Blueprints of the afterl.., p.29
Blueprints of the Afterlife, page 29
“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.
After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.”
“Am I going to die?” I said.
Bickle replied, “What do you mean, like right now? I have no idea. I’m no doctor. I’m a docent. I show you around the museum and tell you what you’re looking at.”
At this point my consciousness was flickering like a bug light. I figured I would agree to whatever Bickle wanted then get out of it later if I needed to. So I said yes, I’d accept his offer to join the academy. He wiped his mouth and whistled toward the Hummer. Two guys got out, paramedics in turbans. They immediately went to work on my gunshot wound. One of them had a syringe of something. This time I disappeared for a long time.
I woke up in a hospital in Phoenix, conscious enough to know I was in a hospital and to catch a glimpse of the motorcycle accident victim I was sharing a room with, a black guy with a long beard, before I blacked out again. The world seemed to have been paused. I couldn’t hear. I was drugged and dragged into some sort of nothing zone and when I opened my eyes I stood across an operating room watching surgeons who were wrist-deep in my guts.
I left my body behind and walked down the empty hall. The motorcycle victim stood in the hallway talking on a cell phone, his bandages off. He was saying, “Yeah, baby. They want me here for when the dude wakes up. All’s I got to do is lay there and look injured.”
At the far end of the hall stood a woman who I somehow knew had been waiting for me. As I came closer I saw that she was naked and her skin was blue. Silvery-blue, really, like a fish. Hairless. I understood that I was supposed to follow her. She pointed to a door, which opened on a vast circular space with a floor that sloped inward, like one of those funnels you toss a coin into then watch roll around and around until it falls into the hole in the center, for charity. I stepped forward and approached the center and started to get scared that I would fall in. The woman stood beside me, then sat in a chair, a regular wood chair, that was pitched forward because of the slope of the floor. I saw there was a chair for me as well, so I took it. We now sat side by side, looking into the hole. I couldn’t see the walls of this place, or the ceiling. All was black except for the light beige floor, lit as if under an unseen spotlight. A dull machine roar came from the direction of the hole and I was overcome with panic and awe.
The woman’s voice surrounded me. She didn’t move her mouth. She said, “I come as an emissary from a steward race. Now is time for revealing. You have been encoded with the prophecy. This prophecy is not something that was to be revealed to you all at once, but over time. You were born encoded, and through your experiences have come to decode the message. Bloodshed and suffering are coming for all. The time for negotiating with this fate has long passed. Humans have been under observation throughout their rising by other stewards of life. At times we have intervened in your affairs. Your religions, your greatest achievements of art and science, were guided by our hands. Look within yourself. You know this to be true. Your religions have outlived their usefulness. They have become tools of death. A new path is opening to you, one that creates life and populates the universe with seeds. This is the purpose of your love. After the century of bloodshed and suffering will come a new era. Those few who survive will emerge from where they’ve hidden and set in motion new life. Still, pockets of the human animal will seek oppression and slavery. In this final struggle these forces must be overcome for new life to blossom.”
I asked, “What is my purpose in this?”
“Your purpose is to know these things to be true.”
I looked down to find myself drenched in blood. From a crater in my torso came an explosion of tubes, clamps, gauze. Surgeons’ hands worked furiously to resolve something inside my body. I caught the eyes of one of them and heard him say, “Shit, he’s conscious. He’s conscious!” I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. Someone did something to the intravenous. A biochemical semitruck plowed into my bloodstream and I was out again.
I remember the TV bolted to the wall. The view out the window, to distant hills stubbly with cacti. Blood coming out of my catheter. The black guy in the next bed staring straight ahead, saying nothing.
The cops showed up, wanting to know how I’d gotten shot. I told them I didn’t know. After they ran a background check and determined I had no criminal record or outstanding warrants, they lost interest in me. I watched game shows, sedated. The Price Is Right, that faithful companion to the elderly. The sun rose and fell. I sat in my wheelchair in the little park behind the hospital. I tried to speak as little as absolutely necessary. I didn’t want to talk to doctors or nurses or police officers or social service idiots about how this had happened or how I was feeling. I didn’t want to call anybody, not even Wyatt and Erika. I became an outline where a man had been, like one of those molds they made of people buried in the ruins of Pompeii. I can’t tell you what I even thought about. I went about the stupid business of healing.
How long were you in the hospital?
