Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

  “I almost killed people,” he said, shuddering. “I think I would have.”

  Nan pursed her lips. But when she spoke, Milo was surprised at how gentle she sounded.

  “You were making progress,” she said. “There’s something to be said for that. Let’s get you home.”

  She reached down and, with a surprisingly strong grip, helped him to his feet. He stood quivering for a minute, and they made their way along the river.

  “I couldn’t help but notice,” said Milo, pausing to throw up again, “that I have not become part of the Oversoul.”

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  They crossed a bridge and walked through town. Past fancy neighborhoods. Past suburbs.

  “I suppose,” said Milo, “I have to come back as a tapeworm now.”

  “Stop whining.”

  “Well, I didn’t accomplish anything.”

  Nan stopped. She gave his elbow a yank and turned him to face her.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “the value of a life is in what it doesn’t do. Imagine if Hitler had resisted the voice inside him and spent his life keeping bees? What a great life.”

  Milo considered this.

  “Driving into the ditch instead of hitting the bus,” said Nan, “is why you don’t have to come back as a tapeworm. Be satisfied with that. You didn’t reach Perfection and you didn’t win any prizes. Now, hush. Here we are.”

  They had arrived in the middle of a trailer park, in front of a rusty old Airstream with broken windows. Off to one side towered what had to be a thirty-year pile of beer cans.

  “Home sweet home,” said Nan.

  “Mmmm,” said Milo, entranced by the beer cans.

  They were all his mind had room for, just yet.

  —

  The inside of the trailer matched the outside. Stained chair, peeling walls, and some kind of smell, a combination of feet and banana peels.

  Milo didn’t care. He aimed for the bedroom at the rear, collapsed on the damp mattress, and zonked out.

  Time passed.

  He didn’t sleep well. Kept waking up if anything happened, like if a bird flew by or a leaf landed on the beer cans.

  He hid his head under a moldy pillow, but it didn’t help.

  It didn’t help because it wasn’t the light and the noises and things that were keeping him awake. It was Suzie.

  Don’t think about that! warned part of his brain.

  Last time, in the desert, he had listened to this part of himself. Now he gave it a violent shove.

  For eight thousand years, he had awakened by a river, and Suzie had been there, and everything was fine. Now everything was bullshit.

  He could feel the shape of her, where she would be if she were lying there with him. He would have zipped out to buy some dry sheets, of course, and would spray some afterlife version of Lysol. They would have made love and talked.

  Milo screamed into the pillow and got a mouthful of mildew.

  —

  They had fallen in love at a time like this. The day he died for the hundred-and-first time.

  For his first hundred lives, they had been friends. They had long talks; they watched TV together. They traded books and argued about desserts.

  “I’ll have some of yours,” she would say, not ordering her own dessert.

  And Milo would say, “No, you won’t,” and he was serious. He was territorial about his food. He loved food and wanted everything on his plate. And he would make her order her own. Friends do things like that to each other.

  Then everything changed.

  One day, he was down on Earth leading one of his less admirable lives: a Scottish rascal named Andrew Milo McCleod, who made a living stealing other men’s sheep. The sheriff had caught him and tied his hands behind him and was getting ready to cut off his head.

  Milo was looking around at the high hills and the mist, thinking about things. Maybe he could get his arms free and make a run. He thought about his chances of getting into Heaven and wished he’d bedded more women. He thought about Lord Donnel, who owned these hills and the sheep he’d stolen, and wished on him a pox that would make Swiss cheese of his private bits. That’s what he was thinking when a pale woman in a black dress appeared in front of him, saying, “Mind what you wish for, Milo.”

  And he’d tossed his head, winked his eye, and said, “Well, then, lass, I wish you’d give us a kiss.”

  She seemed amused. And she did kiss him. Kissed him good. It made him dizzy and made him wish to keep his head. He was going to suggest that she help him to his feet so he could make a run, at least. Get to the woods and—

  But she stepped aside to make room for the sheriff, who had sharpened his broadsword. He kept a string of human ears along his belt; that’s how nasty this sheriff was.

  “I love you,” said the woman.

  He loved her, too, Andy Milo McCleod did. Very much! Just as he loved the morning air and the low clouds and the sun that was hiding behind them and the sheep dotting the far hill and the sea and the rocks it crashed on, and how he’d love to kiss this girl again, whoever she was—

  The sword whistled.

  A sharp, electric jerk.

  The world rolled, then stopped, and he lay facedown in the grass, trying to blink the clover out of his eyes. Then the sleep shades came down.

  He found himself beside the pale girl, looking down at his disconnected head.

  His soul memory floated together until he knew who the girl was.

  “I am so, so, so, so sorry,” she said.

  “That was a good kiss,” he answered. He wanted to kiss her again. It was all he cared about.

  “Did that hurt?” she asked. “It looked like it hurt.”

  “It hurt more than you’d think,” he admitted, rubbing his neck. “I think it has something to do with, you know, cutting through the spine. It’s hard to describe.”

  She reached up and put her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him.

  Had she said “I love you” before his head came off?

