“Exactly,” said Mama. “Here, it’s the idea of a bridge. Or a spoon. Or a fencepost. It’s a pure form.”
Nan and Mama, Milo now noticed, seemed to shimmer in a way that other things and people did not. As if they were wrapped in a wonderful second skin. Now that he glimpsed and considered this phenomenon, it did seem as if they were more there somehow. More real. Suzie—Death—had shimmered in this way, also. How curious.
“And those forms,” said Nan, waving her hand at the back of the kitchen, which was comparatively dark, “go out and diffuse even more, until they’re mostly shadows, with a few flickers and flares now and then. Harder to see the forms for what they are. Harder to tell what’s real.”
“And that’s Earth,” said Milo. “Where we go to live our lives.”
“Where you go,” said Nan, “to live your lives. We don’t have to go anywhere.”
Milo still didn’t understand what Mama and Nan were, exactly.
“We’re like tiny slivers of the fire,” said Mama, “come out into the dark to help you.”
“Help me what?” asked Milo.
At that moment, Mama waved her arms again, and the next thing Milo knew, they were outside, walking down the street. The street led straight downhill to a quiet little park.
“We’re here to help you become part of the fire,” said Mama, putting on a pair of sunglasses. Milo had never seen sunglasses before. Interesting! And cool. “We’re here to help you get through the illusions and into the real universe.”
“The Oversoul,” said Milo.
“Yep,” said Nan. “Every life has something to teach you. Chances for you to learn and grow and eventually become perfect. It may take thousands of lives.”
“It’s our job,” said Mama, “to help you decide what kind of life to attempt next.”
“I need to give that some thought,” said Milo. “Obviously.”
They reached the park, where Milo turned and looked back the way they had come and noticed that the street now led downhill, back to his house.
“It was downhill coming here,” he remarked. “How…?”
“Flickers and changes,” said Mama. “Changing forms. Reality is elusive. Down on Earth, it’s even more elusive.”
“Which would seem,” said Milo, “to make it even more difficult to decide what kind of life would lead toward truth and growth.”
“Smart kid,” said Nan. “Let me tell you, it’s not always the obvious choice.”
“How long do I have to choose? How long before I have to go back?”
Mama and Milo sat down in the grass, while Nan lit a cigarette (interesting, thought Milo, observing) and stood watching a new house materialize across the street.
“You go back when you feel like it,” said Mama.
“And what if I—”
Mama shushed him.
“Lay back and watch the clouds,” she said. “Let your mind be quiet. Just be.”
Milo tried to just be, but his mind kept filling up with thoughts of Suzie. Was that okay? He fell asleep thinking about that, feeling uneasy.
—
It was decided, after a week, that Milo would be reborn as a radio personality named Milo “Pork Chop” Zilinski, in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And he went and lived that life and died when he was forty-nine. When he woke up in the afterlife on a rusty old railroad bridge, he found his head cradled in Suzie’s lap. She stroked his hair but didn’t kiss him or anything. It wasn’t like that between them yet and wouldn’t be for a long time. They had a minute or two to themselves, to enjoy being grown-ups together, before Ma and the cat lady showed up.
“What was your favorite thing?” Suzie asked. “What will you miss the most?”
“From life?” Milo gave his answer some thought. Life as Pork Chop Zilinski had been kind of sleazy. He doubted they were going to give him a nice house this time.
“Christmas,” he said. “That was my favorite.”
Liar. His favorite thing had been a girl named Peanut, backstage at Ozzfest.
She let him get away with it. That’s how people make friends.
Milo drifted up through oceans of memory and opened his eyes.
The afterlife, after the shark got him. In bed with Suzie.
He slid the armband over his wrist. A perfect fit.
Suzie lay against his side like a jigsaw piece. They fit together the way people do when they’ve held each other a hundred thousand times.
She gave his arm a squeeze and said, “Look sharp. You’ve got company.”
A knock at the apartment door. A loud, fat knock. A Mama knock.
Shit. That’s right. They wanted to talk to him about something.
“Do you know what they want?” he asked Suzie.
Suzie bit her lip.
“No,” she lied.
He let her get away with it.
“Just go,” she said.
He left the bed with a sour feeling in his stomach.
“Milo?” she called after him.
“Mmm?”
“Pants, baby.”
—
He followed Ma and Nan and forty-some cats out of his dingy little neighborhood, walking quietly once again. Meditating as they went, supposedly. Milo kept thinking about the weather and his third-grade teacher and a troublesome refrigerator he’d once owned.
He also thought about the two women he found himself with. He had known them for thousands of years by now, but did he know them any better? Was he supposed to love them? He did, a little, he supposed. But they scared him, too.
They passed into a comfortable, cozy little neighborhood. There were hummingbird feeders and fences. You could hear somebody playing music, just barely.
Then, quite suddenly, everything fell away.
The sidewalk simply extended like a pirate-ship plank out into empty space.
It was like a magic trick. There was the sidewalk, and the end of the sidewalk, dripping clods of dirt and little scraggly roots…and then nothing. A touch of vertigo played cement mixer with Milo’s senses.
A soft breeze blew. It should have smelled like spring or like a neighborhood, but it smelled like nothing.
“What is this place?” Milo asked.
“It’s Nowhere,” said Nan.
Milo waited. There had to be more.
“When you go back this next time,” said Nan, “it will be your nine thousand nine hundred ninety-sixth life.”
One of the cats twined between Milo’s ankles, as if trying to nudge him off-balance. His stomach lurched.
“So much suffering,” said Ma, “being alive. Being born, living, dying, being reborn. I’d think you would want to break out of the cycle, Milo.”
They’d had this talk before.
“I like the cycle,” he said. “I like living lives.”
“That’s fine,” said Ma, “but you’re not supposed to keep going back forever. You’re supp—”
“I know what I’m supposed to do.”
“You,” snapped Nan, “are like the kid who’s been held back in fifth grade for the eighth time. Achieve Perfection already!”
“I think this ‘Perfection’ thing might be overrated,” Milo mumbled.
Mama stepped up beside him. Bowing her head for a long moment, she said, “Think of yourself as a rocket ship.”