Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “Your store!” he gasped. “Your candle store!”

  “My space,” she said, “where the candle store will be.”

  Inside, she clapped her hands, and a hundred candles leaped into full flame. “I took the first step and signed a lease. The next step is…what? I guess fill it up with candles. A coat of paint. A sign with a cute name.”

  Milo picked up one of the candles: a tall amber-colored sculpture of a rabbit.

  Other candles wore other shapes. A knight. Snoopy. Buddha. Earth-mother figures with round, pregnant bellies. Fruit candles. Candles shaped like cars and houses and horses and skulls. Cobras. Dancers. Angels. Ghosts.

  They were beautiful and lifelike. Many of them looked as if they were about to say something.

  “You’ve been busy,” Milo remarked. “Which begs a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Does this mean you quit? Your other, you know, job?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Okay,” he said, “obviously not, because you just wore yourself out for a solid week, bringing almost the entire world over from the other side. But you couldn’t keep doing all three—making the candles, making people die, and tending the store when you open. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong. That’s the next thing to check off the list, I think. But it scares me.”

  She took a deep breath and scrunched her hair up in her fingers.

  Milo’s eyebrows rose.

  “Death,” he mused, “is afraid of something?”

  “Can you blame me? I mean, I’m not supposed to quit. Can Summer quit and join the circus? Can Beauty give notice and go work at the animal shelter? It will affect the balance—”

  “Oh, God!” said Milo, shaking his fists. “If I hear one more time about how everything has to be in balance, balance, balance, I’m going to literally catch fire. I mean it.”

  “That’s like getting mad at hydrogen or apple trees.”

  Milo stood silently fuming.

  “I’m tired,” he said.

  “Well,” Suzie answered, “I’m going to bed, myself. I put a cot in the back. I can sketch you a quick map to your house—which is very, very nice—or, if you come with me, we can do the Happy Pony.”

  “The…?”

  “I read about it in a magazine. Looks like a woman riding a pony. Makes you happy.”

  He followed her to the cot.

  —

  For the next two weeks, they played house just like a billion other couples. They slept together. They got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They had moods. They watched TV and left notes for each other.

  They did laundry. They both sucked at it and were always shrinking things and turning white things pink. Suzie had some weird garments, like dark robes and velvet tunics and cloaks with a hundred pockets. Work clothes. One time Milo put on her voluminous, hooded nightwatch cloak and came up behind her, saying, “Your tiiiiime haaaas coooome!”

  Suzie was painting the antique tin ceiling with a long, telescoping brush. She froze, favored him with an expression like ice on stone, and said, “Put. That. Back.”

  He put it back.

  A lot of their time together was passionate. They had to go out and buy a bed, because they broke the cot.

  Some of their time together was unusual. Like the time she went off to work and came home all upset because a lot of kids died in a school fire. It bothered her when death was hard for people, even though they went on and lived other lives. It was the kind of thing that made the living hate and fear her. That particular night, Milo held her for an hour while she shivered and stared at the floor and didn’t want to talk. She didn’t cry, as Milo would have.

  Outside, the afterlife remained the same as always. Earthlike, and also dreamlike. Days came and went. Streets changed direction. The balance of Heaven and Earth followed its own inscrutable schedule. Clouds flew. Rain fell. The moon changed.

  “I want it to be like this all the time,” Milo told Suzie one Sunday morning (it was Sunday there, anyway. One street over, it might be Thursday, or Shoe Day. You never knew).

  They were reading newspapers on the couch together, legs intertwined.

  She gave him kind of a hug with her legs.

  This, he thought. This is Perfection.

  Very few people know how to leave a moment like that alone and not fuck it up.

  Milo didn’t know.

  “That’s why,” he said, “when I go back this next time, I’m going to make sure I have what I need to get it right.”

  Suzie’s face clouded.

  “What does that mean, exactly?” she asked.

  How to explain the idea that had crept up on him during their morning coffee?

  “I’m not taking any chances next time,” he said. “I’m going to have special powers.”

  Her eyes held a cautious interest.

  He counted off on his fingers.

  “One: I can choose to be smart if I want, right? Fine. I’m going to be really fucking smart.”

  “That’s no guarantee.”

  “Of course not, but”—Finger Two—“I can also choose to have unusual strengths and challenges. Like, you know, being clairvoyant, or reading auras, or irresistible personal charisma.”

  “Which?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind.” Finger Three. “I’m going to be born to smart parents, in a smart community. And I will use my abilities to do good.

  “That’s as far as I’ve got,” he said. “But my last few lives, after consideration, I have been taking a knife to a gunfight. This time I will hit humanity like a bomb of goodness.”

  Suzie put down her portion of the newspaper.

  “I like it,” she said. “If you make it, maybe we really can be like this”—she indicated the couch, their coffee, a nearby brandy bottle, the sunlight, the shop—“all the time.”

  The sunlight shifted just so, the way it only does in candle shops.

  “So you’re going soon?” she said.

  He nodded. “You know how it is. Once you get the itch, it just gets worse. It’s like the Universal Cosmic Eye telling you it’s time.”

