Sum (10 page)
Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He’s not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He’s not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.
He is as impressed by the gorgeous biological results as the rest of us, and He often spends slow afternoons drifting through jungle canopies or along the sea floor, reveling in the unexpected beauty.
When our species stumbled into sentience, we became awed by His lightning-bolt experiments with electricity, His racing cyclones, His explosive fun with volcanoes. These effects generated more awe and perplexity among the beautiful new species than He had expected. He didn’t want to accept credit for something He did not deserve, but acclaim was tendered without request. He began to find humans irresistible with their unrestricted love. We quickly became His chosen species.
Like us, He is awestruck when He ponders the perfect symphonies of internal organs, the global weather systems, the curious menagerie of marine species. He doesn’t really know how it all works. He’s an explorer, curious and smart, seeking the answers. But with enough of our adoration, the temptation overcame: we assumed the creation was planned, and He no longer corrected the mistake.
Recently He has run into an unforeseen problem: our species is growing smarter. While we were once easy to awe, dragging knuckles and gaping at fire, we have replaced confusion with equations. Tricks we used to fall for have been deduced. Physical laws predict the right answers; the intellectual territories we once gave away now convene under the banner of better explanations. We command theories of physics so strange and complex that God gets blood pressure spikes trying to understand them.
This puts God in a tricky situation. Ancient books relate how God unleashed all His wonders on Egypt. He feels a little defensive now, because He doesn’t have any more wonders to unleash, and He’s increasingly concerned that we would see the strings if He tried. He’s in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults. All this is reflected in the steady decline of attempted miracles in the past millennia. He is too noble to rely on bluffing, and the thought of being caught and revealed as an amateur embarrasses Him. This is why God has increasingly kept a professional distance from His favorite species. As He grew more withdrawn, saints and martyrs filled the vacuum as His marketing team. He’s ashamed now that He didn’t put a stop to them earlier; instead, he slipped into seclusion as they generated endless chronicles.
But this story has a happy ending. He has recently faced His limitations, and this has brought Him closer to us. Studying our details from His heavenly outpost, He began to understand that His subjects are entirely capable of empathizing with His position. Everywhere He looks He sees positions of strange credit: parents who seed a child’s life but have limited control over it; politicians who briefly steer the ship of state into the dimly lit future; enthusiastic lovers who marry without knowing where the commitment will lead. He studies the accidental co-locations that initiate friendships, inventions, pregnancies, business deals, and car accidents. He realizes that everyone is knocking over dominoes willy-nilly: no one knows where it leads.
In the afterlife, in the warm company of His accidental subjects, God now settles in comfortably, like a grandfather who looks down the long holiday table at his progeny, feeling proud, somehow responsible, and a little surprised.
Because the afterlife is a form of justice, we may think that it cannot include animals, who are not held responsible for their actions. Thankfully we would be wrong. It would have been a lonely afterlife without animals, and we have discovered the pleasant truth that the hereafter is full of dogs, mosquitoes, kangaroos, and every other creature. After you arrive and look around for a while, it becomes obvious that anything that once existed enjoys a continued existence.
You begin to realize that the gift of immortality applies to things we
created
, as well. The afterlife is full of cell phones, mugs, porcelain knickknacks, business cards, candlesticks, dartboards. Things that were destroyed—cannibalized naval ships, retired computers, demolished cabinetry—all return in full form to enjoy and furnish the hereafter. Contrary to the admonition that we cannot take it with us, anything we create becomes part of our afterlife. If it was created, it survives.
Surprisingly, this rule applies to creations not only material but also mental. So along with the creations that join us in the afterlife are the gods we created. Lonely in a coffee shop you might meet Resheph, the Semitic god of plague and war. The head of a gazelle grows from his forehead; he gazes wistfully out the window at passersby. In the grocery store aisle you may bump into the Babylonian death god Nergal, the Greek Apollo, or the Vedic Rudra. In the shopping mall you’ll spot gods of flames and moons, goddesses of sexual acts and fertility, gods of fallen warhorses and runaway slaves. Despite their incognito clothing, they are typically detected by their gargantuan size and such characteristics as lion heads, multiple arms, or reptilian tails.
