I've mentioned Defending Your Life before. It's an Albert Brooks film. Its premise: you're born; you live your life on Earth; you die. After you die, you go to Judgment City, a purgatory of sorts (but a nice one: all-you-can-eat restaurants where, no matter how much you eat, you gain no weight, etc.). In Judgment City, you must defend, in court, your conduct during your life on Earth. If you're successful in convincing the court that you did a decent job at living your life there, you move on to the next plane of existence (a much cooler place than Earth, much nicer, your court-appointed defense attorney tells you -- life on Earth is sort of a joke, you're told, compared to what comes next).
If the court doesn't rule in your favor, though, you have to go back to Earth and live another Earth life, and die another Earth death, and then return to Judgment City, where, again, the court decides whether you're ready to move on or not.
Well. I have no idea what happens to you when you die. The Defending Your Life explanation makes as much sense to me as anything else I've heard. And I've been thinking, recently, about a twist on the living-on-Earth-until-you're-ready-to-move-on deal. I've been thinking about something like this:
You're born, on Earth. Your first Earth life is pretty cushy. You're born in the early 1960s, in New York. Your parents are rich. Rich as in, rich-rich: rich enough that you won't have to work a day in your life if you don't want to. But you do work: you work on Wall Street. Between salary and bonuses, you make about eight million dollars a year. There has never been a month when you've worried about how you were going to pay your Con Ed bill or your rent. You marvel at the wealth of the Warren Buffetts and Rupert Murdochs of the world and you wish that you had their wealth. But the fact is that you own an eight-million-dollar apartment in New York, and a seven-million-dollar house in East Hampton, and a smallish three-million-dollar apartment in London. (There's also your parents' place in New Hampshire, which you and your brother will inherit, and where you have your own small, four-bedroom pool house which your dad built for you and which you never use because you have three other houses, all of which you prefer to this one.)
In your professional life, there are ups and downs, yes: at one point, you and your fellow Wall Streeters make some reckless decisions. Really reckless ones, actually: your recklessness plays a non-negligible role bringing the country's economy to its knees. You're forced to consider putting your London place on the market, although in the end, you don't end up having to do that (those are a few very stressful months, though). Also, you have to sell one of your Van Goghs (one of the lesser ones).
But it all works out in the end: the federal government has no choice but to bail out the investment bank where you work -- along with scores of other banks -- at vast taxpayer expense, and a little over a year after the worst of it, you get a six-and-a-half-million dollar bonus.
So what seemed like a disaster turned out not to be one at all.
Three years later, your father dies; your inheritance, after taxes, amounts to fifty-three million dollars. Again: you're not Murdoch-rich! But you're doing alright; more than alright. You die at age eighty-one: your drop dead on a golf course in Scotland. Your death is instantaneous: you feel about a quarter of a second of acute pain, but then you feel nothing.
So, you're dead. You don't go to Judgment City, though; this isn't Defending Your Life. You're sent to The Blue Room, where a blue-scrubs-clad clerk seated at a blue desk looks you over, looks over your file, and sends you back to Earth for your next life.
You're born in 1901, in Akron. Your family employs a maid and a cook, as many middle-class families do. You get a B.A. and a law degree from the University of Michigan. You move to Boston where, as a lawyer, you advise various corporate clients. The 1930s aren't particularly rough for you; there's plenty of need for lawyers during the Depression, plus you never got rich playing the stock market, but never lost your shirt either. After thirty-seven years of marriage (during which you've only have sex with eight women who were not your wife, not including prostitutes), a quick bout of pneumonia takes your wife's life. You die a few years later, your children at your bedside, after a week-long illness.
In the Blue Room, the blue-scrubs-clad clerk (the same guy from before, although you don't remember him, because you don't remember the Blue Room from before) looks you over, looks over your file, and sends you back to Earth for your next life.
