Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  She watched, though, and sometimes helped, while others did these things.

  Maria Ximena married Jesus Franco, and they had three daughters. The fishermen started putting little five-horsepower engines on the back of their boats and catching more fish. One year there was a hurricane. For several years, there was a war. One year everything was wonderful! Sometimes that happens. The fish were bigger, everyone was healthy, and they had a festival with a bonfire twenty feet high. Iago Fortuno married a woman who, although not a nun, had nonetheless taken a holy vow of silence, and the other men were in awe of this and thereafter considered Iago one of the wisest and most clever of men, and they convinced him to fill the mayor’s office.

  A young man named Carlos des Casas Montoya tried to impress Suzie by swallowing a sword. Two swords at once! Three! And then died, coughing blood.

  Maria Ximena Franco died of a fever. Jesus, her husband, went blind in one eye the day she was buried. Two of their daughters grew up and moved away to the city. The third daughter became a communist and carried a rifle everywhere.

  A young man who called himself El Gato courted Suzie with poetry. He played his guitar for her and sang a song he had written, comparing her to the wind.

  “El viento es una mujer y un canción y un sueño,” he sang, and died in his sleep.

  If the villagers noticed that Suzie had remained beautiful and unchanged for a great many years, they didn’t mention it. The old women still looked at her with the same knowing eyes, although the original old women had given way to new old women.

  A day came when she felt moved to sweep out the house one final time and go back where she belonged (technically). She knew it the way you know it’s time to go to bed at the end of a day.

  She knew it, not surprisingly, the day Iago Fortuno died of old age.

  She walked through his garden and his greenhouse and found him in his bed, sitting up, waiting. Before she could lean down and kiss him on the forehead, he stirred, saying, “I have something for you.”

  And he retrieved something from the wooden table at his bedside and handed it to her.

  A flower. A small yellow flower.

  “Una flor inmortal,” he said. “An immortal flower. You can just enjoy it and not be sad.”

  The flower was made of silk and wire.

  Suzie said, “Bueno, Iago,” and leaned down and kissed him on the mouth, and off he went to the afterlife.

  Suzie went back up the hill and swept her house and closed the door behind her and became a wind along the beach.

  The old women made respectful signs but whispered, “La rana está fuera del pozo. The frog is out of the well,” and broke out a bottle of wine their grandmothers had put aside years before.

  —

  The waitstaff at Santana’s didn’t approach Suzie while she was drinking her margarita.

  They weren’t afraid. They just wanted to see if she could drain the whole bucket.

  She could, as it turned out. Afterward, though, she fell asleep right there at the table, so someone had to wake her to tell her it was time to go. They fetched Santana himself.

  “Señora?” he said, poking her in the shoulder a little bit.

  “Milo?” she slurred, raising her head. Then: “Oh. Hi. Sorry.”

  She stood to go, staggering. As she staggered, she noticed something that disturbed her. She felt…less…than before. Like chunky soup that had been thinned with water. If she raised her hand to the decorative ceiling lamps, she knew, she would find herself becoming transparent.

  “Shit,” she said to Santana. “I’m starting to fade.”

  “Sí,” answered Santana. “Lo siento. The frog is in the well.”

  “It sure is,” she agreed, and stumbled out and became an evening breeze. A thin, unsteady breeze that made snoring noises and wobbled around in the park all night as if lost.

  Milo had lived many lives in which he was talented in some way.

  Sometimes the talent was developed through practice and hard work; other times it was more like a birthday present. Either way, special abilities always made things easier. It was like going into battle with a magical sword.

  —

  He was a racehorse named Across the Sea, with lungs like locomotives and hooves like war hammers, who couldn’t bear to see another horse pass him by.

  —

  He (she, actually: Milona Oxygen Templeton) managed cargo for interstellar freighters—one of the hardest jobs ever. You had to be able to keep schedules in your head and coordinate quantum collapse points. She could imagine hyperspace the way other people might imagine a stick of chewing gum.

