When he died, Brad Jordan went to heaven. He would not be able to recount the journey from his body to heaven because his consciousness only experienced what he recognized as sleep, and he was only subconscious at that point and had no way of truly grasping the experience in a way that would make sense to someone else.
Heaven for Brad Jordan had all the trappings of the Christian heaven he had heard about his entire life and only half believed it. He didn’t identify as Christian in his adult life, but he had been to church before and he had watched enough movies to have an expectation for what heaven should be.
His body was the body he remembered from Earth, but he wore what looked like a clean white T-shirt that was as long as a dress with sleeves that billowed when he lifted his arms. He was also slightly translucent, just like he imagined his ghostly form would look. He appeared in a landscape of puffy clouds that served as the ground beneath his ghostly feet – that felt like he was standing barefoot on cool cotton – and there were clouds in the distance as large as mountains.
“Welcome to heaven!” he heard a voice say enthusiastically behind him and he turned to see a man with black skin and a pleasant, human face. He wore the same robes that Brad Jordan wore and he was just as transparent, but large, feathered, white wings stretched high at his back. “Sorry about your long journey in nothing, if you remember it of course. Do you remember it?”
Brad Jordan remembered dying, and he remembered being asleep, moving through memories and dreams, but he couldn’t know how long that had lasted.
“Nah man, not really. Felt like I went to sleep and woke up here.”
“Good,” the man said, “that’s how it should be. So, I see that you do not have wings. You don’t need them, but if you would like them, just imagine them and they will appear. Your robe will change to accommodate them. Follow me.”
As the man with wings led Brad Jordan over clouds towards a distance of more clouds, a golden gate appeared in the distance and soon they stood in front of it. The gate seemed arbitrary, like it didn’t really separate anything from anything else. The bars of the gate were thin rods of gold, framed by thin sheets of gold to form an arbitrary structure in the cloudy expanse, and Brad Jordan could easily see through to the other side.
“This it?” Brad Jordan asked as they stood in front of the gate and he looked around himself. “This heaven? I thought it was supposed to be roads paved with gold, and more than just one angel.”
“Well…of course,” the winged man stammered and he made a noise that sounded like he cleared his throat.
What this nigga got to be nervous about?, Brad Jordan thought to himself. His life on Earth had taught him to be skeptical of anyone he hadn’t already spent considerable time with. In Mississippi, he was the plug, and that meant dealing with shady people to acquire things for his clientele. He’d met so many different personalities and he paid attention closely enough to know when someone was acting suspiciously. He knew when nervous twitches presaged danger for him and he instinctively took a few steps back from the winged man.
“You know about the gates to heaven, right?” The winged man said. Brad wondered if his suspicions of the winged man were compounded by the darkness of his skin that was so dark that it seemed more unnatural the more he looked at it. “You enter and everything will be just as you imagined it. Just like the rabbis said.” The winged man smiled and showed pristinely white teeth.
“Nigga, I ain’t Jewish,” Brad Jordan said and his suspicions were all but confirmed in that moment. “I’m in the wrong place or something.”
“It’s all the same in the end, just enter the gates and you will see the heaven you always expected. All humans are there, those Jewishes you’re talking about, whatever it is you call the thing you are…”
Brad Jordan shook his head with bemusement. This winged man didn’t seem like any angel he’d heard about before, and he didn’t even seem to know what Christianity was.
“Is Jesus in there?” he asked the winged man from a distance that made him more comfortable.
“Jesus? Of course, Jesus is in there. Jesus is all around in there, just doing his thing. You know all the stories right?” The winged man was trying to be casual, but it seemed he had never heard the name before.
“For real? What he look like?”
The winged man looked up and made noises with his mouth like he was quietly thinking out loud. “Like…he’s got this face…hair…tall?…and he’s just great. Everybody loves Jesus. Come on in, I’m sure he’s eager to meet you.” As spoke, the gates swung out and a bright light issued from the open space behind the gates.
Maybe that really is heaven, Brad Jordan thought, and he took a step closer as he stared at the heavenly glow. But then he saw the look of relief on the winged man’s face, and it was enough to make him take a step back.
“Is Lucifer in there?” Brad Jordan asked and the winged man was shocked out of his relief.
“Lucifer? Yeah, sure, everyone you know from heaven is in there…”
Brad Jordan was running in the other direction before the winged man finished his sentence. But in the blink of an eye, the man was standing with his arms crossed in front of Brad Jordan and he stopped still. The winged man didn’t have wings anymore and neither of them was translucent.
“You could have just gone along with it,” the man said. His voice was emotionless, and it reminded Brad Jordan of some of the worst people he had ever met. “I should have studied up more on what human heaven is, I thought it was just clouds like Endla. My bad. But I guess we have to do this the hard way.” He smiled, but only with his mouth and Brad Jordan knew that he was staring into the eyes of the devil.
“You trying to take me to hell?” he asked the man.
“No,” the man said with a half-hearted laugh. “Not at all. I plucked you from the holding place where your soul was destined to dream forever. In a way, I saved you from a purgatory.”
“I was alright before I showed up here,” Brad Jordan said confidently. “You can send me back. We can act like none of this happened.”
“But I need you, Brad Jordan. You are worth more than your weight in rhasd, when you were alive of course, you can’t really weigh anything without a body.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Owuo, and I can be your best friend or your jailer, and either situation is fine with me. But unless I come across the soul of Mavis Turner by some stroke of luck, you belong to me. And while you belong to me, so does Zacchaeus Turner.”
“How you know Zacchaeus?”
“He is a hero on more worlds than one. Come with me, Brad Jordan, and I will tell you everything.”
Owuo cast a portal of black that appeared next to them. It was like a flat oval in the sky and Brad Jordan could feel it pulling at him.
“It’s not hell, I promise,” Owuo said. “And I will not harm you unless you give me a reason.”
Brad Jordan was smart enough to do as he was told, but only because Owuo was no ordinary man. But he would keep his eyes open, and he would do what could to avoid an afterlife of eternal torture and tormet by this devil.
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