“Nope. I have wanted to make candles since they were invented. I mean, it’s the greatest kind of sculpture. Say you made a candle of Michael Jackson, and it would be all cool and look just like him, and you’d show it to people, and they’d say, ‘Oh, that’s the cutest thing I ever saw,’ and then you could light it and watch his head melt. Candles are awesome.”
Twilight deepened into night. Something in the river jumped and splashed.
Milo said, “And that’s what you’d rather do instead of being Death.”
“Wouldn’t you?”
Hell yeah! Milo thought. “Hell yeah!” he said.
—
In the middle of the night, Milo woke up and decided to go get reborn.
Suzie woke up, too. And knew.
“You just got here!” she protested.
“I know,” he said, brushing her hair out of her eyes. “But I can’t help thinking I ought to get it done with. I’ll perform my great act of Love and Sacrifice, and when I get back we can be together.”
“Don’t fuck it up.”
“Love and Sacrifice are pretty straightforward.”
“There are subtleties, babe.”
“I know,” he answered. (What subtleties?)
She kissed him. Then she turned away and pulled the covers over her head.
She never accompanied him to the river. It didn’t seem right to have Death on your arm when you were going off to get born.
At the river, he didn’t undress. You didn’t have to. He just waded through the mucky shallows and cattails into knee-deep water and the cooler, faster current.
Images flashed in the water. Possible scenes and faces, snapshots of lives he might live.
This one? No. That one? Interesting. Chances for Love and Sacrifice. Big chances.
When he finally chose, the choice frightened him. But he steeled himself and dove.
There was a brief shock, a pause, a Nothingness, and then he was being squeezed like toothpaste into the world again.
If anyone was going to perform an act of perfect cosmic love, it was probably Milo.
He had been in love sixty-eight thousand five hundred and four times.
The first time he fell in love—really, really in love—he was an Iron Age farmer in middle Europe. He and his wife, Hyldregar, were married by a druidic shaman. By the time they were in their twenties, both were stooped from heavy work. They had ten children, two of whom lived to be grown-ups.
The tenth childbirth killed Hyldregar. After that, Milo aged even faster and died when he was thirty-two. His neighbors during the last seven years of his life called him gragn luc moesse, which meant “the sad old stargazer.”
“Love means being torn in two,” he was known to tell young people on their wedding day. You shouldn’t say things like that to young people. He had to live a penalty life as a catfish, after that.
—
In future times, Milo and his lover Brii were born aboard a vast, world-sized generation ship on its way to Aurelae Epsilon, during the earliest colonization of the stars. Most of the passengers had forgotten that they were even on a ship. “This is the shape of the universe,” they declared, “these halls and tunnels and great machines.”
Milo and Brii attempted to reach the outer shell of the ship, passing through engine rooms the size of continents. They saw graveyards, artificial forests, and the great gravity gyros themselves. They passed through war zones. They saw a wasteland, where everyone had been dead for two thousand years. On the far side of this apocalypse, they found the hull of the ship, at last, and witnessed space passing by at one-tenth the speed of light. Then they went back down, back home, with their stories. Milo got a job in radio, and Brii published a magazine. They told the story of their journey to the edge of the ship and became famous.
The ship traveled for a thousand more years before reaching Aurelae Epsilon. Milo and Brii were the ship’s great love story and became the first great love story of the new world.
—
In some lives, love is like a movie.
In Renaissance Vienna, Milo was a young musketeer who fell in love with Sophia Maria Mozart, a great beauty (and the composer’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt).
Sophia Maria was the wife of Maximilian VanFurzelhaas, a minister to King Ferdinand and a notoriously angry man who was always off traveling. Every time Maximilian would go away, Milo would slip into the garden beneath Sophia Maria’s window and sing funny songs to her. Eventually, he got her to come down into the garden and play Adam and Eve with him. He brought Venetian masks.
VanFurzelhaas was gone so often that his household staff became quite familiar with Milo and catered to him on his visits as if he, not VanFurzelhaas, were lord of the house. Even outside the household, the affair became well known. Milo’s fellow scholars made up a tavern song—titled, with a refreshing absence of subtlety, “Milo Heidelburg Is Fucking Maximilian VanFurzelhaas’s Wife, Tra-La”—which became popular enough that VanFurzelhaas himself finally heard it and came roaring home to bury his sword in Milo’s throat. Milo, the superior swordsman, contrived to wound the aristocrat and escape to Salzburg. From then on, however, Sophia Maria was required to accompany her husband on his travels. This only broadened her pantheon of amours, which included some of the foremost heroes of the age, including the sculptor Leonard Duesel, the architect Zeinsfisthoffen, and the pope, once, quite by accident, in the dark.
Milo, in the end, fared less well, having the poor judgment to return too soon. He joined the ranks of Vienna’s defenders during the Ottoman siege in time to learn that VanFurzelhaas had been placed in partial command of the defenses. His arm proved long enough to have Milo assigned to a particularly hot spot upon the ramparts, wherefrom he was famously captured and launched by catapult back into the city.
—
Sometimes, between his first hundred or so lives, Milo tried to spend his time with Suzie, though they weren’t yet lovers in those days. They both enjoyed swimming and food. They enjoyed asking each other questions like “Would you rather lose an arm or an eyeball?” And sometimes Milo thought he caught her looking at him a certain way.
He wondered what would happen if Death went to bed with a plain old mortal man.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It might destroy our friendship. It might even burn you up. Like, literally consume you with fire. I seriously don’t know.”
Milo was flustered. “Can you read my mind?” he asked.
“I thought you knew.”
“Well, don’t. Jesus!”
After his hundredth life, he helped her open an exotic-food store called the Chocolate Squid. The store was fully stocked with squid and chocolate-covered butterflies and flowers you were supposed to dip in cheese, and more. When the gods tried to do human-style things, Milo observed, they often missed the mark.
The whole year the store was open, only fifteen customers came.
After Suzie closed the door for the last time, Milo tried to kiss her, but she turned away.
“I’m serious about the burning-up,” she said.
—
On Earth, life after life, Milo fell in and out of love all the time.