Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  Afterward, Mom took Milo by the elbow and called the twins with a whistle, and the four of them went to the shore together and stood—cautiously—knee-deep in the sea.

  And they talked about Dad. Just talked about him. And cried.

  And Mom didn’t say they shouldn’t talk about him anymore after that. Dad hadn’t been an islander. But, as far as Milo ever knew, they didn’t. He was part of another world, or a face from a fading dream.

  —

  There was another funeral, the next night.

  Sometime during the high tide, with hundreds of people around, three sisters had walked right into the ocean, holding hands, and let the monstrous undertow take them.

  “No one tried to stop them?” Milo asked Chili Pepper.

  Chili Pepper shook his head. “Some people choose not to live like this,” he said. “It’s like defiance, you know?”

  A light rain came down on the funeral that night, so the colors were dimmed somewhat.

  There were no bodies to bury, so Boone sprinkled some sand on the wind.

  “Betty,” he intoned. “Lunch Lady. The Priestess of Mu.”

  “What does it mean when you sprinkle the sand?” Milo asked Boone later.

  Boone didn’t know. “Just seems right,” he said.

  —

  They became islanders.

  One of the first things they learned was that the islanders called themselves the “Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame.” (Booty Dog had a twentieth-century pop-culture book called I Want My MTV. They got a lot of their names from this book.)

  Other islands named themselves after their own mood and style. Big, glad names were popular, like the Sexy Geniuses and the Hookah Panthers to the north. There were serious names, like Hope Island, the Isle of Life, and Gateway Atoll.

  “Things change,” Boone told Milo, “so names change. Last year we were the Twilight Zone.”

  They traded with other islands sometimes. Here on the Hall of Fame, they grew a kind of grass that was great for twisting into rope. On the Isle of Life, they grew apples that could feed four people for a week. So they traded grass for apples.

  “Last year,” Boone told Milo, “we traded a girl named Red Rita to a boat builder named Spock.”

  “Traded?” Milo’s eyes darkened.

  “Married,” Boone clarified. “Relax.”

  Hall of Famers helped them build houses—one for Mom and the twins, one for Milo and Suzie. Milo and Suzie’s hut was made from giant leaves, mostly, and some metal plates salvaged from a cartel trash drop.

  One whole wall of Mom’s hut was an aluminum strip with part of a faded advertisement on it, advising everyone to watch a TV farce called Time Lobster.

  Mom made a better islander than Milo would have guessed. She taught in a little bamboo schoolhouse they had and took a seat on the New-Things Committee, a think tank for brainstorming up better ways to live. If you’d had an engineering job or a real education, you got pressed into this group. A man named Raymond Carver, a former cartel lab chief, had been in charge of this board for as long as anyone could remember.

  There were other committees, with constantly shifting membership.

  The Food-Safety Committee, which identified and gathered fruits and vegetables that wouldn’t poison you if you ate them. (Suzie took this group by storm, showing them how to dry and preserve certain fruits, and their stores began to increase.)

  The School Board. The Fairness Committee.

  The Tsunami Committee, whose members learned to read the sea and kept watch on a high bluff with a giant warning drum. This committee had a subcommittee: the Rebuilding Committee.

  Milo and Suzie both became members of the Fish Committee. You had to be young and fairly healthy to be on that one, which they were.

  For the time being.

  Health wasn’t something you took for granted here.

  Milo noticed a lot of missing arms and eyes. There were people with weird swellings that came and went quickly, leaving misshapen bone. Almost no one on the island was unmarked. Some of the youngest bore strange puckerings and scars on their skin. Demon Rum had a hole in his foot that went straight through (he wore a ring of braided grass through it). A girl named Bug had what looked like extra veins in her throat, and her voice was rough, as if she breathed sand. Many, many people had a bad eye, or a wandering eye, or an eye with a blue caul over it. Several people were blind. There were never any babies. This wasn’t talked about.

  Milo and Suzie were also assigned to the Water-Pump Committee.

