The Wrong Heaven Read online

  When I got home, it was dark already. I poured myself a G&T, drank it standing up, and then poured another. I went outside and plugged the statues into the outlet at the base of the porch. They lit up against the darkness.

  “I saw what you just did,” said Jesus. “I saw how strong you made that drink.”

  “You are loved,” said Mary. But she sounded a little strained.

  “I was just a normal human like you, and I got through life’s trials without stimulants or depressants,” said Jesus. “Do you need to see my hands again?”

  “You don’t need to keep reminding people,” said Mary.

  “It was very traumatic,” said Jesus.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m a mess. I admit it. And the worst part is, I’m supposed to be guiding people.”

  “How can we help?” asked Mary, smiling and spreading her hands.

  “Well,” I said, “for starters, I would feel better if I just knew that there was a Heaven. That Billie Holiday was in a better place. And the caterpillars, and David G.’s baby brother.”

  “It’s not so much like that,” said Jesus. “It’s not really another place.”

  Mary cleared her throat. “Let me explain it to you,” she said. “Think of caterpillars. Hedgehogs. Carrots. Dogs. Babies. There’s a Heaven for each one, and they all exist in the same airspace, like all the radio signals from all the world flying through the air, constantly. But you need the right equipment. Is your Heavenly Radio tuned to the right station? You might be picking up Carrot Heaven, or Hedgehog Heaven.”

  “The radio is a metaphor,” said Jesus. “The metaphors are given out at birth, like names. Some people get the wrong ones. You can get another, at Customer Service, but there’s no escalator. This is the only body you’ve ever had. Use it, and walk up the stairs. You get to Heaven by willpower and thigh muscle.”

  “Call this toll-free number from a touch-tone phone,” said Mary, “if you believe you’ve selected the wrong Heaven for your species, gender, socioeconomic status, and weight class. You are loved. You are loved. You are loved.”

  “Possibly,” said Jesus.

  I turned and walked inside, without unplugging them. I lay on the couch and felt their faint glow through the curtain. I couldn’t believe that Jesus had mentioned my thighs.

  Outside, Mary softly murmured the toll-free number, over and over and over. I got up and called it.

  It was busy.

  I went into the kitchen and opened up the freezer. I took out the gin bottle, but it was empty. I stood there with the bottle in my hand, tapping its cold heft against my thigh, trying to decide whether it was worth a trip to the liquor store. Then my eyes fixed on Billie Holiday.

  I thought about how we used to spend time here together, doing the dishes. I’d taught her to stand on the counter with a clean towel wrapped around her; I’d rub the dishes against her towel-clad body to dry them. She loved to help out. She loved the attention, and the togetherness.

  No one knew about that but she and I. No one but me could remember. The responsibility was mine, and no one would help me with it: not even Our Lord and the Holy Mother. They might know about the various levels and frequencies of Heaven, but I was the only one who could lay my friend to rest in the earth.

  I knew what I had to do.

  When I got to the store, its door was shut and the lights were off. But when I peered through the glass door, I could see one light on in the back—probably in some sort of storage closet—and the silhouette of someone moving around.

  I rapped strongly on the door. The silhouette stopped and stood still. I knocked again, and in a few seconds the green-eyed man was at the door.

  He turned the lock and opened it. “We’re closed,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “But I really need your help.”

  “With what?”

  “I want one of your shovels.”

  He sighed. “Why do people always wait till the middle of the night to decide they need one of those?” He stepped aside. “Come in.”

  I came in. He pulled a string, and a lightbulb on the ceiling clicked on. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll go get one from the back. Which color do you want? We have white, blue, and black.”

  “Black,” I said. He disappeared into the back for a moment, then returned carrying a black plastic shovel, about as long as my forearm. The image of a single wing was embedded on the flat part.

  I looked up at him. His eyes flamed like emeralds. A small pool of light encircled us against the hot, breathless dark.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I want to know.”

  He shrugged. “Felix,” he said. “Felix Ramirez Johnson.”

  “Felix,” I said, “can I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Will you be my witness?”

  “Your what?”

  “I’m going to hold a funeral, right now. For my dog, in my backyard. And I need a witness.”

  Felix looked like he had seen everything. He shrugged. “I’ll get my coat,” he said.

  In the car, I said, “So. Felix. Where are you from? Mexico?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I’m Nicaraguan. But I was born here.”

  “Oh. Nicaragua. Is that where they have the Galápagos Islands? With the turtles?”

  “No, that’s Ecuador.”

  “Oh.” I pulled into the driveway. Mary and Jesus were still lit up in front of the rosebushes.

  “Well,” said Felix, “they look nice.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But they’re really just being such bullies.”

  He nodded. “I know what you mean.”

  As we approached the statues, Mary said, “You’ve brought a friend!”

  “What’s up, Felix,” said Jesus. He gave a little nod.

  “Sorry, guys,” said Felix. “I’m gonna unplug you.” He reached out and pulled their cords, and that was that.

  Felix and I took turns with the black shovel. It was a surprisingly excellent instrument. It felt good to dig, and to watch him dig; different combinations of muscles surfaced in his arms as he moved the shovel up and down. We had a hole in no time.

