The AFTERLIFE (1)

THE AFTERLIFE (1) (inspired by SUM: Forty tales from the afterlives by David Eagleman) WHEN you arrive at a black wrought iron gate after you have died and see the electronic notice: WELCOME TO THE AFTERLIFE, pretty soon you will be asked to select your afterlife option. Without thinking about it too much, you might choose ‘REPEAT’, which is in fact an opportunity to do everything all over again. The good, you think, outweighed the bad, so it seems like a pretty good option. What you soon discover, however, is that everything is in clumps. It is not linear, as you lived it. First up is birthdays. I have all of my 81 birthdays over 81 days. My fingers get sore from opening too many presents. The one that brings the biggest smile is the bike, when I was 13. A red and blue Malvern Star. Subsequent birthdays were an anti-climax present-wise. But when I get to 36 again, I get to revisit the Café Royal, in London on Regent Street. DH Lawrence’s birthday experience at the same venue was at a similar age around the mid 1920’s. He ended up vomiting everywhere, in the Domino Room. A more mundane experience is sixty accumulative weeks of continual teeth cleaning. Sometimes your mouth drips with blood. You watch your teeth slowly changing shape and becoming irregular, and stained. Hair brushing is also mundane. This only goes for 45 years and then stops. Not even a comb is needed after that. Football match after football match, eight months of it, more triumph than despair, the blue and white stripes the common denominator. After a while the sirens hurt your ears. A cumulative thirty years of sleep, sometimes restlessly. There are some classic dreams- especially numerous are the car crashes built around anxiety you often had. These are also bunched together- a bunching in amongst the bunching. Thank God when they finish and are replaced by 2000 or more erotic ones. Staring blankly at walls takes up close to a year. Your feelings of emotional anguish- that terrible adolescent break-up that caused stomach pain. Boredom, ennui, broken bones or mere sprains and head knocks. These are the moments that you suffer the most in reliving. Cutting finger and toe nails takes up 3 days. You never did do that kind of thing much. Pulling out ear wax and picking your nose takes up triple the time of this. As for shaving, 300 days, and doing dishes (shamefully) 130, all painfully boring but better than gardening- 270- and cleaning the toilet- 190. Month upon month is spent driving various cars, the majority of it in the same one or two suburbs. Several of these months waiting restlessly before a red light. Only a week on a plane, but what a jam- packed week of excitement and anticipation. Ironing, games shows, shoe laces, sunburn recovery and swimming, telephone conversations. It is weird waiting to see what clump comes next. The biggest dread is the big clumps of embarrassment, and failures at work, and terrible restaurant experiences and sore stomachs, toothaches and vomiting. These are all counter balanced, naturally, by periods of beautiful reading and watching experiences, delectable food and stimulating walks. At the end of the day, it is reliving the best moments of your substantive self: as son, bachelor, father and husband. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………