by Mur Lafferty
“You have questions,” He said.
I nodded. He walked slowly to a garden bench that hadn’t been there before, and when He sat all the flowers around Him perked up. After some hesitation and general marveling, I joined Him. He watched me patiently.
“God, I really appreciate … everything. I do, but, things aren’t making sense,” I began, trying to sound as reverent as possible.
“Are you unhappy?” He asked. “Is this not everything you wanted?”
I nodded again. “It is, but, well, I need to understand how it works. Why did I see my grandma with two different husbands? What made Daniel just turn around and say he loved me once we were dead? How did we manage get the house next to the celebrities?”
He smiled and the words appeared in my head. “This is paradise. You can have whatever you want.”
“But what if it’s not what someone else wants? What if I had been in love with Craig Thomas, my main crush from high school, who hated me?”
“You may have had Craig Thomas in your paradise. Craig would not necessarily have had you in his,” He explained patiently.
For the first time since I’d arrived, my euphoria drained away. A pit opened in my stomach and I shivered. “So that’s not Daniel.”
“It is Daniel; it is the part of Daniel that loves you. We could not have replicated the emotion if it did not exist already. It is not Daniel’s soul, however. Daniel has his own paradise elsewhere.”
“Oh, God,” I buried my head in my hands.
“Yes?”
“Is it this way for everyone? You build this illusion around them for their paradise? Heaven is just made of…lies?”
God considered this. “Not lies, but pieces of truths. Life is too complicated to snap together perfectly in the afterlife. Everyone wants something different. Most people aren’t bothered by it, though. The ones who figure it out, anyway.”
I shook my head. Daniel stood at the kitchen window and waved at me, smiling broadly. How had I not seen it before? Daniel was not someone who had ever given affection openly. It had always been hidden by jokes and sardonic comments, peppered with rare instances of the compassion he usually reserved for his girlfriends, and shown to me only if I’d had a very bad day. I had chalked the “new” Daniel up to heaven’s safe environment; since he knew heaven was wish-fulfillment, he no longer had anything to fear. But no, the sardonic part of his personality was gone entirely.
God spoke. Of course He could read my thoughts. “We could have duplicated that part of his personality, but that is not the part that loves you. And you didn’t really want that, anyway.”
“But it’s a part of him. I want all of him!”
“Done, then,” He said, and looked at Daniel, whose smile shifted to become more cynical, but still friendly.
“No, it doesn’t matter. He’s an illusion. I don’t want him now. Not at all.” Tears streamed down my face and my cheeks burned. How was this paradise? “Wait, is this really hell? Is the illusion designed to make me miserable?”
His green eyes were kind. “Are you miserable?”
I looked down at the perfect grass with no weeds. “I wasn’t, till now.” The illusion shattered, it felt like a punch in the gut. I thought Daniel had chosen me. It didn’t matter anymore. I just wanted to be alone.
I breathed deeply, rubbing my eyes, and pressed them hard to make the tears stop. When I finally opened them, the house was gone; all I saw was a small wooden bungalow surrounded by ferns. It featured a green dome with a couple of windows, a wrap-around porch. God was gone. Daniel was gone. The only thing that remained was my garden and greenhouse. I got off the bench and went inside.
The bungalow had three rooms and a small bathroom. It was beautifully simple, the kind of house I’d dreamed of running away to when life – even Daniel – got to be too much. No TV, no computer; just books, a fireplace, a kitchen, and a bed. It was missing only one thing…that’s when I turned around and found her: Jet, my black Labrador from my childhood. She trotted up and put her nose into my hand. I went to the kitchen to put a kettle on for tea and stepped back outside to inspect the greenhouse.
It was empty of all plants except for the oak bonsai. Its perfection was no longer apparent – some of the wiring work I had done hadn’t taken and it stuck out in odd angles. Roots strained out of the water holes in the bottom, begging for pruning and repotting. I finally smiled at this imperfection and resolved to take care of it. After the tea. And after fetch with Jet.
