“It’s better than oblivion?”
“It’s about evolution. That guy kept evolving. When he started losing his mind, you’d think he would have slipped into death. But he didn’t. He kept getting up in the morning, and doing things, and learning. And when death did come, he was okay with it. He kept evolving. Taking the next step. And that’s how it should be. And the next step, if I can earn it, is the Sun Door.”
Suzie made a questioning noise of some kind.
“We’ll figure out what to do about you,” he said. “We just need to keep ahead of them long enough to figure it out.”
True night had fallen, afire with stars. Paper lanterns, fueled with candles, rose like butterflies over the city and the bay.
“I wish we’d done this long ago,” said Suzie.
The stars and the lanterns cast reflections in the water.
It was as if they’d run away to outer space.
—
Time passed. They lived on the sampan, sometimes staying in the same harbor, sometimes moving down the coast. Over days and nights, and in and out of weeks.
Once or twice, Milo thought he sensed unfriendly eyes turned their way. Sensed plans and bad intent moving around them. Sensed balance seeking to assert itself. When that happened, they waved. They sailed. They anchored up rivers, under vast, overarching flowering trees.
They were the most beautiful fugitives in all eternity.
—
Even as fugitives, they knew that life was for doing stuff.
They read books together. They ate and drank at festivals. Once, they made a paper dragon big enough for the two of them to hide inside and wove through the crowds, ringing bells and roaring. Delighted children followed them.
They made love so slowly—how else can mist make love?—that they fell half-asleep, the way you do lying in warm grass. She was like a shadow, or warm water, moving against him. Somehow, making love was still making love, whether both were completely there or not. Making love was powerful shit.
One morning, Milo was sitting in the stern, washing socks in a bucket and watching game shows on a tiny battery-operated TV, when he saw a phalanx of universals walking down the pier. Walking toward them with a purposeful stride, bearing quarterstaves.
“We should go,” Milo called down into the galley, where Suzie was taking her turn at cooking.
He didn’t have to say anything more.
She gave an exhausted sigh but did what needed doing.
Whir! Rustle! Whoosh! They left.
—
They lived up on a mountainside for a while.
Not a long while. Milo had a feeling that their time and their luck were both running short.
The souls who lived on the mountain harvested tea every day, and Milo and Suzie joined them. The tea grew in narrow hedgerows on steep terraces cascading down the mountain. Sometimes mist rolled in from the sea and left them isolated on the mountain, above the clouds, like a cartoon vision of Heaven.
They herded goats, which ate weeds but left the tea alone and nourished the tea shrubs with their poo. They lived in a round wooden house with three hundred other people. The house was like a whirlpool made of walls and windows and laundry hanging down. They all ate together and launched paper lanterns together at night and heard everybody through the walls and open windows when they talked or sang or loved. The house was six thousand years old, and everyone who had ever lived there had scratched his or her name on a wall, on a stair, on the roof, somewhere. The house was like a library of names. Milo and Suzie wrote their names on the little wooden platform around the well. Milo wrote “Milo.” Suzie wrote her true name, which all universals and natural forces have; it was a puzzle of seven interlocking infinity symbols made of streams of numbers representing letters. If you touched it, it burned and moved under your hand. Underneath, she wrote “aka: Suzie.”
One day, a universal slice in a poor burlap robe walked up the mountain—at first Milo thought it might be Mama, and he tensed.
It wasn’t.
The universal helped them pick tea without saying a word to anyone.
Milo and Suzie disguised themselves in sunglasses, just to be safe.
The universal launched paper lanterns with them and ate supper with them. He introduced himself as Mohenjodaro Bo-Ti Harrahj Nandaro, the Fifth Way of the Fifth Light of the Fifth Sign of the First Night, He Who Is Both Near and Far, an Incarnation of Work.
He wrote his name on their big wooden salad bowl. It took him fifteen minutes.
—
Mohenjodaro never said a suspicious word. He did all the dishes, spent the night in the tool barn, and was gone before breakfast.
“What’s on your mind?” Milo asked Suzie after breakfast. They had chosen to stay home in bed that morning, because Suzie was feeling especially transparent and worried.
“I don’t like running scared,” she answered. “I’m sick of running, and of running out like a slow hourglass. I want to feel at home. I want my candle shop back. I want us to…to—”
“Live our lives,” said Milo, standing at the window, looking out on the green mountain rising from the sea of mist.
“Yes,” said Suzie, her voice quivering. “But they’re not going to let us do that. The boa isn’t going to let us. It’ll catch up, sooner or later, like a wave spreading out.”
Silence.
This is what giving up feels like, Milo thought.
Far below, the mist thinned and parted for a moment, affording a glimpse of the shore below and the river winding away.
Milo’s breath caught. His eyes took on a soft and peculiar blaze.
“I know what to do,” he whispered.
She gave him a doubtful look but said, “Let’s hear it.”
“Follow me,” he said, and they left the whirlpool house, holding hands.
Down through the tea shrubs in the fog, to the river’s edge.
Suzie understood.
“You’re going back to live your last life,” said Suzie. Her eyes saddened, but Milo saw her steel herself and straighten. “That’s as it should be,” she said. “Go, while you can, and—”
“You’re coming with me,” he said.
Her head tilted. Curious and confused.
“We’ll get it right, together,” said Milo.
“No,” said Suzie. “You mean, like, I would live a life…I’d be human?”
“One life. Get it right or get it wrong, and we’ll either win or lose together. Everything, or…nothing. The sidewalk.”
“Baby, I can’t do that,” she said gently.
“Suzie,” said Milo. “Sweetheart? Lover of eight thousand years? I love you so much, but don’t be a stubborn ass. What have you got to lose? Either of us?”
Suzie’s eyes flared, wild and desperate.
“I’m the wisest human soul in the universe,” he reminded her. “Give me the benefit of the doubt, this once.”
She said nothing, but they began walking again, crossing the narrow, rocky beach.
There, in the gray water before them, were thousands of possible lives.
Suzie lifted her hand. “Look,” she said. “That one.”
Milo looked.
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said at first. But the more he looked, the more her choice made sense.
“Peace,” he said. The Master would approve.