1. You have pain in your back and can’t sleep. For three months it goes on like this: back pain, waking up, going to the couch, reading a magazine, not sleeping. Everyone you know asks why you look so tired, why your bad mood. Your wife doesn’t ask.
2. You go to the doctor and the doctor puts you in a machine. While the machine takes pictures of your back, it plays classical music. You don’t know anything about classical music except that it’s depressing. Violins don’t cover up the machine’s noise, and when they do, it’s not like it’s enough. No music in the world can hide the fact about where you are at that moment, in the basement of a hospital, inside a tube. Also depressing is the fact that your doctor can’t find it. “Your pain,” he says, “it’s in your head.”
3. You go to a psychologist. “Of course it’s in your head,” the psychologist says. He asks where else you expected your pain to be. He says that the best thing to do is to surrender to it. Try marijuana. “Seriously,” he says. “We live in California.” He rubs his beard and asks about your mother.
4. You tell your wife that the psychologist says to surrender. “That’s not the same as giving up,” she says. “Suicide is not surrender.”
5. But it’s not just back pain that you’ve been moaning about. It’s the shittiness of the world in general. Of course, it’s not the world in general that you find so shitty. It’s the world as you perceive it vis-à-vis its shittiness toward you. Your wife says that if you don’t stop feeling sorry for yourself, she’s going to leave you. She loves you, she says, but it’s clear that you’re not thinking about her. You tell her that she doesn’t mean it. Actually, she says, she does. That night neither of you sleep. You, on the couch, in the meanest part of yourself, in the bile-producing ducts in your gallbladder, and in the empty spaces in between, feel this as a victory.
6. But in the morning she comes out of the bedroom with her suitcase. She’s going to stay with her parents. Not forever, she says. But definitely for a couple of nights.
7. You call your mother. You ask how she could have done this to you. “Done what?” she says. Bring you into a world, you say, where everything is turned against you. “You mean a world,” she says, “where most of the people you know love you. A world,” she says, “where you’re considered a contributor to the total sum of good.” She asks how she could not.
8. But you go ahead and do it anyway, that thing that you’ve been threatening to do. You do it in the bathtub with pills. You regret it too almost immediately after you’ve swallowed them. But by then it’s too late. It’s true what they say: What’s done is done. How sad is that?
9. When you open your eyes you’re in a room with your grandmother. She’s your grandmother but she’s also an angel. You’re an angel too. You have the halo and the wings. The room you’re in is white and there’s harp music playing. It’s not, truth be told, all that different from being in an MRI. “That was stupid,” your grandmother says. You ask if you’re in Heaven. Your grandmother rolls her eyes.
10. You sleep all the time in Heaven. It’s practically the only thing to do. When you’re not sleeping you play in an orchestra. Because that music in MRI machines? It’s not being piped in at all. There are literally orchestras of angels that go to hospitals and play for sick people. In life, you never had the patience to be a musician, but in Heaven, after you put some effort into it, you find that you have some talent for the violin.
11. When your mother and wife show up in Heaven, they’re happy to see you but also kind of surprised. You know, you say. You were surprised too. But Hell’s a lie, something that they made up down on Earth. Your wife doesn’t believe it. “Not after what you put us through,” she says. “It’s just different,” she says, “different than what we thought it would be.” She says that she was sad for a long time. She even thought about suicide herself. But then she met someone new. They got married, had kids. Her new husband is already up there in Heaven. It turns out that you know him. He plays saxophone in your orchestra. You like him. He’s a nice guy.
12. And that’s the thing about Heaven: eventually everyone you know shows up. For a while it’s like Facebook, or a really great party, but then the conversation dies out. Because there are no politics in Heaven; there’s no weather. Even the music gets old. You’ve heard all the harp music a thousand times. You’ve played all of the violin solos. Why on Earth doesn’t anyone write any great violin solos anymore?
13. One day, you go to ask your grandmother what it is that she does to pass the time. But you can’t find your grandmother. You check all of the rooms in Heaven and realize that it’s not just your grandmother who’s missing. Your mother and your wife are gone too. All of the faces are changing. You don’t recognize anyone anymore.
14. Back in your room, you sit on your bed and think about all of the people you used to know in Heaven. Your grandmother, your wife. The priest who officiated over your funeral. Your sister. Your sister’s twin daughters. The daughters’ sons and the sons’ daughters. Presidents of the United States, those you voted for and those you did not. Even your wife’s new husband, the saxophone player, even he is no longer in Heaven. You close your eyes and try to sleep, but for the first time since you’ve come to Heaven, you can’t.
16. Soon the phone next to your bed begins ringing. It’s an old-fashioned phone, black and with a cord. You pick it up and on the other end is your grandmother. “Listen,” she says, “you’ve enjoyed yourself, right? You’ve had a good time?” Of course you’ve had a good time. You’ve been in Heaven. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “You can’t stay in Heaven forever.” Why not? “It’s kind of like Disneyland,” she says. “They have to keep the lines moving.”
17. You wrap the cord around your fingers. You feel like crying. You wonder if they lied to you about this being Heaven, if they lied to you about Hell being a lie. You ask your grandmother where you’ll go next. Your grandmother sighs. She says that you’ll go to another Heaven, of course, a Heaven where everyone is already waiting for you. A Heaven with rock music, she says, and picnics, with great, big outdoor spaces and lots of dogs. It’ll be different from the Heaven you’ve known, but it’s a Heaven all the same. And after that, when the picnic’s over and the dogs have gone to sleep under the picnic tables and the ants are carrying away the chicken bones, you’ll go to another Heaven. And another Heaven. Because there’s always another Heaven. And another Heaven after that.