Seven or Eight Afterlives

1. village 

you wake up in a hut in a small fishing village, in your same body with your same tattoos, but you are injured in some way, your body twisted as though thrown from a train, and the villagers are caring for you with a gruff tenderness, but when they come in to check on you, you don’t recognize their language and can’t communicate with them — it takes months or years for you to learn this language, which doesn’t really resemble any language on earth as far as you know — when you’ve recovered, they also teach you, at your request, to fight with a kind of short flat halberd, as occasionally bandits or brigands attack the village — you ask around and find that none of the people here are dead (as far as they know), they were born here and remember nothing else, but there are rumors of another person or village that spoke a similar-sounding language to your own, so you set off in search of your fellow dead to try and get some answers — you are still in danger, you can still bleed and be injured, so you must be careful, because you have no idea what comes next, what happens if you die in this afterlife — is there another one after this? do you return to earth? — then after years of hard travel and many strange wonders and bizarre hanging cities, one day on the blasted road you see a family being attacked by “peacekeepers,” as the local toll-collectors are called — you unsheathe your halberd and rush to defend the family — you shed blood — you kill two peacekeepers, your soul and mind knotting themselves painfully at the existential implications — until suddenly an arrow from a hidden archer pierces your side and you fall into darkness and out of this new world and

2. tower

you wake partway up an impossibly tall circular tower where the top and bottom aren’t visible, everything shrouded in fog — the tower is made of thick indestructible glass or glass-analogue, with a constant curved stairway corkscrewing up and down along the glass — round walls separate the stairway from the large inner area, with a village or town or commune on each floor — you learn the local language, which consists primarily of singing, and gradually you hear a rumor from the others that your location on the tower when you wake depends on your deeds in life, though many of the “lives” people describe to you sound like nothing you’ve ever heard on earth or in the fishing village after that — most people assume upward is the “good” direction but nobody’s really sure — everyone’s needs are perfectly met (food and clothing regularly appear in large colored glass bins connected to vacuum tubes that stretch up- and downward, perhaps endlessly), and so the people are free to pursue whatever interests them — there are rumors of someone who invented a parachute, which will theoretically allow a person to descend to the lowest levels of the tower, assuming it ever ends — some extremists have even jumped off the tower, believing they will fall forever and be able to see the entire height of it — but it is difficult to get outside, as the glass-analogue is unbreakable and there are only a handful of balconies with doors that lead out — these balconies are spaced out every 10,000 stories or so — tens of thousands of floors are known, but nobody in your section has been all the way to the top or bottom — eventually you join up with a mapping expedition and proceed to spend years or decades surveying the tower — on the 427,695th floor above the one where you originally woke, you and your crew find a jagged hole in the glass and wriggle outside and smell the sky and cold air for the first time in many years — you rise and stretch and a sudden powerful wind buffets the slim balcony, catches your coat, and yanks you off into the endless air — you fall — the tower flashes by as you plummet — for the first few days it seems repetitive, identical, and in your terror you think perhaps the tower is infinite — but days or weeks later, as thirst starts to loosen your brain and the wind starts to chafe and burn your skin, you think the light is changing, growing greener as you descend, darkening — finally you break through a blanket of clouds and see, miles below, a glittering green sea — finally, finally, you can see the base of the tower, a massive ziggurat or city yawning up out of the sea — the golden towers rush up at you — a crash of breaking glass and

3. beach

you wake to find yourself walking along a long rocky stretch of coastline with an enormous, unclimbable cliff on the right side and endless ocean on the left — you can see the coastline curving ahead and behind with little harbors and bays — you assume that you should continue in the direction you woke to find yourself walking, but you can also turn around and head the other direction if you want — you could also try climbing the sheer shale cliff to see what’s up top, or swim out to the ocean, or build a raft (perhaps you spot a distant island through the fog) — along the way, you see various rough wooden lean-tos built of driftwood and twine, but you never see any other people — occasionally you spot strange sea-creatures washed up on shore, unlike anything you saw on earth — the nights are cool and bright and purple — at first you think of this trek as a trudge, a kind of solitary torture as punishment for your many sins in life, or lives, but soon you come to think of it as a reward, with the sea breeze and the sound of the waves and nobody to distract you from the ocean, and away up ahead you see the long sweep of the coastline and wonder who or what you may find when you finally arrive at your destination — but your body ages and grows weary over the years — you are strong at first, the constant walking and the lean pseudo-fish and the freshwater trickling down from the cliff keeping you fit — but eventually you grow thin and weak, and one day a misstep among the rocks irreparably ruins your ankle, so you sit in one of the wooden lean-tos and gaze out at the sea until the sun or sun-analogue goes down and you succumb to weariness among the sounds of the waves until

