by Dara Horn
But what Daniel loved best about school were the field trips. One night he and his fellow not-yets were flown, in a long chain riding high across the sky, up to the storehouses of snow. They arrived at the coldest corner of the night sky, a black void in the universe where nothing could even be imagined; even his fellow not-yets seemed to vanish into deep barrels of frigid darkness. But then their teacher—this time, a humble, contented already-was named Job—knocked at the edge of the universe, and a giant door creaked open. Behind it was a cavernous room, radiant with an almost blinding light that refracted through millions of icicles that hung from its ceiling and grew from its floor like the stalactites of the earth, forming bars of ice cages that held in enormous heaps of snow, marked for future winters. The silence in that room of snow, the white peace that would fall to the earth overnight in the future when people would wake up and find their world changed, lingered in Daniel’s ears until the day he was born. On another trip, their teacher showed them the gates of the seas—towering portals made of thick bars of moonlight and wind, invisible to the mortal eye, perched on the seashores of the world below and swinging closed just as the tides swelled too high, declaring to the oceans, “This far, and no farther!” Daniel’s class went on voyages down to the depths of the abyss, and to the highest heights of heaven, and into the recesses of the heart. Every moment delighted Daniel, thrilled him. When Daniel and his classmates had six months to go, their teacher even took them on a tour of the gardens of paradise. They ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil—sweet fruits that made Daniel hungry, and left a sour aftertaste in his mouth. But there was one place that their teacher would only tell them about, and refused to show them.
“Until you are born, all of paradise is yours, so enjoy it,” their teacher said. “The only thing in paradise forbidden to you is the tree of life.”
Daniel and his classmates looked at each other in awe. “Where’s that?” one of the not-yets asked.
The teacher pressed his lips together, then sighed. “On the farthest eastern side of nowhere,” he said, “where no one can ever reach it. It’s guarded by angels with four faces and six wings each, and the path to the tree is blocked by the bright blade of a revolving sword.”
A revolving sword?
“But everywhere else, you can go,” the teacher said.
And then the teacher began showing the class all of the cures for lung cancer. Unfortunately, that was when Daniel stopped paying attention.
THE IDEA THAT something lay beyond the limits of his paradise bothered Daniel, haunted him. He was an obedient not-yet, though, and never dreamed of trying to go there himself. Instead he busied himself in other parts of paradise. He still went to school every day, but the secrets of the universe he learned there no longer impressed him. As Daniel’s uncle Benjamin once told Daniel’s father (in one of the many letters Daniel’s father never read), actually school was very easy for him, and mostly he learned things outside of school. Like at the public baths.
The public baths of paradise, like those in the world below, have many chambers, some with water, some with steam, at many temperatures. But while the baths below are purportedly good for the skin, intended to rejuvenate the body, the baths above are good for the character, a soak in liquid emotions intended to age the soul. At the paradise bath that Daniel visited daily, he always headed straight for the warm pool of love, a crowded tank in which the not-yets wallowed in mobs, body to body along the benches lining its sides and splashing each other in the center. On long white nights in the world to come, Daniel would sink down on his knees in the warm waters, tipping his head back until love filled his ears and buoyed up his wings. He would close his eyes and slip down beneath the still waters, hoping that no one would notice if he remained there forever, submerged in the blind, warm depths. But the already-weres who ran the place weren’t supposed to allow them to stay there long. It wasn’t healthy, the signs on the walls read. Those at risk of heart disease, or those who had a family history of broken hearts, were especially warned not to linger. But most did anyway, wrenching themselves out only when they absolutely had to, shivering off to school with their wings shriveled and shrunken.
Daniel had barely just arrived one night, sinking himself into the sweet warm pool, when the bath attendant assigned to watch him, a bald, thin man named Boris, sneaked up behind him and hauled him out by his wings.
“What are you doing?” Daniel sputtered as Boris raised him into the frigid air. Daniel had only discovered the bath a few weeks before, and he was livid.
“You can’t just sit in that pool all night. You need to get used to the other temperatures,” the bald man told him, his voice gruff. “You don’t want to be surprised after you’re born. If you never feel it here, there’s no way you’ll survive it there.”