A month and a half? Two? Maybe three? I didn’t really keep track. My health insurance was apparently taking care of everything and I had money in the bank if I needed to dip into it. I walked with a lot of pain, taking little more than fifteen or twenty steps before I had to sit down again. I lost twenty pounds and grew a beard. I read People magazine cover to cover. No one came to visit me. I was always polite with everyone and tried to make myself as invisible as possible. Then one afternoon I was watching TV and something caught my eye. It was a shot of the Las Vegas Strip, abandoned, flooded with sand. The casinos were all decrepit, falling apart. A digital billboard flickered with an image of a woman in a bikini. It was an aerial shot, swooping down through the desolation. It took me a while to understand this wasn’t news footage. It was the trailer for some new action movie. And I thought, Las Vegas. Of course.
I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn’t something that came about all at once. There was no one climactic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane, or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing, bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading “The end is near.” The end was a slow but accumulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors’ names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn’t make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn’t help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompass the planet.
Whatever had happened to me after the shooting—first Bickle, then the visitation by the blue woman—had so altered my priorities that I found it impossible to imagine returning to a so-called “normal” life in which I’d have a job, a place to live, friendships. I didn’t have any claim to these things anymore. The whole human enterprise—buildings, roads, laws, media, sports, religion, culture, you name it—struck me as a vast, collective dementia. The only pursuit that made any sense to me was the development and spread of new life through the universe. Ridiculously, of all people, I’d been selected to help bring that about.
Soon I was able to walk a loop around the halls. I managed to pee without a catheter. They took out the IV and I could eat more or less normal food. I thought again about calling Wyatt and Erika but the longer I put off calling them, the more I thought they’d be angry or something. It really makes no sense but I equated letting them know where I was with getting in trouble. All my belongings were at the house I owned but I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to retrieve. The gunshot wound had drawn a line through my life, separating the person I thought I was in San Francisco with this new person, alone in Arizona. Eventually I was released and on my way out the doctor asked me where I was going. I said I didn’t know. They pushed me to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I stood up, started walking down the street, and stopped at the first car dealership I found. Happened to be a Volkswagen dealer. I walked in and bought a new Passat, then drove to Las Vegas, where the apocalypse was well under way.
Luke, you are so completely full of it.
[…]
Apocalyptic visions in the desert? Near-death experiences where you commune with aliens? Really? You really expect me to take this seriously?
[…]
What do you think is beyond that door? This isn’t a rhetorical question. What’s beyond that door?
I—I don’t know.
Well, there’s a hallway, some offices, a break room with vending machines for soft drinks and snacks, a parking garage where I park my Volvo every morning. Beyond that there’s a city, with streets lined with stores like Applebee’s, Whole Foods, and Best Buy. There are dry cleaners and gas stations and churches and schools. There are freeways leading to suburbs where there are homes where people live. And in those homes are kitchens where food is prepared, bedrooms where people sleep and dream, garages where they put their cars. People typically get up and go to work five days a week then spend a couple days doing whatever they want. People take vacations, make money, meet partners, have children, get old, get admitted to hospitals, then die. Every year there are a couple new and exciting electronic gadgets that people get excited about. People pay attention to sports scores and who celebrities are sleeping with. They try to get promotions to get more money to spend on stuff for themselves. Some of them go to community gatherings, some get obese, a very few commit criminal acts and get incarcerated. There are addicts, social workers, software developers, bus drivers, attorneys, and teachers. Everyone getting up in the morning, taking showers, listening to the radio on the way to work, catching a movie on the weekend or doing some gardening. That’s the world out there, Luke. Not some fucked-up postapocalyptic nightmare. So things got a little hotter there for a while thanks to fossil fuels. We’ve had wars, some instances of genocide. A terrorist attack on occasion. But overall we see problems, we fix them, and we move on.
You’re a nihilist. You’ve given up on the human race. You assume all will end in a rain of fire and boiling oceans but have the temerity to suggest that somehow a few “good” people will be able to stick it out long enough to propagate life through the universe. You want it both ways.
All I know is—
You said it yourself, Luke. I have the transcript right here. Hold on… Where is it. Okay, here, “… it’s flattering to imagine that you’re so important that secret brotherhoods struggle over your fate…” But you fell for it, too. You let your imagination get the best of you with all this talk of aliens in hospital corridors. Imagining a postapocalyptic future is just a way to cope with your sense of being an outsider. Since you can’t fix the disappointments of your real life, you imagine a future life in which you’ve miraculously survived and are looked to as some sort of prophet. But this is all there is. All we have are roads, buildings, institutions, commerce, entertainment, governments, and jobs. This is the real world. There is no other world.
[…]
Okay, I didn’t mean to fly off the handle like that.
[…]
Can I get you something? A juice?
[…]
Look—
Why is the prophecy so threatening to you?
Threatening?
If what I’m saying is crazy, why have such an emotional reaction to it? Why not just dismiss me? Who’s crazy? I know what’s happening on the other side of that door. I can get online in this place. I read blogs. We’re at the dawn of a horrifying and hellish new era.
