I died last Sunday in a Burbank hospital while my third wife Rachel stood out of earshot from the nurse, whispering into her cell phone, scheduling an appointment with her colorist. I believe the last words I ever heard her speak were ‘I have a funeral to attend, Stefan. Now quit being a bitch and bump somebody.’
Rachel always got what she wanted.
Hell isn’t anything like I’d imagined. There is no devil or gates or flames and in the commissary where every morning I serve food alongside a telemarketer named Dave Buntz they have candy and burgers. Almost everybody smokes and carries a cell phone while all day and night, even though I’ve seen no cars, I hear them honking. There are towering, windowless structures made of concrete. In the lobby of my building people gather around a faulty vending machine to gossip and place bets on new arrivals. There’s the constant smell of smog and failure. Televisions are everywhere and always on. I’ve seen no animals or children. I arrived alone last week under the dark of night in what could only be described as a motor home with no driver and no bathroom.
In two weeks Dave will have finished his ten years so he just received his Next Life Assignment. He’ll be reincarnated as a fatherless baby girl somewhere in Kenya. Dave was concerned about the heat so he submitted his appeal to the Next Life Board, telling them he’d prefer Born Poor in Norway or even Ward of the State in Kentucky. Nobody on the Next Life Board seemed to be paying much attention; but afterwards, while sharing a cigarette in the stairwell with a hit man named Chad, Dave was told not to get his hopes up, that lots of people wanted Born Poor in Norway because of all the free health care and state mandated vacation time.
I’ll get my Next Life Assignment in fifty years because, for whatever reason, I was judged to be five times more evil than Dave and all the other Ten-Years. That’s how it works down here: ten years for guys like Dave, fifty for guys like me. But as Dave likes to point out, at least I’m not an Eternity, forced to wear a red vest and tight slacks, wandering around with nothing to look forward to other than another evening on the treadmill or an occasional Nietzsche sighting.
Television Preacher With Chins snores while he sleeps and sits in our room all day watching television, refusing to be seen in his red vest and tight slacks. He’s got that could give a shit Eternity look about him and isn’t much for small talk. When I moved in and reached to shake hands he just sat down with a scowl, pointed to the masking tape running down the middle of the room and said, ‘cross that line and I kill you.’ I almost pointed out that I was already dead, but decided not to make waves, especially on my first day.
Tuesday morning Joe Stalin slammed his tray down in front of me and demanded an extra plate of chicken wings. While they claim to be strengthening it, the training program here still isn’t great, so I turned to my supervisor and with a raised eyebrow and a shrug asked for guidance. Troy leaned over, cupped a hand over his mouth and whispered ‘give Joe a few more wings’ before turning, tapping his watch and giving a disappointed look to Attila The Hun, who was tucking in his shirt, matting down his wet hair and discreetly punching his timecard. I reached with my tongs to place more chicken wings on Joe’s tray, but he’d already sat down alone near the arcade games, where I saw Bobby Oppenheimer shout, “Where’s my fucking quarter” as he kicked a tired Ms. Pac Man machine.
Every week-day at noon I grab lunch and walk downstairs with my Death Report and a pencil to meet my Truth Counselor for Lifewatch. We sit in front of a giant television in a windowless room that still smells like the aerobics gym it used to be. Today, Fran stubs out her cigarette, pushes play, and on the screen I see a creative type in media glasses pitching ideas for a credit card commercial to a roomful of pissed off suits. Then I see the creative type on the streets of what looks to be Manhattan, saying ‘fuck you’ to a homeless woman with outstretched hands.
I tell Fran to stop the tape and point out this isn’t my Lifewatch. She looks up from her chilidog with a don’t tell me how to do my job look on her face. I shrug and tell her again. Fran asks to see my Death Report, locates my Hell Number, then squints through her glasses at the spine of another tape sitting on her desk. She tells me she has to get through thirty fucking Lifewatches today while shoving my tape in the VCR and cursing me for putting her behind schedule. Then she walks with a tub of melting ice cream over to the far corner of the room where she plops her slack ass down on a leaking beanbag.
