Sum (3 page)

Something dawned on you when you heard the children’s song:
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is
but a dream
. You began to suspect that you were, perhaps, a butterfly dreaming it was a human, or, worse yet, a brain in a jar experiencing sights and sounds and smells and tastes—all of them but dreamstuff. And so you waited for death in order to wake up, in order to find out whether you were strapped with spotted wings or surrounded by a glass jar.

But it turns out you missed the mark. It is not life that is a dream; it is death that is a dream.

Stranger still, it is not your dream; it is someone else’s.

You now recall that your dreams always had background characters: the crowds in the restaurant, the knots of people in the malls and schoolyards, the other drivers on the road and the jaywalking pedestrians.

Those actors don’t come from nowhere. We stand in the background, playing our parts, allowing the experience to feel real for the dreamer. Sometimes we listen and pay attention to the plot of the dream. More often we talk among ourselves and wait for our shift to end.

This is not a job choice but indenture: you owe the same number of hours of service as you spent dreaming during your lifetime. No one is very pleased about this work except for some former thespians among us. Mostly we give them the interactive roles every night; we’re happy to sit in the background. If we’re lucky enough that the dreamer casts us in a restaurant, we get a free meal out of it. On less fortunate nights, we’re cast as masqueraders at a terrifying party, or as sufferers in deep circles of Hell, or as co-workers who have to point and laugh when the star walks in without clothes.

For those in the interactive roles, lines of dialogue are flashed on a screen behind the dreamer, to be delivered as convincingly as possible. Most of us give poor performances; we’re not trained actors and have little incentive. Fortunately, the dreamers seem to believe whatever we deliver. Even if we don’t look like the characters in question, the dreamers are convinced that we are who they think we are, and are only mildly confused even when we cast different genders in the roles.

Once, a long time ago, the dream casts went on strike, and for three days everyone on Earth dreamt of wandering empty homes and threading through deserted streets. Interpreting this as a grim omen, several people jumped to their deaths. When they showed up as new inductees in the dream cast, their piteous stories brought forth tears of sympathy from the others, who abandoned the strike immediately.

Perhaps it doesn’t seem to you as if the afterlife is much of a punishment. But I haven’t told you the worst part.

In the mornings, when we’re done with our nighttime haunts in other people’s skulls, we fall into restless slumbers of our own. And who do you think populates
our
dreams? Those who have finished their time here and pass from this world. We forever live in the dreams of the next generation.

The man to your left hypothesizes that everything is cyclical and that we’ll eventually be back on Earth. This appears to be a time-sharing plan devised by some efficient deity; in this way we’re not all populating the Earth at the same time.

What’s the problem with this? There is a woman in my dreams whom I see every night, but I can never catch up with her, passing as we do into our next worlds.

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

So you wait in this lobby until the third death. There are long tables with coffee, tea, and cookies; you can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world, and with a little effort you can strike up convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation may be interrupted at any moment by the Callers, who broadcast your new friend’s name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth. Your friend slumps, face like a shattered and reglued plate, saddened even though the Callers tell him kindly that he’s off to a better place. No one knows where that better place is or what it offers, because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us. Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. We all wag our heads at that typical timing.

The whole place looks like an infinite airport waiting area. There are many famous people from the history books here. If you get bored, you can strike out in any given direction, past aisles and aisles of seats. After many days of walking, you’ll start to notice that people look different, and you’ll hear the tones of foreign languages. People congregate among their own kind, and one sees the spontaneous emergence of territories that mirror the pattern on the surface of the planet: With the exception of the oceans, you’re traversing a map of the Earth. There are no time zones here. No one sleeps, even though they mostly wish they could. The place is evenly lit by fluorescent lights.

Not everyone is sad when the Callers enter the room and shout out the next list of names. On the contrary, some people beg and plead, prostrating themselves at the Callers’ feet. These are generally the folks who have been here a long time, too long, especially those who are remembered for unfair reasons. For example, take the farmer over there, who drowned in a small river two hundred years ago. Now his farm is the site of a small college, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he’s stuck and he’s miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He is utterly alienated from his name; it is no longer identical with him but continues to bind. The cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart were complicated. The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history. He waits with aching heart for his statues to fall. And that is the curse of this room: since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be.

The debate about God’s gender is misdirected. What we call God is actually a married couple. When they decided to create humans in their own image, they compromised and manufactured approximately equal numbers of both genders.

