The Question

I thought of the question in philosophy class, and the story became its own thing.

“Why do you want to go to Heaven?”

I’ve been hearing this question for a while now; for how long exactly, I can’t honestly say. Time doesn’t seem to pass here. Everything seems to happen in a single moment. I tell myself that the seemingly frozen concept of time is the result of there being no clocks in the corridor I’ve been inching my way through. My watch, which I’ve kept on my wrist at all waking hours since I got it for my high school graduation all those years ago, seems to have slipped off during my transition over.

A part of me knows I should be upset about the missing watch, but the majority of me thinks it doesn’t matter anymore, thinks that maybe keeping track of how much time has passed isn’t what really is important. One second I’m on my way to visit Elle in Madison. It’s a few months after her mother’s death, and I want to make sure she’s still doing alright. The next moment I’m in this line. The time between these two things doesn’t matter; what matters is the event.

I take another step forward.

“Why do you want to go to Heaven?” I’m now close enough to see the source of the question past the few that remain ahead of me. She doesn’t slowly come into view, but it just appears there after a step. A woman stands behind a podium. She appears to be in her mid-20s, brown hair. Two streaks of blond frame the sides of her face, which is the face of the pretty girl in school.

She hangs her head down, not looking over the podium which she leans against, but at whatever rests on it, if anything. The person in front of her, dwarfed by the height of the podium, remains silent. I notice the Source bobbing her head slightly, as though devoted to showing she is hearing every word the current answerer has to offer.

Now I move forward once again, the person at the head of the line apparently done with their turn. I can’t see where the person went, and�"

“Why do you want to go to Heaven?”

Again the Source doesn’t bother to look past from her towering podium to look at the person before her. The latest to stand at the front of the line looks up at her, and I believe I see a glimpse of hope in his face before I’m moving forward once again and -

“Why do you want to go to Heaven?”

I have no idea where the hopeful man has gone, and it is a moment before I realize that it is now my turn. Now it is my turn to answer the question that I have heard an infinite amount of times before this moment.

I look up at the Source, searching my mind about why I should gain entrance to Heaven and an eternity of pleasures and rewards. My good deeds pass through my mind, searching for what would allow me into Utopia, but for each good memory that runs across my mental screen, an image of the wrongs I have witnessed during my life follows.

I remember the time I pulled a kid out of the road just before a car was about to strike him down. Quickly following behind that memory is the image of a child, my niece, at 6 years old. Her skin seems to have given way to her bones, her face more resembling a skull than the plump face of a child. She wouldn’t make it a year after the initial diagnosis.

As I remember my days as a marine, helping to free the enslaved people of a corrupt dictatorship, I remember the labor camps, the piles of bodies bulldozed into the pits which served as their final resting place, and the look of the swollen, hungry bodies of the young and old.

Each good memory I have is set off balance by a horrid one, unnecessary death and suffering allowed by the Great God that asks me to justify my placement into Its Eternal Paradise. Do I really want to go into the Utopian land of a being that doesn’t bother to have the give-a-damn to prevent at least some of the chaos that reigns on Its planet?

When this final thought enters my mind, the Source does something that I don’t expect; she looks up and makes eye contact with me. This is the first time I see her silvery eyes. I can’t help but to stare into them, which seems to have a weird effect on me. The longer I stare, the larger the eyes seem to become. The Source’s face gets lost in the light; the podium quickly follows. Now all that I see is the silver of the eyes and �"

The silver is gone. In its place is a conference room, complete with big, leather chairs in one of which I am seated. It looks to be a room where one would expect important business-types would gather to make important business-type decisions. I look around and find a door. I want out. I go to it, attempt the knob. There is no give in it, not even the slight turn of a locked door. Nevertheless, I pull on the door, but it doesn’t budge.

I turn away from the door, take a few steps, and get my first view of the windows. I cannot say whether the view was good or not, for there was no view. Outside the windows wasn’t a great city landscape, bright white light, or eternal darkness, but nothing at all. This goes beyond simple sight and smashes into all my senses, physical and otherwise. There are no words for what that emptiness does to me, but as close as I can get to what really happens to me is this: I stand mesmerized by the lack of anything beyond.

