Good News for Modern Man

One big advantage of my being drafted so peremptorily onto George’s team was that it left me no time to mope over the slightly depressing fact that I was dead. I didn’t miss the kids – and I certainly didn’t register that I wouldn’t be seeing them for quite some time – because I’d fallen into habits that applied whenever I was working away from home. Check in. Meet client. Go back to hotel. Work on the pitch. Read a novel in bed. I was so used to conducting myself according to this routine that as I staggered back from George’s place I was trying to remember what book I’d bought at the airport. Moseying unsteadily along, racking my befuddled brain, I walked slap-bang into a little old lady and knocked her to the ground.
 
“Oh, my goodness, I am so sorry!” I blustered, bending down to take her arm. “Are you all right?”
 
Two guys – big guys, no fat – rushed towards us from the other side of the street. A narrow middle-aged woman scurried down the steps of the nearest house.

Wonderful, I thought. Drunken new guy mugs frail spinster. Great debut in the neighborhood, Piers.
 
“Holy Mother!” the narrow woman exclaimed as she reached us. I was surprised at the choice of words, but actually she wasn’t blaspheming. Pulling the old broad to her feet, I realized that I’d just flattened Mother Teresa of Calcutta. A pas doesn’t come much fauxer than that.
 
“Perfectly all right,” the Holy Mother said, brushing off her habit. “No harm done.”
 
“Entirely my fault. I’m such an ass,” I said. The big guys were standing on either side of me and my ears were practically flinching in anticipation of being boxed.
 
“Well, these things happen,” said Big Guy A.
 
“They happen to the best of us,” Big Guy B agreed. “Are you all right yourself, friend?”  
 
“Come in and have a sit-down,” the lean woman said to the Holy Mother. She turned to me. “And you too. You must be so embarrassed, you poor thing.”
 
I declined the offer, saying that I needed to get home.
 
“You take care now,” said one or other Big Guy. “You know your way, yeah? You going to be okay?”
 
I thanked everybody in sight and tottered off down the avenue with all my bones intact. Pretty obviously I was not in Manhattan anymore.
 
When I got home there were books on the shelf in my apartment. They hadn’t been there when I’d left – but I had thought of books, and there they now were. All my favorites. The complete works of Kurt Vonnegut, for instance. And I mean the completely complete works. I noticed a couple there that he hadn’t written yet.
 
I settled down in bed with a cup of strong coffee which I was willing to bet wouldn’t keep me awake, lit a cigarette that’d probably have a beneficial effect on my cardiovascular system and I opened God Bless You, Mr Rosewater at page one.
 
About an hour in, the doorbell rang. I pulled on my robe and loped through to open the door.
 
“Hello,” Pythia smiled. “So I shouldn’t be here, huh?”

​

*

​

“When we come up with something,” I said to George before the next meeting, “how will it be delivered? I mean, is His Omniscience going to rent billboards on Broadway and project slogans onto the Taj Mahal?”
 
“The discovery of ancient scrolls in a Palestinian cave usually works,” George shrugged. “Or a monastery in France. He often uses France. I think He likes the accordions.”
 
The second meeting was even less successful than the first. Any hope of progress was killed stone dead by GW’s report on our request to the Top Floor for a bit more substance.
 
“We have all we need, apparently,” George told the committee glumly. “We have to be creative with what we’ve got.”
 
The members of the committee grumbled - but this wasn’t, to be honest, the worse brief I’ve ever had to work around. At least creativity was allowed. I’ve had clients who took the superstitious and slightly fearful line that creativity was only a brandished femur short of voodoo. But when you’re dealing with a fuzzy concept, you at least need an account team who share a common approach. The bunch I was stuck with couldn’t have shared a pizza if it arrived sliced.  
 
Galahad banged on about devoutness and chastity, which prompted Tolstoy to improvise endless deconstructions of the ambiguity of religious morality and the essential decency of the horny-handed peasant. Sid attempted to pour oil into the  whirlpool by suggesting that every disagreement was really a meta-harmony of complementary discords; and Pythia contributed sarcastic one-liners that made me laugh but didn’t actually move the project along. And George took minutes. Pages and pages of minutes. Hours.
 
“And the meeting closes at…” George checked his fob watch. “…twenty past six.” He scribbled down the time and drew a line under it. “Shall we adjourn to the parlor for refreshments?”
 
Pythia glanced at me. “Actually, I have to rush off,” she said. “Sorry.”
 
