After you die....surprise!
June 8, 2018 8:59 AM   Subscribe

Friday Flash Fiction: "Sum" by David Eagleman. "In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while sitting on a toilet. You take all your pain at once, all twenty-seven intense hours of it. Bones break, cars crash, skin is cut, babies are born. Once you make it through,..."

"... it's agony-free for the rest of your afterlife. But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. You spend six days clipping your nails. Fifteen months looking for lost items. Eighteen months waiting in line. Two years of boredom: staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal. One year reading books. Your eyes hurt, and you itch, because you can't take a shower until it's your time to take your marathon two-hundred-day shower...."
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"Sum" is one of 40 stories along the same lines, collected together in the book of the same name (by Eagleman).

The same webpage has three more of these stories. tl;dr: "Descent of Species" - Don't wish to be a horse in your afterlife. "Egalitaire" - God has a big problem on her hands. "Circle of Friends" - What's so wrong with friends? Plenty.
posted by storybored (19 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
“Sum” is the last book of fiction I read that really excited me and made me recommend it to my friends. Eagleman is great.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:05 AM on June 8, 2018


You spend three minutes wondering if you'll be punished in the afterlife for organizing your books by the colors of their spines.
posted by phooky at 9:08 AM on June 8, 2018 [6 favorites]


You spend three minutes wondering if you'll be punished in the afterlife for organizing your books by the colors of their spines.

no, but there's a special level of hell for spines-in-pages-out.
posted by Dr. Twist at 9:16 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


Only one hour realizing I've forgotten someone's name? I wish!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:02 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


Only 27 hours of pain?

Story must be told from a male point of view then...
posted by Faintdreams at 10:09 AM on June 8, 2018 [17 favorites]


No kidding, Faintdreams.

I passed 27 hours of pain at age 12 and have tripled it (minimum) every month since.

Hey it's 2018 and these newfangled web browsers have built-in calculators!

I'm 42, so that's 20 years of 12 months per year of 24 hours x 4 days (it was closer to 7 days for 12 years, then 3 once I got on the Pill, which I'm now off but it's still 3-4 days) of gut-wrenching, pain-medication-resistant endometriosis pain. Also, we'll just calculate that and leave out all the twisted ankles, skinned knees, car crashes (I've been in four), flus, tendinitis, common colds, headaches, slammed fingers and the broken arm I've had. 20 years x 12 months x 96 hours per month (also generous given my cycle is anywhere between 21-28 days, so really it would be more than 12 months a year sometimes) = 23,040 hours.

That's 960 days.

2.63 years.

If dudes ever wonder why women get angry, you can take my 2.63 years of gut-wrenching, faint-inducing (I didn't even faint when the surgeon pulled out my three wrist pins, for which I was awake because I asked for it), pain-medication-resistant pain and shove it where the sun don't shine.

Oh and I have a few more years to go yet, then it's menopause.
posted by fraula at 10:47 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm pretty sure a comedian did this as a bit. And now I can't figure out who it was. You are all welcome for this helpful comment.
posted by oneironaut at 10:51 AM on June 8, 2018 [3 favorites]


CBC's Wiretap broadcast a few of these stories in its final seasons. Here's a good one.
posted by maudlin at 11:17 AM on June 8, 2018


Then we get to hours spent web surfing, and time folds in on itself from the immense strain.
posted by Query at 1:27 PM on June 8, 2018


Who's spending 58% as much time having sex as they are reading books and aren't they tired by now?
posted by howfar at 1:30 PM on June 8, 2018


Only 27 hours of pain?

Story must be told from a male point of view then...


The fact that it's seven months of sex wasn't a giveaway?
posted by nubs at 2:25 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


Story must be told from a male point of view by somebody who's never suffered a chronic pain condition then...
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:24 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


I got Sum from the library a while ago (after hearing about it here on MetaFilter, I think). For reasons I'm not sure I can articulate, it didn't work for me and I stopped reading after about 10 of the 40 stories. However, one of the stories stuck with me. In it, humans turn out to be an artificial intelligence designed by a race of slow-witted beings to figure out the meaning of life for them. And we do figure out something that ought to be of interest to them, but when we try to tell them, they are, of course, incapable of understanding us.
posted by aws17576 at 6:36 PM on June 8, 2018


Oddly reminds me of Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams" from forever ago.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 8:13 PM on June 8, 2018 [1 favorite]


I don't understand why pain is separated out anyway, because it isn't an activity. If you're in pain whilst mowing the grass, are you just pain-free during the grass-mowing section? During the pain section you can't be mowing the grass, so you're... what? In which case you're not replaying your life, you're re-enacting it.
posted by stillnocturnal at 2:13 AM on June 9, 2018


I heard "Ineffable" read on a repeat broadcast of RadioLab a few months ago and it's stuck with me a lot. Reproduced in its entirety as a quotation in this review of the book.
posted by lazuli at 8:49 AM on June 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


Dang straight this has to be from the POV of a male person who does not have a uterus or a chronic pain condition. Sheesh. 27 hours of pain could be, like, just ONE baby being born. Heck, I was in false labor for the entire last two weeks of my ONE pregnancy.

Plus I have chronic migraine. I've experienced 27 hours of pain from that just this week.
posted by BlueJae at 9:37 AM on June 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


(Although, hey: at least I know I'd be well qualified to last through 27 hours of pain in a theoretical afterlife. If it's really limited to 27 hours, for everyone-- if you get to fast forward through what in your last life was really more like 270 hours of pain, or 2,700, or 270,000-- sign me up. I'll relive everything else at real-time speed. I can totally deal with the 300 straight hours of telephone hold music in exchange.)
posted by BlueJae at 9:44 AM on June 9, 2018


no, but there's a special level of hell for spines-in-pages-out.

Ironically, that level of hell involves never being able to find the book that frees you from it.
posted by jaduncan at 11:01 PM on June 10, 2018


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