My euphoria had lifted, but I was thankful for this. I felt a little like myself again. I was sad about losing Daniel, but not as if we’d broken up. It was kind of like putting down a bag of potato chips when you knew they were empty calories, no matter how good they tasted. My new resolve was to succeed alone. I smiled when I realized I’d taken the hard way. I decided to tell Grandma Melissa if I ever saw her again. The real her, of course.
Certainly, a small part of me still pined for Daniel, but that feeling had been ever-present since eighth grade, and was something I could ignore when I had to. I was good at it.
A solitary existence, complete with imperfections, might be hard at first, but at least it was honest.
CHAPTER FIVE
I grew to learn time means nothing in heaven. I still received newspapers on occasion, any time I ever wondered about earth or people I had loved. I did remember to check up on my parents, and actually mourned the relationship we’d never had. I’d never been the perfect girl they had wanted; I suppose their perfection seemed so false that I took it as hypocrisy, and ran fast and hard the other way.
It was clear from my checkups that they were spiraling downhill, the dual stress of losing me and Grandma Melissa driving them apart. You’d hope that such shock would have made them treasure each other more, but Mom had taken up scrapbooking on all her free time, and Dad seemed on a fast track to a heart attack. He’d put on at least thirty pounds and generally lived in filth, beer cans piling up around him in the den. Neither of them cleaned. I realized with sadness that I might be seeing him in heaven sooner rather than later.
I missed the handful of friends from the flower shop and the college friends who’d stayed in the area, but I knew I’d eventually see them all at one point or another. I honestly wished them long lives; I had eternity to wait, after all.
I didn’t receive reports that any other relatives had died, but I didn’t trust to ever see the real people if they died anyway; most of us weren’t that close. Solitude had never been something I had enjoyed while living, but I realized that back then I had been afraid of it. Being alone wasn’t so bad. Besides, it was better to make the active choice to be alone than to spend your whole afterlife afraid of it. I was never bored: I tended my garden, I played with Jet, and I read countless books and newspapers. My afterlife took on an air of silent contentment.
I didn’t know if Jet was real or not, but I figured she was. Dogs loved unconditionally, so it would make sense that she would want to be with me. Then again, I remembered that my Sunday school teacher from my youth said that dogs didn’t have souls. Who knew? I didn’t care, honestly, and didn’t want more horrible truths handed to me by the almighty God.
My repotted oak tree survived, although it never was the spitting image of perfection. I loved it for that reason alone - I often felt like it and Jet were the only genuine things around me. I kept it in the greenhouse, but pulled it out on occasion to get some fresh air and light – or, to be honest, to give me a dose of reality.
Loneliness wasn’t an issue. At least, I thought it wasn’t until one day there came a knock at the door.
I raced to get it, Jet barking up a storm behind me. Suddenly thrilled at the prospect of seeing another face, any face, I opened the door.
Daniel stood on my front porch, smiling ruefully. “Kate? Is it really you?”
#
I made him tea. He turned it down. This comforted me; the Daniel I knew had always hated tea.
“So, tell me abou
t your heaven,” I said when we’d settled.
“When I first got to heaven there were, well, a lot of women waiting for me. I spent most of my time with them…at least at first.”
I snorted to hide my disappointment. “I didn’t know you were a Muslim.”
He glared at me. “It didn’t last the whole time. I fell for one of them, Miranda, and we were married. We opened up a soup kitchen downtown.”
“There’s a downtown in heaven? There are homeless in heaven?”
He nodded. “That’s when I realized there was something wrong. In paradise, there’s no one to help. Then heaven created some happy homeless people for me to help. It was hollow.
“Once I figured this out, I talked to Miranda to find out about her life on earth. She spun some story that didn’t really work out. It was pretty confusing; here was my dream girl, smart, funny, and sexy as hell, but I couldn’t get a handle on where she came from, you know? Who she really was. Then God showed up and we talked.”
I rubbed my arms. “Yeah, pretty much the same thing on my end.”
“Really? What was your heaven before this?”