“But what about everybody else?” Daniel protested, waving his arm at the other not-yets splashing and laughing in the water. “Nobody’s making them leave!” Drops of warm water still lingered in his ears.
Boris looked around at the other bath attendants, most of whom were lounging on the sides of the pool of love, dawdling, dangling their toes in with their charges. “That’s because their attendants are idiots,” he whispered. “Come with me, and I’ll show you how to really take a bath.” Then he took Daniel under his wing and whisked him off to a deserted room on the far end of the bathhouse. Before Daniel knew what was happening, Boris had plunged him, feet first, into a tub of ice-filled hate.
Daniel screamed. Boris refused to let him out, holding his shoulders down under the ice. The pain was terrifying. Daniel screamed himself hoarse, but Boris just watched him scream, his face immobile at the edge of the bath. Slowly Daniel’s limbs began to go numb, and with the numbness, his screams subsided. He could no longer move, but he could also no longer feel. He sank deeper into the ice, frozen and silent.
“That’s enough,” Boris said, and wrenched him out of the water. Still numb, Daniel rode on Boris’s shoulders like a block of ice, more silent and cold than the storehouses of snow, until Boris opened another door, this time to a small, deep tank. He closed the door and gently lowered Daniel into a cold still pool of grief.
Daniel remained frozen, but he was no longer numb. This time he could feel the cold water seeping into his prebirth nose and ears and mouth, chilling his limbs. He tried to float, but he sank like a waterlogged book to the bottom, submerged in the cold. The ice had scalded him until he couldn’t feel, but here there was no shield against the deep chill that seeped into him, tugging on his spine. He struggled in the water, but the more he moved, the more the cold soaked his bones. Boris watched him writhing beneath the surface and held his breath. At last he could no longer stand to watch, and pulled Daniel out. “A lot of people like to jump into the hot tub as soon as possible after the cold, but it’s not a good idea,” he advised Daniel. Daniel barely heard him. His blue face was streaked with tears. “Let’s get you to one of the steam rooms instead.”
Daniel wept on Boris’s shoulder as Boris carried him into another room, this one thick with a gently heated mist. How wonderful it was! The steam of friendship—warm, mostly, but with a slightly cool edge—gathered on his limbs until they thawed. Slowly, movement returned, and he breathed in deeply, inhaling the refreshing moisture until his body tingled with life. He tipped his head back and felt the cozy mist tickle the insides of his ears until he started laughing. He was still laughing when Boris lifted him up again and carried him to another room, this one with a narrow pool divided in half, partitioned between desire and lust.
When he slipped into the half nearest to the door, Daniel found the water so hot that he almost climbed out, afraid of being scalded. But the more parts of his body he slipped into it, the less he wanted to leave. Bit by bit, his body took the drug and lulled itself into the burning pool. He enjoyed the tug of the heavy heat, allowing it to pull his head below the surface, allowing his eyes and mouth to ease open—and then, underwater, he screamed. Salt! He felt
the salt blind him, searing his eyes and gagging his tongue. If I keep my eyes and mouth closed, it will be fine, he thought. He squinted his eyes and pursed his lips, but the damage had been done. His head burned, reeled. This time he climbed out and jumped into the next pool without Boris’s help—a churning hot tub where he rinsed his eyes and mouth, swallowing the tumbling whirlpool of boiling water until his head went weak in the heat. It was only after that, when Daniel had stayed in the hot tub so long that he nearly burst his own tiny heart, that Boris took him out and brought him back to the main room, where he gently floated him on his back into the pool of love.
“Much better, isn’t it?” Boris asked.
But Daniel could no longer speak. The water that had simply been warm before now overwhelmed him with ecstasy, caressing him from every side, buoying him to the surface, embracing him around the neck. When Boris lifted him out, much later, he didn’t even protest. This time the warmth had entered him forever, saturating his bones and his heart.
“Now you understand why you needed that,” Boris told him as he wrapped him in towels far from the water’s edge. Daniel felt Boris’s strong arms around his shoulders and marveled that he didn’t miss the water. It was as if he were still in the pool, on dry land.
“Yes,” Daniel murmured, still in a daze. He looked back at the pool and saw all of the other not-yets swimming in it, splashing in it, chasing each other in it, playing games in it. Taking it for granted.
