Chapter One. (Final TVC Leak.)

I’m sure you have a lot of questions; I know I did. I suppose I should tell you the terribly embarrassing story of how I died, shouldn’t I? Begin at the beginning, which is the end of my human life.

After my stint ended with the 20-something secretary, I began my search for “the one.” I found many other divorced ladies my age on the various dating apps on InnerSociety.

While getting ready for a lunch date I thought to…. Well, to be frank, empty my bowels. As one does after consuming massive amounts of coffee before a date. While I was doing so, I had a heart attack. That’s it, that’s the whole mundane truth as to how I died. Heart attack while taking a shit. The real kicker was, I did not even realize I was having a heart attack. It felt like indigestion.

As I lay dying my last thoughts were of my ex-wife, I was sure she would have found all of this hilarious. I did not, especially because when you die not only does your soul exit your body. But you’re forced to stay with your old form until someone from upstairs sends an employee for your soul.

I had assumed that if there was someone upstairs collecting souls maybe they had forgotten about me, because not only did I watch my body enter rigor mortis and the beginning stages of a body decaying. I also watched my phone get text after text from my date, screaming at me in all caps that I stood her up. Oh, how I wished that I forgot to plug my phone into the charger. But alas, I was just as much of a slave to the thing as everyone else that I knew when I was alive.

My date continued to berate me via texts for a few days. It was an odd thing to witness, my body slowly decaying, and this woman, who I had never met, start her day by texting me something to the nature of “Good morning Harry, I hope you have a crap day after standing me up! You REALLY missed out on a good thing!” And then in the afternoon, another text would pop up, “I was having a great lunch, and then I thought of you! Now I can’t eat anything! And I love food, but because of you, I lost my appetite. Shame.”

These texts kept rolling in for the two days that I was still dead and still waiting for something to happen. For someone to find my body. Oddly enough, the texts were, yes, a little concerning on her part. But also, a comfort to see. They made me feel like I was still human, still receiving degrading texts from an unhinged dating app prospect. The vicious and vindictive part of me wished I could have texted back; HA I hope you feel bad for berating me when you eventually find out that I’m dead! Unfortunately, there was no room to be petty when you cannot interact with objects anymore.

Now, why didn’t I just leave the bathroom, you might find yourself asking. Well, I desperately wanted to depart from my cramped bathroom and face the world as a ghostly being, but I felt this strange pull to my human form. Just the thought of parting with my physical form filled me with dread. I tried to shake the feeling, after all, I was dead. Why did I still have feelings at all? Hell, why did I still have a sense of smell even though I was dead? The smell of decaying feces was not a smell I wanted to endure until someone stumbled upon my body.

Logically, I didn’t think this added up. However, I’ve seen enough Japanese horror movies to rationalize this to my sudden death. No big deal, my subconscious was still attached to my former body. Perhaps my subconscious feared whatever was to come now that I was dead. Who knows, maybe the beyond was worse than life itself? However, moving past my subconscious need to stay with my body, I also did not want to watch myself decay. Or smell it for that matter.

I died on a Thursday night, so realistically if no one found me over the weekend it might have taken until Tuesday for at least my job to wonder, if not my mother. So, I fought my subconscious, and I went for the bathroom door. In fact, I lunged for it.

When I went for the doorknob, of course, I quickly remembered I couldn’t interact with objects anymore. My hand went right through the doorknob. I decided to try my luck walking through the door. This worked, walking through the door may have made me a little disoriented when I made it to the other side. However, I was free of the confines of that bathroom and my decaying feces. Relief ran through me but of course, nothing can be so easy. This was proven to me when I blinked once, and I found myself right back in the bathroom with my former self. Yet again stuck in a very small space with not only my decaying body but the fecal matter that remained in the toilet. At that moment I wished I had been a person who would have courtesy flushed.

The problem I was most concerned with was my mother did not believe in cell phones. Even though by that point anyone could have received one from the government. She did, however, believe in InnerSociety and the power and reliance of a house phone.

