THE END

I stepped off the solar-powered tram at Heaven’s Gate thinking: How do I get out of here? I’m not supposed to be dead!” My internal dialogue continued.

You’re not supposed to be dead? What a joke! Of course you’re supposed to be dead. You were murdered, you idiot! I warned you! I warned you over and over and over again not to buy into your brother Barry’s sham movie deals! Did you listen? Nooooo!

I looked around. This is Heaven? The scene looked like the entrance to Disneyland on the day after Christmas. It was a dreary gray scene without flowers. There were drab stuccco ticket booths, maybe 500 of them. Each had a sign on its top:

The signs were faded, the paint on the ticket booth counters were chipped, the angels in the booths had the same dead eyes as the clerks behind the counter at the DMV. When most people, even the dead, see a line they join it—sometimes without even knowing what the line is for. It was no different at Heaven’s gates. Each booth had a hidiously long line of the dead attached like giant anacondas. And, they weren’t the dead you’d imagine waiting to enter heaven, like nice elderly, silver-haired couples who died in their Boca townhome after taking their Metamucil. These dead were a deluge of humanity so immense they could have filled Calcutta, twice. Then it came to me. You don’t die and “go” to Heaven because you lived a good life, no! First you die, then like applying for unemployment or food stamps, you go to Heaven, get in line, and apply to get in.

I did not join one of the lines. I’ll say it again, I was not supposed to be dead. Even if I was supposed to be dead, Heaven was out of the question just as standing in line was. I’m a Jew. We don’t stand in lines; we make reservations! There is no heaven for us. You die and poof, you’re gone; ashes to ashes.

Every imaginable type of human being was represented. The stench was horrible. There were obese Midwesterners with pinkish corn-fed complexions; barefoot Bhindis with asphalt eyes and red-dotted foreheads; a group of Chinese tourists carrying oversized Louis Vuitton bags, who must have been killed on their flight from Paris to Peking; Susan Boyle; an Afghani shopkeeper with aged-rutted skin and brown, rotting teeth; leering Somalis chewing khat; old Persians with short, clipped beards, dark pin-striped suits, and tieless white shirts buttoned at the neck, who walked with the air of a prince; actual Saudi princes; Mexicans; a bent, old Arab woman in a burkah, who looked like she’d died carrying a bindle of hay for her husband who was too cheap to buy a donkey; more Mexicans; pie-faced Mongolians; two crippled Eskimos, Richard Nixon; scattered barefoot, psychotic, homeless with sooty toenails grown out into long vinelike potato shoots, carrying on animated conversations with who knows; a cluster of blue-haired Germans walking with hands clasped behind their slightly tilted backs; old Jewish Yentas with morbid facelifts dressed for lunch at Versailles; spartan athletes wearing hi-tech sports gear who took early leave; Julia Childs; little children with gut-wrenching innocent eyes; junkies; meth-heads; winos, Black and Brown bangers; Moldovians; hookers; a lesbian dwarf and her blind, nonbinary Latina/Latino wife.

There were three separate booths marked “United States.” To serve social justice, each of these booths had reader boards indicating the percentages of dead arrivals by race, disability, sexual preference, and privilege. Whites with privilege and Asians were still way ahead of gays, Blacks, and Latinos.

I spotted a retiree in a polyester golf shirt standing by the main entrance on the other side of the booths. He had gray hair, a Polident smile, and cheap Lenscrafter bifocals like he’d just arrived from Lesiure World. His angel’s wings were silver-tipped and marked with the golf ball brand Titleist. He was waving preregistration card holders like a Walmart greeter. He looked like someone I could talk to. I took out five crisp hundies from my wallet (even though the Russians had fed me through a giant sausage grinder, I was whole), dressed as I was when they plucked me off of Larchmont. My Patek Phillipe, although it had stopped at 5:37, was on my right wrist and my new Dries Van Notens were barely scuffed. I held the bills like a five-card stud hand so that he would see each $100, tucked it into my palm, then plowed my way through the reeking throng to speak to him.

He turned out to be a hologram, standing, waving people through like an automaton, aimlessly chanting:

“Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!”

“Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!”

