Milo shot into the afterlife as if sprayed from a fire hose.
Everywhere, water crashed and surged. The river convulsed as if a universal storm sewer had backed up. That’s what happens when tons of people die all at once. The afterlife can burst like a dam.
Milo found himself in a tumbling river full of struggling bodies and crying voices. Voices disappointed that they had just endured the end of the world and got to the afterlife, and now that appeared to be ending, too.
Suzie must be awfully busy, he thought.
A day passed. Now and then a house floated by, and people climbed on it. Occasionally, there would be an island of some kind, and the newly dead would crowd over it and overwhelm it.
Milo floated and relaxed.
The river passing between worlds wasn’t like other waters. You couldn’t drown in it. It would, if you let it, carry you along like a leaf or a water bug. It would hold you like a reflection.
Milo let it.
He even, after a time, allowed himself to sink and take root in the bottom muck, where he swayed like seaweed, sleeping.
She swam down and pulled him like a cattail, raising mud in a boiling cloud.
Half awake, he protested like a sleepy child.
They sat on the shore together, dripping and holding hands. As his brain de-fuzzed, Milo noted that the river had gotten more or less back to normal. The shrieking crowds were gone. Flotsam and dreck littered the trees and a nearby park, but on the whole the crisis seemed to have passed.
Milo wondered how long the adjustment had taken.
“It’s been a week,” Suzie whispered.
“I was in the river for a week?”
She pressed a finger against his lips.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I assume you don’t think I was sitting around all that time with my thumb up my ass. Listen: Almost everyone in the world died.”
“Peace,” said Milo. “I get it. I was there.”
She was so, so tired. Now that his eyes cleared, he could see it in the color of her skin, which had gone colorless and translucent.
She crawled like a cat onto his lap, and now it was her turn to sleep.
They both woke up sort of sprawled in the mud. Some kind of large shadow hovered over them and was tickling Milo’s lip with a long, dry weed.
He batted at the weed, sitting up, blinking.
“Mama,” he said. “Hey.”
“You guys are cute,” said Mama.
“Bite me,” mumbled Suzie, who hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
Mama clapped her meaty hands.
“Chop-chop!” she said. “Now that things are back shipshape, Nan wants everyone to come over.”
“To her house?” asked Milo.
“Why?” asked Suzie, sounding combative.
Mama rolled her eyes. “I’m too tired for this shit,” she said. “Can we just go, please, and make the best of it?”
They went. Muddy and bleary and talking to themselves, they went.
Many lives ago, as a little kid walking to school in Ohio, Milo (and all the other neighborhood kids) lived in fear of a scary widow named Mrs. Armentrout. They were super-careful not to set foot on Mrs. Armentrout’s lawn, because she’d come to the door and curse at them or knock on her window like gunshots going off (one time she made a kid named Leonard shit his pants). Then one day a stray dog bit Milo as he was passing by, and she came out and drove the dog off with a leather belt. She brought Milo, crying and shaking, into her kitchen and gave him a Coke with a tiny bit of vodka in it while she smoked a Pall Mall and phoned his mom.
Nan reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout, and her house reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout’s house.
The outside of the house would never catch your eye. It sat surrounded by a dead lawn and a dead garden. Once you passed inside, though, it came to life.
It was like stepping into a crowd, because Nan had about eighty-five television sets, all turned on all the time and set loudly to separate channels. They were not the slim, streamlined modern television sets, either, but the kind from the 1960s: wooden battleships with big dials. Nan’s TVs all had huge doilies on top and supported hundreds of framed pictures. Nan rarely appeared to actually watch any of these sets, but if you turned one down or changed the channel, she’d yell at you, even if she was occupied at the far end of the house.
The house itself was a minefield of…things. Every end table (topped with doilies) was crammed with Hummels or bowls of plastic fruit. No surface of any kind was without its own ashtray, piled with old butts and lipstick stains. No wall space (with awful 1970s wallpaper) that wasn’t hung with a tiny painting of Venice or a dog or a vase. And there were vases, too, and crafted mugs waiting to be knocked over. You walked through Nan’s house with your elbows at your sides. You stepped carefully and sat carefully, because, of course, there were the cats.
Everywhere. Countless.
If the televisions were the eyes and heart and electric blood of the house, the cats were its breath. They moved from place to place in tides, as if the rooms breathed them out and then in. There were pauses and stillness now and then, as if the house rested, and then sometimes sudden flurries, as if the house had gasped aloud, some alarm sensed only by the cats, by a common neurology, secret and occult.
They left their muddy shoes outside and located Nan in her kitchen, smoking and watching Family Feud on a countertop TV.