I tried to form a lie and then felt self-conscious about committing a flagrant sin (but then again, he said he had been able to have lots of premarital sex in Heaven, so what did that mean?).
“Eh, it’s not something I’m ready to talk about yet,” I managed to say. “But I figured it out like you did, and then ended up here. Before you, the last person I saw was God.”
“Living alone is the last place I’d expect you to be,” he said.
I shrugged and didn’t meet his eyes. “It was better than the alternative. And it’s been fun. Or at least real.”
“Pretty fucked up, huh?” he said, frowning at his hands. Apparently swearing was cool in heaven, too.
“So what happened after you talked to God?”
“For one thing, I felt like my head was clear for the first time since getting here. And I wondered where you were. So I started walking, going mostly on instinct, till I finally landed here.”
I smiled. Tears threatened to overtake my resolve, so I got up to stoke the fire and hastily wipe my eyes.
“So now that you’re here, what now? Wanna be roommates? I’ve got a small house, but I’m sure adding a room won’t be a problem. This place is pretty easy to manipulate when you want something.”
He didn’t answer. When I looked up from the fireplace he was looking out my window at the road.
“Remember when we said we’d take a trip out west if we had enough money, during Spring Break?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling a blush rise to my cheeks. I had hoped and fantasized that it would be a trip full of epic, movie-worthy romance, all the while knowing, of course, that it would be like every moment with Daniel: fun, spontaneous, and devoid of anything deeper.
“Well, why don’t we do something like that now? I think we should explore.”
I cupped my mug and sat down on my sofa. “If everything here is fabricated, to make us happy, what’s the fun in exploring? Besides that, where would we go?”
He met my eyes. “I don’t mean in this heaven. When I talked to God, I asked Him why He was a bearded English-speaking white guy. Turns out, he’s black to the blacks and Italian to the Italians. When I asked him about whether the Christians were right and everyone else was in hell, he said that everyone had their own heaven. Or hell. I think we can get to those places. What do you think? Want to try?”
I blinked at him, feeling stupid for not having asked myself the same thing. “Uh, well, even if we could explore them, how would we get in? We might have been good enough to get into Christian heaven, but I’m pretty sure we don’t qualify as Jews, Muslims, or Buddhists, just to name a few.”
He opened his backpack and pulled something out a velvet ring box. My face flushed, but he looked more pleased with himself than he did a man in love, so I willed my hands not to shake as I took it. Inside was not a ring after all, but a necklace; a gold chain holding a diamond cross. It was heavy and gaudy, the diamonds sparkling brightly whenever they caught the light. I looked up at Daniel, trying to smile.
He snorted. “Don’t look at me that way. I know it’s awful, but look.” He pulled one out of his own shirt and held it to the light. “Jewish,” he said. The diamonds moved to form a Star of David. “Wiccan,” he said, and it became a five-pointed star. He went through a couple more religions, and the diamonds always formed their signature symbols.
“That’s great, Daniel, but what does it mean? I doubt it takes a necklace to get into heaven these days. I know I wasn’t wearing a cross.”
“It’s a passport, Kate! It marks us as travelers through the afterlife.”
I finally took mine out and peered at it. “How did you get this? Cracker Jack box? Happy Meal? God doesn’t just give them out, does He?”
Daniel stashed his necklace under his shirt. “He said He gives them only to travelers. Some people arrive here and are happy with paradise. They feel this is their reward for a life well lived. But some people aren’t done with their journey. They have more traveling to do. So He sends them on a kind of walkabout to wander the afterlives. Sometimes He has jobs for them to do, He said, but I don’t think that’s us.”
I stared at the pendant for a moment. I was happy here in heaven, in my solitary bungalow with my dog and my real plant. Daniel didn’t love me; that was obvious by the description of his heaven. But eventually he had sought me out. That meant something. It meant more than most of the things that had happened since my death.
I slipped the necklace over my head and inside my shirt. “So, how does one pack for a trip through the afterlife?” I asked.