“…time I come here and y’all are always starin’ at those windows as though something important is out there.” The speaker of these words stands behind me. If I had to guess, he’s standing just inside the door. I take in all his features as I turn around. He is a tall, dark man with salt-n-pepper hair. He wears a matching goatee and blue, wire-rim glasses on his face. His blue-grey, pin-striped business suit is perfectly fitted and comes off as very expensive. This is a man dressed for success.

“Are you ready to start this thing? I’ve got other business to attend to.” His impatience doesn’t come across in his tone or body language; it merely exists in his words. In fact, a smile teases at his lips, suggesting I just missed an inside joke.

“Wha-what are we starting?”

He takes out a folder from the air, simply reaching back his back, and it’s there. “It seems that Liz got the impression you didn’t want to go Heaven, and policy states that you don’t get to go to that other place.”

I stare at him blankly, judging by the wink of his eye I missed another inside joke. He goes on, “We are here to work this all out. It’s a freewill issue. You have to want to get into Heaven.” I continue to stare, dumbfounded by what’s happening. “You are David Nix, right?”

The sound of my name after all this snaps me back out of the confusion, “Yeah, I am… Who are you?”

The man smiles, “That’s slightly complicated. You call me Gigi though. Sounds pretty girly, but it’ll work for you.” Gigi takes a couple steps toward me, reaches out his hand and places it on my shoulder. “What do you say to us getting started, eh?”

Before I can respond, the conference room gives way to a dark movie theater. Gigi and I are sitting behind two shadows, one girl and one guy. On screen, Sam Spade is telling the police off in his classic Bogart voice, “And the only chance I’ve got of catching them, and tying them up, and bringing them in, is by staying as far away as possible from you and the police, because you’d only gum up the works.”

I begin to turn to Gigi to ask him why we are here, and then I know. My first date with Shannon. The left shadow ahead of us moves a little closer to the right, and the outline of a face becomes clear against the backdrop of the movie screen. That silhouette is one I’ve had the opportunity to see from this day until the day I showed up in the corridor. The second shadows turns to face the first, and the two converge in an embrace of lips. Shannon sat on the left, me on the right.

The feelings of that moment well up in my body, filling me with a sense of euphoria and purpose. I knew then that I had found my soul mate, the woman I would gladly spend the rest of my life with. Like the view outside the windows in the conference room, there are no words to convey the feeling of love that passed between us in that kiss.

Gigi grabbed my hand and smiles, “One more, then we talk.”

The pressure on my hand begins to increase exponentially and a moment later, Shannon is in front of me, lying on a hospital bed, screaming. This is the birth of my first child. Shannon never looked so beautiful has she had that day. Sweating, red in the face from effort, hair matted to her forehead, and dressed in a hospital gown, she wasn’t done up like the models on the covers of fashion magazines or stars of Hollywood movies, but she possessed more beauty than any of them. She was going to bring us our first child, and nothing could have made her more beautiful than that.

Before I fully adjust to the change, another image of my wife overlaps the first, and then a third overlaps with both of them. Each successive image of my wife is slightly older. Her hair is different lengths at the same time, the crow’s feet of her eyes growing deeper from the laughter we’ve shared over the passing years.

“These are the feelings that you’ll receive in Heaven,” Gigi says, but I ignore him and continue to be captured in the moment.

Unlike in the movie theater, I am not separate from these scenes. In these, I get to play the part I had in the past. I help coach my wife through the process, help her to remember to breathe and allow her to crush my hand when she pushes. Three times Dr. Johnson hands me the scissors to cut the three cords that, when severed, officially welcomes our children into the world.

I hold the three babies in my arms for the first time all over again. Christine, Alexander, and Michelle stopped crying the instant they were placed in my arms. I made the same promise to all three of them in those moments, “The world is a bad place, but I promise to do my best to prepare you for it and keep you from as much unnecessary harm as possible.”

“In Heaven, you’ll receive all of God’s gifts, just as you’ve received on Earth,” Gigi speaks just as I make the promise to my children and a memory is jarred loose from its resting place.

“I’ll show you the gifts that your God gives,” I scream at Gigi and grab him.

The scene changes again. The road is poorly lit, and the moon’s light is absorbed by clouds overhead, but I’ve never managed to forget this night no matter how hard I’ve tried. Somehow Gigi has fallen into the role of Shannon this time. Seeing Shannon violated by Gigi overlapping her pisses me off further, even though I know that it was probably my fault he’s there. I have brought us here.

