Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “The Oversoul,” said Milo.

  “Yep,” said Nan. “Every life has something to teach you. Chances for you to learn and grow and eventually become perfect. It may take thousands of lives.”

  “It’s our job,” said Mama, “to help you decide what kind of life to attempt next.”

  “I need to give that some thought,” said Milo. “Obviously.”

  They reached the park, where Milo turned and looked back the way they had come and noticed that the street now led downhill, back to his house.

  “It was downhill coming here,” he remarked. “How…?”

  “Flickers and changes,” said Mama. “Changing forms. Reality is elusive. Down on Earth, it’s even more elusive.”

  “Which would seem,” said Milo, “to make it even more difficult to decide what kind of life would lead toward truth and growth.”

  “Smart kid,” said Nan. “Let me tell you, it’s not always the obvious choice.”

  “How long do I have to choose? How long before I have to go back?”

  Mama and Milo sat down in the grass, while Nan lit a cigarette (interesting, thought Milo, observing) and stood watching a new house materialize across the street.

  “You go back when you feel like it,” said Mama.

  “And what if I—”

  Mama shushed him.

  “Lay back and watch the clouds,” she said. “Let your mind be quiet. Just be.”

  Milo tried to just be, but his mind kept filling up with thoughts of Suzie. Was that okay? He fell asleep thinking about that, feeling uneasy.

  —

  It was decided, after a week, that Milo would be reborn as a radio personality named Milo “Pork Chop” Zilinski, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  And he went and lived that life and died when he was forty-nine. When he woke up in the afterlife on a rusty old railroad bridge, he found his head cradled in Suzie’s lap. She stroked his hair but didn’t kiss him or anything. It wasn’t like that between them yet and wouldn’t be for a long time. They had a minute or two to themselves, to enjoy being grown-ups together, before Ma and the cat lady showed up.

  “What was your favorite thing?” Suzie asked. “What will you miss the most?”

  “From life?” Milo gave his answer some thought. Life as Pork Chop Zilinski had been kind of sleazy. He doubted they were going to give him a nice house this time.

  “Christmas,” he said. “That was my favorite.”

  Liar. His favorite thing had been a girl named Peanut, backstage at Ozzfest.

  She let him get away with it. That’s how people make friends.

  Milo drifted up through oceans of memory and opened his eyes.

  The afterlife, after the shark got him. In bed with Suzie.

  He slid the armband over his wrist. A perfect fit.

  Suzie lay against his side like a jigsaw piece. They fit together the way people do when they’ve held each other a hundred thousand times.

  She gave his arm a squeeze and said, “Look sharp. You’ve got company.”

  A knock at the apartment door. A loud, fat knock. A Mama knock.

  Shit. That’s right. They wanted to talk to him about something.

  “Do you know what they want?” he asked Suzie.

  Suzie bit her lip.

  “No,” she lied.

  He let her get away with it.

  “Just go,” she said.

  He left the bed with a sour feeling in his stomach.

  “Milo?” she called after him.

  “Mmm?”

  “Pants, baby.”

  —

  He followed Ma and Nan and forty-some cats out of his dingy little neighborhood, walking quietly once again. Meditating as they went, supposedly. Milo kept thinking about the weather and his third-grade teacher and a troublesome refrigerator he’d once owned.

  He also thought about the two women he found himself with. He had known them for thousands of years by now, but did he know them any better? Was he supposed to love them? He did, a little, he supposed. But they scared him, too.

  They passed into a comfortable, cozy little neighborhood. There were hummingbird feeders and fences. You could hear somebody playing music, just barely.

  Then, quite suddenly, everything fell away.

  The sidewalk simply extended like a pirate-ship plank out into empty space.

  It was like a magic trick. There was the sidewalk, and the end of the sidewalk, dripping clods of dirt and little scraggly roots…and then nothing. A touch of vertigo played cement mixer with Milo’s senses.

  A soft breeze blew. It should have smelled like spring or like a neighborhood, but it smelled like nothing.

  “What is this place?” Milo asked.