  —

  In India, long ago, he was a snake charmer. Just an ordinary snake charmer at first, until one day he wasn’t careful and was bitten. He went home and lay down and waited to die but didn’t. It turned out that he was immune to all sorts of poison. He became a swami, a holy man, and people would come to see him drink terrible things and be bitten and survive. He said prayers for pilgrims, and they paid him.

  One day a lot of black fluid came gushing out of his mouth and eyes and pores, and he fell over dead. Things add up. You can’t help it.

  —

  One time he had what people like to call “a way with animals.” He became a famous cowboy, in an age of genetically engineered beef. He rode horses with legs like whips, careening among beef cattle like corn-fed tankers, under an artificial deep-blue sky.

  “Gee!” he would yell, and “Haw!” and the horses flowed the way he wanted, because they loved him. The cows mooed at him like foghorns. They loved him, too, in their sad, doomed way.

  —

  He was Mona Rivette, the precocious daughter of a waveform physicist, a beautiful child with the misfortune to be one of the last victims of a terrible wasting disease. By the age of nine, she was almost completely paralyzed. Her condition, and her terror of being shut up within her own body, drove her to an act of singular genius.

  She asked her father to let her use some of his cloud time on the solar supercomputer, and he did. She asked him now and then to bring her such-and-such a material or to have such-and-such a thing machined or molded, and he always did.

  On her eleventh birthday, she presented her family and the District 45 Galactic Patent Board with an invention she called a “fish,” a communications device that hovered over a person’s shoulder and served to call people, or compute things, or record sights and sounds, or broadcast, or measure things with lasers, and so on. It was the ultimate personal assistant.

  People loved the fish because it did a lot of the tedious technical work they often didn’t feel like doing. The pricier models would even fetch things. They also loved it because it was cute, hovering beside them, or flying with them, or even swimming with them, if swimming was something they did.

  “Holy shit,” said the physicist, when his daughter showed him her invention. And he oversaw the patents and saw that they made his daughter wealthy.

  For two years, Mona lived in a wheelchair, waited on hand and foot by her own invention. It enabled her to speak and write down thoughts and invent two or three other things before the day it helped her say, “Goodbye,” and hovered nearby, purring sadly, while she died.

  —

  In some lives, Milo developed talents that were pretty much superpowers. In medieval China, he was the kung-fu master Mo Pi, who walked alone up to a Mongol encampment one day and quietly demanded that they turn around and go home. When the invaders laughed, Mo Pi stamped his foot one time on the ground, bowed, and went home. Three days later, an earthquake rolled through the countryside and the mountains. When the last aftershock had faded, the Mongols had gone home.

  —

  Often enough, great talents must also be great secrets.

  Behind the Iron Curtain, Milosevic Kocevar became a respected shoemaker. He made sturdy shoes for reasonable prices, married a drab woman and raised drab children and ate a great deal of cabbage, and never bothered anyone. Or so it
seemed.

  Unknown to all but a few, Milosevic sometimes made bombs. He planted the bombs under the cars of the snerkezeii, the secret police, and in the dustbin of the little government building at the edge of town. Sometimes he planted bombs on the highway, where the Red Army caravans passed. The bombs looked like discarded shoes. They were never detected in time to stop them from exploding.

  Later on, when he was very old and the Iron Curtain came down and he told everyone what he had done, even his own family didn’t believe him.

  —

  Sometimes you become good at something by accident. Centuries ago, Milo owned a brewery and brewed an excellent beer. His only competition was old Geoffrey Morgan, who had won the top prize at the Bristol fair every year since before Milo was born.

  Geoff Morgan had a beautiful daughter named Igraine, and when she turned sixteen, Milo asked to marry her.

  “Nay!” barked Geoff Morgan. “The day you get Igraine’s hand is the day that swill of yours wins top prize at the fair!”

  So Milo went home and brewed his finest beer and was almost finished when a battle broke out nearby between the king’s men and the retainers of the Duke of Salisbury. The fighting spilled into town. The dead and their blood got into the open vats, and while a dead man can be fished out, you simply cannot remove blood from beer.

