She’d seen a Japanese film in which the newly dead faced a panel of long dead bureaucrats and were asked, on the spot, to choose the moment in their lives in which they would live eternally, suspended in the feeling and the physicality of the chosen moment. This meant that, provided you had lived a good life, whatever that might mean, you could dictate the terms of your own paradise within the limitations of your previous mortal experience. She was sure that the idea for the film was not a new one because she knew that there were no new ideas, especially in films where everything was borrowed and reconstructed and presented with various degrees of verisimilitude. In the case of the Japanese film - or what parts of it she’d seen because it was screened on television in the early hours of a Sunday morning while she drifted in and out of sleep - the level of verisimilitude was high though she had to admit that her state of drifting may have given it more of a feeling of truth than was actually there. Or perhaps her semi-conscious state took away any of the criteria of verisimilitude and gave the film the reality of dreams, given that there was such a reality - but she was not going to enter yet another argument with herself on the nature of dreams and reality.  She was, nevertheless, struck with the idea behind the film and began to trawl the ocean of her own experiences for the one moment she would have liked to be suspended in forever. Her formaldehyde moment. Her destiny.

She thought she had lived a good life, so far. Goodish. Relatively so. Of course she was no saint though the saints she had investigated - and she had, at some stage, been very interested in the lives of saints - generally had had some colourful experiences before the patina of sainthood and time had covered them up and made them less glaringly at odds with the general expectations people have of their saints. According to a faction of the Russian Orthodox Church, the last Tsar of Russia was a saint. He’d been recently elevated and this, she supposed, meant that he had had his interview with the celestial panel. She wondered which sumptuous moment from his grandiose life - a life, he insisted, was simple because he chose to sleep on a camp bed and practice some other minor austerities - he had chosen to suspend himself in. It was difficult to say because all historians agree that he was an indecisive sort of Tsar and, if logic had a bearing on anything, this would make him an indecisive sort of saint.. The time before the panel of pale-faced Japanese bureaucrats must have been a torment, for him and for the members of the panel who had an army of newly dead goodish sort of people to deal with on any given day, at any given moment. But it was interesting to wonder if saints in general – the body of saints as opposed to the renegade individual saint - would chose for their eternal moment a moment from the period where their lives began to aspire to sainthood and they were doing good things like martyring themselves or if they would choose a moment from their past lives when they were living on a more bestial plane. Like the Tsar. She couldn’t imagine him choosing the moment of martyrdom -if that was really what the moment before the death squad was - over the moment when his power seemed limitless and endless and his queen, endlessly desirable. Then again, perhaps he might. His face, she had often thought, was the face of a man who relished pain. At other times she thought it was merely a family face, the same face of a dynasty of rulers weakened by the excesses of intermarriage, softened by pampering, washed out by the glare of a thousand chandeliers. Perhaps she was being unfair. Perhaps this meant she was not a good person after all and would never be asked to choose her moment. And yet she persisted with making choices.

Her choices swung wildly from day to day, depending on how the particular day had gone. If it had been a day at home, in the peace of her garden with her son rattling around inside the house, she chose, of course, that moment when she had first seen her newborn child. A woman’s defining moment. The great icon of Mother. But if the rattling around in the house changed to that string of small demands or that litany of little protests that are the stuff of day-to-day motherhood, she would see that the moment, though romantic, was not all she had cracked it up to be. It was, as it were, uninformed. And in that it was poorer. How could she choose not to know her child? And if she had chosen the moment of birth, then that’s what she would have chosen: forever, never to know her child. She would have chosen a moment about herself. She would have chosen a moment excluding her child.