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh, fuck it. I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time. In the afterlife, we have to be so careful, and I wanted everything to be just right.”

  Milo looked around at the head and the blood and the sheriff over there having a pee.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. He put his arms around her.

  And there was a repeat of the kiss, and they both knew they’d have to get going.

  “I know how to describe it,” he said. “When your head’s chopped off. It’s like hitting your funny bone super-hard, except it hurts like that all over your body for a second. Especially, you know, your neck.”

  “Thank you, love.”

  They kissed tenderly while the sheriff walked over and picked up the severed head by its long red locks and dumped it in an old barley sack.

  —

  After that morning in the Highlands, a lot of things had changed.

  They had begun sneaking around, for one thing. They weren’t sure it was necessary, but they didn’t want to be split up, so hey.

  That night, in the afterlife, Nan and Mama and Suzie had brought him to his house (a crappy old shack by the water-treatment plant), then gone off and left him. Then, beginning a long tradition, Suzie had come back in through the kitchen window, all dry leaves and cool wind. They held hands and walked to his rickety, crooked old bed and didn’t speak at all for the longest time.

  It was, and was not, what he’d expected.

  It was warm and perfect. They had always felt “at home” with each other. They felt even more at home now. Familiar, as if they’d been making love for centuries.

  It was not wildly supernatural. Milo had expected that making love to Death would involve weird fires and shadows and whisperings in the dark—perhaps even pain—but there was very little of that. Only the soft red glow in her eyes. The occasional drawing of blood. The sudden flutter and leathery warmth of being wrapped in wings, once or twice. And once he
r eyes had widened until they seemed to drink him in, and he felt himself falling and his whole self being drowned out by something larger, like a single note in a symphony, and he screamed and screamed—

  Other than that, it was all surprisingly normal.

  Afterward, they went out to dinner, and he let her share his dessert. A giant slice of peanut butter pie. Not because he wanted to but because being in love is different from being friends.

  Which was why, centuries later, Milo got up off his moldy bed and left his damp, trashy trailer without getting a wink of real sleep and went to find her, whether the cosmic God-soul liked it or not.

  What if she’s been sucked into the universal yin-yang? wondered a part of him. What if she no longer exists here, really?

  He told that part of himself to stick a pickle in it and kept putting one foot in front of the other.

  —

  He stopped at a sundries store for canned food and a can opener and some bottled water. He made a knapsack out of a pillowcase, slung it over his shoulder, and headed for—what?

  A red moon lurked in the trees.

  Milo walked until he came to a railroad crossing. There, he put down his knapsack and waited.

  A crow came and sat on the railroad sign for a while, then flew away again.

  A train howled from far off, then rumbled closer the way trains do, throbbing and groaning and slicing along the rails. It blasted its horn as it went past, and Milo reached up to keep his cap from flying off.

  He threw his knapsack into an open boxcar and jumped after it. Tumbled through dust and straw and rolled to a stop in the dark.

  He scooched back to the door and rode there awhile, in the wind, watching the moon until he fell asleep.

  —

  He woke up because something at the dark end of the boxcar made a noise.

  Animal?

  “Someone there?” he called.

  “Hell yes,” someone said. “A coupla someones.”

  “Well, hello.”

  “Hello yourself.”

  Milo peered into the dark until his eyes made out three forms seated against the back wall.

  Milo had ridden the rails before, down on Earth. If this were Earth, he’d take out his knife now and whittle a piece of wood. To look casual and cool, and to show he had a knife. But he didn’t have a knife, and this wasn’t Earth.

  Milo said, “I’m looking for somebody.”

  “Well, you found somebody.”

  “Somebody in particular,” said Milo. “Death.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” he added.

  Clickety-clack.

  “You’re talking about Suzie,” said one of the shapes, one of the voices. “You’re Milo. I heard o’ you.”

  “Ten thousand lives,” said another voice. “You’re like Superman.”

  “Well,” said Milo, “I don’t know about all that.”

  “I heard from a guy who heard from a guy that you threw an elephant up in the air and it never came back down.”

  Milo raised his eyebrows.

  “Superman or not,” said the first, “y’ain’t supposed to date them. That’s like the man who married the ocean. Ever heard of that?”

  “I’ve been warned.”

  Clickety-clack.

  “What’s it like?” asked one.

  Milo considered the question and found it fair.

  “Think about the most amazing girl you knew in high school,” he said. “Not your girlfriend or some other girl you hooked up with. I mean the one you never did hook up with. The one who haunted you and still haunts you. Know what I mean?”

  They knew. Every man knew.

  “Marsha Funderburg,” said one, in a quiet voice.

  “Wu Ping,” said another.

  “Vicki Tuscedero,” said a third.

  “Well,” said Milo, “it’s like that.”

  Outside the boxcar door, a few lights passing. Someone’s farm, probably.

  “Well,” said the first voice after a while, “ain’t seen her. Sorry.”

  The train slowed. Milo gathered up his knapsack and steadied himself against the door. When it slowed a bit more, he thought, he’d jump.

