And it worked, in a way.
There never was such a moment, after all. If you were supposed to be in the moment, this was the one, all right. There was this one idea going out to all the people on all the planets that maybe you couldn’t get people to stop being predators, but you could get them to stop being prey. That from now on there would be this great big peaceful future, and either it was going to be or not be, depending on what people did with this one moment, the whole future waiting on this one breathless moment, like an elephant on the head of a pin. Maybe things will change after this, and we can all stop living the same idiotic greedy mistakes over and over, lifetime after lifetime, and finally evolve into the kind of people who insist on living well—
“No, no!” you growl, because even though these are worthy thoughts, they are not meditating, and just this one damn time—
But it can’t be helped, because it’s not just your head, is it? It’s the head and soul of all the voices of all your ten thousand lives and eight thousand years and all their pasts and futures, all the cavemen and race-car drivers and milkmaids with pale cheeks, all the spacemen, crickets, economists, and witches. The voices are full of the things people are full of, the things they will carry with them into whatever future takes shape, things like waffles and hard work and things you hope no one finds out. Things you fear, and things that defeat you, like spiders and children and forgetting to set the clock. Gothic shadows like the Hook Man, escaped and haunting the woods. Things like barbarians and taxes and red and blue lights in the rearview mirror and the feeling that’s always there, like a haunting, the most human thing of all: the feeling you forgot something, forgot something, left something undone. The voices in your head, your thousands of years and lives, talk about Perfections you have known, like the time you were catapulted over the walls at Vienna, the time you left the first footprint on the moon, the time you dove in and saved Stacey Crabtree’s little girl from drowning, the time you played a violin note that broke the stained glass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Troy, Michigan. The voices talk about the masks you wear, like the wife mask and the husband mask and the mask where you pretend you know what you’re doing and the festival mask and the masks of ennui and joy. They talk about the thing behind the mask, the greatest and most mysterious thing of all, the source and object of all fears and hates and lives, the last thing we see and know before we die, which ties it all up in a nice glowing bow of Knowing, and Silence, and Peace.
Except it hardly ever works that way, including Now, and you look at Suzie and she looks at you in those moments before the great big thing happens and the end comes, and you kind of fall together, laughing at each other for trying to be so serious, laughing for the same reason you do most things, which is a reason you still don’t know, and neither do wise men, moo cows, or Death.
They did not wake up beside the river.
As Milo’s soul memory came flooding back, he realized that this was unusual and a bad sign. He remembered waking up in the well last time.
No flowers, and no sunshine.
Just dark.
“Are you kidding me?” said Milo. “What, are they still mad about the whole fugitive thing?”
Hello? Where was Suzie?
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” came Suzie’s voice. She sounded frightened, uncertain, which wasn’t surprising. She had never died before.
There she was, on his left, grasping her head, looking sort of wild.
He took one of her hands and held it, waiting.
“We died!” she gasped. “I died! Wow. Wow. I used to be Death. I’m like a goddess. Omigod omigod omigod.”
It was a tall order. Most people got to the afterlife and remembered that they’d once been truck drivers or ostriches.
“We’re supposed to wake up by the river,” she said. “That’s where I always met you. Why aren’t we by the river?”
“They’re still mad about the whole fugitive thing. Maybe. Just a guess.”
As their surroundings came into focus, Milo saw that they stood in the middle of a library of some kind. Paneled in dark wood. A fireplace with a sculpted fox over the keystone. Leather chairs. A low table in the shape of a sea chest.
“Maybe it’ll be okay,” Milo ventured. He gave her hand a squeeze.
Suzie shrugged. “Maybe for you. It was like a betrayal, going off and doing what I did. Universals aren’t supposed to live. We’re supposed to watch people live and give them shit about it.”
Something was going on outside the little library. There was light of a sort, filtered through shuttered, deep-set windows. And voices…a dim murmur. Not unlike the sound of a crowd gathered on the other side of heavy walls. Not unlike the mob that had tried to carry him to the chopping block last time.
“I don’t suppose you have any of your cosmic powers left?” he said. “You could just whoosh us out of here, or…”
Suzie flexed her fingers. Blinked her eyes.
“No,” she said. “Nothing.”
Milo’s eyes widened then. Suzie was—
“Solid!” he yelled, grabbing her up and squeezing her. “You’re solid! You’re not fading!”
“I noticed that,” she said. “Neither are you. I don’t know what it means.”
Neither did Milo, now that he considered it. But if it meant that she wasn’t going to fade into oblivion, that was good. Is that what it meant?
A door at the end of a hall flew open, and Mama came charging in, between the leather chairs. Her great arms and mighty hands reached out.
Mama wrapped Milo up like a boa constrictor. He couldn’t breathe.
Suzie squirmed and fought beside him; Mama had captured them both.
They sank into her as if she were a warm, oozy version of the Europan Sea.
“I was wrong,” he heard Mama say. “I should have understood what you did with the Buddha. And then you went down and taught one of the most powerful lessons in history. Well done.”
Suzie’s grip tightened on Milo’s hand.
Had they done it? Had they been successful?
