Down below, the Master had drawn near the river, and the air above the water began to shake and glow.
A golden light spun itself out of thin air and cast a perfect cosmic dawn over the multitude. It made everything beautiful and simple. Made everything clear, like the air and the light after a rain.
Surely, thought Milo, the Buddha himself understood what he had done.
Maybe he would say something at the last minute. Any second now he’d stop and say, “Hey, we’re forgetting someone! Why, without Milo, the Master would just be a story about some old coot who forgot his own name and sat around meditating in his own drool. C’mon down, Milo!”
But the Buddha did not say these things.
He waded out into the river, wearing a breezy expression.
“Please,” said Milo. He didn’t have the energy for anything more. Time and space had clamped onto him with a corkscrew and twisted everything right out of him.
He was done.
How could a person be so wise and so good, generally, and wind up with the whole universe against him?
The Master became a mere shadow in the wild flood of light. Then the Sun Door overwhelmed him and absorbed him, and he was a part of it.
The great light closed and faded.
“That’s pretty much the opposite of where you’re going,” said Nan. But Milo barely heard, because his own ancient voices had begun to speak up, taking rather a pissy tone.
You were on your next-to-last chance to get life right, said his soul, and you murdered Buddha. Oops.
Oh, come on! Milo thought. You were there!
You. Murdered. Buddha.
I tried to do something complicated and beneficial, Milo explained. Tried to, anyway. Inside, he suddenly felt a feathery kind of flutter. A violence that was soft, angelic.
Milo’s own soul was trying, in its metaphysical way, to beat him up.
—
The light was just evening light now, over the river and the town and the bridge and the multitude. But the excitement wasn’t quite over, the great day not quite done.
Blinking, the crowd turned and buzzed and seemed to be seeking something. Slowly, following pointing fingers, they all found what they were looking for and raised their eyes to the hill, to the backyard where Milo stood, to Milo himself.
As one, they pointed.
“Him,” they said.
“Oh, fucking hell,” said Milo. “Really?”
—
Pop! Mama materialized beside him.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I didn’t want to miss the receiving line down there.”
“Ma!” cried Milo. Hope!
“Thank God!” he said. “I was about to—”
“Hush,” said Mama, turning away. “Please, just hush.”
Milo felt himself collapsing inside. Indeed, he would have fallen, but they caught him. Not Mama and Nan but the backyard people, the crowd people. And they raised him up and carried him the way crowds have sometimes carried saints to the stake or queens to the chopping block. Downhill, along the river.
Milo closed his eyes and let it happen.
Over the bridge, toward the neighborhoods and their sidewalks.
He heard the names they called him. They weren’t very creative.
“Buddha killer.” “Buddha poisoner.” “Buddha’s Judas.”
Now and then someone would give him a poke or throw something at him. Something wet splashed over his shoulder. Something hit his knee.
Milo remained silent. He didn’t want them saying, later, that he raged and panicked like a madman or a killer, but just then someone let him have it with a stick, right in the funny bone.
“God fucking dammit!” he howled.
All around him, eyes bugged.
“See?” they said, pointing. “See? I’ll bet he was always like this! All ten thousand lives, like a time bomb, waiting.”
That’s it, Milo thought. If they can be mean, I can be mean. I have more experience than these losers, anyhow. And he began fighting to turn himself over, opening his jaws as wide as they would go. He would begin by biting some fingers off. And then some faces. What did he have to lose?
And then he was flying.
It happened in an instant. A storm of leaves and dust, snatching him up and out of their grasp. Up and away into Nowhere, into Nothingness. Nothing but wind and something that wrapped around him and felt like legs, looked like bottomless eyes, felt like a tongue.
“Lover,” said the dark and the wind and the nothing.
—
When the whirling and the dark settled down, they were someplace far away.
Twilight. A soft breeze and wind chimes. Colored lanterns here and there. A harbor, with old boats that rose and fell as if breathing.
They materialized aboard one of these boats. A long, spacious sampan, like a big canoe with a roof.
Chinese Heaven, thought Milo. Cool.
He looked around.
“Suzie?”
Something like a gasp and a whisper from the shadows at the sampan’s far end.
He didn’t see her until the moon broke out from behind clouds. Then he saw her, draped like a rag over the gunwale, dripping like heavy mist.
“Aw, shit,” he said, rushing to her. Trying to hold her. Trying to find something solid enough to touch.
“You have to hold me,” she breathed. “I’m all used up. You have to let me take from you.”
He held her. He shuddered with rage and fear. How long before she faded into nothing? How in hell had she managed the strength to scoop him up and fly off with him?
“I know,” she sighed. “Shut up.”
Even her voice wasn’t all there.
God, he thought, when you loved someone, every day was Opposite Day. Being with them made you feel weak and also strong. They made you want to laugh and cry. Get dressed up and get undressed. You wanted to keep them forever and eat them like a bucket of cheese fries.
“I killed Buddha,” he told her.
“He understood,” said Suzie. “He knew it was the smart thing, what you did.”
Milo stomped both feet in frustration. “I knew it!” he yelled. “I knew it! Goddammit, Suze, how come he didn’t say anything? All he had to do was look at those universal slice bastards and say, ‘Don’t be too hard on Milo, you soulless bipolar butt-suckers; he was only trying to ensure a future of peace and goodwill,’ but nooooooooo—”
“He was busy,” she said calmly, “being transformed into pure eternal light. I missed you, by the way.”
Well, yeah.
“I missed you, too,” he said. “We didn’t get to see each other much last time.”
“We might not get to see each other much this time, either. Depending on how badly they want to chase you down. Depending on…”
She waved one hand in front of a lantern, and the hand became invisible.
But he was able to read her eyes, and they were love eyes.
See, now, Milo thought. This is Perfection.
“Maybe if we go into the pure eternal light together,” Milo said, “we’ll dissolve together or something, and sort of be together still.”
She nodded.
“Maybe my expectations have diminished,” she said. “But that would be okay with me, too.”
Milo sat, leaning back against the gunwale. Suzie lay down with her head in his lap. She matched his breathing.
“Buddha made me see something about Perfection that I hadn’t seen before,” he said.