  Suzie got a peculiar look on her face.

  “I do know,” she said. “I know exactly, in fact.”

  She got up.

  Milo squinted at her.

  “Suzie? You’re puzzling me.”

  But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking up at the antique tin ceiling.

  Not at it so much as through it. The way, Milo thought, you might look at the ceiling if you were getting ready to say something to the whole universe.

  “I’m sorry, Milo,” she said. “I’m afraid this might be uncomfortable for you.”

  Before Milo could phrase a question, she opened her mouth, and the room and the neighborhood and the universe itself turned inside out. The language of Everything That Was crammed itself into the candle shop’s back room full of photons and hurricanes and sweater vests and dung beetles and Thursday afternoons. Pyramids and bathtubs and award-winning barbecue sauces—

  Milo felt himself stretching like a rubber band.

  It stopped.

  The room quieted, leaving them both as they had been, standing in the back of the shop. Milo patted himself down, half-expecting a galaxy or Queen Victoria to fall out of his pants.

  “You just quit,” he said, “didn’t you?”

  Suzie nodded. She looked a little ashen.

  “Are you okay?”

  He crossed the floor and put his arms around her. Felt her forehead.

  “I’m okay. I just surprised myself, is all.”

  “All right.”

  They stood that way for a while. Long enough for the shadows to lengthen.

  He let her go. Turned to head for the bathroom.

  “I need to give some more thought to my own Big Idea,” he said. “A life with advantages isn’t the same as a life with privileges, but there are still pitfalls. Similar pitfalls, really—”<
br />
  “Milo?”

  Suzie’s voice was suddenly small and frightened.

  Turning, he found that the room behind him no longer existed.

  It was as if the walls and floor and the space between them had stretched. As if a lens had interposed, with Suzie on the opposite side. She stood just as he had left her but at the same time not quite there, as if she stood around a corner.

  She cried out, called his name.

  He reached for her, but she was light-years away.

  “What’s happening?” he cried, still reaching. But he knew.

  Things were balancing, exactly as she had feared.

  “I love you,” he said mournfully.

  Tears left Suzie’s eyes and shot across the room like sideways rain.

  She streamed away like water, flashing in the half-light. Gone.

  Milo called after her. His voice stretched like the howl of a train, then snapped back to normal, along with everything else. He paused a second, looking around, sizing up what had happened. Then reason left him, drained out of him like a flood in reverse, and left him on all fours, screaming like a child.

  —

  “She’s not gone,” Nan told him for the third time, handing him his third Coke and vodka. “She’s somewhere, in some form. Somewhere.”

  Milo sat at her kitchen table, shaking. He had come to the door a stuttering, crying, runny-nosed mess. He wanted his moms. All ninety-nine hundred of them.

  “I saw her go,” he explained again.

  “Nothing ‘goes,’ ” said Nan. “Don’t you listen?”

  “Bullshit. That whole thing with the sidewalk.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “Dammit, Milo, drink your whatever-it-is and be quiet awhile. Wheel of Fortune’s on. And American Idol and Welcome Back, Kotter.”

  They sat there in silence through Welcome Back, Kotter and a fresh bottle of vodka and six more shows in a row.

  —

  When Milo finally walked down to the river, a week later, it wasn’t because he’d worked it all out in his head and was healed and ready to begin a new life. His head and heart still felt like bomb craters.

  That’s why he was at the river.

  He didn’t want to think of it as a kind of suicide, but, hey, when you have loved a woman for eight thousand years and then the cosmic boa itself decides you can’t be together, it’s hard.

  “Stupidest goddamn thing,” he muttered. Then he shut up. Everything he said, everything he thought, just dug the crater a little deeper.

  He concentrated on the new life he had chosen. Looked for it in the water.

  Advantages. Special abilities. Superpowers, even. He looked for them in the water as he waded through the mud and the reeds, looked among the reflections as the river flowed around his knees.

  The images were not always what you expected, but you knew them when you saw them.

  A goose. A tall man in professorial robes. University buildings, ivy and stone.

  The river filled with pictures and reflections and pulled him down.

  A river. Mist. An old stone bridge.

  Nothing.

  A roulette wheel doesn’t make choices.

  There’s a cause: The wheel is spun.

  There’s an effect: A ball pops around like an electrocuted cat and eventually comes to rest somewhere.

  In much the same way, the cosmic boa doesn’t make choices. Causes go in one end, a passive balancing takes place, and effects come out the other end.

  So you can’t blame the universe for the fact that Suzie, having spun her relationship with the universe as one might spin a roulette wheel, suddenly found herself wormholed out of her candle shop and materialized far, far away in the corner booth at Santana’s Taco Palace.

  It happened so fast, and was so terrible and awful, that she sat there for three whole minutes with a numb expression on her face.

  She said, “Milo,” one time, in a shaky voice.

  But she didn’t cry. In fact, when the server—a serious-looking woman in a cowboy hat—appeared at her table, she ordered a mess of tamales and a margarita.

  “Rocks,” she specified. “Not frozen.”

  “Bueno,” said the server, and started to walk away.

  “In a bucket,” Suzie further specified.

