Paradise

Loosely based on the premise of Mitch Albom's book "The Five People You Meet In Heaven". Wrote this for a creative writing class a while ago, takes me back to the old days...enjoy(:

                When I woke, I was on the beach.

                It was cold.  That I could remember; the sensation of shivering, the feeling I got when the water from the slate-gray ocean touched my toes.  C’est venteux.  Je suis froid.  Il ou elle, vous, nous nous sommes froid…

                I had no idea how I’d gotten there.

                Slowly, I became aware that I was wearing nothing but an enormous yellow rain slicker, with a matching triangular sort of hat.  My feet were bare.  I was already standing, and so I started walking through the sand, and I had to be careful of the countless broken bottles that lay half-submerged, jagged lips poking up in a few places like the pieces of trombones or broken hearing aids.  It was foggy, and I couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of me.  The farther I went the more anonymous, damaged objects kept turning up, buried in the sand or swept in by the slow-moving waves.  The horn of some ship sounded in the distance, and it made me think of whalers, and unromantic men in rubbers and dust-jackets hoisting high great oil-burning lamps with one hand and throwing out line with the other.

                It was perhaps ten minutes walking before I saw the woman.

                She was standing underneath what I could see had once been an umbrella, but which had been stripped of its covering, leaving a salt-rusted spiderweb of plastics that opened wide to the sky like a decomposing flower.  She had a book in one hand, and appeared to be studying it closely.  She didn’t look up when I approached.

                I stopped when I was maybe ten feet from her, and waited, hands in the big pockets of my jacket.  It seemed to have gotten colder, and it had started to snow, of all things, tiny half-frozen flakes that splayed out over the uncovered parts of my skin.  She kept on reading, eyes scanning the page, until I’d made up my mind to start back the way I’d come from and turned around, not bothering to look over my shoulder at her.

                I’d gone maybe ten steps when she called out, “Hey.”  I didn’t stop.  I was sure that if I looked back she would still be reading, one hand poised at the bridge of her nose like she was wearing an invisible pair of glasses.

                “Hey, you.”  I felt a hand on my shoulder and found myself suddenly underneath the umbrella, facing the woman, who as I watched took a piece of dirtied paper from somewhere, marked her page with it, and stowed it in one of her innumerable pockets.  She looked at me squarely then, with more than what seemed the appropriate frankness.  “Thank you for joining us,” she said, with more than a hint of sarcasm.  “We don’t have forever.”

                I tried to ask her then who she was, I think, but when I tried I realized I couldn’t get the words past my mouth.  She shushed me like I’d made a noise.

                “Listen,” she said, “the fact is, you probably don’t remember what happened and it’s not my job to tell you.  But I need your full cooperation on this.”

                For the life of me I couldn’t remember whether I should shake my head or nod, so I just blinked several times, until she looked away from me.  I noticed that it was warmer here, that the dead umbrella was giving off some kind of warmth, like a portable stove.

                                “You’re dead,” she said, not unkindly.  “And you’ve got a long walk ahead of you.”

                I looked out across the ocean and strained my eyes.  If I squinted just enough it seemed like there were small craggy mountains hovering far away over the calm crests of the waves.  I wanted to say something symbolic, something I’d heard before, maybe, but when I tried all that came out was a faint choking rasp.

                “You can’t talk when you first come here,” she said.  “Honestly it seems to turn out better that way.”

                There was a short flash of light somewhere behind her, and a low rumble of thunder quickly followed.  She looked up and mumbled something under her breath, almost like she was taking it as a sign.  “I’m going as fast as I can,” she muttered, and then she said, “Well, I guess I’d better explain some things to you.  They tell me I’m the one who’s best at it, anyway.”

                I made a noise like a car engine starting, then choked out a fleeting,”Whh…”

                “My name… well, I guess you don’t need to know my name.  I’m an author.  You used to like me quite a lot, actually.  I’d say I was flattered, but I had no idea who you were.  I never met you.”  She paused and coughed once, wetly, then continued.  “We had the same birthday, I don’t know if you knew.  I saw you once, when I was going out to celebrate with my husband.  I don’t know why but I spent half the evening watching your table- not you, really, more like the people around you, the balloons- you had great silver balloons, remember that?  They were as wide across as your head.  I went home and tried to write about it, afterwards.  But I couldn’t do it.  The whole thing just stopped three or four sentences in, every time I tried.  That was the only thing I ever wrote about, until I died about half a year later.   I never finished it.  This whole time I’ve been waiting here, waiting to tell you that.  Saying it now it seems so unimportant.”  She blew out a breath through her teeth.  “Anyway.  That’s just the first part of what I’ve got to tell you.”