“Nice to see you,” Milo told her.
“Sit down,” she said, neither kindly nor unkindly. “I’d offer you something to snack on, but I gave everything to the relief people when they came by.”
“That was nice of you,” said Suzie.
“Don’t patronize me.”
They all took seats around the table and then sat there saying nothing.
Eventually Suzie said, “Can we please get this silliness out of the way?”
“The silliness,” said Mama, “as you call it, isn’t the least bit silly.”
Milo raised his hand like a schoolkid.
“Whatever the silliness is,” he said, “it appears to involve me, and I haven’t got the first idea—”
“I think what you did for your family in this last life counts as an act of Perfection,” said Suzie. “I think it’s obvious. These two bullies disagree. I vote ‘yes.’ ”
“There’s no vote,” said Mama. “A lifetime either balances perfectly or it doesn’t. Nan and I happen to understand why your recent life didn’t balance, and Suzie does not.”
Milo got up and started making himself a cup of coffee.
He hadn’t thought about his evaluation yet. Things had been rather busy since the comet. Now that he gave it a moment’s thought, however, he became angry.
“I would like to know,” he said, “what was the slightest bit imperfect about the life I just led.”
His eyes burned. He swallowed hard. A cat yowled, at the back of the house.
“You weren’t even close,” said Nan.
“Think it through,” said Mama. “You went down there with a plan, right?”
“I went down there to promote Love, with a capital ‘L,’ through selflessness and sacrifice. And what did I do? I gave my family to another man so they could have a chance of survival. Do you understand what that means? The emotional cost? Of course not. That’s why you”—he pointed at Mama and Nan—“always try so hard to fit into human forms and always get it wrong.” He indicated the house, the TVs, and the cats.
Nan narrowed her eyes and pulled on her cigarette but said nothing.
Milo filled the coffeemaker and sat back down to wait.
Mama put a big, soft arm around him.
“Tell me about the fence,” she said.
The fence?
“The huge fence you and your ARK people put up around the ships to keep everybody else out.”
Ah, shit.
“It’s like we were building a lifeboat,” he said. “There’s no way there was going to be room for everybody. Let me guess: The perfect thing to do was to somehow help the whole planet. Everyone on Earth.”
Mama nodded. So did Nan. Suzie glared at the floor.
“What other kind of help did you have in mind?” Milo asked. “There was pretty much ‘getting killed by the comet’ and ‘not getting killed by the comet.’ ”
“There were survivors,” said Mama. “They will start rebuilding, bit by bit. You might have helped those people get ahead of things a little bit.”
“Hindsight,” said Milo. “How was I supposed to know there’d be survivors?”
Beneath the television chatter, an uncomfortable silence.
“If it was easy,” whispered Mama, “they wouldn’t call it ‘Perfection.’ ”
“Helping those who were involved in the project,” argued Milo, “was the best use of our time and resources. Even the gods can’t suggest an alternative.”
“We’re not gods,” said Suzie.
“Oh, hush,” whispered Nan. “They can’t tell the difference.”
“In any case,” said Mama, “it doesn’t matter what any of us thinks. The ocean is wet. Two and two is four.”
The coffee machine said ding. Milo ignored it.
“How am I ever supposed to make a perfect choice?” he asked. “It’s always a trick question in the end.”
“I don’t know,” snapped Nan. “Be trickier? Get smarter? That’s your job. We’ll know your perfect moment when we see you do it. It’s supposed to be amazing and surprising and impossible, and yet almost everyone manages to do it within nine thousand lives. Everyone but you. That’s all I know.”
The light shifted in the windows. Cats began, a couple at a time, to fill the kitchen.
Feeding time.
Time for goodbyes.
To Mama and Suzie, Nan said, “His house ought to be ready by now. Go sit and drink his coffee and argue all night, if you want. Master Chef is on in three minutes.”
Suzie rose from the table. “I’ll take him,” she said.
“Well, there’s a big fat surprise,” said Nan, lighting another cigarette.
Leaving the house, crossing the dead lawn, Milo took Suzie’s hand.
“Is it far?” he asked. He hoped his new house was nearby; he liked Nan’s neighborhood.
“We’re not going there yet. I have something to show you.”
Her voice had a rubber-band bounce to it. Excitement.
It wasn’t far.
They walked uphill, along a brick street lined with shops and Victorian streetlamps. The shops had enormous windows with heavy wooden molding and plastered doors. Gilded signs on hanging shingles.
Suzie stopped before a nameless storefront. The windows were soaped. No sign hung above the door.
“They’re closed,” Milo was saying, but when Suzie produced a skeleton key and unlocked the door, he remembered.
“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—”
“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.