THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 57
what, precisely, had the woman in the
sari assumed about him? R. was dis-
tracted from his quibbles by a sudden
awareness, as if a suppressed frequency
in his range of hearing had been nudged
open by her suggestion: so many of the
surrounding voices were speaking lan-
guages other than English. He’d been
filtering. R. felt shame at his own as-
sumptions, the limits in his own terms
of inquiry.
Ahead, in the great stream of bod-
ies, R. now spotted a kind of island, an
area left vacant. He inferred it, as one
moving through a landscape might infer
the presence of a distant lake or beach
from a break in the tree line. What
formed this airspace? Why should there
be some zone that others here avoided?
R. felt compelled toward it. He longed
for the elbow room. It really had grown
impossible to move without making
contact with those edging him on every
side, despite how all were invested in
the imperative of constant motion.
R. moved for the open space.
5.
The trench was long and wide, the sides
banked and smooth. It sloped to water,
perhaps to a depth of four feet at the
bottom, no more. A handful of people
had chosen—or at least R. preferred to
think they’d chosen—to slide down.
They now cavorted and splashed there,
though it was hardly wide enough at the
bottom to qualify as a swimming pool.
There was no guardrail. R. teetered
briefly at the edge, trying to see. Were
those at the bottom truly happy, or were
they frantic?
“Can they get out again?” R. asked
the person beside him just then, who
was too near to distinguish exactly.
“We’d have to help them.” The speak-
er’s tone was not uncompassionate.
“How?”
“Form some kind of human ladder,”
the person mused, then squeezed off
under a hedge of bodies, duckwalking
to make an escape. The suggestion was
adept, R. saw, though this level of or-
ganization seemed unlikely.
The waders had the pool to them-
selves, at least, for now. R., untempted,
pushed away.
R. rode into the swirl, which had be-
come almost like a human gear system.
He found himself jostled upward, taken
off his feet for an instant. His view of
the plain of milling heads was instruc-
tive: the watery trenches were inter-
spersed regularly throughout the vast
concourse. The density of bodies made
the gaps unmistakable. Had the floor
slid open, at some point, to reveal the
pools? Or was it that they’d become
noticeable only now?
R. was pushed up against a structure
that protruded quite unexpectedly into
his path. Nothing so large as the trenches,
it had been hidden in bodies until the
last second. A kind of bench or table, it
stood at elbow height. No—a minibar,
a thing he’d heard mentioned earlier.
Several bodies clung to it, like a raft.
Here, finally, a thing one might au-
dition as a source for sculpture. Some
portion of this bar or pedestal might
give formal joy—to R., at least—if he
envisioned it isolated from the whole
configuration and sealed over with his
distinctive green-gray oatmeal polymer.
Yet how could he get far enough back
to see it in its entirety? Hopeless. Any-
how, now that he bent to examine its
join to the floor, the object was flagrantly,
remorselessly uninteresting.
He should quit thinking this way.6.
New people had been continuously ar-
riving, that was the only possible expla-
nation. And R. felt he could judge thisfact from their posture, from their mur-
mured inquiries, the frisson of excite-
ment in their tone even as they could
locate barely an inch of floor to claim
for themselves. You’ll get over it, R.
wanted to tell them, but didn’t. He sup-
posed he’d become a kind of veteran of
this place, in what felt like little more
than an hour. (Time was a ridiculous
concept.) Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!
he almost joked, but it was hardly funny.
He felt both sorry for them and irri-tated that they could have no idea how
easy it had once been to circulate.
At this thought, R. faintly recalled
someone, long ago, trying to explain
this place to him, the system that pre-
vailed. Of course, he’d paid no atten-
tion. You don’t care about that kind of
stuff until you’re forced to, mostly. And
why should he have cared to listen then?
It wouldn’t have done any good. No, be
where you are. Be there when you get
there. And now he was.7.
So it came at last, the undistinguished
thing. R. was certain he’d been warned.
The teeming reached its limit, and R.
found himself toppled with a mass of
others down a smooth bank, into one
of the trenches. The only space that re-
mained. R. had had no idea how near
to one he’d been, the instant before. It
had become impossible to see beyond
the heads and shoulders massing so
tightly, there was no one to blame but—
R. managed to arrest this thought. No
one to blame. It was so obvious. None
raised any real protest, despite their
bodies struggling pointlessly, a residue
of instinct. No, the roar of voices seemed
mainly to emanate from above, from
those just discovering their nearness to
the trench, just losing their foothold at
the rim. Down here, among the fallen,
it was strangely quiet.
The bodies close—he’d grown ac-
customed to that. R. found it almost
consoling. When the water reached him,
though, he felt puzzled by the physics:
could the weight and the mass have
displaced the shallow pool upward
through the crevices? Or had more water
been piped in now?
Maybe so. Then again, maybe not
important to understand.8.
R. woke again on the bus. He gathered
himself just as they pulled up again,
outside the place, the situation he’d so
easily recognized, even the first time—
curbside entrance, sliding doors, etc.—
and allowed himself to be swept, with
his cohort, into the afterlife. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Jonathan Lethem reads “The Afterlife.”