  “It’s Nowhere,” said Nan.

  Milo waited. There had to be more.

  “When you go back this next time,” said Nan, “it will be your nine thousand nine hundred ninety-sixth life.”

  One of the cats twined between Milo’s ankles, as if trying to nudge him off-balance. His stomach lurched.

  “So much suffering,” said Ma, “being alive. Being born, living, dying, being reborn. I’d think you would want to break out of the cycle, Milo.”

  They’d had this talk before.

  “I like the cycle,” he said. “I like living lives.”

  “That’s fine,” said Ma, “but you’re not supposed to keep going back forever. You’re supp—”

  “I know what I’m supposed to do.”

  “You,” snapped Nan, “are like the kid who’s been held back in fifth grade for the eighth time. Achieve Perfection already!”

  “I think this ‘Perfection’ thing might be overrated,” Milo mumbled.

  Mama stepped up beside him. Bowing her head for a long moment, she said, “Think of yourself as a rocket ship.”

  “Not the rocket metaphor,” sighed Milo.

  “Every life you live should take you higher, learning more, becoming wiser, growing in every way. Eventually you reach orbit, living higher and higher lives, circling the planet, until one day, at last, with one final push, you reach escape velocity and fly away into the stars. Remember the fire? That flying away is your destiny, Milo. It’s every soul’s destiny. Weightless and free.”

  “Right, right,” said Milo. “Escape velocity. Perfection. Do you know how not-easy that is?”

  “Yes,” said Nan. “That’s why you get thousands of lives to do it.”

  “I’ve heard this a million times,” Milo fumed.

  “Then maybe you need to hear it a million and one!” bellowed Mama, patience gone, swelling like a mighty, psychotic cow. “If you’d try and understand it, maybe we wouldn’t still be here, having the same stupid argument we’ve had over and over, and maybe you wouldn’t be on the verge—”

  She stopped.

  “On the verge of what?” asked Milo.

  “Tell ’im,” rasped Nan. “Hurry up. I’m missing my shows.”

  “The thing is,” said Mama, drawing up closer, facing him, “you don’t get to keep trying forever.”

  Here it comes, thought Milo.

  “A soul gets ten thousand lives,” said Nan. “Ten thousand tries. After that, it becomes Nothingness.”

  Milo froze.

  Huh?

  “That leaves you,” said Mama, “with five more lives to get it right. If you do, you will go through the Sun Door in a flash of golden light and become part of the Great Reality.”

  “The Oversoul,” added Nan. “Everything.”

  “The universal boa,” barked Milo. “I get it.”

  “I hope so,” said Nan. “Because if you don’t, we’ll bring you here and push you off the end of the sidewalk, and you’ll vanish forever from time and space. Your soul will be canceled like a dumb TV show.”

  Milo almost threw up. He dropped to his knees to keep from reeling into space.

  “I have grown!” he yelled. “Every time I’ve lived a life! When I’m down there, I’m the wisest guy on the planet. I could be
president, except I know power is a crutch! I could be rich, but I know money is a siren song. I live by the governing dynamics behind all the traps and illusions—”

  “Wisdom,” said Nan, “is not the same as Perfection.”

  Frustration.

  “Do they give extensions?” Milo asked. “Maybe I can convince them to let—”

  “Them?” said Mama. “There’s no ‘them.’ The universe doesn’t have a judge or a landlord. It’s like a river. It flows and changes and does what it has to do to stay in balance.”

  “Two plus two equals four,” said Nan. “It’s not personal. And it doesn’t matter how you feel about it.”

  Over thousands of years, Milo had gotten used to the glow that Mama and Nan—and Suzie, and all universals—wore. The skin of superreality that enfolded them. Now he noticed it anew and, for the first time, found it frightening rather than motherly or protective.

  “Enough,” said Ma, sounding tired. “Listen. We have sort of a plan, if you’re interested. What you should do, for your next life, to set yourself up.”

  “Okay,” said Milo.

  “Your next life should be all about self-denial,” said Nan. “Like the great hermits, back in the old days.”

