Excerpt
Reincarnation Blues
Chapter 1: The Wise Man of Orange Blossom KeyFlorida Keys, 2017
This is a story about a wise man named Milo. It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark.
The day didn’t begin badly. Milo woke up before sunrise, tucked his fifty-year-old self into a pair of shorts, and walked out to meditate on the beach. His dog, Burt—a big black mutt—followed.
Milo sat down in the sugar-white sand, closed his eyes, and felt the warm, salt breeze in his beard. He took note of his ponytail feathering against his back, and seagulls crying. That’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated:
notice things, without really thinking about them.
Milo was not a particularly good meditator. He cracked open a beer, and watched the sun come up. Meanwhile, as always, the more he tried to think of nothing, the more he thought of ridiculous, noisy shit like his big toe, or France. Maybe he would get a new tattoo.
He drank his breakfast, noticing the ocean, welcoming its ancient indifference. He tried to match its breath—the breath of time itself—and fell asleep, as usual, on the beach with his beer and his dog, until the tide rolled in far enough to wet the sand under his ankles.
He was, perhaps, the crappiest meditator in the world. But he noticed this, accepted it, and let it humble him. Humility was one of the things that made him a wise man.
He walked back to the house to open a new bag of dog food.
The shark that would eat Milo in a few hours was miles away, at that particular moment. It patrolled the surf off St. Jeffrye’s Key, looking for manatees.
The shark knew it was hungry. This required no thought. The shark lived in the moment, every moment, in a perfect equanimity of sense and peace, meditating its way through the sea without even trying.
Milo worked in his garden for a while.
He played with his dog and read a book about fossils.
He went online and spent twenty minutes watching dumb videos.
Then he drove his old pickup truck to St. Vincent’s Hospital, because visiting the sick is an important part of a wise man’s job. He took Burt with him.
Petting dogs was good for people; it was a scientific fact. Burt was a wise man too, in his way.
All animals are.
On this particular day, Milo and Burt visited Ms. Arlene Epstein, who was dying of being a hundred years old.
She was asleep when Milo arrived, and he stood there looking at her for a minute.
Hospitals had an unfortunate way of reducing people, he thought. Looking at Arlene Epstein in her bed, tissue-delicate, you’d never know that she had once been a legendary bartender, keeping rowdy tourists in line with a sawed-off hockey stick.
Burt hopped up and rested his forepaws on the mattress.
“Milo,” yawned Arlene. “Is it Thursday already?”
“Saturday,” he answered, kneeling.
“I always liked Saturdays,” mused Arlene. “I think I’ll die on a Saturday, if I can help it.”
“Not today, though,” said Milo. “You look good.”
“Fantastic,” she replied, sitting up and giving his beard a tug. “You can take me for a walk.”
Arlene was not supposed to go for walks. There was a sticker on her door that said she was a ‘fall risk.’ Milo ignored the sticker, and stole a walker from a closet down the hall.
Arlene took one step about every three seconds. Milo stuck casually by her side, ready like a hair-trigger to catch her. Burt walked along the wall, sniffing like crazy (dogs love hospitals. Think of all the different smells you can never quite get rid of).
When they had traveled ten feet, Arlene asked, “Milo, do you know what happens when we die?”
He was honest with her. He said, “Yes.”
One step. Two steps.
“Well?” she asked.
“You come back as something else.”
Arlene thought about that.
“Like another person?” she said.
“Or a dog. Or an ant. Maybe even a tree. Burt was a bus driver in his last life.”
The old woman stopped.
“Don’t f*** with me,” she said. “I’m going to die soon, on a Saturday, and I want to know.”
Milo looked down at her with deep, honest eyes.
“I’ve lived almost ten thousand lives,” he told her. “I am the oldest soul on the planet.”
Arlene looked into one of his eyes, then the other. Seemed to like what she saw. She set the walker aside, took Milo’s hand with both of hers, and leaned on him some.
They resumed walking.
“Will I still be
me?” she asked.
