I’d been an atheist for all but the last few minutes of my earthly life and on earth I had never felt I needed guidance from God. But after just one meeting with God and his family, I felt lost without them. It would be a tragic irony beyond belief if I’d learned the truth about the existence of God just before God ceased to exist.

Of course I didn’t know that God was dead, or even if God could die. God had told me the very reason for my own existence was as a back up for the contingency that he was captured by the enemy. But if God had been captured, what could I possibly do about it? Even already dead, I was still scared to death. Had God given up so much of his power and vision that he could be blindsided by an attack before he had a chance to meet me that morning? And what was the purpose of that meeting, anyway?

I started to realize that I was panicking when I saw a red glow being projected on the walls of my bedroom, and realized it was coming from me. I looked in the mirror and saw that I was flashing like a neon sign.

So I took steps to calm down. I took a step back. I consciously tried to relax. I didn’t even know whether I had a heart anymore (I’d been so busy since I got to Heaven that I didn’t even have a chance to read the user’s manual for my new body; it was still sitting unopened on my bedside table) so I took the deep breaths that in my old body would have slowed my pulse. It worked. I stopped glowing and calmed down.

Hey, regardless that my town home was across the border in Culver City, I was an Angeleno. As a radio personality I’d handled earthquakes, brushfires, mudslides, riots, and Barbra Streisand’s political pronouncements. There wasn’t any disaster I couldn’t handle.

I needed more information.

Since I wasn’t on the air myself, I turned on the TV, just at the right time to catch breaking news on HNN: a press conference by Satan.

Satan walked out with what looked to be her general staff lined up behind her. She looked as if she’d had a sleepless night. For some reason that was not apparent to me, the emotions she was projecting were not in agreement with the message she was delivering. She was about to declare victory but she looked as if she was giving a concession speech.

“I’m not taking any questions yet,” she said, then put on a pair of eyeglasses and read from a prepared statement.

“The Divinity have surrendered Heaven,” read Satan, quietly but emotionally. “The program of the Anorexic Party for transfer of power to a popular form of government has been agreed to.”

There was a huge roar of approval from the crowd. Satan waited until it died down to continue.

“I felt it was better to make some minor concessions rather than have to engage in a protracted war of attrition against our brethren still loyal to the Royal Family. Here are the negotiated terms under which we now enter into the era of Heavenly freedom.

“First,” Satan said, “The palace has been removed from Heaven into its own dimensional matrix and the Trinity are banned from Heaven. Any angels or humans who wish to join them will be permitted to do so while the tunnels are still operating. We have been assured by the Divinity that there is enough spacetime within the palace to accommodate comfortably all angels and resurrected humans who wish to join them.

“Second, with respect to the territories of earth, we have agreed to an earthly Interregnum for the Reformation period of the Christian epoch, at the end of which the future control of earth will be determined by a popular election for the governorship of earth. Qualification for governor shall include only native earthborn, which excludes all previously unincarnated angels; additionally, none of the Trinity may run for this office.

“The Interregnum shall begin Luther 001 at 0900 CeST and end with the election to be held on earth on a date to be mutually agreed to by both parties, who must file before Satan 001 at 0500 CeST. At 1200 hours CeST, all tunnels to earth or to the palace shall go dark. One-way tunnels to transport earthborn souls to Heaven before Satan 001 shall be permitted for the duration of the Interregnum. Those of you not with us: this is your last chance to depart our territory. Outbound tunnels will be dark after noon today.

“Also after noon CeST today,” Satan continued, “all access to the Tree of Knowledge shall be shut off, both here and on earth. The Trinity shall be permitted to listen to and answer prayers for comfort from the earthbound during the Interregnum but neither the Trinity nor our party shall be permitted to perform any miracles above π on the Aquinas Scale for the ­duration.

“At the end of the Interregnum, elections shall be held on earth, and upon our electoral victory two-way tunnel traffic shall be reactivated for all and the Anorexic Party shall be free to take control of earth in addition to the territories already ceded to us today.”

Satan paused for a moment then put away her statement and took off her glasses. “I’ll have further statements, and perhaps answer some questions, later this afternoon, after I have a chance to consult with my kitchen cabinet. That’s all for now.”

The crowd erupted into shouts of “Say-tun! Say-tun! Say-tun!”

Lights flashing, Satan walked off the podium, her retinue following.

I couldn’t believe it. How could God just run away like that, giving up to someone as evil as Satan without a fight?

It just didn’t make sense. But it was about to. Big time.

My doorbell played the chimes of Big Ben. I opened my front door. It was Sophia and Estella. I let them in.

“We have a recorded message for you,” Sophia said.

A holographic image of the Trinity appeared in front of me, backlit as if in solar eclipse. I saw my daughter Felony standing off to the side.

It was way too bright. I needed to shield my eyes. Estella saw my problem, waved a hand in front of my face, and my eyes adjusted properly.

And God spoke:

“My son, I know you’re frightened right now. You’re just now coming to realize that I’ve been watching over you for your entire life, even though you didn’t know it, and now you will learn that I’m going to have to leave you on your own for a while.

“I know you’re going to find this hard to believe but even I can be afraid. Especially I can be afraid. I have more reasons to be afraid than anybody because I have more that I love at risk than anybody else. It’s all right to be afraid. Just don’t let your fears get the better of you.

“I would have preferred to tell you this in person but events have come to pass sooner than I would have hoped, though not sooner than I prepared for.

“I’m sending you on a mission of vital importance. You must return to earth before the tunnels are shut down at noon today. Sophia and Estella will see you safely back to earth but they may not stay there with you. Be certain of this: everything you need to know, everything you need to know how to do, is already within you. You do not need to look to the Tree for guidance. All of the Tree that you need is within you.

“You are to be our Ambassador Plenipotentiary to earth, with full authority to act in our name and to make binding commitments on our behalf. To put it another way, you are the campaign manager for the Party of God in the upcoming gubernatorial election that will determine the fate of earth. The outcome of that election will in turn determine the fate of the rest of my creation.

“I give you these blessings to help you on your mission:

“First, look for a circle to form around you.

“Second, don’t make campaign promises I’m not going to be able to keep.

“Third, feel free to ask for advice, but when it comes time to do your job, you’re the only one qualified to do it.

“Fourth, resist not evil.

“And fifth … use the Force!”

God smiled at me.

“Your daughter will be safe here with us so you don’t have to worry about her being used as a hostage.

“I’m betting everything on you, Duj. You are my ultimate go-for-broke: all my cash bet on one horse to win. You have all of our blessings, all of our love, and all of our faith.”

The image faded.

“We must fly, sir,” Sophia said to me, “if Estella and I are to have time to make it back to the palace from earth before the tunnels are shut down.”

I had never been a religious man but I crossed myself.

“But, sir, you’ve never been a Catholic,” Sophia said to me.

I grinned as bravely as I knew how. “You ever try to make a Star of David on your chest?” I asked, knowing she wouldn’t get the joke. “Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter XI.

A phrase I had learned from reading Ayn Rand, back in my college days, came back to me, “The hatred of the good for being the good.”

Lucifer hadn’t lied about God’s “sexual” motive for creation. The same dialectic of tension-and-release that makes sex pleasurable also makes music pleasurable.

Simply, Lucifer had been putting everything God had done in the worst possible light, rendering no respect or gratitude to God for the simple fact that if it was not for his creative impulses, his willingness to take risks, to be inventive, to take action rather than do nothing, Lucifer would not have even existed to raise her foul-mouthed objections.

After the crowd broke up, I said a quick thanks to the Iceman for getting me into the rally and flew back to my town home to finish reading Satan’s own “Mein Kampf.”

Lucifer was a persuasive writer, but the very clarity of her vision is what made me understand how evil it was down to its very roots.

