Sum (6 page)

First you notice there are many blunders: the good are going to Hell and the bad to Heaven. When you approach the woman at the front desk to inquire, you find she is recalcitrant and insolent. She tells you to go to line number seven, where you will fill out a complaint form and turn it in to desk number thirty-two. As you wait in line and strike up a conversation with the woman behind you, you discover that the afterlife was long ago given over to committees.

It turns out that power was wrested from God near the beginning, when he began to lose control of the workload. Humans began doing whatever they liked; adultery flourished, crime materialized and escalated. God realized that He had no concept of the skills required to run an organization of this magnitude. Because of the excessive procreation of His humans, the population was doubling at a blinding rate, and the managerial load for a hereafter became staggering. A file had to be kept on every individual, planet-wide, with constant updating of new sins and good deeds. God tried taking care of all this Himself, pushing through pencils so fast they smoked. Compounding the workload was the fact that God, in His bigheartedness, had also established pleasant afterlives for every animal. He grew exhausted but stated resolutely that He would not degrade His promises of afterlife. He would not abandon a single baby, a single animal, a single insect. He would not downsize. He had made His promises and intended to keep them.

The angels who had supported God in the beginning watched with concern as it seemed the whole operation might slip out of His control. They began to sow the seeds of discord, introducing the idea that God would never have gotten where He was without them. As the system grew progressively disorganized, they hatched plans for their own rise to authority. As humans invented better technologies, the angels progressively took advantage of these to automate the process. By the 1970s they were zipping through uncountable piles of punch cards; by the 1990s they had reduced the operation to a warehouse of computers; at the turn of the millennium they had constructed a sophisticated intranet by which they could track in real-time the disposition of all souls. God developed a reputation of being old-school, and the reins of power became increasingly slippery in His uneasy grasp.

Very few people visit Him anymore. He finds Himself lonely and misunderstood. He often invites over men like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, and together they sit on the porch drinking tea and lamenting about movements that sweep over the tops of their founders.

There is no afterlife for us. Our bodies decompose upon death, and then the teeming floods of microbes living inside us move on to better places. This may lead you to assume that God doesn’t exist—but you’d be wrong. It’s simply that He doesn’t know
we
exist. He is unaware of us because we’re at the wrong spatial scale. God is the size of a bacterium. He is not something outside and above us, but on the surface and in the cells of us.

God created life in His own image; His congregations are the microbes. The chronic warfare over host territory, the politics of symbiosis and infection, the ascendancy of strains: this is the chessboard of God, where good clashes with evil on the battleground of surface proteins and immunity and resistance.

Our presence in this picture is something of an anomaly. Since we—the backgrounds upon which they live—don’t harm the life patterns of the microbes, we are unnoticed. We are neither selected out by evolution nor captured in the microdeific radar. God and His microbial constituents are unaware of the rich social life that we have developed, of our cities, circuses, and wars—they are as unaware of our level of interaction as we are of theirs. Even while we genuflect and pray, it is only the microbes who are in the running for eternal punishment or reward. Our death is unnoteworthy and unobserved by the microbes, who merely redistribute onto different food sources. So although we supposed ourselves to be the apex of evolution, we are merely the nutritional substrate.

But don’t despair. We have great power to change the course of their world. Imagine that you choose to eat at a particular restaurant, where you unwillingly pass a microbe from your fingers to the saltshaker to the next person sitting at the table, who happens to board an international flight and transport the microbe to Tunisia. To the microbes, who have lost a family member, these are the mystifying and often cruel ways in which the universe works. They look to God for answers. God attributes these events to statistical fluctuations over which He has no control and no understanding.

Heaven looked approximately like people said it would: vast gardens of flora and fauna, angels with harps, San Diego weather. But when you first arrived, you were surprised to find that everything was in disrepair. The gardens were vastly overgrown. The angels were gaunt, sitting on blankets with small paper cups for change in front of their dented harps. They tinkled out a small ditty as you walked by. The day was warm but the sky was gray with smog.

God is gone. The rumor is that He stepped out long ago, saying He’d be right back.

