“Peace,” Suzie repeated.
She waded out into the water.
“I wonder what it’s going to be like,” she wondered aloud.
“Like being a god,” said Milo, “except without any of the god stuff.”
“You sound like you hate it.”
“I hate being born. It’s gross.”
Waist deep in the waves, she hopped up and kissed him on the lips.
“All or nothing!” she said, and turned and dove.
Milo was right behind her, sliding into life one last time.
Milo’s lives flashed before his eyes. That happens sometimes when you die and also when you’re about to be born.
Not all of his lives flashed. Just certain ones. Lives that went with what he’d learned from the Buddha. Lives where he’d done something Peaceful with a capital “P.”
—
Once, he had been a tree for five hundred years and thought of the world outside himself as something big that changed and moved and had fire in it. When the wind blew, he bent. When fall came, he shed his leaves. When they came and chopped him down and made a house out of him, he was a damn fine house. He had grown so old and thought and felt so slowly that he was able to understand these things and to know that they all had their place.
His every moment and every thought were Stillness and Peace.
—
On Gorm 7, an experimental planet where they were trying out different ways of living, Milo lived in a neighborhood where the comptrollers doubled the rent one year.
The people in the neighborhood did not storm the comptrollers’ offices. Instead, they took off all their clothes and went to live in the woods.
“Back to nature,” they all said.
“Hey!” cried the comptrollers. “You can’t do that! That’s not a choice! You need our houses!”
The naked people didn’t answer. They disappeared among the trees.
Milo happened to be walking behind his (former) neighbor Julie DeNofrio. She had an impossibly elaborate—and strangely hypnotic!—tattoo on her back.
He never would have seen that if not for this peaceful—and highly effective!—consumer protest. You never know what little surprises will come along when you choose to evolve.
There had been peaceful changes up in the afterlife, too. Not long after he and Suzie became lovers, she had decided to open a greenhouse.
“You’re going to grow and sell plants?” Milo asked. “I heard you right?”
“Yeah,” she said. They were eating burritos. She stopped eating hers. “Why?”
She could read his mind, so he tried not to think about how Death didn’t seem like someone who would have a green thumb.
“Nothing,” he said. “I’ll help you if you want.”
She started eating her burrito again.
The greenhouse was a success. As it turned out, death was a huge part of growing plants. Things died and went in the soil. Leaves died and fell off, or you trimmed them. Plants died and made way for new plants.
She was especially good at carnivorous plants. She grew a Venus flytrap one time that ate one of Nan’s cats.
“Maybe she won’t notice,” said Milo.
And she didn’t.
Way in the future, the people on different planets didn’t bother one another much, except to trade. But in 3025, the people of Kurgan 4 attacked the people of Pondwater 3.
“You’re going to work for us now!” roared the Kurgans.
But the people of Pondwater 3 (Milo was one of these) said, “No.”
The Kurgans shot some of them. But the Pondwater people still said, “No.”
The Kurgans tried to beat them and twist their arms and get them to work and help out and go where they wanted them to go, but the Pondwater people either just stood there and ignored them or said, “No,” or went limp and lay down on the ground.
Sometimes they quoted the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah, a famous teaching about how you can’t force someone to do something if they’re not afraid of you.
Eventually, embarrassed and puzzled, the Kurgans said, “Aw, fuck you guys, anyway,” and knocked over some potted plants, got back on their ships, and went home.
Milo was one of the unfortunate few who got shot. As Milo lay dying, a man in a ball cap came and looked down at him and said, “It’s not really an end, you know. You’re like a wave that rises up and then returns to the river. The wave will rise again.”
“I know,” said Milo. “But the wave would still like, maybe, a little slice of pizza before it goes.”
So the man in the ball cap went and got him a slice of pizza.
That was a nice thing to do.
The small things, Milo thought as he died, were really the big things.
—
Suzie, too, had given Peace a nudge now and then.
Of course, because she was Death, Suzie’s nudges could be confusing and might not look like Peace at first.
She had gone to the horseraces once. To the Epsom Derby, in 1913.
It was nice. It was festive. Lots of dandy British people in fancy hats. The women’s hats were enormous. Suzie couldn’t get enough of the women’s hats. She wanted one.
That was one of the things she hated about her job. You got to go to these wonderful places sometimes and have a great time for a while…until it was time to be Death and throw a wet blanket over everyone’s day.
She was there because of a woman named Emily Davison.
Emily Davison was a suffragette. She had been jailed a bunch of times for fighting for women to have equal rights—voting, mostly, but other things, too. A couple of times she had gone on hunger strikes, and prison matrons had to force-feed her liquids through her nose.
Suzie was standing by the rail, watching the horses line up for the next race, when Emily Davison stepped up beside her and said, “Well, hello.”
“Oh,” said Suzie, surprised. “Hello.”
Emily was a wise old soul, and discerning. Some people could recognize Death whether she had decided to make herself visible or not, and the suffragette was one of these.
The bell rang, and the horses took off down the track, out of sight.
Suzie admired Emily’s hat.
She almost wanted to ask if she’d mind taking it off, before, so it wouldn’t be ruined, but didn’t. She wasn’t tactless.
“You’re not going to try and talk me out of it,” said Emily, “are you?”
Suzie shook her head. “I think it’s a brave thing,” she said. “And necessary, unfortunately. Good things will happen for a lot of people after this.”
Emily nodded. She stood very, very still, watching the track with wide eyes.
Hooves thundered as the horses began coming ’round.
“I’m frightened,” Emily said.
Suzie laid a gloved hand on her arm and opened her mouth to say something reassuring. But what exactly?
“It’s all right,” said Emily, managing a weak, breathless smile. “You can have my hat, after, if you like.”
With that, she ducked under the rail and onto the track and flung herself in front of Anmer, a racehorse belonging to King George.
The crowd convulsed and gave a single, sickening gasp. Followed by screams.