A day passed. Now and then a house floated by, and people climbed on it. Occasionally, there would be an island of some kind, and the newly dead would crowd over it and overwhelm it.
Milo floated and relaxed.
The river passing between worlds wasn’t like other waters. You couldn’t drown in it. It would, if you let it, carry you along like a leaf or a water bug. It would hold you like a reflection.
Milo let it.
He even, after a time, allowed himself to sink and take root in the bottom muck, where he swayed like seaweed, sleeping.
—
She swam down and pulled him like a cattail, raising mud in a boiling cloud.
Half awake, he protested like a sleepy child.
They sat on the shore together, dripping and holding hands. As his brain de-fuzzed, Milo noted that the river had gotten more or less back to normal. The shrieking crowds were gone. Flotsam and dreck littered the trees and a nearby park, but on the whole the crisis seemed to have passed.
Milo wondered how long the adjustment had taken.
“It’s been a week,” Suzie whispered.
“I was in the river for a week?”
She pressed a finger against his lips.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said. “I assume you don’t think I was sitting around all that time with my thumb up my ass. Listen: Almost everyone in the world died.”
“Peace,” said Milo. “I get it. I was there.”
She was so, so tired. Now that his eyes cleared, he could see it in the color of her skin, which had gone colorless and translucent.
She crawled like a cat onto his lap, and now it was her turn to sleep.
—
They both woke up sort of sprawled in the mud. Some kind of large shadow hovered over them and was tickling Milo’s lip with a long, dry weed.
He batted at the weed, sitting up, blinking.
“Mama,” he said. “Hey.”
“You guys are cute,” said Mama.
“Bite me,” mumbled Suzie, who hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
Mama clapped her meaty hands.
“Chop-chop!” she said. “Now that things are back shipshape, Nan wants everyone to come over.”
“To her house?” asked Milo.
“Why?” asked Suzie, sounding combative.
Mama rolled her eyes. “I’m too tired for this shit,” she said. “Can we just go, please, and make the best of it?”
They went. Muddy and bleary and talking to themselves, they went.
—
Many lives ago, as a little kid walking to school in Ohio, Milo (and all the other neighborhood kids) lived in fear of a scary widow named Mrs. Armentrout. They were super-careful not to set foot on Mrs. Armentrout’s lawn, because she’d come to the door and curse at them or knock on her window like gunshots going off (one time she made a kid named Leonard shit his pants). Then one day a stray dog bit Milo as he was passing by, and she came out and drove the dog off with a leather belt. She brought Milo, crying and shaking, into her kitchen and gave him a Coke with a tiny bit of vodka in it while she smoked a Pall Mall and phoned his mom.
Nan reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout, and her house reminded him of Mrs. Armentrout’s house.
The outside of the house would never catch your eye. It sat surrounded by a dead lawn and a dead garden. Once you passed inside, though, it came to life.
It was like stepping into a crowd, because Nan had about eighty-five television sets, all turned on all the time and set loudly to separate channels. They were not the slim, streamlined modern television sets, either, but the kind from the 1960s: wooden battleships with big dials. Nan’s TVs all had huge doilies on top and supported hundreds of framed pictures. Nan rarely appeared to actually watch any of these sets, but if you turned one down or changed the channel, she’d yell at you, even if she was occupied at the far end of the house.
The house itself was a minefield of…things. Every end table (topped with doilies) was crammed with Hummels or bowls of plastic fruit. No surface of any kind was without its own ashtray, piled with old butts and lipstick stains. No wall space (with awful 1970s wallpaper) that wasn’t hung with a tiny painting of Venice or a dog or a vase. And there were vases, too, and crafted mugs waiting to be knocked over. You walked through Nan’s house with your elbows at your sides. You stepped carefully and sat carefully, because, of course, there were the cats.
Everywhere. Countless.
If the televisions were the eyes and heart and electric blood of the house, the cats were its breath. They moved from place to place in tides, as if the rooms breathed them out and then in. There were pauses and stillness now and then, as if the house rested, and then sometimes sudden flurries, as if the house had gasped aloud, some alarm sensed only by the cats, by a common neurology, secret and occult.
They left their muddy shoes outside and located Nan in her kitchen, smoking and watching Family Feud on a countertop TV.
“Nice to see you,” Milo told her.
“Sit down,” she said, neither kindly nor unkindly. “I’d offer you something to snack on, but I gave everything to the relief people when they came by.”
“That was nice of you,” said Suzie.
“Don’t patronize me.”
They all took seats around the table and then sat there saying nothing.
Eventually Suzie said, “Can we please get this silliness out of the way?”
“The silliness,” said Mama, “as you call it, isn’t the least bit silly.”
Milo raised his hand like a schoolkid.
“Whatever the silliness is,” he said, “it appears to involve me, and I haven’t got the first idea—”
“I think what you did for your family in this last life counts as an act of Perfection,” said Suzie. “I think it’s obvious. These two bullies disagree. I vote ‘yes.’?”
“There’s no vote,” said Mama. “A lifetime either balances perfectly or it doesn’t. Nan and I happen to understand why your recent life didn’t balance, and Suzie does not.”
Milo got up and started making himself a cup of coffee.
He hadn’t thought about his evaluation yet. Things had been rather busy since the comet. Now that he gave it a moment’s thought, however, he became angry.
“I would like to know,” he said, “what was the slightest bit imperfect about the life I just led.”
His eyes burned. He swallowed hard. A cat yowled, at the back of the house.
“You weren’t even close,” said Nan.
“Think it through,” said Mama. “You went down there with a plan, right?”
“I went down there to promote Love, with a capital ‘L,’ through selflessness and sacrifice. And what did I do? I gave my family to another man so they could have a chance of survival. Do you understand what that means? The emotional cost? Of course not. That’s why you”—he pointed at Mama and Nan—“always try so hard to fit into human forms and always get it wrong.” He indicated the house, the TVs, and the cats.
Nan narrowed her eyes and pulled on her cigarette but said nothing.
Milo filled the coffeemaker and sat back down to wait.
Mama put a big, soft arm around him.
“Tell me about the fence,” she said.
The fence?
“The huge fence you and your ARK people put up around the ships to keep everybody else out.”