He tried a light switch over by the door. No lights. He tried a switch in the kitchen. Nothing. The power wasn’t even turned on yet. Man…
He made his way down the hall, letting his eyes adjust in the half-light. The hall opened into a single bedroom. Over here, the shadow of a bed, an end table, a clock radio—
The air stirred.
Dust and dry leaves whirled up in a funny little tempest. The leaves formed a shape and slowed down, until only the shape remained.
Suzie coalesced beside the nightstand. Nearly cocooned in black hair, eyes softly (but literally) burning.
She wrapped long arms around him and gave his lips the lightest flicker of a kiss, the way a snake might kiss.
He drew her closer. The flickering kiss deepened.
“You should at least let them get out of the neighborhood,” Milo said. “They’re not blind, you know.”
“I think maybe they suspect,” said Suzie.
“Well, if they do find out—and they will—they won’t approve. You know they won’t.”
“Shhhhh,” Suzie hissed.
Then she coiled around him, forcing him to the floor.
Cheap carpet, he noted. There were going to be burn marks.
—
Eventually, the half-light from the windows became a deep purple dusk.
Morning, noon, twilight, and night didn’t always happen in order in the afterlife, the way they did for the living. Order was often an illusion. There were fewer illusions here.
They had worked their way up onto the bed. Both were nearly exhausted and damaged here and there.
Milo buried his face in her hair, breathing deep. She smelled like midnight.
“I missed you,” he said.
She propped herself up and looked down at him.
“Please,” she said. “You don’t even remember me when you’re down there screwing around with your Tanyas and Amys and Batangas and Li Wus and Marias—”
“I can’t help that. It’s what happens when you live a life. I still sort of miss you, somehow, in a something’s-missing kind of way.”
“Liar. But you’re sweet.” She bit him a little, on his neck, drawing blood.
“I brought something for you,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember this?” she asked, and from the depths of her hair she produced a copper circlet. Banged up, half-green with verdigris, it was a rough sculpture of a snake swallowing its own tail.
“An armband,” Milo said, taking it from her hand. Holding it, feeling its weight, he realized the armband was familiar.
“From my first life,” he said.
“And your first death,” she added. “Remember?”
He remembered.
He turned the armband over and over in his hands and let the memory rise up like a dream.
INDUS RIVER VALLEY, 2600 B.C.
Milovasu Pradesh opened his eyes, when he was able, and the world flooded into him, a river of color and sound. The parents who had brought him into the world lived among green trees and mountains. Between the mountains, green fields. A river flooded by, tumbling into a deep, misty gorge.
The world was full of voices: The roar of monsoon rains, the sounds of insects and night. His father telling stories, his mother singing songs.
No one in his village knew that he was a brand-new soul. How would they? You don’t come into the world with numbers on your forehead, telling how many lives you’ve lived. The only way anyone might be able to tell, at a glance, is by watching your eyes. New souls have the hungriest eyes, drinking in the world for the first time.
“He’s like a stone,” said Milovasu’s father. “When he is watching something or listening, he is completely still. He barely breathes.”
“He’s like the sun,” argued his mother. “You watch. One of these days all this watching and listening will catch fire inside him, and he’ll be like a god; you watch.”
“He will be a leader,” said the village leader, and everyone agreed.
The village leader had once been a warrior of some distinction. He wore a soldier’s copper armband, a ring in the shape of a snake swallowing its own tail. He slipped this ornament from his arm and allowed Milo to wear it around like a hat one afternoon.
Milo learned quickly. He walked when he was three months old. Walked, in fact, all the way to the gorge and had to be chased and snatched up at the last second. Potty training was a breeze. His first words came out in a sentence, proper and whole: “Father, do you hear the wind blowing in the trees?” To which his father replied, “What? Yes, I hear it. Holy shit!”
Always, he was the leader in the games the boys played. Until the year he turned six and stopped growing. One day, it seemed, the other boys shot up another foot, and Milovasu stayed the same. No one knew why.
“Maybe he’s just gathering his strength,” mused his father, “and in a month or two he’ll put on a great burst and pass them all.”
But he didn’t. He stayed small. Sometimes, too, he had trouble breathing. His chest would tie itself in knots, and he would have to sit down, wheezing and croaking until his chest loosened again.
The other boys no longer let Milovasu play games with them. When he insisted on running among them, anyhow, they snatched him up off the ground and began passing him back and forth like a ball.
“I won’t allow this!” howled Milovasu. As he was passed through the air, he made a hammer with his fist, and the boy who reached up to catch him received such a blow on the nose that he staggered around like a drunk and was laughed at. Milovasu strode off in triumph, trying to hide the fact that he couldn’t get his breath. He was hoping to get out of sight around a tree before he passed out.
Before he got far, four boys overtook him and knocked him to the ground, and the boy he had hit filled his mouth with dirt.
The next day, however, he was back. Again, he ran among the boys. This time, when they grabbed him, he took hold of the largest boy, Sanjeev, by the wrist and gave his arm an expert twist. This was something he had learned from watching his father and the other men wrestle. Sanjeev cried out in pain at first, but then stifled himself. Pain, the elders taught, was transitory. Like most things outside a person’s boa, it came and went.
“Let me go,” he said to Milovasu, “and no one will lay hands on you again.”
Milo let him go.
Standing, Sanjeev said, “It was childish of us to treat you that way.”
Milovasu shrugged and answered, “Well, we are children.”
“Nevertheless. But let me say this: It is a fact that you are smaller than all the rest, and you do make an excellent ball. An ordinary ball doesn’t turn and thrash in the air and make itself difficult to handle. May we use you as a ball, Milovasu?”
Milovasu appreciated the respect shown by Sanjeev. And his father had taught him not to be overly proud. He agreed.
His father, when he first witnessed this new game the boys played, was puzzled and angry. But when he watched awhile and saw how it was, he was even more proud of his son.
“Milovasu will be the smallest leader this village, and maybe the world beyond, has ever known,” he said.