Naphtali ben Shalom
Copyright (c) 1983 N. Borenstein. All Rights Reserved.
Resurrection Day! The mere mention of the ever-dreamed-of event brings a vague mist to the eye, a perceptible swelling to the chest, a vision of a glorious past surpassed only by the reality of the endless present. Resurrection Day! To be whole and living, more than living again! For most of us, no memory could be more glorious.
Resurrection Day! Would that my own memories were so fond! For me, the day was a day, not spectacularly bad, but bewildering to say the least. For, unlike you, Dear Reader, I awoke not to the trumpets of angels and the vision of Jesus, nor to the land of renewable virgins for the faithful, nor to the torments of Purgatory, nor even to the silent eternity of the white light. Awakening from a poor night's sleep to a disturbingly altered sickbed, I found a tangle of electrodes implanted in every cranny of my suddenly youthful, remarkably perfect body.
Science fiction, you say? No, I had never read the stuff in my lifetime, so this was no heaven for me. This was a mistake so ghastly that none of you have had to suffer it. I was the first. I was lucky.
I was the anonymous man in the famous photographs of T'ang at the press conference. I was the first world-shaking proof of his genius. The first human revived at a distance of more than five light-seconds. Considerably more.
One hundred fifty-two light years, to be precise. Not a lot, it's true, by modern standards -- at this writing, the first Neanderthals are just arriving in their caveman heaven -- but enough to shock me more than a bit, unaware as I was of even the briefest passage of time.
The result was precisely what you would imagine, and precisely what no one who hadn't been Resurrected could ever have imagined.
But yet, you're thinking, my integral personality suvived somehow, at least enough to write this narrative. True enough, something survived. In fact, my memories are as lucid as yours, beginning five years after my Resurrection, or about twenty years before the second Resurrection, that "first" one by which the modern calendar is reckoned. That is, I remember clearly everything since 20 B.F.R. as well as you remember events from your own past. The previous five years are a patchwork of nightmares. The entire lifetime B.M.O.V.P.R. (Before My Own Very Personal Resurrection) is now a total blank, except for that one maddening vision of the night I went to sleep and never came back. I've lost it all. Can you imagine not having lived before your Resurrection? I can imagine little else.
I know from the record that I died on July 27, 1985. The first space shuttle, they say, had flown a few years. I recall nothing, not even of that. I recall little before the day when a needle in my arm took away the nightmares and the past in their graceless harmony, and led me into the new life of a temporal transplant.
From then on, my problems were principally economic and social. What does a twentieth century personality do in a twenty-second century culture? Obviously he reads a lot, vids a lot, and generally tries to catch up. And, given an eternity, he succeeds. About by the time they brought back Buddha, I was finally a man of my own time. I write now, however, not for my new-found temporal peers nor even for the again-living contemporaries I left behind. Rather I address myself to that putative elite which, in its eclectic cross-cultural reads and vids, has come to wonder at the consciousness of Man, its indescribable temporal gaps, and the apparent total incongruity of one generation with those not nearly adjacent. If you can understand my meaning at all, without translation, you are either my near-temporal peer or my comrade in intellectual time travel. To the latter, I dedicate this account of recovery when the journey has been physical, unexpected, and oh-so-very abrupt. I am as disappointed as you are that I can not present an account of my earliest moments, not to mention my first few years. But in the absence of anyone else to tell you how I felt, I can only offer the story of my memories, however paltry they may be.
Behold, then, what I found and left behind.
While I have no personal memories, which is to say, emotional memories, of the world I left behind, no names, no faces, no hopes or fears, I retained certain things despite the ordeal of my rebirth. My language, as my present authorship bizarrely attests, survived. My culture, in large part, survived. My vision of the world as a physical globe upon which nations and nuns sat and conducted their business survived all too well. When I thought of India, I thought of slums, I really did. There was an enemy, bad guys and good guys, a population crisis, the works. It was, in fact, the real world, as we all in our hearts tend to assume the years A.F.R. have not yet become. Humans, I knew, lived in physical bodies that became useless to the inhabitant upon death. Death, I knew, was either a permanent scientific void or a limitless heaven or hell. Most of all, I knew for certain that when I died, I would either feel nothing, think nothing, be nothing for ever again, or I would see one of the Great Religions Vindicated, a triumph for some believers, and most likely damnation for me.