“Yes,” said Mama. She sprayed tears. Sprayed.
“You mean…”
“Perfection.”
Suzie gasped. Relief flooded through Milo, and he had to clench up to keep from peeing.
Nan’s voice came down the hall from another room.
“Congratulations,” she croaked. A couple of her cats wandered into the library.
“Took you long enough,” she added.
—
“Everyone’s waiting,” said Mama, spreading her arms again and ushering them toward a set of mighty oaken doors. “And I do mean everyone. You might even have a bigger crowd than the Buddha, believe it or not. You’re the oldest human soul ever, Milo. And, Suzie—if I can get used to calling you that—you’re a real original. In fact, no one’s really sure what’s going to happen with you. I mean, you came from the universal mind but not as a human, and now here you are going back, after being human—”
“I’ll risk it,” said Suzie. “It beats the alternative.”
Milo found himself slightly faint and wobbly. It was too much to understand. In a way, it was like a graduation, except not. It was like…he didn’t know what it was like.
Nan’s voice, behind him.
“I promise you,” she said, her voice low and warm, the voice of a mother or grandmother, “there is nothing on the other side of the Sun Door but joy and wholeness. You’ll see.”
She gave Milo a hug from behind. It was like being hugged by a well-meaning twig.
He believed her.
“About that,” said Suzie. “About the Sun Door.”
On the other side, the crowd hummed and roared.
Mama and Nan both said, “Mmm-hmm?”
“We’re going through together.”
Mama and Nan looked at each other. Conferred silently. Shrugged.
“You can try it,” said Nan. “It’s not how it’s done. In the Oversoul, ev
eryone’s together, see—”
“We’re not asking,” said Milo.
Nan and Mama looked a little nervous, but they nodded.
Milo took Suzie’s hand, and they faced the double doors together.
The doors swung wide. Light flooded in, blinding them. Shouting and screaming deafened them.
There was nothing they could do but shuffle along as Mama, like a pillowy tugboat, herded them out into pandemonium.
Fingers touched them as they walked. Mama pushed. The multitude squeezed them along like peas in a tube of toothpaste.
Like the Buddha’s well-wishers, they were everywhere. The hill and the floodplain, the bridge—all seethed and crawled with waving, with singing, with colors and banners. In the town beyond, they stood on rooftops. Zeppelins and balloons floated and whirred.
They were in the river, too. Where it was shallow enough, they waded and stood, applauding, cheering. They were joyful, purely joyful, and it was like a tangible thing. They were joyful because they looked at the wonderful thing happening to Milo, to Suzie, and knew it would be their day someday.
The air above the river warped and shivered, as if an invisible someone had struck a great invisible gong. Shock waves of light and joy radiated, forming something like a tunnel.
They reached the riverbank and splashed through the shallows.
Suzie grasped Milo’s shoulder, and their eyes locked. They slipped arms around each other, trusting in the crowd to move them in the right direction.
Suzie, wild-eyed, didn’t speak. Milo leaned in to kiss her, saw her eyes close and her lips part—
The door enfolded them, drew them in.
They were two swimmers in a flood. Milo felt their souls spreading out like peanut butter. It was perfect. Even sort of sexual, in a way. They flowed through each other, leaning in for a long, hard, wet kiss, and swam through the Oversoul together.
Together.
For about three seconds.
Imagine if you were an earthworm.
Imagine that you have an earthworm girlfriend, and the two of you have been together as long as your worm brains can remember. You love each other in a crazy, primitive, soulmate kind of way. You can’t even think what it would be like without her. You can barely think at all.
Then one day you wake up and you have turned into a human.
You are huge, like a human, and understand all the things humans understand. You have a beer belly and a New York Rangers cap. Holy shit! Yesterday all you knew about was crawling in the dirt. Today you have a bachelor’s degree in sports marketing. Today you understand about taxes and the solar system. You read and write Spanish and English. You have a best friend, an ex-wife, and a kid you see on weekends. You have been to Brazil and Europe, which, to an earthworm, would be like visiting distant galaxies, except that the very idea of “galaxies” would melt an earthworm’s mind.
Do you think you’d be all heartbroken about losing your earthworm girlfriend? Your earthworm self?
You wouldn’t.
Actually, here’s the thing: You and your worm girlfriend are actually both in there, smooshed together in your vast new brain. You and a trillion other worms.
You do not think about being trillions of separate earthworms. Why would you? You move ahead with being your new, awesome, ancient self.
—
Everything makes sense to you now.
Time. Gravity. Which fork to use. Zippers. Infinite dimensions. Tacos.
It’s all part of a dream you are having.
A billion years pass.
Or they would, if time weren’t just part of the dream.
So you dream a billion years. What’s the difference?
The billion years pass like a great sleeping ocean.
—
And then one day you dream that you are an old soul named Milo, standing knee-deep in a river, holding hands with an old soul named Suzie.
Everything comes back around. Everything.
—
You forget that it is a dream.
And you pick up where you left off, with a long, deep kiss.
(You remember understanding gravity and Chinese, but it’s fading.)