On the second day was when my house phone started to ring. And I thought thank God! My mother! From the bathroom, I heard the shrill house phone buzz until it finally went to voicemail. Hearing my Mother’s worried voice, as annoying as she may have been, was truly a god sent.

“Baby! Now I know you’re a grown man now, but I usually hear from you by now! You know what this stress can do to my heart.”

The irony of that guilt-ridden statement, I thought.

“How did coffee go with that girl the other night? Was she a keeper? Call your Mother back sweetie, you're worrying me.”

With that, she hung up on the outdated answering machine. Give it another day she will find me, I thought. And oh boy, was I wrong. My cell phone buzzed minutes after the voicemail was left, it was the ex. Who, naturally, had been labeled in my phone as “Melissa The Hutt.”

It read a simple, “Your Mother called Franks studio to see if I had seen you around. Obviously, I told her I had not. Call your mother Harry.”

“Call your mother Harry,” I mocked out loud.

Before I was done mocking my ex, an Innersociety message from my mother popped up in my notifications, “call me Harry,” it said.

I usually called her every single night either after work or after a date. Thank God for overbearing Italian mothers, a short three hours later my elderly mother found my body whilst screaming her head off, understandably.

Yelling, “My baby! No, not my baby! A mother is not supposed to outlive their baby! No!” My mother is a very dramatic woman, who I was sure would have told her friends that she had found me dead on the floor in the kitchen. Rather than crapping on a toilet. In an overly outrageous fashion, of course.

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, sometimes when you die in an odd position, i.e. on a toilet, sometimes your body will mold itself in that position. Your limbs become almost like stone and you are stuck in whatever weird position you died in. Why is this embarrassing, you may ask yourself? When you die your family will have to call the funeral home to take your body away. If the men who come can’t remove your body from, let’s say the toilet seat, they break your limbs.

My mother cried and gagged over my body for 30 minutes before finding it in herself to call the closest funeral home; two young men arrived shortly thereafter to take me away. I watched them laugh at my unfortunate demise, before deciding to break my legs to remove me from the throne my body was stuck to.

While bagging and tagging me in the bathroom, they complimented my floaters that were in a toilet, a respectful 7 out of 10. They, however, did not flush. Once my body was finally removed, I was able to finally leave my bathroom prison and stand with my mother and watch as they loaded me up into their van. She, understandably, was still in hysterics.

My mother, unknowingly, stood next to me in front of the window that faced the street, while she was hyperventilating in between snotty, big sobs. I could not bear to watch my mother cry with a line of mucus running from her nose into her mouth, so I continued to stare at the street where the funeral home truck had been. I knew I should have had a bigger reaction to my mother experiencing something as traumatic as discovering her own son’s body, but I didn’t feel much of anything at all.

My mother was trying to catch her breath between her sobs when I noticed a man and his dog. There is nothing odd about a man walking his dog around the block, but what was odd about the scene was the dog’s leg in particular.

When I first noticed the dog and the man, the small pup lifted his leg as though it had finally found the perfect spot to lay down his urine mark. Nothing odd about that, that’s what dogs do. What was odd was the fact that the dog’s leg was up for an ungodly amount of time when I realized the dog hadn’t urinated in the time we had been standing in front of my window. Aside from the dog’s leg being raised like he was about to relieve himself, nothing coming from it. I waited, my mom sobbed, the dog’s leg stood straight up, and nothing.

And perhaps if I had still been alive the lack of urine exiting a dog’s body probably would not have bothered me I would have been so consumed by my mundane existence I probably wouldn’t have noticed at all. The fact was, I was dead, and I was noticing, and that man and his non-peeing dog were weird. There was just something off-putting about their presence. For one, I had never seen this man or his dog in my time living in my condominium. I lived in a small community of people who all rented out similar condos, we all knew each other even if it was in passing. But I didn’t know this man, and I didn’t know his strange dog either.