                “In case you haven’t guessed yet, you’re in heaven.  Or you’re on the way there, anyway.  And before all this is over, you’re going to meet five people.  I’m the first.  Each of us is going to be someone from your life.  I don’t know what this is supposed to teach you.  But I’m pretty much done with all this as it is.”  She fell silent for a moment, like she was expecting me to ask something.  I was almost completely dry by now, and the strange warmth coming from the umbrella was beginning to get uncomfortable.

                She continued.  “I don’t know what your life was like.  I’m sorry, I probably should, but then again what does it really matter now?  I just have to tell you why you’re here.  That should be pretty self-explanatory.”  She looked away from me and dug around for something in her pocket.  There was a rushing sound, and a wave clapped down on the beach near us, covering us both with spray.

                “So, there’s really nothing else I can tell you,” she said.  “Any questions?”  She waited a moment while I tried to stammer out some half-hearted response, then laughed and cut me off.  “It doesn’t matter if you did.  I don’t know any more than you do.”

                The heat of the umbrella was hurting me now, and when I looked up to find the source I saw that a bizarre phosphorescence was collecting at the center, glowing so brightly that it hurt to look at it.  As I watched, it grew bigger and bigger, until it had enveloped both of us and the only sound was the crashing of the waves, which seemed far off, like the rumbling of a distant highway.

                “So long,” I heard her say.  “It’ll be good to finally be out of the damp.”

                And the sound of the waves died out, bit by bit, until there was nothing left.

      *             *             *

                I didn’t see her at first.  She was standing in the corner of the room, which was small and dark and had strange unlighted fixtures hanging like thin hands from the short ceiling.  I was sitting in a large red armchair, too high up from the floor, that had soot stains on the arms and frayed bits of string coming out of the sides.  I tried to stand and couldn’t.  My feet uselessly and I looked around for something to stare at.

                She coughed.  It sounded like a car backfiring or an electric stove flickering to life.  I turned my neck as far as it would go, stared off into the darkness behind my left shoulder.  She emerged slowly, like a pale bloated swimmer surfacing from shallow water.

                Her dark hair and face were the same as when I’d last seen her, though she was perhaps a little taller.  She wore a long red dress, strapless, that ended severely just below her knees.  She was smoking, although I knew for a fact that she’d never smoked in her life.

                “Hey,” she said to me.

                “Hey,” I said.

                She smiled, and four cracked little wrinkles appeared between her eyes.  “I wasn’t expecting you for a while.”

                “You know.”  I shuffled around in my chair, uncomfortable.  “Things happen, I guess.”

                “Yeah.”  She lifted the cigarette to her lips and took a long drag.  I swear her cheeks turned transparent as she sucked, so that I could see her gums and her straight white teeth, brought into line by years of orthodontia.

                “So what’s going on with you?” she asked.

                “Nothing.  I don’t know, really.”

                “Do you want to ask me anything?”

                “Why do you look so different?  The dress, and…”  I gestured at the cigarette, which she held poised at an angle a few inches from her mouth.  “You never used to do that.”

                She nodded and reached across me to a wooden side-table I hadn’t noticed.  She grabbed a carton of cigarettes lying there, maybe forgotten until then, extracted one, and offered it to me.

                “You know I don’t.”

                “Just take one.” She took my limp hand and formed it in a fist around the lone cigarette, and then put my hand back in my lap.  “They light themselves.”

                “I crossed one wrist over the other with a substantial effort and ignored the cigarette.  “Why are you here?” I asked.

                “It’s my grandfather’s study.  His desk is over there.”  She pointed to a small roll-top jammed into a corner, next to a door that was open just a fraction of an inch.

                “Why am I here?”

                She continued like she hadn’t heard me.  “Over there is where I’d sit and watch him work.  He had this huge jar of pistachios, up there, and we’d sit and eat out of it and do whatever it was we were doing.  My grandmother would come in and give us tea and almond cookies.”  She turned back to me and grabbed my hand in her smaller one.  “Do you remember I told you that?”

                “I remember.”

                “You never met him.  He’s the one who gave me my middle name.”  She let go of my hand and walked over to a table that was pushed up against one blackened wall and she picked up something, a paperweight maybe, and turned it over and over in her hands.  “You told me once that the first word you ever said was ‘light’, and I always thought it had to mean something, that we were somewhere else completely and we ended up together, and that the first thing you said was what my middle name meant.”  She set down whatever it was she was holding and smoothed the side of her dress down.  “I married a lawyer, in case you want to know.  I had one child and I died when I was driving her to school and I hit a telephone pole.”