  “You live in a cave and starve yourself,” added Mama, “and speak to no one, and ignore everything but all that wisdom packed up in your soul. No distractions. No family, no great food or great journeys or girlfriends or achievements. You sit, and you understand.”

  Milo considered this.

  There were, he knew, many ways a soul could reach Perfection. After eight thousand years, he had tried them all. You could love, you could become some kind of savior, you could achieve a great peace or teach something new and powerful. But one of the most successful, if your soul was old and wise enough, was the hermit thing. You tortured your inner self with isolation until—pow!—one day it turned into some kind of sun or soul diamond, and—poof!—off into Perfection you dissolved. Trouble was, it was enormously unpleasant and hardly anyone could pull it off. Sooner or later, most souls crawled to the nearest village and started wolfing down baloney and pinching college girls, and that was the end of that.

  “No,” said one of Nan’s cats. A black cat with a fluffy tail, staring up at them with huge, familiar eyes.

  “Eavesdropper!” hissed Nan.

  The cat stretched and changed and became Suzie, who stood on the sidewalk with her arms crossed.

  “You’re setting him up for failure,” she said. “People are Milo’s talent and skill. It’s how his soul is shaped. Two plus two.”

  Mama reached out and pulled Suzie away from the edge. “You’re giving me fits, honey,” she whispered. “That’s better.”

  “Well,” rasped Nan, “he had better do something extraordinary. The usual horse poop isn’t going to get it.”

  Milo rose to his feet. They all spent a minute examining the sidewalk.

  The temperature dropped again. The sky advanced into twilight.

  “It doesn’t make it any easier,” said Nan, “the two of you boinking around behind our backs like a couple of teenage jackrabbits.”

  Suzie’s head whipped around.

  “That was tactful,” remarked Mama.

  “I’m sorry,” said Nan. “You didn’t imagine it was a secret, after eight thousand years? Well, how cute.”

  “Jackrabbits?” repeated Suzie.

  “Sorry for the reality, sweetheart, but it’s just one more way our boy here is out of balance. People-souls don’t do the Hokey Pokey with universal-souls. He’s a person. She’s Death, for crying out loud. You think that’s been a big fat help, all this time?”

  “Um,” said Milo, “I rather thought it might be an advantage. I thought it meant I was really, really advanced.”

  “It should be an advantage!” spat Suzie. “You are advanced!”

  “Balance!” growled Mama, eyes closed, trying not to lose her temper. “Listen: This isn’t the first time that someone like her has been in love with someone like him. Ages ago, Spring—the season of spring, you understand—fell in love with a woman. At first, this was wonderful. The woman reveled in this giant spirit that loved her, this Perfection of warmth and rebirth and new growth, plus I suppose he made himself just awfully handsome, bursting out all over with health and goodness and freshness. And he got to be alive and living in an everyday way he’d never known. He learned to pick out new carpet, and sleep, and eat breakfast, and make love. She called him ‘George.’ And when he held her, he showered her with young leaves and dandelions and dogwood petals. Sometimes, when they held each other, he was a man. Other times, maybe he was rain or a fabulous tree. And, naturally, she became pregnant.

  “At first, that was fine news. The woman’s belly became great and firm, like the ripe Earth itself. Then it became too great and firm, until it seemed she must burst. And then she did burst. She exploded with meadows and cowslips and warm breezes. Miraculous, except, of course, she was dead.”

  Twilight deepened around the sidewalk and the neighborhood.

  “It’s worked okay so far,” said Suzie. “The two of us.”

  “And I’m glad for you,” said Mama, “both of you.” She patted Suzie’s cheeks as if making a pie. “But I think it’s part of what’s keeping our Milo here from moving on. It may even move him straight into Nothingness. And I think I’m done talking about it for now.”

  “Me, too,” said Nan.

  “Fine,” said Suzie.

  “Fine,” said Mama.

  Mama and Nan vanished in a golden flash.

  “Fine,” repeated Suzie, disappearing in a dash of wind and leaves.

