I’m awake. The pain is gone. I can breathe freely again. But I don’t have to. My body seems imbued with oxygen. Or opium. Something very blissful. A figure is approaching. Floating in on what appears to be a lily pad. It looks like that transgender freak from The Crying Game. He floats down beside me; he’s laughing and says, “I get that all the time.”
“What?” I say. “What?”
“Jaye Davidson...Crying Game. We do look a lot alike…and not just above the neck, if you know what I mean. Nod…nod…wink…wink.”
The doctors must have upped my dosage. This is positively hallucinatory.
“No hallucination,” he says.
“Are you reading my fucking mind?” I bellow, clenching my fists, ready to poke him.
“Easy, Christopher,” he says too sweetly for his own good. “I can’t help but read your mind. I’m God and you’re in Heaven. Welcome.”
“Heaven! I’m a goddamned non-believer. What the hell am I doing in Heaven?”
“Oh, Christopher, we don’t discriminate against non-believers here. What kind of Heaven would that be? I gave you your wonderful mind after all. How could I punish you for using it? Do you think Helen Mirren is going to burn in hell for showing off those knockout tits I gave her? And speaking of tits, we’re going to have a couple of the girls show you around…”
Oh my God, it’s the Albanian dwarf and Bambi coming my way.
“Christopher,” he says, “so you remember Mother Theresa and Lady Di.”
“Oh, of course, he does," pipes up the ugly one. "He wrote about what a couple of whores we were. How’d he put it, Di?’
“Fucking fat slags,” answers Bambi. Erroneously of course. What a bimbo.
“That was the Dixie Chicks. I called the Dixie Chicks fucking fat slags,” I correct, barely containing what little patience I have for all those who are not my intellectual equal.
“Girls,” says God, “Hitch is right. Di he called you ‘a simpering Bambi narcissist’ and, Mama T, he called you ‘a thieving fanatical Albanian dwarf.’ And the western world will not see the likes of wit like his again. Not if I have anything to say about it. (Snort...snort.) And I do.”
I slap myself in the head.
“Tut…tut,” says the dwarf. “All’s forgiven. All is forgiven.”
Then his girls take me arms in arms and lead me down the garden path to a bandstand where a chorus of white-robed, dark-skinned children is assembled.
“Recognize them, Hitch?” the skinny one asks me.
I groan.
The dwarf jumps in, “These are some of the little ones from Iraq who got to Heaven prematurely courtesy of that war for which so manfully provided intellectual ballast, Hitch. They love it here. Makes me wish I had done a better job of dispatching the little souls from that hellhole of mine in Calcutta. But what are dirty needles compared to heavy artillery? You were right in that book you wrote about me, Christopher. I should have spent the money more efficiently.”
“Enough of that, Terry,” the candle in Elton John’s windsock interrupts. “No use dwelling on the past. The kids want to sing you a song, Christopher. Children…”
They sing:
"Hello, Christopher
Though you never knew us at all
You had the gall to pimp yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the warpath
And they made you change your game
And it seems to us you lived your life
Like a blowhard in the wind
Always knowing who to sling it to
When vanity set in
And we would have liked to have known you
But we were just kids
Our candles burned out long before
Your legend ever did
Bush sucking was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Washington created a superstar
And pain was the price we paid
Even when you died
Oh the press still hounded you
All the papers had to say
Was that Christopher was often very rude
Hello, Christopher
From the young ones from Baghdad to Tirkut
Who see you as something more than literati
You're our scary Uncle Hitch”
“Welcome, Uncle Hitch,” they shout in unison.
I want to kill somebody. “Enough of this,” I say. “If this is heaven, Orwell must be here. The man’s a saint. I demand to see Orwell.”
“Demand?” says God, sliding up beside me. “You’re not ordering a round of drinks at some Dupont Circle bar here, Christopher. Be nice.”
Nice, fuck. Just then I hear, “Hi-ho, chaps,” from behind me, and I turn around to come face-to-face with Orwell himself. “Hitchens, good man. Heard you were on your way. Lovely to see you here. Lovely.”
For the first time in my life I’m speechless.
“Ahem,” says God. “First time in your Afterlife, Christopher.”
“Orwell,” I explode, “how do you stand having this Nancy boy getting all Big Brother on your every waking thought?”
“Oh, you get used to it, Hitch. Trust me. And it’s not as if you have a choice. We all leave free will at the door in this place. So I’m here to invite you to a welcome party in your honor.”
“Will there be other atheists there?” I ask.
“Lots. Hitler. Stalin. Saddam.”
“Saddam? He gassed his own people! The Kurds. What about the bloody Kurds?”
“Oh, they’ll be there too. They’re bringing the whey. Snap!”
“Cute, Orwell,” I say in disgust. “From Newspeak to cheap puns. Is that what’s happened to you up here?”
Just then a couple rides by on a bike. And I cannot believe my bloodshot eyes. Sitting on the handlebars is Barbara Olsen. Peddling is Osama bin Laden. He’s wearing a brown bowler hat and they’re singing:
Raindrops keep fallin' on my head
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turnin' red
Cryin's not for me
'Cause I'm never gonna stop the rain by complainin'
Because I'm free
Nothin's worryin' me
This is the most perverse thing I have ever seen I think to myself.
“Think again,” says God. “I like to think of this as a contrarian’s paradise, Christopher. I would have thought you’d like that, self-styled contrarian that you were.”
“This flies in the face of all that’s moral!” I thunder.
“Pshaw,” says God. “Morality, is like faith and hope and all those other gooey abstractions you were so zealous in deconstructing—a mere handrail to help humans traverse the sharp precipice of the mortal plane before falling into the deep, dark abyss. The abyss, and then this: The Bliss, where loving your enemies is no longer a choice, Christopher, but a mandate. Those who didn’t practice at home have a hell of a time with it here.”
I hate this place.
“Yes, that would be you, Christopher,” little Miss Godly pubes says. “See you at the party. And try not to dress like a slob.”