What It’s All About

The brilliance of the afterlife was painful. My own hands were the only things I could rest my eyes on that were not so luminous as to make my brain ache. Slowly, hour after hour, I became a little more able to make out others – not enough to directly look at them but, somehow, enough to sense them and make out their general shape.

There was a really long line here, which it seemed to me, was a bit backwards. I had materialized at the head of it and, as had become the custom here, was gently, yet firmly, bumped from that position. So why not materialize at the end of the line? I thought. Still, I was glad to be considered for paradise and wasn’t going to start stirring up trouble. As politely as I could, I asked the least luminous person, next to myself, some general questions to get the drift of the place.

Several days further down the line, I met someone who understood what presently passes for English with me, and got a few answers. The blinking fellow who I’d found was a pleasant sort and shared with me as much as he knew. His name was Eomer, and he had fallen in the battle of Hastings. He had been a servant to a mid-level knight and had the bad fortune of standing by his side when he was killed. He would have liked me to believe that there was some great gallantry involved, but further questioning revealed that Eomer had passed away when the opposition’s arrows had ventilated the knight – and his horse. Killed “standing by his side” just sounded better than the clean truth that he had been crushed by an armored horse falling dead atop him.

E, as I began to call him, showed me how the line progressed in a serpentine rather than straightforward manner and pointed out the few celebrities he’d recognized. The names meant nothing to me but I thanked him for his help and started to work my way toward the line’s end. E asked the fellow ahead of him to save his spot and came along. He was curious to see who had died in the (to him) future. As we walked, between the zigging and zagging of the weight of humanity, I began to notice some of the features of the place. The floor had the firm, fresh feeling of polished marble but was more warm and comfortable. It was also completely transparent – which is a thing that will stop you mid-stride when you glance down in passing. E chuckled that he’d reacted much the same way. He said he’d nearly jumped out of his skin – until I reminded him that he was out of his skin when he got here.

More and more, we saw people splayed out on the floor looking down at the Earth below. It was a beautiful sight. We were just above the surface but situated in such a way as neither tall buildings nor clouds nor even the occasional moon shot came anywhere near – a little too close for some folks but a little too far away for most. Some of them spent all their time peering down trying to catch a glimpse of all they left behind – even long after the generations were beyond remembering all who’d passed.

Off to one side, and after a bit of questioning, I saw four men standing in a lopsided circle. Three of them were Archimedes, Galileo and Alexander Bell, the fourth I’ll introduce in a minute. They had concocted, through some use of their uncommon wit, to place themselves in such a way as to put a slight crease in this celestial floor. The crease allowed them some magnification of the world below that others could enjoy from a bit of a distance – so as not to interfere with the curve. I heard Einstein, who it seemed had been trying to hide in the crowd, respond to some older men who were questioning the activity.

In a wonderfully rolling German accent the old professor couldn’t avoid a lecture, “By accurately pressuring the surface they have discovered… wait a moment…. Ach, it’s a different question.” Then his face grew tired. “God is more than what you think,” sighed the wild-haired physicist. “Why would he be limited to what you can imagine? I pity those who cannot understand how He dreamt up evolution or who cannot tolerate that he shared free will! What a fool you must be to think such magnificence is caught up in book, a symbol or single concept?” Then, as if he had said it a thousand times before, he came to his well-considered point. “For one human being to tell another about God is an insult to both.” I think he would have gone on, but something in the space above us caught his attention, and he wandered away following it… on an incline proportional to the object’s distance and the time it would take him to reach it – relatively speaking. A grinning Carl Sagan stepped in to fill his place.

Now the last member of the lens-making foursome was a strange case. He was the only one I had the chance to meet, but he left me feeling so ill at ease about so many things, that I wished I hadn’t. He told me his name was Stephen Hawking, and from his general vocabulary and cleverness, I thought it might be true. However, he could not have been more than 25 years old. He was athletic and tall with a self-deprecating wit and a manner that tilted toward misogyny. After a few rounds in the conversation, I became convinced that this was the evil twin of the wheelchair bound theorist who’d been my contemporary. He assured me that such ideas were foolish and that he was merely from an alternate reality created as a harmonic to our own. He was in the process of explaining the equation at the root of it all when he abruptly imploded without explanation or comment from those nearby, who would later deny he’d ever existed at all. By the time I gathered my thoughts, a low rumble drummed through the place, like the toll of a bell just beyond our range of hearing, and sent all eyes, including mine, straining Earthward. Standing in absolute silence, we could all see the globe as a glistening gem in the absolute nothing of space, and then without ceremony, or acrimony for that matter, it was done.

There was no clash of nuclear titans or alien invasion or global rotisserie to hang it on – it just stopped being… interesting. It still spun in its orbit, just as its brother planets swung in theirs, but it rejoined its family of lifeless rocks bedecking what must be a mostly lifeless multiverse. The clouds swirled down to wisps and then vanished altogether. The blacks and greens, the brick reds, the pansy yellows and eggplant purples all faded to an indistinguishable level of pale, sandy brown. As if an unseen switch had simply turned off all that made Earth the justifiable center of our attention. Now only the bleak moon beamed down on an equally vacant face beaming blankly back.

The line formed up again, and as it had quickly nearly doubled, it wound back and forth and turned half again on itself. E scurried back to “the past,” and in taking my place, I was surprised to find so few faces I recognized nearby. A passing observer having noticed the same mentioned that, just like with birth and school, we never seem to choose who is near at hand, but we make friends, spouses and even enemies out of whatever crowd we’re given.

The line progressed quickly, but I was still quite a distance away when I got to see the proceedings at the head of the line. There, what I perceived as the trinity, stood next to what must’ve been St. Peter. Not being Catholic, he was a bit out of focus to me, but others said they saw him perfectly. Around the entrance were a number of other, let’s just say “entities”, who must have been significant to a great many of those here gathered but were nearly invisible to me. As the ages progressed, some became more substantial while others faded away.

Whenever the line allowed me to get a clear view, I would see each supplicant step up to face this small gathering and await questioning. Again and again, to my growing uneasiness, the person being interviewed would extend their right foot to be examined. They would twist it, so as to display both sides and then move on to do the left. When this was through, the hands would, in like fashioned be examined. Another ten turns of the line and I saw what came next: As each person completed the examination they would begin jumping inexplicably toward and then away, from the assembled committee. When they proved themselves proficient they were admitted to the permanent paradise beyond.

Then it hit me… as if waking up in some cinematic cliché, I sat straight up in bed in a cold sweat. My pulse was racing, my head aching. I had made a terrible mistake. Three years in seminary, a fortune in therapy, a two-month trek through Tibet and a vision-quest with the Zuni – all wasted. Now, I finally knew the truth of the truth: They were doing the Hokey Pokey

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Publication Date: 07-22-2011

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