  Everyone worked on the giant pump. But the board members were responsible for knowing how the thing actually worked and for keeping it going. They would be the first to suffer if the cartel came for water and didn’t get what they wanted.

  “You’re spending the time and work needed for collecting food,” Milo observed, after a week, “on running this dinosaur for those fuckers.”

  “No shit,” said Jale.

  “We’d all be a lot healthier if we could send out two, three times as many fishing crews.”

  “No shit,” Jale repeated.

  “You’re stuck here eating fruit from the island, and most of it’s toxic.”

  “It’s poisoning you, too, Diver Man.” She pointed out a swelling near his elbow.

  His first cancer. Lovely.

  They burned it off with a piece of hot steel from the trash.

  —

  In the first weeks that they lived on the island, Milo and his family attended five funerals. They thought that was a lot. Then the storm came.

  It was the kids who noticed it first. Some of the younger fishermen.

  They had found a dead fish on the beach and were poking it with sticks when the very youngest, a three-year-old girl named Moo, straightened up, pointed her stick at the horizon, and said, “Storm.”

  The other kids turned instantly and froze. When someone said, “Storm,” it was a slightly less urgent form of the tsunami drum.

  They all pointed together, screaming “Storm!” over and over, a piercing alarm.

  Most of the islanders rushed to the beach.

  Suzie and Milo had seen storms on Ganymede, on screens and through windows. But they were fitful, staticky things. Some wind and dust; the milk cries of an infant atmosphere. They had seen video of Earth storms, and of course there was stormy Jupiter with its cyclonic eye. But the thing that came oozing over the horizon that afternoon wasn’t just windy and dark. It looked bad and unnatural and out of place.

  “It looks like a stomach,” said Milo.

  It came writhing across the sea, balloon-smooth, pink, and horrible, quivering like jelly. Here and there, parts of it puckered or spilled like guts. The pink gave way to patches of decomposing greens and blues.

  A stinking wind flattened the surf and took them by surprise. A wind like burning plastic and rotting feet. A score of islanders doubled over and retched on the sand.

  Then they ran for the jungle in one flying mass. The young hit the trees first, followed by the unencumbered grown-ups, followed by those who carried children or belongings, followed by the elderly and the sick.

  What exactly was going to happen? Milo wondered.

  They ran under a huge rocky overhang—a shelf like a giant hand trying to karate-chop its way out of the Earth—near the base of the volcano.

  It started out fairly roomy, but as the older, slower islanders kept arriving, they shuffled farther back, closing in tighter until they were packed like synthetic olives in a jar. Milo snugged up behind Suzie, wrapping his arms around her.

  Thunder rumbled, and the putrid wind found them. Milo breathed through his mouth.

  Then there were hands on his arms, but not Suzie’s hands. Smaller ones, seeking his fingers and holding on.

  The twins. Serene was on his left, smiling up at him. Carlo, on the other side, had captured Suzie’s hand. They both smiled, but their eyes were troubled and questioning.

  “What is it?” asked Serene.

  �
��A storm,” answered Milo. “A bad storm.”

  “We’ll be all right,” said Suzie, hoisting Carlo onto her hip.

  Milo glanced around. “Where’s Mom?” he asked.

  “I thought she was in here,” said Suzie. “Isn’t she here?”

  Milo turned a full circle.

  “Mom!” he called, but the wind had kicked up; other voices were calling out, too.

  “Just stay with us,” he told the twins. “We’ll find Mom after.”

  Quite suddenly, the air went green.

  Flash! Lightning.

  Crack! Immediate thunder.

  And then the world came apart.

  —

  Was this what a hurricane was like? Milo wondered. The wind was like a steam press, pushing them and whipping at them with loose leaves and branches. It shot water sideways at them through the strange green air.

  Milo didn’t like the feel of the water on his skin. Was it crawling on him, feeling for a way in? That’s what it felt like. Beside him, Serene fidgeted, wiping the mist from her face and flinging it from her fingers.

  “It’s slippery,” she complained.

  “I know,” said Milo.

  Serene slid between Milo and Suzie and took hold of Carlo’s ankle.