  I had chosen a lovely spot beneath the oak tree in my backyard, and when the hole was large enough, I placed Billie inside. I’d dressed her in her favorite tartan rain jacket and boots, and wrapped her in her favorite blanket. I threw in the rubber martini glass and my copy of “Lady Sings the Blues.” Then I stood back up and folded my hands. There was a feeling of momentousness in the air. Something important was happening. And I had no idea what to say.

  “I should say a prayer,” I said, finally. “A eulogy, I guess.”

  “Sure,” said Felix.

  “Before these witnesses,” I began. “Before these witnesses, God and Felix Ramirez Johnson…”

  Felix stood with his head bowed respectfully. How was I supposed to continue?

  “Before these witnesses,” I said again. “Before these—”

  And then I burst into tears.

  Felix stood there, doing nothing, while my sobs exploded like wet fireworks down my face and clothes. Or rather, he wasn’t doing nothing. He just wasn’t moving. But I could tell something was taking place within him; he was paying attention to my sobs, listening to them, as if he were a scientist in the wild, and they were the cries of some elusive animal, and they carried a great and indiscernible meaning.

  Felix let me cry until I stopped. It was a long time.

  “The day my parents were murdered,” he said, finally, “I didn’t feel anything at all. And I haven’t felt anything since.”

  We stood there, staring down at the grave. We stood there until it felt like the grave was staring back at us. Then, our eyes glazed over and lost focus and we weren’t looking at anything anymore. We turned and went inside.

  “There’s one more thing I need help with, before you go,” I told Felix, filling up two glasses of water
.

  “What?”

  “Well, I feel like I need to get rid of Jesus and Mary.”

  “Hm.”

  “No hard feelings,” I said. “They just make things more confusing.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And since you can’t take them back,” I continued, “I need to destroy them.”

  He nodded, and folded his arms. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  I told him what I was thinking.

  “I see,” he said, nodding slowly. “I’m not sure about the plastic.”

  “But it’s special plastic,” I said. “The Pope waved at it.”

  “True,” he said, and shrugged.

  We went and got the statues from the front of the house and brought them around to the backyard. I got the can of kerosene from the garage and the fire extinguisher from the kitchen, and Felix pulled a book of matches out of his coat pocket. I doused the statues in the liquid; he lit a match and tossed it.

  Jesus and Mary blossomed instantly into flame. I let them burn for a few seconds—just long enough to see their features begin to melt—and then I sprayed them down.

  Mary stood there dripping, her body charred and singed like an overgrilled hot dog. But Jesus continued to burn.

  I looked over at Felix; we locked eyes for a moment, and then he turned and ran into the house and emerged with a pitcher of water. He dumped the water onto Jesus. The water cascaded over and around the flames, but He continued to burn.

  Felix and I worked as a team. He went back and forth from the kitchen, getting more water; I continued to soak the statue. But no matter how many times we drenched Him, He would not stop burning. Finally, we stopped trying.

  “Well,” said Felix. “I’ve never seen this before.” He took a step back. “It’s not stopping, but it’s not catching anything else, either.”

  It was true. The fire did not spread. Even Mary, next to Him, appeared flameproof. She just stood there, palms folded demurely, her face thoroughly charred.

  Felix slowly approached the flaming Jesus. He contemplated it for a moment. Then he stuck his hand right into the flame, and held it there.

  I screamed. He removed his hand. It was perfect and smooth and untouched.

  “Well,” I said. “What should we do?”

  He shrugged his signature shrug. “I guess we should make the best of it.”

  Suddenly, I knew exactly what that meant. “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  Felix and I spent the night in front of the flaming Jesus, marshmallows speared on long sticks snapped from the oak tree, roasting them in Our Lord’s flames. The backyard was dark, and He was our only light.

  “I can’t believe you’d never had s’mores before,” I said.

  “They’re really good,” he admitted. He put another marshmallow on his stick and extended it into the flames. Instantly, the whole thing caught fire; he removed it and blew it down, revealing a dry blackened lump. He looked up and made a sheepish face.

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “The most important thing, no matter what happens on the outside, is to keep the inside tender. You can always peel away the surface. There’s always another layer underneath.”

  I watched as he removed the charred exterior, flake by blackened flake. “Here goes,” he said. Then, he slowly extended the naked quivering mass toward the fire, and held it at exactly the right distance from the burning Jesus. We both watched as the alchemy took hold: the marshmallow’s skin slowly turning into gold, kissed again and again by the edge of the flame.

  The Other One

  As far as I could tell, I was the only customer at JoyfulSongTime. Again. This was the third day in a row I had spent my lunch break here, and I had yet to encounter another person, aside from the teenage attendant who’d swiped my credit card and then solemnly handed me a sparkly tambourine.

  I didn’t even like karaoke. I had come here for a very specific reason: to sing one song and one song only, over and over again, until I was hoarse. The goal was a kind of immersion therapy. The goal was to sing Alanis Morissette’s “Hand in My Pocket” until it lost its hold on me.