  Milo blinked his eyes. Clicked his heels. Tried to beam himself back to his crappy apartment.

  No dice.

  He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and walked, and pouted, and walked.

  Death doesn’t pout.

  It doesn’t chew its nails or get frustrated and throw fits.

  Suzie reminded herself of these things, storming away from the sidewalk, glaring and grinding her teeth, hurling her cosmic self through space and time.

  “Assholes,” she muttered.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been party to an argument over the Way Things Are Meant to Be.

  —

  She hadn’t been Death very long, the first time they butted heads.

  It was yesterday, or it was a thousand years ago. There wasn’t really a difference. Time was a swamp inside a giant washing machine.

  She came upon a blue whale lying on a beach, moaning softly to herself. The whale was a sister and a mother and a grandmother. A great-grandmother, actually. Whole worlds of life had passed through her, and now here she was, the victim of a trick in the tide, washed up on land, being crushed by her own weight.

  Suzie let the whale see her. Tried to look friendly (“friendly,” she had learned, was important to humans and other mammals). She made herself look like a whale, somewhat, and stood looking into one vast dying eye.

  Hi, said the whale (whales are telepathic).

  Hi, said Suzie. And she left it at that. Being Death was kind of like being a therapist; it worked better if you let them do the talking, if there was going to be talking.

  She told Suzie her name, which was AiiOOOOOnuuUU. The spirit inside the old grandmother was exactly what you’d expect of such a creature: huge and dreamy, crackling with plans and memories. She did not want to die yet, and certainly not like this.

  Being trapped on land, for a whale, was the marine equivalent of accidentally locking yourself outside with no clothes on.

  AiiOOOOOnuuUU lay there missing the sea. The picture in her head (and Suzie’s head) was like an endless blue heart. Living in the ocean was half-dreamlike, an act of worship without the complication of gods.

  Suzie let AiiOOOOOnuuUU’s mind fill her senses. She leaned forward and rested against the whale, against a hundred seasons of memories and voyages and names she had known.

  Suzie let
the whale feel her own memories. Let her feel what it was like to fly, what it was like to be timeless.

  Death took a million forms. Suzie shared some of her favorites.

  Fire. Chocolate. Silence. Sleep.

  Bicycles. Being melancholy.

  One time, she had brought a dying girl a present—an Eiffel Tower snow globe. The girl had wanted to see Paris but never got to go. The girl held the snow globe and was transfixed and happy when Suzie touched her head and snuffed her out, and that was one of the few times Suzie was mortal enough to cry on the job. She gave this memory to the whale, who was puzzled by it, but grateful.

  The whole idea of this communion was to get AiiOOOOOnuuUU to relax and become sort of peaceful and accepting and hypnotized before Suzie brought things to an end.

  But it backfired.

  The whale made a mournful, rattling sound and tried to heave herself backward, fighting to get to the water.

  But Suzie already had her whale hands on AiiOOOOOnuuUU’s head. The great eye went dim and went dark and went out, and just at that moment Suzie changed her mind.

  “No!” she bugled, in whale language. Her voice emerged fierce and wet.

  And before she knew she was going to do it, she pulled AiiOOOOOnuuUU back from Between and breathed her into the dead, mountainous body.

  The great lungs filled! The great eye moved in its orbit!

  Frantic, Suzie looked around for a way to get AiiOOOOOnuuUU into the sea. Impossible! Aw, shit—the tide had gone out, leaving nothing but sand and rocks and clams for a hundred yards.

  I’ll talk to the ocean himself, she thought (she knew this ocean: a tall, deep-looking fellow with pearls for eyes and a taste for Greek wedding music). She called his name, which took ten minutes and made it rain but failed to get his attention. In the meantime, she became aware of voices on the wind, calling to her through the rain, and turned to discover several dark forms standing in the sawgrass, just uphill.

  Death had more than one shape and name, after all.

  “You can’t do that,” they said (Death is telepathic, too, but likes the sound of its own voice).

  Suzie, defiant, said, “I just did! I’m not taking her yet.” The whale was a great spirit. Couldn’t they see?