4. canal

you wake in a long barge moving slowly along a narrow and silent ship canal — there are steep hills full of dark buildings on either side, and you pass under rusted bridges, but everything looks abandoned and sometimes burned-out — the architecture is an odd and unsettling mix of different styles and eras: italianate stuff, ruined skyscrapers, gothic churches, tiny stucco houses, thatched roofs, etcetera — you don’t see any people, and when you occasionally disembark and walk into the city, all the buildings are empty and quiet, a hot wind whistling through — you find you still need to do basic human things like eat and sleep and shit — the barge has a galley filled with old canned goods whose labels you can’t read, but you also find that the canal itself is filled with long silver fish that you can catch and eat — you travel for months, following the current, with infrequent days-long breaks when you tie up the barge and explore the ruined cities and houses and dead gardens — no matter how far you explore, you never seem able to crest the enormous hills on either side of the canal, bristling with buildings, but that could be because you’re worried about losing sight of your barge and the canal itself, your only transportation and direction, or else perhaps a kind of hard black vegetation takes over and makes cresting the hill impossible — finally, after long silent years of travel, you grow bored enough to crave some kind of hobby, so you start looking more carefully through the buildings (the few you can get into) for books — only very occasionally do you find any, and they are always small crumbling books with identical faded green leather covers, their pages filled with a spiky alphabet you’ve never seen before, the same lettering on the cans of food in the barge — so you start carving pictures to pass the time — eventually you also begin to wonder: the only signs of any type of life are the silver fish and the dark green moss along the canal’s edges, so you figure there must be some other type of life, because what do the fish eat? — looking closer, you start to notice smaller minnows, strange minuscule polliwogs, and tiny water insects skimming the surface — you cup one small swimming something in your hand, and you feel a gentle nip as it bites you, and your vision fuzzes at the edges and then

5. labyrinth

you wake in a maze, between tall yellow stone walls covered in glyphs and whorls and lichen — after days of traveling, you find that there are empty villages built into the stone of the maze and that you are in one continuous and unmapped labyrinth that may or may not be infinite — after a week or two, in the slanted light streaming through the vines one afternoon, you see an enormous shadowed something lumbering toward you, its sides shaggy, its face masked — it gives an inhuman bellow like the sound of tearing metal, and other huge things emerge from over the tops of the walls — you turn to flee but you slip in a puddle and a sharp corner of stone wall catches you in the temple and

6. elevator

you wake in an industrial-sized elevator, decorated in an intricate style your eyes cannot categorize, delicate scrollwork and large gleaming letters or sigils — you can’t tell whether the machine is rising or falling — there are hundreds of buttons emblazoned with strange symbols and glyphs you don’t recognize, and you need to pick which button to press, whether to head up to the top or down to ground level and maybe leave the building, if this is a building, or else choose a middle button, something in between — you choose a button — with a sudden lurch, a cable snaps and you are in freefall and

7. bridge

you wake on a massive ancient stone bridge with entire villages and towns built into it — the support pillars extend downward into unknown mist — the bridge is unknowably long and forms an entire universe to the inhabitants, who have never known anything else — you are surprised to find the inhabitants speak a similar language to the one you learned in the fishing village, lifetimes ago, a spikier dialect that you can understand about half of, if you really focus — the people understand what you mean by death (when you ask them about it, aided by elaborate pantomime), but none of them remember previous lives or afterlives, and they do not understand what you mean when you describe the concept of an afterlife — if you travel for weeks in one direction, you eventually come to a broken section of the bridge, a jagged edge torn by (according to local legend) some huge meteorite ages ago — you can just barely see through the mist that the bridge does continue on the other side of the broken section, but the gap is far too wide to get across — if you travel for weeks in the other direction, you eventually come not to an end of the bridge but to a border guarded fiercely by some fanatical people who speak a different language and kill anyone who tries to cross — the bridge continues beyond their land, but nobody in your section has seen past it or heard of what is beyond — there are some who have attempted to rappel down the stone support pillars to see what lies below the bridge, but none have returned — the pillars are slick with moss and rain, worn smooth by the centuries, so they are difficult to climb down, and also rope is a rare commodity in this world because plants and animals are difficult to raise on the bridge, and most resources must be used for food, clothing, and shelter — only the wealthy can afford rope, so rappelling happens only rarely — after years of collecting and foraging and stealing, you are finally able to find some type of ingenious climbing gear (not rope) to descend a pillar — you slip and fall the last fifty feet and land in cold, dark water — all you can see around you for miles is more water — but then you find another society down there, a group of boat-people who live at the bases of the pillars, which grow slightly wider at the water level and then continue down beneath the depths — you live among them, learning their languages and customs and legends — these people, too, have no memories of previous lives or hope of future ones — they put all their energy into surviving on their floating villages and creating an odd form of water-art, where they use hoses and bellows to shoot water into complex shapes and mandalas — you marry a local artisan and learn the art of fishing and collecting kelp, and you are, in a way, quietly happy — until one day an earthquake brings down the bridge above you, city-sized stones raining down into the sea, people and vehicles and animals plunging and splashing, rock arches and temples and filigreed statuettes, and a miles-long slab of bridge plummets down from the clouds in sickening slow motion directly above your village but

8. train

then it’s a train and it’s moving and you’re on it — your clothes are crumpled, your eyelids gritty — outside, a green glacial river tumbles past — after a few bewildered moments you realize this is the same train, the same seat, the same day that you died on earth, the first time, seven or eight lives ago, or at least a very close duplicate — you are wearing the outfit you died in — you check your watch and see that it’s two minutes before the time the train will derail, killing everyone — with a shout, you rush to the back of the car — yelling at the passengers to exit, now, hurry, a crash is coming — you grab a child, the only person you can carry, a little boy with dark curls and a monster truck t-shirt, and you sprint to the space between train cars, icy wind slapping at you, and leap toward the river, hopelessly, clutching the child in your arms