  Milo arrived at the fair that year with a dark, bitter beer, instantly popular for its peculiar and aggressive taste. He won top prize, and won Igraine, and returned to a long, fat life making beer and children. And every year he grew more famous for the drawing of his mysterious dark beer. He and his lady always arrived at the fair just a shade too pale and with bandages about their forearms (though these were scarcely noticed and never remarked upon by polite folk). What was remarked upon was the way Milo and his bride were so devoted that there was nothing he couldn’t ask of her, nothing she wouldn’t do for him.

  —

  Milo enjoyed his brewing talent so much, he tried to take it with him when he died.

  He spent hours and hours in the basement of his modest afterlife home (his reward for a modest life making beer), making more beer and still trying to find a way to make the perfect dark beer without having to open a vein.

  “You’re supposed to move on,” griped Suzie, sitting on the basement steps. Her eyes watered and her voice sounded scratchy. She was experimenting with smoking cigarettes, her latest human curiosity. It wasn’t working well. She stubbed out her smoke on the steps.

  “I am moving on,” said Milo, opening a tap and tasting his latest batch. He grimaced. “The last keg was too sweet. This one’s bitter. A step in the right dir—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she coughed. “You’re supposed to take what you learned and start getting ready for a new life. Not dwelling on the old.”

  A smirk twisted Milo’s lips.

  “I know what this is about,” he said. “This is about her.”

  Suzie scrunched her eyes up. “Her who?”

  “Her. Igraine. The love of my life. The most recent one.”

  “You’re off your pickle. Jealous of an Earth chick?”

  “Be respectful,” he said.

  Suzie’s eyes flared. “Listen to you!” she shouted. “You’re the one who’s got her on the brain. Not me.”

  “Okay,” said Milo, closing the tap, rolling the barrel away. “Fine. She’s on my mind. We were married fifty years, after all. And that makes you jealous.”

  She gave him a complicated look.

  “You know we’re just friends,” she said. “Right?”

  How could she be so dumb?

  “I’m not dumb,” she said, her tone pure ice. “I’m Death. Don’t you get it? I bring things to an end. I don’t do the Love thing. It’s not my area.”

  Milo shrugged. Fine. He wasn’t going to beg.

  “Next time I’m alive,” he said, “I’m going to be the first man to sleep with a million women. How do you like them apples?”

  “Good. I hope your soul pecker falls off.”

  Milo went silent, inside and out.

  Soul pecker?

  —

  After a life in banking, Milo had to serve a penalty life as an alligator snapping turtle, waiting in the murk at the bottom of slimy ponds. Claws dug in, holding his breath.

  These were talents, too. Waiting. Striking fast, when the time came.

  Sitting in the murk, raw talent fifty million years old, coiled like a spring in the swamp.

  —

  He was a jazz musician, saxophone, smoky and slow. Mookie Underwood, in pinstripes and suspenders and a tie with a perfect four-in-hand. Saddle shoes, shined like planets that clicked and tapped their way through orbit.

  If you watched people listening, whether it was in a club or a hall or down at Smokestack Records, they all had a certain look, which they couldn’t help, as if they were trying to get a peek down the bell of that big brass sax, because it sounded like something lived down there. Something wise and wet and not particularly happy. There was an old soul behind that sound, but whether the soul was in the saxophone or in the man himself was never plain.

  KING’S COLLEGE, CHRISTMINSTER, BRIDGER’S PLANET, A.D. 3417

  An old stone bridge.

  A primordial morning, full of mists and loomings. A river of mist flowed under the bridge, and a shore of mist came to meet it.

  The mist retreated before morning sunlight, and a stone church emerged, as if rising out of time. It was followed, at a distance, by a stone clock tower.

  Three wooden sculls, flying like spears across mist and water, shot out from under the bridge. Strong, hearty voices called out:

  “Stroke, slow the slide!”

  “Power three on five, boys! One, two…”

  “Three, hands down and away!”