They are lonely, in large part because they’ve lost their audiences. They used to cure disease, act as intermediaries between the living and dead, and dole out crops and protection and revenge for the loyal. Now no one knows their names. They never asked to be born, yet they find themselves ensnared here for eternity. Only rarely is there a local resurgence of belief in an old god, a small clumping of fans, but such bursts are always short-lived. The gods recognize that they are stuck here with their dealt hand of cards: a vengeful personality, fire for eyes, dysfunctional kin, and eternity on their hands.
When you begin to look around, you’ll discover thousands of them. The Aztec Mictlantecuhtli, the Chinese Monkey King Sun Wukong, the Norse Odin. In afterlife phone books you can find the Rainbow Serpent of the Aboriginal Australians, the Prussian Zempat, the Wendish Berstuk, the Algonquian Gitche Manitou, the Sardinian Maymon, the Thracian Zibelthiurdos. At a restaurant you might eavesdrop on the still-cold relationship between the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat and the storm god Marduk who once split her in two. She picks at her food and only gives curt replies to his attempts at conversation.
Some of the gods are related to one another; others have untraceable genealogies. What they have in common is a proclivity to refuse the free housing offered in the afterlife, although no one is sure why. Most likely it is because they are having a difficult time coming to terms with the idea of sinking to the level of their onetime genuflectors.
Instead, at night, lonely and homeless, they cluster in one another’s company on the far edge of the city, lying down to sleep in large grassy meadows. If you’re interested in history and theology, you’ll enjoy walking these fields of gods, this quiet horizontal spectacle of abandoned deities laid in uneven rows to the vanishing point. Here you might run across Bathalang Maykapal of the Tagalogs, and his main enemy, the Lizard God Bakonawa; having no one who cares about their fights anymore, they now share a lonely bottle of wine. Here you see the god of light, Atea, from the Tuamotu Archipelago, and his son Tane, who in his heyday hurled the patricidal lightning bolts of his ancestor Fatu-tiri; now the whole family sits around, their vendettas withered and difficult to reinvigorate. Look: here’s the Maori Tāwhirimātea, the god of storms and winds, who spent his lifetime punishing his brother deities for separating his parents, Rangi and Papatuanuku; with no more audience, his winds are spent and he plays cards with his brothers under calm skies. Over there you can see Khonvoum, supreme god of the Bambuti Pygmy, clutching his bow made of two snakes, which he still believes might appear to mortals as a rainbow. Here is the Shinto fire god Kagu-tsuchi, whose birth burned his mother to death; now the only evidence of his former blaze is a light smoky smell.
Like a museum, these fields of gods, this pastoral encyclopedia of mythology, is a testament to human creativity and reification. The old gods are used to watching us here; the new gods are stung by how quickly they slipped from reverence and martyrdom to desertion and tourism.
Although the gods choose to congregate together out here, the truth is that they cannot stand one another. They are confused because they have found themselves here in the afterlife, but they still, deep down, believe they are in charge. They have typically risen to the top because of their aggression, and they still want to claim supremacy over the others. But here they no longer enjoy the peak of a hierarchy; instead, they suffer side by side in a fellowship of abandonment.
There is only one thing they appreciate about this afterlife. Because of their famed vengefulness and creativity in the arts of torture, they find themselves impressed by this version of Hell.
In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. She shares qualities with all religions’ descriptions, but commands a deific grandeur that was captured in the net of none. She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.
You can see in Her glittering eyes how delighted She is to hand forth the Book of Truth. The Book cleanly addresses your lifetime of questions with no philosophical gaps or loose threads. As you observe Her excitement about revealing this, you begin to suspect that deep down She was afraid that an especially clear-thinking theologian would guess the answer. All the clues were there, and only people’s personal backgrounds got in the way. You notice that She feels relief as She watches while people’s biases and traditions impede clear theological guessing. It is only because of these cultural blinders that She retains Her enviable position of revealing the universe’s great secrets each day as the dead cross over to Her territory in the next dimension.
