Then one day you wake up and you have turned into a human.
You are huge, like a human, and understand all the things humans understand. You have a beer belly and a New York Rangers cap. Holy shit! Yesterday all you knew about was crawling in the dirt. Today you have a bachelor’s degree in sports marketing. Today you understand about taxes and the solar system. You read and write Spanish and English. You have a best friend, an ex-wife, and a kid you see on weekends. You have been to Brazil and Europe, which, to an earthworm, would be like visiting distant galaxies, except that the very idea of “galaxies” would melt an earthworm’s mind.
Do you think you’d be all heartbroken about losing your earthworm girlfriend? Your earthworm self?
You wouldn’t.
Actually, here’s the thing: You and your worm girlfriend are actually both in there, smooshed together in your vast new brain. You and a trillion other worms.
You do not think about being trillions of separate earthworms. Why would you? You move ahead with being your new, awesome, ancient self.
—
Everything makes sense to you now.
Time. Gravity. Which fork to use. Zippers. Infinite dimensions. Tacos.
It’s all part of a dream you are having.
A billion years pass.
Or they would, if time weren’t just part of the dream.
So you dream a billion years. What’s the difference?
The billion years pass like a great sleeping ocean.
—
And then one day you dream that you are an old soul named Milo, standing knee-deep in a river, holding hands with an old soul named Suzie.
Everything comes back around. Everything.
—
You forget that it is a dream.
And you pick up where you left off, with a long, deep kiss.
(You remember understanding gravity and Chinese, but it’s fading.) After a while, you walk out into the river, and let it take you, and give way to the weirdness of being born.
You hold hands. Nothing tries to pull you apart.
You hang together in the water, between lives and worlds. The river carries you, time enfolds you, and catfish swim through you.
They came back separately, somewhat back in time, and didn’t meet until they were practically adults.
Age sixteen found Suzie working as a cleaning lady at St. Thomas’s Cathedral, in Sauvignon. One night she heard strange noises from inside the crypt of poor old Archbishop Guilliaume. Swallowing her fear, she pried the lid loose and found a handsome—if somewhat dusty—young man crouched inside.
“Well!” sighed the young man. “I can breathe again!”
They fell in love at once. Otherwise he may not have confessed to her that he had jarred the lid shut while attempting to rob old Guilliaume’s grave, and she might not have suggested that he go ahead and rob the eighteen other honored crypts in the cathedral and that they run off together before dawn and make a life for themselves in the South of France.
“Done!” said the young man, and he gave her a splendid, stirring kiss.
It was an oddly full kiss, in its way. Full of strange knowings and mysteries.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Milo.
“Mon Dieu!” gasped Suzie. “That was one hell of a kiss!”
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1882
Milo Falkner and Suzanne Cobb met on a sleigh ride, at Milo’s birthday party, the year they both turned ten. They didn’t hold hands right away, but they smiled at each other a time or two and blushed.
Milo’s father (a notorious rakehell) was running on strong homemade beer that night, making free with the whip, and turning left over the dangerous end of Sand Lake, where the ice was often thin.
Snap! Once or twice, the lake protested. Bang! Like a gunshot.
Which was, finally, the cue for young Milo and Suzie to clasp their mittens together.
The sleigh reached shore. They still held hands, blooming inside like candles.
Suzie, upon reporting the sleigh ride to her parents, was forbidden to have anything more to do with Milo and “that whole family of misbegotten reprobates,” all born, it was said around the county, with snakes for umbilical cords.
He wrote her a letter; it was intercepted. She wrote him a letter, which was also intercepted, and which earned her a week of copying Bible lessons.
Then, horror: Suzie fell ill, the way children in those days were prone to do. She paled and evaporated until, at last, when she said, “Milo,” ever so softly and cried a single tear, her father had him sent for.
And Milo was brought up to sit with her and to talk to her about things. Swimming. Frogs. How he liked books and would teach her to hunt ducks.
“Not ducks,” she breathed. “I love ducks.”
“Geese, then,” he said.
And she lived.
Her father, fearing the worst, had already bought her a grave plot over at Grassby’s and, being a practical sort, had gone ahead and kept it. In the years that followed Suzie’s recovery, she and Milo sometimes took picnics there.
—
On a future planet, a millennium away, Milo and Suzie came back as responsible parents and taught their children the most famous story in all the interstellar colonies: the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah and the Martyrs of Europa.
They told how the martyrs had died to broadcast awful truths about the ancient, greedy cartels. They told how miners and engineers all over the solar system followed their example and refused to work, even though some of them became martyrs, too, before the cartels fell apart.
All good parents taught their kids this same lesson: If everyone agreed to suffer pain or death rather than be treated unjustly, greedy people could never again gain power.
“We’ve had fifty generations of justice now,” they told the children. “Don’t be the generation that blows it.”
“We won’t,” said Shaggy and Little Red Corvette.
BLUE CREEK, MICHIGAN, 1892
The year he was to have begun law school, Milo became the first person to drive a motor vehicle across Petoskey County. The vehicle itself was a great, noisy thing, mostly a clumsy steel boiler with a smokestack on it. Newspapermen followed (or outpaced him) on horseback, telegraphing dispatches as fate permitted. Sometimes Milo drove for miles without incident or delay. Other times, he spent hours making repairs.
After a journey of fifteen days, Milo pulled up just after eight o’clock in the evening at Toastley Hall, a dormitory at Casper Teaching College, marched up to the chaperone’s desk, and asked that his sweetheart, Miss Suzanne Cobb, be sent down, in order that he might kiss her for the photographers.
“No,” said the chaperone, a sour and suspicious person who, in a former life, had been a cornstalk. “Curfew is strictly seven-fifty, and no gentlemen after six.”
Milo said, “Please.”