The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

I think that most people tend to meditate more on What Comes Next as they get older, and since I’m now in my late sixties, I qualify in that regard. Several of my short stories and at least one novel (Revival) have approached this question. I can’t say ‘have dealt with it,’ because that implies some conclusion, and none of us can really draw one, can we? Nobody has sent back any cell phone video from the land of death. There’s faith, of course (and a veritable deluge of ‘heaven is real’ books), but faith is, by its very definition, belief without proof.

When you boil it down, there are only two choices. Either there’s Something, or there’s Nothing. If it’s the latter, case closed. If it’s the former, there are myriad possibilities, with heaven, hell, purgatory, and reincarnation being the most popular on the Afterlife Hit Parade. Or maybe you get what you always believed you would get. Maybe the brain is equipped with a deeply embedded exit program that starts running just as everything else is running down, and we’re getting ready to catch that final train. To me, the reports of near-death experiences tend to support this idea.

What I’d like – I think – is a chance to go through it all again, as a kind of immersive movie, so I could relish the good times and good calls, like marrying my wife and our decision to have that third child. Of course I’d also have to rue the bad calls (I’ve made my share), but who wouldn’t like to reexperience that first good kiss, or have a chance to relax and really enjoy the wedding ceremony that went by in such a nervous blur?

This story isn’t about such a rerun – not exactly – but musing about the possibility led me to write about one man’s afterlife. The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot.

Afterlife

William Andrews, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, dies on the afternoon of September 23, 2012. It is an expected death; his wife and adult children are at his bedside. That evening, when she finally allows herself some time alone, away from the steady stream of family and condolence visitors, Lynn Andrews calls her oldest friend, who still lives in Milwaukee. It was Sally Freeman who introduced her to Bill, and if anyone deserves to know about the last sixty seconds of her thirty-year marriage, it’s Sally.

‘He was out of it for most of the last week – the drugs – but conscious at the end. His eyes were open, and he saw me. He smiled. I took his hand and he squeezed it a little. I bent over and kissed his cheek. When I straightened up again, he was gone.’ She has been waiting for hours to say this, and with it said, she bursts into tears.

Her assumption that the smile was for her is natural enough, but mistaken. As he is looking up at his wife and three grown children – they seem impossibly tall, creatures of angelic good health inhabiting a world he is now departing – Bill feels the pain he has lived with for the past eighteen months leave his body. It pours out like slop from a bucket. So he smiles.

With the pain gone, there’s little left. His body feels as light as a fluff of milkweed. His wife takes his hand, reaching down from her tall and healthy world. He has reserved a little bit of strength, which he now expends by squeezing her fingers. She bends down. She is going to kiss him.

Before her lips can touch his skin, a hole appears in the center of his vision. It’s not a black hole but a white one. It spreads, obliterating the only world he’s known since 1956, when he was born in the small Hemingford County Hospital in Nebraska. During the last year, Bill has read a great deal about the passage from life to death (on his computer, always careful to obliterate the history so as not to upset Lynn, who is constantly and unrealistically upbeat), and while most of it struck him as bullshit, the so-called ‘white light’ phenomenon seemed quite plausible. For one thing, it has been reported in all cultures. For another, it has a smidgen of scientific credibility. One theory he’s read suggests the white light comes as a result of the sudden cessation of blood flow to the brain. Another, more elegant, posits that the brain is performing a final global scan in an effort to find an experience comparable to dying.

Or it may just be a final firework.

Whatever the cause, Bill Andrews is now experiencing it. The white light obliterates his family and the airy room from which the mortuary assistants will soon remove his sheeted breathless body. In his researches, he became familiar with the acronym NDE, standing for near-death experience. In many of these experiences, the white light becomes a tunnel, at the end of which stand beckoning family members who have already died, or friends, or angels, or Jesus, or some other beneficent deity.