Bardo

Bardo (n.) — in Tibetan Buddhism, the liminal state between death and rebirth.

-One-

“Good morning, honey,” said the Person as he transitioned from sleep to wakefulness, feeling as if he were rolling over in bed. He opened his eyes and looked around: this was not his bed, and this was certainly not his bedroom. The Person found himself sitting at a table, in a booth, near the back of a classic American roadside diner of the Art Deco style. A chrome jukebox hung from the wall to his left; a faceless waitress carrying a full carafe of coffee walked by to his right. Outside the window it was twilight, with a narrow highway stretching as far as he could see in both directions. A faint sound of rockabilly was recognizable in the background.

Sitting opposite the Person across the table was another man dressed in a beige sport coat and khakis, working away at what looked like a cross between an antique cash register and a typewriter. The man looked up at the Person, turning his attention away from his machine, smiling benignly.

“Hello there, welcome,” said the man, stopping his typing—or whatever it was he was doing—and placed his hands on the table.

“Is this a dream?” the Person asked, looking around the diner, periodically bringing his gaze back to the man in front of him.

“Does it feel like a dream?” the man asked in response, looking the Person in the eyes. The Person thought for a moment.

”No, it doesn’t,” the Person exhaled, “I mean, there’s something vaguely familiar about this place, and about you, but I can’t quite pin it down, like I’ve seen both in a dream sometime long ago. Or maybe in flashes of childhood memories. But I can’t quite pin it down.”

“That’s the way this usually works,” the man said matter of factly, “When a person dies, they make a brief pit-stop to meet a Clerk—like me—before moving on to whatever they’re slated for next. Often the setting is something familiar to the deceased. In your case it’s a roadside diner like this. It was a favorite lunch spot for you and your father when you were young. Your Clerk might appear as a half-familiar composite of people you knew, in order to ease your transition.” The Clerk pressed a few buttons on his machine.

“So, I’m…dead?” the Person asked in disbelief.

”Yes,” the Clerk said, looking up from his machine again, “you were asleep at home and suffered a massive brainstem hemorrhage. You died painlessly. You didn’t even wake up, nor was your wife awoken when it happened. She’ll wake up to you having passed peacefully in the night. And don’t worry, your body won't be in too embarrassing a state when she finds you,” the Clerk added, “A lot of people seem to worry about that.”

“Oh my god. I’m d…dead” the Person said with a stammer. “But…but we just had our third kid. I’m too young, this doesn’t make any sense,” the Person became frantic, tripping over his words, talking half to himself and half to the Clerk.

“These things happen,” said the Clerk, “that’s how life works, as you say.’

”Yes, of course I knew I was going to die someday!” the Person snapped, “It’s just that I…” He trailed off, staring at the tabletop in front of him. Another faceless waitress walked by to his right, carrying a carafe of coffee, while out of the corner of his left eye he caught the shining headlight of a car as it whizzed past the diner.

“It’s just that you…what?” the Clerk asked, his head tilting ever so slightly.

“I…It wasn’t…I don’t know…it didn’t feel real to me, the fact that I could die…like this. It wasn’t real yet. I mean, I knew I could die in a plane crash or car accident or some other bad luck, but who dies peacefully in their sleep before reaching forty? I guess I always thought I’d have more time.” The Person lowered his head as he finished speaking.

“We hear that a lot,” replied the Clerk.

“I mean, what’s my family going to do? My kids? And where the hell is this place, by the way? Where am I? Oh god, I feel like I’m gonna puke.” The Person placed his palms on the table and tried to slow his breathing.

”You will be fine, and so will they,” said the Clerk matter of factly. For some reason the Person found the Clerk’s voice oddly comforting, despite his dispassionate tone. “Your life insurance policy and other arrangements you prudently made before dying will ensure your family is provided for. You’ll be remembered more or less fondly by those who knew you. Your wife will grieve for an appropriate amount of time. She’ll eventually date again here and there, but won’t remarry. Your two children who are old enough will remember you as kind and reliable. And for you: soon your memories and their salience will start to fade, just as you forget a dream shortly after waking. It’s part of the whole process of getting you ready for your next life.” The Clerk punched a few more buttons on his contraption.

“My next life? I’m being…reincarnated?” The Person stammered. The Clerk was right: he could already feel the memories of his life becoming foggier and less definite. His panic started to subside as memories of his family and friends and everything else he knew in life became increasingly fuzzy and distant.

“Yes, once you leave here, you’ll be reborn into a new life,” said the Clerk.