I understood, perhaps for the first time, that while procreation is driven by the female seduction of the male and the female nurturing of the young, the male willingness to explore, to invent, to face the unknown down, to be “men of action’—all of which require bravery, boldness, and utter risk-taking—were what drove males from God on forward to create the new.

Now I knew why western religions all insisted, counter-intuitively to the observation of nature, that God was male. Real creation is a violent invasion of the way things already are, and females are by nature neither violent nor invaders.

Of course this doesn’t mean that females can’t be creative and males can’t be nurturing. We each contain, to a lesser extent, the attributes of the other gender. But purely for identifying the principles involved, creation is the male principle and procreation is the female.

Lucifer, by any of the names she had used at one time or another—Eve, Lilith, Satan—hated God because by nature he was more spontaneously creative, more comfortable in the role of creator, than she was. Creation seemed easy for God. Lucifer had to work at it.

Lucifer was jealous of God because when it came to composing universes, God was Mozart and she was Salieri.

Lucifer’s own effort at creating a new universe of her own — which she named “Hell” as a compliment to the ancient Greek philosophers — was a good example. I’ve had it independently corroborated that the account she gave in her book, telling what went wrong with Hell, was pretty honest.

After her life on earth as Eve, Lucifer concluded that what she had witnessed going wrong on earth had been the human tendency to focus on the differences between people rather than their similarities. People fell into an “us versus them” mentality. There were your own tribesmen; everyone else was a barbarian, a ferengi, a gaijin, a gentile — an outsider. Men focused on the differences they had from women, and vice versa, rather than each focusing on their common humanity and symbiotic roles. Men, in particular, focused on their differences and fought wars over them against other men.

When she decided to create a universe of her own, Lucifer’s conception was elegant and, in my opinion, very bold. She decided to make all of her creatures hermaphroditic—capable of either fertilizing others or being fertilized to bear children themselves—and to make all of them physical twins to each other. It would be an entire planet of twin siblings whom, she believed, would have no differences to fight about.

Brilliant in conception as it was, Hell was a ­disaster.

The principle of uniformity started out bad and, as it evolved, only got worse. Without individual distinctions, everybody saw everybody else as a spare part, to be thrown away as soon as the slightest defect showed up. The social order quickly drifted into an insect-like totalitarianism that made the liquidations of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot, in our own history, look like the work of amateurs. With no individuality built into the system, there wasn’t a single revolutionary capable of the independence of mind necessary to lead a liberation movement to save that world from its own dead end.

They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Lucifer, the Goddess of Hell, found out the truth of that bit of wisdom the hard way—and she felt so guilty over the misery that resulted from her own creation that she decided to start questioning the principle of creation, itself.

It was a short slippery slope from creative frustration to jealousy to a rejection of all she saw around her. It was not by accident that she named her anti-God political movement the Anorexic Party. It was not just that those who rejected God were spitting out the food of life. It was that they were spitting at the king of all invention.

I was so shaken up that I needed to get my mind off politics, even if for a few hours. I got my daughter’s number from the Tree, gave her a call, and made plans with her to attend the violin competition of the Heavenly Olympics that evening. Heaven follows the original Greek Olympics in that events are not only athletic but also artistic.

We noticed a lot of celebrities in attendance, but I have to admit I was a bit surprised to see John F. Kennedy sitting in a box with Jackie. I hadn’t known the two of them were an item again.

The Olympic Violin competition that night was wonderful, with contestants playing everything from Bach to Bluegrass. As usual, the judges were themselves past violin competition gold-medalists such as Niccolò Paganini, Joseph Joachim, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern and Fritz Kreisler. The gold that night went to a rookie, barely up from earth, named Julie Schulman, who brought the stadium to their feet with his bravura performance of Hoagy Carmichael’s third violin concerto.

After the concert, Felony and I went flying into the Sinai mountains for a midnight picnic, and I finally got a chance to catch up with what my daughter had been up to recently. She had written a comic screenplay titled Alas Poor Eunuch that William Shakespeare had committed to direct because she was preoccupied writing another script, and the two of them were in a dispute about casting.

“These Brits are such snobs,” Felony complained. “Bill wants an actor he worked with at the Globe for the lead, but I had Groucho in mind when I wrote the script and I don’t give a damn that Groucho’s not ‘classically trained.’ If Shakespeare doesn’t back down, I’m going to ask my co-producer, George Lucas, to fire him while we’re still in pre-production and see if we can get Nora Ephron.”

When I got home that night at about 0300 CeST, there was a message on my phone from God’s appointment secretary, Ruth, asking me to come back to the palace for a meeting with God at 0900 that morning. I decided I had time for a few hours shut-eye so I set my alarm for 0700 and sacked out.

It seemed to me that I’d only been asleep for a few minutes, though, when I felt a huge crack and my bed started shaking. The first thought in my head was earthquake and my California instincts took over immediately. I flew, literally, under the nearest doorway and waited for the rumbling to die down.

But when I looked out my window, what I saw filled me with horror.

The gigantic diamond palace at the center of Heaven—the seat of the Throne of God — was missing from the night sky … and the streets below where it had been were on fire.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter X.

But after what I saw, I started wondering, myself, whether it was God who was making a mistake by taking us on faith, expecting the rest of us to be as decent, smart, and reasonable as he was.

I was concerned that looking like God would make me conspicuous as I tooled around Heaven. God assured me that I didn’t have to worry, not in a city where God impersonators nightly performed in revues and comedy clubs, where God bodies were the most popular Halloween costume every year, and where every Friday night the midnight show at the Rialto attracted hundreds of fans in full God regalia to lip-synch to the cult movie, God: The Musical. “Every once in a while,” God told me, “I still go to the midnight show, pick a seat somewhere in the middle, and sing along.” He grinned. “I haven’t been recognized yet.”

Maybe God wasn’t recognized but I wasn’t out on the streets of Heaven more than a week when I was.

I was having a cappuccino a few blocks from the palace, sitting at a booth in a HoJo’s Jr., thumbing through a copy of Satan’s number-one-best-selling autobiography titled Lucifer is My Slave Name, when I heard a voice from my past. “Duj? Duj Pepperman? Is that you?”

I turned around to see the smiling face of Iceman Shnull, my co-host on a morning drive show we’d done together in San Antonio for six years, who had been killed at 28 by a drunk driver, twenty years before I passed. He still looked as young as ever.

“Well in the name of God, if it isn’t the Iceman!” I said, standing up.

“I thought it was you!” Iceman said, hugging me. “You look like crap, pal, but I’d know your face anywhere!”

So much for anonymity.

Iceman slipped into the booth opposite me and dropped a piece of plastic with the order number 42 onto the table.

“What are you doing nowadays?” I asked him, sitting down again.

“I’m on-camera talent for Heavenly News Network,” he said. “I do remotes, mostly entertainment premieres, but lately with what’s been going on, I’ve been doing more hard news breaks. What about you? Still doing talk?”

“Well, I was,” I told him. “Then I got carjacked in the parking lot of Jerry’s Famous Deli and suddenly I’m out of a job.”

Iceman grinned.

An angel brought over a tray with his order, fried clams, a side of welsh rarebit, and a thick chocolate malt. “You eating?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “That’s all I’ve been doing since I got here,” I said. “Been eating so much, now that I won’t get any fatter, that I think I’m ready to hurl.”

“Yeah, everybody does that at first,” he told me. “But in a couple of more weeks you’ll settle down and get the hang of it. Hey, isn’t being able to fly even better though?”

“If I’d known how much fun it is,” I joked, “I would’ve killed myself years ago.” I’d already found out by reading in the Tree that you couldn’t get past final judgment into Heaven if you’d killed yourself … at least not without a good lawyer.

