Ryan Boudinot - Blueprints of the Afterlife

I asked, “What is my purpose in this?”

“Your purpose is to know these things to be true.”

I looked down to find myself drenched in blood. From a crater in my torso came an explosion of tubes, clamps, gauze. Surgeons’ hands worked furiously to resolve something inside my body. I caught the eyes of one of them and heard him say, “Shit, he’s conscious. He’s conscious!” I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. Someone did something to the intravenous. A biochemical semitruck plowed into my bloodstream and I was out again.

I remember the TV bolted to the wall. The view out the window, to distant hills stubbly with cacti. Blood coming out of my catheter. The black guy in the next bed staring straight ahead, saying nothing.

The cops showed up, wanting to know how I’d gotten shot. I told them I didn’t know. After they ran a background check and determined I had no criminal record or outstanding warrants, they lost interest in me. I watched game shows, sedated. The Price Is Right, that faithful companion to the elderly. The sun rose and fell. I sat in my wheelchair in the little park behind the hospital. I tried to speak as little as absolutely necessary. I didn’t want to talk to doctors or nurses or police officers or social service idiots about how this had happened or how I was feeling. I didn’t want to call anybody, not even Wyatt and Erika. I became an outline where a man had been, like one of those molds they made of people buried in the ruins of Pompeii. I can’t tell you what I even thought about. I went about the stupid business of healing.

How long were you in the hospital?

A month and a half? Two? Maybe three? I didn’t really keep track. My health insurance was apparently taking care of everything and I had money in the bank if I needed to dip into it. I walked with a lot of pain, taking little more than fifteen or twenty steps before I had to sit down again. I lost twenty pounds and grew a beard. I read People magazine cover to cover. No one came to visit me. I was always polite with everyone and tried to make myself as invisible as possible. Then one afternoon I was watching TV and something caught my eye. It was a shot of the Las Vegas Strip, abandoned, flooded with sand. The casinos were all decrepit, falling apart. A digital billboard flickered with an image of a woman in a bikini. It was an aerial shot, swooping down through the desolation. It took me a while to understand this wasn’t news footage. It was the trailer for some new action movie. And I thought, Las Vegas . Of course.

I was beginning to understand that the end of the world wasn’t something that came about all at once. There was no one climactic event that definitively destroyed life as we knew it. Rather, it happened incrementally, so slowly it was difficult to notice, the frog in the boiling water. A few of us saw it coming but were dismissed as insane, or we blew our cred by drawing lines in the sand and declaring that the world would end on a particular date. You know the cartoons with the sandal-wearing, bearded freak on a street corner holding a sign reading “The end is near.” The end was a slow but accumulating tabulation of lost things. We lost species of animals, polar ice, a building here and there, whole cities. There was a time when we lived on streets where we knew our neighbors’ names but now we were all strangers isolated in our condos late at night, speaking across distances to our lonely, electronic communities. Children used to play in forests. We used to gather around a piano and join our voices together. I tried to determine whether these sad thoughts were just the result of growing old. Probably, but that didn’t make them any less real. Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn’t help but project my grief onto the world at large. It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend. Now my grief intended to encompass the planet.

Whatever had happened to me after the shooting—first Bickle, then the visitation by the blue woman—had so altered my priorities that I found it impossible to imagine returning to a so-called “normal” life in which I’d have a job, a place to live, friendships. I didn’t have any claim to these things anymore. The whole human enterprise—buildings, roads, laws, media, sports, religion, culture, you name it—struck me as a vast, collective dementia. The only pursuit that made any sense to me was the development and spread of new life through the universe. Ridiculously, of all people, I’d been selected to help bring that about.

Soon I was able to walk a loop around the halls. I managed to pee without a catheter. They took out the IV and I could eat more or less normal food. I thought again about calling Wyatt and Erika but the longer I put off calling them, the more I thought they’d be angry or something. It really makes no sense but I equated letting them know where I was with getting in trouble. All my belongings were at the house I owned but I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to retrieve. The gunshot wound had drawn a line through my life, separating the person I thought I was in San Francisco with this new person, alone in Arizona. Eventually I was released and on my way out the doctor asked me where I was going. I said I didn’t know. They pushed me to the parking lot in a wheelchair. I stood up, started walking down the street, and stopped at the first car dealership I found. Happened to be a Volkswagen dealer. I walked in and bought a new Passat, then drove to Las Vegas, where the apocalypse was well under way.

Luke, you are so completely full of it.

[…]

Apocalyptic visions in the desert? Near-death experiences where you commune with aliens? Really? You really expect me to take this seriously?

[…]

What do you think is beyond that door? This isn’t a rhetorical question. What’s beyond that door?

I—I don’t know.

Well, there’s a hallway, some offices, a break room with vending machines for soft drinks and snacks, a parking garage where I park my Volvo every morning. Beyond that there’s a city, with streets lined with stores like Applebee’s, Whole Foods, and Best Buy. There are dry cleaners and gas stations and churches and schools. There are freeways leading to suburbs where there are homes where people live. And in those homes are kitchens where food is prepared, bedrooms where people sleep and dream, garages where they put their cars. People typically get up and go to work five days a week then spend a couple days doing whatever they want. People take vacations, make money, meet partners, have children, get old, get admitted to hospitals, then die. Every year there are a couple new and exciting electronic gadgets that people get excited about. People pay attention to sports scores and who celebrities are sleeping with. They try to get promotions to get more money to spend on stuff for themselves. Some of them go to community gatherings, some get obese, a very few commit criminal acts and get incarcerated. There are addicts, social workers, software developers, bus drivers, attorneys, and teachers. Everyone getting up in the morning, taking showers, listening to the radio on the way to work, catching a movie on the weekend or doing some gardening. That’s the world out there, Luke. Not some fucked-up postapocalyptic nightmare. So things got a little hotter there for a while thanks to fossil fuels. We’ve had wars, some instances of genocide. A terrorist attack on occasion. But overall we see problems, we fix them, and we move on.

You’re a nihilist. You’ve given up on the human race. You assume all will end in a rain of fire and boiling oceans but have the temerity to suggest that somehow a few “good” people will be able to stick it out long enough to propagate life through the universe. You want it both ways.