“So…” the Person paused, unsure which of the thousand questions queued up in his mind was the most important to ask next. “Are you God? Or, you know, ‘the supreme being’, or something like that? Who are you?”

“No, I’m not God. I am a Clerk. I play my little role helping to keep this cosmic machinery running,” the Clerk gestured around. “I am only one of many. We each play our part. Just like you.”

A feeling of nausea began to rise up in the Person. “Please tell me I’m not going to be reincarnated as a worm, or a dung beetle, or some factory farmed animal.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be reincarnated as a non-human animal,” said the Clerk, pausing as if to think for a moment, “That would be, well, ridiculous.” The Person thought he detected a slight quizzical expression on the Clerk’s face.

The Person looked at the Clerk in disbelief. “Oh, well I’m sorry I don’t know all the totally obvious ground rules for the afterlife.”

“That’s quite alright,” replied the Clerk, ignoring the Person’s sarcasm, “that’s why I’m here—to help. You see, you are a driven and disciplined man. You plan ahead and you accomplish your goals. You are, more than anything else, prepared. Although this whole situation seems to have thrown you for a bit of a loop, I must say.” Did the Clerk have a mild sense of rebuke or disappointment in his voice, or was the Person imagining things?

“Okay, so who will I be reincarnated as? Some guard on a watchtower? A disaster prepper?”

“No,” said the Clerk. “In your case, you’ll be reincarnated as you, the same man, more or less, that you were before and always have been, with a few tweaks here and there every once in a while.”

The Person’s feeling of nausea worsened, now accompanied by a mild vertigo. Were before, and always have been. He rolled it over in his mind. “This reincarnation thing,” he asked hesitantly, “how long has it been going on? Or, uh, how many times have I been reborn?” The Person observed the Clerk appearing to consider the question.

“From your perspective, it’s been going on for a very long time,” said the Clerk. Again, the Person couldn’t quite tell if the Clerk was subtly changing his tone and expressions, or if he was reading too much into things—was the Clerk being cagey? The Person briefly considered what it would even mean for him to “read too much into things” right now, given the circumstances, but he bookmarked that thought for later.

The Clerk must have sensed the Person’s dissatisfaction with his answer and went on to add, “Considering you were a student of physics in your most recent life, I assume you’ll appreciate this comparison. Imagine the number of atoms in your universe. Now, imagine that every atom contains within itself an entire universe like yours, with all those universes containing even more universes in all of their atoms, and so on in both directions, with your own universe being contained inside a single atom within another larger universe, within another, and so on. Take that process a few steps in both directions, and the number of lives you’ve lived so far is in the same ballpark as the number of atoms in all those universes.”

The Person felt the bottom drop out from beneath him. “I’ve been living the same life over and over again for,” he paused, “basically an infinite amount of time?”

“Oh no, that’s nowhere close to infinite,” said the Clerk, crisply. “But, I could see why it might feel that way to you. I should say, however, it’s not quite true that you’ve been living the exact same life again and again. Each life is different in at least some minute aspect. Some diverge quite substantially, once in a while. But, no two of your lives are truly identical, even if they’re similar enough that you couldn’t easily tell the difference.”

“Do these little differences amount to anything? Am I going anywhere, or am I just living what feels to me like the same life on repeat, forever?”

“You’re working something out, that’s for sure,” said the Clerk, after tapping a few of his machine’s buttons. “It’s in your nature to do that. You’re a problem solver.”

“How am I doing that if I can’t remember my past lives? How would I even know if I’m making progress—whatever that is—or just going in circles for billions of years?”

“You do spend billions of years going in circles, sometimes,” said the Clerk, “but over the long run there has been change. Compared to how you started out—” the Clerk cut himself off and appeared to twist something, perhaps turning a knob, on his machine.

“This ‘thing I’m working out’, am I on a mission or something? Is there some ultimate goal for me at the end of all this? Is there an end? I feel like I’m flying blind here.” As he spoke, the Person’s vertigo worsened; the room started to spin. He began to feel faint and disoriented.

“We’re out of time, I’m afraid,” the Clerk said after glancing at his watch. He proceeded to remove his strange device from the table and placed it beside him, out of sight. The Person felt close to losing consciousness and pressed his hands harder against the table to prop himself up, focusing all of his attention on the Clerk. His vision started to narrow. He heard the Clerk, whose voice sounded increasingly distant, say, “For a long time now, you’ve been asking me some version of that question almost every time we meet. But you already know you wouldn’t remember any knowledge I could impart to you here, assuming I had any to give. Perhaps you should continue what you’ve already been doing recently, and consult with yourself at some point during your next life regarding this question...”