“Me too,” I volunteered, perhaps a little too quickly. “Prior engagement, George. Rain check, yeah?”
 
As I was helping him take the sandwich plates out to the kitchen, George said, “You’re finding it all a little ponderous, aren’t you?” He smiled. “Don’t worry. It was just like this when the boys were drafting the Declaration of Independence. But that came out rather well, eh?”
 
I piled dishes in the sink. “Well, its tenets are still central to American culture, so I guess that’s some kind of tribute to your foresight.”
 
GW beamed. “Yes, yes. We hoped that would be the case. So America has grown tall in the soil of those principles, has it?” His eyes filled with tears. “That’s most gratifying.”
 
I nodded a vague affirmation of his assumption. From what I could remember of the Declaration, its stated reasons for the colonies waving bye-bye to the Old Country included imprisonment without trial, the establishment’s encouragement of domestic rebellion overseas, restriction of free immigration, the iniquities of trade embargoes  – to name just a few injustices that the old man and his buddies had sought to do away with. Looking at George dabbing at his eyes with a cotton kerchief, I was glad that Ascension Boulevard didn’t fall within the subscription area of Time magazine.
 
“Anyhow, I have to hit the road,” I said, discomfited. “I’ll give the campaign some more thought tonight.”
 
As I turned to go, he put his hand on my arm. “Piers,” he said quietly, “it’s perhaps not my business to know, but are you becoming involved with Pythia?”
 
I opened my mouth to say ‘No’. No, of course not – I never get it on with co-workers. No, no – we just met. No, no, no – what kind of girl do you think she is? No, George – for goodness’ sake, I only died last week.
 
But I couldn’t say that. My biog was right on the money – I’m essentially an honest man, and I could feel myself becoming more honest by the hour in this place.
 
“Yes,” I said. “Looks that way.”
 
George smiled. “Good. I like her and I like you. You go well together.” He led me to the front door. “Have a good time. You’re a long time dead.”  
 
Pythia and I spent a relaxed evening at my place.  I opened a bottle of the delicious red stuff and we lounged untidily on the couch. She told me stories about cryptic prophecies she’d delivered to a succession of Greek generals and kings (“…really nice boys, most of them, but absolutely no sense of irony…”), and I read aloud to her from God Bless You, Mr Rosewater. I like to read before bed.
 
Lying awake later, Pythia’s sleeping head on my chest, I looked back over my first two days in Elysium. The place was not the happy-clappy, Stepford-Souls, Pleasant-Valley  Dullsville I would have imagined. The residents seemed to experience the usual range of human emotions and they expressed those emotions in the normal mortal way. In the committee meeting alone I’d seen irritation, boredom, sarcasm and frustration as well as laughter, companionship, generosity and sensitivity. Lust was evidently allowed here in Paradise. Smoking and drinking were permitted. And yet, as I’d noted after I caromed into Mother Teresa, this was absolutely not Manhattan. It wasn’t even Carmel. Whatever it might be that made Heaven different to any other town I’d got laid in, it had something to do with the arcane criterion for admission.
 
But the hour was late. I was tired and somewhat drunk. I dunno, I thought. I adjusted the pillow behind my head. To hell – haha – to hell with it. I’d figure it out tomorrow.
 
And as I glided towards sleep, I reran the excerpt from God Bless You, Mr Rosewater that I had read aloud to Pythia. My favorite paragraph in literature – Mr Rosewater’s blessing of a newborn child - would be part of the next installment, and I was looking forward to reciting it for her.
 
Hello, baby. Welcome to the world. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You have a hundred years at the outside. There are no rules that I know of, except…
 
I sat bolt upright, rolling Pythia clumsily onto her stomach. She groaned and pulled the comforter over her head.
 
“What are you doing?” she said, muffled.
 
“I’ve got it!” I exclaimed. “I’ve absolutely got it!”
 
She pushed the covers back and peeked out at me, hair tousled, eyes gleaming.
 
“What - again? Yummy.”

*

“Couple of weeks back, I was driving through Atlantic City. My car stalled at an intersection. It was prone to stalling, that car. I held up traffic through two greens and – I tell you – all hell broke loose. Horns honking. People coming up the line to ask me what the fu…what the devil I thought I was doing. I mean, it was obvious that my car had died, but still they felt they had to express their displeasure.”
 
The committee members looked at me quizzically. They had no idea where I was going with this.
 
