When you begin to look around, you’ll discover thousands of them. The Aztec Mictlantecuhtli, the Chinese Monkey King Sun Wukong, the Norse Odin. In afterlife phone books you can find the Rainbow Serpent of the Aboriginal Australians, the Prussian Zempat, the Wendish Berstuk, the Algonquian Gitche Manitou, the Sardinian Maymon, the Thracian Zibelthiurdos. At a restaurant you might eavesdrop on the still-cold relationship between the Babylonian sea goddess Tiamat and the storm god Marduk who once split her in two. She picks at her food and only gives curt replies to his attempts at conversation.
Some of the gods are related to one another; others have untraceable genealogies. What they have in common is a proclivity to refuse the free housing offered in the afterlife, although no one is sure why. Most likely it is because they are having a difficult time coming to terms with the idea of sinking to the level of their onetime genuflectors.
Instead, at night, lonely and homeless, they cluster in one another’s company on the far edge of the city, lying down to sleep in large grassy meadows. If you’re interested in history and theology, you’ll enjoy walking these fields of gods, this quiet horizontal spectacle of abandoned deities laid in uneven rows to the vanishing point. Here you might run across Bathalang Maykapal of the Tagalogs, and his main enemy, the Lizard God Bakonawa; having no one who cares about their fights anymore, they now share a lonely bottle of wine. Here you see the god of light, Atea, from the Tuamotu Archipelago, and his son Tane, who in his heyday hurled the patricidal lightning bolts of his ancestor Fatu-tiri; now the whole family sits around, their vendettas withered and difficult to reinvigorate. Look: here’s the Maori Tāwhirimātea, the god of storms and winds, who spent his lifetime punishing his brother deities for separating his parents, Rangi and Papatuanuku; with no more audience, his winds are spent and he plays cards with his brothers under calm skies. Over there you can see Khonvoum, supreme god of the Bambuti Pygmy, clutching his bow made of two snakes, which he still believes might appear to mortals as a rainbow. Here is the Shinto fire god Kagu-tsuchi, whose birth burned his mother to death; now the only evidence of his former blaze is a light smoky smell.
Like a museum, these fields of gods, this pastoral encyclopedia of mythology, is a testament to human creativity and reification. The old gods are used to watching us here; the new gods are stung by how quickly they slipped from reverence and martyrdom to desertion and tourism.
Although the gods choose to congregate together out here, the truth is that they cannot stand one another. They are confused because they have found themselves here in the afterlife, but they still, deep down, believe they are in charge. They have typically risen to the top because of their aggression, and they still want to claim supremacy over the others. But here they no longer enjoy the peak of a hierarchy; instead, they suffer side by side in a fellowship of abandonment.
There is only one thing they appreciate about this afterlife. Because of their famed vengefulness and creativity in the arts of torture, they find themselves impressed by this version of Hell.
Apostasy
In the afterlife you meet God. To your surprise and delight, She is like no god that humans have conceived. She shares qualities with all religions’ descriptions, but commands a deific grandeur that was captured in the net of none. She is the elephant described by blind men: all partial descriptions with no understanding of the whole.
You can see in Her glittering eyes how delighted She is to hand forth the Book of Truth. The Book cleanly addresses your lifetime of questions with no philosophical gaps or loose threads. As you observe Her excitement about revealing this, you begin to suspect that deep down She was afraid that an especially clear-thinking theologian would guess the answer. All the clues were there, and only people’s personal backgrounds got in the way. You notice that She feels relief as She watches while people’s biases and traditions impede clear theological guessing. It is only because of these cultural blinders that She retains Her enviable position of revealing the universe’s great secrets each day as the dead cross over to Her territory in the next dimension.
If these people were able to completely shake their traditions, the claims of their ancestors, the songs of their childhood—She reasons—they would have a decently clear shot at the right answer. And this is why She was always leery of apostates, those who rejected the particulars of their religion in search of something that seemed more truthful. She disliked them because they seemed the most likely to float a correct guess. If you assumed that God is fond of those who hold loyally to their religions, you were right—but probably for the wrong reasons. She likes them only because they are intellectually nonadventurous and will be sure to get the answer just a bit wrong.
Upon their arrival in the afterlife, She divides people into the Apostates on Her left and the Loyals on Her right. The Apostates are put on the down escalator, and only the Loyals remain in Heaven. Each day She welcomes new Loyals from two thousand religions. She watches them study the Book of Truth and waits for it to sink in with a delicious thrill.
But something has gone terribly wrong with Her plan. The truth does not convince. The newly arrived Loyals have an imperturbable capacity to hold the beliefs with which they arrived, a deep reluctance to consider evidence that separates them from their lifelong context. So She finds Herself unappreciated and lonely, wandering in solitude among the infinite cloudscapes of the nonbelieving believers.