If it had been a day when she wanted to run away, she chose those sorts of moments when you find yourself on top of a mountain or on a cliff, or watching the sun set behind a line of hills or watching it rise over the ocean. Moments of poetry, transporting moments when you feel you have somehow and in some spiritual sense risen above and beyond all other moments. The trouble, of course, was choosing the particular moment to the exclusion of other such soaring moments. Should she exclude the roar of waves on the Great Ocean Road, should she let go of Venice at daybreak, should she sacrifice the stars and the sea and the temple at Mahabhalipuram, should her moment on the ramparts of Novgorod the Great be forever lost to her for that moment on the deck of a ship where the wave rose in front of her, like a wall of jade? It was hard, choosing the moment. It was harder, perhaps, than the choice an artist makes when he decides to suspend a moment between the sides of his canvas.  She wondered, for instance, how Leonardo had chosen the moment at which to capture the Annunciation. Did he see the Angel in flight before he settled it on the carpet of flowers, its wings still and parallel, its hand raised in perfect line with the table on which the Madonna’s own delicate hand rests? Was the symmetry of the moment or of Leonardo’s making? Perhaps it was of both. What guarantee was there that the moment she might choose was not a moment she had reconstructed in her memory to be more beautiful, more harmonious, more like the Annunciation than it had actually been? Could her own aesthetic sense conspire with the impatient panel to push her into a false choice?

After a week of deliberation and agony, she saw that the Japanese film had taken hold of her in a way that was irrational and she wondered if she was mad. She decided that her dreamlike state during the film had something to do with how that film had seeped into her imagination. It was a rational decision, then, to look at it again in the sober light of day, fully awake to its limitations. She searched through the weekly television guide to find the name of the film but found that the advertised program for the timeslot was bafflingly labelled ‘ Religious program,’ as if the person compiling the guide had given up putting names to things. She could see his point and really, given the nature of the film, or at least the nature of it as she had interpreted it, the label was not too far off the mark. She rang the video shop, she rang her friends, she put out an e-mail at work. All to no avail. No one had heard of the film and furthermore, no one who had been awake at that time of night had been interested in watching a ‘ Religious program.’ Perhaps the film did not exist, perhaps the idea was her own. But she knew this was impossible because she knew there were no new ideas so she went back to choosing her moment because she felt that it was only when she was secure in her choice that the film and its insidious idea would finally lose their hold. She went to her old diaries for clues but the clues were hidden under a jumble of self-indulgent words, words she could hardly bear to read, words that embarrassed her, words that made her think that most of her life was made up of such trivia that the glorious moment, wherever it was, was so drowned in the accumulated rubbish, that it could never be retrieved.

And yet she continued to think about it, turning over her life again and again in search of the paradise moment. One day she was sitting on the verandah watching a blackbird sitting in a tree. It crossed her mind that paradise might be as simple as this: her sitting on the verandah, the bird sitting in the tree. But it was somehow too pat, this simplicity thing. The end of an American film, perhaps, but not the answer to the Japanese one.

Actually, the answer was all too obvious. And she found it just in time to retrieve the normal patterns of her life. The film was just a film, the idea was just an idea and the glorious moment was only glorious because it was preceded by other moments and followed by still more moments and washed over by longer periods of time until it became coloured and clouded and sometimes illuminated by flashes of memory. What was being offered up by the long dead bureaucrats in the film was not a paradise but a hell and that, in the nature of things, no person had ever lived, would ever live, the kind of good life required to deserve eternal residency in paradise. So it made sense that the bureaucrats, the gatekeepers, could only offer up a paradise in keeping with the limitations of the candidates who, like herself, were so taken up with themselves that they believed in their own moments and actually thought that their experiences, no, that one of their experiences, no, that a single moment in that experience could be blown up into a full-scale heaven.

The telephone rang. Reluctantly she left the verandah and the blackbird. It was her colleague, the film buff who had taken up the challenge of identifying the film with a vengeance. He was a Kurosawa expert, or so he said, so the fact that the film was Japanese made it a matter of honour for him. She could tell by the triumphant tone of his voice that honour had been satisfied.

“The film,” he said, “is called After Life.”

She was struck by the peculiarity and the predictability of the title. Of course they’d have to call it something like that, the film-makers, because, while they’d appropriated the idea, they had no idea about its meaning. The proposition, surely, was that there was no After Life. There was only a Past Life, specifically, one moment in the Past Life stretched from Here, wherever that was, to After which had no points of reference except for the past. She felt strongly that the word ‘after’ had no place in the title of the film. She said so. She gave her reasons in a synoptic form because she wanted to get back to the verandah. “I think you’ve misinterpreted After Life,” he said condescendingly. She laughed. She said it was a common problem, this misinterpretation of the after life. He didn’t get it. She put the phone down. She went back to the verandah where the blackbird had chosen his moment to sweep down and take a hunk out of her croissant. Inside, the child was awake, rattling round his room looking for his shoes.