Distance
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.”
Reins
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.
Microbe
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.
Absence
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.
Will-o’-the-Wisp
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.
Incentive
Even with the aid of our modern deductive skills, it is impossible to imagine our own death. It is not because we lack insight, but because the concept of death is made up. There is no such thing. This will become clear to you at some point, when you get into a situation that you think should kill you—say, a severe car crash. You’ll be surprised to realize that it didn’t hurt. The witnesses around you will laugh and help you up and brush off the glass and explain the situation.
The situation is that the people around you are Actors. Your interactions with other people were almost entirely scripted from their point of view. Your “afterlife,” if you want to call it that, is your initiation to the game.
We realize this moment of disclosure will be hard on you. For God’s sake, you will think as you pick yourself up from the car wreck, what about my lover? What was our relationship based on? Were all the nighttime whispers fabrications? Rehearsed lines? And all my friends: Actors? My parents: pretending?
Don’t despair. It’s not as bad as you think. If you think you were the only uninitiated one while all the rest were Actors, you’re not quite correct. About half the people are Actors, and the rest, like you until moments ago, are the Beneficiaries. So it is equally likely that your lover was in the same naive boat you were—and now it is your responsibility to become an Actor for her, so that she detects no change in the relationship. You will become like an adulterous spouse striving to force normal behavior. You may have to be an Actor for other Beneficiaries as well: your boss, your cabdriver, your waitress.
As an Actor, you get to see the backs of things. When you finish a conversation with a Beneficiary and exit the room, you find yourself in a backstage waiting area, where slanted two-by-fours hold up the unfinished backs of walls. There are couches here, and you can get snacks from vending machines. You make small talk with other Actors while you wait for your next appearance. Your next appearance will be, say, at 12:53 p.m. for what appears to be a coincidental run-in with someone on the subway.
Before each appearance, you are given a small script on a note card. Generally the instructions are vague. For example, you may be instructed to feign surprise when you run into the Beneficiary; perhaps you will also be instructed to pretend you have just bought a dog or, alternatively, to act as though work is weighing on your mind. Other times the instructions include something quite specific: you are to mention somewhere in the conversation the title of a new book, or drop the name of a mutual friend. Presumably, other Actors during the week will have similar assignments, so the Beneficiary will be guided toward a new idea or meeting.
So you memorize your brief script, and when you walk back through the door you will be wherever you are next needed: the restaurant bathroom, or the museum gift shop where your friend is waiting to meet you, or perhaps a bustling sidewalk where you are to be spotted arm in arm with another Actor. For the Beneficiaries, the back sides of all doors are constructed just before they enter; for the Actors, all the doors of the world are our portal into and out of this waiting room. We don’t know how the Directors dynamically construct the world, much less for what purpose. We are only told that our obligation here as Actors will eventually end, and then we will move on to a better place.
You may decide you’re not willing to uphold this continuous lie to the Beneficiaries. You may yell into the Directors’ intercom that you won’t be their deceitful stool pigeon. This is a typical reaction. But very quickly you will relent and play your part earnestly. We don’t know much about the Directors, only that they are clever enough to get us to do something we don’t want to do.
Why do we play our parts so earnestly? Why don’t we go on strike and blow the cover of the truth?
One factor is the sincerity in the face of your lover: her life of unexpected reactive emotion, her heartfelt belief in chance and spontaneity. You’re slave to that gorgeous earnestness in her eyes, her engagement with a world of possibility.
But in truth there is a deeper reason you play your part so convincingly. If you play your part well, you can more quickly leave this acting job. Those with the best behavior are rewarded with ignorance: they are reincarnated as an uninitiated Beneficiary. You could permanently blow the cover, but the Directors are confident that you won’t; they know you will sink to any depth of infidelity to preserve the lie for your eventual return to it.
Death Switch
There is no afterlife, but a version of us lives on nonetheless.
At the beginning of the computer era, people died with passwords in their heads and no one could access their files. When access to these files was critical, companies could grind to a halt. That’s when programmers invented death switches.
With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command. Individuals began to use death switches to reveal Swiss bank account numbers to their heirs, to get the last word in an argument, and to confess secrets that were unspeakable during their lifetime.