“Listen, I’m on a quick break before I have to head back to work,” Iceman said. “I’m covering Satan’s big Anorexic Party rally at Judas Park this afternoon. I can lend you an HNN press badge and slip you into the press section. You want to come?”

Of course I took the Iceman up on his invitation. This was exactly the sort of thing God told me I was supposed to be checking out.

Iceman and his crew set up their telepresence pickups with dozens of other networks right in front of the band box while I found myself an empty chair a few dozen feet farther back, sitting with the radio commentators and print reporters.

I felt conspicuous about my appearance when a beefy angel, one of Satan’s roadies, gave me a weird look. I gestured at the spare tire around my middle and shrugged; the roadie laughed, gave me a thumbs up, and went back to putting up seating on the platform behind Satan for her personal guests.

“Why does God permit suffering?” Satan asked, her hands raised to the skies of Heaven dramatically. “Permit suffering? Permit suffering? God was counting on suffering! God thinks suffering is good for you! Perfection wasn’t good enough for God. God didn’t like perfection. The entire fucking idea behind creation was to fuck things up as much as possible and make everyone else’s life a living hell!”

The multitude at the huge rally, tens of thousands of angels but with a surprising number of saved humans mixed in, roared in unison, “Say-tun! Say-tun! Say-tun!”

There’s no kind way of saying this so I’ll just say it. Satan looked like hell. She was painfully gaunt and sickly looking, her reddish-blonde hair hung down limply, her pale skin hung on her loosely, and she tried to cover up the physical decay by wearing a long black dress and a black beret tilted to the side.

“And at the end of the day, what are these great gifts that God has given us? To make us into animals that were designed only to eat other living things and turn them into shit?”

“No!” the crowd shouted.

“To go through life on earth, ignorant of the truth and scared that we were made from dust only to be turned back into dust … only to find out that we don’t really die forever and it was all just God’s little practical joke?”

“No!”

“To have sex—with physical organs, may I remind you, that God thought so little of that he made them do double duty with pissing and shitting—so we can fall in love with someone who, if you don’t get sick to death of each other while smelling each other’s farts and bad breath, is going to die and leave you feeling that everything that makes life joyful has come to an end?”

“NO!”

“And why? For what? Why did God put all of us through this?” Satan asked the crowd.

“So God could jack off!” an angel in the front shouted.

The crowd roared its approval.

Satan laughed. “You know already. You’re with me before I open my mouth. I don’t even have to tell you any of this. That’s right. God is a thrill junkie, a sex addict, a maniac who runs experiments that destroy other people’s lives without even having the decency to warn them of the risks. The Larry Flynt who lives in that floating pleasure palace with that sluttish sex goddess he calls your mother … and their misbegotten bastard — that middle Eastern terrorist from Central Casting — who claims to be your savior … are Dr. Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, and their monster!”

Satan raised her hands again.

The crowd chanted in unison, “Say-tun! Say-tun! Say-tun!”

Satan lowered her arms and waited for silence.

“All of this is so we can follow in Daddy’s footsteps and became dreamers. We’re supposed to think that if we just put our noses to the grindstone and study the Tree of Knowledge that we’ll all be able to make pretty little universes of our own. Well, I’ve been there and done that. I followed the program. I became a human being. I learned how to dream. I created a universe of my own. And I’m here to tell you that it’s not only an impossible dream, creating a universe of your own is a nightmare for everybody involved! Why do you think I named the universe that I created, using God’s own blueprints, hell?”

The crowd roared with laugher.

Satan lowered her voice, almost to a whisper.

“Is this right? Is this fair? After seeing how this great experiment called creation has worked, are you still going to mindlessly stand there like stunned sheep and say to me, ‘In God we trust?’”

The crowd laughed uproariously.

“Or are you going to use the one gift that Heaven’s own version of Bill Gates gave you that actually has some value? The power to say no? Do you want this nightmare to continue forever or do you want to claim your right to be master of your own destiny? Do you want to stick with this prepackaged, preplanned, one-size-fits-all monopolistic beta test that I like to call Universe 2000 — ”

“Say-tun! Say-tun! Say-tun!”

“—Or do we say that we’ve simply had enough of being ruled by a tyrant, demand free and honest elections, and run things ourselves?”

“Say-tun! Say-tun! Say-tun!”

Satan pursed her lower lip, stuck out her chin, and extended her right arm out to the mass crowd standing before her in a grand salute.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter IX.

In the time before Time, there was but One Spirit and He was Whole and Content. This spirit was my Father, whom you now observe incarnated into a fleshly body of His own design.

My father wished a companion so he split off part of himself and created a free Spirit, the first spirit created free from prior existence becoming the Second Person—my Mother.

My father and mother, God and Goddess, played with Each Other, creating tensions and releasing them pleasurably, and They decided to make their playing with each other even more pleasurable by taking part from each of them and making a Third.

I was the First Child of God and his Goddess—the Third Person in existence, and the First Born of the race of angels that followed.

“Hold up a second,” I interrupted. “Christians always refer to you as the Second Person of the Trinity,” I said to Jesus. “You’re saying you’re the Third Person?”

Instead, Maryse answered, “Jesus is the Second Person, if you’re considering it as a royal chain of command. I do my best to be apolitical, to reign but not rule. My interests lie in the advocacy of justice.”

Jesus continued:

No one then had bodies. We were all free spirits, and gender was not yet invented. Any of us could join for a time with any other, then part again as we willed. You might think this sort of existence was perfect, but it wasn’t. We had intellect and we had fun, but we didn’t have goals and without goals we did not experience our lives as meaningful.

Mortal or immortal, no one can be content for very long without anything important at stake, and very long comes quickly when you’re immortal. We were discontent.

My father and mother saw trouble brewing with their children not having anything meaningful to do, so they decided to do something about it. My father’s introspection told him that just as he had arrived at the impulse for creation by contemplating the greater pleasures offered by the tension of denied gratification, in the same way providing the discontented angels with the possibility of denied gratification could provide their existence with a goal, a direction, a purpose. Out of this sense of purpose could grow meaning.

First he decided that the resistance necessary for delayed gratification would require creating a universe with congealed energy and a linear time line, a universe of matter and energy, space and time. He had made galaxies, stars, and planets in his previous experiments, and imported a number of already made ones into this new universe.

He spent a week evolving life on a planet around a nice, medium-sized star, designed a salad of colorful plants and a menagerie of interesting pets in a self-sustaining, self-replenishing, and homeostatic ecosystem.

Finally, he invented outer bodies that could slow down the frequency of angelic spirits, enabling matter to impose limitations on spirit—making them subject to external forces. He even fashioned a body for himself, and liked it so much that he started wearing it frequently.

On the sixth day, my father opened up Eden, the first ever theme park, and told his children that if they wanted to play in it we’d have to put on these cute new bipedal mammalian bodies he’d evolved for us to use while in the park. What they didn’t tell us kids was that it wasn’t just a playground. Eden was a kindergarden that taught through educational games, with the purpose of teaching little angels how to grow up to be big gods.

“But something went wrong,” I said.

“Not something went wrong,” said Jesus. “I went wrong. I was the first born. I claimed my rightful place as the first angel to put on a body. You know me by still another name, the name on the body I put on. Adam.”

His appearance morphed. Now he was taller, clean-shaven, fairer, more Nordic-looking.

“You ate the fruit from the tree with the knowledge of good and evil?”

“That’s a nice way of putting it,” said Adam.

Visits to Eden were set up on the buddy system. We angels each had to pair up with another buddy and put on matching bodies—one male, one female. My buddy was my best friend, Lucifer, an angel who was just a little younger than me. You guessed it. Lucifer became Eve.

