The World of the End (3 page)

3)
    Good news for the vegetarians among you: Since in our world everyone has successfully undergone the death stage, there are no bodies, no carrion, no roadkill. From this you can safely surmise that the only type of food you will not be eating here is flesh. Hunting is absolutely prohibited. Bon appétit.

4)
    Housing. As you will soon see, the contours of this world are not easily grasped. In order to avoid a population explosion caused by a dizzyingly large aggregation of the dead, the Other World has been built in four dimensions. You are familiar with geographic parameters that measure length and width. This world is characterized by retroactive time dimensions, enabling it to house all of the world’s dead since the dawn of humanity. Place is time, confusing as that may sound. Simplifying matters, all of the dead people in this room, 9,568 in number, passed away on June 21, 2001 and therefore live on Circle 21, in the city of June 2001. Each and every one of you has been provided with living quarters in the skyscrapers on June 21 Circle, which serves as a type of neighborhood. Each skyscraper has 1,000 housing units, divided into twenty-four floors. Each door bears your initials. The hour of your death determines your floor. For instance, someone who died between one and two in the morning will live on the first floor, someone who died between two and three will live on the second floor, and so on. You are not obligated to live in your specified quarters, but if you do, order will prevail. In general, even if you do decide to change your place of residence, your address will be yours forever. At the close of the lecture, as you leave the room, a guide of ours will escort you to the circle and assist the bewildered in finding their new quarters.

5)
    Transportation. In our world there is but one kind of mechanized vehicle: the multi-wheel—a five-hundred seat bus that will take you from the central station in your city to the destination of your choice. In order for our paved roads not to be overburdened, all other vehicles have been banned. To the drivers, chauffeurs, mechanics, grease monkeys, off-road enthusiasts, and Formula One fanatics—our apologies.

6)
    Entertainment and Recreation. At your disposal is an awesome array of entertainment options, including plays, movies, concerts, operas, galleries, libraries, indoor courts, outdoor courts, grassy fields, playgrounds, restaurants, cafés, pubs, and nature reserves. We direct your attention to the video rental shops across town, where you can find, along with the usual selection of movies and TV shows, a series of special tapes chronicling your former life. If you want to watch them, you must use your personal identification code—in other words, your thumbprint. Upon arrival at the window of the Vie-deo, you’ll be asked to push the request button. Present your thumb. Within ten seconds you’ll receive your selected video. Each year of your life is documented on a different tape. If, for instance, you’d like to watch your twentieth year, then push the button marked twenty on the console’s calendar. There’s no need to return the tape of life to the shop. Since we support each person’s right to privacy, the Vie-deo will bar all attempts at identity theft. Our apologies to the peeping toms and those who lived dull lives. Moreover—and this next comment is directed at the fingerless or the thumb-less—your artificial thumb is equipped with a unique print that will be considered your identification print, and yours alone.

7)
    The godget. You wear the godget around your neck. It is the size of a calculator and it resembles a remote control. The godget has six buttons for your convenience. Each button has a function that allows you to determine the conditions of your renewed existence:

BUTTON 1
—Day and Night, determines your favorite part of the day. One click—dawn. Two clicks—morning. Three clicks—afternoon. Four clicks—dusk. Five clicks—evening. Six clicks—night.

BUTTON 2
—Weather, setting your preferred climate. One click—zero degrees Celsius, snowy. Two—ten degrees, cold but not rainy. Three—ten degrees, cold and rainy. Four—fifteen degrees, chilly with a stiff wind. Five—fifteen degrees, chilly, no wind. Six—fifteen degrees, drizzling. Seven—twenty degrees, warm with a gentle easterly. Eight—twenty-five degrees, warm and dry. Nine—twenty-five degrees, warm and humid. Ten—thirty degrees, desert-dry. Eleven—thirty degrees, a wet sauna. Twelve—other.

BUTTON 3
—Sleep, determines your preferred mode of sleep. One click—eight hours of dream-free sleep. Two clicks—eight hours of sleep plus dreams. Three—catnap. Four—two hours of light sleep. Five—twelve hours of stone-cold dream-free sleep. Six—twelve hours of sleep with dreams. Seven—eternal sleep.

