Milo didn’t wake up beside the river this time.

He didn’t even wake up in the desert.

He was sitting at the bottom of a deep well. Sort of like a jail cell but without a sink or a toilet.

“Great,” he muttered.

It didn’t take a wise man to guess that this was where you went if you murdered the Buddha.

“Hello?” he called.

No one answered. Would they just leave him here and forget about him? Were they that mean?

Dammit, he had one more life to live! Somebody was going to listen to him, by God. He began looking around for a stick, for some rocks, anything he could throw. He would throw one hell of a fit, if they thought they could just stick him down here—

Something interrupted the light and came tumbling down the well.

A rope ladder. It snapped to an end just in front of his face and swung back and forth.

“Climb up here,” snarled Nan’s voice. “Want you to see something.”

Milo growled in frustration. He had really been looking forward to throwing his fit.

He climbed the ladder.

At the top, there was Nan, with a cat or two, standing in what looked like someone’s backyard.

Most of the yard was packed with people—standing, sitting on blankets, sitting on lawn chairs. They were all facing the same direction, paying not the least bit of attention to Milo.

Even Nan ignored him. She, too, was turned away, watching something.

The house and the backyard were built on a hillside, and the hillside overlooked a river. Most of the landscape was hidden beneath a crowd like Milo had never seen, spilling down the hill and stretching for miles.

It was a festive crowd, to say the least. They wore bright colors. There were flags and hand-painted signs. There were shirtless drunks with painted chests and eighteen thousand different kinds of music playing. It was Woodstock Meets the Super Bowl.

Milo stepped up beside Nan.

“What—” he began.

“Shut up and watch,” Nan barked. “You might learn something in the hour or two you have left.”

What?

His heart pounded. They meant to space him. Or “Nothing” him, or whatever you wanted to call it. God…what did that mean for Suzie? She had been nearly gone, that night on the train. What about now? Was she still out there? Or had she gone ahead of him, into Nowhere?

The crowd grew louder. They sang out in raw joy and gladness.

The source of the joy and gladness appeared, not far away, downhill.

It was the Buddha, arriving in the afterlife. He made his way pleasantly, humbly, through the crowd. He was young again, Prince Siddhartha, with shining black hair falling over one shoulder.

Would the Master recognize him? (Help him?)

Milo waved both arms and shouted, “Hey! Up here!”

Nan elbowed him in the gut, sneering, “Keep still, you. That’s the greatest soul that ever lived, down there. You’re just the bastard who killed him.”

Milo wheeled on her, turning red. “I should have known you wouldn’t understand!” he bellowed. “I did the most difficult thing imaginable, for the good of the Master and everyone in the world—”

Nan elbowed him again.

“You get everything wrong,” she muttered. “You always go too far.”

Down below, the Master had drawn near the river, and the air above the water began to shake and glow.

A golden light spun itself out of thin air and cast a perfect cosmic dawn over the multitude. It made everything beautiful and simple. Made everything clear, like the air and the light after a rain.

Surely, thought Milo, the Buddha himself understood what he had done.

Maybe he would say something at the last minute. Any second now he’d stop and say, “Hey, we’re forgetting someone! Why, without Milo, the Master would just be a story about some old coot who forgot his own name and sat around meditating in his own drool. C’mon down, Milo!”

But the Buddha did not say these things.

He waded out into the river, wearing a breezy expression.

“Please,” said Milo. He didn’t have the energy for anything more. Time and space had clamped onto him with a corkscrew and twisted everything right out of him.

He was done.

How could a person be so wise and so good, generally, and wind up with the whole universe against him?

The Master became a mere shadow in the wild flood of light. Then the Sun Door overwhelmed him and absorbed him, and he was a part of it.

The great light closed and faded.

“That’s pretty much the opposite of where you’re going,” said Nan. But Milo barely heard, because his own ancient voices had begun to speak up, taking rather a pissy tone.