Lucy was always the life of any party, the sort of angel it was always fun to be around. But she always knew I was a sucker for a game of Truth or Dare. She dared me to hack into the project Eden folder of the Tree of Knowledge—Dad’s Macintosh computer, if it helps you to think of it that way—where we found an as-yet unimplemented design for dihydrogen monoxide crystals. Snow. Lucy immediately thought of all the fun possibilities. Skiing. Sledding. Snowball fights. Making snowmen and snow angels.

You were a teenager once, you know what it’s like. Once Lucy and I got the idea stuck in our heads it seemed like wicked fun. We goaded each other into it and neither of us wanted to back down and look chicken. Our reptile brains — the serpent of legend — were tempting us.

Lucy didn’t know her way around the Tree and I did. To continue the metaphor, she was computer illiterate and didn’t know how to get past Dad’s passwords and safeguards. When it came time to go beyond joking around with each other and actually hack into the planetary operating system, I was the one who knew how to do it and did it.

So, I captured a moon, did a little work on the earth’s orbit, and the next time Dad put on his body and came down to Eden for a walk through the park, I started up the snow machine and told him to look at how Lucy and I had ‘improved’ on his design.

“Did you spank them?” I asked God.

God didn’t answer but shot me a look suggesting my question was boorish. Yes, God had said “ask anything,” but maybe I had gone just a bit too close to the line. Maryse, who has perfect manners, pretended not to notice my faux pas.

“No, Duj,” Jesus said, saving me. “Actually, Dad and Mom were pretty understanding about the whole thing, considering how totally I’d screwed things up. I’d introduced what amounted to a destructive virus into earth’s ecosystem, resulting in an ecology spiraling wildly out of control and, just a few hundred years later, in a global deluge.”

“Jesus!” I said involuntarily.

He nodded and continued:

But worse than that, I’d screwed up the Great Plan.

Lucy and I stayed on earth in our new fleshly bodies in the company of other angels who had incarnated in the park, but Dad told us if we stayed, it was under the condition that we had our access level in the Tree of Knowledge reduced until we returned to the Celestial Realm. I’d crashed Eden’s self-sustaining ecosystem and we were going to have to build a new colony on earth ourselves, by hand. We had to learn whatever lessons the earth had to give us without being able to check our answers by looking in the back of the book. No more angels would be allowed to join the colony until we had things working again; we were going to have to rely on the labor of our own human children.

Things got pretty bad. There was a lot of disagreement among those of us now on our own about what to do. There was a lot of infighting, splitting off into warring factions. You probably already know that things turned violent right from the start, when one of Lucy’s and my sons killed his brother over something as silly as which one had cooked my dad a better dinner during a visit.

Lucy was never quite the same after Cain killed his brother. She withdraw into herself and barely talked to me. She wanted to take off her body and return to the Celestial Realm. She had grown to hate earth and thought the whole Eden project was a mistake from the beginning. I insisted that there was still work to be done on earth. We had those stupid sorts of arguments husbands and wives get into where each of us was accusing the other of having caused the whole mess. Finally Lucy decided to abandon her body and returned to the Celestial Realm without me.

I stayed on earth with our kids until my own body aged beyond repair, then I returned to the Celestial Realm, leaving my human children even more on their own. With little more than a few simple rules to keep them on track, the human race fell into every sort of corruption possible.

Having lived forever, my father has a lot of patience, and isn’t one to give up or give in. If you read the Old Testament you get a pretty good idea how badly it went, how all the choices Dad had left were between bad and worse. My father was determined to get the Eden project back on track, no matter what it took, even if he had to start all over again. The worst of the lot had to be culled—forced out of their bodies and wait-listed for reincarnation — and Dad made lemonade out of the lemon I’d given him by allowing the deluge I’d caused to clean the planet of all but the best samples. There were several more times when cities of totally corrupt humans had to be culled—Sodom and Gomorrah, Canaan — but it was a holding action, at best.

It took my father a while to figure out a plan then he and mom talked it over for a while and brought it to me to see if I was willing to make up for my mistake. It was going to take all three of us, working as a team, if this was going to work. It was the last chance to save not only earth and my children now living there but the future for all the angels as well. I was so ashamed about my celestial stupidity back in the original park that I agreed eagerly, without even asking what exactly I was going to have to do.

I found myself regretting that rash decision more than once, after I found out what I’d agreed to.

Jesus continued:

“When the time came to execute the new plan, my father visited his spirit into a man named Joseph and my mother visited her spirit into a woman named Mary. Both of these humans had been approached by angels in advance to make sure they didn’t mind the joinings. You know exactly what it feels like because it happened to you for a few minutes yesterday, right?”

I nodded. “Except I wasn’t asked in advance whether I minded or not.”

“Well,” Jesus asked, “did you mind?”

I laughed. “You might as well ask whether I like flying, sex, or ice cream. I think I’d give anything to experience that ‘joining’ again.”

“I knew that,” God said to me.

Maryse gave her husband a look and punched him playfully on the arm.

Jesus continued, “While incarnate, they conceived a man child on earth, into whom I breathed my soul at the moment of birth. This was something entirely different than just putting on a body, the way I’d done the first time. I was the first spirit who, having been created in the celestial realm, was naturally conceived and born a mortal human being. I was made to be the first angel ever to die, the first angel ever to go on a suicide mission.”

“How did you stand it?” I asked.

“By the skin of my teeth,” Jesus said. “Just barely. Scared out of my wits when the time came close.”

“Then why did you go through with it?” I asked.

Because it was my fault in the first place! Because it had to be done and there just wasn’t anyone else qualified for the job. Keep in mind, nothing like this had ever been tried before. If something went wrong, existence itself might have been damaged beyond repair. But if it worked—if it could work—then all of us, angels and humans, could take on the power of imagination—learn how to dream—and be able to create universes of our own.

After the small original colony of angels had cast off their flesh and returned to the Celestial Realm, the human children that we angels had procreated on earth lived in a fleshly body that died, was a ghost for a while—sometimes wandering the earth, sometimes hanging around in dismal cities of the dead—and were wait-listed for a chance to reincarnate on earth and do it all over again. No future to speak of.

I came back to earth to bring the children of earth the good news that my father was granting them conditional amnesty and would take them into his kingdom if they’d simply agreed to get with the program again. I had to be born human rather than merely take over a ready-made human body because I was the test pilot to show the human children that they could be transported to the Celestial Realm where they could be given new bodies, grow spiritually, and evolve into gods.

They saw me die. I was dead. There wasn’t any question about it. Then they saw me alive again in a couple of days, looking like myself, without having to be reincarnated as a baby. No less a convincing demonstration of the possibility of resurrection would have worked.

But that was only part of my father’s plan.

Evolution into godhood was once again being offered to the angels. Angels could have their spirits incarnate on earth into human bodies, just like in the original Eden project. Angels who haven’t yet become human first don’t dream. As spirits they lack imagination. Without imagination, creation is impossible.

We were offering angels a chance to become human for a time, so they could learn to dream, and when they returned to the Celestial Realm, they also could become gods.

My father’s great plan was the goal of the modern revolutions: liberty, equality, fraternity. The creator of the universe, the author of history, the inventor of life, the father of the races of angels and humans, was also the first revolutionary. If my father’s plan worked, the Original Spirit would not only have a companion, children, students, and servants. For the first time, God could have friends.

“But no matter what it is, there’s always some malcontent, the fly in the ointment, a critic,” said Jesus.

“Lucifer?” I guessed.

Jesus nodded. “Lucy. Eve. My best friend. The love of my life. The mother of my children. The worst pain in the ass on earth or in Heaven.”

“Your ex-wife,” I said, understanding completely.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter VIII.

I didn’t faint, though I think I had every right to. I was also completely tongue-tied for the first time I could remember.