  “Bood buh ja,” she said to him, and Carlo answered, “Parka.”

  Milo and Suzie shared an amused look.

  “Parka,” said Milo.

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Suzie.

  —

  The rain raised blisters. Everywhere you looked in that crowd under the overhang, there were tiny bubbles on people.

  The storm lasted for hours, like something that had decided to hover over them and digest them. They passed the time whispering stories and conversations. They took turns napping and holding one another up. For a while they sang an ancient spiritual called “Margaritaville.”

  The green air turned pink.

  Milo noticed the trees outside, away from the overhang. Their trunks and leaves had developed veins (veins, or rivers of scarring where the rain had touched them?).

  Leaves fell. Coconuts fell. Whole trees crashed. He could hear them near and far away.

  Flash.

  Crack!

  The lightning began a barrage that went on and on, and the funny thing was, it lulled them. Milo and Suzie found their way to the ground and lay there with the twins between them and fell into strange dreams and wakeful fits.

  —

  When it was over, the older ones hesitated to step outside.

  The storm had rolled on. They could hear it growing distant, still rumbling. It left behind a dullness and a stillness and a stink like a bowel movement.

  “Let it dry first,” said Babs Babylon, a forty-year-old widow, the Hall of Fame’s finest toolmaker.

  “Screw it,” coughed Boone, who had stood the whole time. And he walked out into the wet, through a big puddle that shined ugly rainbow colors, the way gasoline does.

  And most of them followed.

  “Take the twins,” Milo told Suzie. “Will you?”

  She nodded. He didn’t have to tell her he was going to look for Mom.

  First he caught up with Boone, who had stopped among some ferns to puke and catch his breath.

  “Where else would people go?” Milo asked. “Did the Storm Committee find another—”

  Boone shook his head.

  “That’s the only one,” he said. “She mighta stayed in the huts, probably.”

  Then he gagged and said, “Let me be, Milo. Go on now.”

  —

  Milo had no plan.

  If Mom was at the beach, Suzie and the twins would find her there. But Milo had an old, sure, unexplainable feeling that they wouldn’t.

  When he first stumbled—literally stumbled—over a teenager named Miss Nude Mars, he thought she was a pig sleeping in the underbrush. How weird, he thought. Pigs weren’t among the animals they’d seeded on Europa. But this animal was pink and round and was snuffling in the dirt.

  “Jesus,” whimpered Milo, when he saw and understood.

  Miss Nude Mars had one enormous tumor swelling along her left side, from heel to skull. It throbbed. He could see it tugging at her, under the skin, with blue blood vessels like tentacles.

  She looked up at him with one rolling, horror-filled eye, her right eye. The left was collapsing and leaking yellow water.

  “Fulghussss,” she gurgled. She raised her right arm as if reaching for him.

  Milo ran.

  —

  Five minutes later, he found his mother.

  She looked okay, at first. Just a woman resting against a tree.

  “Mom?” he called. And he hurried, tripping over fallen branches and discolored leaves.

  Heard her say, “No! Milo, no—”

  She could speak. She would be okay; whatever had gotten to Miss Nude Mars hadn’t gotten Mom so bad. But what in hell had kept her? How come—and then he saw.

  She was pregnant. Except not really. Something low in her belly was growing big and round, burgeoning as he watched. Stretching her. As he stood there, with a low moan starting down deep in his chest, he saw a portion of her skin part like a zipper alongside her belly button, which now popped out, reversing itself.

  She raised a hand to shield her face, to not see him, to be invisible.

  Through grinding teeth, she uttered a kind of stifled howl. Something old and sure inside Milo made him back away, made him run again.

  —

  This time, he ran to the village.

  He barely spared a glance at the sodden, sagging huts that still stood, or the few misshapen islanders who lay on the sand, dead or dying. One, he saw, had burst like a fallen, overripe fruit. He grabbed a handmade machete from among the village tools and stole away uphill again, into the jungle.

  —

  Milo had to go very far away, inside himself, to do what he did.

  By the time he got to her, she was gagging rather than breathing. Her scream was strangled by rising tumors along her throat, but she looked at him when he arrived, panting and crying.