                “How did I die?”

                “You’ll figure it out sooner or later.”  She coughed into the crook of the arm that wasn’t holding the cigarette.  “Sorry.  Do you remember the night we camped out in your backyard, and we had to go inside because we were afraid there were wolves in your garden?”

                “Yes.”

                “Before we did- I asked you what your greatest fear was.  Do you remember that?  You asked me first, actually, and I said deep water or something, and then I asked you and you said death.  And I remember thinking that was so strange, that you were Catholic and you thought there was a heaven you went to when you died and you were still afraid of dying.”  She looked at me with a worried expression, like she had too many things to say and not enough time to say them.  “But I understand it now a little, I think.  Now I’m dead, and I’m still afraid of dying.”

                Something made me look up then, and when I did I saw that the roof of the room was completely gone, and that in its place there were a multitude of tiny constellations hovering just out of reach, constantly shifting in and out of focus and changing position like they were orbiting around an invisible sun.  I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could hear the smile in her voice when she said, “And I don’t even need a telescope.”

                Without seeing it, I gripped the cigarette in my fingers and lifted it to my mouth.  When I put it up to my lips the end of it glowed, and when I inhaled it was like I was breathing the clearest air on top of the tallest mountain, like the atmosphere at the start of the universe had come rushing down my throat and through my lungs and straight into the heart of me.

                I coughed, and my eyes closed, and when I opened them again she was gone.

      *             *             *

                Would you please not stare at me like that, he said/It's just my foolish pride/But sometimes a man must be alone/And this is no place to hide-

                We were driving.  I was driving, and he was sitting next to me, and I was complaining about the radio.

                “It’s too tinny.”

                “What do you mean, it’s too tinny?  The speakers are fine.”

                “It’s not the speakers.  It’s twangy.”

                “The radio’s fine, the car is fine, the tape is fine, I don’t see what-”

                “It’s not the radio.  It’s the song.”

                “If that’s the attitude you’re going to have you can pull over right here and walk yourself home.”

                “Can’t we just change it?”

                “just listen for a minute.  Listen to the music.  Listen to the words.”

                “I’m changing it.”

                “Just listen to the lyrics.  Listen to the words he uses.  You could learn something from him, you know that?”

                “I could learn how to play the harmonica.”

                “Listen.  That- right there, you hear that?  I don’t understand how you can’t think that’s beautiful.”

                “I’m changing it.”

                “Just wait one second.  Just be quiet for one single second.  I don’t care what else you do as long as you give this a fair chance.”

                “I’m changing it. I don’t care what you say.”

                “You could learn something from this, I’m telling you.  You could figure some things out if you’d just let yourself.”

                Eternity ? said Frankie Lee/With a voice as cold as ice/That's right, said Judas Priest, Eternity/Though you might call it Paradise-

      *             *             *

                This had happened before, and I knew it.

                I was sitting on the porch, in an old wooden rocking chair of my grandmother’s, and he was opposite me, in the huge horizontal swing that sagged in the center, and he was perched like a sack of potatoes in the exact middle of it where he’d been propped up minutes or hours before.

                There was a tube going into his mouth and another into his nose.  He was breathing heavy, with a low, rapid sound, almost like he was panting.

                It took me a minute to get myself out of the chair.  I stood and I towered over him, and I said his name and my name and the names of everyone we’d both known and his expression didn’t change.

                “You were the first one,” I told him.  “The first person I ever knew like this.  You weren’t the first one to die but I can’t remember anyone else before you that was dying like this, and no matter how far back I think it’s my only memory of you.  Is that why I’m here?  So I can learn something about you that I never would have otherwise, or something like that?”

                His eyelids behind his glasses slipped down until his eyes were half-visible behind them.  He yawned.

                “I was afraid of you,” I said, “but now I can’t manage even that.  I just feel bad for you.  And there’s all that about putting myself in your shoes and thinking of how you were when you were young, but I don’t know anything about you then.  I’ve never seen any pictures of you from before you were seventy.  I don’t know what to think of you.”

                His eyes closed completely, and his breathing became more regular.  In a matter of seconds it was as if he’d been sleeping all along.

                “You can’t even talk,” I said, bending forward a little over his prone form.  “After I was five I don’t think I heard you say anything.  And I don’t know what you’re trying to tell me.”

                I laid my hand on his arm, and his skin was warm and dry and the brittle yellow color of old bones.  He didn’t react.

                “If you’re trying to tell me anything.”