BUTTON 4
—Daily updates from the previous world on matters of: One click—news. Two clicks—art. Three—sports. Four—science. Five—other.

BUTTON 5
—Daily updates from the current world on matters of: One click—news. Two clicks—art. Three—sports. Four—science. Five—other.

BUTTON 6
—The telefinger, similar to the telephone you all know, is operated by fingerprint. It is endowed with an enormous amount of memory and can collect up to one hundred thousand potential fingerprints. If you’d like to call a certain individual, all you need is for that person to leave his or her fingerprint in your device and it will remain in your contacts page forever.

It’s important to recall that each godget responds only to its owner.

8)
    Last comment. In two minutes you will hear the public address system. Its job is to inform the citizens of this world that new citizens of the old world have arrived. The Announcer calls the names of the newly arrived so that veterans of this world can meet their loved ones, if any such exist. We request that you stay in the room for two additional hours in order to allow the old timers ample opportunity to make it here and welcome you. We truly hope that our comments have been helpful and illuminating. We wish you a happy and satisfying death. Welcome to the Other World.

*   *   *

When the screen darkened and the naked girl faded from view, the room filled with light, forcing all present to rub their eyes and blink repeatedly. 9,568 naked people lay on the floor, stunned into deathly silence. Ben was the first to come to his senses. Like everyone else, he was surprised, electric with anticipation, but unlike the other 9,567 freshly dead, he was not in shock. He smiled, content. He knew it. Well, part of it. Even in his wildest dreams he hadn’t imagined any of the shades of details that had been laid out by the gorgeous woman in the introductory talk, but what he had known—that death was not the end—sufficed. Pulling the trigger was like an express ticket to the other side of life. To Marian. All he had to do now was wait for the doors to open.

A metallic voice came over the loudspeaker and began intoning the names of those present in alphabetical order, its diction sharp and precise. It was funny, Ben thought, to look at the thousands of naked bodies, speechless amazement stamped on their faces. Funnier still were their bewildered awakenings and the way the PA system triggered a laughable herd mentality. As their names came over the loudspeaker each person in turn nodded and said “yes” in an array of languages, as though the Announcer had come to take attendance in school, summer camp, or a military barracks. Shock was still apparent. As far back as any of them could remember, they had been taught to expect to reach one of two places or none at all. Anything but this strange place. The more Ben tried to bottle it up, the more the laughter tickled his insides and climbed toward his vibrating Adam’s apple, until, at last, their goggle-eyed expressions made it spring forth. Ben rolled on the floor, reveling in the disappointment of the heathens and the greater astonishment of their sworn foes, and, had a fifty-year-old woman not shattered the silence, shrieking that, “you can see my everything,” he would have continued laughing for a while. Luckily for her, her best friend was partner to their final journey. She soothed her, hugged her close, and pointed all around, intoning, in extreme momminess, “It’s okay, everyone can see everyone else’s everything.…”

Ben examined his body. A warm wave washed over him as he considered the thought that in less than an hour he would see Marian, and probably the rest of his family. When he heard the Announcer call his name, his heart shifted gears, keenly aware that she waited on the other side of the doors.

As the last of the names was called, Ben was first to his feet, his eyes boring into the white double doors as if the intensity of his stare alone could pry them open, his hands rubbing one another in mounting joy, his body alive with surging enthusiasm. Another minute passed before everyone realized the magnitude of the moment, calling at the doors excitedly, huddling and pushing as though only some of them would be allowed to leave. Ben turned his head and was about to hammer the guy next to him, who was relentlessly jostling for position, when the doors opened with a soft wheeze. Turning back around, his eyes widened, his smile shriveled, and the tremor that had been coursing through his body went limp.

3

A Spot of Bother

Ann hated the world. Not with a burning jealousy, not with raging passion, and certainly not with much interest. No, her hatred was moderate, calm, and accepting. From a young age, she had understood that she could see people but they did not see her. The world blatantly ignored her. Waitresses forgot to wait on her in restaurants, receptionists continued to talk on the phone in her presence, and everyone cut her in line at the movies, post office, and supermarket. At ten, she came to terms with society’s attitude toward her presence, accepting her inferiority as a congenital aspect of her personality. The understanding that her most striking characteristic had developed in her mother’s womb helped explain the relief that coursed through her as she examined her dwarfish reflection in the bathroom mirror and whispered, with equanimity, “inferior.”

