What do people mean by “spirituality” anyhow? Do they mean they feel instinctively that a higher power guides their life and controls the world around them? Or do they simply mean they feel wonder or awe in the face of beauty? The beauty, say, of a cello concerto in E minor (a favorite of yours, Mother) or of the stratified layers of siltstone, mudstone, and shale making up the Painted Desert (a favorite of yours, Father).

Remember when we witnessed the aurora borealis on a cruise ship to Alaska? We felt awestruck watching gas particles in our atmosphere collide with charged particles from the sun and create arcs of eerie green and pink light that spanned the starry backdrop of night sky. Yet we did not for a moment feel the kind of spirituality that suggested a god (a strapping, curly-headed Zeus, for instance) was crouching behind a cloud with an assortment of colored flashlights to beam across the heavens.

Religious people never think about toilets or toothpaste in heaven, but they often picture the landscape here. They imagine trickling brooks, snow-peaked mountains, thundering waterfalls, and lush forests. They imagine places where they felt awed by natural beauty, where they felt spiritual.

Well, forget the brooks, mountains, waterfalls, and forests. To get a good picture of Town, imagine instead a vast public-housing project. The three-story redbrick dormitories where we live are low-rise tenements. As for the other buildings—schools, libraries, cafeterias, community centers, warehouses—they are plain but solid structures. They are much like the buildings back in Illinois, but with one big difference.

Buildings in Town can “fix themselves.”

Over time, a crack in a wall smooths over, crooked steps even out, and loose floorboards stabilize. If, for example, somebody accidentally kicks a soccer ball through a pane of glass, that pane, over a period of weeks, grows back within its frame. Sometimes a bored townie breaks the window in his dorm room on purpose just to watch the glass slowly reappear.

Three weeks after I arrived, I broke a pane of glass on purpose, not out of boredom but rather to conduct an experiment. I did not want to let in the outside noise since I am a light sleeper, so instead I took a hammer to a pane in the shed that sits atop my residence, the Frank and Joe Hardy Dormitory. Early every morning, I head to the roof to watch the sunrise and check the glass growing in the window frame. With a ruler, I measure the day’s growth to see whether it is constant. So far, it is not: the glass grows one inch on some days and three on others. Puzzling.

With a jackknife, I cut a line down my left forearm this week. Do not fret, Mother and Father: I am conducting an experiment to time how many days my wound takes to vanish. Apparently, we heal faster in heaven. We are also immune to serious diseases, so the children who died of, say, leukemia need not worry about suffering again. Also, blindness and deafness do not exist in Town, so imagine the amazement and bewilderment of a person like Helen Keller when she awakes in a world she can see and hear.

Does Town fill me with awe? Yes, it often does. Yet in the month I have been here, I have met few people who share my wonder for such banal things as toilets, light switches, and garbage chutes. Flush a toilet here and where does your urine go? Turn on your desk lamp and where does the electricity come from? Throw an empty pineapple can into a garbage chute and how far down does it fall?

Some townies claim that our garbage falls all the way back to America. They believe that the chutes are a kind of portal back home and that other such tunnels back to America may exist here. I need irrefutable proof before believing in such a phenomenon. To check the depth of the chutes, I recently tied a child’s beach pail to the end of a hank of yarn and lowered the pail into a chute. Though I had posted notices about my experiment on all three floors of the Frank and Joe, my dorm mates ignored them and dropped down bags of trash that knocked the pail from its lead and ruined my experiment. No matter. I will try again.

The mode of transportation in Town is ten-speed bicycles. Their paint is often chipped, and their chains sometimes fall off, but they work well enough to go from point A to point B (no riding on the sidewalks, though). The bicycles belong to everybody; in other words, we may not own one specific bicycle that catches our fancy. Yesterday I reserved a ten-speed at the bicycle depot and rode it to the Guy Montag Library to spend the afternoon browsing the stacks. I tied the requisite red ribbon to the handlebars to show that the bicycle was in use, but when I came out of the library later, my borrowed ten-speed was gone. One would assume that angels respect rules and do not filch what is not theirs. Sadly, townies have the same foibles as the people of Hoffman Estates.