On the television and through a cloud of cigarette smoke I see myself with 70’s sideburns kneeling down to tell my six-year-old son I’ll be gone for three nights on business. Then I blow a grand playing Pai Gow, get drunk on Stoli and bang a nameless call-girl in a comped suite at The Flamingo. I watch myself slap my second wife and spit on a cab driver in Buffalo. I cut to the front of a line at a Dallas airport, flash hundreds of middle fingers and urinate twice on my agent’s driveway. I misbehave and sell my boat for alimony. Afterwards, my Truth Counselor turns off the monitor, hands me a workbook and leaves me alone with a breakfast burrito to work out my problems under a flickering light bulb.
Richard Nixon lets me call him Dick and occasionally spots me when I bench press down in the basement gym. He doesn’t use the machines and spends most of his time standing around in a sweat suit bitching about his new roommate, a slave-trader from Georgia who hogs the remote and only showers on weekends. Dick is a Fifty-Year, but the other day in the steam room he reminds me of his ambitious environmental program, tears up while talking about his daughters and overall makes a pretty decent case for being a Ten-Year. I place my hand on his bare shoulder and tell him I care. He thanks me with a smile and disappears through a wall of steam, wrapped in a towel that freefalls to the wet floor as he shimmies into a bathroom stall.
The other day at Lifewatch I’m shown tapes of Terry, the television show I hosted for two decades before I died and ended up here. I watch as a parade of transvestites and grotesques are booed and humiliated. I see heavy women confront angry men and sit through an entire show devoted to toddlers who eat too much. I interview the unloved and the unlucky. I see actors dressed as security guards pretending to break up a fight between three black women and a fake Nazi from Toledo. I prod, push and preen in front of the camera. I see myself dramatically revealing the results of a paternity test while we broadcast on a screen downstage the triumphant reaction of a tattooed man in the green room. I dangle a microphone beside a disfigured albino wearing ruby red slippers and a dwarf dressed as Toto while they exchange wedding vows in front of a transvestite named Phil. I produce fake tears and ask a woman with no limbs about her sex life. Then I page through my Death Report and in large red font under a section titled Contribution to Society find the number Zero.
I’m awoken by the sound of a ringing phone very early in the morning. With my bare foot I kick the top bunk in an effort to rouse Television Preacher With Chins, but he just keeps snoring into his drool drenched pillow. Then I realize the ringing is coming from my still unused, Hell-issued cell phone, which is on the nightstand next to a coffee mug full of dick shaped erasers.
“Who the F is this?” I ask, polite but firm. I hear coughing on the other end of the line and coming from the television in the background a man explaining how to make big money breeding gerbils.
“Terry, tell me one Goddamn thing.”
I recognize the voice. It’s Dick Nixon.
“It’s five o’clock in the morning, Dick,” I tell him.
“Tell me why Jack Kennedy’s privileged little can isn’t down here with us.”
I hear ice cubes rattling. The president belches quietly.
I hear ice cubes rattling. The president belches quietly.
“Dick, I’m not sure how anything works down here,” I say. “Maybe he’s in another section?” I add. “One for Democratic presidents.”
“Cocksucker,” he slurs, followed by a long uncomfortable silence. Then he takes a couple more pulls of his cocktail and clumsily hangs up.
I can’t quite get back to sleep so I walk down the street to the hundred story mall, take the escalator up to sixty, and sit down on a plastic bench in front of the Sunglass Hut, where I’m approached by a shortish man with a lot of gel in his hair. He’s wearing an ink black suit.
“Josh Greenberg,” says the man, producing both a wide smile and his hand. “Huge fan of the show, Terry,” he says, somewhat sincerely. “You, my friend,” he says, gently placing his hand on my chest. “Are a national treasure.”
“Thank you, Josh,” I say, while noting the ironic presence of a Sunglass Hut here in Hell, where there is no sun.
“Listen, I’m a talent agent. Well, was a talent agent,” he says. Then he makes a gun with his hand and holds it to his temple. “Suicide,” he whispers. “I’m a Ten-Year. How about you?”