Each female She creates is close to Her heart. She becomes the woman for just a moment as She shapes her and, in this way, is able to try out different heights and weights, emotional depths and IQs, skin tones and eye colors. The same applies to every male shaped by Him. On certain nights when they’re feeling liberal, each creates a member of the opposite sex, just to see what it’s like.

When you die, you go to live in their large home and enjoy a parent-child relationship with them. Every human in the world is a child to them, and they devote tremendous effort to their parenting skills.

It is heartening to see that they learn from us in the same manner that all parents learn from their children. For example, it turns out they didn’t know how to express the workings of their universe as equations, so they are greatly impressed with the ideas of their physicist children, who phrase clearly to them for the first time what they wrought.

On the other hand, it would be misleading to tell you that it’s always been a happy family, because there was a period of time when that wasn’t true. Their marriage was an arranged one, and over the millennia they grew unhappy with each other’s company. By careful observation of their humans over the years, they learned that sometimes couples don’t work out, that people separate, adulterate, divorce—and none of it is so terrible that the universe crashes down. And so, in the manner that all parents learn from their children, they separated.

There were many acts of bitterness. They stung each other with unfair accusations, using information so personal it shouldn’t have been broached. Hurt, in an idea of quick revenge, She created a planet of all females. He retorted with a solar system of males. She encircled His line of planets with a band of women on meteors. The two of them armed the new humans to battle it out, women against men. Both sides were supplied with weapons ranging from sarcasm to tanks.

But something strange happened. The planets and meteors were silent. Orbits dragged like slow whispers through the empty space. No battles waged; not a shot was fired.

Upon close examination, they discovered that the monosexual inhabitants were miserable, crushed like existentialists under a feeling of the absence of something terribly important, something they couldn’t put their fingers on.

Eventually, She dropped Her hands from Her hips and He from His. She spoke the first tender words in months, asking if He was hungry. He responded by offering to cook something for them both. The planets of men and women drifted back together, and the race started again, with its pursuits, seductions, choices, competitions, temptations, arguments, and a great cosmic sigh of relief as they all fell emancipated into each other’s arms.

In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures. They look vaguely human, but they are smaller and more brutish. They are singularly unintelligent. They knit their brows when they try to follow what you are saying. It will help if you speak slowly, and it sometimes helps to draw pictures. At some point their eyes will glaze over and they will nod as though they understand you, but they will have lost the thread of the conversation entirely.

A word of warning: when you wake up in the afterlife, you will be surrounded by these creatures. They will be pushing and shoving in around you, rubbernecking, howling to get a look at you, and they will all be asking you the same thing:
Do you
have answer? Do you have answer?

Don’t be frightened. These creatures are kind and innocuous.

You will probably ask them what they are talking about. They will knit their brows, plumbing your words like a mysterious proverb. Then they will timidly repeat:
Do you have answer?

Where the heck am I?
you may ask.

A scribe faithfully marks down your every word for future record. Mother and daughter creatures peer out at you hopefully from observation decks.

To understand where you are, it will help to have some background.

At some point in the development of their society, these creatures began to wonder:
Why are we here?
What is the purpose of our existence?
These turned out to be very difficult questions to answer. So difficult, in fact, that rather than attacking the questions directly, they decided it might be easier to build supercomputing machines devoted to finding the answers. So they invested the labor of tens of generations to engineer these. We are their machines.

This seemed a clever strategy to the elders of their community. However, they overlooked a problem: to build a machine smarter than you, it has to be more complex than you—and the ability to understand the machine begins to slip away.

When you wear out and stop functioning, your software is re-uploaded into their laboratory so they can probe it. This is where you awaken. And as soon as you make your first sound they crowd around you to learn one thing:
Do you have answer?

They don’t realize that when they dropped us into our terrarium, we didn’t waste a moment: we built societies, roads, novels, catapults, telescopes, rifles, and every variety of our own machines. They have a hard time detecting this progress of ours, much less understanding it, because they simply can’t follow the complexity. When you try to explain to them what has happened, they cannot keep up with your rapid and unfathomable speech, so they set about their dim-witted nodding. It makes them sad, and the most insightful among these creatures can sometimes be seen weeping in the corners, because they know their project has failed. They believe we have deduced the answer but are too advanced to communicate it at their level.

They don’t guess that we have no answers for them. They don’t guess that our main priority is to answer these questions for ourselves. They don’t guess that we are unable, and that we build machines of increasing sophistication to address our own mysteries. You try to explain this to the creatures, but it is fruitless: not only because they don’t understand you, but also because you realize how little you understand about our machines.