Heaven — it’s an interesting question, and it’s even more interesting because nobody around here agrees on the answer. Ask a dozen different people, get a dozen different theories. Heaven exists, or there’s no such thing. It’s harps and clouds, or it’s a big dinner table with all your friends and family around it and your favorite foods, or it’s this, where we are — nobody agrees, because nobody knows. I never believed in it myself, never believed in any of that life-after-death business. You die, you go in the ground with your good suit, bip, end of story. Then I died, and that theory went out the window, but I don’t know any more about heaven than you do.

Take Mary Charles as a for-instance. Mary Charles will tell you that heaven exists, that she had her chance to go to heaven but she stayed on earth. So you think, okay, heaven is somewhere else, then. But Mary Charles, she’s not unhappy here. She does her share of complaining, it’s true, but I wouldn’t even call it haunting, what she does, as much as passing the time — she’s contented. So — what, then? Mary Charles is wrong?

And let’s say for the sake of argument that Mary Charles is wrong, that she’s actually in heaven — she chose her own heaven, maybe by mistake, but in any case, she’s in it now whether she knows it or not. Where would young Rixon fit into that? Because no matter what else you think about heaven, who’s there, what’s on the menu, everyone agrees that heaven is supposed to be a good thing — and no matter what else you think about Robert himself, and let’s not get into it, this isn’t a good place for him. It isn’t the right place. He doesn’t belong, doesn’t fit, and he knows he doesn’t, even if he wouldn’t use that name for it. Whatever his heaven is, this isn’t it.

And it isn’t mine either, but not because it’s here on earth. “Heaven on earth / That’s what you made / For me, since the day we met…” Anyone who ever lived knows, heaven on earth is possible. You can’t watch the sun go down through the trees out here in October and think otherwise, or listen to a Sarah Vaughan record, or get married. Heaven is obvious, sometimes. But heaven, I think, has a completeness to it, and when so many of us miss so many things…if it were heaven, my wife would have met me in the sculpture garden. But she might meet me there one day, and then, yes, this will be heaven.

For now, no. You don’t get an explanation, so you wait, and you look for a sign until your eyes ache from it, and if it doesn’t come the one day, at least you have something to hope for the next day. Like Stevie, how she walks the same route every night. She expects something to happen up there on Hilltop — or something expects her to happen, one or the other, but it’s like she knows she and that something are going to meet.

My name is Nelson Schrantz. I died of a heart attack May 29, 1999.

September 1, 2003

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