“Try what?” he croaked.
“Try what?” Now she was pissed. “Are you kidding me? What’s wrong with you, you selfish dumbass? Try and be perfect! Try something! What’s the coolest life you’ve ever lived? Maybe not cool, maybe that’s not the word, but—”
“Captain Gworkon,” said Milo.
“Really? Okay. Well, good choice, I guess. Captain Gworkon certainly wouldn’t have sat here in the afterlife, rotting away in front of his own reflection. He would have gone back and spent another lifetime—”
“Juggling,” said Milo.
Mama’s grip tightened on his ankle.
“Dammit, Milo, if—”
“I’m kidding. Fighting evil. He would have gone back and spent everything he had fighting evil.”
He stood up and started unwinding his robes. Behind him, Satan stood, too.
Why not? Being born was a way of getting lost, too, wasn’t it?
“Go,” said Mama. “Fight evil. Do it perfectly. Then come back and we’ll see.”
Bullshit, thought Milo.
But he forced himself. He was, after all, the veteran of half a million Monday mornings. It’s something a wise man or a wise woman knows how to do: shake off your self-pity and your obsession, and put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.
And you wade into the dark desert pool a little way and sort through the lives you see. And just when you’re about to make yourself dive in, there’s a dumb, sad honk! from the riverbank, and you look and there’s that animal, that gross, hateful animal that loves you and maybe thinks you’re a girl camel in disguise. And it has that look animals get when they don’t know if you’re coming back or not.
And you’ve had enough dogs and been enough dogs to know that it doesn’t help when you go back and say goodbye, but you do it, anyway. And the animal drools on you and pants and sweats, and its heart breaks, and there are hearts breaking all over the place like popcorn in this big stupid desert. And you’re bitter. And you feel sorry for yourself, and that’s what’s on your mind when you dive in and the water takes you down and makes you forget all, all except the singularity of You, the escape pod of your soul, moving on and starting over for the nine thousand nine hundred ninety-eighth time in a row.
She faded a little more each day.
She could see the sun through her hand quite clearly now. Like a bright red tattoo.
Shit, thought Suzie.
Sooner than she liked, she would vanish completely.
How did she feel about that? It depended on the moment. It depended, specifically, on her frustration level. Some days she was perfectly happy to get canceled out and not have to deal with anything anymore. Other days she had a gritty kind of hope. Milo would find her, or she would find him. The universe would decide she was right after all…that a little imbalance wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
She wandered.
She blew from place to place, leaves and wind. Sometimes she let the currents of the afterlife just take her. She materialized on shores and in restaurants. In parks and on boats and in kitchens and recycling centers.
The universe didn’t seem to think she was serious about quitting her job; it took her to the bedside of a dying Nigerian king, once.
“I told you,” she said. “I quit.”
The universe flexed its boa. It growled and creaked around her and around the Nigerian king.
“If you and the universe would take your quarrel elsewhere,” sighed the king, “I would be most grateful, as I am engaged in a difficult transformation.”
Wind and shadows. Suzie hit the road.
Was Milo even here? Or was he down there, on some planet, living one of his final lives?
Her instincts seemed to take her away from busy places, out onto the fringes. The places people went when they were tired, or running from something, or looking for something.
Once, she passed through a place where Milo had been. She could feel him there, like a troubled footprint in the sand. Gone now. Leaving behind a catastrophically unpleasant camel.
Dust and wind and faraway places.
Humans had a thing for these kind of places, she had learned. More than any other creature, they needed sometimes to simply flee. To reduce themselves to zero and make something new out of nothing.
She found herself thinking of someone she had known once. A friend she’d had. A human, besides Milo, who might have understood her a little. A man who had gotten her into the biggest fight of her life.
—
His name was Francesco. He lived in Italy.
Francesco had a rich family, and gorgeous surroundings, and was handsome and smart and fashionable. He spent his early years having a hell of a good time, drinking and singing and getting laid with his friends. Then one day it became necessary for them all to go off to war. Their families dressed them in armor and bought them horses and sent them off singing and laughing and flying colorful banners, and almost right away they were captured and tossed in a foreign prison.
This was kind of embarrassing, but the young friends tried to make the most of it, singing songs and telling stories, seeing who could kill the most rats or eat the most bugs, and eventually the war ended and they went home, still singing.
Francesco’s father exclaimed, “Bentornato, figlio!” and kissed him and put him to work in the family business, buying and selling fashionable clothes.
Maybe that’s what caused Francesco to get sick.
Something sure did. In fact, they thought he had died and draped a shroud over him. Suzie was about to kiss his forehead and send his soul off to the afterlife, when he suddenly sat up and said, “Gesù, non so cosa darei per una ciotola di zuppa,” which means, “Jesus, what I wouldn’t give for a bowl of soup.”
This happened sometimes. Ordinarily, Suzie would have flown away home, but something about the young man intrigued her. There was a light about him, some madness or goodness set free by the illness.