You're born on January 20th, 1977, the same day Jimmy Carter is inaugurated. You're not American this time, though, sorry: you're Spanish. Your father is a plumber in Madrid. You're boring, man! Christ, you're boring. But you're detail-oriented, and you rise through the ranks of the Spanish postal service, retiring as the number-four man there (you couldn't really have expected to rise any higher than that -- number-three, maybe, but definitely not above number three, as the number-two and number-one posts are always political appointments). Is your life hard? No; no, it isn't hard. It's neither easy nor hard. It's boring. But that's alright; you're boring. You own the same sofa your entire life; this bothers you, but you don't lose sleep over it. You're killed in 2049: you're the first person to die of Dog Flu '49, an epidemic which never really gets off the ground (except in Sicily: half of Sicily is wiped out, but people don't like to think about Sicily anymore, not since The Fires).
The blue-scrubs-clad clerk (same guy again) looks you up and down, looks over your file, sends you to a place called Section M for forty-eight hours to "detox" from Dog Flu '49 ("just a precaution," blue-scrubs-guy says, and Section M is nice; they have a Wii in there, and one of those soda machines where the soda is free), then sends you back to Earth for your next life.
Leningrad, 1952: welcome to the U.S.S.R.! Is Stalin's Russia a nice place to live? No. No, it isn't. But nobody goes hungry here, not anymore, and this include you. You get a very solid education. You think you might like to be a teacher yourself sometime. That doesn't pan out; you work most of your adult life in a factory in which you participate in the making of
lathes. The lathes are sold to the Chinese as scrap metal. But you
have a job, at least, even if it's a stupid, meaningless job. You have no civil liberties to speak of, but you've never had any of those. It would be nice to have running water which was a color other than green-brown skim milk, but you do have a washing machine (which doesn't work most of the time, but the guy down the hall knows how to fix it, or did before he disappeared) and several items of clothing which are various shades of green-brown. In 1981, the KGB mistakes you for someone else and after seventeen hours of Marathon Man-style "dentistry," you're brain-dead. Three days later, you're completely dead.
In The Blue Room, the blue-scrubs-clad clerk looks you over, glances at your file, and sends you back to Earth for your next life.
Northern India, 1828. Here is what you do: you get the water from the river, and then you carry the water up the hill to the large house where the important people live. That's what you do; that's all you do; forever. You don't know who your parents are; you're not aware that everyone, at least in the beginning, has parents. You die of influenza at age ten, the end.
The blue-scrubs-clad clerk looks you over, glances at your file, winces. He looks at you, looks back down at your file, looks back up at you, all without moving his head; just his eyes move. He squints; he starts to say something; he decides not to say whatever it was he was he was going to say. He sends you back to
Earth for your next life.
You're born in Haiti in July of 1952. By January of 2010, you're 58. You're poor: you are poor. And skinny. You don't know that first-world news organizations have, from time to time, done stories about the "mud cookies" which you eat pretty regularly. They have, though -- have done mud-cookie stories -- because eating cookies which are made from dirt and water is not something that people in first-world countries (or in most other countries) do. Of course, mud cookies aren't the only thing you eat; if they were, you'd be dead. You do eat a lot of them, though: they make you feel like you've eaten something, even though you haven't, not really.
Your only grandson is getting married tomorrow. You have a smile on your face as you walk down the street in Port-au-Prince; you think of the day you were married to your wife, rest her soul. While you haven't heard the mud-cookie stories, you do know that you're poor, that everyone in the world doesn't live as you do, because you've heard that on the BBC. But today, you don't feel poor; today, your only grandson is about to be married, and you feel connected to the past and to the future and --
You were walking down the street and now you're pinned under some sort of cart-thing, and you don't know how that happened. Blood is running down your neck from a gash in your scalp. You feel for the gash with your right hand, touch it, wince, but know instinctively that you're not seriously hurt, that when someone gets a cut on his head, there's usually a lot of blood, even if the wound isn't serious. You strain against the cart-thing, realize that it's not actually pinning you down, that it's merely resting on you, perhaps because it fell on you. You push the cart-thing aside; you stand up; you look around.