All light and sound and thought ceased as the Person fell, yet again, into oblivion.

-Two-

The Person pivoted first to the right, then left, as she jogged through the zigs and zags of the path that wound its way through the park. A gentle light still illuminated the trail as the day turned to night. Or was it the night turning into day? The Person couldn’t remember.

Panting, she leapt over a large stone half-buried in the trail as she set her sights on a small hill just ahead. After a few moments she heard the steps of someone else approaching from behind. She looked over her left shoulder just as a man dressed in an Olympic track outfit closed the distance between them and began running next to her.

“Hello there, welcome,” said the man. He had a formal yet friendly smile, showing no signs of being short of breath.

“Uh, who are you?” the Person asked, glancing back and forth between the man and the trail. “Do I know you?”

“I’m your Clerk. We’ve met before, but you wouldn’t remember me. The last time we spoke was some time ago. You had just died of dehydration in the basement of your then-workplace—”

The Person gave a disgusted, incredulous look and immediately sped up, hoping to leave the Clerk in the dust. She looked over her left shoulder and saw him receding into the background. She turned to face forward again as she continued toward the hill, only to see the same man approaching from a totally different trail on her right. He closed the distance quickly and, again, kept pace beside her.

“As I was saying, a janitor found your decomposing body slumped over your desk six days later, once the smell started permeating the rest of the building,” the Clerk continued, as if there had been no break in the conversation. “You had decided to stay late while the rest of the company took a break for the holiday. You didn’t even realize when they closed the building up. Nobody knew you were there, and you ended up getting yourself locked in a basement corridor. The time before that was pneumonia; you were eighty years old and living in a small guest-house on a farm.”

“The time before that?” she exclaimed, now slightly breathless. “What are you talk…wait, you’re saying I’m dead?” The two continued apace, running over the small hill, heading toward a large pond on the other side.

“Yes, although you could just as well think of this as your impending rebirth,” replied the Clerk. “Your first in a while, at least by your standards,” he added. “This time, you’ll be a nurse’s assistant in a small town medical clinic. Seems like it might suit you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, charging ahead.

“You’re a person who gives, but too much,” the Clerk checked his wristwatch as they both ran beside the pond’s embankment, “or at least too much for the kind of person you fundamentally are. And, more importantly, you give in the wrong spirit. You give to others as a way to keep them away, to remain unnoticed, to avoid taking anything for yourself. You escape yourself with selflessness, but it is false and you leave nothing left over. You hope that one day they will recognize all you have done for them, but no one recognizes your suffering. So you hide in a lifeless limbo, suspended between grandiose self-denial and disavowed self-absorption.” The Clerk smiled.

The Person tried to take in all the Clerk had just said. She considered trying to lose him again, but figured it was futile. She combed through her mind, searching for any memories of what he was talking about. An office basement? A farm guest-house? She couldn’t recall anything.

“Okay, let me get this straight: I used to have some sort of self-denial complex and lived a sad, lonely life. Then I died in a super embarrassing way and,” she paused to catch her breath, “now I’m here? Wherever here is. And you’re telling me I’m going to be reborn? Again?”

“Almost, although as I mentioned there was something of a gap between your most recent death at the office and our conversation now.”

“Why? What kind of gap?” The Person asked, realizing they had been circling the pond repeatedly. She nodded her head to the right and changed course toward a section of dark forest, with the Clerk matching her stride.

“You see, after a while, your self-destructive tendencies were proving to be somewhat problematic. Your office decomposition was, it seems, a red flag. So, it came to be that you were reborn in one of the more remote pocket universes as a means to—how to say it?—knead out some of the karmic knots? Give you some remedial help? Something was clearly out of alignment in you, perhaps this nudged things a tad in the right direction. The universe works in interesting ways.” The Clerk ran closer next to The Person as they entered the dense woods, barely slowing down.

“And what—” The Person ducked to avoid a branch, “what kind of help did I get in this whatever universe you’re talking about? I can’t remember a damn thing.”

“Whatever adjustments that occurred wouldn’t be in the form of conscious, explicit knowledge. In your case, memories wouldn’t serve you much good anyway. Spending 30 million years pedaling a stationary bike isn’t very exciting, I’d assume.” The Clerk looked straight ahead, also dodging branches and other underbrush.