“Sure,” said Milo. “More or less. Of course, you’re supposed to make improvements.”
“Well, I don’t think I want to come back as a tree.”
“Then don’t.”
Arlene patted his hand and told him he was a good boy.
Burt sniffed out something nasty on the floor, and gave it a big, fat lick.
If Milo had gone out swimming then and been eaten by the shark, it would have been a wonderful, generous note for his life to end on. But he didn’t.
The shark, always hungry, had eaten a mess of ocean perch and some floating garbage, and now cruised the deeps between islands, coming up slowly across the outer reefs of Orange Blossom Key.
The shark had
been an ocean perch, in a former life. It had been food of all kinds. It had been the Strawberry Queen for the 1985 Strawberry Festival in Troy, Ohio. Sometimes, in dreams, it remembered these other lives.
For now, though, it swam and was hungry, and swam and was hungry.
Milo still had his workday to look forward to. Part of being a wise man was knowing the importance of work.
Milo did two things for a living.
Thing One: he was a fisherman, and a sportfishing guide.
He owned a boat called the
Jenny Ann Loudermilk, and charged people a fortune to catch fish.
You could charge tourists in the keys practically anything.
Today, Milo’s workday involved housecleaning aboard the
Loudermilk. Maybe a customer would appear, but he kind of hoped not. He was hoping to go surfing, if the waves built up.
He stood on the deck of his boat, wielding a garden hose, spraying away seagull shit and old fish guts. Burt curled up on the floor in the pilot house and lay there watching the flies on the windshield.
Milo thought about Arlene Epstein and wondering if she was scared.
He hoped not. Death was a door. You went through it over and over, but it still terrified people. That’s what he was thinking about when something bright and colorful caught his eye, down on the dock.
A tourist, in an Orange Blossom Key t-shirt. A chunky man of middle years, wearing a mustache, sunglasses, brand-new boat shoes, and a straw hat.
Suddenly, Milo didn’t feel like working that afternoon. Suddenly he just wanted to head for BoBo’s Pub, and sit at the bar and drink beer.
“Are you going out again today?” asked the tourist.
Aw, great balls of shit.
“The customer’s always right,” said Milo. “You want to go out, we’ll go out.”
“How much?”
Milo quoted his fee, which staggered the man. (O, shining hope…)
“Listen,” said Milo, “you get three or four other fellas, it’s easier on your wallet, and we could go out and hit it tomorrow morning—”
But the tourist seemed to be in the grip of some urgency.
“No,” he said. “Let’s go ahead and go.”
“Hop aboard,” said Milo, offering a strong, tanned, tattooed hand.
The tourist introduced himself as Floyd Gamertsfelder.
“I sell carpet,” he said.
“That’s awesome,” said Milo, casting off.
Burt jumped ship and trotted away down the dock, heading home. He didn’t belong out on the water, and he knew it.
Floyd Gamertsfelder didn’t give a shit about catching fish. This was something Milo knew the instant he saw him, the moment he heard that strange urgency in the carpet salesman’s voice. About half of Milo’s customers were like that; they paid heavy money for his time, fuel, and tackle, but they were there for something deeper and more difficult than amberjack or marlin.
This was Thing Two, the second part of Milo’s job: professional wise man and counselor.
People came to him because they had problems they couldn’t sort out on their own, and they had heard of him. Just as people in cartoons climbed mountains to find wise men, real people traveled serious distances to consult Milo aboard his boat, upon the sea, for the price of a half-day charter.
They were smart to do so. When you live almost ten thousand lives, after all, you can learn a great deal. Milo had squeezed so much learning and experience into his one, single soul that the knowledge had grown pressurized and hot, and transformed into wisdom the way coal changes into diamonds. His wisdom was like a superpower.
It showed in his eyes—like green fire in outer space—and in his tattooed skin, which was creased and furrowed as if his suntan had put down roots.
“I really just want to talk to you about some stuff,” Floyd admitted as they motored out of the marina.
“I know,” said Milo.