Blueprints
We look forward to finding out answers in the afterlife. We’re in luck. In the afterlife we are granted the ultimate gift of revelation: an opportunity to view the underlying code.
At first we may be shocked to watch ourselves represented as a giant collection of numbers. As we go about our normal business in the afterlife, in our mind’s eye we can see the massive landscape of numbers, stretching to sight’s limit in all directions. This set of numbers represents every aspect of our lives. Across its vast plains we spot islands of sevens, jungles of threes, branching rivers of zeros. The size and richness are breathtaking.
As you interact with a lover, you can see her numbers as well, and her interactions with yours. She endearingly sticks out her bottom lip for attention, and your numbers cascade into acrobatics. Digits flip their values like waterfalls. As a result, your eyes lock on to hers, and amorous words form on your lips and travel from your throat in air-compression waves. As she processes the words, her numbers flip, waves of change rippling through her system. She returns your affection, as dictated by the state of her numbers.
My goodness, you realize on your first afternoon here: This is totally deterministic. Is love simply an operation of the math?
After watching enough code, a new notion of agency and responsibility dawns. You watch and understand all the signals that lead to a driver stomping on her brakes as her numbers are changed by the numbers of the cat walking in front of the wheels; you can even see the code of the fleas that leap off when the cat leaps. Whether the cat is struck or not struck, you now understand, was not in anyone’s control; it was all in the numbers, married together in a gorgeous inevitability. But we also come to understand that the network of numbers is so dense that it transcends simple notions of cause and effect. We become open to the wisdom of the flow of the patterns.
If you assume this gift of revelation is received in Heaven, you’re only half right; it is also the punishment designed for you in Hell. The Rewarders originally thought to offer it as a gift, but the Punishers quickly decided they could leverage it as a kind of affliction, drying up life’s pleasures by revealing their bloodlessly mechanical nature.
Now the Rewarders and Punishers are in a battle to determine which of them gets more benefit out of this tool. Will humans appreciate the knowledge or be tortured by it?
The next time you are pursuing a new lover in the afterlife, perhaps sharing a bottle of wine after what appeared to be a chance encounter, don’t be surprised if both a Rewarder and a Punisher sneak up behind you. The Rewarder whispers into one of your e
ars, Isn’t it wonderful to understand the code? The Punisher hisses into your other ear, Does understanding the mechanics of attraction suck all the life out of it?
Such a scene is typical of the afterlife, and illustrates how much both parties have overestimated us. This game always ends in disappointment for both sides, who are freshly distraught to learn that being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience. The secret codes of life—whether presented as a gift or a burden—go totally unappreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal.
Subjunctive
In the afterlife you are judged not against other people, but against yourself. Specifically, you are judged against what you could have been. So the afterworld is much like the present world, but it now includes all the yous that could have been. In an elevator you might meet more successful versions of yourself, perhaps the you that chose to leave your hometown three years earlier, or the you who happened to board an airplane next to a company president who then hired you. As you meet these yous, you experience a pride of the sort you feel for a successful cousin: although the accomplishments don’t directly belong to you, it somehow feels close.
But soon you fall victim to intimidation. These yous are not really you, they are better than you. They made smarter choices, worked harder, invested the extra effort into pushing on closed doors. These doors eventually broke open for them and allowed their lives to splash out in colorful new directions. Such success cannot be explained away by a better genetic hand; instead, they played your cards better. In their parallel lives, they made better decisions, avoided moral lapses, did not give up on love so easily. They worked harder than you did to correct their mistakes and apologized more often.
Eventually you cannot stand hanging around these better yous. You discover you’ve never felt more competitive with anyone in your life.
You try to mingle with the lesser yous, but it doesn’t assuage the sting. In truth, you have little sympathy for these less significant yous and more than a little haughtiness about their indolence. “If you had quit watching TV and gotten off the couch you wouldn’t be in this situation,” you tell them, when you bother to interact with them at all.
But the better yous are always in your face in the afterlife. In the bookstore you’ll see one of them arm in arm with the affectionate woman whom you let slip away. Another you is browsing the shelves, running his fingers over the book he actually finished writing. And look at this one jogging past outside: he’s got a much better body than yours, thanks to a consistency at the gym that you never kept up.
Eventually you sink into a defensive posture, seeking reasons why you would not want to be so well behaved and virtuous in any case. You grudgingly befriend some of the lesser yous and go drinking with them. Even at the bar you see the better yous, buying rounds for their friends, celebrating their latest good choice.
And thus your punishment is cleverly and automatically regulated in the afterlife: the more you fall short of your potential, the more of these annoying selves you are forced to deal with.
