The instant Mai's head hit the pavement, she sat up in a hard bed. In place of the car's headlights were the bright overhead halogens of a gymnasium. There was no liminal space between death and this place to which she'd come.
All around the perimeter of the gym were other beds. Most were empty, but some had groups of people gathered around them. People leaned against the wall. Others sat on the ground, still others paced. It was as if they were all waiting for something.
Whenever one person in a group looked up at her, they would tap the others on the shoulder and point. Eventually everyone in the gym was staring at her. Mai looked down to see if something about her attire had drawn their attention, but she was wearing the same thing as everyone else: a blue track suit with a number sown in. She pinched the fabric to read the number. 100.
Someone approached her, a man who seemed familiar even before she could make out his face. It was Dakota, her physics TA from grad school. "You're the last, so that confirms it," he said. He looked twenty-five, like he hadn't aged at all since university.
"Confirms what?" she said.
"It's everyone from physics 103. Your ex is here, too. And your other friend."
Mai stood up. She was already wearing shoes. "But where is 'here?"
"Good question. I assume you remember dying? Everyone else does."
"A car hit me in my dream."
"Dream? I doubt it, but maybe. I find it hard to reason here. No one seems to need food or water, and the oxygen doesn't run out even though the gym has no doors, vents, or other openings."
The others were still staring. "Why are they looking at me like that?"
"Right. Follow me."
Dakota led her to the far wall, in which there were intricate stone carvings of what promised to be doors, but could not be, because the edges were flush with the rest of the wall. Everyone in the gym gathered. All of them, in this place, looked young and fit. Beautiful or handsome, even if they hadn't in physics 103 twenty years ago.
"It says the 100th can open one of these. We've been waiting for you for months."
Chatter fell silent when Mai approached the carvings. She didn't understand what was going on, but the dreamlike logic of this afterlife was disarming, easy to surrender to.
The first door's carving depicted a naked man and woman climbing stairs into the distance. Text below it read: _Through trials of dignity and desire, master the human spirit, ascend to the next._ To the next what? Plane? Form?
The second door depicted an ouroboros, and read: _Human again._
Mai looked at Dakota, then the crowd. "Which do you want me to choose?"
When no one else spoke, Dakota answered. Even after so many years, when this particular group gathered, everyone was still habituated to him taking the lead. To him standing in front and explaining while everyone else listened carefully. "We've discussed it," he said, "but we chose not to settle the issue until you arrived."
Mai stood in front of the human again door. Trials didn't appeal to her, and her life had not been disagreeable. After her postdoc, she continued in energy research at university in the Netherlands, had a pleasant routine and biking route in the Hague. Nothing on the door advertised itself as a button or handle, so there was no specific intention in mind when she raised her hand to feel around it. But this was enough to spook Eva, the old friend Dakota had mentioned was also in the gym.
Mai and Eva hadn't spoken since halfway through physics 3, because of something Eva did. There in the gym, Eva was even more beautiful than she was in grad school. It was if her body had been designed by a man, with the jealousy of other women in mind. She caught Mai's arm and pulled her away from the door. They fell on the ground together.
"Not that one!" Eva said.
Mai looked at the others. "No one wants to be human again?"
Silence.
"I used to," Danota said. "But then I thought about the median human life. And childhood."
Eva grabbed my shoulders. "You want to repeat childhood? Are you sure?"
They had met in middle school, when Mai was still singing gospel at the Wednesday after-school services, still losing sleep over guilt for sexual fantasies that lived only in her head, compulsively repeating verses to make the fantasies go away. Before an understanding of physics liberated her from religious ideas. It had been so long, she'd forgotten the intensity of those experiences. Hindsight could make even great pains seem quaint.
"But what are the trials?" Mai said.
Dakota pointed at the carving of stairs. Along the stairway were five arches to pass under. "That carving is our only hint. There are probably five of them."
"And," Mai said, "the people are naked."
He nodded. "They are. I assumed that was stylistic, but I don't know."