Shannon and the younger me laugh as they walk home from a rare date night. This is six months after the birth of Christine, our first child, and the brief break from parental responsibility is welcome. Gigi, perhaps knowing what is about to happen, asks, “Why?”

“This is why I don’t want to go to Heaven. Any god that would allow this couldn’t create a Heaven I want to spend eternity in!” My yelling echoes unnoticed by the world around us.

We get to the door of our first home and can already hear the all too familiar cries from Christine. Something about these cries is different though; they seem tortured.

I don’t bother with trying to use the door knob and risk it being locked. I kick down the flimsy door and immediately call the name of the babysitter, Richard Buck. There is no answer but the continuing cries of Christine so I rush to the source. There I find her alone and bloodied where no child should be.

I hear a sound from the closet, cross the room in a single stride, and throw the door open. Inside I find Buck, naked from the waist down and still aroused by what he had done. I grab him by the neck and slam him against the wall, just to throw him out of closet and to the floor.

Sometime during this Shannon/Gigi walks in and screams. “What happened!? What happened to my baby!?!”

Her voice seems distance to me though as I climb on top of Buck. Some say they don’t remember what they did when caught in a fever of black rage, but I remember each and every minute detail. The feeling of Buck’s facial bones snapping like twigs beneath my fist, the splatter of his blood against my face, and how his face started to feel mushy as I keep pounding away.

Later at the hospital, a police officer would tell me that I almost killed him. One or two more hit would have sent him to the depths of hell were he belonged. Not getting those last two hits is the second biggest regret I’ve had in my life. The first is leaving Buck with my child.

I’m break out of the moment when Gigi, now separate from Shannon, touches my shoulder, and changes the scene. “That’s enough.We’ve seen enough.”

Enough?!

Without bothering to check where Gigi has taken us, I grab his jacket and the scene gives way to a cold, winter night. In front of us is a pile the size of a large, two-story house. The smell is overwhelming, and I feel the urge to vomit beginning to rise up in me. The smell is no worse than the sight.  The pile is made of human bodies; the smell is the stench of decaying human flesh. These people were killed solely because they dared call their god a different name that the ruling religion of the nation.

I know Gigi is going to change the scene quickly, but I refuse to give him control again.

Now we are surrounded by bloated skeletons bound by chains as though their captors think they actually have the strength to escape.

Now we are in a school hallway, just outside of the room I taught in for 30 years. We are alone, but gunshots can be heard all around.

Now we are in a dank, dark room littered with drug addicts either passed out or passing out on the thin blankets they call beds.

I can feel Gigi struggling to take control, and there are moments where we go where he wants. My first kiss, that night with Tara Bosworth in high school, and my first time sailing the ocean after retirement flash in front of me, but each time we don’t show where I expect us to, we immediately jump again. We pass before the starving, the homeless, the enslaved, the tortured, the raped, the dying and the dead. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, entire families and hordes of people subjected to the harsh realities of the world.

The jumping and the scenes tire me out, and Gigi finally manages to take control. The boardroom where we started out appears before us. I hadn’t noticed until now, but Gigi is crying silently to himself as tears fall down my face as well.

To my surprise, he smiles underneath the tears. “Thank you. The world is fucked up. There is much to do on that messed up planet, and it needs people like you.” I stare at him, wanting to respond but left speechless, so he goes on, “One of the many things that has gone wrong down there is your understanding of what goes on up here. We know many things, and we can do many spectacular things, but we can’t control what you people think or what you do. Mankind casts its own lot.”

Regret passes over his face. Or perhaps it’s longing that I see. His desire to do more than what is in his ability is apparent in his words, spoken and unspoken. For the first time, I consider the possibility that he is human, just further along whatever path we all have to travel.

“Who goes to Heaven then?” I ask.

Gigi lets out a belly laugh, “Who says you aren’t going to Heaven? Think about it.”

Gigi places a hand to my cheek, wipes away my tears as a mother would her child’s. Questions flood my mind, but I have no time to ask them before the room fades away. I pass from a place of great warmth and comfort to a cold environment much too bright to actually see anything. Disorientation takes effect. The details of my adventure with Gigi slips away, and the memories of my life before seem to fall back in my mind, lingering just out of reach, but close enough to impart what life has taught me so far.

I’m slapped gently but firmly on the back, and the sound of a baby crying fills the room.