Blueprints of the Afterlife

gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. Finally I saw it, a Hummer, coming straight at me. I passed out again for what seemed like hours but when I came to, the Hummer had only come a little closer. Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. He walked up with another bottle of water. As I drank, he crouched beside me and asked how I was. I made a smartass response, or I’d like to think I did. I probably whispered something meekly. I don’t remember. With his elbows resting on his knees, Bickle squinted and looked into the distance. He asked if I was familiar with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s book On Death and Dying. The one about the stages of death. There’s denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. He said, “You’re probably going through a little of that yourself right now. And you’ve probably noticed you don’t pass through those stages in a straight line. Thing is, Luke, the human race as a whole is going through those stages. For a long time it was denial, right? The jury’s still out on climate change. We can keep consuming at this rate forever. Then in the last few years we’ve been bargaining. If I just bring my own grocery bags to the store, the ice caps will remain. But what if I were to tell you, Luke, that those of us at the acceptance stage have done the math. We’ve done the computer modeling. What if I were to say that the only way to fulfill our holy purpose as stewards of life in the universe is to sacrifice ninety-five percent of the human race?”

“You’re fucked,” I think I told him.

“Oh, we’re in agreement there,” he said, then asked if I wanted to come to the academy.

I laughed, water dribbling out of my mouth. “The academy,” I said. “There is no academy. If there’s anything, it’s a support group for nut jobs that meets in a church basement rehashing bullshit theories about paradigm shifts and cyberspace.”

You didn’t actually put it that way.

Probably not. But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”

I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.

He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”

“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