If these people were able to completely shake their traditions, the claims of their ancestors, the songs of their childhood—She reasons—they would have a decently clear shot at the right answer. And this is why She was always leery of apostates, those who rejected the particulars of their religion in search of something that seemed more truthful. She disliked them because they seemed the most likely to float a correct guess. If you assumed that God is fond of those who hold loyally to their religions, you were right—but probably for the wrong reasons. She likes them only because they are intellectually nonadventurous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.
Upon their arrival in the afterlife, She divides people into the Apostates on Her left and the Loyals on Her right. The Apostates are put on the down escalator, and only the Loyals remain in Heaven. Each day She welcomes new Loyals from two thousand religions. She watches them study the Book of Truth and waits for it to sink in with a delicious thrill.
But something has gone terribly wrong with Her plan. The truth does not convince. The newly arrived Loyals have an imperturbable capacity to hold the beliefs with which they arrived, a deep reluctance to consider evidence that separates them from their lifelong context. So She finds Herself unappreciated and lonely, wandering in solitude among the infinite cloudscapes of the nonbelieving believers.
We look forward to finding out answers in the afterlife. We’re in luck. In the afterlife we are granted the ultimate gift of revelation: an opportunity to view the underlying code.
At first we may be shocked to watch ourselves represented as a giant collection of numbers. As we go about our normal business in the afterlife, in our mind’s eye we can see the massive landscape of numbers, stretching to sight’s limit in all directions. This set of numbers represents every aspect of our lives. Across its vast plains we spot islands of sevens, jungles of threes, branching rivers of zeros. The size and richness are breathtaking.
As you interact with a lover, you can see her numbers as well, and her interactions with yours. She endearingly sticks out her bottom lip for attention, and your numbers cascade into acrobatics. Digits flip their values like waterfalls. As a result, your eyes lock on to hers, and amorous words form on your lips and travel from your throat in air-compression waves. As she processes the words, her numbers flip, waves of change rippling through her system. She returns your affection, as dictated by the state of her numbers.
My goodness
, you realize on your first afternoon here:
This is totally deterministic. Is love simply an
operation of the math?
After watching enough code, a new notion of agency and responsibility dawns. You watch and understand all the signals that lead to a driver stomping on her brakes as her numbers are changed by the numbers of the cat walking in front of the wheels; you can even see the code of the fleas that leap off when the cat leaps. Whether the cat is struck or not struck, you now understand, was not in anyone’s control; it was all in the numbers, married together in a gorgeous inevitability. But we also come to understand that the network of numbers is so dense that it transcends simple notions of cause and effect. We become open to the wisdom of the flow of the patterns.
If you assume this gift of revelation is received in Heaven, you’re only half right; it is also the punishment designed for you in Hell. The Rewarders originally thought to offer it as a gift, but the Punishers quickly decided they could leverage it as a kind of affliction, drying up life’s pleasures by revealing their bloodlessly mechanical nature.
Now the Rewarders and Punishers are in a battle to determine which of them gets more benefit out of this tool. Will humans appreciate the knowledge or be tortured by it?
The next time you are pursuing a new lover in the afterlife, perhaps sharing a bottle of wine after what appeared to be a chance encounter, don’t be surprised if both a Rewarder and a Punisher sneak up behind you. The Rewarder whispers into one of your ears,
Isn’t it wonderful to understand the code?
The Punisher hisses into your other ear,
Does understanding
the mechanics of attraction suck all the life out
of it?
Such a scene is typical of the afterlife, and illustrates how much both parties have overestimated us. This game always ends in disappointment for both sides, who are freshly distraught to learn that being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience. The secret codes of life—whether presented as a gift or a burden—go totally unappreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.