He went from living “up there,” as some would say, and learned to live “down here.”
He worked at a grain elevator for a time, earning some food and a warm bed. Then the air began to feel as if it might snow in a week or two. Maybe he should head south.
He went south until he smelled the salt and the sea islands, but he still felt cold. Felt sort of thin, and it occurred to him maybe it wasn’t the weather or the season.
He was riding atop a long, rusty train under a full moon when it occurred to him. He had made himself a fire—just a little hobo fire, a stick or two—and was trying to warm himself against the slipstream when he noticed something that startled him.
He could see the fire through his hand.
He jerked and said, “Fuck me!” and jammed his hand into his coat pocket.
Later, when he’d got up the nerve, he raised his hand against the moon, and…
“Fuck me,” he whispered.
The road was haunted. By him.
As if a switch had been flipped, he saw them all along the old train, like riders on a mythical snake. The moonlight shone through them, but it ran over them like water, too, and made them visible.
Some of them sat; others stood. All stared ahead but with a hollow disinterest in where the train was actually going. Many of them had allowed themselves to age, leaning like old barns. Many of them had fires, like him. None of them looked warm.
A cross-breeze caught Milo. A stream of milder cold, bearing dry leaves.
“If you can see them,” said the cross-breeze, “maybe you can see me, too.”
The breeze took his hand, and he turned his eyes toward the moonlight.
She was like steam over softly boiling water. Barely there.
“Suzie,” he said, and they sat there by the fire for a while, holding hands, touching foreheads, leaning against each other as much as this was possible. Parts of them were like mist. These parts flowed through each other.
It was the saddest joy Milo had ever known.
“I’m not being dragged into the Big Whole,” she told him. “I’m getting the sidewalk treatment.”
Goddamn them, Milo thought. Or it, or whatever.
“It’s just reality, love,” she said. “Death isn’t a person. She’s Death. If she’s not Death, she’s nothing. Two plus two. You quit moping around out here in the Empty, and go back and live. Go do your Perfection thing.”
A tunnel loomed. All along the spine of the train, the ghosts lay down side by side and held their breath against the smoke and steam of the engine.
After the tunnel, the night itself seemed more clear. The train rolled and whistled down a long timbered trestle over a lake. It might have been Lake Michigan. It was endless.
“I don’t know what to do,” croaked Milo. “If I go back.”
The engine whistled and moaned, miles ahead.
Suzie waved one ethereal hand, indicating the ghostly riders up and down the hundred boxcars.
“No one knows what to do,” she said. “It’s a crapshoot. Haven’t you figured that out? Please let’s not have this conversation; we’re short on time.”
WAAaaaaaAAAaaaaWOOooOoooOOOoo! moaned the train. “You do know what to do,” she said, “actually.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. It’s like when you were trying and trying to figure out how to juggle more than three beanbags. You got tired of getting nowhere, and you went and asked somebody. Don’t act surprised; I’ve been digging around in your mind.”
“A teacher,” said Milo.
“A teacher.”
“Like, the greatest teacher ever.”
“Something like that.”
Dawn touched the great lake. Up and down the train, the ghosts became hints of themselves. Milo held on to Suzie’s hand while the sun burned through the morning fog. Then he stood and performed a fairly credible swan dive off the train.
It was a long way down, and it hurt. Jolted him unconscious when he hit the lake. But he wrestled himself awake and drifted down through the cold, searching images and shadows, searching possible lives, sinking through more than two thousand years.
Kind of a shame you had to go that far back to find a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really fine teacher.
Milo had tremendous respect for learning.
Learning was the most important thing a soul could do. There was an infinity of things to learn and to teach. There was an infinity of ways to get the learning and teaching done.
—
You could learn from mistakes, to begin with. That was pretty common. Milo’s first mistake, as a baby in India, had been to reach out and grab a Ghaasa spider. The Ghaasa spider bit him on the thumb, and part of his thumb turned black and fell off. And he screamed, and wisely let it go, and didn’t do that again.
—
You could learn to do things no one had ever done before, if you could imagine them being done. As a Moroccan inventor named Abass Ibn Firnass, Milo decided that it was time for his own species to conquer the air. Constructing himself a framework of wood and heavy paper, he flung himself from the highest roof in Andalusia, and damned if it didn’t work.
For nearly ten minutes, to the wonder of crowds far below, he swooped and glided among the towers and minarets, until at last his momentum slowed and it came time to effect a landing. At this point, he realized that, in so thoroughly studying the elements of flight, he had neglected to develop a protocol for landing. Birds flew with their wings, so he had built himself wings. They land on their tails, however, and Abass had failed to provide himself with one. He survived a hard landing with considerable injury but no regrets.
“You are an angel!” gushed a local poet.
“You are kind,” answered Abass, “but I am a scientist and a friend to man, something a hundred times greater.”
—
He was an old copper miner whose job was to teach rookies how to drill holes and stuff them with dynamite and then get away before the dynamite was detonated.
He took this teaching very seriously.
So did his students.
Teaching is more likely to be a fine art when a passing grade means you don’t get your ass blown off.
—
One of the most mysterious of Milo’s lives was lived as Rabbi Aben ben Aben, a revered Jewish mystic. All his life, he sat bent over scrolls and texts. One day he staggered to his feet, a wild look in his eye as if he had unlocked something unlockable, learned something unlearnable.
“What is it, rabboni?” whispered his fellow scholars.
“It’s a trap!” he cried, and fell down dead as a stone.
This was probably an important teaching, except no one, including Milo, understood what it meant.
—
Milo learned about money and became a famous economist.
He invented the field of “cryptoeconomics.”
It was like the field of “cryptozoology,” which concerned itself with animals that weren’t real, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Some economists, Milo noted, went around saying that if you helped rich people get richer and didn’t make them pay taxes, eventually that would help out the poor people, too.