“Fifty-Year,” I tell him. “I just got here.”
“Fifty-year?” he exclaims with fake outrage. “You shouldn’t even be here, Terry.” He shakes his head in astonishment. “This place is so fucked.”
I’m flattered and am about to tell him so when one of his cell phones rings.
“I have to take this, Terry. You understand,” he says, while searching his pockets for a business card, presumably to hand over in some futile effort to generate some future business, sometime in the distant future, after we’ve been reincarnated as children of long-haul truckers or Gypsies or geese. Josh comes up empty and instead tells me with his hand to ‘call him,’ then turns and walks towards the food court while the bullet hole in the back of his head winks bye-bye.
I’m flattered and am about to tell him so when one of his cell phones rings.
“I have to take this, Terry. You understand,” he says, while searching his pockets for a business card, presumably to hand over in some futile effort to generate some future business, sometime in the distant future, after we’ve been reincarnated as children of long-haul truckers or Gypsies or geese. Josh comes up empty and instead tells me with his hand to ‘call him,’ then turns and walks towards the food court while the bullet hole in the back of his head winks bye-bye.
On the street outside my building, twenty-four hours a day and since I arrived, a bunch of Eternities are working some kind of construction. I have no idea what they’re putting up or repairing or tearing down, but there are dozens of them dressed in those dumb red outfits, operating jackhammers, earthmovers and crawlers in between smoke breaks and the occasional fistfight.
I navigate my way through the construction and across the street to check out the karaoke bar I’ve been hearing so much about. Inside, I see half of Milli Vanilli staring into an empty shot glass, walk past him and take a seat in the corner just as Joey Mobutu is finishing ‘You Light Up My Life’ and taking a deep bow before an indifferent, largely Asian crowd. I crane my head to find a waitress but instead see a fat Japanese woman standing near the restrooms, pointing in my direction and shouting Tay-wee, Tay-wee. Minutes later I’m staring into a semi-circle of shrieking Japanese women, all of them furiously snapping pictures and feeding me shots of Sake.
I’m pleased to be recognized.
An hour later I find myself onstage, sweating under the lights and slurring the words to ‘Suspicious Minds,’ while trading winks with a big-chested Eternity I recognize from a popular soap opera down here called “Dead.” Later on we Macarena in perfect unison before I crawl home and pass out.
The following morning they put a paper mache New Arrival hat on my head and lead me and hundreds of other New Arrivals through an unlit underground tunnel that smells like rain. We’re instructed not to speak or remove our hats. A man with a British accent says he’s starving and we’re told that later there will be bread and maybe some beans. We walk in silence for a couple hours and I begin to fear the worst: that for the last week we’ve been on a kind of Damnation Probation and, having failed, are being processed into a more sinister section of Hell, with worse food, more construction and no Karaoke.
And then, up ahead and above a sea of paper mache New Arrival hats, I see the tunnel dead end into a set of massive iron doors. Through a bullhorn someone in charge commands us to stop and the crowd slows, bunching up like rush hour traffic. People around me begin to perspire. After a few minutes I hear the sound of something hydraulic decompressing and the iron doors begin to part slowly, allowing a beam of light into the tunnel, which widens with anticipation as the doors continue to open.
Two frightened men beside me grasp hands.
Two frightened men beside me grasp hands.
At the front of the crowd the man with the bullhorn shouts ‘fifteen minutes, people’ and motions with his arm for everyone to follow as he walks through the doors and disappears up a stone staircase. I’m next to the last one through and walk up perhaps fifteen steps before joining everyone else on an enclosed landing that butts up against a gigantic Plexiglas barrier. “This is Heaven, assholes,” bellows the spherical man with the horn. Behind a clique of pornographers I crane my neck to get a better view and through the glass wall I see Heaven laid out before me.
For the first time in several years I say the word beautiful.
I see laughing children chasing each other up and down vibrant green hills. I see something resembling the sun rising in the distance. There are Labradors and Clydesdales and families of running deer. I see an ice blue lake stretching into eternity and an old couple doing the backstroke. There are people of all shapes and colors and ages. I see untouched white snow and sand dunes and a sleeping volcano. I see a pair of donkeys that look to be in love.