You were on your next-to-last chance to get life right, said his soul, and you murdered Buddha. Oops.

Oh, come on! Milo thought. You were there!

You. Murdered. Buddha.

I tried to do something complicated and beneficial, Milo explained. Tried to, anyway. Inside, he suddenly felt a feathery kind of flutter. A violence that was soft, angelic.

Milo’s own soul was trying, in its metaphysical way, to beat him up.

—

The light was just evening light now, over the river and the town and the bridge and the multitude. But the excitement wasn’t quite over, the great day not quite done.

Blinking, the crowd turned and buzzed and seemed to be seeking something. Slowly, following pointing fingers, they all found what they were looking for and raised their eyes to the hill, to the backyard where Milo stood, to Milo himself.

As one, they pointed.

“Him,” they said.

“Oh, fucking hell,” said Milo. “Really?”

—

Pop! Mama materialized beside him.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss the receiving line down there.”

“Ma!” cried Milo. Hope!

“Thank God!” he said. “I was about to—”

“Hush,” said Mama, turning away. “Please, just hush.”

Milo felt himself collapsing inside. Indeed, he would have fallen, but they caught him. Not Mama and Nan but the backyard people, the crowd people. And they raised him up and carried him the way crowds have sometimes carried saints to the stake or queens to the chopping block. Downhill, along the river.

Milo closed his eyes and let it happen.

Over the bridge, toward the neighborhoods and their sidewalks.

He heard the names they called him. They weren’t very creative.

“Buddha killer.” “Buddha poisoner.” “Buddha’s Judas.”

Now and then someone would give him a poke or throw something at him. Something wet splashed over his shoulder. Something hit his knee.

Milo remained silent. He didn’t want them saying, later, that he raged and panicked like a madman or a killer, but just then someone let him have it with a stick, right in the funny bone.

“God fucking dammit!” he howled.

All around him, eyes bugged.

“See?” they said, pointing. “See? I’ll bet he was always like this! All ten thousand lives, like a time bomb, waiting.”

That’s it, Milo thought. If they can be mean, I can be mean. I have more experience than these losers, anyhow. And he began fighting to turn himself over, opening his jaws as wide as they would go. He would begin by biting some fingers off. And then some faces. What did he have to lose?

And then he was flying.

It happened in an instant. A storm of leaves and dust, snatching him up and out of their grasp. Up and away into Nowhere, into Nothingness. Nothing but wind and something that wrapped around him and felt like legs, looked like bottomless eyes, felt like a tongue.

“Lover,” said the dark and the wind and the nothing.

—

When the whirling and the dark settled down, they were someplace far away.

Twilight. A soft breeze and wind chimes. Colored lanterns here and there. A harbor, with old boats that rose and fell as if breathing.

They materialized aboard one of these boats. A long, spacious sampan, like a big canoe with a roof.

Chinese Heaven, thought Milo. Cool.

He looked around.

“Suzie?”

Something like a gasp and a whisper from the shadows at the sampan’s far end.

He didn’t see her until the moon broke out from behind clouds. Then he saw her, draped like a rag over the gunwale, dripping like heavy mist.

“Aw, shit,” he said, rushing to her. Trying to hold her. Trying to find something solid enough to touch.

“You have to hold me,” she breathed. “I’m all used up. You have to let me take from you.”

He held her. He shuddered with rage and fear. How long before she faded into nothing? How in hell had she managed the strength to scoop him up and fly off with him?

“I know,” she sighed. “Shut up.”

Even her voice wasn’t all there.

God, he thought, when you loved someone, every day was Opposite Day. Being with them made you feel weak and also strong. They made you want to laugh and cry. Get dressed up and get undressed. You wanted to keep them forever and eat them like a bucket of cheese fries.

“I killed Buddha,” he told her.

“He understood,” said Suzie. “He knew it was the smart thing, what you did.”