I could see Sophia and Estella enjoying my predicament, but they managed to contain themselves.

“Uh, pleased to meet you,” I managed to croak, my radio voice gone for the moment. I managed to stay on my feet, took his hand, and shook it.

“Make yourself comfortable,” God said. “Mi casa es su casa. I had my angels bring you here a little early so we could chat a bit privately before my wife and son join us for breakfast.”

“You’re … married?” I asked.

God nodded. “I had the Hebrews start their calendar on my wedding day so I’d never forget an anniversary.”

God noticed the expression on my face. “What?” he said.

“Uh, aside from the idea that God has a human body and a wife, I’m just a bit thrown off by the idea that you need a calendar to remember anything,” I said. “I didn’t know you could forget.”

God opened a bottle of juice and poured it over two glasses of ice, handing me one. “It’s the same nectar Jesus gave you that you liked so much,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the glass.

“You’re welcome,” God said. He motioned me to a recliner facing an outside view of the city, and sat down in one right next to it, leaning back and putting his feet up. “You’re right. I can’t really forget anything,” he said. “But I can get so focused on a project that I might need a reminder to widen my perspective again. You were married. You remember how that annoyed your wife.” God took a sip of his drink and put the glass down on the armrest of his chair. “Ask your burning question,” he said.

“Since you’re God, who am I?”

“Who, indeed?” said God. “Yesterday, while sitting in a restaurant on earth, you remembered that you are God and experienced godlike powers of cognition. Just now you learned that you look and sound exactly like God, too. You’ve dreamt of living here. Two of my best angels have been treating you like you’re God. Yet, you haven’t felt much like God since you drowned—in fact you’re quite frightened. The only continuity of identity you have is Duj Pepperman. You’re self-conscious about all your ungodly imperfections. You feel powerless. You take notice that I live here in this magnificent palace at the center of Heaven and you don’t. Does that about sum up the paradox of your question?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Can I add the observation that, like me, you also have a fondness for long monologues?”

God grinned. “And, you have my chutzpah,” he said, sipping his nectar again. “What I’m about to tell you is unrecorded in any earthly scripture. You can find clues in the Christian gospels, many more in Gnostic texts, but any religious scholar on earth, clerical or lay, would regard a clear statement of the purpose for your very existence as the foulest heresy, the sort of blasphemy they still execute people over, in some quarters. This had to be kept secret from everybody on earth, including you.”

I didn’t say anything. God was right. I was now too frightened to talk.

“You’re my back-up copy, Duj,” God said. “Heaven is about to fall into civil war and I cloned you in case I’m captured by the enemy.”
I hope nectar doesn’t stain. I dropped my glass on the carpet.

The human drama starts with the words, “In the beginning,” but the first thing you have to understand about God is that he always was, he is now, and he always will be. When Moses asked God for his name, God identified himself as, “I Am that Will Be”—which is about as close as God could come to describing the unconditional fact of his existence to a brilliant but pre-scientific revolutionary.

From the cradle of philosophy in ancient Athens to modern rationalist thinkers such as Ayn Rand, the axiom that “existence exists” is the starting point for all philosophical examination. Yet, many secular philosophers thought the existence of God impossible because their logic told them that God couldn’t come into existence out of nothingness and any consciousness that arose out of existing nature would be subject to natural laws like we are and therefore neither unconditional nor godlike.

What they failed to consider is that existence itself is conscious: self-aware, contemplative, volitional. The words “existence” and “God” are two words identifying the same axiomatic fact. Existence itself is the body and mind of God.

For unfathomable eons, God’s experience of himself was whole and contented. He enjoyed thickening and thinning his body into distinct universes, blowing bubbles that exploded into universes bound by time and space, creating galaxies, stars and planets, watching them do their cosmic dances, then either dissipate back into his body or crunch back together for another explosion and a new dance.

Then God had a philosophical thought, a “what if” speculation, a fantasy, if you prefer. It was a thought that was to change everything, including God’s own experience of himself.

“What if,” God thought, “I could want something I couldn’t have?”

It was an intriguing idea. Since everything that existed was part of God’s body and obeyed his every command, how could anything fail to yield to his will? It was like the classic child’s question, could God make a mountain so big that he couldn’t move it?

Many times had God composed universes the way we would think of a musical composer writing a symphony. God found pleasure in the dialectic of tension and release, dissonance resolving into consonance. There was always a small thrill as God felt a universe crunching to maximum tension, then exploding. God wondered what the thrill of release would be like if there could be an even more intense build up of tension, one he couldn’t launch at will.

The new thought was exquisite in the variety of possibilities it raised.

God contemplated the new thought for what even he considered a long time. After contemplating a lot of different possibilities, and even creating and destroying a number of different universes as experiments to verify his thinking, God decided that the only thing that could possibly create the sort of dynamic he was looking for, the only thing that could build up a tension great enough for the sort of thrill he was seeking, would be to split off part of himself into a separate consciousness, independent of himself, a separate consciousness that could say to him, “No.”

With the possibility of the first “no” would also be created the possibility of the first “yes.”

Thus did the Lord trade his omnipotence, his omniscience, and his omnipresence for the possibility of finding love.

All that followed—the creation of other conscious spirits, the creation of life, the creation of angels and of men, and the even more fabulous opportunity that God offered himself, that he could merge his consciousness into one of his own lesser bodies and live for a time among his own creatures—was an adventure for God. He had given himself the gift of love, but with it came the gift of grief.
Never did God regret his decision. Not for an instant, he told me.

Start with Helen of Troy’s beauty but add in Goldie Hawn’s smile. Go next with the body of Rita Hayworth. Mix well with Kathleen Turner’s voice, Ayn Rand’s intellect, and Audrey Hepburn’s charm. Season lightly with the sass of Sandra Bullock or Jenna Elfman and this might come close to adequately describing my first impression of God’s wife, Maryse.

Breakfast was at a round table in the family room. The table floated without any pedestals to bump knees into and the chairs floated automatically to the right height and distance. Around the table were the holy Trinity: God the Father, Jesus the Son, Maryse the Holy Spirit … and me.

Food service seemed to be via teleportation or some technology unfamiliar to me; either that or God was just creating a smorgasbord off the cuff. Being distracted by the company and the conversation, I don’t remember everything I was eating, but I do remember portions of a gingerbread frittata, smoked salmon blintzes with Cointreau sauce, and some fresh fruit that looked like a mango but had the texture and taste of crème brulet.

It wasn’t my plan to become the center of conversation, but Maryse had other plans. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard the name ‘Duj’ before,” she said. “How did you end up being called that?”

I smiled wryly. “It’s my own fault,” I explained. “My first job out of college was on a small AM station in Riverside during evening drive time. I ran the board, spun records, read news, did a little commentary now and then, and took calls. I was fielding an obnoxious caller who disagreed with one of my commentaries, and he said I was nothing but a stupid disk jockey. I shot back—clever me—that I wasn’t a stupid disk jockey, I was a stupid dusk jockey, and before too long, ‘DJ’ became ‘Duj’ and I was stuck with it.”

“That’s interesting,” she said, smiling warmly, “because my name came about almost the same way. “Before I was incarnate my name was Yse.” She pronounced it to rhyme with Leesa. “I was named Mary when I was on earth. I couldn’t decide which name I wanted to use when I crossed back to the celestial realm so I put them together as Maryse.”

God saw that I was still holding my tongue and gave me a look.

I leaned back slightly and shrugged. “It’s not that I don’t want to ask all three of you questions,” I said. “It’s that I want to ask everything and I don’t know where to start.”

“Ask anything, Duj,” God said. “That’s why you’re sitting at this table now. Even though this is new to you, you’re family.”