  On the shore, shouts and cheers from people half visible:

  “Huzzah!”

  “Steady on, Harrow, that’s the way!”

  Somewhere in the fog, a finish line crossed. A climax of cheers, jeering.

  The fog lightened then, revealing a hundred or more boys in jackets and school ties. Among them, the robes and gray hair of professors.

  The assembly grew quiet at the crack of a distant pistol and craned their whole selves to see upriver, beyond the bridge, eyes on the next race.

  All eyes, as it happened, except for the eyes of Mr. Daniel Titpickle, vice dean of boys, who excused himself through the crowd until he reached the towering robes and frowning soul of William Hay, professor of theology, and tapped him on the arm.

  “What is it, Titpickle?” rumbled Hay.

  “It’s the Froosian Goose,” whispered Titpickle. “It’s gone missing from the Damocles Club again. There’s reason to suspect the Barleycorn Society.”

  Hay, the Barleycorns’ faculty adviser, raised a dread eyebrow. Something made him skeptical, although it was, in fact, traditional for the Barleycorns to make off with the Damocles Society’s sacred Froosian Goose, just as it was the Damocles Society’s duty, whenever possible, to kidnap the fabled Barleycorn Bones.

  The Froosian Goose was an ancient stuffed goose (shot by King Edward II of Earth, founder of the original King’s College), “a simbol of Fellowshippe” carried with solemnity and placed before the brothers at assembly. The Barleycorn Bones were, according to certain dark and secret lore, the skeleton of one Jonathan Poore, a famous priest and cannibal.

  The Froosian Goose had been captured once or twice a year since the society’s founding some hundred years ago. The bones had been stolen only once, and the brother with the misfortune to be asleep on guard that night, according to legend, lay buried under the dining commons in Oxbridge Hall.

  “If you’d come with me back to my office,” suggested Titpickle, “we can dial up Broode at security, and he can tell you—”

  “No need for that,” said Hay, raising a ministerial hand. “Not this time.”

  “But—” sputtered Titpickle.

  Hay silenced h
im with a dead eye.

  “It’s not my lads,” he said, “sinners though they are. Not this time. I’ll involve the police, if they need involving.”

  He dismissed Titpickle without word or gesture. A slight flexing of the atmosphere about his person was all it needed, and the dean slunk back the way he had come, missing the unexpected triumph in the second race—and by four seats!—of the brothers of the Round Church Circle.

  —

  Hay taught his classes like a dark lord. His more-serious students worshipped him. The dilettantes scowled behind his back, until they learned that what the older lads said was true: Hay had eyes in the back of his head, and ears everywhere.

  “Hay is diabolical,” his acolytes declared, “like all great religious minds.”

  Hay usually took his lunch in Washing Commons, but not today. Today, to his wife’s surprise, he went home and asked her to make him one of whatever she was making for Milo. Milo was their eight-year-old boy, a challenging young man who attended Sparrow, a primary prep school attached to the university. Most of the faculty brats went there. It was like a daycare facility where they read Chaucer.

  So Victoria—Hay’s wife—kissed him on the cheek and made him a meatloaf sandwich and fetched him a glass of milk. Then she went off about her housework, leaving Hay at the table alone, where he was sitting and waiting with his hands folded in his lap when Milo came banging through the door and dashing into the kitchen, all flying hair and shorts and class four tie.

  Hay would have preferred for his son to stop and address him with quiet awe, but he settled for a quick “Hey, Dad!” and a wave of one not-too-clean hand as his offspring shot past, out of the kitchen quite as suddenly as he’d come in.

  Hay terrified everyone on Bridger’s except for his own child, which confounded him. He didn’t know, of course, that his child was an ancient soul who had lived almost ten thousand lives, who had been everything from a king to a pollywog.

  Hay waited. He took a bite of his sandwich.

  He was rewarded with the boy’s reappearance. Tie loosened, shirt untucked, shoes jettisoned, but with his hands and face clean. He mounted to the table and, with something like good manners, addressed himself to his lunch.