“Because once you’re born, you might feel all of those things,” Boris was saying. “In any order. And you can’t control it.” Daniel looked up, but Boris had turned away from him, his eyes staring at the ground. He held him tighter. “Maybe it will never happen,” Boris said, and blinked. “I hope it never will. But if it does, I want you to be prepared.”
SOME OF THE not-yets love to sleep. The beds and hammocks in paradise are made out of music, chained melodies and woven symphonies and firm fanfare mattresses and ropy-netted ballads and strong percussive massages. The not-yets swing and rock to sleep to all kinds of rhythms, resonating with sounds that they will listen for again someday in the world below. But some, like Daniel, are more restless. And they are the ones who love to eat.
The museums of paradise are restaurants filled with masterworks of art, served daily à la carte to the not-yets until they have eaten and seen it all. There are many museums to choose from, and the menus are diverse, stocked with every possible medium and style, from origami to watercolors to tapestries to monuments, from the most realistic to the most abstract. The curator-waiters, know-it-all mortals that they are, encourage the not-yets to eat nutritiously. But most of the not-yets are picky eaters. It’s hard for them to eat something besides the clichéd pictures, the sweet comfort food that tastes exactly the way they have learned to expect. The already-weres tell them to try some surrealism for a change, taste just a tiny piece of a distorted cartoon, just a few bites of abstract art. They try to warn the not-yets, when they see them ordering too many unoriginal landscapes and still lifes and portraits and nudes, that they are going to need to be prepared to see things differently after they’re born, that there is more than one way of seeing. Without nourishing preparation, the already-weres inform them, they will be born without any taste for new experiences; their eyes will never be starved for fresh perspectives in waking life, never hungering for visions of what might be.
So the waiters and chefs fill the daily menu with farm-fresh images and aged meaty works, sweet-and-sour sculptures and subtly seasoned visions of things in the world below. Sometimes they succeed, and the braver not-yets develop a hunger for beauty. At the end of the meal, though, it remains a matter of taste. Some love the salty, salacious paintings best; others prefer the spicy portraits of the winking woman or the ethereal landscape or the man seen from behind. A rare few appreciate the bitter, ghastly images in all media, finding in them something closer to bittersweet. A few not-yets are ascetics who simply don’t enjoy eating—weak anorexics of experience who refuse to taste even the sweetest of sights. The waiters are forced to serve them kindergarten drawings, stick figures and happy faces, just to keep them from starving to birth. They are born with their eyes closed, and until they die, they see less than the blind. But even though the already-weres try to promote healthy eating habits, decadent photographs are still always served for dessert. Like the realistic paintings, they are sweet. Rumor among the waiters has it that they are the more accurate depictions of what the not-yets might see after they are born, and most not-yets crave them, gorging themselves on pictures of their future parents and brothers and sisters. But some of these pictures prove hard to swallow. It is a sad not-yet who orders a sweet snapshot of some mortal parent or sibling, only to discover a bitter aftertaste lingering on his tongue. Even worse, though infinitely more common, is the not-yet who eats a picture of a future mortal lover, gobbling it greedily and licking the frame, and then finds himself suffering all night long, vomiting as he clutches his gut. Desserts are the most likely part of the meal to cause stomachaches, though most not-yets still wolf them down. They haven’t yet learned how to be afraid.
For Daniel, the world to come was an endless feast. He was always hungry, and he devoured pictures of people and landscapes almost indiscriminately, ordering whatever the not-yet at the next table was having. His palate expanded to every color, and he never saw a picture he wouldn’t eat. Unlike the other not-yets, who relished the desserts, Daniel delighted in every part of the meal, from nutritious oils to high-fiber wooden statues to crunchy candy comics. The curator who served his meals in his favorite museum—a grinning already-was, also named Daniel—at first took little interest in him. Most curators were too busy coaxing the dieters to eat another stick figure. But once the natal Daniel had eaten there a few times, the mortal Daniel began to linger at his table, trying to broaden his palate and cultivate his tastes.
“Two panels of water lilies,” Daniel ordered one day at lunch, “and two of those woodblock prints with Mount Fuji in the distance.”