The gender ratio seemed relevant. Trials of dignity and desire, the naked illustrations, the fact that this group of people knew each other already, all of it had to mean something. This physics 103 was the first section to open registration after it became a requirement for the English master's students, which were almost all women. In the gym now, there was maybe one boy for every five girls.
Suddenly, holes opened in all four of the gym's walls and through them water flooded in. Mai and Eva helped each other up. Some people stood on the beds, which were bolted down, to avoid the water rising from the floor. It was not slow. Every few seconds it rose an inch.
"You have to choose!" Eva said.
Mai hurried to the door with the stairs, but could not find a way to open it. The water reached her knees.
"That's not it," Dakota said. "If there were a button we'd have found and pressed it. I think it will know when you choose. In your mind."
But what did that mean? without knowing what lay behind the door, she could not even picture what she was supposed to choose. Instead what she pictured, in spite of how inappropriate the timing, was Dakota shirtless. Back in class, she sometimes used to raise her hand and ask for help on a problem she understood already, so that he would come over and leave over her in this almost paternal way. He had broad shoulders and powerful forearms. That was all she could do with him at the time, because for the first half of the semester she had a boyfriend, and in the second half Dakota had a girlfriend. But now that they were close together again, those feelings were waking up.
If they chose to reincarnate through the human again door, they would, probably, lose all their memories. But the trials would give them more time together...
As if in response to this train of thought, the door opened. Water flooded in many times as fast now, and everyone was swept through the door by the current, onto a water slide.
It let out into a sunny outdoor area at the edge of a chasm whose bottom was too far to see from the top. Attached to the ravine edge were docks with five floating platforms whose signage invited people by the number on their uniform. The first read,"1-20 board here." Once they boarded the platforms, it was clear the number assignments had meaning. The first clue was that on every platform there were four men and sixteen women. Second, Mai was at least acquaintances with everyone in 81-100. Dakota was there, Eva, and her ex, Henry, who avoided eye contact with her.
The first platform left dock, starting floating its way across the chasm.
"What do we do?" Eva said.
There were no instructions. The obvious thing to do was go forward across the chasm like the others, but the platform had no controls. Only a hopper. Beside it, there was a basket labeled "fuel" containing strips of green fabric.
Dakota tapped the gauge on the hopper, which was near empty, and going lower. "Let's try this," he said, and fed the green fabric into the hopper. Smoke rose from the opening and the gauge tilted away from E. The platform lurched forward.
Mai knelt to watch the gauge. "It's draining quickly."
Eva looked over the edge. "What happens when it runs out?"
The answer, though an unwanted one, came right away. The platform with people 1-20, which had pulled far ahead, suddenly fell out of the sky, into the abyss below.
Dakota untied his shoes and threw his socks in the hopper. The gauge went up, just a tad. "It eats fabric," he said. "Men, your jackets." He unzipped his own and fed it to the engine.
In terms of fabrics, they each had shoes, socks, joggers, underwear, shirts, and jackets. The women had sports bras. At first this seemed like plenty. No one would have to make any uncomfortable decisions. But after they'd spent all the shoes and socks, all the jackets, and all the men's shirts, and they still had a quarter of the chasm left. Another platform, 61-80, had fallen into the abyss.
Before any discussion, a woman from the back, in a panic, ran to the hopper and stripped completely. Fed everything she had into the hopper. That was how they learned bras and underwear burned longer than everything else.
Thanks to this woman's sacrifice, no one else had to suffer the indignity of stripping completely. Mai, Eva, and the other women took off their bras and fed them into the hopper, but kept their shirts on. The woman who was now naked resented this, and glared from the corner railing where she stood with her arms folded to cover her chest.
On the other side of the chasm, it was clear other crews coming off the platforms had fueled their trip in less egalitarian ways. Most people were fully clothed, and then a handful of women were nude.
After only the first part of the first trial, forty had been eliminated.
On this side of the ravine, there were more platforms, this time smaller, lined up at a cliffside. Elevators. Mai boarded to the one whose sign read, "96-100".
When Eva boarded, Mai said, "Are you wishing we chose the other door yet?"
