Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Randal Graham is a law professor at Western University. He lives in London, Ontario, with his wife and their Himalayan kitty.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

It's okay if you don't believe in the afterlife. The people who live there don't believe in you, either.

What if you went to heaven and no one there believed in Earth? This is the question at the heart of Beforelife, a satirical novel that follows the post-mortem adventures of Ian Brown, a man who dies on the book's first page and finds himself in an afterlife where no one else believes in "pre-incarnation." The other residents of the afterlife have mysteriously forgotten their pre-mortem lives and think that anyone who remembers a mortal life is suffering from a mental disorder called the "Beforelife Delusion."

None of that really matters to Ian. All he wants to do is reunite with Penelope, his wife. Scouring the afterlife for any sign of her, Ian accidentally winds up on a quest to prove that the beforelife is real. This puts him squarely into the crosshairs of some of history's greatest heroes and villains, all of whom seem unhealthily obsessed with erasing Ian's memories and preventing him from reminding anyone of their pre-mortem lives. Only by staying a step ahead of his enemies can Ian hope to keep his much-needed marbles, find Penelope, and restore the public's memories of the beforelife.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

Ian died at midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe Wednesday. He couldn’t be sure which, come to think of it, and now that he was dead the point seemed moot.

That’s where the story should have ended. Even Ian would have agreed. Dying was the last thing Ian ever wanted to do, and he’d always assumed it would be. So when he died — either on Tuesday or on Wednesday — Ian thought this was The End.

As you may have already guessed, Ian was wrong about this in almost every respect. This shouldn’t be held against him. Ian had been raised without the mind-broadening benefits of Sunday schools, synagogues, Ouija boards, horoscopes, and other types of metaphysical training, and he lacked the important clue that, in a longish book about the only noteworthy slice of his own life story, he had died right at the top of page one. But Ian did die on page one. All things considered, this was something of a shame.

Ian thought this was a shame.

Or rather, a tiny, flickering slip of consciousness that thought of itself as Ian thought that Ian’s death was a shame. It was also annoyed. Owing to Ian’s t-crossing, i-dotting, nitpicking nature, this tiny, flickering, and decidedly tedious slip of consciousness couldn’t rest until it discovered whether its final spark of life had been snuffed out on Tuesday or Wednesday.

These things might matter, it reflected. What if people in the afterlife care about that sort of thing? There could be consequences. Big ones. Rules that apply to people who die on specific days. Netherwordly tax benefits. Seniority based on expiration dates. Or replacement bodies doled out on a first-come, first-served basis. They might have deathday parties. Or crypt rhymes. Tuesday’s corpse is fair of face; Wednesday’s corpse will rot in place. That sort of thing.

These things might matter.

Ian resolved to puzzle it out. It’s not as though he had anything better to do, what with one thing and another. He’d already noticed death’s obliging way of clearing up a schedule.

Ian started with what he knew. He was certain that he’d died at the stroke of twelve. He’d been standing on Platform Six, saying something-or-other about the midnight train to Union Station. Then he’d turned to watch it arrive. A moment later he had slipped, cried “whoops,” and fallen base-over-apex onto the tracks. That’s when Ian had met the train — or just its underside, really. The meeting had not gone well for Ian. The last sounds he heard had been a clock striking twelve, the screech of the braking train, and the mingled screams and shouts of alarmed commuters.

And “whoops,” Ian reflected.

His last word had been “whoops.”

Typical, thought Ian.

It was remarkably typical. While Ian had no way of knowing this, the 487th edition of Khuufru’s Eternal Almanac ranks the word “whoops” as the fourth most common final utterance of English-speaking humans, hot on the heels of “I’ll bet it’s harmless,” “What happens if I pull this?” and “These oysters seem a bit off.” But however run-of-the-mill his own last word had been, Ian was sure he’d said it at midnight. Twelve o’clock, right on the dot. Night noon. Zero hours, zero minutes, zero seconds.

It’s important not to fall prey to woolly thinking. You might be tempted to think that midnight, what with all of its “witching hour” mythology, is an auspicious time to die. Much more interesting than, say, dying at 8:17 or 9:24. But the problem you’re ignoring — and the thing that was really starting to get on Ian’s nerves, if he still had nerves — is that midnight is ambiguous. You know where you stand with 8:17 or 9:24, but midnight raises questions. Is it part of yesterday, or today? Tonight or tomorrow? Is it the final tick of one day, or the first tock of the next? Tuesday or Wednesday? Last night or this morning?

Is midnight an ending, or a beginning?

This could be embarrassing, thought Ian, who would have furrowed his brow and scratched his head if he’d still had one. What if there are . . . I don’t know . . . immigration forms in the Hereafter? Name: Ian Brown. Place of Birth: Toronto, Canada. Date of Death: June 5 or 6, not sure which. Ian would hate to spend the first day of his afterlife arguing with some Netherworldly Customs Official about an improperly filled-out Form F4-6A (Type T — arrivals by train). Few things could get under Ian’s skin like an improperly filled-out form. The whole idea made Ian queasy.

That is, it would have made Ian queasy if he’d still had a physical form. Disembodied spirits lack the plumbing involved in getting queasy. They do have everything they need to become dispirited, however, and that’s what Ian did next.

What happens now? Ian wondered. And then he knew: I’m still dying.

He was watching the final flickers of his last few sparks of consciousness while the intact bits of his brain fired their final, parting shots. There was nothing for Ian to do but wait for his last remaining grey cells to stop firing, fizzling, pulsing, or doing whatever it is that dying neurons do. Then he could get on with the job of fading into oblivion.

Ian waited.

Ian waited some more.

The more Ian waited the more he didn’t fade into oblivion.

Whether this was a remarkably dull afterlife or a low-budget entry in the Hallucination Sweepstakes, Ian was starting to feel antsy. This presented practical problems, there being few pastimes available to a man who has lost his body. Given this limited range of options, Ian opted for a stroll down memory lane.

Early editions of this book contained a beautifully written account of Ian’s reflections on his past. It was eight pages of elegant, artful prose, easily justifying any number of literary awards. Regrettably, editors of the current edition felt that Ian’s memories couldn’t hold a reader’s attention.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Ian’s life had been downright dull. He had been the middle child in a middle-income family and had (in his middle years) occupied a mid-level government position in a mid-sized Canadian city. Ian was middling in most respects. The only remarkable thing about Ian was how utterly unremarkable he was. He was beige. He was vanilla. He was almost perfectly average. If you added up all the people in the world and then divided them by global population, you’d have Ian. If mediocrity were an Olympic sport, Ian would finish right in the middle of the pack.

Being killed by a train had been the one newsworthy thing that had ever happened to Ian, and now he wouldn’t be around to see the coverage. He could imagine the headlines, though: Man Trips in Front of Train Entering Station: Death by Freudian Slip.

It was at this precise moment — just as Ian had started imagining the text of his own obituary — that whatever homunculus lived in Ian’s mind mashed control-alt-delete on its cognitive keyboard and rebooted Ian’s sense of the physical world.

Ian almost wished it hadn’t. The physical world wasn’t friendly.

It was a maelstrom. It was a crashing, churning, Ian-centred vortex in which Ian was being tossed about like change in a dryer. The next thirty-eight seconds were so uncomfortably crowded with activity that they can’t be recounted with any degree of precision. There was a lot of movement, though — whirling, spinning, pounding, nauseating movement. And there were...