“There are fifty variations on that,” the already-was Daniel advised, consulting the menu of the day. He frowned, then leaned forward, rested a hand on Daniel’s table, and whispered in his ear. “I’m afraid they’re all a little stale,” he confided. “May I recommend something fresher?”
“Like what?” Daniel asked.
“Let me show you,” the curator said. He rushed back to the studio kitchen, returning with a small watercolor. It was of a woman flying horizontally in the sky, suspended over a little town. Daniel looked, and began to salivate.
“Who’s the artist?” Daniel asked.
“Oh, I’m sure you’ve never heard of her.”
But Daniel had already taken a mouthful of it, and soon he had devoured the whole thing—salty, thick, intense. He was full.
As the days passed, Daniel grew more adventurous in his eating habits. Meaty flying goats, spicy splashes of color, refreshing silkscreened mountains, well-seasoned melted clocks—there was nothing the already-was Daniel suggested that the not-yet Daniel wouldn’t try. He even wolfed down funerary art. Most of the not-yets shunned the art of tombs and graves, finding the flavor too bitter and intense. But it was an acquired taste, Daniel discovered. As he nibbled on sarcophagi and tombstones and terra-cotta warriors, he found that the dry, earthy flavors hid within them a bittersweet aftertaste of eternity.
“Hm,” the already-was Daniel mused during one lunch, when his unborn charge ordered a series of mortuary murals from a tomb in lower Egypt. “I guess a taste for that stuff runs in the family.” But later, when the not-yet Daniel requested an entire meal of funerary sculptures from the imperial tombs in Hue, the curator closed his notepad and refused.
“Why not?” the not-yet Daniel wailed.
“It really isn’t healthy to eat so much of it,” the mortal Daniel insisted. “It’ll give you heartburn. Let me get you something with a little more fiber.” And he brought out a feast of illuminated manuscripts, sa
lted and spiced with gold-leafed names of God.
The natal Daniel enjoyed his meals, despite the dietary restrictions imposed by the curator. But he was beginning to suspect the mortal Daniel of deliberately giving him the saltiest works of art to eat. As he ate more regularly at the mortal Daniel’s table, devouring strange surreal pictures, he noticed that he was becoming increasingly thirsty. Even between meals, he felt a dryness in the back of his throat, and soon the artwork failed to satisfy him. He needed something more. When he asked at the restaurant for something to drink, the mortal Daniel only laughed.
Daniel began wandering around paradise restlessly, climbing on the stars. No form of music could rock him to sleep. He ate again from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, hoping for refreshment. But he was surprised to find that its fruit had become bland and dry. He stole a few mouthfuls of storm water from the storehouses of rain, but they left him bloated and anxious about causing droughts below. The gardens of paradise bored him. It seemed to him that there was nothing worth doing anymore, that he might as well just sit and wait for his birth. And then, three weeks before he was due to be born, he found something to satisfy his thirst.
THE DRINKING AGE in the world to come is twenty-one. Twenty-one days, that is—three weeks until one’s time has come to be born. At that point, the not-yets are allowed into the famous bars of the world to come, where they must choose for themselves whether to remain sober, to let themselves get a bit tipsy, or to drink themselves to birth. But the drinks in these bars aren’t like the poor, dark, dingy ones in the world below. Instead, the vast wine cellars of the world to come are filled with bottled books.
They are arranged, the wine cellars, like libraries, by vineyard, varietal, vintage—author, genre, date. The librarian-sommeliers bring up the requested bottles carefully. Some are meant to be drunk warm, heated with love; others are plunged into icy buckets of hatred or chilled slightly in anger before drinking. Most are served at room temperature, objectively tasted; while some (cheap titles, usually, avoided at least in public by the smarter not-yets) are served lust-hot. Wary drinkers usually ask to see the label before opening the bottle, inspecting the title and the author’s name to make sure it matches what they ordered. (“‘Deuteronomy,’” Daniel cried once when a drowsy bartender brought out a flinty screw-capped carafe. “I asked for ‘Deuteronomy,’ not for ‘The New Economy.’”) The true bibliophiles are also offered a drop to sample first, to swivel under their tongues, testing for basic quality. (“Tfu!” Daniel once spat. “Plagiarism!”) After that, it is simply a matter of taste, and of how long one takes to get drunk.