Until, finally, the dark thing inside Francesco came out from under its rock and wouldn’t go back, no matter what she did. He caught the sniffles, and his eyes grew hollow. Suzie pushed at him and pulled and fed him certain things and even yelled a little, but nothing was working.
When parts of him began to turn black, Francesco looked up at her and said, “Suzie, enough.”
He was right.
She kissed him on the head and sat there holding his hand while he dimmed and went out and rose up and became one with the cosmic hoo-ha.
Suzie closed his dead eyes and gave the cosmic hoo-ha a taste of the old middle finger.
—
Now, centuries later, Suzie thought about Francesco often. A lot of people did.
She thought about him whenever she felt particularly lost out there on the edge of things. Wandering the moors, the empty roads. Sometimes looking for Milo, sometimes not. Too tired and angry to be happy.
Sometimes fellow drifters would look at her with the long, long stare they all shared and ask where she was headed.
“I’m just trying to avoid the universe,” she would answer.
Captain Gworkon.
Milo had fought against evil in many lives, but Captain G was the most conspicuous.
It happened in what most people would think of as the future. He won a galaxy-wide lottery and spent the whole bundle on bionic surgeries. He had himself built into a flying atomic cyborg, descended on the fortresses of powerful space pirates, and towed them to justice in chains.
Crime in the fourth galactic arm dropped off by 50 percent.
This was not, to his surprise, entirely appreciated.
“You saved us from the bad guys,” a grad student once said to him. “Who’s going to save us from you?”
He didn’t let her question bother him. People like that usually thought differently when their own lives were threatened.
Two nights later, he saved the same grad student from a pack of wild synthetic pig-dogs.
“I’m sorry about what I said,” she said, kissing his metal cheek. “It was a failure of imagination.”
“Most failures are,” he answered. “No prob.”
—
Evil.
Sometimes it was something that stood up and announced itself clearly. Like the times when he was born a Muslim, and the Christians were evil, and the times he was born Christian, and the Muslims were evil. He thanked God, in those lives, for making it so obvious.
—
Other times, it was still obvious but harder to fight. Like the time he was a laborer and signed up to help build a tunnel under the Crookshank River. And sometimes the air locks failed and the tunnel flooded and men drowned. But if you complained about safety, thugs would come into camp at night, looking for you, and say how a man who fit your description had broken into some houses, and they’d have witnesses. And away you’d go, and the message was to keep quiet and take your chances and suck it up.
Milo spoke up and wouldn’t stop, even when they came for him. He had an accident in jail and died spitting blood.
—
Sometimes, the fight took place in the most commonplace of ways.
In the twenty-first century, they made it illegal to buy cheap prescription drugs online. The pharmaceutical companies paid lawmakers to keep it that way, and medical expenses were bankrupting people, killing people. Milo ignored these bullies, and bought whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted, and fought evil that way.
Sometimes superheroes are regular people, and there are millions of them, typing away at their keyboards.
—
Many centuries ago, Milo led a thousand peasants in a protest. They marched up to the lord’s castle and demanded lower taxes. They didn’t have enough to eat.
The lord got up from his turkey dinner and ordered twenty soldiers to go up on the walls and fire some arrows at the peasants.
Ten peasants fell down amid the wheat and the wildflowers and died.
The nine hundred ninety remaining peasants turned around and ran like hell.
“What’s wrong with you people?” Milo screamed after them. He tossed rocks at their retreating backs. “There are so many of you and about forty of them!”
It was like watching a horse get bossed around by a horsefly.
—
Milo was a saxophone player called Mookie Underwood, and he walked across a bridge into Selma, Alabama, with hundreds of other men and women. On the other side of the bridge, policemen waited with clubs.
“Turn back,” called the policemen.
The marchers didn’t turn back.
The cops clubbed them down and beat them.
The marchers ran and were chased and horribly beaten.
Cameras flashed. Cameras rolled. All around the world, people saw.
“Let them watch,” Mookie choked through his own blood. “Let them see. It’s their ass, too.”
—
Fighting evil was often a secret undertaking.
As a shoemaker named Milosevic Kocevar, he had defied the Waffen-SS by hiding books beneath his floorboards. Some in the resistance shot at soldiers, some destroyed railroads, others hid books and paintings and kept them out of Nazi hands.
Milosevic, for his part, preserved a rare library of Polish pornography. When the war came to an end, he returned it to the museum, which hid it away with secret pleasure. To this day, you have to ask to see it.
When he got to the afterlife, after that particular Polish life, Milo found that Suzie had a perfect copy of the entire pornography collection.
“You risked your life for this?” she asked.
The expressions on her face were dramatic and varied widely. Some of the drawings and photographs were quite surprising. Some of them involved ponies.
“When people try to destroy art or thought,” Milo explained, “it makes all forms of art and thought valuable. It’s a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn’t see. It’s a real evil, a thing with substance and power. I was helping to preserve people’s chance to see and to choose.”
“I see,” she whispered. “I understand.”
For a solid month, every time he turned around she had one of those books open.
“I’m fighting evil,” she’d say.
“Rozumiem,” he’d answer, in Polish. “I understand.”
COVINGTON, OHIO, 1948–1972
When a soul has been born almost ten thousand times, birth comes easier.
Milo recovered in good form from all the squeezing and the sudden brightness. Of course, he didn’t understand right away who or what he was, any more than any other infant did. But time passed, and he learned.
He learned emotions. Sometimes he was filled with huge, sunny goodness. Sometimes he was apprehensive or calm. Sometimes he raged. When he raged, he was fed. He noticed this.
Aside from a certain smartness and confidence, Milo was mostly like other babies all over the world. But something in his brain—that wonderful brain—was different. Something like an OFF switch. The switch, like the rest of his brain, wasn’t finished forming yet.
What was it an OFF switch for?
Unknown.
—