Supposedly everybody has one moment of greatness. When you die and after they process you, it’s all anyone talks about. Complete strangers come up to you in the street and ask you what you did that was so great and then they go on and on about what they did.
That’s most of the afterlife, really: stories about how great people are. When you meet somebody they say, “So what was it?” and everybody knows that means what was your moment of greatness. When I was first dead and after they processed me, some guy came up to me while I was waiting for a light and asked it, just like that. I said, “What is what?” and he said what was my moment, how did it happen.
I told him cancer and he said yeah, yeah, but what was my great moment. I told him this was it, meeting him, kind of like fuck off, and he asked me what my problem was. Then he said he’d tell me his story first.
The guy dragged his story out for an hour. It was all about how he rescued this woman who’d been tossed into the rapids by some deranged asshole. Apparently this guy saved her. He pulled her to safety in icy water with a current that would’ve dragged an otter to its death.
Everybody in the afterlife has a story like that. Each story I hear is more incredible than the last, and the real bitch of it is that they’re all true. After a while I started to make up stories to fit in, but people could tell they were made up.
Somebody said if I didn’t have a moment I could grieve. He said there was this one woman whose great moment was when she successfully grieved not having had one and they had to send her back to life again.
I went down to the office, which was a dingy little grey brick building with a pub on either side of it. I waited two hours to talk to a guy who told me that I was wrong and that they didn’t make mistakes like that.
I said what about that woman they had to send back to life. He sighed and said where did I hear that one, but he took all my information and said that he’d have someone get back to me.
I waited four months and they didn’t get back to me, so I went to see them again. A woman told me they’d pulled my file twelve weeks ago and why hadn’t I come in sooner. Then she led me into her office and told me to sit down and we went through my file.
My file was my life, right from birth. The woman said it was probably when I was really young. “That happens sometimes. Somebody’ll say something prophetic when they’re only three months old, or they’ll run next door and call 911 during a fire when they’re not even a year and a half, stuff like that,” she said. She said people couldn’t usually remember those moments right away.
The woman said that they were supposed to put a note about the great moment on the front of the file so that it could be found more easily, but you couldn’t find good archivists in the afterlife, or good help, period, for that matter, because people were always running off to the bar to swap stories about the great things they’d done.
She said whoever’d done my file hadn’t even bothered to sign the draft, so she didn’t know who to call and now she’d have to go through it line by line. She said she’d do it, but she was meant for better things. She said when she was fourteen she’d lifted a BMW off her brother after this guy’d run him over. She said she’d get back to me, though, and I said if it was all the same I’d wait while she went through it.
It turned out I did have a great moment. It took a day and a half to find and I could tell she was pissed about having to sit there and go through my file. She told me the story about her and her brother and the BMW twenty-six times, and she told it once to one of her subordinates when he walked by. At one point she insisted on going out for sandwiches and she was gone four hours.
After a day and a half, she stopped and said ha, there it was. She said I was twenty. She said how could I forget if I was twenty. She said she’d never heard of anyone over two or three forgetting their great moment like that.
My great moment was the time I fell off my bike going under the Pretoria Street Bridge. It was April and twenty-five degrees out, but there was still ice under the bridge and my bike hit it and skidded out. I jumped off the bike and landed on my feet and the bike slid out the other side.
There were even witnesses. There were two high-school girls sitting in the grass on the other side who saw it happen. The woman reviewing my file said she could call them as witnesses if I insisted.
I said come on. I said the whole thing was just a fluke and if I hadn’t landed on my feet, then what? I might have skinned my knee, I said, and I didn’t even wind up with either of the girls. The woman said I could’ve busted a kneecap or done worse and landed on my head and she said it wasn’t her problem if I didn’t wind up with either of the girls. She said the file showed they were suitably impressed and if I was a spaz around women that was my own problem, and it was that moment that was great and not the one after it.
I told my story around to a couple of people and they said huh and then they said that was really awesome in a condescending sort of way.
I’ve since gone back to lying. I’ve gotten better at it with practice. People don’t seem to pick up on it. I tell a bunch of different stories and people are always impressed. Especially the people who’ve heard more than one. They said they thought everyone only had one great moment. They said they’d heard that. Even the people we call great really only had one great moment and it’s just that the rest were really good.
They say it’s amazing. They say they’re in awe of me. Sometimes when I walk into a place, though, I feel like people are exchanging looks and that really they know and that they don’t say anything because they feel sorry for me.
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