  “Is it true,” one of the shadowmen asked, “there’s a place where you step off a sidewalk and turn into nothing?”

  “It’s true,” answered Milo.

  Click. Clack. Slower.

  Lights ahead. Town.

  He jumped.

  —

  He walked into the town and found the police station.

  Not exactly a police station, per se. But most towns and cities had a place where you could go if you needed help, and this town had a nice one. A brick building right downtown, with a cement eagle over the door.

  Milo found a tired-looking sergeant sitting behind a tall desk.

  “Hi,” said the sergeant, in a friendly-enough tone for the middle of the night.

  Milo said, “Hi. I’m looking for someone.”

  “The someone got a name?”

  Milo told him the name.

  The sergeant appeared to freeze for a second. Then he leaned forward and surveyed Milo like a schoolmaster.

  “That would make you Milo, I gather?”

  Shit. “That’s right,” he said.

  “Well, it shouldn’t really surprise you that I have instructions not to tell you anything. In fact, the instructions I have say that if you show up asking about Ms. Suzie, I’m to recommend you find some other way to focus your energies. There’s something of a tone to the message, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I’m also supposed to ask you to wait here,” said the sergeant, “if it’s not inconvenient, until—”

  Milo was already gone.

  —

  He didn’t go far. Just a few blocks down, close to the railroad, where he stretched out on a park bench for a while and tried to sleep.

  Woke up at some hour in the night with that feeling we all get of having just missed someone calling our name. He sat up and listened.

  A breeze circled his bench. Shadows teased his eye.

  Nothing. Across the park, a cat or a possum darted through the pool of a streetlamp.

  Unable to get back to sleep, he shouldered his sack and walked back to the railroad tracks.

  —

  “Haunted? What do you mean, ‘haunted’?”

  Milo sat in the middle of a crowded boxcar on a fast train, rocking and clacking. Sometimes when a train was well populated, it could become almost like a party. This one had become a great conversation, illuminated by flashlights and old-time lanterns, fueled by a whiskey jug making its rounds and an enormous knapsack full of Cajun hot fries.

  Someone, an old man in gumboots, had said there were parts of the road that were haunted.

  “How can anything here be haunted?” asked a woman with a henna tattoo across her forehead. “It’s the afterlife.”

  “You can die in the afterlife,” said the old man, who was curious in his own right, just for being an old man. Everyone up here was youngish. Weren’t they?

  Yeah, sure. Just like everyone was happy, and eager to get born again, and couldn’t wait to join the Oversoul.

  “If you die in the afterlife,” asked a number of people, “where do you go?”

  The old man explained that you go Nowhere.

  “But you might take a while going,” he said.

  —

  Milo shuddered.

  He slipped off the train at moonrise, with the jug tucked under his jacket, and drank his way down the road. Some road in the middle of nowhere. A stray dog joined him for a while.

  —

  His days and nights became a blur of towns and conversations.

  “Death? The Death? She came for me, is all I know.”

  “I’m not allowed to tell you anything, friend. There’s a message here—”

  Sometimes he stuck out his thumb, and sometimes he’d catch a ride.

  Sometimes
he’d get a lecture or a cautionary tale.

  The guy who tried to date the Northern Lights. The gal who loved the Jet Stream.

  Everywhere, he kept thinking he’d walk into a bus station and find her selling magazines. Maybe she’d be on the bus itself, so he rode the bus sometimes, searching faces.

  Sometimes he was recognized. He was, after all, famously old and wise, and famously in deep shit.

  “Is it true,” they asked, “about the place that goes Nowhere? Is it like a tunnel? Is it a stormy place or, like, a big hand that reaches down and grabs you?”

  “It’s just a sidewalk,” he told them.

  He wandered through nights and days, and in and out of weeks, and almost over a year.

  He got skinny, like a stick. He learned not to be hungry except when he had to be.

  He began to smell musky, like an animal.

  He went from living “up there,” as some would say, and learned to live “down here.”

  He worked at a grain elevator for a time, earning some food and a warm bed. Then the air began to feel as if it might snow in a week or two. Maybe he should head south.

  He went south until he smelled the salt and the sea islands, but he still felt cold. Felt sort of thin, and it occurred to him maybe it wasn’t the weather or the season.

  He was riding atop a long, rusty train under a full moon when it occurred to him. He had made himself a fire—just a little hobo fire, a stick or two—and was trying to warm himself against the slipstream when he noticed something that startled him.

  He could see the fire through his hand.

  He jerked and said, “Fuck me!” and jammed his hand into his coat pocket.

  Later, when he’d got up the nerve, he raised his hand against the moon, and…

  “Fuck me,” he whispered.

  The road was haunted. By him.

  As if a switch had been flipped, he saw them all along the old train, like riders on a mythical snake. The moonlight shone through them, but it ran over them like water, too, and made them visible.

  Some of them sat; others stood. All stared ahead but with a hollow disinterest in where the train was actually going. Many of them had allowed themselves to age, leaning like old barns. Many of them had fires, like him. None of them looked warm.

  A cross-breeze caught Milo. A stream of milder cold, bearing dry leaves.