The Afterlife
for Barry Canter
for Barry Canter
by Ethan Canter
There’s a man standing on a hill. He put on and took off all the names life gave him. He did not fight, even if he struggled. He wrapped his life into a hundred thousand little moments, then left them sprinkled around, like dropped coins. A hundred thousand memories—found, opened, recalled, shared, loosely framed and over time slightly faded by revisitings.Memories, and the marks he made on paper, wood and steel—as it were, his parting gifts. As it were, his humble attempts to gouge some permanence into this impermanent thing called life. As it were, the one thing a man yearns and toils to do—to in his life somehow transmute his soul and leave something behind that was not there before. As it were, his last and first stand—to be remembered—to be remembered even, and perhaps even especially when the time comes for him to forget himself.
He smiles and rests his hands in his pockets. The hill seems somehow to be growing, or the ground below is falling away—he’s not sure which, and perhaps it’s a bit of both, and either way the effect remains the same. We grow small and ant-like in his eyes. And from here, where we still are, he fades and blends into the white and blue of a passing sky. He takes a breath—the air is fresh and cool up in the atmosphere. “Next stop: Heaven,” he jokes to himself, and grins. But the joke freezes and falls like icy rain, his brow furrows, and a heavy thought comes into his mind. “What about all the bad things I’ve done?” he thinks. “What about all the pain I caused?” His teeth begin to chatter and he pulls his jacket tight around his chest. His scepticism, once such a cunning tool, for so long such an impenetrable defence against the games men play—his scepticism, like his dog barking the Jehovahs and vacuum salesmen away—his scepticism, up there so high in the atmosphere, up there where there are no front doors, where there are no men, where there are more and more no more rational views—up there in the shivering atmosphere his scepticism shatters like a frozen balloon, and he wonders, “Who will judge all the things I have done? Who will judge all the things I did not do? And who will carry my ghost through the verdict and the sentence?”
Well, we are the courtroom, my friends. We are the jury. We are the gavel. You see, God is not dead—He is the collective effort of us the living. And though our anger can build the torments of Hell, our forgiveness will un-build it all again back into freedom. And someone wants to whisper ‘Heaven,’ and so why not let them? If there are a hundred words for love, why not use them all? If there are a thousand ways to forgive, why not learn them all? And if anyone here knows how to finally and completely dispel with anger, why not pass that trick around? For we are the Power and the Glory. We are the Verdict and the Sentence. We are the Light that guides the way. We are the afterlife. Someone say ‘Amen.’
Up on the hill thunder rolls in the distance. The clouds twist and curl. The wind howls and barks. And a madman does his best old-time jig to the music coming up from the valley below.
But then suddenly, beneath the soft stamping of his feet, the ground cracks—one single and jagged crack, no wider than a hand. He follows it with his eyes as it makes its way down the side of the hill, through the dark grass now wet with rain. And through the mist of a thin cloud, and in the haze of the evening dusk, he sees a house he still remembers. The windows are aglow from the lights inside. The sound of music seeps through the thin mesh of a screen door and comes up at him in waves. A dog barks. Someone shouts and another laughs so loud that he himself can’t escape the contagion of a chuckle.
Someone calls his name and he turns. And like a word or thought on the tip of your tongue he sees the face of someone he knows but just can’t place. “You see,” the familiar stranger says, “I told you—nothing really ends, it just changes.” “When did you tell me that?” he protests, still, as always, sceptical of charming aphorisms. The stranger smiles and holds out an inviting hand.
Only that which begins can end—a poem, a song, a dream. But we do not begin—we are born. Only that which is made can end—but we are not made, we are born. No, we do not end, we just change. Like the rain we saturate the lives of others, and become, for them, and in them, that which we ourselves were not before. Like the wind we are always around but somehow never there, like the sound of a voice when no-one else is in the room, like a shadow seen out of the corner of your eye, like the warmth of a hand held in your own somehow, and somehow so unreasonably, lingering forever. We do not end—we only go on and on and on, travelling the everythingness of one another, whispering words of love like beacons in this dark endlessness—cradling, for a time, a lover, a child, a life.
It’s unclear how, or even by whom the front door was opened. But nonetheless it was opened. And in that brief moment the dog got out, and with no sense of hurry headed up the hill as though it knew the way. The rain had passed but a light drizzle still hung in the air. The crack in the earth had now turned into a shallow stream, and as the dog crossed it it stopped to take a drink. At the top of the hill it sniffed around at where the grass had been trodden, left it’s mark the only way it knew how, sat itself down, stared into the distant horizon, tilted its head ever so slightly to the left, and then thought those things that only a dog can think.