“Maybe a month earlier, my four-year-old kid jumped off the jungle-gym at the park and landed on the foot of a woman who was there with her dog. Man, you’d’ve thought she’d been showered with hot coals. My daughter was a delinquent. I was a lousy father. We must both be on drugs. It was ugly.”
 
George frowned. “Well, I guess the lady was shocked. Her reaction’s understandable.”
 
I shook my head. “There you go, Mr Washington. It’s understandable to you. That’s the type of person you are. It’s the type of person…” I raked my gaze around the table. “…that you all are. That everybody here is.”
 
“What sort of person?” Tolstoy asked.
 
“Forgiving,” I said. “Reasonable. Unaccusatory. They judge not. What makes this place Heaven is the people in it.” I leaned forward on the table. “And the people are in it because they were that way when they were alive. Doesn’t matter what religion they subscribed to, or what morals they embraced. Their rituals, their gods, their mistakes – all irrelevant. Only one thing counts when it comes to making it through the Pearly Gates. Attitude.”
 
A muttering conversation rippled around the table. It resolved itself to silence and George looked back to me, shaking his head and grinning.  
 
“That could be it, Piers. That really could be it. But if you’re right, we need to come up with an explanation of it. A document. Some kind of Declaration.”
 
I was ready for that suggestion. I’ve been to a lot of meetings.
 
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, George, but the world has moved on. Our target market has no time for wordy declarations. Leo – we can’t write a novel about this. Sid, Galahad – holy books are not an option.” I met Pythia’s gaze. “No cryptic ambiguities, I’m afraid.” She nodded just slightly and smiled. I straightened up. “We need a straightforward, simple slogan. And I have it.”  
 
I picked up a marker and turned to the white board, and I wrote:
 
Goddamn it, you've got to be kind.
 
I tossed the marker aside and looked back at the committee. “That’s it. That’s all we need to say. Carve it on the Pyramids. Burn it across the Alps. Emblazon it on the moon, if you like. But that’s the whole campaign, right there.”
 
They liked it. They tossed it to and fro; they suggested improvements of phrasing; they tried to weld on elaborations and qualifiers and clarifying sub-clauses. It’s what committees do. But in the end they decided it was perfect just as I had written it.
 
“It’s stunning in its candor,” Tolstoy said.
 
“It’s a mystic rune,” Galahad beamed.
 
“It’s indestructibly fragile – a perfect eternal bubble,” Sid chuckled. “I love it.”
 
“The Boss will love it too,” George said.
 
“You’re so clever,” Pythia murmured, and she took my hand. “Did you think of that last night?”
 
Man, they were all over me. They thought I was gold. And I could have allowed them to sustain that opinion – but that would have been a lie. I’m not a good liar.
 
There are no rules that I know of, except - goddamn it, you've got to be kind.
 
 “Actually,” I said, “it’s not me. It’s a twentieth-century writer called Kurt Vonnegut. I stole it.”
 
“Well, it’s still wonderful,” George said before anyone else could comment on my shameless talent for plagiarism. “We need to take a formal vote on whether to put it forward to the Client.”
 
I held my breath, but the vote was unanimously in favor.

*

Pythia suggested that we all go out for a celebratory meal. As the others set off from the house, George gently pulled me back.
 
“Thank you, Piers,” he said. “I think we have wrought something valuable here today, and it’s due in the main to your efforts.”
 
I shrugged. “Glad to have helped.”
 
“You know,” he said, as he took his tailcoat from its hook, “it makes me proud to think that the nation I helped forge has given rise to the likes of you. Forgive me the conceit, but you are the American I imagined the Union producing. Honest, intelligent, literate, industrious.” He chuckled. “And kind, of course.”
 
“Oh, please,” I said, embarrassed. I took his coat from him and held it up so that he could slide his arms in.
 
“What a nation it must be by now,” he mused, shrugging on the jacket. “The equality of all men. The dignity of labor. The process of government tied inextricably to the will of the people. A paradise that anticipates this Paradise of ours, eh?”
 
“How far is this restaurant?” I asked.
 
He turned to me and fixed his eye on mine. “Is it how I imagine it, Piers? I really would love to know, and I ask you as an honest man. Tell me true - is the United States of America the heaven on earth that I envisioned, that I fought for, that I strived to manufacture?”
 
I looked George Washington full in the face and I took a deep breath.
 
“George,” I said. “What can I tell you?” I reached out and adjusted his upturned collar. “You’re right on the money.”