After a while, you walk out into the river, and let it take you, and give way to the weirdness of being born.
You hold hands. Nothing tries to pull you apart.
You hang together in the water, between lives and worlds. The river carries you, time enfolds you, and catfish swim through you.
They came back separately, somewhat back in time, and didn’t meet until they were practically adults.
Age sixteen found Suzie working as a cleaning lady at St. Thomas’s Cathedral, in Sauvignon. One night she heard strange noises from inside the crypt of poor old Archbishop Guilliaume. Swallowing her fear, she pried the lid loose and found a handsome—if somewhat dusty—young man crouched inside.
“Well!” sighed the young man. “I can breathe again!”
They fell in love at once. Otherwise he may not have confessed to her that he had jarred the lid shut while attempting to rob old Guilliaume’s grave, and she might not have suggested that he go ahead and rob the eighteen other honored crypts in the cathedral and that they run off together before dawn and make a life for themselves in the South of France.
“Done!” said the young man, and he gave her a splendid, stirring kiss.
It was an oddly full kiss, in its way. Full of strange knowings and mysteries.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Milo.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Suzie. “That was one hell of a kiss!”
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1882
Milo Falkner and Suzanne Cobb met on a sleigh ride, at Milo’s birthday party, the year they both turned ten. They didn’t hold hands right away, but they smiled at each other a time or two and blushed.
Milo’s father (a notorious rakehell) was running on strong homemade beer that night, making free with the whip, and turning left over the dangerous end of Sand Lake, where the ice was often thin.
Snap! Once or twice, the lake protested. Bang! Like a gunshot.
Which was, finally, the cue for young Milo and Suzie to clasp their mittens together.
The sleigh reached shore. They still held hands, blooming inside like candles.
Suzie, upon reporting the sleigh ride to her parents, was forbidden to have anything more to do with Milo and “that whole family of misbegotten reprobates,” all born, it was said around the county, with snakes for umbilical cords.
He wrote her a letter; it was intercepted. She wrote him a letter, which was also intercepted, and which earned her a week of copying Bible lessons.
Then, horror: Suzie fell ill, the way children in those days were prone to do. She paled and evaporated until, at last, when she said, “Milo,” ever so softly and cried a single tear, her father had him sent for.
And Milo was brought up to sit with her and to talk to her about things. Swimming. Frogs. How he liked books and would teach her to hunt ducks.
“Not ducks,” she breathed. “I love ducks.”
“Geese, then,” he said.
And she lived.
Her father, fearing the worst, had already bought her a grave plot over at Grassby’s and, being a practical sort, had gone ahead and kept it. In the years that followed Suzie’s recovery, she and Milo sometimes took picnics there.
—
On a future planet, a millennium away, Milo and Suzie came back as responsible parents and taught their children the most famous story in all the interstellar colonies: the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah and the Martyrs of Europa.
They told how the martyrs had died to broadcast awful truths about the ancient, greedy cartels. They told how miners and engineers all over the solar system followed their example and refused to work, even though some of them became martyrs, too, before the cartels fell apart.
All good parents taught their kids this same lesson: If everyone agreed to suffer pain or death rather than be treated unjustly, greedy people
could never again gain power.
“We’ve had fifty generations of justice now,” they told the children. “Don’t be the generation that blows it.”
“We won’t,” said Shaggy and Little Red Corvette.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1892
The year he was to have begun law school, Milo became the first person to drive a motor vehicle across Petoskey County. The vehicle itself was a great, noisy thing, mostly a clumsy steel boiler with a smokestack on it. Newspapermen followed (or outpaced him) on horseback, telegraphing dispatches as fate permitted. Sometimes Milo drove for miles without incident or delay. Other times, he spent hours making repairs.
After a journey of fifteen days, Milo pulled up just after eight o’clock in the evening at Toastley Hall, a dormitory at Casper Teaching College, marched up to the chaperone’s desk, and asked that his sweetheart, Miss Suzanne Cobb, be sent down, in order that he might kiss her for the photographers.
“No,” said the chaperone, a sour and suspicious person who, in a former life, had been a cornstalk. “Curfew is strictly seven-fifty, and no gentlemen after six.”
Milo said, “Please.”
He was refused again, and the exchange escalated, until the newspapermen observed Milo—with an unholy look in his eye—carrying the chaperone out of the dormitory, across a manicured yard, and down a gentle hill, to dump her with a noisy splash into a convenient willow-shrouded golf pond.
This proved controversial. Milo was fined by local authorities and excused from his law school for the space of one year. He took work as a grave digger at the Blue Creek Cemetery.
Suzie, visiting her beloved in the graveyard one summer lunchtime, only remarked, “I’d have thrown that old pea-wit in the pond myself back in September, if I wasn’t afraid of hurting the ducks.”
Then she gave him a kiss, there between two open graves. A good kiss, too. The kind it’s nice to give—deliciously, thrillingly so!—but not at all polite to talk about.
—
They came back as a couple who met in Paris between wars. Milo had a movie camera, and she had a brace of performing birds.
Reincarnation Blues Page 34