Ugly Heaven

by Carlton Mellick III

  The farther they walk, the more artificial the buildings appear. It is hauntingly colorful. The homes around them seem so clean and perfect, as if nobody actually lives in them. Some doors and windows seem almost painted on the sides of the houses, as if they are just decoration and don't actually open.

  "Not everyone here was from America," he continues. "Some weren't even from the era of automobiles and televisions. We do have televisions. There's only one channel but it's fun to watch. We have baseball, too."

  "How do you remember what things used to be like?" Tree asks. "I don't remember anything."

  "Memoria pills," Blue Beard says. "We have developed drugs that bring back memories."

  "Can I get some?" Tree asks.

  "Sure," he says.

  "When? Soon?"

  "Now, if you want. I always carry some around with me. Remembering is my favorite hobby. I used to be an astronaut." He digs into his pockets. "Here.”

  He drops five blue-egg pills into Tree's hand. "I can get you more later."

  They arrive at a small house with a red fence and garden gnomes. Blue Beard opens the plastic gate and pets the gnomes.

  "This is my second home," he says. "You can stay here for a while. Nobody will know you're here."

  Swan is smiling, squeezing Tree's arm.

  "I can't believe there's actually a civilization here," she whispers to Tree.

  Blue Beard opens the front door. No lock. Takes them inside.

  Swan says, "I've been looking for a place like this forever! Thank you!"

  She is too excited to realize it... the difference.

  After they enter the house, the colors disappear. Tree can feel it. He knows there's something wrong. The insides are not as colorful as the outside. It is gray and ashy within. The walls are cracked and blackened. Empty except for melting furniture and an old doll filled with beetle shells.

  It feels like a tomb.

  Blue Beard opens his mouth to say something to Swan but his voice is fading out. She can't understand him. He becomes transparent.

  The window and the world outside of the door grows black. Blue Beard fractures into puzzle pieces and crumbles away. All that's left is a cold dead darkness watching them from outside.

  Swan slams the door, gasping, leaning all of her weight against it so that nothing can get inside.

  "What's wrong?" Tree asks. "What's happening?"

  "It's happened to me before," Swan says. "In the old ruins."

  "What?"

  She shakes her head. "I don't know."

  Salmon looks out of the window. The sun is burnt out. The houses in the neighborhood are dark and lifeless.

  "This town is dead," Swan says. "Just like everything else in Heaven."

  "But where is everyone?" Salmon asks.

  "They were just ghosts," she says. "I knew it couldn't be for real."

  Tree pulls her away from the door and hops outside, leans against the faded red fence. The buildings are now old and rotten. The grass is long dead. The pavement cracked. The sphere is even crumbling in on itself. A large hole has opened up on the east side and has taken out an entire block.

  "It looks like it's been deserted for centuries," Tree says. "But it looks too modern to have been built centuries ago."

  "Time is different in Heaven," Swan says. "For every year that passes on Earth, a hundred pass here. This place could have died five thousand years ago."

  "So what do we do now?" Tree asks.

  Swan kicks rubble across the yard.

  "I think we should stay," Salmon says. "It's not so bad."

  He sits down in a lawn chair, but it disintegrates under him.

  Swan stares up at the dead sun. It is kind of like a moon now. It reflects the ghostly electric-blue light emanating from the hole in the sphere.

  Tree still has the pills Blue Beard gave him.

  "How is this possible?" he asks Swan, showing her the pills.

  Swan just closes her eyes and plops her head onto his shoulder. Her nose rubbing against his sea snail skin.

  Tree holds her and rubs his fingers along her spiny neck.

  Tree and Swan take a walk through the cold ruins, the sidewalk cracking under their feet like sand dollars, Tree using Swan's shoulder like a crutch.

  "I've been searching Heaven for years," Swan says, "trying to find evidence of God."

  "No luck?"

  "I'm convinced he is dead."

  "CLOTTA and Rowak didn't say he was dead."