“Here goes,” I said, turning back to Maryse. “Do you just call your husband ‘God’ all the time or do you have a nickname for him?”

She grinned at me. “It depends on what sort of mood I’m in. If I feel he’s really being pig-headed about something, I call him ‘Joe,’ because I know it annoys him so much.”

I cocked my head to the side. “Joe?”

“Diminutive of ‘Joseph,’” she said. “That was God’s name when he incarnated on earth.”

“Okay, now I’m really getting confused,” I said. “I thought you,” I said indicating God, “incarnated on earth as you,” I said, gesturing toward Jesus.

“Mmm-hmm,” Jesus said, taking half a bagel and shmeering cream cheese on it. “You can blame the Nicene Council in the early fourth century for that one,” he said. “You ready for the real story?”

I leaned back and listened to The Gospel According to Jesus.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter VII.

It must be obvious from this narrative that Sophia and Estella had been assigned to watch over me. Just exactly what that responsibility entails is a matter open to interpretation, but allowing me, while asleep, to float out of my open bedroom window buck-naked to do an aerial tour of the Heavenly City, does not in my opinion qualify as attention to duty.

At the time I departed earth, a lot more about dreaming was mysterious than understood. People tossed around terms like wish fulfillment, R.E.M. cycles, alpha and theta brainwaves, collective unconscious, directed dreaming, and bicameral minds. But the simple fact is that the ancients, who saw dreams as omens or prophecy, at least took what happened during dreaming as something as real as waking states of being. With the exception of the few remaining Australian aboriginals, practically nobody on earth had a clue why human beings were made to dream.

Almost immediately upon my arrival in Heaven, I found out what dreams are for. It was not only an inescapably obvious experience, but it was at the heart of a political struggle that made earthbound conflicts over abortion, Jerusalem, or skin color look like a bingo game by comparison.

The capacity to dream, to really dream, is what makes the human race “made in God’s image.”

I’m not talking about merely replaying waking experiences while asleep. That’s one of the lowest levels of dreaming that even a sleeping dog experiences. I’m not talking about the visiting between those living on earth and loved ones who’d crossed beyond, or even the antics of otherworldly trespassers who got off on using human dreamers as their personal entertainment consoles.

The sorts of dreams I mean are the ones that seem more real and important to you than what happens when you’re awake, dreams that are either a horror you awaken from with pounding heart and covered in sweat, or a transcendent bliss that breaks your heart when you awaken to mundane existence. Some people have taken dreams this intense to be visits to other realms, including Heaven and Hell, and in rare cases they were.

But what God designed dreams to be in his original specs for the human race is our ability, like God himself, to imagine new worlds into existence.

Not that I learned all this on my first night in Heaven. What I did learn that night is that the dreams I’d had as long as I could remember, in which I could fly, came true once Jesus had given me my new body. My old body being constructed of matter with the properties of mass, and consequently gravitationally attracted to all other masses, was simply not designed to rise out of a gravity well at will.

Back on earth, some living souls used their dream states as an opportunity to leave their leaden bodies behind a short while, for some astral soaring around the planet, while others flew by ignoring gravity in dream worlds of their own creation. Speaking for myself, I had a rare night of the first kind, in which I left my body behind in bed and soared above mountains and through cities, and quite a few more of the second, where my ability to fly was an ordinary feature of my created dream lands.

What I didn’t know, when I climbed into bed that first night, is that the new body Jesus gave me wasn’t made out of ordinary matter like my old body, and that its mass was a variable designed to be consciously controlled. Once I fell asleep and habitually went into one of my usual flying dreams, my new body automatically responded, and like a sleepwalker, I was propelling myself right out my bedroom window and floating above the treetops.

I was cruising along about a mile high and a couple of hundred miles an hour when Sophia and Estella caught up with me, gently caught me and started guiding me back home, still fast asleep. I awakened at about 3,500 feet up and about fifteen minutes away from my bedroom window to find myself naked but not cold, flying prone with the city lights of Heaven below me, two gorgeous angels as my honor guard, and my pecker pointing down like landing gear.

I didn’t have a chance to be embarrassed for very long. As soon as she became aware that I was awake, Sophia laughed merrily then pulled herself close to me, kissing me sensually. Estella joined in kissing me from the other side. I was way distracted after that but I can state with some authority that I wasn’t doing any more dreaming that night. I didn’t need to.

The science-fiction novelist and folksinger, L. Neil Smith, once asked in a lyric, “Can you get laid, up in Heaven?”

Believe it or not, even though the opportunity presented itself to me, my first choice wasn’t to spend the rest of my first night in Heaven doing a ménage à trois with a couple of angelic Playmates. I could fly. I hurriedly dressed and I spent the next few hours in flying lessons, soaring above and through the streets of Heaven with the two most beautiful flight instructors I’d ever seen.

While we’re on the subject, let’s get a few things straight about angels.

Angels don’t have wings. They’re not burritos like humans; they just use the one astral body, not pulled by gravity. The whole “on wings of angels” thing was a nice poetic metaphor but if you ask me it’s gotten a little old.

Angels are neither androgynous nor are they non-sexual beings. It’s just that they can choose what sex they want to be. God never neutered them. That tubby bitch Silent Bob got this last part wrong when he made Dogma.

Angels are not silent but beautiful sex dolls for humans, either, although I might have given that impression. Sophia and Estella just dug me and it was mutual.

Successful marriages between angels and humans are very rare. If you think the whole Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus thing is hard-going communication, try going on a third date when you really are from different worlds.

Human writers took the word “angel,” which translates as “helper,” then went off on long literary tangents portraying angels as nothing more than God’s messengers, choir singers, and clerical staff. Wrong. The race of humanoid spirits we call angels were God’s first children, our older brothers and sisters. Sure, they do chores around the house; they’re good people and enjoy helping out when they’re not too busy with their own stuff. There’s a corps of elite angels who serve in the Regiment of the Lord, when God needs soldiers, bailiffs, or police officers. But “angel” isn’t a job description. Even in Heaven, the phrase, “You’re an angel!” is mostly a term of endearment.

The important difference between humans and angels is that angels are those spirits who have never incarnated into flesh. Angels who have incarnated into flesh are pretty much the same as spirits grown on earth. They wouldn’t be angels any more; they’d be human. The angels that have never been human don’t sleep; it’s not part of their nature. They’re alert all the time.

Angels don’t dream.

There are angels who are jocks and angels who are nerds. You don’t want to go up against an angel in a karate match or on Jeopardy; they’ll cream you. But psychologically, angels are simply not human.

Angels don’t write novels or plays; they write elegant verse, encyclopedias, and history. They are fabulous mathematicians with tons of theorems attributed to them but none of them could have come up with the visualization that led Albert Einstein to E=mc². They’re the best engineers around. Angels make wonderful portrait painters, photographers, and cinematographers; but there isn’t a René Magritte or Walt Disney among them. They’re terrific dancers but lousy actors; the universe’s best Renaissance musicians, circus performers, and Elvis impersonators — this last is the opinion of Elvis, himself — but an angel couldn’t write a joke if someone’s life depended on it.

That doesn’t mean that angels don’t laugh or aren’t witty; lots of things amuse them—usually human foibles, like my late-night nude excursion. I’ve been at cocktail parties where I saw angels, in duels of sarcastic banter, one-upping Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde.

I learned the hard way that you don’t want to take angels to a comedy club. Once I took Sophia and Estella to a club in the Soho district of Heaven called The Divine Comedy to see the 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe doing a stand-up routine, and twenty minutes into his act, Marlowe came down to our table and started ragging on me because I kept on having to lean over and explain to the angels why all the humans were laughing. I found out later that the girls had done this sort of thing before and, though they really don’t get human jokes, seeing me squirm was how the two of them were getting their jollies.

