by Bill Pottle
me that I had spent so much time preparing for unimportant things, and now that I was about to give the most important speech of my life, I had no idea what to say. I had already decided to give one private recording each to Luke, Esperanza, and Jamie, and one to all of them. Then, I would make one more recording for everyone else. I silently thanked God for digital technology. I had memories of my parents, photos of my grandparents, and only a written record of anyone before that.
All of those records became faded and distorted over time.
Digital technology was different, though. As long as my descendants took care of it, the ones and zeros would never change to 0.1s and 1.2s. The lines of worry etched upon my face, the one tuft of hair remaining on my head, and the fear behind my eyes would be just as vivid a thousand years in the future. Luke’s Taekwondo instructor once said that video tape was the worst invention ever for martial artists. People sure were a lot faster, taller, and more dominant when stories of their matches were told around the metaphorical campfire. So although future generations might look at me and see an extra twenty pounds of beer-gut, they would be seeing the truth.
That’s what I wanted, wasn’t it?
The choice between an unpalatable truth and a logically unlikely fiction was one of the most important choices humans had to make. Or was it? What if believing in God helped a person get up every morning, helped them be a better person during the day, and helped them stave off the isolation that came with the blackness of night? Did it really matter if He existed or not?
For me, a few hours away from death, it was just about the only thing that did matter.
Something about the way death was always open to everyone made it sacred. No matter what they took from you, no matter how bad life got, you always had an option. I wasn’t talking about suicide— that was a coward’s way out. I was talking about fighting to the death. I always found the whole ‘over my dead body’ comment odd, though. People were basically embracing failure. It was almost if you tried your best and gave your life, then no matter what happened you could accept it. I would rather cry out ‘over my dead body with my relentless ghost clinging to your heels.’ Still, sometimes I thought doing your best was all life really was about. Who could ask more than that? Either God exists or He doesn’t, but few religions could logically argue with the idea that if a man did his best and treated others as they wished to be treated, he should be rewarded in the afterlife.
I had devoured sacred texts of most of the major religions looking for commonalities. If a concept was common to a majority of the world’s religions, that said to me that it was either a part of the divine that was so universal everyone recognized it, or such a fundamental part of human nature as to require invention of an explanation.
The world’s religions seemed to be divided evenly between the ‘one shot’ Jerusalem-based religions of Christianity and Islam, and the Indian-based reincarnation religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Sikhism. I never did get a clear picture from scripture of what the Jewish people thought, and I guess that’s why the Pharisees and Sadducees were always arguing. Then, there were many other religions that didn’t really say much of anything about the afterlife, almost as if it wasn’t important.
Although I doubted my wager would ever become as famous as Pascal’s, looking at things from a gambler’s perspective produces a clear winner. If you take the one-shot religions and you’re right, you’re set—straight into heaven. But if you’re wrong, then you just get to be reincarnated and try again. If you always have this attitude then your soul will just keep being reborn—not a bad outcome. On the other side, if you take the reincarnation view and you’re right, you achieve some sort of state of perpetual bliss, but if you’re wrong— there’s always the chance of going to Hell.
Of course, I didn’t base my belief on logical tests, and this reasoning couldn’t tell me which one-shot religion was right, but it did help ease my mind.
What I was really worried about was that there was no afterlife. The existence of a soul would be the most pleasant of all human fictions. If I was nothing more than a ‘biological robot’ living in a deterministic universe, then I would simply cease to exist.
That was what really scared me.
When I was a kid I tried to ‘remember’ events that happened before I was born. I would lay awake at night in my bed and close my eyes, trying to see how Columbus’s ships looked when he sailed the Atlantic. I figured that if my soul was immortal, it should be able to know what happened before I had achieved my current state of consciousness. Similarly, I worried about things happening after I died. My mind wrapped itself around the possibility of not existing for eternity. I never missed the time I spent asleep, so why should I miss the time I was dead? Eternity was the real problem, though. I couldn’t imagine it any more than I could imagine how big the universe was. It didn’t mean I didn’t try— I would think of the entire world, and then zoom out to the solar system, and then to the galaxy, and zoom out impossibly farther than that. But no matter how far I went, the entire thing would collapse into a bright speck in the eye of a maiden in some far off planet, and the zooming out process would continue again. It’s like how any fraction with infinity in the denominator is always zero. You could be oblivious for a million, or billion, or trillion years, and you’ve only completed 0% of your time.
I imagined what would happen to my body after I died, boredom never distracting me. I saw my coffin lying there, stained mahogany preserving my body for decades as the world turned above, oblivious to my passing save for the occasional stranger who came by to pay heed. Time went on, and the joints that held the wood together slowly gave in to the assaults of the worms and bacteria around them. The bugs ate through the plush white velvet, and started to consume my body. People visit less and less as what’s left of me slowly starts to decay. I’m oblivious to the fantastic discoveries going on above ground, but I’m safe from the pain of the world as well. Only the occasional genealogist comes to visit me now, coming to jot down some notes at the tombstone of the somber man they see in the recordings.
Somehow, my body never completely decomposes. Half of a skull, a few shards that once formed a rib, and a femur remain. They are all that is there as time sweeps away the face of the world, making it something wholly unrecognizable. Empires rise and fall, the ravenous sun feeds off the energy of the earth, growing bloated until it fills up the sky. Humans have ceased to exist. Yet even this passes, and as my skull stares up at the devastation with one gaping eye socket, I have not gotten any closer to eternity…
Panting, I pushed the thought from my mind. Just as the gnome reminded me, there was nothing I could do to make God exist or not exist, all I could do was my best with the short time I had left. I wanted to be mad, but I simply had no time for it. It surprised me inside— I had always been good at compartmentalizing my feelings, but this was ridiculous.
By this time the camera battery was fully charged, so I set it up on an old picnic table. I brushed off the chips of bleached-green paint and cursed as a splinter dug into my index finger. I held the finger up to my face, squeezing the plump digit with my other hand. The pink color in my skin oozed out, concentrating into a droplet of bright red blood. I used my fingernails as tweezers and the splinter slid free, as if I was uncorking a treasured bottle of burgundy. Bringing my finger to my lips and sucking on the remaining metallic-tasting liquid I was reminded of the inappropriateness of the metaphor. Only one man turned wine to blood.
I leveled the camera between the boards and flipped the switch to ‘REC.’ I waved to the camera, hit stop and went back and checked that it played well. The image of me waving happily appeared on the LCD.
I had no time for mistakes.
I talked then, spending the afternoon recounting everything I had to say to them. There was no script, no organization. I just talked about how I loved them, how much they all meant to me. I talked about their futures, how Luke really could make it to the Olympics if he wanted to,
how Jamie could open up that restaurant, and how Esperanza gave hope to us all. I told them to dream big and then work to make their dreams come true. But I reminded them of the need for balance, the danger of getting so caught up in their dreams that they failed to appreciate the beauty that was in ordinary waking life.
It was growing towards evening by the time I finished, so I gathered up the discs, wiped a few last tears, and drove home.
Jamie met me as I walked in the door. “You wouldn’t believe my day,” she said, giving me an absent-minded peck on the lips as I entered. “Well, I was waiting for the plumber who didn’t even come until noon, and then I was off to the dry cleaners who had somehow managed to lose three of your shirts. By the time I made it to school, I was already late for the meeting with Luke’s teacher. I had to rush to the grocery store and only made it home a few minutes before you did.”
I was about to tell her right then and there, but she was in such a hurry. “Oh, here’s the salmon,” she said, handing me a plate with six fleshy pink fillets darkened with her trademark honey lime soy sauce. “Es is outside so be careful around the grill.”
I slid open the screen door