Then, through some towering Redwoods and a field of wheat, I see a thatch of blonde hair atop a young boy’s head. I push past the pornographers and press my face against the glass and a chill runs through my torso when I see him. It’s my son Sam looking lanky and glowing with love. He’s tossing a silver football back and forth with an athletic man wearing sunglasses and a Padres cap.
I bang on the Plexiglas trying to get his attention but he doesn’t hear me. The spherical man with the bullhorn stands, cocks his head and scrunches his brow in my direction. I look up to climb the wall but there’s no traction and no end in sight. Sam is perhaps one hundred feet away but might as well be with The Living. I want to bust through the wall, past the donkeys and dunes and straight to my only child. I cup my hands and scream his name while delivering a kick to the glass. He glides up a riverbank and hands the football to an old black woman in a dashiki before sitting down cross-legged on a tree stump no more than ten feet in front of me. I see bullhorn guy point and then two bearded men in official looking uniforms start towards me. I take several steps back and then run full force and kick both feet against the glass. Sam turns his head very slowly and looks right at me. His blue eyes are lit up like winter sun ice. His hair looks like it’s made of feathers and his skin glows a warm honey brown.
His face.
There is no anger or guilt or death or ills.
There are no regrets or grudges or paths not taken.
I see no spite, no sarcasm and no trouble.
Only love.
I’m seeing him for the very first time.
I smile and start to mouth ‘I love you,’ but then with a sudden jolt the beards upend me and carry me screaming through the crowd and over towards the stone staircase. I crane my head to see Sam but a gaggle of shaved head tattoo guys are in the way.
I’m dragged down the staircase.
“Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmm,” I shout, in one long drawn out wail that fades into a distant echo as I collapse into the dark tunnel and the iron doors swoosh shut behind me. I’m tossed into the back of a golf cart and driven in silence back to my room, where I’m force fed three Ambiens and fall asleep watching “Dead.”
In my dreams I’m back with The Living and am given a second chance as a father. Instead of half listening while Sam tells me about his turtle who hasn’t woken up in days, this time I’m kneeling down with him near the backyard garden, planting a small flag on a makeshift grave while improvising a prayer for fallen pets. I’m sober and present as Sam is onstage telling Willy Loman he’s ‘a dime a dozen.’ I lie in the snow at Fender Park beside a seven-year old Sam, watching in silence as our cider scented breath disappears into the swaying pine trees above. And instead of spending the weekend in Saugatuck with the woman who will become my second wife, I’m trick-or-treating through East Grand Rapids with my son, who is dressed as a pumpkin, his tiny hands outstretched, eyes wide with wonder.
I sit on the edge of his bed and tell him through a smile that tomorrow we’ll drive west until we reach the shores of Lake Michigan, where we’ll climb aboard my sixteen foot Sunfish and push off, just the two of us, the bottomless blue lake below, the sun hovering over Wisconsin, a distant Holland lighthouse our lazy compass. He closes his eyes and squeezes my hand and tells me it sounds like the perfect day. Then I’m at the rudder while Sam is sitting cross-legged at the bow, wrapped in a red life jacket, squinting into the distance. The lake spray on the bow looks like a million white diamonds bursting with light. Sam calls to me over the thumping waves, says something I don’t hear and points up into the sky. I look up to find the only cloud that’s in motion, soft as a velvet pillow, rising peacefully into the heavens. Sam says something again but I still can’t hear him. I stare hypnotically into the cloud before slowly it darkens, comes to a stop and gradually morphs into Television Preacher With Chins, who is looming over me, lighting a Pall Mall and telling me we’ve run out of toilet paper.
It’s eight o’clock in the morning and I’m late for work.
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Nikki Stern
Lauren J Barnhart
Sandra Stephens
Mortimer Hayden Smyth
Saturn Smith
Rachel Tepper
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Comments
Rated
Anything I say will see trite and petty compared to what you have written.
Thank you for writing this.