Indeed, as he recovered, it seemed Francesco had gone crazy. He kept skipping work, spending his days out in the meadows and woods, chasing birds and skinny-dipping in streams and trying to pet the deer. His friends and neighbors laughed and laughed, but Francesco only laughed back, took off all his clothes, and walked stark naked out of town. He went to live in the ruins of a stone chapel out in the wilderness, eating berries and nuts and doing as he pleased.
“Questo è folle!” gasped the townspeople. “You can’t just go around being happy and doing whatever you like!” Some of them even went out to the wilderness to tell him so.
Francesco didn’t answer them with words. He just kept right on being happy, right in front of their faces. This made some of his visitors angry, and they went home and kicked things around the house. A few of them, however, decided to stay. By and by, a little community formed: a group of the nicest people you ever met, wearing rags and living on berries, fixing up the old chapel stone by stone. Animals even started coming around. Birds and deer and squirrels and frogs and toads and such.
Suzie couldn’t believe it. Humans usually had some weird addiction to suffering and toil. These freaks, insisting on simplicity and happiness, reminded her a bit of Milo (currently off living a life as a Japanese bunny rabbit). If they weren’t careful, one of two things was bound to happen. One: They would spread their happiness to others and make the world a better place. Or two: They would make people uncomfortable and get burned at the stake.
Suzie even put on a human form and warned Francesco about this. “Happiness scares the crap out of people,” she told him.
He only smiled and went on doing what he was doing.
Something happened then, while they were talking.
They saw each other. Really saw each other.
Francesco saw who she was. He looked surprised to discover Death hanging around his little chapel. But he wasn’t upset. Death was part of nature. Death was a door. She was also, apparently, not bad-looking.
And Suzie saw waaaaay into Francesco
. She saw that he would become a famous example of peace and goodness and make the world a better place. It was terribly important that he continue what he was doing, so that these things could come to pass.
Suzie saw something else, too. Something bad.
Francesco was still sick and didn’t know it. The sickness was sleeping inside him, and very soon it would wake up and kill him. She saw it the way you sometimes see a shadow down in the water.
She decided to not let it happen.
She found some rags to wear and pitched in helping to fix the chapel.
Her feet and hands grew rough. She tried to pet the animals, but they recognized her and kept their distance.
Francesco walked to Rome (with no shoes on) and had a talk with the pope, and the pope liked him and blessed him, and after that more people started coming to the chapel. Not to laugh or be uncomfortable but to see and learn.
Not long after that, the sickness inside Francesco bloomed and grew, and Suzie felt the urge to kiss him on the forehead and make him be dead. But she didn’t.
She didn’t make the same mistake she’d made with the whale, though. Didn’t let his soul escape and then try to stuff it back inside. She focused on the shadow instead. Stuffed it back under whatever interior anatomical rock it had been hiding and told it to stay put.
Francesco was down with the sniffles for a day, but that was the worst of it. By evening he was well enough to take some of his disciples out to look for lepers to feed.
There would, Suzie sensed, be hell to pay.
Sure enough, about a week later, she was out in the meadow looking for a good keystone to anchor the chapel door when she saw a tall, pale figure riding down out of the woods.
One of the other Deaths. He called himself Zaazeemozogmelaffello-Ba-Tremuloso-Ba-Jalophonso-Umbertoaawiigsheetossalavagredorro-Ba.
“Well?” said this universal slice, approaching Suzie. “Where is he?”
Suzie had just found an especially likely looking pile of rocks. She picked up a good one and held it in a way that, she hoped, looked mildly threatening.
“Where is who?” (She tried to look innocent, as well.)
The other Death just looked disgusted and turned to ride on toward the chapel.
“You can’t have him,” Suzie called out. She gripped the stone harder. She’d throw it if she had to.
He stopped.
“Suzie,” he said. “What’s going on? You know this isn’t how it works.”
She nodded.
“Still,” she said.
He looked uncertain and climbed down off his horse.
“What do you propose?” he asked. “And would you put the stone down, please? We both know you’re not going to throw it at me.”
She dropped the stone.
“He’s important,” she said.
“I’m sure he is. I’m sorry. This is how it balances out.”
“Sometimes the balance is wrong.”
“That’s not for you to say.”
Suzie’s eyes flared.
“I’ve decided that it is for me to say,” she told him. “How do you like them apples?”
“Apples?”
She had an idea. “You can have him,” she said, “if you beat me at a game.”
“Like what?” (Death was a sucker for a challenge. They all were.)
She reached into her pockets and drew out two little green apples.
“We throw these apples,” she said. “Whoever’s apple goes farther gets to have their way.”
He looked puzzled and wary.
“That’s not really a game,” he said. “As such.”
She tossed him one of the apples and said, “One.”
“As you wish,” he said.
“Two,” said Suzie, and “Three!” and they both threw as hard as they could, and a crow came swooping down out of the air and grabbed Suzie’s apple and carried it off over the trees, out of sight.
The other apple landed in an old posthole, at a respectable distance.
“That doesn’t count,” Zaazeem-etc.-Ba complained.
But he got back on his horse and rode away, embarrassed by the way he’d been tricked.