Milo stomped both feet in frustration. “I knew it!” he yelled. “I knew it! Goddammit, Suze, how come he didn’t say anything? All he had to do was look at those universal slice bastards and say, ‘Don’t be too hard on Milo, you soulless bipolar butt-suckers; he was only trying to ensure a future of peace and goodwill,’ but nooooooooo—”

“He was busy,” she said calmly, “being transformed into pure eternal light. I missed you, by the way.”

Well, yeah.

“I missed you, too,” he said. “We didn’t get to see each other much last time.”

“We might not get to see each other much this time, either. Depending on how badly they want to chase you down. Depending on…”

She waved one hand in front of a lantern, and the hand became invisible.

But he was able to read her eyes, and they were love eyes.

See, now, Milo thought. This is Perfection.

“Maybe if we go into the pure eternal light together,” Milo said, “we’ll dissolve together or something, and sort of be together still.”

She nodded.

“Maybe my expectations have diminished,” she said. “But that would be okay with me, too.”

Milo sat, leaning back against the gunwale. Suzie lay down with her head in his lap. She matched his breathing.

“Buddha made me see something about Perfection that I hadn’t seen before,” he said.

“It’s better than oblivion?”

“It’s about evolution. That guy kept evolving. When he started losing his mind, you’d think he would have slipped into death. But he didn’t. He kept getting up in the morning, and doing things, and learning. And when death did come, he was okay with it. He kept evolving. Taking the next step. And that’s how it should be. And the next step, if I can earn it, is the Sun Door.”

Suzie made a questioning noise of some kind.

“We’ll figure out what to do about you,” he said. “We just need to keep ahead of them long enough to figure it out.”

True night had fallen, afire with stars. Paper lanterns, fueled with candles, rose like butterflies over the city and the bay.

“I wish we’d done this long ago,” said Suzie.

The stars and the lanterns cast reflections in the water.

It was as if they’d run away to outer space.

—

Time passed. They lived on the sampan, sometimes staying in the same harbor, sometimes moving down the coast. Over days and nights, and in and out of weeks.

Once or twice, Milo thought he sensed unfriendly eyes turned their way. Sensed plans and bad intent moving around them. Sensed balance seeking to assert itself. When that happened, they waved. They sailed. They anchored up rivers, under vast, overarching flowering trees.

They were the most beautiful fugitives in all eternity.

—

Even as fugitives, they knew that life was for doing stuff.

They read books together. They ate and drank at festivals. Once, they made a paper dragon big enough for the two of them to hide inside and wove through the crowds, ringing bells and roaring. Delighted children followed them.

They made love so slowly—how else can mist make love?—that they fell half-asleep, the way you do lying in warm grass. She was like a shadow, or warm water, moving against him. Somehow, making love was still making love, whether both were completely there or not. Making love was powerful shit.

One morning, Milo was sitting in the stern, washing socks in a bucket and watching game shows on a tiny battery-operated TV, when he saw a phalanx of universals walking down the pier. Walking toward them with a purposeful stride, bearing quarterstaves.

“We should go,” Milo called down into the galley, where Suzie was taking her turn at cooking.

He didn’t have to say anything more.

She gave an exhausted sigh but did what needed doing.

Whir! Rustle! Whoosh! They left.

—

They lived up on a mountainside for a while.

Not a long while. Milo had a feeling that their time and their luck were both running short.

The souls who lived on the mountain harvested tea every day, and Milo and Suzie joined them. The tea grew in narrow hedgerows on steep terraces cascading down the mountain. Sometimes mist rolled in from the sea and left them isolated on the mountain, above the clouds, like a cartoon vision of Heaven.

