Whereupon

After which, I don't know...

We found ourselves in an unfamiliar place… as we often do. There was light, only a bit of it, coming from above us. Everywhere else was dark. We looked down and saw our pants and shoes. A comforting sight, an anchor of familiarity. We shifted a bit, and kicked up dust from the ground in the process. Understanding began to leak through some levee in our mind, and we felt all the sudden at peace. Here we stood at an ordinary bus stop. Overhead, a dim and flickering street light. Glancing behind us we saw a weathered wooden bench. We noticed we were not alone.

To our side, a figure stood. As we focused on it, it seemed to emerge from the darkness around us. Wisps of definition coalesced into a towering form of shadow. Any meager sense of ease we had built up to that point, evaporated. A cold sweat formed on our arms and forehead. Another understanding made its way into our awareness, this one both calming and upsetting.

“I’m dead,” we said.

The form writhed and twisted; a particularly dark patch swung down to face us. We swallowed with some effort.

“Yes,” a raspy voice came from the shadow.

“And you’re here to take me,” we said, with some effort.

“No,” the form said.

“Well this is rather abnormal, aren’t you Death?” we asked.

The darkness within darkness continued to hover before us, perhaps studying us. Eventually a sound emanated from it, like rusty chains dragging across cobblestones. Was it… laughing?

We glanced nervously around us, looking for some escape route should it be necessary. Over our shoulder we saw two pinpricks of light pierce the darkness.

“Ah, finally,” the creature sighed beside us.

Sounds wafted on a warm breeze to us. The rumble of an engine and rocks kicking down a road. A bus was approaching. It stopped in front of us, and the metal folding doors squealed in protest as they swung open.

“After you,” the shadow said.

We felt that this was odd for two reasons. The first was that the creature seemed to have no malice in its voice, and that we trusted it. The second was that it had some sense of courtesy, this impossible demon. We boarded the bus. The creature followed, stuffing its incorporeal gloom into an ordinary bus.

The interior of the bus was lit as well, and it was not empty. The driver ignored us as we entered, and immediately set off again before we had found our seats. We steadied ourselves against the motion as we walked down the central aisle. There were other passengers, more like us than the shadowy form, yet still somewhat incoherent. Their faces were obscured, as if viewed through water or dappled glass. None seemed to notice us, though we noticed them. We found an empty row, and sat. The creature sat in the seat across from us.

The bus rumbled onward for some time, as far as we could tell. We mustered up the courage, and turned to the shadow.

“Excuse me, could I ask you a question please?” we were making a bet that the creature which displayed some sense of civility would respond well to politesse.

Again, the deepest black of the shadow formed on the side facing us.

“Proceed,” it said. A good sign.

“Well,” we said, “I was hoping you could tell me where we are, since I’m dead — is this the afterlife?”

A bit of shadow flicked upward in a somehow comprehensibly dismissive gesture. “You have created this,” it said. “All of you require some mechanism of transition. A way to bring you from your previous understanding to your current one.”

We looked around, then back to the form. “Are we all this cliché?” we asked.

The same grinding sound emanated from the shadows, but softer, more of a chuckle this time. Was it restraining itself to not bother the other passengers?

“I like you,” it said, “I will allow you one more question.”

We perked up at that. We knew just the question, as it had been lurking in the back of our mind since our arrival.

“What is existence? Is God real?” we rushed, before the form changed its mind.

“That’s two questions,” the grating voice reprimanded. “But two faces of a coin, so to speak. What you are referring to is Whereupon.”

“Whereupon?” we asked, taken aback.

“The closest approximation I can give that fits within your old understanding is the word: Whereupon,” the creature said. “In your new understanding it would be something like this.”

Upon its final word the aisle that we had just walked down split in two. The floor was unzipped as if by some unseen hand and we fell into utter blackness. Once inside, panic faded quickly to be replaced by a deep sense of comfort. We felt a happening unfold from an infinitely preceding stretch of previous happenings. Patterns of light emerged, then collapsed into one another, never to be seen again. Even then we began to notice even deeper patterns which underlaid those emergences and collapses.

Color folded inward from both sides of our awareness, and the interior of a bus zipped around us like clothes around a body. The darkness was gone, the patterns faded from our understanding. We sat in a bus next to a demon once more.

“You still need more time, I see,” the shadow said. “It is usually difficult for you folk to leave the shelter of Whereupon’s embrace.”

Mind still reeling, we shook our head and turned to the demon. “What could there be outside of that?” we asked, bewildered.

The shadow laughed a third time, this one the loudest of the three.

“Everything.”