“Why’d she even bother to go in the bathroom?” asked Aldrin, and the two husbands laughed together for the first time.
By nine P.M., they knew Kim’s seat was assured.
They all had a glass of wine in the kitchen. Even Libby.
By midnight, the passenger lists were complete. Milo was not on any of them.
No one knew what to say, so they said nothing.
—
In the middle of the night, Milo left.
It was something he had decided, weeks ago, to do if the lottery turned out as it had.
He bought a sleeping bag, pup tent, and a mess kit from the commissary automat, left the dormitory, and made himself a little camp in the hills.
He wasn’t alone. They dotted the hillside: Dark patches, sleeping bags, on dark grass. Campfires here and there, like red stars. These were the ranks of those who were staying behind. Putting some distance between themselves and the silver future-ships.
It was not comforting, Milo found, joining these ranks, this great pre-dying. It was empty and terrible and made him feel as if someone had performed a stomach operation on him. It brought his asthma on so strong that he went to sleep that way and dreamed he was strangling.
—
They called themselves the Earth People.
In the morning, some of them got up and went to work. Others slipped off through the corn. Milo did not go back to the lab. They were finished there. The Earth People who slipped away left holes in thousands of jobs, and those jobs still needed doing.
Those who remained became job-doers. This was all that remained of what had once been full, above-average lives. Now anything that required time and years and a future was set aside. Dreams and plans. Fears about growing old. Wishes. All that remained was the doing of jobs, and maybe memories and some indiscriminate sex. Milo’s voices grew quiet, almost silent.
He took a job with the fueling teams, making sure the awesome chemistries stayed cold or hot. He worked in an astronaut suit, amid clouds of cryogenic steam.
He tried not to think about anything.
He was helping to fuel the Avalon when Kim found him. She rode up on the tiny crew elevator, at lunchtime. With an actual old-fashioned lunch pail and a baloney sandwich.
He was sitting on the fueling tower with his legs dangling into space. He saw Kim’s lab shoes out of the corner of his eye. Felt her there, looking down at him.
“What are you doing?” she asked. “Why would you leave like that?”
He stood.
“You know why,” he said.
“We still have three days!” she cried, hitting him in the chest. “At least it’s something!”
Milo shook his head. “You have to try and be a family, the three of you, for real, before they strap you in and take you away, wherever. You need this time, and I’m giving it to you.”
She gripped herself with both arms. Eyes squinched closed, but no tears.
He drew her to him and pulled their bodies tight together.
She tried to slip her hand inside his enviro-suit.
“No,” whispered Milo. “Go be his. Make him yours.”
Softly, she hit him in the chest again. They stood rocking, their foreheads touching.
“Libby?” he asked.
“We tried to tell her. We had to try and tell her everything, really—I mean, we’re loading in two days practically. Plus, we had to try and explain about you, and…well, what do you expect? We had to sedate her. That’s all there is to tell. She loves you. I love you.”
Milo nodded. He kissed her forehead.
After a minute, she did what she had to do. She rode the elevator out of sight.
After work that day, Milo stopped in the lower hills and looked back down at the compound. The arks lay waiting, ready, their noses lifted into the soft wind, reflecting green grass and blue sky.
He eyed the chain-link fence behind him, traced its gray length for miles across the hills. How useful would the fence be if they came? Surely they would come, once they saw the arks go up. There would be no disguising it. They would see, and they’d come, finally.
—
The Earth People did their jobs.
On the third morning, they helped to load the arks.
They sealed the mighty hatches and primed the awesome engines.
They fled to the farthest hills.
And it happened.
The ships boomed, and the ground shook, and the air went blurry like water, and the shock waves arrived.
The Avalon flared, lifted, then burned away into the sky, white-hot, mirror-bright.
Then the Atlantis.
Then the real heartbreaker, the Summerland. And that tugged at them and hurt them in a way they hadn’t anticipated, because when she was gone—which she was, too soon—it was really over. The great accomplishment had been accomplished, and now here they all were, a bunch of dead people standing around looking at one another, without even a job to do.
—
They built bonfires. Halloween bonfires. Beach-sized bonfires, college pep rally–sized bonfires. Some commandeered the surviving shipbuilding cranes and built pyramids and Jenga towers. There were architects and engineers among them, so there were marvels and wonders by the end of the week, spread over miles, drenched in everything from kerosene to leftover rocket fuel.
At night, exhausted, they slept.
Who knows what they did everywhere else on the Earth?
Milo worked on the construction of a giant wooden man. He had a giant wooden mouth and a pecker and everything.
—
On the last morning, people finally came to the fence.
They stood outside at first, fingers hanging on the mesh, looking in like jailbirds in reverse. Then they climbed over or cut their way through. Some of them were angry, but they didn’t do anything to hurt anyone once they got a look at the bonfires, at the pyramids and towers and the huge wooden man. Whatever had happened here was over. All that was left was this tribe of doomed people, just like them.
At nightfall, they lit the fires.
The whole landscape went up in a garish false day, roaring, an elemental mockery of the launching of the arks. Where were they now, the ships? Hanging in orbit? Were they watching?