In the end, we packed some books on world religions and history, the special fuzzy socks that I liked to wear at night, a notebook, and my teapot. When we were done, I looked around my little house. It was time to go. Jet wagged her tail by the door. “Jet wants to go, too.”
“I don’t see why not, unless she’s not real,” Daniel said.
“I think she is,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”
CHAPTER SIX
To my surprise, once we left the pearly (wrought iron) gates, the road was unlike the one I had walked on my way to heaven – or I suppose I should start calling it Christian heaven. The sky was a clear blue, not the grayish white blandness I remembered, and the road was a white asphalt with golden arrows pointing back toward heaven. We ignored them.
After walking that road for some time, we approached a massive roundabout with dozens of roads branching out from it like spokes, each stretching to the horizon. Each road was composed of a different material; one was made of packed dirt, another of small stones, and another of red clay. Wooden boards made up yet another, and another seemed to be made from woven reeds.
“Where do you want to go first?” I asked, turning in a circle. I tried to count the roads, but lost count after twenty or so.
“Dunno. Where do you want to go?” he asked, kicking a stone. It bounced across the road and into the center of the roundabout: a flawless bed of white sand. It rolled a couple of feet and came to rest at the edge of the circle.
I snorted. “This isn’t dateless Saturday night, Daniel. You honestly have no idea where you want to go?”
I stepped into the sand bed, which was surprisingly firm, and crossed to the stone. It lay in front of a road lined with cobblestones. “How about this one?”
He shrugged. “Works for me.”
I wondered how smart it was to wander blindly into an unknown heaven, but this was an adventure after all, so we headed forward with purpose. The white sky never changed, but after a while I began to wonder how long we had traveled. My feet felt fine, but mentally I began to drag. I nearly wept with relief when Daniel suggested we stop.
“Look, clearly there’s no night here, but I’m getting sick of this scenery,” he said, stamping down a circle in the tall grass beside the road. The road had become hilly; the drab lan
dscape had gained grass, but not much else.
“Or lack thereof,” I said.
He pulled some granola bars from his backpack and passed me one. I tore into mine, but he held onto his. “So where do you think this one goes?”
“Dunno,” I said, my mouth full. I was suddenly ravenous, eyeing his unopened bar.
“Don’t you think we should be prepared?”
“Well, we’ve got this lovely white-guy bling that’s supposed to keep us safe, right?”
He shook his head. “First, don’t say ‘bling.’ You sound like a moron. Secondly, that’s the thing. I don’t think they’re supposed to keep us safe; they’re just our passport into the heaven. What happens after that is up to us.”
I swallowed. “So we’re just wandering around without map or any means of protecting ourselves?”
“Pretty much. But it’s not as if we could have gone down to the heaven Walmart and purchased guns before we left. I’m pretty sure there aren’t guns in heaven. Or Walmart, now that I think about it. And if there are Walmart guns, the waiting list has got to be a bitch.”
“We can’t be killed, can we? I mean, we already did that.”
“I don’t think so, but…” he reached out and pinched me. I slapped his hand away. “People can hurt us. Or lock us up.”
“You’re just a bucket of sunshine, aren’t you?” I tried to keep my tone light.
“Just thinking out loud. Wondering if we should stock up on, I dunno, afterlife mace or something.”
I laughed. “I’ll let you know if I find any, and then I’ll pick up two.”
He grinned at me. “So, do you think we can go to hell?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, but would you really want to? I think hell is a lot like pirates.”
He stared at me with so much confusion that I laughed. “I mean that they’re both shown in movies and stuff as funny things. Pirates versus ninjas, pirates versus zombies. It’s all fun. But pirates were terrible people - murderers, rapists, thieves - and they probably smelled really bad. Hell is always a place with fire, but no one gets burned, and it’s full of tax collectors and demons that are easy to outwit. I don’t think hell is really a place we would want to visit. Especially if you’re right about this necklace not being able to keep us safe. Imprisoned in, say, the pagan heaven would be different than being imprisoned in hell. Just my guess.”