Five Idiots You Meet in Heaven

Most people don’t appreciate how tough it is to pick the five people someone meets in Heaven. The line-up needs to have variety, but it can’t seem too random. You don’t want to pass over anyone important while still making sure there are some surprises along the way. Each person should be peculiarly suited to delivering some specific lesson, but the lessons have to build up to a grand revelation about the meaning of life. Not everyone’s fit to be a Heaven-meeter, and the selection process is complex. It’s an art, really. For example, the following are some of the people that Joe might have met in Heaven but didn’t:

Joe’s father: Joe’s dad would have been an obvious choice. He was a big influence on Joe’s life, and he could have explained how that watch that Gonzalez gave to Celine was a metaphor for how some things stay constant even as time ticks by, how one generation passes things on to the next like their names and their jobs and their hatreds of the Dutch. But Joe’s dad was never very articulate, and there was some worry that he might blow it. Plus, Joe’s mom was already slated to deliver the third lesson, and two parents seemed a little redundant.

The little boy who died in the explosion: I know. I know. “What little boy?” Right? Well, remember that unexploded shell that blew up Joe’s best black army friend Colby? It turns out that there was a little Korean boy who was hiding behind a rock and got hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel, dying instantly. It’s sort of like Joe and Colby were responsible for his death in a really indirect way. “Why soldier mans make the sharp happens?” he would say to Joe heart-rendingly, “You make the bad metals go my head.” (through the magic of Heaven, the boy would appear to Joe to be speaking grammatically incorrect English). This tear-jerking encounter would teach Joe the preciousness of child-life, the most innocent and adorable life of all.

Julie: Julie was still alive when Joe was crushed by those candy crates, so that wasn’t going to work. Besides, she’d since remarried, and it probably would only have been awkward.

Julie’s second husband: Julie’s second husband Mark died of lung cancer a little over a year before Joe’s accident. He was a large man with a crew cut and thick, heavy glasses. He was an accountant for an aerospace consulting company, but his passion was making scrap-iron sculptures in the backyard which he occasionally sold. He treated Julie very well, and she in return overlooked the anonymous homosexual intercourse in which he sometimes indulged. They had two children together and were relatively happy.

Mark could have taught Joe that relationships are the most important things we have in life or that it’s important to be true to yourself at least every third weekend at the reststop just south of Fort Lewis. But he was cut at the last minute to make room for Marty Goldstein.

The chairman of Xizhu Snack Foods: Wen Chenwei killed himself several years after the company that he ran for his father-in-law acquired the candy warehouse that employed Old Joe. The purchase had been Wen’s idea, and, while it was never regarded as a disaster exactly, it failed to bring the success and consequent approval of Wen’s family and business connections that Wen so desperately craved.

One afternoon, while visiting the apartment he furnished for his mistress in a suburb of Shenzhen, Wen excused himself to go out and buy cigarettes. Instead going to the front door, however, Wen headed for the balcony, hoisted himself up onto the railing, rolled awkwardly over the side and plunged 14 stories to sidewalk below. No doubt some sort of poignant lesson could have been squeezed out of this, but it wasn’t clear what Joe would make of it.

This guy who almost ran over Joe one time: Wendel Hurst was an entrepreneur, an evangalist and a crank. He was a man with a big beard, a big heart, and big ideas. He could have taught Joe that nothing is impossible, that you get out of life what you put in, that it’s important to dream your journey through life or something, and so on.

Though Joe and Wendel were effectively strangers, their lives were crucially intertwined. One day, Wendel had driven his pickup truck in from his farm in Eastern Washington to sell his hand-crafted goat cheese and to distribute religious pamphlets. As he rounded a corner late that morning, a young boy darted out in front of him chasing a ball. Wendel was forced to swerve suddenly to avoid hitting the child. Joe’s life could easily have ended that day. He could have been crushed under the wheels of Wendel’s truck and never been mentored by wise old Marty Goldstein and never been friends with Colby in Korea and never married Julie and never divorced Julie and never written that letter-to-the-editor about the horoscope typo. But he didn’t die. So he did those things.

Wendel, on the other hand, didn’t make it. Yes, he survived the accident mostly unhurt, but later that day he was mauled by a tiger. Shaken by how close he had come to killing a child-life (which Wendel knew to be the most innocent and precious life of all), Wendel sat in the ditch with his hands on the steering wheel breathing heavily for several minutes. Finally, he was able to put the truck in drive and head back home to his farm.

Among Wendel’s many projects, he operated a rescue and rehabilitation center for exotic animals, which he cared for and then rented out for films and birthday parties. Wendel was still upset about his experience in Tacoma when he made his evening feeding rounds, and apparently the eldery bengal tiger that he had inherited from an eccentric bootlegger could sense the anxiety on him. Wendel died from loss of blood. It made the papers.

But this was a pretty flimsy connection, even for Heaven.

Eustace McConnel: When Eustace McConnel arrived in America in 1873, he had nothing in his pockets but ambition and several hundred dollars in savings. And a pocketknife. And, actually, he didn’t keep either of those first things in his pockets. He was certainly ambitious, though, and while working long hours at a lumber mill outside Boston, he dreamed of owning a sweatshop of his own someday.

Eustace’s two most notable features were his frugality and a large and splendid handlebar mustache. And both continued to grow over time. On the strength of the first, he was soon able to invest in a dry goods store in St. Louis. On the strength of the second, he won the hand of his beloved Abigail, the handsome but dull-witted daughter of a landowner with whom he’d had some dealings. The store did well, but Eustace sensed that the real opportunities for a man like himself lay further west.

Eventually, Eustace and Abigail ended up in a growing port city in the state of Washington, where Eustace opened a sweets shop selling taffy, peanut brittle and lollipops. Later, the operation was expanded as local grocers and then stores as far afield as San Francisco and Boise began to stock McConnel Candy. Eustace himself did not care for sweets, but he appreciated the delight his product brought to others and also the cheap sugar then beginning to trickle in from the Hawaiian islands.

One night when Eustace was 72 and had long ago earned the title of candy tycoon, he left his factory late in the evening to find a longshoreman skulking around a pile of empty barrels. The man, who appeared crazed with pain and liquor, clutched at his jaw. “You McConnel?” he asked, and as he opened his mouth to speak, Eustace caught a glimpse of gums sparsely populated with black and rotting teeth. Without waiting for a reply, the longshoreman plunged his cargo hook into Eustace’s stomach and left him to die.

If Joe had met Eustace McConnel in Heaven, he could not only have learned all this interesting background to the company that employed him for so long, but also learned a lesson about how things that are sweet are best enjoyed in moderation.