Some people hypothesize that God is never planning to return. Others say God went crazy; others assert He loves us but was called away to spawn new universes. Some say He is angry, others say He contracted Alzheimer’s. Some hypothesize he is on siesta, others on fiesta. Some say God does not care; some say God cared but has passed away. Others suggest that it doesn’t make sense to ask where He went, since He may never have been present. Perhaps aliens, not a god at all, built this place. Some ask whether we owe our afterlives to neutral scientific principles not yet understood. Others predict God is about to return at any moment; they point out that His days correspond to our millennia, and perhaps He’s on an afternoon’s drive.

Whatever lies behind His absence, it hasn’t taken long for the garden to degrade into a Hobbesian jungle. People have belligerently taken sides based on their disappearance theories, and the debates rise like plumes of black smoke. At one point, someone found an old footprint of God’s in a far reach of the garden and tried to carbon-date it, but no one agrees on the results.

Then an incredible thing happened. Someone started brawling, someone started shooting, someone started bombing, and now war has broken out on the consecrated plains of Heaven. New arrivals are swept directly into boot camp and trained in weaponry. The afterlife, as anyone here will tell you, is not what it used to be. We have ascended and brought the front line with us.

The new religious wars do not pivot on God’s definition but instead on His whereabouts. The New Crusaders mount attacks against infidels who believe God is returning; the New Jihadis bomb those who don’t believe that God has other universes to attend; the New Thirty Years War rages between those who think God is physically ailing and those who find the suggestion of fallibility sacrilegious. The New Hundred Years War wages between those who have concluded He never existed in the first place and those who have concluded He is on a romantic junket with his girlfriend.

That’s the history. That’s why you’re under this defoliating tree now, machine-gun chatter in your ears, your nose aching with Agent Orange, bazooka rounds lighting up the night, clenching the blood-blackened soil in your fingers while the leaves drop around you, loyally crusading for your version of God’s nonexistence.

In the afterlife you are invited to sit in a vast comfortable lounge with leather furniture and banks of television monitors. Upon the millions of blue-green glowing screens, you watch the world unfold. You can control the audio coming through your headphones. With a remote control, you can change the angles of the celestial cameras to capture the right action.

So although you’re not a part of life on Earth anymore, you can monitor its progress. If you think this could get boring, you’re wrong. It is seductive. It is spellbinding. You learn how to watch well. You become invested in the outcome of your descendants’ lives. Dozens of intriguing details need to be kept under surveillance. Once you’ve sat down, the monitors command your attention completely.

In theory, you could choose to watch anything: the private activities of single people in their apartments, the unfolding plans of saboteurs, the detailed progress of battlefields.

But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world, the ripples left in our wake. You follow the successes of an organization you started or led. You watch appreciative people read the books you donated to your local religious group. You watch an irrepressible girl with pink shoes climbing the maple tree you planted. These are your fingerprints left on the world; you may be gone, but your mark remains. And you can watch it all.

You may as well get comfortable: the stories play out over long time scales. You may choose to monitor the video screen showing your grandson, an aspiring playwright, deep in thought on a park bench, scribbling notes for a scene. You’ll be able to follow him for years to track his success. In the meantime, waitresses drift by you with carts of sandwiches and coffee, and you only need to leave to sleep at night. When you return in the morning, you swipe your membership card at the security gate and choose a nice seat for the day.

But here’s the rub: everyone’s membership card expires at a different time, and expiration means no more entry into the video lounge. Those who are excluded mill around outside the building, grousing and kicking at the dirt.
Weren’t we good?
they ask.
Why should we be locked out while others watch?

They, too, want to discover how their contributions guide the course of the world, want to see their grandchildren develop, want to witness the proud future of their family name. They grieve and commiserate with one another.

But they don’t know the full story. Locked outside, they miss seeing their organizations lose members. They miss watching their favorite people melt away with cancer. They miss seeing the aspiring playwright amount to nothing and do not have to watch his solitary death as he tries to drive himself to the hospital but draws his last ragged breath on the roadside. They miss the drift of social mores, their great-great-grandchildren changing religions, their lines of genetic descent petering out. They don’t have to watch as Moses and Jesus and Muhammad go the way of Osiris and Zeus and Thor.

Meanwhile, they kick the dirt and protest. They don’t understand they’ve been blessed with insulation from the future, while the sinners are cursed in the blue-green glow of the televisions to witness every moment of it.