Ah, shit.
“It’s like we were building a lifeboat,” he said. “There’s no way there was going to be room for everybody. Let me guess: The perfect thing to do was to somehow help the whole planet. Everyone on Earth.”
Mama nodded. So did Nan. Suzie glared at the floor.
“What other kind of help did you have in mind?” Milo asked. “There was pretty much ‘getting killed by the comet’ and ‘not getting killed by the comet.’?”
“There were survivors,” said Mama. “They will start rebuilding, bit by bit. You might have helped those people get ahead of things a little bit.”
“Hindsight,” said Milo. “How was I supposed to know there’d be survivors?”
Beneath the television chatter, an uncomfortable silence.
“If it was easy,” whispered Mama, “they wouldn’t call it ‘Perfection.’?”
“Helping those who were involved in the project,” argued Milo, “was the best use of our time and resources. Even the gods can’t suggest an alternative.”
“We’re not gods,” said Suzie.
“Oh, hush,” whispered Nan. “They can’t tell the difference.”
“In any case,” said Mama, “it doesn’t matter what any of us thinks. The ocean is wet. Two and two is four.”
The coffee machine said ding. Milo ignored it.
“How am I ever supposed to make a perfect choice?” he asked. “It’s always a trick question in the end.”
“I don’t know,” snapped Nan. “Be trickier? Get smarter? That’s your job. We’ll know your perfect moment when we see you do it. It’s supposed to be amazing and surprising and impossible, and yet almost everyone manages to do it within nine thousand lives. Everyone but you. That’s all I know.”
The light shifted in the windows. Cats began, a couple at a time, to fill the kitchen.
Feeding time.
Time for goodbyes.
To Mama and Suzie, Nan said, “His house ought to be ready by now. Go sit and drink his coffee and argue all night, if you want. Master Chef is on in three minutes.”
Suzie rose from the table. “I’ll take him,” she said.
“Well, there’s a big fat surprise,” said Nan, lighting another cigarette.
—
Leaving the house, crossing the dead lawn, Milo took Suzie’s hand.
“Is it far?” he asked. He hoped his new house was nearby; he liked Nan’s neighborhood.
“We’re not going there yet. I have something to show you.”
Her voice had a rubber-band bounce to it. Excitement.
It wasn’t far.
They walked uphill, along a brick street lined with shops and Victorian streetlamps. The shops had enormous windows with heavy wooden molding and plastered doors. Gilded signs on hanging shingles.
Suzie stopped before a nameless storefront. The windows were soaped. No sign hung above the door.
“They’re closed,” Milo was saying, but when Suzie produced a skeleton key and unlocked the door, he remembered.
“Your store!” he gasped. “Your candle store!”
“My space,” she said, “where the candle store will be.”
Inside, she clapped her hands, and a hundred candles leaped into full flame. “I took the first step and signed a lease. The next step is…what? I guess fill it up with candles. A coat of paint. A sign with a cute name.”
Milo picked up one of the candles: a tall amber-colored sculpture of a rabbit.
Other candles wore other shapes. A knight. Snoopy. Buddha. Earth-mother figures with round, pregnant bellies. Fruit candles. Candles shaped like cars and houses and horses and skulls. Cobras. Dancers. Angels. Ghosts.
They were beautiful and lifelike. Many of them looked as if they were about to say something.
“You’ve been busy,” Milo remarked. “Which begs a question.”
“Yeah?”
“Does this mean you quit? Your other, you know, job?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Okay,” he said, “obviously not, because you just wore yourself out for a solid week, bringing almost the entire world over from the other side. But you couldn’t keep doing all three—making the candles, making people die, and tending the store when you open. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong. That’s the next thing to check off the list, I think. But it scares me.”
She took a deep breath and scrunched her hair up in her fingers.
Milo’s eyebrows rose.
“Death,” he mused, “is afraid of something?”
“Can you blame me? I mean, I’m not supposed to quit. Can Summer quit and join the circus? Can Beauty give notice and go work at the animal shelter? It will affect the balance—”
“Oh, God!” said Milo, shaking his fists. “If I hear one more time about how everything has to be in balance, balance, balance, I’m going to literally catch fire. I mean it.”
“That’s like getting mad at hydrogen or apple trees.”
Milo stood silently fuming.
“I’m tired,” he said.
“Well,” Suzie answered, “I’m going to bed, myself. I put a cot in the back. I can sketch you a quick map to your house—which is very, very nice—or, if you come with me, we can do the Happy Pony.”
“The…?”
“I read about it in a magazine. Looks like a woman riding a pony. Makes you happy.”
He followed her to the cot.
—
For the next two weeks, they played house just like a billion other couples. They slept together. They got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. They had moods. They watched TV and left notes for each other.
They did laundry. They both sucked at it and were always shrinking things and turning white things pink. Suzie had some weird garments, like dark robes and velvet tunics and cloaks with a hundred pockets. Work clothes. One time Milo put on her voluminous, hooded nightwatch cloak and came up behind her, saying, “Your tiiiiime haaaas coooome!”
Suzie was painting the antique tin ceiling with a long, telescoping brush. She froze, favored him with an expression like ice on stone, and said, “Put. That. Back.”
He put it back.
A lot of their time together was passionate. They had to go out and buy a bed, because they broke the cot.
Some of their time together was unusual. Like the time she went off to work and came home all upset because a lot of kids died in a school fire. It bothered her when death was hard for people, even though they went on and lived other lives. It was the kind of thing that made the living hate and fear her. That particular night, Milo held her for an hour while she shivered and stared at the floor and didn’t want to talk. She didn’t cry, as Milo would have.
Outside, the afterlife remained the same as always. Earthlike, and also dreamlike. Days came and went. Streets changed direction. The balance of Heaven and Earth followed its own inscrutable schedule. Clouds flew. Rain fell. The moon changed.
“I want it to be like this all the time,” Milo told Suzie one Sunday morning (it was Sunday there, anyway. One street over, it might be Thursday, or Shoe Day. You never knew).
They were reading newspapers on the couch together, legs intertwined.
She gave him kind of a hug with her legs.
This, he thought. This is Perfection.
Very few people know how to leave a moment like that alone and not fuck it up.