“30 million years!” she exclaimed, nearly clotheslining herself on a neck-level vine, “on a stationary bike? What? Where? Why? That sounds like literal Hell!”

“On the contrary,” laughed the Clerk as they exited the woods and entered a clearing, “If Hell as you understand it were real, it would be much, much worse. Besides, a lot of that time might have felt not so different than this run. Not so bad, right? As to why, well, the cosmos needs to get its energy from somewhere, I suppose. 30 million years on a well-made stationary bike generates a lot of joules. And you weren’t by any means the only one over there. But, you genuinely helped people—all of existence, actually—even if it was from the tiny corner of an engine-room pocket universe.”

They began running parallel to a stream that cut through the clearing.

“30 million years on a bike and I’m getting reborn as a nurse’s assistant? Shouldn’t I be Lance Armstrong or something? Or whatever else they’re doing 30 million years in the future now?” The Person looked ahead to the source of the stream alongside which they were running, and saw that it came from the top of a mountain now looming in front of them.

“You will be reborn into precisely the life you are supposed to live, in the way you will live it. But time works a bit differently here, so you’ll be reborn shortly after your prior death, not millions of years in your future. Besides, you didn’t take 30 million years just to develop your quads. Whatever you take with you to your next life will be a deeper knowledge, more subtle, harder to articulate—”

The Person’s breath became heavier as she felt herself suddenly starting to flag. “Like knowing how to ride a bike?” she raised an eyebrow at the Clerk, who met her gaze with a slight grin as he raised his wristwatch up to eye-level. Her pace slowed further, sound became muffled as if she were underwater. Despite her slowing to a crawl, the Clerk now seemed to lag behind her, slowly receding into the distance.

“I hope you took as much pleasure in our conversation as I have. I think the biking did you some good. Maybe next time we can try jogging at a slower pace, take some time to appreciate the scenery…”

The faint words of the Clerk echoed in the Person’s vertiginous mind before evaporating as she fell, yet again, into oblivion.

-Three-

The Clerk sat at a desk in the corner of the drab, windowless office room, clicking away on his mechanical contraption. On his desk also sat a traditional green-shaded banker’s lamp with a stack of manila file folders filled with papers sitting beside it. Had the Person sitting silently in a small office chair at the opposite corner of the room been of the more curious type, he would have wondered why the banker’s lamp was needed, as the room was already permeated by a thick yellow fluorescent light which seemed to lack any identifiable source. The combination of the yellow light on the faded green carpet yielded a vaguely diseased-looking hue. The walls were a dark, cheap wood that reminded the Person of the panels on the side of an old station wagon. The hum of the sourceless light and the Clerk’s button-pushing were the only sounds the Person could hear besides his own breath.

The Person wondered how long he’d been sitting here. Would someone call his name? He couldn’t remember: was he dropping off a memo in receiving or deliveries? Eyeing the Clerk as he sat, the Person noted his featureless black suit and tie over a white button-down shirt. His shiny, black hair was pomaded to one side. The Clerk glanced at the Person occasionally while continuing his own work.

“Is this receiving?” the Person asked after a while, “or, I’m…I guess I’m not really sure where I’m supposed to be.”

“You’re in the right place, receiving is down the hall that way” replied the Clerk, pointing his finger up toward a door located in the ceiling in the far corner of the room, which the Person had not noticed until now. “This is a different branch.” The Person looked up at the door.

I’ve never seen a door in the ceiling before. That’s weird. I wonder how they get up there…

The Person eventually returned his attention to the present moment. “So, am I supposed to deliver something? Or are you giving me something to take somewhere? Sorry, I can’t seem to remember.”

“You don’t need to do anything. You’re here because you died, and I’m the Clerk facilitating your transition to whatever you are meant to do next.”

“Oh,” said the Person after a pause. He had the tone of a man who had just been fired from a job he was already on the fence about. After another delay he went on, “Really? I’m dead? That’s, well…what happened?”

The Clerk put down his work and turned his attention to the Person. “You were playing an online video game alone in your apartment at three in the morning. It was a Tuesday. After slaying a particularly fearsome opponent, you aspirated a celebratory bite of Chicago-style hotdog upon which you promptly choked to death.”

The Person sat silently, the Clerk unsure whether he was taking it all in or just staring blankly at him. “I don’t really know what to say,” he replied, breathing slowly and heavily as he glanced nervously around the room. “Can I go back? I guess, I wish I’d had more time.”

