They succeeded in getting one part of the tent to stay up, and another part fell down.
“God is great,” said Milo, instead of cursing. “Okay, but listen: If you had a partner, you could do stuff like juggle things back and forth. And we could talk and have patter, you know, instead of just standing there grinning.”
“Again,” said Akram, “I decline. I am thinking of writing a book or buying a horse farm.”
The whole tent collapsed again.
“Forget it,” said Milo. “I’ll just think of it as a very expensive sleeping bag.”
And he walked off to gather the animals and take them to the pond.
—
The beasts drank, and Milo sat with his feet in the water, trying to juggle three stones. The best he could do was to keep two of them in the air, while the third either thumped to the ground or splashed into the water.
A voice behind him said, “There’s a trick to it, you know.”
Milo turned to find Akram behind him, juggling beanbags.
“I can teach you how to juggle in less than five minutes,” Akram said. “It’s easy. Stand up.”
Milo stood. Akram handed him two beanbags.
“Hold a bag in each hand,” Akram told him. “Toss one bag from your left hand to the right, so you wind up with both bags in one hand.”
Milo tossed. Easy.
“Now do it again, except this time, when the first bag is in the air, toss the other bag so that it crosses behind it, in the air, and catch it in your left hand.”
It took Milo a couple of tries to get this right, but he got it.
“That’s the trick,” said Akram, shrugging. “Toss, crisscross, repeat.”
It took only a few minutes’ practice before Milo could get all three beanbags popping and circling in the air.
“Wow,” said Milo. “Thanks!”
“So here’s what we’ll do,” said Akram. “Now that I’ve shown you the trick, it’s up to you to figure out how to juggle more than three. When you can keep seven things in the air, I’ll show you how to juggle knives without stabbing yourself in the face.”
“Thank you?” said Milo. “That’s nice of you? What made you change your mind?”
“The mind is a blessing and a mystery,” Akram replied, departing.
—
Milo had purpose again.
He was a lowly student, studying under a great master. He was the sorcerer’s apprentice. It was a role he knew, of course. In his thousands of lives, he had learned kung fu and how to fly airplanes. He had been a poker champ, a pool-hall hustler, and a prima ballerina. He knew by now how to learn a thing and practice it until it looked like magic.
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.
Chop wood, carry water, as the Buddhists said.
So Milo worked hard. He kept the animals fed and watered. He watched Akram. And he practiced. This became his life.
Of course, you had to have a reason to work that hard, to practice like that, and Milo did. He wanted very much to do what Akram could do with a crowd. Not only that, but he wanted the strange, easy peace that seemed to come over the master when he had a bunch of knives or shoes or kittens in the air. As if he weren’t there, almost.
Sometimes he found himself dreaming of juggling instead of dreaming about Suzie. Sometimes.
“Who’s Suzie?” asked Akram one morning when they were eating donuts in the bazaar.
“Why?”
“You call her name at night.”
Milo didn’t want to talk about it. Or think about it, or dream. He stuffed his whole entire donut in his mouth and glared into the sun.
“As you wish,” said the master. “Obviously this is a mystery of some import. Now chew, please.”
—
How to juggle more than three things?
Milo watched Akram. He did exercises. He whirled his arms and flexed his hands. He learned to roll marbles between his fingers. He did push-ups in the sand.
Satan liked to bite him and step on him when he did push-ups. He practiced dodging Satan.
The aha moment, when it came, was not what he’d expected. He had been juggling beanbags all morning, trying new ways of crisscrossing, when it suddenly hit him.
Ask.
So Milo walked to the bazaar, caught a tall, dark-eyed juggler at the end of his show, and said, “I’ll give you fifty bucks to show me how to keep more than three things in the air,” and the dark-eyed juggler said, “You throw them higher.”
“And faster, too, right?”
“Nope. Just higher.” And the guy took his money and walked away.
Aha!
—
Milo practiced for a month before he went to Akram and said, “Watch this.”
“Now is not a good time,” said Akram, who had a bunch of paper and a pen and was busy writing. “I told you I might write a book. Well, I am doing it. The story of my life and also my teachings about juggling.”
Milo popped five beanbags into the air. This did not seem to impress Akram much, but he stopped writing to watch.
Milo added a sixth. Then a seventh. The bags whirled higher, now circling a crescent moon.
“I’ve seen worse,” said Akram. “Of course, it’s been a month—”
Milo added more bags, reaching into his robe for one more, two more, ten more. While one hand was busy fetching new bags, he kept the rest of them going with the other.
Akram’s jaw dropped open. He put down his pen.
Milo caught each of the beanbags, one by one, and stowed them away in his robe.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, indeed!” said the master, wide-eyed as a child.
“What were you writing about in your book?” Milo asked. “What’s it called?”
“It’s called The Day Milo and Akram the Remarkable Started Working Together as Partners.”
Milo offered a grateful bow.
“God is good,” said Akram.
“Fuckin’ A,” said Milo.
—
They practiced juggling together, passing things back and forth. And Akram spent some time teaching, finally.
“There’s a secret,” he told Milo, as they passed seven beanbags back and forth, “to juggling anything the crowd throws at you.”
“Like the snake that one day?”
“Precisely.”
“What is it?”
“In the air, an object tends to spin on three axes—three separate directions—and you need to get it to hold still and just go up and down.”
And this is exactly where Milo’s training took a complicated, technical turn. His days became a montage of science and repetition. Throw this, throw that. Learn how objects move in the air. Some of it Milo already knew; in his many lives, he had been a scientist. He had flown the trapeze in the circus. He had pitched baseballs and swung swords.
Time passed. He practiced, survived injuries, and practiced more.
Akram worked on his book. Sometimes he showed Milo an interesting passage or two.
“I juggled an elephant one time,” he said, handing Milo the book. “Read.”
“It says here,” said Milo, “you juggled only one elephant. Is that really juggling?”
“It is when it’s an elephant.”
“Akram, Jesus! How strong are you?”