Everything is gone. Or, rather, everything has been smashed, or almost everything: smashed, as if by a gigantic fist. Not just for a few blocks, either: for block after block after block, in all directions, everything: smashed. Lots of fire, too, and smoke: the few things which have not been smashed seem all to be on fire. You can see, in the distance, the Presidential Palace, which you've never seen from a distance before, because it used to be the case that buildings were in the way, blocking your view of it. Not anymore. The palace doesn't look quite right either.
You walk for several hours. Your brain cannot process what your eyes are seeing, so stopped trying a while ago. You would like to return to your hovel of an apartment, but you can't find it. Not that you've really looked: you know that it's gone -- everything for blocks and blocks is gone, fist-smashed, and you were within just a few blocks of it when the smashing occurred. You stop at an intersection. You hear: explosions, screams, sirens far in the distance. And then everything goes all blurry.
And then you're in a park, and it's dark out. Many people are here in the park. Half of them are crying -- wailing -- while the other half are consoling the ones who are cry-wailing. Your friend -- your only friend, really; you are a shy person, an intensely private person; you have your family, yes, but you have few friends, and really just this one -- is shaking your left shoulder, you realize, in an attempt to wake you up. You look at him (how did he find you?); you want for him to have tears in his eyes, but his eyes appear to be beyond tears.
He tells you this: That both of your sons are dead; that your daughter is dead; that both of your sons' wives are dead; that your daughter's husband is dead. He tells you, also, that your grandson, whose wedding was tomorrow, is dead; he tells you that the woman whom your grandson was going to marry tomorrow is dead; he tells you that the priest who was going to marry them is dead. And how does your friend know with certainty that all of these people are dead? Because they were all in the same place, but that place is gone now, smashed: smashed, and also, on fire.
You don't understand why you're not crying, but you're not crying. You get to your feet, with your friend's help. Your friend puts his hand on your shoulder. You ask him about your dog. He says, "..."
His mouth was there, about a foot from yours, but now it's gone. You come to understand that his mouth is gone because he has fallen to the ground, his body crumpled at your feet. Slowly, because your body hurts, you kneel beside your friend, who, you realize, is not breathing. You shake him: nothing. You feel for his pulse: nothing. You raise your open palm, bring it down on your friend's empty face, hard: nothing. Your friend is dead.
Everyone is dead.
You walk. You walk through darkness lit only by firelight. You walk some more. You come to a wide street; you step off of the curb and into the street. A large fire truck barrels down the street. You wish not to be hit by the fire truck, but you can't figure out how to avoid that. The flat-fronted truck makes contact with your body at about seventy miles per hour.
In The Blue Room, the blue-scrubs-clad clerk looks you over, glances at your file. There is a device on his blue desk. He presses a blue button on the device, leans his face close into it, says something which you can hear but cannot understand. A voice inside the device says something in response. "Fine," the clerk says, and he stands, and as he stands, a blue door behind the clerk and to his left swings open and into the blue office. Standing in the doorway is a man who is well over six feet tall and who is wearing a pastel-green linen suit with no tie and who is smiling the widest smile you've ever seen, an utterly genuine smile. Behind the man is a world if green... green what? You can't tell. But you understand that what is on the other side of the door is... You don't have the word. What's on the other side of the door is Next.
The blue-scrubs-clad clerk (whom you feel you've met before, although you can't imagine where) extends his hand, and you shake it, and then he hands you a pen and clipboard with some sort of document on it. You sign the document and hand the clipboard and the pen back to the clerk, who gestures with his left hand toward the man in the green linen suit who still stands in the doorway smiling his utterly genuine smile, and who also extends his hand, which you shake. Without opening his mouth, the man in the green linen suit says, "Congratulations!", and without opening your mouth, you find that you're able to say, "Thank you!", and without opening his mouth, the man in the green linen suit says, "Next!", and you follow him through the door.
So maybe that's how it works.