The night writhed in pagan howls. Everywhere, shadows leaped or clustered in groups. They sang in some cases. Some were silent.
Milo’s voices were silent, too, finally and completely. They had all experienced their own deaths. No need to share this one.
Not long after full dark, the comet rose in the sky. Different from before. Dreadful.
A woman staggered past Milo, calling, “Terry? Terry!” (And Milo thought, That’s how the world ends? People stumbling around, yelling, “Terry”?)
The comet brightened and moved with sudden speed.
An immense riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiipping tore the sky.
A knot of men and women came dancing along, drunk, naked, and crazy-eyed.
“Dance with us!” they howled, clutching at him. Milo tore himself away, baring his teeth like a dog.
Thunder like a million rockets.
The ground tore open and the air caught fire.
“Terry!” someone screamed.
And then dark. And then nothing.
Milo shot into the afterlife as if sprayed from a fire hose.
Everywhere, water crashed and surged. The river convulsed as if a universal storm sewer had backed up. That’s what happens when tons of people die all at once. The afterlife can burst like a dam.
Milo found himself in a tumbling river full of struggling bodies and crying voices. Voices disappointed that they had just endured the end of the world and got to the afterlife, and now that appeared to be ending, too.
Suzie must be awfully busy, he thought.
A day passed. Now and then a house floated by, and people climbed on it. Occasionally, there would be an island of some kind, and the newly dead would crowd over it
and overwhelm it.
Milo floated and relaxed.
The river passing between worlds wasn’t like other waters. You couldn’t drown in it. It would, if you let it, carry you along like a leaf or a water bug. It would hold you like a reflection.
Milo let it.
He even, after a time, allowed himself to sink and take root in the bottom muck, where he swayed like seaweed, sleeping.
—
She swam down and pulled him like a cattail, raising mud in a boiling cloud.
Half awake, he protested like a sleepy child.
They sat on the shore together, dripping and holding hands. As his brain de-fuzzed, Milo noted that the river had gotten more or less back to normal. The shrieking crowds were gone. Flotsam and dreck littered the trees and a nearby park, but on the whole the crisis seemed to have passed.
Milo wondered how long the adjustment had taken.
“It’s been a week,” Suzie whispered.
“I was in the river for a week?”
She pressed a finger against his lips.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I assume you don’t think I was sitting around all that time with my thumb up my ass. Listen: Almost everyone in the world died.”
“Peace,” said Milo. “I get it. I was there.”
She was so, so tired. Now that his eyes cleared, he could see it in the color of her skin, which had gone colorless and translucent.
She crawled like a cat onto his lap, and now it was her turn to sleep.
—
They both woke up sort of sprawled in the mud. Some kind of large shadow hovered over them and was tickling Milo’s lip with a long, dry weed.
He batted at the weed, sitting up, blinking.
“Mama,” he said. “Hey.”
“You guys are cute,” said Mama.
“Bite me,” mumbled Suzie, who hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
Mama clapped her meaty hands.
“Chop-chop!” she said. “Now that things are back shipshape, Nan wants everyone to come over.”
“To her house?” asked Milo.
“Why?” asked Suzie, sounding combative.
Mama rolled her eyes. “I’m too tired for this shit,” she said. “Can we just go, please, and make the best of it?”
They went. Muddy and bleary and talking to themselves, they went.
—
Many lives ago, as a little kid walking to school in Ohio, Milo (and all the other neighborhood kids) lived in fear of a scary widow named Mrs. Armentrout. They were super-careful not to set foot on Mrs. Armentrout’s lawn, because she’d come to the door and curse at them or knock on her window like gunshots going off (one time she made a kid named Leonard shit his pants). Then one day a stray dog bit Milo as he was passing by, and she came out and drove the dog off with a leather belt. She brought Milo, crying and shaking, into her kitchen and gave him a Coke with a tiny bit of vodka in it while she smoked a Pall Mall and phoned his mom.
Nan reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout, and her house reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout’s house.
The outside of the house would never catch your eye. It sat surrounded by a dead lawn and a dead garden. Once you passed inside, though, it came to life.
It was like stepping into a crowd, because Nan had about eighty-five television sets, all turned on all the time and set loudly to separate channels. They were not the slim, streamlined modern television sets, either, but the kind from the 1960s: wooden battleships with big dials. Nan’s TVs all had huge doilies on top and supported hundreds of framed pictures. Nan rarely appeared to actually watch any of these sets, but if you turned one down or changed the channel, she’d yell at you, even if she was occupied at the far end of the house.
The house itself was a minefield of…things. Every end table (topped with doilies) was crammed with Hummels or bowls of plastic fruit. No surface of any kind was without its own ashtray, piled with old butts and lipstick stains. No wall space (with awful 1970s wallpaper) that wasn’t hung with a tiny painting of Venice or a dog or a vase. And there were vases, too, and crafted mugs waiting to be knocked over. You walked through Nan’s house with your elbows at your sides. You stepped carefully and sat carefully, because, of course, there were the cats.
Everywhere. Countless.
