On the floor before them, the cutting had begun. Slowly at first. Respectfully.
“That cow wasn’t just a cow. She was formerly lots of other things, including a famous bodhisattva named Aishwarya. She gave herself to this family out of a perfect understanding that they could use her flesh to live and get better. And she was neither proud nor afraid. That’s important.”
Between them, a young woman with wonderful eyes had appeared, happily watching the family butcher the cow. She and Suzie bowed to each other. Then the woman vanished.
Milo stroked his chin. “I could do the sacrifice part,” he said. “I think.”
Suzie looked thoughtful. “You and this cow-person-soul have a lot in common,” she said. “You’re about people, one way or another. That’s why I brought you.”
It was getting pretty bloody down there on the floor. The old woman was especially fierce, ripping gristle with her bare hands.
“We need to go,” said Suzie.
Wind and dark.
—
They stood by a river, in the afterlife, in the middle of a tremendous crowd. The crowd wore bright colors and waved banners of yellow silk.
Airships and balloons crowded the sky.
The bodhisattva and former cow, Aishwarya, strode to the river, wearing a beatific smile. The crowd parted for her, and she waded into the river.
The air itself turned golden around her. The gold flared and boiled, and then flashed out in a ring of cosmic light, casting a moment of unmistakable Perfection over everything, over thousands of souls and stones, the airships and the wind itself.
And then it faded.
And everyone turned and went off to do their own thing, as if someone had gotten on a loudspeaker and said, “The magic, perfect cow-woman has left the building. There’s nothing more to see here.”
—
Back at Milo’s apartment, Suzie collapsed across the living-room sofa, and Milo occupied a beanbag chair. Some Styrofoam pellets popped out through a wound in one side.
“If a cow can do it,” he said, “I can do it. If I can perform some kind of great sacrifice, then I will have achieved something perfect, and maybe I can have bargaining power to not go into the Everything?”
“It’s not just sacrifice, Milo. If a wolf chews its leg off to get out of a trap, that’s sacrifice, too, but it’s also desperation. It’s not Perfection. There has to be love.”
“I have love!” protested Milo. “I’m in love with you.”
“?‘Love’?” said Suzie, “and ‘in love’ aren’t always the same thing. ‘In love’ is a human thing. Chemicals. ‘Love’ is cosmic. I love you, too.”
She took his hand, and some love traveled up his arm and burst inside him like a galaxy. For a moment, he contained wonders and stars and time, and could speak Spanish, and existed in twenty dimensions. He also began to explode a little.
“Babe,” he wheezed.
“Oh. Sorry, sorry.”
Kiss on the cheek. He fizzled back down to his usual self.
They sat in silence for a while. The light in the window began to change.
“Hungry,” said Suzie.
—
They found a smokehouse down on the river. A woodsy joint called the Bucket. The piano player was drunk and loud, the air thick, the meat hot, and the beer, a local favorite called “Skeeter,” was black. It was the kind of joint not frequented by Mama-types or Nan-types or other representatives of the universal mind.
“No Nan or Mama tonight,” said Suzie, over her first beer and her first basket of wings. “All they do is watch. Watch people live their lives, watch people do everything that matters, while they sit off to the side and make their judgments.”
She had insisted on wearing a disguise if they were going to go out. Baseball cap and a fake mustache. Otherwise, people pointed at her and whispered. Death was the original celebrity.
“You’re one of them, you know,” Milo pointed out.
“I know,” she answered. “Shut up.”
Like most conversations between people who have been together for eight thousand years, it was a conversation they’d had before.
“Goddammit!” Suzie tore off her fake mustache. She kept getting garlic sauce in it.
Milo struggled to get a rebellious chicken leg down before it fell apart in his hands.
You couldn’t really eat and talk a lot at that particular joint.
—
Later, they walked along the riverbank.
“I may be one of them,” said Suzie, “but I’m not like them. They’ve got a lot of nerve, getting all critical of us for, you know, being together.”
“It’s not like it doesn’t make sense,” Milo said. “You’re like a god, and I’m just—”
“I am not a god. I’ve explained this a million times.”
Milo decided not to say anything else for a while. They walked in silence. A dragonfly buzzed them and flew out over the river.
“I’m going to quit,” said Suzie.
Huh? Milo thought. Was she serious? And was she crying? She hardly ever cried.
“What do you mean, ‘quit’?”
“You know,” she said, waving her arms. “Quit. Stop doing my job. I’m sick of this shit, always having to worry about whether I’m rocking the cosmic canoe.”
“Can you do that?” Milo asked. “Quit being Death the way you quit waiting tables or teaching biology?”
“I don’t know.”
Out over the river, a dragonfly flew complicated loop-de-loops.
A fish jumped up and ate the dragonfly.
Milo put his arm around Suzie.
“A question,” he said. “When a fish in the afterlife eats a dragonfly, does the dragonfly go to the afterlife?”
“It was already in the afterlife, Milo.”
“Well, exactly, see? So?”
“It’s complicated.”
“You say that about everything.”
“Everything’s fucking complicated.”
Another dragonfly zoomed between them. It looked a lot like the same dragonfly.
“I want to open a candle shop,” she said.
He looked at her with one eye closed. A shop?
What would it mean, operating a business in the afterlife? People did, of course. But Milo had never quite understood how money worked up here. You could earn money if you wanted, but at the same time, if you needed something from a store, you could go get it, whether you paid for it or not. By the same token, if you went to a bank and asked for some money, they’d give it to you. Like everything else in the afterlife, it was change-y and shifty and unclear. (“I don’t get it,” he had once said to Mama, trying to understand. “Money in the afterlife might as well be air!” Mama had replied, “It’s an Ideal Form, remember? It’s the idea of money.”) Dealing with money sounded like an enormous pain in the ass. He raised an eyebrow at Suzie.
“A shop? You want to be a shopkeeper?”
“It’s more about being an artist,” she said. “I’d make the candles. In different shapes.”
“Are you just saying that, off the top of your head, or—”