Even stranger, this man, and his frozen-in-time dog seemed to be staring right at me. His gaze never wavered, it never faltered from me to my sobbing mother. After minutes of his and his dog’s unblinking stare, I started to get this creeping feeling that this man was able to see me.

By this point, I knew that to the living at least, I was invisible. Frankly, I assumed I would be forced to roam the Earth forever. Watch my mom grow old and die, watch my ex-wife live out her new life with her all too optimistic yoga instructor husband.

But that man across the way, standing in front of my neighbor’s condo, clearly staring at me. The more the man stared at me, the more I noticed him staring at me, the less weird it got. The more I examined the man and his non-peeing dog his gaze almost felt comforting, it seemed that he and even his dog smiled at me for a moment. The smile appeared on the man’s and his dog's faces all at the same moment. After another minute or so had passed, the smile that crept along his cheekbones and his dog’s snout was gone again.

My mother eventually sat on my couch; she was still crying herself into a hyperventilating frenzy. I stayed at the window a few moments longer, afraid that if I walked away the man would disintegrate into the ether. But the man continued to stare, unmoving for a while. Until he broke and he started to make a hand gesture, the universal come here.

I decided then that in death there probably was no such thing as consequences. And really, what did I have to lose? I figured that seeing whatever the old man wanted from me was possibly much better than roaming the Earth for all eternity.

I imagined the pain of not only watching my mom die but watching her live… without me. Watching my ex-wife live out her bliss with her new life. Even if the man and his statue dog had been the Devil asking for my soul, it would have been better than the afterlife that I had started to piece together after days of overthinking with my corpse. And he could have been the Devil, but the way I saw it...perhaps the Devil was a nice guy.

Although I knew my mom couldn’t see me if on the off chance, she somehow found out I hadn’t tried to kiss her goodbye, I would never hear the end of it. And if the afterlife is truly the end, when my mom does go, I didn’t want to spend it with her berating me for not trying to say my last farewell.

So, I attempted a goodbye to my mother regardless. I knelt in front of her, made a futile attempt to brush her hair to the side, and leaned in to kiss her forehead with my ghost lips. You always see this in movies about the dead when they say goodbye. What the movies get wrong is, when you kiss a person’s head who is living your face goes right through their skull. I felt like I was already making a fool out of myself. I kept my goodbye simple. “I love you, Mom, see you when I see you.”

That’s all, simple and easy, something I thought she would want to hear.

I took one last look at my mother before I proceeded to walk through my front door and made my way across the street to the old man and his dog, whose leg still had not come down. On the short journey, I decided I would stand next to the man and not say a word to play it safe. On the off chance, he was just a new, weird neighbor that I hadn’t had the displeasure to meet when I was alive. Perhaps his dog had some sort of UTI, or maybe he was just waiting for the most opportune time to urinate.

I stood next to him, not saying a word. On the off chance, I was just crazy, and the old man couldn’t see me and was just enjoying some sunshine. Who knows, right?

I didn’t know much about the whole being dead thing at the time. I did not want to risk being stupid just in case any other ghost people were watching. After all, thousands of people die every day. They must be everywhere, right? And if that was the case, I did not want to make an ass out of myself the first week.

Sure enough, the old man did speak to me. But his dog did not move. I wondered if he was some sort of broken simulation to make the man appear more approachable.

“Well son, are you ready to move forward?” He finally asked.

His voice possessed more of an old-timey diction. It had the weight of a different time, perhaps a time when we were moving from a British accent to a more Americanized accent.

Regardless, I nodded in response.

The man smiled revealing his yellow teeth, he blinked hard three times and it was like this dog finally entered our reality and started urinating. The dog seemed to let out an audible “ahh” as the old man said, “Good boy.” After the words “good boy” were spoken the man and his dog started to stare into the distance toward my condo again.

“That’s it?” I asked after a few minutes had passed. I expected more.

The old man took a deep breath and said, “Sometimes it takes a moment.”