  "They don't know. They like to think he is in one of the dead cities somewhere. Lingering. But they have never explored those cities. They have no proof."

  "How do they know about the dead cities if they've never explored?"

  "They don't. People have explored the dead cities ages ago, but that was long before CLOTTA came to Heaven. All those explorers are gone now. Died or disappeared in one way or another. But I've journeyed to those cities. A year ago I traveled from city to city. All of them the same. Rubble upon rubble. Like this place. Thousands of years dead. I eventually gave up and went back to CLOTTA's town. But unfortunately I was three shadows heavier and they sent me underground."

  "You don't seem four times more evil than other people," Tree says.

  "The number of shadows does not measure the evil of a person. CLOTTA's shadow is probably twice as evil as all six of our shadows put together. They are just lazy. They want to judge people in black and white. A person with more than one shadow is evil. A person with pink skin is annoying."

  "A person with yellow skin is creative."

  "Right. She isn't sure about any of it. She just makes assumptions. CLOTTA has only known a single yellow in the past. A girl who happened to be a good singer and dancer. Now she thinks all yellows will be wonderful singers. Same with pinks. Pinks aren't annoying people, they just happen to be a color that annoys CLOTTA."

  "You don't seem to like her very much."

  "You have no idea.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Squid-spiders ooze down the back of Tree's thigh.

  "You're not sewn up," Swan says.

  She takes him into a nearby ghost home, finds some needles and thread in a bathroom. The toilet is still intact. It is shaped like a cross between an Earth toilet and the toilet/buckets of Heaven.

  Swan leans him against the wall and sews the lips of his ass together, wiping squid-spiders out of her way.

  "Why are there bugs coming out of me?" Tree asks.

  "It's the circle of life here," she says. "When you eat, your food gets recycled into new life. It might go in as cooked meats but comes out a colony of insects."

  "That didn't happen before."

  "It doesn't usually happen at first, but once your digestive system develops you'll be excreting all kinds of living things. It takes some getting used to."

  "How long have you been in Heaven?"

  "Not too long. Five years maybe. I still haven't gotten used to it. Everything here is as confusing now as it was the first week."

  "Do you see any of the new colors? Have any new senses?"

  "If I would have stayed with my mentor I would have known three new colors by now. He was training me to focus, to tap into the new senses, to explore the new limits of sight and taste and sound. But I wasn't a very good student."

  Swan finishes stitching and bites the thread. "I'm still a baby, though. Just like you.”

  "What's the point?" Swan asks.

  Tree, Salmon, and Swan are lying in the road, gazing up at the other side of the city. The buildings like ugly clouds.

  "The point of what?" Salmon asks.

  "Continuing," she says. "God is dead. All the Heaven cities are dead. Not many people ever seem to cross anymore. And this is it. After we die here, we're gone forever."

  "How do you know we die forever?" Salmon asks.

  "Our souls are flesh now. Once our souls die, we die."

  "Who says?" Salmon crosse
s his legs. "CLOTTA and Rowak are the ones who believe that. Who is to say we don't go to another afterlife after this one? And another one after that?"

  Swan shakes her head.

  "It's possible," Salmon says. "I didn't believe in Heaven and look at me now."

  He turns to the yellow man. "What do you think, Tree?"

  Tree croaks. "I don't even know if I believe we're really in Heaven at all."

  "Why not?" Salmon uncrosses his legs.

  "I don't know what Heaven is supposed to be like. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be like. I'm not sure of anything at all."

  "Well, might as well just believe in whatever makes you happy," Salmon says. "Then at least you're happy until you're proven wrong."

  Salmon rocks his head from side to side, lying between Tree and Swan with a big smile on his face.

  Swan finds Tree an old foot in one of the abandoned houses.

  "At least you'll be able to walk," she says.

  The foot is more like a metal spider. Only there aren't any fangs. Swan clicks a lever on its side and it springs into life. The legs squirreling in the air at them.