New era? What’s so new about it? When has the world not been fucked-up? Wasn’t it pretty fucked-up for the Jews in Auschwitz? Wasn’t it pretty fucked-up for the Africans on slave ships?
You have no—
Point to any era and I’ll show you pestilence, war, slavery, genocide. Even the supposed good times were tinged in darkness. There’s no such thing as a new era of fucked-up shit because the shit has always been fucked-up. Fucked-up is the nature of the shit. And yet somehow we endure it. And little by little life improves. Fewer women die in childbirth. Slavery is abolished. Children don’t have to work in factories anymore. Life expectancies increase—
Momentary illusions of—
Here’s a question for you: Why is it that when things were going relatively well for you, when you were making the big bucks in the dot-com bubble or just sort of retired and hanging out, getting stoned with your friends, that you seemed to lose interest in finding Nick, the academy, and Mr. Kirkpatrick? You only started believing in the Age of Fucked Up Shit after Nick shot you in Arizona—if, in fact, that’s what actually happened. Anytime things were going right for you, the future of the world seemed bright. Anytime they were going wrong, the imminent collapse of civilization was at hand. Can’t you see how thoroughly you projected your own subjective vision of reality on the world?
I’m done here.
I’m not trying to get into a fight. But I think we’ve reached a point in this conversation when we have to change the fundamental question. Instead of asking what kind of world you live in, it’s time to ask what kind of world you want.
[crying] [unintelligible]… too late for that.
It’s not, though, Luke. It’s entirely up to you. What kind of world can you imagine? A sick world of suffering? Or one of beauty and light? What’s it going to be?
[crying] I can’t.
Yes you can.
I can’t choose. I just have to [unintelligible] in Vegas.
What happened in Las Vegas?
SKINNER
Skinner clutched a shrub. The sky looked like a black-and-white photograph of scrambled eggs. Rivulets rushed down the gully’s pebbly slopes, forming little puddles that grew and merged and turned into pools. Skinner beat his legs to will them to move but they wouldn’t budge; the lower half of his body appeared to belong to a corpse. Soon a shallow pool rose around him. He strapped his backpack to the front of his body, stuffed three capped and empty water bottles inside, then waited until the water began to move before he let go of the shrub. At first it was like a child’s ride at a theme park, the old man bobbing along idiotically, squinting up at the rain hurtling into his face. He spit, cursed, coughed. The stream started moving faster, egged on by gathering volume and dropping elevation. Within an hour the formerly dry riverbed was coursing with water. Skinner, a tiny object flung along by the current, strained to keep his head up. An uprooted tree passed nearby, then bits of campsite garbage and a rodent riding a log. On either side of the waterway evergreens swayed and shook water from their boughs. Skinner shivered and chattered profanities. His head went under for a second before he surfaced long enough for a gasp to fill his lungs, then he was down again, scrubbed against the gravel riverbed, lifted up for more air as if the river was toying with him, prolonging his death. He grabbed the exposed root of a tree dangling in the water but couldn’t summon the strength to pull himself up and decided to let go. Let me be washed from this earth. He bobbed up onto his back and saw the sky, was flung sideways and upside down and caught glimpses of green and brown then was dunked into impossibly silent water for what appeared to be his final moments—Chiho Waitimu Roon—the water went black, then resolved to bluish green and in the shadowy depths he saw something moving: steel beams, some kind of machine. As his remaining breath dribbled from his nostrils he discovered that he was in a net, then sensed his body rising quickly to the surface. When he broke through he winced, sucked air, coughed. From above, a mechanical squeal. A leg-like thing moved in his periphery. The net rose above the surface of the water and now he saw that he was dangling from the underside of a multilimbed contraption, like a spider with the net hanging from its abdomen, its mechanically articulated hydraulic legs wobbling as the thing rose up to twenty feet tall. Eight of these legs came together at a central hub, a battered disc about the size of a compact car, from which the net swung. The machine stumbled drunkenly out of the river and onto the bank, then picked its way along a trail through trees reluctantly letting in the daylight. Skinner watched the forest floor beneath him: reddened cedar boughs and the occasional vine maple. Branches crackled around him as the robot awkwardly bumped against tree trunks and stumbled over exposed roots. A fir bough whacked Skinner in the face. The path widened and became a logging road, over which the mechanical beast moved with more confidence. Skinner smelled burning wood. The robot lurched in a new direction and entered a clearing. A little A-frame cabin stood with its roof covered completely in moss, smoke curling from the chimney. From inside came the sound of a stereo cranked full-volume, a sort of freak-out guitar solo interminably carving up sixteenth notes. The robot sighed and came to a halt. Skinner choked out a “Hello?”
