Afterlife (short story)

"Afterlife" is a short story by Stephen King, first published in the June 2013 edition of Tin House, an American literary magazine and publisher. The story was later collected and re-introduced in the November 3, 2015 anthology The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, in which King revealed that the idea came from his own musings on mortality as he grew older. Thought first published for mass consumption a year later, King read the story aloud for a charity event to raise money for scholarships at the University of Massachusetts Lowell on December 7, 2012.^[1] Footage of the reading was uploaded to YouTube.^[2]

"Afterlife" is the experience of a Goldman Sachs investment banker, William Andrews. He passes surrounded by his wife and children, and then enters a bureaucratic vision of the afterlife. There he meets a spiritual caseworker who offers him a difficult choice, seemingly with the knowledge that he has already made the choice many times before. As well as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, in which Goldman Sachs was implicated, the story also refers to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City.

Synopsis

Dying of colon cancer in a hospital bed, William Andrews' wife leans down to him and sees a smile on his face, which she wrongly perceives as being for her. In fact, he is merely ecstatic at the sensation of leaving his body, and therefore all of his pain, behind. At the centre of his vision he sees a pinprick of white light which steadily expands.

He then finds himself standing in a regular office corridor, to one wall of which is pinned several photographs of a company picnic, in which Andrews discerns many faces from his past and, inexplicably, former president Ronald Reagan. Ahead of him he sees a door with "Isaac Harris" printed on it, and inside he finds Harris with a tall pile of folders, which are delivered to him by a pneumatic tube. Harris introduces himself as a spiritual caseworker sentenced to a purgatory, of indeterminate length, where he must convey the choice facing each recently deceased person. This choice is between two doors, which Andrews sees to his left and right.

If he walks through the left door he will live his life again and, apart from a vague and fleeting déjà vu, remember nothing of his conversation with Harris. According to Harris, Andrews has visited his office numerous times and always chosen the left door, despite being told again and again that there is nothing he can do to change any of the bad things he did in his life. (These include slamming the door shut on and severing the tip of his brother's pinky finger when they were children, shoplifting as a young adult, and committing an act of possible date rape with a drunk girl in a fraternity basement, while he himself was also drunk, after which two fraternity brothers took turns with the girl as he watched.) If he chooses the right door he will move on from the cycle of existence forever.

Andrews learns that Harris was the very same (real-life) co-owner of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which produced women's garments and in 1911 was responsible for the deaths of 146 workers, after Harris and his business partner, Max Blanck, locked them in to prevent theft and cigarette breaks, before a fire broke out. Though Harris does not know how long his purgatory will last, and is suffering from ennui in the absence of bodily desires, he still has not fully accepted responsibility for the deaths of his workers. He raves about how he did not cause the fire, he wasn't the one smoking when he should not have been, and that Andrews has no right to judge him when he was one of those responsible for the financial crisis. (For his part, Andrews absolves himself of responsibility with the thought that the corruption mostly went on far above his pay grade.)

Determined to atone for the bad things he has done, as well as to re-experience all of the good things, like his marriage and children, Andrews chooses the left door, despite Harris' adamant warnings that he will not remember anything of their conversation, and will therefore not have a chance to alter the events in his life. Andrews, however, is determined to hold on to at least something that took place. The story closes as Andrews is born in 1956, and from her hospital bed his mother reflects on the seeming impossibility that she is now a parent.

See also

• Stephen King's short fiction bibliography

References