I looked around waiting for something to change, for the dog to stop urinating…something. I started blinking rapidly, thinking that somehow that might help the process move along. When I turned back to the old man, he made a distorted face that seemed almost conflicted. He reached his hand out to me and said, “Sorry Sonny, sometimes some people aren’t ready. Sometimes they need a push.”

The man tapped my shoulder, it didn’t feel hard. But it was hard enough that my body fell backward. However, the moment of my body hitting the pavement never came. I thought maybe since I was dead and all, maybe I would just fall and fall until I went through the earth and came out the other side, but that never came either. I went through the pavement and into the darkness. I closed my eyes anticipating that falling forever into darkness would be my purgatory. I don’t know how much time had passed but just when my screaming became a comfort and when I thought the void that I was pushed into was bottomless, that my feet would never find the ground again was when I finally stopped falling.

Rules and Regulations.

I always thought Heaven would be a free-for-all, the major downside I was confronted with upon arriving was Heaven's rules. My only guess as to why there are rules in Heaven at all is to keep the “Utopia” regulated. Granted, most of the rules are ones that seem obvious to even the most chaotic neutral of a person.

Obviously, you are not allowed to attempt to “kill” (I use the word “kill” lightly being that we are all already dead) any of your peers. Believe it or not, you can date in Heaven, but you are not allowed to bed someone else’s partner. You also can’t slut about in Heaven. Dating one person at a time is fine even if you manage to fuck your way through all of Heaven. But if you fuck a bunch of people at once, you’re done for.

No stealing, no accusatory statements against your neighbor. This ultimately does not matter regardless, because God is consistently monitoring the whole joint. Respect your God and do not worship false gods, which again is impossible. When entering Heaven, you have a meeting with God to answer any question you may have and to get assigned your brand-new position in the land where God, Angels, and Jesus Christ exist. With that being the case, realistically who else would you worship? Joe from the Happiness department? Unlikely.

The more basic rules, to my understanding, is to follow the ten commandments. Now, when I was presented with these rules, I assumed God would send you straight to hell if these rules were broken. I’ve come to find out that when these rules are broken, depending on your ranking, you merely get demoted.

You heard me right Heaven has a ranking system, apparently, there are people who have lived their lives devoid of sin. Those people are at the top of this ranking system. The ranking system’s purpose is solely to assign you to your position.

I assume people who have lived without sin probably do something fun like make rainbows, or maybe they get to create miracles for the humans still alive on Earth. Honestly, I am not sure.

But don’t worry, most people do not live their human lives without sin. So, those who have stayed here long enough (a few millennia or so) and without any issues (i.e. breaking the rules) do eventually get promoted.

These general rules are easy to follow, but there are two more serious rules that I find hard to not break. And of course, they are the most important. Firstly, there are angels in Heaven. I would consider them like the military or some sort of weird police force. They seem to serve God without doubt, unlike some of the people who I have met in Heaven, I would consider Angel’s true believers. They rarely ever speak to anyone other than other angels, but it can be off-putting when they do speak. And unlike the military or even the police, it’s generally frowned upon to speak to an Angel. They enforce God’s rules here in Heaven, and they seem to serve no other purpose.

If you’re unlucky enough for one to speak with you, for your safety here in the ranks you better listen to what the Angel has to say. The second rule, oddly enough, is we are not allowed to discuss what our version of God or Heaven looks like to our peers. Which crushes my everlasting curiosity as to what other Heavens I’m missing out on. Simply because my Mother told me Heaven was clouds and pearly gates! I am desperate to know if someone thought of Heaven as Brooklyn. Or maybe some creative person thought up an elaborate video game as their form of Heaven.

You might find yourself asking, okay so what happens if you break the more serious rules? I know, I asked the same thing. I assumed that these were the rules that if broken… straight to hell with you! The short answer I was given, by God himself is, “There are worse things than the Human perception of hell.”

Average.

My mother was your average strong Italian American woman who instilled into me her Catholic beliefs. As I said we were average, we went to church every Sunday, we would confess our sins when we felt the guilt suddenly strike our guts. We drove a minivan and my father left my mother for his assistant.

