after delivering a eulogy that is both inspirational and absolute, with a solemnity great enough for the occasion, conduct and preside over—I am choosing my words carefully and none other will do—the end of the world.
This is as strange for me to say as it must be to hear, and I should add that I’m not yet certain that the end is coming; it could be a grand deception, or sincerely but wrongly delineated, like the edges of the world on a fifteenth-century map. There are compelling arguments for and against each possibility, and I change my mind about them so often that on Sunday, instead of having discovered the truth, I may be as confused as a pilot with spatial disorientation, in danger of mistaking a graveyard spiral for a safe landing, when up is really down, sky is really earth, and life—suddenly and irreversibly—is really death.
A month ago I thought we all had too much rather than too little time, and that like one of Zeno’s paradoxes its end couldn’t be reached. The future looked as though it would stretch out forever with no single moment more or less significant than any other—with a basic equilibrium underlying its progress—not because time was fair but because it was neutral, as disinterested and limitless a dimension as length and depth.
What I thought turned out to be meaningless, however, the sort of frangible wisdom that can’t survive large or even small cataclysms of the spirit, when during the course of two days in mid-February I lost my job and fell in love.
Neither event was extraordinary and together they might have struck the sort of balance I believed in, with the good and bad canceling each other out, except that the woman I fell in love with, Mary Shoale, was the only daughter of Montgomery Shoale, founder of the antisex religion Prescription for a Superior Existence. Looking back I see the unwisdom of getting involved with someone whose family ties were so forbidding, and even then I knew I should pursue a more available woman, but I was convinced that she and I were soul mates who belonged together at any cost, proof that love emboldens as much as misleads us.
The fallout came quickly. On the afternoon we first got together, an anonymous note was slipped under my front door warning me to stay away from Mary or face swift and severe retaliation. Not knowing if it was serious, I called her but couldn’t get through, and so spent the next few hours debating the question. Either she didn’t actually have to follow PASE precepts just because her father had invented them, or she was obliged to do so for that very reason; either I had nothing to worry about, or I had everything to worry about. The answer arrived later that evening when a Paser broke into my apartment to carry out the note’s threat. He was a large man, a giant, but with the help of my neighbor Conrad, who happened to be over, I prevailed in the resulting skirmish. Afterward, while waiting for the police to take him away, I understood that Mary and I would have to proceed on a cautious footing, that we couldn’t be careless about our affair with zealots like the giant running around. But in the calm of that moment, as I swelled with resolve and relief that the worst was over, shaken but guardedly hopeful, five more Pasers entered the room and took up positions around us, and when one of them pointed her gun at me I saw that the worst had yet to come.
Before she fired many things occurred to me, the most important of which was that I had never thought much about the afterlife. Conrad began to protest and was told to be quiet. I stared at the gun. My adoptive parents, Rick and Ann, who were artists, had reared me without religion and the incentives of heaven or hell or purgatory or nirvana, and I’d not gone out of my way to fill in the blanks. Which isn’t to say they opposed religion; rather they thought of it as an inheritance that other people made the best of or discarded. They didn’t dismiss it out of hand and they weren’t uninterested in the soul. Ann had once even described art as a pathway to joy more honest than religion—it admitted, after all, to being a human invention—but not better. In her view, art’s only advantage was that it didn’t tell a purportedly true story that science could disprove, which religion did only because it was so old, because in the past people had had to grope blindly for explanations of life and death and pain and love, which they called Judaism or Hinduism or animism. Happily, science had since come up with a version of how the cosmos worked that rendered the seven-day theories and turtles resting atop turtles all the way down quaint and irrelevant.
Bjorn Bjornson, who like most of the villagers here has a trace of the poet-philosopher in him—something about living so far from the planet’s nerve centers and being preoccupied with the great cycles of sky and ocean, where the human drama is contained in an unvarying population of 1,400 villagers among whom one is both participant and anthropologist, gives one access to more sweeping thoughts and ambitious language than the rest of us possess, which has led me to think that if we all lived as these people do, and as our ancestors did for millennia, rarely straying more than twelve miles from our birthplace, we might be better prepared for what is to come—phrased it as I would have liked to at the time, when I told him yesterday about Prescription for a Superior Existence. Shaking his great blond equine head Bjorn said, “In religion, in the end, the new is neither better nor worse than the old; beliefs and insights swirl and constellate over time without shedding any greater light than what has pulsed weakly throughout the ages. Reason and passion enact a tortoise and hare race in our hearts, and what seems true and beautiful today may seem false and hideous tomorrow.”
So I can’t adequately explain what happened in my living room, with Conrad and the giant and the five paratroopers standing around like Roman senators on the Ides of March, a moment heavy with anticipated violence. Whereas I might have thought, “Here it is at last, what we are all marked for from the beginning,” and seen it as a pointless conclusion to what had been a cosmically pointless existence—though able to obsess me for thirty-four years with the same resolute focus everyone pays to his or her own being—I felt that it shouldn’t end there, and that I would do anything to extend it long enough to determine its why and wherefore, which I knew then were not matters of insignificance or superstition but actually more important than work and friendship and the romantic impulse and whatever else I’d slotted into my viewfinder and looked at with such keen interest. I seemed to have gotten everything wrong, and I wished for a speech or action that would arrest the woman with the gun.
This is only worth mentioning because after being shot I did not die. Instead I opened my eyes in what appeared to be a hospital recovery ward on a hard bed beneath a thin sheet and thick downy comforter that smelled of unscented soap, as dawn glowed through three triangular skylights above me. Repudiating everything I’d thought about misunderstanding life, I sat up and looked around. The room and its contents were white: the sheet, ceiling, end table, linoleum floor, dust particles in the air. My head felt both weightless and heavy, like a stone held under water, and I craved coffee and food and any of the painkillers a hospital of this size would stock in unregulated doses. Nine beds were lined up on either side of mine and another ten along the opposite wall, in all of which men were sleeping, a mishmash of ethnicities and ages, though most looked younger than forty. I swung my feet onto the floor’s warm tiles and was about to stand up when an alarm clock rang and everyone opened their eyes at once, as if they’d been feigning sleep.
Next to me a tall stout Indian folded on a pair of thick plastic glasses, yawned widely, and said, “You must be Jack. I’m Mihir, and I will be your mentor here. Those are for you to wear.” He pointed to powder blue cotton pants and a collarless long-sleeved shirt stacked in a tidy pile at the foot of my bed. Everyone was dressing in the same outfit and folding their bed sheets so vigorously that they might not have been convalescents. Some hummed high-energy pop tunes. “I hope you slept comfortably and are fully rested. These mattresses are firm, yes, perhaps too much so for your taste, but the firmness is part of the treatment. Did your wife send you?”
“I’m not married.”
“Parents?”
“What kind of hospital is this?”
“Hospital? We are at the PASE Wellness Center. Please put on your exercise garments.”
“I have to get out of here.”
“Yes, naturally, after you have improved. In a moment we are due at Elysian Field, so we haven’t time for