Search
In the moment of transition between life and death, only one thing changes: you lose the momentum of the biochemical cycles that keep the machinery running. In the moment before death, you are still composed of the same thousand trillion trillion atoms as in the moment after death—the only difference is that their neighborly network of social interactions has ground to a halt.
At that moment, the atoms begin to drift apart, no longer enslaved to the goals of keeping up a human form. The interacting pieces that once constructed your body begin to unravel like a sweater, each thread spiraling off in a different direction. Following your last breath, those thousand trillion trillion atoms begin to blend into the earth around you. As you degrade, your atoms become incorporated into new constellations: the leaf of a staghorn fern, a speckled snail shell, a kernel of maize, a beetle’s mandible, a waxen bloodroot, a ptarmigan’s tail feather.
But it turns out your thousand trillion trillion atoms were not an accidental collection: each was labeled as composing you and continues to be so wherever it goes. So you’re not gone, you’re simply taking on different forms. Instead of your gestures being the raising of an eyebrow or a blown kiss, now a gesture might consist of a rising gnat, a waving wheat stalk, and the inhaling lung of a breaching beluga whale. Your manner of expressing joy might become a seaweed sheet playing on a lapping wave, a pendulous funnel dancing from a cumulonimbus, a flapping grunion birthing, a glossy river pebble gliding around an eddy.
From your present clumped point of view, this afterlife may sound unnervingly distributed. But in fact it is wonderful. You can’t imagine the pleasure of stretching your redefined body across vast territories: ruffling your grasses and bending your pine branch and flexing an egret’s wings while pushing a crab toward the surface through coruscating shafts of light. Lovemaking reaches heights it could never dream of in the compactness of human corporality. Now you can communicate in many places along your bodies at once; you weave your versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together. You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms.
Just as in your current life, the downside is that you are always in flux. As creatures degrade and your fruits fall and rot, you become capable of new gestures and lose others. Your lover might drift away from you in the migratory flight of tropic birds, a receding stampede of wintering elk, or a creek that quietly pokes its head under the ground and pops up somewhere unknown to you.
Many of your same problems apply: temptation, anguish, anger, distrust, vice—and don’t forget the dread arising from free choice. Don’t be fooled into believing that plants grow mechanically toward the sun, that birds choose their direction by instinct, that wildebeest migrate by design: in fact, everything is seeking. Your atoms can spread, but they cannot escape the search. A wide distribution does not shield you from wondering how best to spend your time.
Once every few millennia, all your atoms pull together again, traveling from around the globe, like the leaders of nations uniting for a summit, converging for their densest reunion in the form of a human. They are driven by nostalgia to regroup into the tight pinpoint geometry in which they began. In this form they can relish a forgotten sense of holiday-like intimacy. They come together to search for something they once knew but didn’t appreciate at the time.
The reunion is warm and heartening for a while, but it isn’t long before they begin to miss their freedom. In the form of a human the atoms suffer a claustrophobia of size: gestures are agonizingly limited, restricted to the foundering of tiny limbs. As a condensed human they cannot see around corners, they can only talk within short distances to the nearest ear, they cannot reach out to touch across any meaningful expanses. We are the moment of least facility for the atoms. And in this form, they find themselves longing to ascend mountains, wander the seas, and conquer the air, seeking to recapture the limitlessness they once knew.
Reversal
There is no afterlife, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to live a second time.
At some point the expansion of the universe will slow down, stop, and begin to contract, and at that moment the arrow of time will reverse. Everything that happened on the way out will happen again, but backward. In this way our life neither dies nor disintegrates, but rewinds.
In this reverse life you are born of the ground. At funeral ceremonies, we dig you up from the earth and transport you grandly to the mortuary, where the birth makeup is removed. You then are taken to the hospital, where, surrounded by doctors, you open your eyes for the first time. In your daily life,
broken vases reassemble, meltwater freezes into snowmen, broken hearts find love, rivers flow uphill. Marriages reride rocky roads and eventually end in erotic dating. The pleasures of a lifetime of intercourse are relived, culminating in kisses instead of sleep. Bearded men become smooth-faced children who are sent to schools to gently strip away the original sins of knowledge; reading, writing, and mathematics are expunged. After this diseducation, graduates shrink and crawl and lose their teeth, achieving the purity of the highest state of the infant. On their last day, howling because it is the end of their lives, babies climb back into the wombs of their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the wombs of their mothers, and so on like concentric Russian dolls.
In this reverse life you have blissful expectations about what will come next as you experience your story backward. At the moment of reversal you are genuinely happy, for while life must be lived forward the first time, you suspect it will really be understood only upon replay.
But you have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back, the cloth of that story line unravels. Reversing through the corridors of your life, you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here.