My mother then had a slew of boyfriends that she proceeded to parade through my childhood home. When my mother was drowning in men and collecting bricks of resentment toward my father is when we stopped going to Church. See, as I said, just your average American family with normal problems.

When I reached the age where I was moving away from childhood trauma and graduating into adulthood traumas, I moved out and attended a decent four-year University. Afterward, I got a regular job as an insurance agent. A job that I was, at best, mediocre in my performance. A job that also had nothing to do with my college degree. A problem most college graduates have after they make their way across that stage to collect their degree.

I am still convinced that dreams die when you sign that dotted line and agree to an interest rate of 15% on a student loan that just covers one measly semester. And you will say yes and sign again and again every single semester, thinking it will better your life. But in truth, you are giving your life away on the simple promise of spending now and possibly excelling later…after your expensive degree.

My job consisted mostly of sales. And when you have a job selling something. Working almost solely on commission and you are also below average at the selling part. It turns out, you tend to make a mediocre wage. I was not vexed or even remotely perplexed by my average-sized salary.

I lived an ordinary semi-crap life, so I was at peace with my almost middle-of-the-road wage. But when I eventually got married to my long-time girlfriend, that is when my contentment regarding my wage came to a halt. We were trying to live the “American dream,” or at least Melissa wanted the inflated American dream.

The dream that most Americans have, a dream that consists of producing children and moving out of our run-of-the-mill condo and into a home that was far better than ordinary. A home that is also suitable for our future above-average children. My wage, unfortunately, seemed to be a factor that was preventing my wife’s American dream from coming to fruition.

In turn, my wife also started to collect bricks of resentment for me, just as my mother did to my father when I was young.

My “mommy issues” started to bubble to the surface during this time. I proceeded to follow in my father’s footsteps. I took on a lover, of sorts. I, however, was not advanced enough in my career to have an assistant. I settled on our company's young 20-something secretary. As all stories of adultery go, my wife did find the texts between Janet and me. Of course, she left me. Took her invisible house of resentment with her.

Like my mom, who was too resentful to ever forgive my father. My wife, subsequently, never forgave me, and she married a yoga instructor, of all things. But Frank, her new husband, owned many businesses. Thus, his wage was far better than the standard.

Before I died, from what I saw on InnerSociety, they have a house and three very athletic children (two of the children are from Frank’s previous marriage, from what I gather but still.). Which I suppose was for the best. After all, given my exes’ vanity and my protruding waistline and receding hairline, we would have had, at best, cute chubby children who had the pleasure of anticipating hair loss in their mid-twenties. Which, I’m sure, would have been something that Melissa could have used to fuel her unyielding indifference toward me.

Going back to my mother, I grew up moderately religious. After my father left, that was during the same time when it seemed to be going out of style to go to church every Sunday. Attending Sunday Mass was a trend that was dying in our community. My Mother’s friends never questioned why we were not attending Mass anymore because their children were growing older as well. There was no time for Church, we can all praise the Lord before bed every night in the comfort of our own homes. Or at least those are the things we told my mom’s friends, and what my mom’s friends regurgitated back to us.

When we did regularly attend church, we never participated in any anti-gay-rights dogma or any preachings that were remotely bigotry. My mother and her friends, along with all their children attending church was almost like a trend from the 80s that needed to run its course into the 90s. Attending Sunday mass was something our grandparents did with our parents, thus tradition followed me into my childhood. Until, like most trends and traditions, this one died out as well. Sure, we said we were religious. And my mom still posted status updates on InnerSociety about God, but we never attended church regularly again.

Perhaps we were not true believers, I never had the bible drilled into me. I did not, and I still don’t know all the bible stories unless it’s something in the vein of Noah’s Ark. If there was a book that was called the classics of the bible, that is essentially the only holy stories I was taught.

I was a child when we still attended Sunday mass regularly, but it was when my grandfather died that my mom explained to me exactly who God was to her. And of course, what Heaven was, what she believed it to look like, and why Grandpa had to go there after his heart stopped beating.