They herded goats, which ate weeds but left the tea alone and nourished the tea shrubs with their poo. They lived in a round wooden house with three hundred other people. The house was like a whirlpool made of walls and windows and laundry hanging down. They all ate together and launched paper lanterns together at night and heard everybody through the walls and open windows when they talked or sang or loved. The house was six thousand years old, and everyone who had ever lived there had scratched his or her name on a wall, on a stair, on the roof, somewhere. The house was like a library of names. Milo and Suzie wrote their names on the little wooden platform around the well. Milo wrote “Milo.” Suzie wrote her true name, which all universals and natural forces have; it was a puzzle of seven interlocking infinity symbols made of streams of numbers representing letters. If you touched it, it burned and moved under your hand. Underneath, she wrote “aka: Suzie.”

One day, a universal slice in a poor burlap robe walked up the mountain—at first Milo thought it might be Mama, and he tensed.

It wasn’t.

The universal helped them pick tea without saying a word to anyone.

Milo and Suzie disguised themselves in sunglasses, just to be safe.

The universal launched paper lanterns with them and ate supper with them. He introduced himself as Mohenjodaro Bo-Ti Harrahj Nandaro, the Fifth Way of the Fifth Light of the Fifth Sign of the First Night, He Who Is Both Near and Far, an Incarnation of Work.

He wrote his name on their big wooden salad bowl. It took him fifteen minutes.

—

Mohenjodaro never said a suspicious word. He did all the dishes, spent the night in the tool barn, and was gone before breakfast.

“What’s on your mind?” Milo asked Suzie after breakfast. They had chosen to stay home in bed that morning, because Suzie was feeling especially transparent and worried.

“I don’t like running scared,” she answered. “I’m sick of running, and of running out like a slow hourglass. I want to feel at home. I want my candle shop back. I want us to…to—”

“Live our lives,” said Milo, standing at the window, looking out on the green mountain rising from the sea of mist.

“Yes,” said Suzie, her voice quivering. “But they’re not going to let us do that. The boa isn’t going to let us. It’ll catch up, sooner or later, like a wave spreading out.”

Silence.

This is what giving up feels like, Milo thought.

Far below, the mist thinned and parted for a moment, affording a glimpse of the shore below and the river winding away.

Milo’s breath caught. His eyes took on a soft and peculiar blaze.

“I know what to do,” he whispered.

She gave him a doubtful look but said, “Let’s hear it.”

“Follow me,” he said, and they left the whirlpool house, holding hands.

Down through the tea shrubs in the fog, to the river’s edge.

Suzie understood.

“You’re going back to live your last life,” said Suzie. Her eyes saddened, but Milo saw her steel herself and straighten. “That’s as it should be,” she said. “Go, while you can, and—”

“You’re coming with me,” he said.

Her head tilted. Curious and confused.

“We’ll get it right, together,” said Milo.

“No,” said Suzie. “You mean, like, I would live a life…I’d be human?”

“One life. Get it right or get it wrong, and we’ll either win or lose together. Everything, or…nothing. The sidewalk.”

“Baby, I can’t do that,” she said gently.

“Suzie,” said Milo. “Sweetheart? Lover of eight thousand years? I love you so much, but don’t be a stubborn ass. What have you got to lose? Either of us?”

Suzie’s eyes flared, wild and desperate.

“I’m the wisest human soul in the universe,” he reminded her. “Give me the benefit of the doubt, this once.”

She said nothing, but they began walking again, crossing the narrow, rocky beach.

There, in the gray water before them, were thousands of possible lives.

Suzie lifted her hand. “Look,” she said. “That one.”

Milo looked.

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said at first. But the more he looked, the more her choice made sense.

“Peace,” he said. The Master would approve.

“Peace,” Suzie repeated.

She waded out into the water.

“I wonder what it’s going to be like,” she wondered aloud.

“Like being a god,” said Milo, “except without any of the god stuff.”

“You sound like you hate it.”

“I hate being born. It’s gross.”

Waist deep in the waves, she hopped up and kissed him on the lips.

“All or nothing!” she said, and turned and dove.

Milo was right behind her, sliding into life one last time.