  Why “Hand in My Pocket”? I had no idea. Believe me, I had tried to figure it out, why this song of all the songs in the world should have woken me in the middle of the night, and then stayed. I’d had songs in my head before, of course. But this song inhabited me. It blared so loudly through my consciousness that I couldn’t focus on the briefs I had to write, couldn’t help but walk in time with its beat, pace my thinking to its slow loopy cadence.

  I couldn’t afford the distraction. I was planning a wedding, and I had dozens of billable hours ahead of me. I worked at the kind of Midtown law firm where people actually said things like “I need this done yesterday!” I got the sense that if an associate lost focus noticeably enough, the partners would take her into a quiet back conference room, where she would be discreetly beheaded. Our clients were the people who owned America, America’s version of kings. They’d tolerate no slack, no whimsy.

  ’Cause I’ve got one hand in my pocket, and the other one is giving a high five.

  I hadn’t intended to end up at a place like McNally, Bose & Gold. I went to law school with noble civic intentions; I wanted to be Erin Brockovich. But then I joined the firm to pay off my loans, and discovered my own deep veins of masochism and venality. It became addictive to tap those veins, to discover new veins when the original ones had become depleted through overuse. I succumbed to a pleasurable moral swoon. I began to indulge in other activities I’d previously disdained: spin classes, boozy brunches, adultery. When the married partner I’d been fucking left his wife to be with me, it seemed like my new, self-centered worldview had triumphed.

  Now, a year and a half later, Dennis and I were engaged. I had always claimed, for feminist reasons, that if I ever got married I would forgo a white wedding dress, but that was before I saw myself refracted in the mirrored bridal dressing room at Bloomingdale’s, in a gown with a plunging front and lacy back, looking like a beautiful stranger, like the kind of woman I previously never would have even bothered to envy because she was so completely of another realm, apart in her feathery grace from the clunk and sweat of daily reality. I had done the impossible, what everyone wants to do: I had become a different person.

  Then, about a week after my dress fitting, I awoke with an ache in my abdomen and a shocking river of blood between my legs. My periods had always been irregular, but usually they came on more gently; this flood was sudden and absolute. Biblical. I rinsed and replaced the sheets (luckily, Dennis had already left for work), plugged myself with a tampon, and dragged my sluggish, sodden self to the office—but after a few hours I gave up and left to work from home. I was extracting a saturated tampon twice an hour. Was this body really the same graceful, confectionary thing I’d seen in the Bloomingdale’s mirror last week? I couldn’t believe what it seemed to be saying about itself, that it could spew forth such carnage.

  When I got home, I took my laptop to bed with a bar of chocolate and a hot water bottle. At first this was a relief, but I soon found myself wrenched by a sudden, crippling sadness. I curled up in the fetal position for an hour, uncurling myself only to pull open my laptop and Google am i having a miscarriage???

  The thought had occurred to me suddenly, with an inner shock of something-like-certainty, but the Internet could not tell me for sure. It wasn’t likely that I could have gotten pregnant (I was on birth control) but it was possible (I’d missed a day here and there). I’d certainly never bled like this before. I debated calling my gynecologist, I debated calling Dennis, but in the end I did neither.

  I didn’t even tell Dennis my suspicion when he got home and asked, with tender boyfriendly solicitude, how I was feeling. By then the bleeding had slowed to a trickle. I simply moaned and turned over onto my stomach and accepted his offer of a back rub. My head was turned to the side and I could see our reflection in the window: a woman prone on her bed, her caramel-colore
d hair spilling out over the pillow, while a tall handsome man tenderly strokes her back. It was a nice picture. The whole idea suddenly seemed impossible and ridiculous, the idea that I might have had a miscarriage. It didn’t fit. I felt faintly embarrassed about the whole thing. I murmured Thank you to Dennis, and something like You’re the best, and something involving love.

  The next morning, when I woke up, my belly had stopped aching, and Dennis’s heavy arm lay across my body like a caveman’s club, and I felt protected and out of danger and blissfully sane. At work I was myself again. That night we drank a bottle of wine and I gave him a blow job that made me feel like the blow job champion of the world, like a real winner. Things were back to normal.

  Then, in the middle of the night, it started: the song. It woke me at 3 a.m., pounding through my head like an insistent revelation, preventing me from sleeping until morning.

  The teenage attendant led me down the hall and showed me into the dim cave of room 6: small and dark, with padded vinyl couches and swirling disco lights. He went through the same routine I’d seen several times already, the silent flight-attendant-style pointing, showing me the binders full of laminated lists of song titles, the remote I would use to enter their identifying numbers, the button I would press if I wanted to order some beer or shrimp-flavored chips.

  “Have a joyful song time,” he whispered. Then he exited the room, shuffling backwards, pulling the door shut behind him.

  I sat down, entered the familiar six digits, and heard the opening strains of “Hand in My Pocket”: not the actual Alanis song but the bubbly karaoke version, accompanied by video images of a blond couple strolling down a Parisian boulevard, both wearing flippy ’90s-era hats and laughing heartily, heads thrown back, as if the streets of Paris were inherently hilarious. I now knew this couple intimately; they had transcended their initial ridiculousness and come to seem inevitable, as if they had emerged directly from my unconscious, as if I had dreamed them myself.