“Do you, really? To be fair, you did have forty-three years,” replied the Clerk as he shuffled a few papers, “and you weren’t born into grueling poverty or a slave society, so…”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. To be honest, I guess I’m not sure how I feel now. I wasn’t all that happy anyway when, you know, when I was alive.” The Person looked at his arms and legs as if to confirm he was still there.

“We hear that a fair bit here. And to answer your first question, no, you couldn’t go back even if you genuinely wanted to.” The Clerk rotated a crank on his machine’s side.

“What’s going to happen to me now?” the Person replied, trying to work out what the Clerk was doing with his device.

“Usually I’m chaperoning people on their way to rebirth in their next life, or else to a period of remediation before their next rebirth…”

“Wait, so is this all some Buddhist thing?” the Person cut in, gesturing around him.

“No.” The Clerk appeared slightly puzzled for a moment before continuing on, “As I was saying, most people go through many rebirth cycles. It appears, however, that you are scheduled for neither a rebirth nor remediation. In your case, you will be reincorporated into the cosmos.”

The Person gave the Clerk a blank stare. “Re-into-the-what?”

The Clerk stopped clicking away at his machine and sat back in his chair, placing his hands in his lap. “Well,” he appeared to be choosing his words carefully, “you see, your existence has been somewhat atypical. Most of you cycle through subsequent births in accordance with the overall cosmic economy. You add a bit here, take a bit there, but it all equals out at the end of the eon. At least, it usually does. It’s complicated. But every once in a while we end up with a remainder or deficiency that must be corrected. That’s where you came in.”

The Person looked at the Clerk, bewildered.

“Think of yourself as something of a ‘karmic placeholder’, so to speak,” explained the Clerk, “inserted to patch a scheduling error in the cosmic spreadsheet. An extra body was needed for one lifetime in order to balance the math while the system worked itself out. This allows the whole thing to keep running smoothly,” the Clerk gestured around the bleak office, half-smiling, “and so, your life is quite important in that respect: without you, the whole thing could have ground to a complete halt.”

“So,” the Person sputtered briefly, “I’m a…my life has been, just filler?”

“‘Filler’, if that’s what you choose to call it, is nonetheless important in its own way. And besides, do you have a more accurate description for how you spent your time?” the Clerk asked. The Person tried to think, struggling to recall memories of his life which he found hazier by the moment.

“Why me? Is there some reason?” the Person’s voice became quiet.

“Why not you? The universe doesn’t run with only you in mind, or with any particular anyone in mind, for that matter. That’s just how things shake out. You know, causality and such.” The Clerk gave an almost imperceptible shrug.

“But what if something happened with my karma while I was alive? Don’t I need to be reborn to work that out too? It doesn’t seem fair that I only had one life for all of eternity while other people get to be reborn.” The Person noticed a subtle anxiety creeping in as his foot started tapping against the floor.

“No,” the Clerk looked at a sheet of paper, “you accrued no ‘karma’ one way or another during your life, so there is nothing to work out.”

“How is that possible?” asked the Person.

“In order to accrue ‘karma’, you must act. Your life—your nature—was not one of action, but rather passivity. You reacted—sometimes—but no more. You often felt like a stranger in the world, standing just outside of it, observing it, just passing through, but never a part of it. You never one made an existential commitment. That sort of thing could always wait for tomorrow, to the extent you gave it any thought.” The Clerk pulled open a desk drawer, placing a handful of paper-filled manila folders inside.

“As for fairness,” the Clerk went on, “what difference is it to you whether you sit around doing nothing for one lifetime or a trillion?”

The Person sat silently. He felt a profound emptiness open up within him. His foot tapping stopped, his breathing slowed. He glanced around the room again as the last memories of his life slipped away. “What now?” he asked hesitantly.

“Nothing more, this is the end” replied the Clerk, pressing a few more buttons on his machine before removing it from the desk and placing it in a square, black leather carrying case sitting beside him. “The accounting is once again in balance. You have played your part…” the Clerk paused to consider his words, “satisfactorily.”

The Person felt his breath becoming shallow. He heard the closing of the Clerk’s case and looked up at him, but the figure was becoming blurry. The Person’s vision began to narrow. He gently rocked back and forth in his chair trying to balance himself as he felt the room start to spin. His ears rang, quietly at first, then gradually getting louder and louder. His vision faded.

Through the piercing ring, the Person heard the voice of the Clerk—“Do not be afraid. You are returning to the source. I hope you enjoyed our brief time together—” as he lost all sensation, all awareness, and fell into eternal oblivion.

To be continued…