  As quickly as possible, with all his strength, he beheaded his mother with the machete. He was insanely practical about this, stepping nimbly away so that the hundred bad fluids that sprayed from her didn’t catch him.

  Why? What had happened? Had his mother not gotten moving in time? Hadn’t known to head for shelter? Hadn’t known where the shelter was?

  He would never know. He would try not to think about it. Already his mind was putting ice on the whole afternoon, packing it away someplace numb.

  He backtracked and found Miss Nude Mars again, but she had split down the back and rolled wide open, and toadstools were growing from the torn flesh. The toadstools had tiny little finger things around their caps. They waved at him.

  —

  For a week, maybe more, the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame sat around and didn’t say much. Sat looking out at the sea and the sky. One man—a relatively young man, a former free-enterprise flier named Dracula—walked off into the surf and was dragged away. Forty people were there when he did it. They let him do it.

  Milo went to Suzie and the twins, meaning to have them scrape the rain blisters off and clean themselves with ocean water (Was that clean? Was anything clean?), but Suzie was way ahead of him. Everyone was doing it.

  Over and over, they went to the sea, up to their ankles, and scrubbed at themselves with sand and seawater. A few of them scrubbed themselves until they bled, and others watched them do this and let them do it. Until Jale came hobbling up to Cracklin’ Rosie, who kept scrubbing and bleeding and had torn three fingernails loose, and said, “No, Rose. Stop it. Stop,” and held on to her until she stopped, and kept holding on to her. And that seemed to shake a lot of them out of it. That seemed to be the thing that got the Rebuilding Committee moving and doing, and got Uncle Sam to hike uphill to check on the tsunami drum, and got them all gathering and speaking and touching one another, even if they fl
inched at first.

  —

  “I buried her” was all Milo told Suzie and the twins, who cried and got sad and mad, the way people do.

  It wasn’t quite true. Burial hadn’t been necessary. The storm dead took care of themselves, was how Milo thought of it.

  Serene and Carlo came to live with Milo and Suzie, who hardly ever saw them. The twins came and went as they would, like a windstorm, nontoxic and indecipherable.

  There were funerals, when a week had gone by and they had a good idea who was gone.

  William Hofstettler, Marny deJeun, Pat the Bunny, and Junebug. Cordero, Napoleon, Wait for Me Zane, Callisto the Stripper, and Wavy Gravy. Wavy Gravy, some argued, wasn’t really dead; he had vanished into a tumor cocoon, and when he came out, he was someone else. They voted to go ahead and have a funeral for him, and he attended as Wavy Gravy 2.

  Dr. Hook, Velma Peters, Jalapeño, Kellogg, Double Dip, Jodi Petunia, Boone, Ivan Rue, the Last of the Mohicans, Milk Money, and Joelle Texas Radio.

  “Joelle Texas Radio” was Mom. Milo had almost forgotten.

  —

  Time passed.

  A month later—two?—the entire population lay out on the beach, watching Io and a score of tiny inner moons transit Jupiter.

  Something sparkled between the moons on the giant planet’s upper limb. Like fireflies or glowing embers.

  “That’s pretty,” said Milo.

  “Yes and no,” said Chili Pepper, several yards away. “It’s cartel ships on the way.”

  —

  In the morning, sure enough, a whole cartel fleet came burning down through the atmosphere.

  One of the smaller sleds roared overhead, thrusters blowing, and settled on the beach. The Hall of Famers dropped what they were doing and formed a double line just uphill, like a bunch of naked soldiers.

  Milo was on his way up to the pump, almost to the woods. Raymond Carver, who seemed to have replaced Boone, shouted at him.

  “Milo! Get down here and get in line!”

  Milo opened his mouth to say something rude.

  “Just do it!” bellowed Carver, jogging toward the Hall of Famers himself. “ ’Splain later!”

  Milo lined up. So did everyone who wasn’t already on duty up at the pump.

  Milo took a spot next to Carver as the sled opened and three Monitors marched out.