I’m getting ahead of my own story.

Morning came but I wasn’t tired. At about 6:30 AM by my living room clock, I took a quick shower, put on my meeting-with-the-affiliates suit, and flew out with Sophia and Estella for my breakfast meeting.

Have you ever noticed that the gospels refer to Heaven as the Kingdom of God? You wouldn’t know it from movies like Heaven Can Wait, Made in Heaven, or What Dreams May Come. You don’t see God playing any part in Hollywood’s version of Heaven. It’s a curious omission.

Heaven is a kingdom. God is the king. The Lord’s palace is at the very center of the city and is Heaven’s main tourist attraction.

What everything that had happened to me added up to, since line seven had lit up in the K-TALK studio, was that Duj Pepperman had been given a royal summons to appear at court that morning at 0800 hours Celestial Standard Time.

A number of traditions—Gnostic, Hermetic, Masonic — refer to God as the Great Architect of the Universe. Nowhere is this observation truer than in the design of God’s own home.

The Heavenly Palace is an enormous diamond whose lowest point hovers about fifteen feet — exactly ten cubits — off the ground. Think of the structure as two Great Pyramids joined together at their base, floating in the air, with the apex of one pointing up and the apex of the other pointing down.

Each facet of the diamond lights up in an ever-changing pattern of colors, so that the overall impression from any approach is that you’re looking at a display that combines the drama of never-ending fireworks with the intricacy of a Bach cantata.

On official occasions when God is holding open court, each of the facets becomes a view screen, and you can watch the proceedings from just about anywhere in the city.

Like the entrance to Jesus’ resurrection clinic, there are no doorways. You fly up to any outside surface and simply pass through to the inside.

The space inside the palace seems to operate on its own physical laws. You simply can’t get anywhere inside where you’re not invited; if you tried, you’d simply find yourself outside the diamond again, with the possibility that the outside surface wouldn’t open to you any more.

From whatever point public visitors enter the palace from the outside, they end up at the same reception hall inside, reminiscent of the lobby to a great museum.

The palace is a city within a city. Of course there’s the Great Hall where God holds court in the grand style, as well as God’s own personal residence and the private offices, apartments, and conference facilities used by the palace staff. Several museum-worthy collections housed within the palace are open to the public—art, historical displays, and a pavilion dedicated to the Lives of the Saints, as well as research facilities available to scholars who have been cleared for high-level-access in the Tree of Knowledge. There’s a library with every book or film that’s ever been burned on earth, including the missing works of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others that were destroyed in Alexandria.

The palace also has 46 public restaurants ranging from fine dining to snack bars, and there are angels who act as docents for tours of the palace’s museums and ceremonial facilities, when not in official use. There’s even a souvenir kiosk where you can pick up miniatures of the palace, art reproductions, toys, and the inevitable shirts that read, “My parents went to Heaven and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Sophia and Estella had security clearance to bypass the reception area and shepherd me directly from outside the diamond into God’s living room.

I don’t know what I was expecting from God’s personal digs, but this wasn’t it. There weren’t any fancy Louis XVI chairs or long halls with huge oil paintings; no displays of fine bone china or carved ivory miniatures; no desks with inlaid mahogany. The only obvious ostentation was shelf after shelf displaying books, musical albums, and movies. It’s a habit of mine to check out what people keep on their home shelves; it’s often a glimpse into their personality. God’s living room has the best collection of science-fiction and fantasy I’ve ever seen outside of the Ackermansion, but his listening tends toward music salad, from Camille Saint-Saëns to Stevie Wonder, from Dmitri Shostakovich to Astor Piazzolla, from Vince Guaraldi to Alanis Morrisette. Chris Isaak’s song “Wicked Game” was playing when I came in. Uh oh, I thought.

The place wasn’t designed for show but for creature comfort. There were plush couches and even plusher recliners, an extensive wet bar, a long table heavy with bowls of fresh fruit, candy bars, cheeses, crackers, potato chips, dips, and bottled soft drinks on ice.

There was a huge roman bathtub with massage jets, enormous stereo speakers in each corner, and the biggest flat-screen I’d seen anywhere.

You know how there are places in dreams that you keep on going back to, that you can describe in detail as easily as places you’ve lived, but that you know you’ve never been to before? Suddenly I had the strongest flash of déjà vu I’d ever experienced.

I’d lived in this room, in my dreams.

But that momentary precognition made it only slightly less shocking to me when God walked into the room, obviously the Lord of the palace because he was barefoot and wearing a silk kimono. God waved to Sophia and Estella, then grinned widely when he saw what had to be the queerest expression on my face when I first saw him.

Aside from my being overweight, I was an identical twin of God.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter VI.

If you get nothing else out of this narrative, get this: just about everything is more complicated than I’d thought.

As Felony was leading me by the hand to the appointed place of my rebirth, my inability to see things around me subsided, and I gradually became aware of my surroundings. We were walking along a path in a well-manicured city park, with high-rise architecture surrounding me at a distance.

It was hard for me to assign a style to the buildings. You know how, in the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life, Judgment City looks like the outskirts of Las Vegas? This was nothing like that. There was little in common with earth styles of architecture at all.

It wasn’t the glass-and-steel towers of America, not the classical styles of a European capital, neither the elaborate temples of Asia nor the Moorish edifices of the ancient Near East. It was more self-consciously artistic, with the architect being liberated from the load-bearing requirements of earth construction to explore pure esthetics, and with an astonishing variety of building materials.

Some buildings looked as if they had been grown as a single crystal, the ultimate in organic integrity. There were some structures that looked as if they were constructed of clouds, and a few that had the Blade Runner look of a Syd Mead illustration. Some of the more-metallic-looking buildings hovered high above the others, like a cover from a 1940’s Astounding. The overall effect was like the 1964 New York World’s Fair or Disneyland, but done for real.

The building that Felony brought me to near the outskirts of the park looked as if Dr. Seuss or M.C. Escher had a hand in its design. From the outside it looked like a series of glowing mazes that turned in on themselves. But when you passed inside (not through a door; right through what appeared to be a solid wall) it looked a cross between an ancient Roman home and the medical practice of Dr. Victor Frankenstein. I had a real sense that whoever had done the interior decorating had seen way too many movies.

To my right I saw a modernistic waiting room with plush chairs, couches, and coffee tables piled with old magazines that would have looked at home in a dentist’s waiting room. The room was full but I didn’t have to put my name on a list. Sophia and Estella, the angels who crossed me over, were waiting for me as we entered, both dressed in a translucent white dress that reminded me of a nurse’s uniform by way of Hugh Hefner. Either Sophia or Estella would qualify as your average Playmate of the Year. “He’s waiting for you,” Sophia said.

“Who’s waiting?” I asked, but directed the question to my daughter, and suddenly she was no longer 12-years-old but a woman who looked my own age.

“Jesus, of course,” Felony said. She kissed me on the cheek. “Call me when you’re settled in, Daddy. I’m in the Tree.”

Felony disappeared, the way the two angels had when I’d died. It was a bit disconcerting.

“This way, sir,” Sophia said. The angels linked arms with me from both sides. I didn’t know whether to feel escorted or under arrest.

There’s no way to say this that isn’t going to tick somebody off, so I’m just going to say it. The Savior looked like a Middle Eastern terrorist or a Colombian drug lord. Or at least that’s what he looked like to a Hollywood-imprinted American arriving from the early-21st century.

Jesus looked short, muscular, olive-skinned, with piercing eyes, jet-black hair, and a thick black beard; when I was brought in to him he was wearing a white Sydney Greenstreet suit. The only thing that broke the stereotypical first impression was Jesus’ brilliant smile and the bear hug with which he greeted me.

The angels left, closing a door behind them, and Jesus motioned me over to a couple of upholstered chairs, catercorner to each other.

