FanPost

After the Party

Focus not on the negative and not on the positive but the normal. The goal is to find the level and stay near it. Cling to it to it like a man adrift, the sea trying to freeze him to death while it tears him from his raft. My family is all fisherman and hewers of stone and cutters of wood on one side and soldiers and American government employees and taxi drivers on the other side. I got into banking because I liked the money.

In truth I should have been a school teacher. I should have taught history, the one thing I can both admit to barely understanding while also speaking intelligently about. The history of boxing, as I understand it. The history of the twentieth century, as it appears to me. The history of all mankind, washed ashore in British Colombia. A series of human feet steadily appearing on the beaches of the Salish Sea. More than twenty have appeared now. The long history of violence washed ashore for anyone to see.

The explanations don't matter. Murder victims, suicides, victims of the 2004 tsunami, those who died in a plane crash. The evidence points in a thousand directions but leads to the same conclusion. Violent ends to lives. Oddly the feet show little evidence of having been severed. Scientists suggest in their own way that the answer to this question is both complicated and unknowable.

Some of the feet have been identified. A missing Vancouver man and one confirmed suicide and another suspected. Though currents can carry body parts for thousands of miles so the unidentified feet, all of which have been found in sneakers, could be from anywhere. Because of a soapy substance created by human fat there is usually no means of doing much in the way of forensic analysis. I like to think there's a lab somewhere on the West Coast where a grizzled old scientist takes a long drag off his cigarette before sighing and saying yep, that's a foot.

Sign of the times. Human feet start washing up on beaches then I think it's time to start throwing normal out the window. Maybe normal isn't so good after all. Maybe the only way to survive is to shut it all out and live in your own head. Sometimes that means weeks of manic creativity and sometimes that means weeks of crippling depression.

Human feet. On a beach.

A few years back a whale beached itself in some small Newfoundland town and the residents quickly demanded the rotting carcass be removed. It smelled like death and death smells like a rotting whale. Several thousand pounds of prehistoric fat and flesh and bones decaying in front of these small town folk. At least a beached whale made sense. But human feet? They shouldn't be there. Not on the beach.

There are fleeting moments where anyone would have to say that I am functioning at a high level. No mental static to cloud my judgement and no fog to keep me penned in. On good days I am free from worry and want and stress and those days mean more to me now than ever have.

I read a book of short stories a few years back called Sum: Forty Tales form the Afterlife. It was written by the rising star of neuroscience David Eagleman who has recently theorized that some mental illnesses may be a temporal disorder. As in, people are experiencing time incorrectly and therefore read their own thoughts and ideas as hallucinations because they appear to be sourced elsewhere. I like that idea because it is nothing approaching normal. It is odd and I like odd.

But this book was his first and it was also his only fictional work. True genius might only strike once in a person's lifetime and I think this may be it for him. It is one of the finest books I have ever read and it helped me make sense of a great deal of confusing concepts. Death being one of them.

So in the vein of Eagleman and with an eye on not dwelling on my worst moments, this is a story about the afterlife as I imagine it, today anyway.

*****

When you die there is no flash of white light or images scrolling across your vision. The whole affair is rather clinical in fact. You wake up in a waiting room and immediately realize that something has gone horribly awry. You are without form. Without substance. It is an indescribable feeling to become untethered from the three dimensions of space and you might shriek in fear. You will feel the staff roll their eyes, because you certainly won't see it.

Eventually a person — an actual person — will call you by name to the front desk and you will clumsily relocate your new vessel, this creature void of form, to them. They will lay a clipboard with a questionnaire on it in front of you and ambivalently ask you to make your selections.

You won't read the questions because you will be busy trying to both explain that you cannot pick up the pen to write on the page and having a mild panic attack over the knowledge that you cannot really do much of anything. The person will laugh and point at the sheet and as you read their questions the answers appear on the page.

Question One: What is the standard interest rate on a credit card?

Question nine: The average cat eats what multiple of its bodyweight during its lifetime?

Question four hundred and twelve: Did you believe in God?

The questions make no sense and you leave most of them blank. It may feel like a game of trivia at times but when you hit the question of God you will pause. It is in the nature of man to assume he is being tricked or otherwise embarrassed and defrauded at all times. You will stare at this question and then at the person and then you will look around the antiseptic waiting room awash in fluorescent lights and eggshell paint and other shapeless forms.

You might reasonably assume that this is a test. Perhaps you were a staunch atheist and even this scene is not enough to change your mind. You reason that this is the hallucination of a dying man and there is nothing to be worried about. Soon this will be resolved and you will spend your eternity fertilizing the flowers around your grave. This, you think, is bullshit.

That will appear on the paper and the person will look at you with a hint of knowing concern. They will point down a hallway and where you find yourself suddenly travelling through. The feeling of nothing is oddly jarring to you. The memory of the ache in your knees seems almost pleasant, you think. This form makes you constantly and acutely aware that you are no longer alive.

You reach the door and while you are trying to figure out how something with no hands might open a door you are suddenly inside a dimly lit room. It is all brushed steel and there is a metal desk under a single light where someone sits. Intimidating stacks of paper all about him. He looks up and you know in this moment who he is.

The face of who you were and all of mankind before you. As he moves the face changes though you cannot notice it. You feel sick and suddenly you are a man aged twenty five years again. He motions for you to come have a seat across from him and you stride across the cavern of a room to meet him. He does not look up.

You sit in the metal folding chair while he flips quickly through paperwork. Stopping to stamp the date occasionally.

Bullshit eh?

You say nothing.

Well here's how it is. The boss is away on business so we've got some more flexibility here.

You say nothing.

We can let you into heaven for a trial run, strict probationary period of three lifetimes. Let you get the feel of it and let us get a look at you.

You say nothing.

Or we can follow procedure here and ship you back to earth. Same as the day you left. Entirely up to you.

You say nothing. You think for a moment. Before you can get the words out the man smiles into his paperwork. Suit yourself, pal.

And so back you go. Back to the body you vacated. Some seventy trips around the sun await you. Life plays out exactly as it did before. The pain and the joy and the heartbreak all unchanged. You end up back there in that office and this time the questionnaire has simply one question.

Did you find what you were looking for?

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