  "Here," she says.

  The ball of the spider opens up to reveal a sparkling coil of bone that drills into the bottom of Tree's ankle. The pain is like bananas on the barbecue.

  It locks into place. Tree's new foot is a collection of tiny metal insect legs.

  "Try it out," Swan says.

  Tree takes a step. The spider catches him. He doesn't feel the resistance of the ground, but his legs hold him up. It is awkward and unsteady.

  "It'll work," Tree says. "I think."

  Swan claps her hands and ripples her lips.

  The spider foot bounces Tree's ankle up and down.

  Tree puts the five pills on a concrete table that Salmon made out of the walls of another home. A fire burns in the corner of the room and emits rusty plum sensations.

  "How should we split them?" Salmon asks.

  "I don't want any," Swan says.

  "Why not?"

  "I don't trust them," she says. "Plus, I don't want to remember anyone I'm going to miss."

  "I have to try," Tree says.

  "You can have three," Salmon says to the yellow man. "Your memory is more important to you."

  Salmon takes two of the pills and slips one in his mouth.

  He almost instantly falls backward onto the floor and fades out of consciousness.

  "Is he dead?" Tree asks.

  "No," Swan says. "Sleeping."

  Tree smiles at the spiky fish girl and kisses the blue pill before eating it. He is able to lie himself down before blacking out.

  Tree is sucked back into his past. Into his old human skin. He understands the differences. The tightness of human flesh. The bland patternless skin. The itchiness. The clothes. The hair. The sweating. The testicles. All coming back to him.

  His memory is in a hospital. He works here. He is a master surgeon. Maybe one of the best in the field. He doesn't know this for a fact, but he feels it, he sees it in the way people look at him as he walks through the halls. He is somebody important. He saves lives for a living. They all admire him.

  He's an expert with a scalpel.

  Tree, or whoever Tree used to be, enters an operating room with plump nurses and a birdy old man who waits quietly to be cut open by masterful hands. Surgeon Tree gets right to it. He doesn't need to concentrate. It is all casual. He slides rubber gloves onto his hands and whips a delicate blade off of a small metal table. And like an artist he flicks the knife into criss-crossy patterns lightning fast. Gashes open up on the patient before it even touches him.

  With his precise incisions, he's able to take the old man apart into tiny pieces and then reassemble him into something better. Something that works correctly. His hands move faster than the eyes can see, but Surgeon Tree doesn't need to look at what he's doing. He just stares straight ahead, over the bulbous nurses' shoulders. Checking time on the clock and counting tiles in the ceiling.

  As Tree's mechanical limbs tornado blood into the air, causing a wind that curls the old man's tongue to the back of his wide-open mouth, the nurses burst into a thundering of applause and nod their heads with utmost respect.

  Tree awakes to Salmon leaning over him, jerking him out of his memory.

  "What? What?" Tree cries.

  "Do you remember?" Salmon asks.

  Salmon scrunches Tree's yellow chest skin.

  "Do I remember what?" Tree smacks his little hands away, and looks around for Swan but she is not in the room.

  "Us," Salmon says.

  "You interrupted my memory," Tree says. "I was enjoying it."

  "What was your memory? Was I in it?"

  "No. I was at work. At a hospital. I was a famous surgeon on Earth. I think..."

  "Then you don't know?"

  "Know what?"

  "We were..."

  "Yeah?"

  "Lovers," Salmon whispers. "We were married."

  "Married? Were you a woman on Earth?"

  "No, we are gay. You love me. Don't you remember?"

  "I don't remember anything about being gay."

  "But you are gay. You're my husband." Salmon lays his face across Tree's chest.

  Tree pushes him and backs away.

  "We're soul mates," Salmon says. "That's why we arrived in Heaven at the same time. We're destined to be together forever."

  "I don't believe it," Tree says. "I'm not in the least bit attracted to you."