Suzie didn’t tell Francesco what had happened, just as she hadn’t told him the whole truth about his bout with the sniffles.
She also stayed up all night watching the door, in case Zaazeem-Ba tried to sneak in and take Francesco in the dark. But he didn’t.
The years passed. Summer and winter gave way to each other, in turn. People came to the chapel to watch and help. Some of them started their own communities in other places. Suzie finally got the animals to let her pet them. Some of them died, but they seemed, overall, to sense that this was okay.
Every now and then, one of Suzie’s colleagues would come riding across the meadow (or whirling on the wind or falling with the rain or creeping with the twilight), and she would challenge them. And she managed to send them away, by hook or by crook.
Until, finally, the dark thing inside Francesco came out from under its rock and wouldn’t go back, no matter what she did. He caught the sniffles, and his eyes grew hollow. Suzie pushed at him and pulled and fed him certain things and even yelled a little, but nothing was working.
When parts of him began to turn black, Francesco looked up at her and said, “Suzie, enough.”
He was right.
She kissed him on the head and sat there holding his hand while he dimmed and went out and rose up and became one with the cosmic hoo-ha.
Suzie closed his dead eyes and gave the cosmic hoo-ha a taste of the old middle finger.
—
Now, centuries later, Suzie thought about Francesco often. A lot of people did.
She thought about him whenever she felt particularly lost out there on the edge of things. Wandering the moors, the empty roads. Sometimes looking for Milo, sometimes not. Too tired and angry to be happy.
Sometimes fellow drifters would look at her with the long, long stare they all shared and ask where she was headed.
“I’m just trying to avoid the universe,” she would answer.
Captain Gworkon.
Milo had fought against evil in many lives, but Captain G was the most conspicuous.
It happened in what most people would think of as the future. He won a galaxy-wide lottery and spent the whole bundle on bionic surgeries. He had himself built into a flying atomic cyborg, descended on the fortresses of powerful space pirates, and towed them to justice in chains.
Crime in the fourth galactic arm dropped off by 50 percent.
This was not, to his surprise, entirely appreciated.
“You saved us from the bad guys,” a grad student once said to him. “Who’s going to save us from you?”
He didn’t let her question bother him. People like that usually thought differently when their own lives were threatened.
Two nights later, he saved the same grad student from a pack of wild synthetic pig-dogs.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” she said, kissing his metal cheek. “It was a failure of imagination.”
“Most failures are,” he answered. “No prob.”
—
Evil.
Sometimes it was something that stood up and announced itself clearly. Like the times when he was born a Muslim, and the Christians were evil, and the times he was born Christian, and the Muslims were evil. He thanked God, in those lives, for making it so obvious.
—
Other times, it was still obvious but harder to fight. Like the time he was a laborer and signed up to help build a tunnel under the Crookshank River. And sometimes the air locks failed and the tunnel flooded and men drowned. But if you complained about safety, thugs would come into camp at night, looking for you, and say how a man who fit your description had broken into some houses, and they’d have witnesses. And away you’d go, and the message was to keep quiet and take your chances and suck it up.
Milo spoke up and wouldn’t stop, even when they came for
him. He had an accident in jail and died spitting blood.
—
Sometimes, the fight took place in the most commonplace of ways.
In the twenty-first century, they made it illegal to buy cheap prescription drugs online. The pharmaceutical companies paid lawmakers to keep it that way, and medical expenses were bankrupting people, killing people. Milo ignored these bullies, and bought whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted, and fought evil that way.
Sometimes superheroes are regular people, and there are millions of them, typing away at their keyboards.
—
Many centuries ago, Milo led a thousand peasants in a protest. They marched up to the lord’s castle and demanded lower taxes. They didn’t have enough to eat.
The lord got up from his turkey dinner and ordered twenty soldiers to go up on the walls and fire some arrows at the peasants.
Ten peasants fell down amid the wheat and the wildflowers and died.
The nine hundred ninety remaining peasants turned around and ran like hell.
“What’s wrong with you people?” Milo screamed after them. He tossed rocks at their retreating backs. “There are so many of you and about forty of them!”
It was like watching a horse get bossed around by a horsefly.
—
Milo was a saxophone player called Mookie Underwood, and he walked across a bridge into Selma, Alabama, with hundreds of other men and women. On the other side of the bridge, policemen waited with clubs.
“Turn back,” called the policemen.
The marchers didn’t turn back.
The cops clubbed them down and beat them.
The marchers ran and were chased and horribly beaten.
Cameras flashed. Cameras rolled. All around the world, people saw.
“Let them watch,” Mookie choked through his own blood. “Let them see. It’s their ass, too.”
—
Fighting evil was often a secret undertaking.
As a shoemaker named Milosevic Kocevar, he had defied the Waffen-SS by hiding books beneath his floorboards. Some in the resistance shot at soldiers, some destroyed railroads, others hid books and paintings and kept them out of Nazi hands.
Milosevic, for his part, preserved a rare library of Polish pornography. When the war came to an end, he returned it to the museum, which hid it away with secret pleasure. To this day, you have to ask to see it.
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