzie joined them. The tea grew in narrow hedgerows on steep terraces cascading down the mountain. Sometimes mist rolled in from the sea and left them isolated on the mountain, above the clouds, like a cartoon vision of Heaven.

  They herded goats, which ate weeds but left the tea alone and nourished the tea shrubs with their poo. They lived in a round wooden house with three hundred other people. The house was like a whirlpool made of walls and windows and laundry hanging down. They all ate together and launched paper lanterns together at night and heard everybody through the walls and open windows when they talked or sang or loved. The house was six thousand years old, and everyone who had ever lived there had scratched his or her name on a wall, on a stair, on the roof, somewhere. The house was like a library of names. Milo and Suzie wrote their names on the little wooden platform around the well. Milo wrote “Milo.” Suzie wrote her true name, which all universals and natural forces have; it was a puzzle of seven interlocking infinity symbols made of streams of numbers representing letters. If you touched it, it burned and moved under your hand. Underneath, she wrote “aka: Suzie.”

  One day, a universal slice in a poor burlap robe walked up the mountain—at first Milo thought it might be Mama, and he tensed.

  It wasn’t.

  The universal helped them pick tea without saying a word to anyone.

  Milo and Suzie disguised themselves in sunglasses, just to be safe.

  The universal launched paper lanterns with them and ate supper with them. He introduced himself as Mohenjodaro Bo-Ti Harrahj Nandaro, the Fifth Way of the Fifth Light of the Fifth Sign of the First Night, He Who Is Both Near and Far, an Incarnation of Work.

  He wrote his name on their big wooden salad bowl. It took him fifteen minutes.

  —

  Mohenjodaro never said a suspicious word. He did all the dishes, spent the night in the tool barn, and was gone before breakfast.

  “What’s on your mind?” Milo asked Suzie after breakfast. They had chosen to stay home in bed that morning, because Suzie was feeling especially transparent and worried.

  “I don’t like running scared,” she answered. “I’m sick of running, and of running out like a slow hourglass. I want to feel at home. I want my candle shop back. I want us to…to—”

  “Live our lives,” said Milo, standing at the window, looking out on the green mountain rising from the sea of mist.

  “Yes,” said Suzie, her voice quivering. “But they’re not going to let us do that. The boa isn’t going to let us. It’ll catch up, sooner or later, like a wave spreading out.”

  Silence.

  This is what giving up feels like, Milo thought.

  Far below, the mist thinned and parted for a moment, affording a glimpse of the shore below and the river winding away.

  Milo’s breath caught. His eyes took on a soft and peculiar blaze.

  “I know what to do,” he whispered.

  She gave him a doubtful look but said, “Let’s hear it.”

  “Follow me,” he said, and they left the whirlpool house, holding hands.

  Down through the tea shrubs in the fog, to the river’s edge.

  Suzie understood.

  “You’re going back to live your last life,” said Suzie. Her eyes saddened, but Milo saw her steel herself and straighten. “That’s as it should be,” she said. “Go, while you can, and—”

  “You’re coming with me,” he said.

  Her head tilted. Curious and confused.

  “We’ll get it right, together,” said Milo.

  “No,” said Suzie. “You mean, like, I would live a life…I’d be human?”

  “One life. Get it right or get it wrong, and we’ll either win or lose together. Everything, or…nothing. The sidewalk.”

  “Baby, I can’t do that,” she said gently.

  “Suzie,” said Milo. “Sweetheart? Lover of eight thousand years? I love you so much, but don’t be a stubborn ass. What have you got to lose? Either of us?”

  Suzie’s eyes flared, wild and desperate.

  “I’m the wisest human soul in the universe,” he reminded her. “Give me the benefit of the doubt, this once.”

  She said nothing, but they began walking again, crossing the narrow, rocky beach.

  There, in the gray water before them, were thousands of possible lives.

  Suzie lifted her hand. “Look,” she said. “That one.”

  Milo looked.

  “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said at first. But the more he looked, the more her choice made sense.

  “Peace,” he said. The Master would approve.

  “Peace,” Suzie repeated.

  She waded out into the water.

  “I wonder what it’s going to be like,” she wondered aloud.

  “Like being a god,” said Milo, “except without any of the god stuff.”

  “You sound like you hate it.”

  “I hate being born. It’s gross.”

  Waist deep in the waves, she hopped up and kissed him on the lips.

  “All or nothing!” she said, and turned and dove.

  Milo was right behind her, sliding into life one last time.

  Milo’s lives flashed before his eyes. That happens sometimes when you die and also when you’re about to be born.

  Not all of his lives flashed. Just certain ones. Lives that went with what he’d learned from the Buddha. Lives where he’d done something Peaceful with a capital “P.”

  —

  Once, he had been a tree for five hundred years and thought of the world outside himself as something big that changed and moved and had fire in it. When the wind blew, he bent. When fall came, he shed his leaves. When they came and chopped him down and made a house out of him, he was a damn fine house. He had grown so old and thought and felt so slowly that he was able to understand these things and to know that they all had their place.

