Reincarnation Blues

Milo is the oldest soul on the planet, having lived nearly ten thousand lives. In his most recent incarnation, he is a fifty-year-old fisherman and informal counselor in the Florida Keys who drinks beer on the beach, meditates badly, and dispenses advice from his charter boat. One night he goes surfing and is killed by a shark.

Dying is nothing new for Milo. He has been executed, catapulted over the walls of Vienna, frozen as an Arctic explorer, and killed in a starship crash. Between deaths, he awakens in the afterlife, a realm resembling Earth but where streets change direction, days arrive out of order, and forms shift when unobserved. The afterlife sits between the living world and the Oversoul, a Great Reality of pure existence that is the source and destination of all souls. Every time Milo dies, he is met by Suzie, a pale woman with long black hair and literally burning eyes. Suzie is Death herself, and she and Milo have been secret lovers for eight thousand years, hiding their relationship from Mama and Nan, two universal beings who serve as his cosmic counselors.

After the shark kills him, Mama and Nan deliver devastating news: A soul receives ten thousand lives to achieve Perfection and join the Oversoul, or it is erased permanently. Milo has only five lives remaining. Perfection means transcending all selfishness through an act so saturated with love that it opens the Sun Door, a flash of golden light that absorbs the soul into the universal whole. Milo protests he is already wise, but Nan cuts him short: Wisdom is not Perfection. Suzie objects to Mama's plan for Milo to live as a hermit, arguing that people are his natural gift. Nan then confronts them about their hidden romance, warning that a human soul coupling with a universal force is dangerous.

To show Milo what Perfection looks like, Suzie takes him on her rounds. In Mumbai, they follow a sacred cow into a slum, where the cow places a stolen butcher knife before a starving family and says, "Please eat me" (59). Suzie explains that the cow's soul, a bodhisattva (an enlightened being) named Aishwarya, achieved Perfection through sacrifice without pride or fear. Milo resolves to do something similar.

A flashback to his first life provides context. Born as Milovasu Pradesh in the Indus River Valley around 2600 B.C., he is a precocious but small child who volunteers to be thrown across a gorge to save his village from raiders. He falls short and dies at the bottom. Meeting Death for the first time as a little girl, he receives her tenderness. In the afterlife, he learns the cosmos's structure, and Death names herself "Suzie," beginning their bond.

Milo dives into the river of rebirth and chooses a life during humanity's extinction event. As a Stanford research assistant, he falls in love with his colleague Kim and joins a secret project building arkships to escape an Earth-destroying comet. Kim and her daughter Libby win passage; Milo does not. He insists Kim bond with the project's lead scientist, Wayne Aldrin, for Libby's sake, and stays behind to die when the comet strikes. Mama and Nan rule that this sacrifice falls short: The project's fence, excluding the rest of humanity, represents a failure of scope.

Suzie then resigns from being Death. Cosmic rebalancing tears her away across impossible distances. Desperate, Milo chooses his next life recklessly. Born as Milo Hay on a distant colonized planet, he displays telekinetic abilities that his father, Professor William Hay, suppresses with a neural inhibitor. Falsely accused of rape by Ally Shepard, an older student with an undiagnosed dissociative disorder, Milo is sentenced to Unferth, an asteroid prison of total abandonment. Under extreme duress, his powers reawaken, and he transforms the prison into a community with gardens, schools, and shared visions. When Ally's disorder is diagnosed and she recants, officials extract him by force. Unable to function in normal life, he eventually steps through an air lock into space. In a subsequent life in 1960s Ohio, Milo works at a slaughterhouse and develops violent compulsions. He dies in a truck accident, but Nan notes the life's value: He drove into a ditch rather than hitting a bus full of children.

Meanwhile, Suzie fades, growing transparent as Death without a role dissolves toward Nothingness. After nearly a year searching the afterlife, Milo finds her atop a freight train, barely visible. Both are disappearing. She urges him to find a great teacher.

He is reborn around 500 B.C. and encounters the Buddha, an eighty-year-old man with penetrating eyes and a declining mind. Milo learns genuine meditation: not silence but acceptance. The Buddha tells him, "The mind can't help being noisy" (262), and Milo comes to understand that "Perfection is being happy with what you are right now" (269). As the Buddha's decline threatens public exposure, Milo makes a devastating choice, poisoning the Master's food to protect the teachings. His companion Ompati unknowingly eats the same poison, and both die. Condemned for killing the Buddha and nearly carried to Nothingness by an angry crowd, Milo is rescued by a barely visible Suzie using the last of her cosmic energy.

As fugitives, they flee through the afterlife. Milo proposes a final gamble: Both will be reborn together, Suzie as a human for the first time, to achieve Perfection or face Nothingness. They are born inside a massive terraforming crawler on Ganymede, one of Jupiter's moons, where humanity's remnants labor under brutal resource cartels. Milo's father is shot by Monitors, the cartel's armed enforcers, for refusing an order that would kill everyone aboard. The family is dumped on Europa's ocean surface and rescued by an island community. Life is harsh: toxic storms cause cancerous tumors, and the cartel forces families to hurt one another as discipline. Milo and Suzie gradually remember their cosmic past.

Drawing on ten thousand lives of experience, Milo tells the islanders the Parable of Jonathan Yah Yah: Since they are already poisoned and dying, they have nothing left to fear. The islanders, now calling themselves the Family Stone, paint themselves as skeletons, dismantle the cartel's water pump, and refuse to work. When the cartel deploys a devastating weapon, the children are sent to sea with salvaged military communications fish to broadcast the resistance across the solar system. The adults stay beneath the bomb, and Milo and Suzie lock eyes. For the first time in all his lives, Milo truly meditates, balanced between annihilation and hope.

They awaken together in the afterlife, Suzie solid again. Mama declares their final life constitutes Perfection, and Nan offers dry congratulations. The Sun Door opens onto a vast, cheering multitude, and Milo and Suzie wade hand in hand into golden light, their souls merging with the Oversoul. Within it, individual identity dissolves into cosmic understanding. A billion dreamlike years pass. Then the Oversoul dreams it is Milo, standing in a river, holding Suzie's hand. They forget it is a dream and let the river carry them into new lives together.

The novel follows them through an endless series of incarnations, always finding each other: as tomb robbers in Sauvignon, as childhood sweethearts in Blue Creek, Michigan, as space cats drifting between stars. In Blue Creek, they marry in 1897, raise children, and endure the loss of a grandson at Anzio. On their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1947, they sit with tangled old hands on the porch swing. Milo tells Suzie he is proud of her. Not hearing well, she squeezes his hand: "That's all right, love. I'm tired of you, too" (369).