BoBo’s was famous across the Keys for BoBo himself: a stuffed baboon with exposed fangs and a life preserver, eternally crouched on his haunches, one paw wrapped around a healthy erection. The bartender had to take BoBo home at the end of each night; otherwise, kids would break in and steal him.
For about a year, Milo had been shacking up with the weekday bartender, a forty-five-year-old former soccer pro named Tanya. After closing, he helped her stack chairs, and then they went back to her bungalow (BoBo rode in the back of the pickup), where they killed half a bottle of wine and made love.
Outside the open bungalow window, waves hissed and crashed. Then, suddenly, one wave made a different kind of sound, a boom like a bass drum in a hollow log.
It was a surfing sound.
“Come surfing with me,” said Milo.
“Not tonight,” she said. “I’m going to get a little drunker and go to sleep.”
“I’ll wake you when I get back,” he said, leaning down and kissing her.
“No,” she protested. “Are you kidding? Let me sleep. I gotta work early tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
Isn’t that dumb? That was the last human conversation Milo had, in that life.
He paddled out past the shallows, muscled his way through breaking waves, and slid downhill into the deeper country, where the waves were still swells, right before they began toppling.
It was his favorite thing. Sitting on his board out there, waiting. Glimpsing the candlelight in the bungalow window. Wondering what Tanya was thinking about. Wondering how Burt was doing at home, a few miles up the beach. Sleeping? Hunting along the shore?
That was Milo’s status in the minutes before the shark. Not bad, as such minutes go.
He even managed to meditate a little, folding himself up inside the moment. He noticed the moon, like an anklebone, like a story, up in space. The night and the breeze and— The shark hit him.
It drove upward like a rocket and smashed into the air with the surfboard in its jaws. Milo experienced it the way you might experience getting hit by a bus. Sudden and hard, and knowing something bad was happening without knowing what yet.
And then knowing and being afraid.
Getting eaten by a shark wasn’t any different for a wise man than it was for a shoe salesman or an aardvark. He felt what was happening with terrible clarity—the awful tearing, crushing—and he screamed and yelled just like anyone else.
Too bad. He had always kind of thought he would go into death like an explorer, in a golden flash of peace and wholeness, and here he was being chewed up like a ham.
His last words were “No! Fuck! No!”
The voice in his head began to go quiet; the light inside him started to go out.
Burt, Milo thought, before he went totally dark, would be smart enough to go find a new friend, someone who would appreciate what a fine dog he was. It was a good and kind thought, a wise thought, and then something like a fast-moving interstellar night flooded through him and snuffed him out like a— —
With a flick of its tail, the shark dove for the middle depths, leaving behind a cloud of gore and pieces of surfboard.
It didn’t stop to savor or to be appreciative. It was still hungry, so it looked for more food.
One half of the shark’s brain noticed the ocean, noticed the sounds and heartbeats of the sea.
The other half noticed the warmth of good food digesting in its belly and remembered being a perch, and a mackerel, and a clam, and a whale, and a dog, and a cat, and the Strawberry Queen.
Dying was nothing new, of course.
Milo had died nearly ten thousand times, in almost every way possible.
Some deaths were horrid; some were not so bad.
The best way to die, of course, was instantly, but this was rare. Milo had died instantly just one time. A tower crane dropped an iron girder on him. It was the only time he got to the afterlife and had to ask, “What happened?”
Of course, even if you knew she was coming, Death was never routine.
Four times, Milo had been executed and therefore had known in advance the exact hour he would die. He had been burned at the stake in Spain, beheaded in China, hanged in the Sudan, and gassed in California. Knowing death was coming, you could usually manage to act brave. But it was just an act. Inside, it felt like someone was working on you with a plunger.
Milo hated the ones that hurt. Fourteen times he had died in combat: speared, knocked off a parapet, wounded and bled out, speared, run over by a chariot, paralyzed with a mace and run over by a horse, kicked in the face by a horse, speared, bayoneted, exploded, shot and bled out, shot and dragged by a horse, fallen on by a horse (Milo hated horses), and choked to death by a giant German infantryman. Once, he had been captured by the Turks and flung by catapult back over the walls at Vienna. This was his favorite. Crushing speed, and then flying through the night in a universe of battle smoke, the fires of the starving city beneath him. Horrifying but wonderful, wonderful!
There were deaths of haunting beauty. As an Arctic explorer, freezing to death, he felt nothing but the illusion of warmth, and his brain released little chemicals of peace and satisfaction. He slipped away as the sun rose, flashing on the ice like a knife catching fire.
He didn’t always get to grow up before dying. He knew what it was like to spend all summer at Children’s Hospital, with his hair falling out, and to die holding Charles, his toy alligator.
Milo had died during orgasm, died after rich dinners in fine company, died in moments of perfect love. Died, in one future life, in a starship crash at the speed of light, in a moment that resonated forever inside the envelope of time, so that it was always happening, like a guitar string that would never stop humming. He had fallen from trees and choked on waffles. He had been eaten by sharks and cancers. He died of bad habits and angry husbands and killer bees, once, and dumb accidents like sticking a high-pressure air hose up his nose when he was working in a tool shop, trying to be funny.
Between lives, when he could remember it all, he sometimes wanted to relive being catapulted into starving, besieged Vienna. How strange to want to relive a death. Forty times he had asked Death to make this happen.
“Why?” Death had asked him.
He thought it over. “I flew!” he answered. “I was weightless.”
She said, “Nothing’s weightless; that’s why we die.”
He settled for the memory: weightless and perfect and closing his eyes, remembering the fire and the speed and the rushing wind and some rising kitchen smoke he had flown through, smelling of onions and roast dog.
You don’t come from dust, no matter what they say. You come from water, and you go back to the water when you die, like a river rolling downhill.
Milo woke up by the water, as he’d done almost ten thousand times. Woke up on a railroad bridge over a dark, sleepy old stream full of stumps and catfish.