After he died, he was surprised to find himself at the pearly gates, heavenly hosts singing something jazzy. There was an angel there with a ledger, not Saint Peter. Though the angel went by Peter.
Not a saint though, the angel said. Just Peter. Ask any of my exes.
The gate hadn’t always been there. Lately, heaven had started to cater to the desire of its guests. People like the gates and the imitation Peter. This was one of many innovations that had begun taking place in heaven. Everyone was certain the disruptions would streamline the difficult process of moving into the afterlife, which had turned out more difficult than God had first imagined. Sure, nothing seemed better yet, but outside investors were hopeful.
Despite that, Heaven wasn’t as much of a disappointment as the man had expected. In truth, he hadn’t thought heaven existed, or if it did, it might be a place where everyone sang to the Holy of Holies, loved one another equally and lacked genitals. There was singing yes. Everyone was in choir. Even the four tenors, but it was manageable. Practice was only three days a week for an hour. There was still time to putter in a garden, watch the skies and there were still genitals.
Sometimes his ex-wife came over for dinner. She wasn’t a perfect guest. He’d have preferred his last girlfriend or his friends from childhood, but he couldn’t find them in the afterlife. Maybe they’d been placed in a different city, a different parallel universe. The bureaucracy in heaven was really something. It was the sort of thing you didn’t even ask about because the responsible angel wound up making you feel guilty for asking.
Ugh, how would I even know? I didn’t make this place. You know what I mean. No committee assignment. No accountability. You know how it goes. I can’t even remember the last time I saw my kids.
The angels didn’t have kids. But they were excellent at making you believe they did.
He wasn’t the perfect host either. Their relationship had always seemed good as an abstraction, but it was made difficult in reality. He and his ex-wife had once said horrid things to one another in the aftermath of an affair, and their subsequent divorce. Her hair was brown in heaven and shoulder length. They didn’t argue in heaven. They felt that enough of eternity had already been spent litigating the small things, tooth paste caps, children’s school districts, holidays with new lovers—it was a time for settling.
Do you miss our lives on earth?, she’d asked, at dinner last week. The way the light goes orange, and the way cry of a sea gull makes you feel like the loneliest thing on earth?
There were no seagulls in heaven. Nor an ocean. There were great puffy clouds, which occasionally rained down Mozart or a reading from one of the sacred texts on earth, the Bhagavad Ghita, the Old Testament in a booming voice. It was quite unnerving.
It’s not exactly Paradise, the man said, but what is?
Paradise was the time we drove down the coast of Croatia and took a boat across the glittering ocean to one of the islands and got drunk in the afternoon and snuck off to have sex.
His ex-wife was a romantic. He didn’t remember it that way. Hadn’t they fought after getting drunk? Hadn’t there been a petty argument about what time to book the tickets and for what price? He didn’t say it though.
Sometimes, after dinner and dishes, they had sex under the table, missionary style, with little foreplay. It was brief and unfulfilling. Like life, he joked. She had never particularly enjoyed his humor. He was always forgetting his audience, making jokes to her that she’d never have found funny.
Limitations of the genre, he said.
What genre?
Husband and wife having a conversation.
Sometimes the man thought about walking away on one of those white and glittering roads, which stretched like spiderwebs from his house, thousands upon thousands of roads. Maybe they lead to other heavens, other universes. No one was sure. He felt he had lived his life in a state of indeterminacy, not sure if he should have left his wife or his lover. Not sure if he should have worked as a finance bro until he’d made enough money or practiced tennis from the age of three for eight hours a day like Andre Agassi. Too many roads. Not enough time. Even here.
His ex-wife seemed distant lately. The sky was singing Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You, and the man felt bereft. He had received that gorgeous morning, an invitation for dinner with God. This was huge because heaven was crowded, full to the gills according to those in the know, and God, though omnipresent, sometimes held intimate dinners so everyone could get to know him personally as though he was Jesus. Everyone in Heaven wanted to be Jesus.
These dinner parties were reminiscent of those held on earth, a smattering of people who, if things went well, would have something resembling a stimulating conversation. Except, at the head of the table sat a glowing orb of infinite wisdom who presided over it all.
What do you say to the man who allowed bone cancer in children? His ex-asked.
I don’t think God is a determinist.
Seems like the sort of thing you should ask. Malaria? Colonialism?
I think those sorts of topics are avoided.
Promise me, she said.
He promised her he would but didn’t mean it. Like how Jesus said he’d come back but clearly wasn’t. Jesus liked the afterlife more. No one sacrificed Him here. He wasn’t going back for anything. It was a bit of a sore subject.
***
Lately, after some deliberation, God had taken to sitting at the table in human form. The truth was, the ball of floating infinite wisdom, the politeness of his guests aside, was rather disconcerting. Tonight, He took the form of a short man with thick glasses who smiled affably at everything said. Maybe He was drunk. It was hard to tell with God. He had a strange sense of humor. It was probably just all that time spent alone.
They had red wine, a Malbec, and salmon over a bed of wild rice. At one point, when the conversation had gone beyond the pleasantness of the weather, God told a rip-roaring joke He always told about three drunk whales in a bar, perfectly mimicking their calls before delivering the punch line. Everyone laughed even though they’d heard it before. It was the polite thing to do, and His imitation was really quite striking.
I created them after all, He said. And no one contradicted them even if they knew whales had been part of a long evolutionary process. God was taking credit for everything, like the director of a movie accepting an award as though the key grips and writers had done nothing.
He knew his ex would use the lull in the conversation to ask about the children, about the industrial revolution or the pogroms. The man saw the endless pathways of light leading out from his yard again, the thin strands fading off into an infinity of distances. He cleared his throat and God turned to him, waiting for him to speak.
The conversation later turned to Jesus but was quickly left. Just one more father disappointed in his son.
When he got home, his ex-came by for lunch instead of dinner. She wanted to hear how it had gone. She hadn’t felt this proud of him in ages. She gave him a penetrating look over a glass of wine.
Did you ask?
About what?
Any of it?
He thought about lying to her as Jesus had done, though He swore it was the Gospel writers who had misquoted Him. Or maybe like Adam and Eve when they had lied about eating the fruit. Outside, nothing was happening in the trees or the sky. God was resting. It was Sunday.
I-
She took off down one of those light filled roads that afternoon, leaving him all over again. But it didn’t matter this time. He was still in Heaven. He still had his whole eternity in front of him. Right now, he felt tired to the bone. He lay in a well of light and dreamed of his life on earth where he was still a child. Back when even a summer’s day, light playing through the leaves of the maple in the year, felt like it would last forever.
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Andrew Bertaina has written things!
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image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 