Sum (5 page)

When you think you’ve died, you haven’t actually died. Death is a two-stage process, and where you wake up after your last breath is something of a Purgatory: you don’t feel dead, you don’t look dead, and in fact you are not dead. Yet.

Perhaps you thought the afterlife would be something like a soft white light, or a glistening ocean, or floating in music. But the afterlife more closely resembles the feeling of standing up too quickly: for a confused moment, you forget who you are, where you are, all the personal details of your life. And it only gets stranger from here.

First, everything becomes dark in a blindingly bright way, and you feel a smooth stripping away of your inhibitions and a washing away of your power to do anything about it. You start to lose your ego, which is intricately related to the spiriting away of your pride. And then you lose your self-referential memories.

You’re losing you, but you don’t seem to care.

There’s only a little bit of you remaining now, the core of you: naked consciousness, bare as a baby.

To understand the meaning of this afterlife, you must remember that everyone is multifaceted. And since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives—often surprising to you—helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail.

In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you’ve left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe.

Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you’ve ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you.

If you wake up and find yourself in this suburb, you’ll know you were a sinner. Not that the accommodations aren’t nice; there are televisions here with many stations to choose from. You have neighbors on all sides of you, with whom you interact occasionally. There are shelves brimming with books that tell good but implausible adventure stories. The children here are sent to school, and the adults go to work. Careers are easy and the groceries are cheap.

You learn that this is called Heaven. We live close to God here. The only mysterious part is that all the good people you knew—the samaritans, the saints, the generous, the altruists, the selfless, the philanthropists—are not here. You inquire whether they have been sent on to a better place, a super-Heaven, but discover that these good people are rotting in coffins, the foodstuff of maggots. Only sinners enjoy life after death.

There have been many theories about why God would arrange things this way. Everyone has a hypothesis, and it’s the customary topic of discussion at barbecue cookouts. Why are we the ones rewarded with an afterlife? It seems clear that God doesn’t much like the inhabitants here; He rarely visits us. But He wants to make sure He keeps us alive.

The woman at the coffee shop insists He is keeping the bad ones around like the Romans kept gladiators: at some point we will fight to the death for His amusement. Your neighbor across the street theorizes that we are being stockpiled to wage war against another God in a neighboring universe, and only the sinful make useful soldiers.

But they’re both wrong. In truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well. God spends most of His time in pursuit of happiness. He reads books, strives for self-improvement, seeks activities to stave off boredom, tries to keep in touch with fading friendships, wonders if there’s something else He should be doing with His time. Over the millennia, God has grown bitter. Nothing continues to satisfy. Time drowns Him. He envies man his brief twinkling of a life, and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with Him.

When you arrive in the afterlife, the Technicians inform you of the great opportunity awaiting you: make any single change you want, and then live life over again. Their pamphlet suggests that you might choose to make yourself two inches taller, or give everyone on the Earth a better sense of humor, or make birds talk. You then get to rerun that choice on the Earth to see what happens. They inform you proudly that this is a unique experiential education program.

Having just attended your own funeral, you may be tempted to propose a clever choice: you want to be the one who eradicates death altogether from our planet.

Just be forewarned: if you propose this, a kind Technician may pull you aside to let you know that you have tried this path before in your previous reruns of life, and it inevitably led to frustration.

Are you telling me this because it will put you out of
a job?
you ask.

No
, the Technician replies.

Is this because death is incurable?
you ask.

No
, the Technician says.

In that case I would like to have my wish fulfilled
.

Suit yourself
, replies the Technician.

So in your new life you grow into a famous medical visionary. You argue that there is no such thing as a natural death and raise millions to fund your research. You program computers to calculate all possible mutations of viruses before they happen and design prophylactic treatments against them. You compute the exact effects of every medication on the normal cycles of the body. Your aggressive anti-death program is a success: after the final breath of an incurably ill elderly woman, you are able to announce that hers represented the last natural death. Great celebrations ensue. People begin to live forever, healing just as they would when they were young, free at last from the overhanging cloud of mortality. You are greatly admired.

But eventually, just as the Technician warned, your success begins to lose its shine. People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation. Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment. People take more naps. There’s no great rush.

In an attempt to salvage their once-dynamic lives, people begin to set suicide dates for themselves. It is a welcome echo of the old days of finite life spans, but superior because of the opportunity to say goodbye and complete your estate planning. That works well for a while, rekindling the incentive to live strongly. But eventually people begin to take the system with less than the appropriate seriousness, and if some large new development occurs, such as a new relationship, they simply postpone the suicide date. Whole cadres of procrastinators grow. When they reschedule a new date, others ridicule them by calling it a death threat. There develops enormous social pressure to follow through with the suicides. At long last, after many abuses of the system, it is legislated that there is no changing a preset death date.

But eventually it comes to be appreciated that not just the finitude of life but also the surprise timing of death is critical to motivation. So people begin to set ranges for their death dates. In this new framework, their friends throw surprise parties for them—like birthday parties—except they jump out from behind the couch and kill them. Since you never know when your friends are going to schedule your party, it reinstills the carpe diem attitude of former years. Unfortunately, people begin to abuse the surpriseparty system to extinguish their enemies under the protection of necrolegislation.

In the end, great masses of rioters break into your medical complex, kick the plugs out of the computers, and once again have a great celebration to mark the end of the last unnatural life, and you end up back in the Technicians’ waiting room.

In the afterlife you find yourself in a beautiful land of milk and honey: there is no poverty, starvation, or warfare, only rolling hills and Lilliputian angels and evocative music. You discover that you are allowed to ask one question of your Maker.

You’re led ceremoniously through the glistening arcades of the palace to the great hall, where your Maker sits enthroned in lights that hurt your eyes. You cannot direct your gaze fully at Him.

Nonetheless, you stand bravely in front of Him and ask, “Why do you live in a place like this, so far from Earth, instead of living down in the trenches with us?”

He is given pause by this question. Clearly no one has asked Him this in a long time. It is hard to tell in the bright light, but it looks as though His kind eyes well up.

He gazes wistfully out into the sky. “For a while I
did
live on Earth,” He answers. “I was never one for exuberance, but nonetheless I had several homes in several countries. All my neighbors knew when I was there, and they would wave. I was well liked.

“I could run things well from that vantage—down in the trenches, as you say—and I actively enjoyed each acre of my creation by walking on it, smelling it, feeling the soil between my fingertips, living on it.

“But one day I came to one of my homes and found that all the windows had been broken.”

He winces in reminiscence.

“Then that happened to a second one of my homes. I don’t know who did it, or what their reasons were, but it dawned on me that the respect I once commanded was caving in. People began to cut me off in traffic. One morning I awoke to find people picketing in front of my driveway.”

He falls silent, misty-eyed, contemplative.

You clear your throat. “That’s when you came up here?”

“I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats,” He answers. “They don’t do it for their benefit, but for yours.”