If the televisions were the eyes and heart and electric blood of the house, the cats were its breath. They moved from place to place in tides, as if the rooms breathed them out and then in. There were pauses and stillness now and then, as if the house rested, and then sometimes sudden flurries, as if the house had gasped aloud, some alarm sensed only by the cats, by a common neurology, secret and occult.
They left their muddy shoes outside and located Nan in her kitchen, smoking and watching Family Feud on a countertop TV.
“Nice to see you,” Milo told her.
“Sit down,” she said, neither kindly nor unkindly. “I’d offer you something to snack on, but I gave everything to the relief people when they came by.”
“That was nice of you,” said Suzie.
“Don’t patronize me.”
They all took seats around the table and then sat there saying nothing.
Eventually Suzie said, “Can we please get this silliness out of the way?”
“The silliness,” said Mama, “as you call it, isn’t the least bit silly.”
Milo raised his hand like a schoolkid.
“Whatever the silliness is,” he said, “it appears to involve me, and I haven’t got the first idea—”
“I think what you did for your family in this last life counts as an act of Perfection,” said Suzie. “I think it’s obvious. These two bullies disagree. I vote ‘yes.’ ”
“There’s no vote,” said Mama. “A lifetime either balances perfectly or it doesn’t. Nan and I happen to understand why your recent life didn’t balance, and Suzie does not.”
Milo got up and started making himself a cup of coffee.
He hadn’t thought about his evaluation yet. Things had been rather busy since the comet. Now that he gave it a moment’s thought, however, he became angry.
“I would like to know,” he said, “what was the slightest bit imperfect about the life I just led.”
His eyes burned. He swallowed hard. A cat yowled, at the back of the house.
“You weren’t even close,” said Nan.
“Think it through,” said Mama. “You went down there with a plan, right?”
“I went down there to promote Love, with a capital ‘L,’ through selflessness and sacrifice. And what did I do? I gave my family to another man so they could have a chance of survival. Do you understand what that means? The emotional cost? Of course not. That’s why you”—he pointed at Mama and Nan—“always try so hard to fit into human forms and always get it wrong.” He indicated the house, the TVs, and the cats.
Nan narrowed her eyes and pulled on her cigarette but said nothing.
Milo filled the coffeemaker and sat back down to wait.
Mama put a big, soft arm around him.
“Tell me about the fence,” she said.
The fence?
“The huge fence you and your ARK people put up around the ships to keep everybody else out.”
Ah, shit.
“It’s like we were building a lifeboat,” he said. “There’s no way there was going to be room for everybody. Let me guess: The perfect thing to do was to somehow help the whole planet. Everyone on Earth.”
Mama nodded. So did Nan. Suzie glared at the floor.
“What other kind of help did you have in mind?” Milo asked. “There was pretty much ‘getting killed by the comet’ and ‘not getting killed by the comet.’ ”
“There were survivors,” said Mama. “They will start rebuilding, bit by bit. You might have helped those people get ahead of things a little bit.”
“Hindsight,” said Milo. “How was I supposed to know there’d be survivors?”
Beneath the television chatter, an uncomfortable silenc
e.
“If it was easy,” whispered Mama, “they wouldn’t call it ‘Perfection.’ ”
“Helping those who were involved in the project,” argued Milo, “was the best use of our time and resources. Even the gods can’t suggest an alternative.”
“We’re not gods,” said Suzie.
“Oh, hush,” whispered Nan. “They can’t tell the difference.”
“In any case,” said Mama, “it doesn’t matter what any of us thinks. The ocean is wet. Two and two is four.”
The coffee machine said ding. Milo ignored it.
“How am I ever supposed to make a perfect choice?” he asked. “It’s always a trick question in the end.”
“I don’t know,” snapped Nan. “Be trickier? Get smarter? That’s your job. We’ll know your perfect moment when we see you do it. It’s supposed to be amazing and surprising and impossible, and yet almost everyone manages to do it within nine thousand lives. Everyone but you. That’s all I know.”
The light shifted in the windows. Cats began, a couple at a time, to fill the kitchen.
Feeding time.
Time for goodbyes.
To Mama and Suzie, Nan said, “His house ought to be ready by now. Go sit and drink his coffee and argue all night, if you want. Master Chef is on in three minutes.”
Suzie rose from the table. “I’ll take him,” she said.
“Well, there’s a big fat surprise,” said Nan, lighting another cigarette.
—
Leaving the house, crossing the dead lawn, Milo took Suzie’s hand.
“Is it far?” he asked. He hoped his new house was nearby; he liked Nan’s neighborhood.
“We’re not going there yet. I have something to show you.”
Her voice had a rubber-band bounce to it. Excitement.
It wasn’t far.
They walked uphill, along a brick street lined with shops and Victorian streetlamps. The shops had enormous windows with heavy wooden molding and plastered doors. Gilded signs on hanging shingles.
Suzie stopped before a nameless storefront. The windows were soaped. No sign hung above the door.
“They’re closed,” Milo was saying, but when Suzie produced a skeleton key and unlocked the door, he remembered.
Reincarnation Blues Page 9