Another disappointment: our libraries have only books of fiction. How I long for a book on entomology or astronomy! But, no, I must make do with murder mysteries, comic books, literary novels (umpteen copies of Lord of the Flies, for example), and young-adult novels about such topics as teen pregnancy and drug addiction. True, Town has no insects, so a book on entomology seems useless, nor does it have teen pregnancy (the only kind of birth here is rebirth) or drug addiction (though there is no marijuana, a boy in my dorm claims he smokes chamomile tea leaves to get “mellow yellow”).

Town, in fact, lacks many things Americans take for granted: telephones, televisions, newspapers, high-rises, cars, traffic lights, supermarkets, mailboxes, and much more.

One thing Town has that American towns do not is gigantic concrete walls—four Great Walls called the North Wall, South Wall, East Wall, and West Wall that surround our home and rise an estimated twenty-five stories high. Slabs of concrete the size of dinner plates sometimes fall off the walls and shatter on the ground. The lower sections are covered in murals done by artistic children. Sometimes groups of townies gather at the foot of a wall and scream or sing together in hopes that somebody on the other side will answer back. So far, no reply has ever come.

Town’s lucky number is thirteen (on account of our age), and so it is divided into thirteen zones arranged in a patchwork: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, et cetera. (The Frank and Joe, by the way, is in Eleven, near the North Wall.) Some townies imagine Town as a rectangular concrete terrarium and all of us in it as lab mice. They wonder if a terrarium to the south houses thirteen-year-old Mexicans and a terrarium to the north, thirteen-year-old Canadians. They think of our god as a scientist conducting endless experiments in a gargantuan laboratory filled with angels.

How I wish our god were a scientist, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins or primatologist Jane Goodall. (As I told you time and again, you two are the spitting images of Richard and Jane even if Mother insists she looks more like a blond Olive Oyl.)

In my opinion, our god is not a scientist but instead an eccentric hippie artist. I call him Zig because the name sounds hip and groovy (hereinafter, Mother and Father, whenever anyone says “God” to refer to the god running our heaven, I will change the word to “Zig” in my story to you). I picture Zig as a skinny man with long hair and a beard, like depictions of Jesus Christ, though Zig does not wear robes but rather faded jeans and T-shirts printed with such things as daisies or the yin-yang symbol. On his feet, he dons flip-flop sandals, which are popular in Town. In my mind, he smokes marijuana (not chamomile tea), burns incense, and wears mood rings on several fingers. Zig must not be a real, honest-to-goodness god because gods are generally thought to be infallible, whereas our Zig is always messing up. For instance, the toilets here constantly get blocked and overflow. As townies say, “Zig don’t know sh*t about plumbing.” (Since you are opposed to swearing, Mother and Father, I am softening the blow with an asterisk.)

Zig never sends us chemistry sets, astronomy textbooks, protractors, or periodic tables. Instead, he sends us poster paints, pastel crayons, chalk, pencils, and markers, all in a full spectrum of colors. We even receive canisters of spray paint (which explains the graffiti everywhere).

Our father who art in heaven (ha-ha).

Zig also sends us instruments like ukuleles, acoustic guitars, trombones, fiddles, tambourines, and harmonicas. Kids are musical here, and I would join in if I did not have a tin ear, a weedy voice, and two left feet. Who am I kidding? I would not join in even if I had twinkle toes and the baritone voice of an opera star.

Zig sends us sports equipment as well—footballs, baseball bats, badminton rackets, basketballs, field hockey sticks. I must admit I find these items sinister: at Helen Keller, I was regularly humiliated in gym class. During murderball, for instance, I was always the most savagely murdered, and hence I was never fond of team sports.

In fact, my policy back in America was this: steer clear of others. It is a policy, Zig willing, I will also adopt in Town.