The diminutive, mouse-faced woman blamed no one for her condition. She had always believed that she was unnecessary to the world, conducting a clandestine affair of what she believed to be mutual animosity. “Why argue with the truth?” she thought, remembering the dark days of her youth in a rundown orphanage. At eight, the kindhearted orphanage director turned to her with a yellowing picture of a couple on their wedding night and asked if she recognized the young bride and groom.

“The two ugliest people in the world,” the girl scowled and spat. The director, appalled, informed her that those were her parents and that they had been killed in a car accident a year after she was born, not long after they moved from England to Israel, but Ann, smiling, said it was too bad they weren’t killed much earlier, and then she ripped the picture to shreds.

The director took the melancholy child under her wing, privately meeting with her in her office every day for three months, befriending her and soothing the embittered girl’s self-hatred with positive reinforcement. Yet just when it seemed that the child had finally begun to like herself, the director made an awful mistake. She left her office door open while speaking to a close friend on the phone. “I have no idea why she bothers to go on living,” Ann overheard her say, “her existence is flat-out pointless.” The troubled girl had no way of knowing that the director was referring to Anita, a battered woman who had, for the twentieth time, returned to the now-loving arms of her husband. Certain she had been referring to her, Ann avoided the soul-lighting smiles of the director and other staff members, convinced that her parents had taken their own lives because they were unable to stomach their revolting daughter. The accident story, she was sure, had been concocted by the pitying hypocrite who spared her feelings and insisted on protecting her from the cruel truth.

Ann excelled in school, she reckoned, because life had taken no interest in her, and while her classmates dedicated their lives to wooing the boy with all the right bulges, she sat on her bed, shut her eyes, and tried to disappear. She never took this tactic to its extreme end, fearing that her body would go undiscovered and be left to rot in the fields where the scavenging birds would find her, pick out her eyes, and feast on her innards.

Ann was certain she belonged to a rare strain of human, the kind that was supposed to be born invisible but, due to a biological fluke, had emerged barely noticeable, stuck between two phases of existence, making their lives far more complicated than that of their peers. It goes without saying that she was the last girl in her class to require a tampon, further proof that nature, in its own way, ignored her. When at fifteen she felt the first drops of blood trickle between her legs, she looked down, then up, stuck her tongue out, and groaned, “I don’t need any favors from you.”

Late puberty did not rattle her apathy toward boys. In her mind, the opposite sex was childish, brute, swaggering, competitive, garish, selfish, stupid, hairy, and repugnant. In the same vein, she saw her own gender as talkative, annoying, gossipy, compulsive, self-absorbed, and shallow.

The college scholarships, which came in droves, only served as kindling for her raging self-hatred. She reasoned that they were part of the education system’s overarching conspiracy to convince her that she was not worthless. Her loathing for the world played a crucial role in her choice of career. On the threshold of adulthood, she vowed to spend her life avenging the glaring injustices done to her: She would dedicate herself to healing the sick, forcing them to continue to suffer the bland burden of existence. Hating people, she sought with all her might to prolong their lives. All those who, in their blindness, stamped her inferiority with their approval could live forever as far as she was concerned. She privately congratulated herself on devising such an insidious scheme, which no one in the world could recognize.

Upon completion of her studies, summa cum laude, she joined the nursing staff of a private hospital in Tel Aviv and, within a month’s time, even got used to the nickname her jealous coworkers gave her. “Anntipathy” felt great elation when the nurses watched in awe as she, a glum loner, cared lovingly for her patients. They failed to piece together the two jagged edges of her personality. The more she exhibited her intolerance for her coworkers, the more her shining attentiveness to her patients’ needs skyrocketed. Although she never exchanged so much as a “good morning” with her colleagues, she chatted incessantly with her patients, smiling and doting on them. The staff, failing to break through her chilly wall of estrangement, decided that her unblemished professionalism was yet further proof that she lacked any type of life beyond the hospital walls. Still, they struggled to make sense of this strange woman in their midst. She was the first to volunteer to cover for a coworker and, over eight long years, she had never once taken a day off. She had been sick on eight different occasions, but she had still come in, scooting between the beds as her body burned with fever.