  "You just don't remember me. I felt the same way when my mind was blank." Salmon grabs a pill from the table. "Here, take another pill. You'll remember me."

  Salmon tries to pry open Tree's mouth but Tree pushes him back.

  "Get away from me."

  Tree exits the rotten house and runs into the moldy streets.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tree wanders through the gray ruins of city, past cars melted into the ground, past mailboxes filled with dust.

  He can hear Salmon calling out for him, so he walks in the opposite direction of the voice.

  It must be a lie. How could Salmon recognize him in his Earth skin? He must be confused. It must be another man from his past that is somewhat similar to Tree. In Salmon's case Swan was right. It is a horrible thing to remember somebody you will miss. Perhaps he misses his lover so much that he has convinced himself that Tree is his husband in a new form.

  Tree heads downtown. He wants to get the pink man out of his head so he can concentrate on his new memory.

  A surgeon...

  He must have been a brilliant man.

  "Give me a hand," Swan says from behind a building downtown.

  Tree didn't realize she was out this far. In the urban section full of micro skyscrapers and trolley tracks. It doesn't look very safe here, ready to collapse on them at any moment.

  Swan is carrying crates into a grocery cart. Full of jars and cans of food.

  "There's some kind of shelter down there," she says. "Most of the food seems well preserved."

  Tree looks through the provisions. They are packaged like food from Earth. Even labeled with commercial logos. But most of the food is unfamiliar. He doesn't understand the writing, but there are pictures of blue and red eel-turtles on some of the cans. And pictures of thorny potato juice on others.

  "What do you think happened to them?" Tree asks.

  "Died out, I guess," she says. "Like everyone else in Heaven."

  "Do you really think we're the only ones left in Heaven?" Tree asks.

  "Besides CLOTTA's community, and the creatures who live on the landscape, yeah. I think we're all alone."

  Tree brushes concrete powder off of Swan's shoulder and then helps her load the crates.

  Tree and Swan in the underground subway system, sitting in the crusty seats of an old subway car, eating pickled lobster-apples and kicking their legs around.

  "So what did the
pill teach you?" Swan asks.

  "I used to be a doctor," Tree says. "A specialist."

  "Good for you," she says, as if she's annoyed that he remembered something about himself.

  "I bet people used to travel all over the world just to receive treatment from me. There must have been procedures that only I could perform properly."

  "You must have been rich," she says.

  "I don't remember being rich yet. Just gifted."

  "What about Salmon? What did he used to be?"

  Tree cringes. "He didn't say."

  "He didn't tell you his memory?" she asks.

  "Well, he said that we knew each other in our past lives."

  "Really?"

  "He said we were lovers. Maybe even married."

  Swan laughs. "You were homosexual?"

  "I don't know. He says so. I don't believe him."

  "Why don't you believe him?"

  "It's impossible. I'm not attracted to him."

  "He looks different now. Perhaps you'd find his human form attractive.”

  "I don't know if I was gay on Earth, but I'm definitely not gay now."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because I'm attracted to you."

  Swan smirks. "So I've noticed."

  "You've noticed?" Tree asks.

  "I can sense these things," Swan says. "It's not really a new sense, more like an extension of sight, but I'm able to see the emotions coming out of you. It's something that develops naturally your first year in Heaven."

  Tree blushes.

  "Don't be ashamed," Swan says. "It's beautiful, the way you feel about me. A bit sudden for such a strong feeling, but I like the way it dances out of your flesh. Like sun-peaches and pools of mercury swimming through the air."

  Tree watches her follow invisible streams in the air. Her sparkler eyes capturing him inside of them.

  She giggles. "Now you're getting aroused."

  "Aroused?" he asks. "How can I be aroused? We can't have sex in Heaven. We don't have the parts."

  "What are you talking about?" Swan says. "Of course we can still have sex in Heaven."

  "How?" Tree asks.

  "CLOTTA didn't take you to her bed?"

  "No."