In my eyes, God was just a friend who kept my grandpa safe in Heaven, who I could speak to only in the form of prayer. I was encouraged to pray every night, but like most, I tended to only pray to God when I was in peril and felt like I was in dire need of divine assistance.

God or Heaven was never something I questioned per se. I blindly believed my mom when she said Heaven was a utopia consisting mostly of clouds, famous dead people, my grandpa, and God. And God was like an old friend whose sole fashion sense consisted of draping white togas, accessorized with a gold belt.

It was only when I started to get a little older, I realized my mom probably took me to church for a few reasons. One: because her mother brought her to church. Two: Her friends went to church and brought their children as well. And Three: so, I can attend religion classes to eventually be able to do the whole confirmation thing. This had two benefits, I would not go to hell. And she could see me get married in my childhood church in front of God, my dead grandpa, and my other dead relatives. Regardless, as an adult, I never questioned my mother’s beliefs and so I thought Heaven was truly a wonderful Utopia of clouds, rainbows, and happiness. I would not say my mother was wrong, but my time here has shown me that, at the very most, Heaven is a nonsensical fever dream. And, at the very least, there are downsides to Heaven.

Prologue, Heaven.

In the most literal sense, Heaven is everything you ever imagined it to be.

If you imagined Heaven as Brooklyn rather than big, pearly white gates and houses made of clouds you’ll get a 400-square-foot studio apartment surrounded by skyscrapers covered in graffiti instead. In fact, you probably crossed a semi-normal-looking bridge to get here. Instead of the big white one made with the most fluffy and prestigious clouds sprinkled with that gold sparkly shit. With shiny, white round pearls on the tops of the cylinder columns that hold the thing together.

Unfortunately, I did imagine Heaven as a place with a big fluffy bridge, big pearly white gates, and more clouds than I ever needed to see in a millennium. So many God damned clouds. You’d be surprised by how nauseating all-white everything gets after days upon days of being blinded by all the sterile gleam.

Regarding the notion of the afterlife being literally exactly how you imagined it. This applies to God as well. Growing up, my mother told me God and Jesus were white men with long beards, dressed in togas. When I got here and met the man himself, that’s what he looked like. Except for Jesus, yes to me he did resemble a white man with a beard who sometimes wore a toga to formal events, but mostly he just looked like a straight-up hipster.

If I wanted to get into specifics. I’d say Jesus is a hipster who spends too much of his time drinking New England India Pale Ale as he pretends to come off as enlightened. The word Jesus described himself as is “woke.” However, I would like to call him a drunk sociopath with daddy issues and far too much free time on his hands. Hell, he even seemed to glorify New York as a romantic idea just like many of the hipsters who seemed to flock to the gentrified Williamsburg as if the place itself would turn them into some sort of new-aged James Dean type.

I would imagine that if you’re someone who envisioned Heaven as Brooklyn perhaps God would also appear as some sort of hipster or some other kind of New York stereotype. The types of folk who fill the coffee houses that have unfinished brick and jazz music lightly bouncing from wall to wall.

However, when it comes to my man Jesus, I honestly think a hipster who consumes too much IPA and falsifies enlightenment is who he really is at his core. He would exist as that no matter how you imagined Heaven to be. Except for me, he is all of that dressed occasionally in a toga for formal events. Usually neglecting to wear underwear.

As I said previously, for me, almost every god-damn thing is a cloud. The ground, my home, and parts of the building where I go to work every day. Parts of God’s mansion and even parts of Jesus’s mansion. As well as a few of the bars on Main Street. Every single thing. The bright side is, we are encouraged to look on the bright side, I can walk everywhere with absolutely no shoes on and I would say that is more comfortable than wearing the silly sandals they distribute. So, I would imagine that if you are someone who imagined Heaven as Brooklyn you probably would not be so comfortable going shoeless, would you? But you probably would be going to an office that might resemble something other than a cloud-like Pantheon. And not everything would be a blindingly pearly white, at least you have that going for you.