The Invisible Jet

Civilization by Marco Brambilla from CRUSH on Vimeo.

Unable and powerless to circumvent my miseries, daunted, discouraged and unable to face reality, I sought refuge in God and gave myself utterly to God. All that I loved and cared for, my family, my home, perished before my eyes; finally, my body and my life; yet my soul was immortal and lived on. At the sound of trumpets, though I thought myself a good and pious man, I admit that, I feared the final judgment of the truly righteous and was much relieved when found myself ushered by heavenly beings of kind and gentle countenance upwards to brilliant vault of clouds, like a glorious roll of fabric, a place of great peace and solace, the inner lining of which seemed cool, quiet and tasteful.

Every one in heaven is in a state of beatitude. There are, of course, degrees of beatitude, each fitting, each infinite and incomparable in its own way, but some beatitudes are clearly greater than others, just as one infinity can be greater than another.

The simplest beatitude is the entry level one; everyone feels really great that they made it in to heaven. This feeling is pretty much identical to getting into the college of one’s choice; the feeling, however, never diminishes and you never have to hear about how someone else got into Harvard.

The next degree of beatitude can be compared to the afterglow from getting amazing oral sex from someone really famous, someone you’ve fantasized about, but never thought you would actually meet because they were too good for you, or died in Ford’s theatre. This is the good kind of oral sex, the kind that is big, wet, Boston Marathon of unrelenting pleasure, the kind with lots of involuntary motions and expressions, the kind where your face is sore and wet afterwards from crying and you go around for days afterwards with a soft, stupid pleased expression and giggle when poked. Only, of course, this never ends.

The following degree of beatitude can be described as simultaneously winning the lottery, the Olympics, the all the Nobel Awards and Academy Awards simultaneously, and then having a Bruce Willis-style shootout with an all-star team of terrorists, which you win while saving the Earth and destroying the Death Star. This is basically a “fuck yeah!” that never ends on a rocket powered hang glider that shoots past the event horizon of total awesome.

There are, of course, infinite levels of beatitude, so there is no way to describe them all. I was gifted with a degree of beatitude roughly equivalent to the most incredible ski vacation imaginable, with infinite skill and agility on staggering slopes of perfect beauty on a snowy planet made entirely of cocaine.

Everyone in heaven accepts being there, even if, like me, they doubted for a second. “Smug” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I mean, fuck, we’re in heaven! How fucking cool is that, huh? It pretty much obliterates every shitty, humiliating, painful moment in one’s life. I mean, you just think of your old yearbook, and it appears, but you never even open it, because you just start laughing.

I came across an another angel. She was more beautiful than any shampoo ad or ad for any feminine product for a beautiful, mortal, decaying body. She was listening to a pair of slender headphones that were white. I asked her telepathically what she was listening to. She let me listen. It was the sound of the damned, the sound of flesh searing, ripping and popping, the sound of people being baked alive, screams of absolute horror, panic and dismay and, worst of all, some terrible unnamable realization, some common note on which they harmonized in agony. It sounded like a remastered track of the Holocaust, put through the Hindenburg, with a low bass rumble from Nagasaki with samples from every awful thing that man has ever done. It was the most beautiful and heavenly music I had ever heard, as though Bach had had access to Black people and cocaine. As I looked into the eyes of this beautiful angel, I wept. The tears turned into matching doves and flew away. She said, “let's go get ice cream” and we flew away to get ice cream at one of heaven's many ice cream parlors, but then we thought of God's infinite goodness and it was sweeter and more satisfying than any ice cream.

There isn’t a lot of catching up in Heaven. Heaven is when you realize that your Mom or your Dad, your child, your best friend or loved one is doing all right, just by themselves, just by being themselves and you can’t add anything to that. They are perfect. You don’t need to write them a letter, or pay them a call. They are, like yourself, perfect and fulfilled. Unless they are burning in infinite torment in hell. But that fact cannot bother you. Not here. Not now. It’s one of the things you have to experience in heaven to understand, just like its amazing cloud topiary.

There is an open bar, of course, but there is no point in drinking. Once you are in heaven, you are already happier than the most incredible drunk that would kill ten Martin Amises. The booze goes down like water, it passes through us like rain through mist.

Wonder Woman and her invisible jet are here. And Wonder Woman no longer has to wear clothes.

Heaven like a huge airport with infinite clean white terminals and everyone is waiting for the same plane. That plane is God. Even here it is uncertain when He will arrive. It is always possible he may be delayed (delay is not an imperfection). It may even be possible that He does not exist. This does not alter the reality of the fact we are waiting.

Deep down, everyone in heaven imagines the same thing. That they may, in fact, be completely alone here. That every other soul they encounter is an illusion, an extra. That only they were saved, were truly righteous. That they were so righteous, they loved everyone and everything, even though they were not worthy of that love. That they themselves are God, and that creation, the fall of man and salvation are just some imagined story, some thought experiment or let’s pretend game that they have created for their own delight, to show their infinite omnipotence.

This thought is thought by all those in heaven: it shines before them when they close their imaginary eyes, like a single point in space, a single distant star.