He was standing next to a 4K reader board displaying blue sky and white fluffy clouds floating across it. It looked like the “Fly the Friendly Skies of United Airlines” video they play on the seat back monitors before a flight. I stood and read the message before trying to talk to the hologram:

“WELCOME TO HEAVEN…NOW THAT YOU HAVE PRE-REGISTERED, IT IS TIME TO SEE ONE OF OUR ADMISSION PARTNERS…DUE TO HIGHER THAN NORMAL ARRIVALS, WAIT TIMES TO SEE AN ADMISSION PARTNER MAY BE LONGER THAN USUAL…PLEASE MOVE FORWARD TO THE PEOPLE MOVER WHERE OUR GUIDE ANGELS WILL ASSIST YOU IN EVERY WAY TO MAKE YOUR ARRIVAL AS PLEASANT AS POSSIBLE…THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE!

YOUR GOOGLE HEAVEN TEAM”

“Your Google Heaven Team”! Google! I have a Gmail account! They’ll have every e-mail I’ve ever sent! I’ll never get into Heaven.

I flashed the cash and tried talking to the hologram. “Listen, I was killed by mistake, mistaken identity. It was my twin brother they wanted. Is there anyway I can talk to a supervisor?” He pixilated, then regained his resolution; he resumed waving people in, “Welcome! Please step forward to the people mover!”

I felt stupid, really stupid. My money was worthless. I dropped the folded bills on the floor; I looked at my Patek Phillipe, then my $850 Dries Van Notens and began hopelessly hyperventilating.

This totally sucks! It’s so unfair. My twin brother went out of his way to avoid doing anything honest, decent, or generous; he lied, cheated, and stole without a hint of remorse. I tried to live a good life, I tried always to be a stand-up guy, one of the good guys. I was on the Mediterranean Diet; he ate like a pig. I never cheated on my wife, he was on his fifth wife and never let an actress into a movie without first holding a private audition in his office. I kept telling him to stay away from making B movies with easy money borrowed from his network of shyster money launderers, to make something legit out of Shore Productions, our Hollywood film production company. He ignored me, then whack! I’m up here, dead, and he’s probably getting ready for dinner at Bestia.

There you go again! We are not talkiing unfair; we are talking stupid, naïve. No, we are talking crazy. Isn’t that what they say about people who make the same mistake over and over again but never stop?

Shut up!

I flashed back to the minutes before I was murdered. I never knew it was coming. I was walking out of Ho Lee Fook on Larchmont where I had picked up some locally sourced “clean” vegan Chinese for dinner; my wife Hannah was 23 days from delivering our first child. I was happy! I was going to be a dad! I had the world on a string! I was carrying the box of to-go cartons with little red pagodas printed on them, holding my iPhone up to my ear with my shoulder, telling Hannah I was on the way home—when out of the blue, two juice men from a local Russian syndicate Barry had stiffed on a loan stepped up from behind me, slipped their meat hook hands under my armpits, and lifted me up onto my toes until I was walkiing like a ballerina. They knocked the box of Chinese food out of my hands.

“Now you are coming with us, greasy balls!”

I could hear Hannah ask, “Walter, who is that? What’s the matter, who is that, Walter?” But before I could answer, they slapped my new iPhone X away from my ear. “Walter! Walter, talk to me!” Hannah was crying. I sensed that would be the last time I would ever hear her voice.

“You’re Molotov’s guys, right?” We were walking towards a black Hyundai Genesis.

“Molotov, Gorbachov, Putin, doesn’t matter. Get in car.”

“It does, it does matter! Because you have the wrong guy! It’s my twin brother Barry you want! Barry handles the money, I’m only the accountant. I lied. I knew what he was doing and begrudgingly helped him work one lender against the others. Let me take you to Barry; he’ll get you the money! I’m the wrong guy.”

“We have right Jew!” one Russian said as the other held a photo of their quarry, me, next to my face.

“I’m the wrong Jew. That’s my brother! See the birthmark on his left cheek?”

They paused. One gorilla looked at the other and said, “Maybe we call Molotov before feeding this one to meat grinder!”

“Meat grinder! If you kill me how are you going to get your money? Please don’t kill me. I’m going to be a father, please! I’ll get your money, I promise. My brother always pays his...