Reincarnation Blues

by Michael Poore

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.

If you watched people listening, whether it was in a club or a hall or down at Smokestack Records, they all had a certain look, which they couldn’t help, as if they were trying to get a peek down the bell of that big brass sax, because it sounded like something lived down there. Something wise and wet and not particularly happy. There was an old soul behind that sound, but whether the soul was in the saxophone or in the man himself was never plain.

Okay, thought Milo, desperate for anything other than despair. He would let the truth flow around him like an ocean, where the waves moved through the water but the water itself was still. He would be like the water, like the still, black moat where that lying, pathological bitch had dumped him— Milo, said his deep soul. I will be like the water, he thought, starting over.

It wasn’t easy. That was the first thing about learning anything worthwhile; you had to have patience. You had to know that if you tried to do a thing a thousand times, you could usually succeed in doing it, and if you practiced that thing a million times, you could do it very well. And so on. Mastering a thing was not magic, just hard work.

It’s something a wise man or a wise woman knows how to do: shake off your self-pity and your obsession, and put one foot in front of the other and keep moving.

Suzie couldn’t believe it. Humans usually had some weird addiction to suffering and toil. These freaks, insisting on simplicity and happiness, reminded her a bit of Milo (currently off living a life as a Japanese bunny rabbit). If they weren’t careful, one of two things was bound to happen. One: They would spread their happiness to others and make the world a better place. Or two: They would make people uncomfortable and get burned at the stake.

Evil. Sometimes it was something that stood up and announced itself clearly. Like the times when he was born a Muslim, and the Christians were evil, and the times he was born Christian, and the Muslims were evil. He thanked God, in those lives, for making it so obvious.

“Well, I didn’t accomplish anything.” Nan stopped. She gave his elbow a yank and turned him to face her. “Sometimes,” she said, “the value of a life is in what it doesn’t do. Imagine if Hitler had resisted the voice inside him and spent his life keeping bees? What a great life.”

It was, and was not, what he’d expected. It was warm and perfect. They had always felt “at home” with each other. They felt even more at home now. Familiar, as if they’d been making love for centuries. It was not wildly supernatural. Milo had expected that making love to Death would involve weird fires and shadows and whisperings in the dark—perhaps even pain—but there was very little of that. Only the soft red glow in her eyes. The occasional drawing of blood. The sudden flutter and leathery warmth of being wrapped in wings, once or twice. And once her eyes had widened until they seemed to drink him in, and he felt himself falling and his whole self being drowned out by something larger, like a single note in a symphony, and he screamed and screamed— Other than that, it was all surprisingly normal.

Learning was the most important thing a soul could do. There was an infinity of things to learn and to teach. There was an infinity of ways to get the learning and teaching done.

“I suck at meditating,” Milo blurted one evening. He wanted to meditate so badly, the failure was giving him stomach cramps. The Master raised a quieting hand. “Meditating is mostly breathing,” he said. “Breathing is our most intimate contact with the world outside ourselves. We bring it in”—the Master inhaled—“and we push it out”—and exhaled. “When we do that, the world outside becomes part of us.” They breathed together, the three of them. In, out. In, out.

“Listen,” said the Master, coughing. “Don’t search the ends of the Earth looking for your happiness. Perfection is being happy with what you are right now.” “What if you’re an asshole?” someone called. The Master offered a weak smile. “I doubt very much,” he said, “that many happy people are assholes.”