  His every moment and every thought were Stillness and Peace.

  —

  On Gorm 7, an experimental planet where they were trying out different ways of living, Milo lived in a neighborhood where the comptrollers doubled the rent one year.

  The people in the neighborhood did not storm the comptrollers’ offices. Instead, they took off all their clothes and went to live in the woods.

  “Back to nature,” they all said.

  “Hey!” cried the comptrollers. “You can’t do that! That’s not a choice! You need our houses!”

  The naked people didn’t answer. They disappeared among the trees.

  Milo happened to be walking behind his (former) neighbor Julie DeNofrio. She had an impossibly elaborate—and strangely hypnotic!—tattoo on her back.

  He never would have seen that if not for this peaceful—and highly effective!—consumer protest. You never know what little surprises will come along when you choose to evolve.

  There had been peaceful changes up in the afterlife, too. Not long after he and Suzie became lovers, she
had decided to open a greenhouse.

  “You’re going to grow and sell plants?” Milo asked. “I heard you right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. They were eating burritos. She stopped eating hers. “Why?”

  She could read his mind, so he tried not to think about how Death didn’t seem like someone who would have a green thumb.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll help you if you want.”

  She started eating her burrito again.

  The greenhouse was a success. As it turned out, death was a huge part of growing plants. Things died and went in the soil. Leaves died and fell off, or you trimmed them. Plants died and made way for new plants.

  She was especially good at carnivorous plants. She grew a Venus flytrap one time that ate one of Nan’s cats.

  “Maybe she won’t notice,” said Milo.

  And she didn’t.

  Way in the future, the people on different planets didn’t bother one another much, except to trade. But in 3025, the people of Kurgan 4 attacked the people of Pondwater 3.

  “You’re going to work for us now!” roared the Kurgans.

  But the people of Pondwater 3 (Milo was one of these) said, “No.”

  The Kurgans shot some of them. But the Pondwater people still said, “No.”

  The Kurgans tried to beat them and twist their arms and get them to work and help out and go where they wanted them to go, but the Pondwater people either just stood there and ignored them or said, “No,” or went limp and lay down on the ground.

  Sometimes they quoted the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah, a famous teaching about how you can’t force someone to do something if they’re not afraid of you.

  Eventually, embarrassed and puzzled, the Kurgans said, “Aw, fuck you guys, anyway,” and knocked over some potted plants, got back on their ships, and went home.

  Milo was one of the unfortunate few who got shot. As Milo lay dying, a man in a ball cap came and looked down at him and said, “It’s not really an end, you know. You’re like a wave that rises up and then returns to the river. The wave will rise again.”

  “I know,” said Milo. “But the wave would still like, maybe, a little slice of pizza before it goes.”

  So the man in the ball cap went and got him a slice of pizza.

  That was a nice thing to do.

  The small things, Milo thought as he died, were really the big things.

  —

  Suzie, too, had given Peace a nudge now and then.

  Of course, because she was Death, Suzie’s nudges could be confusing and might not look like Peace at first.

  She had gone to the horseraces once. To the Epsom Derby, in 1913.

  It was nice. It was festive. Lots of dandy British people in fancy hats. The women’s hats were enormous. Suzie couldn’t get enough of the women’s hats. She wanted one.

  That was one of the things she hated about her job. You got to go to these wonderful places sometimes and have a great time for a while…until it was time to be Death and throw a wet blanket over everyone’s day.

  She was there because of a woman named Emily Davison.

  Emily Davison was a suffragette. She had been jailed a bunch of times for fighting for women to have equal rights—voting, mostly, but other things, too. A couple of times she had gone on hunger strikes, and prison matrons had to force-feed her liquids through her nose.

  Suzie was standing by the rail, watching the horses line up for the next race, when Emily Davison stepped up beside her and said, “Well, hello.”

  “Oh,” said Suzie, surprised. “Hello.”

  Emily was a wise old soul, and discerning. Some people could recognize Death whether she had decided to make herself visible or not, and the suffragette was one of these.

  The bell rang, and the horses took off down the track, out of sight.

  Suzie admired Emily’s hat.

  She almost wanted to ask if she’d mind taking it off, before, so it wouldn’t be ruined, but didn’t. She wasn’t tactless.

  “You’re not going to try and talk me out of it,” said Emily, “are you?”

  Suzie shook her head. “I think it’s a brave thing,” she said. “And necessary, unfortunately. Good things will happen for a lot of people after this.”

  Emily nodded. She stood very, very still, watching the track with wide eyes.

  Hooves thundered as the horses began coming ’round.

  “I’m frightened,” Emily said.

  Suzie laid a gloved hand on her arm and opened her mouth to say something reassuring. But what exactly?