  The server said, “Good for you,” and walked away for real.

  Crying wouldn’t change the boa one bit.

  Neither would getting drunk, of course, but she was going to do that anyway.

  “Tu mama estan gorda,” she said to the universe. “Your mama is so fat…”

  She was going to sit and drink and hate the universe in Spanish.

  And it wouldn’t be the first time.

  —

  It was a long time ago (or not).

  She woke up one day feeling good and tired of it all.

  Good and tired of what, exactly? One day she tried to make it rain on a drought-plagued Guatemalan valley, because three hundred million earthworms were drying out, slowly, in the soil. The universe twisted around and flipped her out of there, reminding her, in its way, that she was Death, not Rain or Mercy.

  The next morning, giving the afterlife the finger, she emigrated downstream to a little fishing village on the Caribbean Sea and lived in a house there for a time.

  She didn’t quit. She still rode her winds and shadows and performed her work. But she also started wearing her hair in braids, eating mangoes, and having conversations with mortal people.

  Odd conversations, because, naturally, most people mistook her for a witch.

  “Mi esposo tiene la respiración más horrible,” someone might say. “My husband has the most horrid breath! What can I do?”

  And, because of course she was old and knew things, she would maybe say, “Probar algunas de las hojas de menta por la laguna. Try some of the mint leaves over by the lagoon.”

  They called her bruja, behind her back, but they meant it in a good way and a bad way, both.

  The grandmothers, though, knew exactly what she was. They looked at her the same way they looked at fire.

  The children and the men simply accepted that she was mysterious in some way. Not unlike Don Chico, the mayor, who had been struck by lightning six times.

  The village was called San Viejo. People fished and lived and played guitars in the evening before she started living there, and they did the same after. They played baseball before. They still played baseball.

  When she first moved to San Viejo—the edge of San Viejo, on a hill above the beach—she made a good friend almost right away.

  Maria Ximena had the same job as a lot of the women in San Viejo, which was to wait for the fishermen to come sailing home in the evening and then take a sharp knife and cut up the fish. One day she was standing at a little wooden table, doing that very thing and cut off the end of her finger. It lay like a tiny cookie amid the fish guts.

  Suzie happened to be standing there. Some of the fish were still vaguely alive, and she quietly brought their little fish deaths to them. When she saw Maria Ximena’s fingertip lying on the table, she stepped up close, took Maria’s hand in her own, and made the finger whole again.

  Maria said one thing about God and one thing about the devil, and after that they were friends. Maria started watching the sunset with her, every night down among the boats, and taught her how to play the tambourine.

  At the same time, in those early days, the young men began falling in love with her. They couldn’t help it. They were afraid to bring her flowers, though, because when they dreamed about her, she had sharp teeth. The only one who was not afraid was a man called Rodrigo Luis Estrada Alday. He was, as the old women said, one of those men God sometimes makes by mistake, the body of a man with three or four men inside it. He had wild eyes and a vast mustache.

  “If I swim out to sea and kill a shark with a knife and bring it to you,” he whispered to her one morning, after church, “you’ll kiss m
e. Won’t you?”

  And she said, “No,” and gave him a sad look, which he misinterpreted. And he swam out to sea with a knife, and the currents took him.

  In time, another of the young men, Iago Fortuno, tried to court her. He started by tying bundles of flowers all around the door of her house.

  “Gracias,” she said. “But flowers are sad, don’t you think? You snip them and give them to someone, and then they die.”

  Instead of being hurt, Iago Fortuno looked thoughtful. Inside his head, he thought, Maybe there’s a way to make flowers last longer or even, like birds, live free of the soil. And he quit being a fisherman and became a florist. He became one of those mysterious things that people didn’t quite understand—like Suzie, or like Don Chico (who had been struck by a seventh bolt of lightning and was dead. No one could agree on a new mayor, so there wasn’t one for years).

  If the people of San Viejo noticed that they tended to die more often or more easily since Suzie had appeared among them, they shrugged and talked about other things.

  Meantime, Suzie did her grim work. Like everyone who works, she continued to learn. She learned that every death was different. Sometimes it was good to go slowly. Animals, especially wolves and tropical birds, liked to be sung to as they died. Other times it was best to be quick. Presbyterians and hamsters, for example, both preferred a nice, quick, no-nonsense death.

  The longer she lived in San Viejo, the more she appreciated the kind of things that went with living. Like having a window open when you slept, and grass, and tortillas. Being happy when people came to visit, and being happy when they left. The way certain things felt wonderful when you held them in your hands: a book, an ax, a baby, a beer, a big-ass pile of M&M’s.

  She loved living among these things, these sensibilities, in San Viejo, although she was content, as it were, to sit beside the water rather than to plunge in. She took no lovers (although she was tempted, out of kindness, once or twice, to kiss poor Iago Fortuno, who continued to bring her flowers, and damned if the flowers he grew didn’t start to stay fresh and alive longer…). She almost took a job helping at the schoolhouse, but one thing the old women seemed to insist on, quietly, was that she not spend overmuch time around the children. She didn’t start a store or organize dances or say political things.