I did not expect to awaken to Indian slums only slightly more livable for their clean water and universal electrification. I did not expect to find a room full of scientists measuring my every galvanic skin response. I did not expect my body to be as prone to breakdown as the old one. And I most certainly did not expect to learn that I had died, that my body had disintegrated over the decades as my soul sped off beyond Ursa Minor, and that T'ang and his physicist-engineers had brought me off through an incomprehensible wrinkle in the space-time continuum, a gravitational collapse, a black hole.
What I did expect, I conjecture (for I cannot clearly remember) was a morning paper and a bowl of Grape-Nuts. But none of the scientists seemed to know or even care what Grape-Nuts once had been.
Naturally, the chief interest of the people of the world was to find out if it was now safe to revive parents, friends, lovers, and heroes of the past. The question of the day was, was I sane? The answer of the instant was an unequivocal negative. Either reincarnation irreparably destroyed the psyche, or new techniques were needed. After a short pause to realize that the solution was not within their domain of current expertise, the physicists retired to their thinking parlors to see what else was new. And the psychologists, led by Vincent Peeler, our other modern God, moved in. I was first to be rehabilitated, and then put to work.
Of course, I don't remember much of the rehabilitation; it was spectacularly unsuccessful until the talkers yielded to the psychopharmacological therapists. So my consciousness really begins with a needle in my arm and a smile in my heart, a drug-induced knowledge that everything is AOK despite its oddity. And so my consciousness remains, an almost-lucid observer only by virtue of the decreasing but still-essential ration of daily hallucinogen. Who ever would have dreamed that a few micrograms could mean so much?
Or that, meaning so much, they could mean so much to so few? Few, that is, meaning me alone.
The problem facing Peeler's team was, of course, quite formidable. They had to determine the principal psychological causes of my complete mental breakdown, to assess the degree to which they were preventable, and to institute a program for the safe resurrection of humanity's dead.
My own problem, no less formidable, was to figure out how to cope with life in my new world. The drug may have kept me sane, but it did not make me sober. I must have appeared to my new contemporaries as a man on the edge of reality, barely able to understand the simplest communication. To me, they were no better; their very clothing was unreal to me, their speech patterns a parody of the English I knew, even their foods were alien. Most of all, I had no idea how their society worked. It seemed founded upon the most naive and unworkable of political idealism, which they freely admitted was continually being disappointed. But I'll return to their politics in due time.
My earliest commonplace memories place me in a dormitory, or so they called it, at the University of Pittsburgh, in what had once been the American state of Pennsylvania.
The dormitory was one that had been erected in my own era, a carefully preserved antique structure of some 30 (?) stories, dwarfing the rest of the neighborhood without rival. Although it had once been only one such building among many tall structures, the rest had gradually been torn down as population decreased and architectural tastes changed. As the only tall building, my dorm was as cherished as an ancient cathedral, but it was cherished by use; students still lived in it, though the overcrowded conditions for which it was built had yielded to a time when I could be given a floor to myself.
Well, almost to myself. I was never, in those days, left without a professional overseer, interpreter, jailor, or whatever my mood persuaded me to entitle my perpetual babysitter. Several people worked at the job in shifts, talking to me, explaining the culture to me, reassuring me, and, most important of all, observing me, taking notes even at the most annoying moments. To this day they won't admit it, but I'm sure my entire life at the time is yet preserved somewhere on videotape.
I do remember the first day I was lucid enough for them to risk a first pass at their real objective. It was springtime, June 24, 2142, or 19 B.F.R. if you prefer. The babysitter-on-duty was none other than Dr. Peeler himself -- reserving to himself, no doubt, the risky chore of trying anything new with me.