  “It’s all right,” said Emily, managing a weak, breathless smile. “You can have my hat, after, if you like.”

  With that, she ducked under the rail and onto the track and flung herself in front of Anmer, a racehorse belonging to King George.

  The crowd convulsed and gave a single, sickening gasp. Followed by screams.

  Suzie stepped out onto the track, amid running race officials and confused horses and men with box cameras and a doctor. She found the hat, and Emily herself, quite ruined.

  The country had been ignoring the suffragettes up to that point. After fifty thousand people attended Emily’s funeral and clogged up the London streets, they couldn’t ignore the suffragettes anymore.

  “How brave,” Suzie kept saying to herself, watching the funeral go by.

  Emily Davison came back as a suffragette in her next life, too, and then as an electric eel, and then a suffragette again.

  As long as some people were that determined, Suzie often thought, how bad could things really get?

  “How bad could things really get?” she said aloud once, but she felt an awful dread in her belly when she said it.

  “Pretty friggin’ bad,” she imagined the universe saying, shaking its fat, pretentious head.

  JOVIAN MOON GANYMEDE, A.D. 2150

  Milo was born inside a machine.

  He lived there with his family and ten thousand other people.

  The machine’s job was to crawl all over Ganymede, Jupiter’s biggest moon, and make it like planet Earth used to be. It pumped things into the atmosphere and did things to the soil, and the people inside drove its engines and cooked its chemicals and lived sweaty, grunting lives.

  Officially, Milo’s name was JN010100101101110. As far as the resource cartels were concerned, this was all the identity he needed. Only his family called him “Milo.”

  His boyhood friends called him “Mildew,” because that’s how boyhood friends are.

  —

  His friends were Frog and Bubbles. Their ball fields were the corridors between turbines in the engine rooms. Their hiding places were tangles of hoses and storage pods. The haunted places they dared one another to go were too many to count: Where someone had been drowned in the algae pumps or died fixing the mighty lobster claws. Places where people had been crushed, steamed, frozen, or recycled.

  There were occasional wonders, like the crawler’s scattered windows—portholes where you could look out over Ganymede’s craters and see Jupiter filling the sky like a magical whale. Sometimes they glimpsed cartel drones hopping across the sky…watching, listening.

  They were on the residential deck one day, poking at some kind of engine jizz oozing down the wall, when screams exploded from a nearby family pod.

  “God, no! You can’t do this! We’ll pay you! It was an accident!”

  “We will find a qualified family, off-planet,” answered a hard, amplified voice. “Now let go!”

  Two Monitors emerged, bulging with police gear. One of them cradled a baby.

  “Our neighbors had an extra last year,” whispered Frog, his voice low. “They tried to hide it, but how do you hide a baby?”

  “If they’re taking it off-planet,” Milo wondered aloud, “how come they’re headed for the kitchens?”

  —

  Years passed. Milo began working with his dad in the crawler’s great central ventilator.

  The day everything changed, Dad found him stand
ing way on top of the lung, riding it up as it breathed.

  “Goddammit, Milo!” bellowed Dad, “you’re going to get us fired.”

  Milo didn’t argue, because getting fired was always a possibility. And if you didn’t have a job, you couldn’t live in cartel housing. And because the crawler couldn’t support homeless people, you’d be sent downplanet. No one ever came back from downplanet.

  “How’s Mom?” Milo asked, sliding down. Mom had been ill lately.

  Dad ducked down a steam tube, grabbing a wrench from his belt.

  “Keep working,” he said. “They’re watching.”

  Milo followed.

  “That’s why I came looking for you,” said Dad. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. Your buddy Frog.”

  Frog brewed and sold affordable black-market meds these days.

  “You oughta think twice about that,” Milo warned. “Speaking of getting fired. Or shot.”

  Dad stopped. He whistled, and his fish dove into his hand, displaying schematics. Dad read the schematics and surveyed the gas lines overhead.

  “Our cartel insurance can’t cover any more of the cartel medicine,” he said.

  “So she’s worse.”

  “Well, you’d know that if you came home nights, instead of blowing your pay at that…place.”

  Shit! Milo thought. Dad knows about that?

  “That” was Dreamscapes, a discount brothel on the rec level. Women could earn additional income as licensed prostitutes while they got a refreshing, narc-induced night’s sleep.

  “I’m going to go fix something,” said Milo, heading back the way they’d come.

  “You do that,” said Dad.

  —

  Home was a circular pod, with sleeping cells in the walls. Mom stayed in her sleeping cell during the dinner hour that night. Milo heard her coughing.

  Dad wasn’t feeling too social, so Milo talked to the twins.

  The twins, Milo’s four-year-old brother and sister, had come along on his twelfth birthday. Good thing their family had a top-drawer skill assignment and was permitted three kids. Carlo and Serene were their own universe of two, sometimes communicating in a language of their own invention. Laughing at things no one else heard or understood.

  “Zee too,” said Serene.