                There was a rapid succession of footsteps, and then the screen door of the house banged open against the wall and on its way there it hit me, but it didn’t, it swung through me and did the same coming back, and in the strange whiteness that followed behind it I could just barely perceive a short dark shadow, balancing a tray laden with chicken and potatoes and plastic forks, thick-socked and solemn in the slow clouded afternoon.

      *             *             *

                And now I’m standing in the middle of an empty waiting room, like the ones in small hospitals and cramped dentists’ offices.  I am incredibly tired.  There are no chairs or tables; nothing to suggest that anyone’s been here.  Everything is clean.  I look to my right and see a tabloid magazine pinned to a wall by one corner with a close-up of a man’s face on it beneath yellow letters so blurred they’re unreadable.  I look to my left and see a dried-out houseplant, in a pot with a rim that looks wide enough for sitting.  I sit.  Some time passes, and then I hear someone walking in the hall.

                A woman I’ve never seen before comes in.  She’s in a white t-shirt and jeans that are too short for her, and her blonde hair comes down to her waist.  The tips are dyed red.  I bow my head and stare at my lap and wait for her to say something.

                She looks at me for a minute, almost like she’s nervous.  “Sorry I’m late,” she says finally.  I don’t look up.

                “I don’t know you,” I say.

                “You don’t.”

                I wait for her to explain.

                “Don’t I remind you of something?”  She bends forward, and I can just barely see her forehead from behind my knees.

                “You’ve already said I don’t know you.”

                “Yeah.  But you should recognize me.”

                I look up.  “I have no idea who you are.”

                “Aren’t you going to ask me?”  She keeps going without giving me time.  “I was a singer.  You heard me, once.  I died in nineteen-ninety, before you were born.  I was played on the radio quite a lot for a while, actually.”

                “And then I heard you when I was ten and I was inspired to become an artist.”

                “No.”  She looks surprised, like she was expecting this to be easier.  “You saw me.  On a poster.”

                “Not you.”

                “My picture.  It was a Sunday and you’d just gone to church and you were in a thrift store that sold old tea sets and your mother bought you that glass turtle that you always kept.”

                She stopped, and I waited for her to go on.

                “Their window was a mess.  I was near the bottom corner, near some tribute thing for Leonard Cohen.  It was bright, remember?”  She’s straightened up now, and her voice is soft.  She sounds panicked.

                “No, I don’t.”

                “ I made you want to go to the park.  I reminded you of something, even then.  When you got home you went to sleep, even though it was only three in the afternoon.  You woke up at one in the morning and wrote down the poem you’d memorized for class.”

                I stand up and my legs ache.  “And why is that important?”

                Her face crumples.  “I thought you would know.  I wasn’t the one who was there.”

                “Well, I don’t.”  I dust off my knees and walk past her, to the open door she’d come from.  “What happens now?”

                “Wait!”  She’s behind me suddenly, with a hand hovering over my shoulder.  “I’ve been waiting here for you to come for- I don’t even know how long I’ve been waiting.  The least you can do is just try to understand-”

                “I’ll have enough time for that later.”  I poke my head out and see a hallway, well-lit, with broad flat lights mounted on the tiled ceiling every twenty feet or so.

                “You don’t get it.  You don’t-” She grabs my wrist and tries to haul me back inside.  “You can’t go until you’ve figured it out!”

                “Figured what out?”

                “I don’t know!”  She’s screaming now, but still her voice is soft, beautiful.

                “And I’m supposed to?”

                “You’re supposed to be patient!  You’re supposed to wait for it to come to you!”

                I wrench my arm away from her and launch myself with a step out into the hallway.  As soon as I get there it feels like I’m floating, or flying, but I can see myself take each step and I concentrate on that as the voice gets quieter and quieter behind me.  She’s stuck her head out the door and she’s yelling, and when one of her hands gets too far out she yanks it back like she’s been burned.  “Come back!” she yells.  “You’re going to understand everything!”

                I walk and walk and eventually her voice is gone, and I look up and see that the hallway is a lot shorter than I thought.  There’s a metal door at the end with a crooked handle and a numberplate that reads #317, second floor, and a sign underneath that simply says In Case of Fire Do Not.

                I open the door, and what’s on the other side does not take my breath away.  It’s a small stairwell, dirty, with a pile of cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another next to the entranceway.  The stairs reach around the side of the wall and seem to vanish in the gloom.  For the life of me I can’t tell whether they’re going up or down.

                I step into the room and shut the door behind me, and the darkness that comes then feels like the most natural thing in the world.