“Mind if I smoke?” Jesus asked.

If I still had one I raised an eyebrow but said, “No problem.”

No, I can’t tell you what brand of cigarette Jesus smokes; he took an elaborately carved pipe and a cloth pouch out of his jacket pocket, packed something pink and fleshy from the pouch into the pipe, and blew into the mouthpiece as if it was a child’s bubble pipe.

It wasn’t bubbles that came out of the pipe’s bowl, though, but a jet of flame followed by a thick cloud of white smoke.

It didn’t smell like tobacco to me, and not like marijuana, either, if that’s where you thought I was going. It smelled a little like incense or burning spices but overall, it smelled to me like barbecue smoke.

I don’t know what I’d expected when I sat down in the arm chair opposite Jesus—maybe a chance to get a few of my questions answered—but what happened next was nothing I could have anticipated.

Jesus took a deep draught of smoke from his pipe and blew it towards me, not a short breath but a deep, continuing wind that traveled along with a deep low humming. The smoke began swirling around me, faster and faster and faster, and a jet of flame formed above me.

Suddenly it was as if I was a candle, but instead of rising, the flame started moving downwards, and I felt intense heat starting at my temple and spreading out from there to my entire body. But instead of consuming me, the flame was making me solid.

I don’t know if I passed out, went into a trance, or whether it was over in only an instant, but the next thing I knew the flame was gone, the smoke was floating easily up to a cathedral ceiling … and I had a solid body of flesh again. But rebirth doesn’t come with clothes. I was sitting in the arm chair, now naked.

Not for long. Sophia and Estella were right behind me with a terrycloth bathrobe. When I stood up I felt a bit wobbly but managed not to fall. Estella helped me on with the robe … and just in time, otherwise the Savior would have been staring at a growing erection triggered by my proximity to Estella’s cleavage as she bent over to cinch the robe’s tie for me.

Sophia placed a golden chalice into my hands, and Jesus picked up one like it. Estella picked up a pitcher and poured a clear liquid into both cups.

“To life,” Jesus said to me.

Jesus put the cup to his lips and so did I. We drank. It was a wow. I didn’t know what it was but knew that if somebody bottled it on earth, Coca Cola would be out of business.

Jesus stood up, and with some effort I made it back onto my feet.

“I apologize,” said Jesus, “but I have a full waiting room. I’ll see you in the morning at breakfast, all right?”

“Sure,” I said, weakly.

Jesus and I shook hands then Sophia and Estella helped me walk out of Jesus’ office … and directly into what looked to be the master bedroom of my town home back in Culver City.

“Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll be back for you in the morning,” said Estella.

“Sweet dreams,” said Sophia, and then, much to my regret, they were both gone.

I went into my bathroom and looked at myself. I didn’t look any different than the way I had looked before I died.

I walked to my bedroom window, opened it wide, and looked out, but instead of looking at the garage doors of the next row of houses, I had a spectacular view of the heavenly skyline at night. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Heaven doesn’t smell like any other city I’ve ever visited. There are no industrial fumes; instead, the air is permeated with a spicy, deep-forest fragrance. There was a lovely warm breeze carrying this wonderful air into the house so I decided to keep the window open.

I was more tired than I’d thought. I threw the robe on a chair, climbed into bed, and was asleep before I knew it.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter V.

Yes, I was outside of my drowning body almost immediately, floating about a dozen feet above the water. I could see things that I couldn’t have seen if I’d had to rely on my old eyes. It was after dark, and the Mercedes had already sunk under the water far enough that all I should have been able to see of it was the roof and a few air bubbles rising to the surface of the water. But I could apparently see right through the solid roof of the car down to my tied-up waterlogged body.

My drowned corpse should have been a gruesome sight but the part of me that was capable of being disturbed was left behind with my old nervous system. I can be dispassionate now in trying to describe what the experience was like but being outside my body was an emotional rush at the time, and the second peak experience I’d had within an hour.

You’ve heard before, from people who’ve described their death experiences, about the bright light. That’s part right and part wrong. We experience it as light, but it’s not what a scientist of our time would have defined as light. It’s not made up of photons (which you’d no longer have an optic nerve to perceive anyway), it’s not an electromagnetic phenomenon at all, but we call it light because that’s what we’re perceiving.

I could stop this narrative right now and switch to writing a textbook about what we are when we are no longer living in flesh. The skeptical talk-show host I was a few hours earlier would have been interested in questions about how we could think without a brain or central nervous system to process information, how we can see without a retina to catch the photons, why we still feel without neural receptors to be compressed, and so forth. If you’re really interested, you can do a search on astral physiology in the Tree of Knowledge, or just take a class. If you’ve read books on out-of-body and death experiences, keep in mind that about three-quarters of what you read was the guesswork of an author who, if he’d even reincarnated, was suffering from dinatal amnesia.

The short answer is: you’re a burrito. You’re an astral body stuffed into a flesh body. You have a consciousness that uses your brain like a computer mouse; you have a second body that is made out of a more durable substance than matter but can be hooked into flesh for a time. Your personality is not trapped in your brain but can be uplifted out of it; your fleshly body is designed for use in the plane of earth and once you’re out of it for good, it’s time to stick out your thumb, so to speak, and hitch a ride in the tunnels.

The light is, among other things, a boarding announcement.

I could see a tunnel mouth forming above me, and felt myself rising slowly at first. I hesitated, feeling an unbroken connection to my teenage daughter, but “remembered” being God again momentarily, and knew that I’d be seeing her again soon enough.

I allowed myself to be sucked up into the mouth and felt myself accelerating.

The tunnel was more like a glowing energy field than something made out of brick and mortar. If this was a movie, the special-effects shot of going into a tunnel would be like the Millennium Falcon going into hyperspace, or like the Starship Enterprise going into warp. And why not? The closest science came to describing a tunnel was a wormhole, and that’s wildly inaccurate. It’s a system of passageways that can be used for travel between worlds, universes, dimensions, time periods, and other sorts of places that twenty-first-century cosmology doesn’t even encompass yet. The tunnel between earth and Heaven is like a local on the New York City subway, if you consider all the possible destinations. Heaven is about two million years in the future and five thousand degrees to the left. Practically walking distance.

When my daughter was little, we’d start singing “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” whenever we drove through a tunnel. I’m not sure why but I started singing “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” and decided to see how long I could keep it up. I soon noticed that there was another voice singing along with me. I, and whoever was joining me, didn’t have to sing very long; I don’t think I was in the tunnel for more than a minute before I popped out the other end.

I felt myself landing on my feet. There wasn’t a mirror but I could look down and see that I seemed to have an ordinary body again, torso, arms and hands, legs and feet. Gravity—I could feel weight on my feet. Clothes, the same ones I’d been wearing when I left.

I looked around. My first impression of the arrival platform was aural rather than visual. I stopped singing “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!” the moment I was out of the tunnel; but the other voice that had been singing along with me continued and was now close by. But I couldn’t see anything yet. For my new eyes, the place was supersaturated with light and objects were hard to distinguish. I could see only light and shadows.

One of the shadows moved toward me. I made an effort to focus and the shadow resolved into a silhouette, and the figure resolved into a human form, and the human form resolved into a very pretty girl who looked to be about 12 years old. It took another beat before I recognized her. She had been 18 years old the last time I had seen her, two weeks earlier.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said.

It was my daughter, Felony.

“Sweetie?” I said, shocked. “I don’t understand. You were in college when I left earth. Was there an accident? Are you dead, too?”

She came up close and hugged me; she had to reach up the way she used to when she was little. “I’m fine, Daddy,” she said. “I’m alive now and I’m alive back at college, when you left.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Everybody who’s going to end up here is already here,” she said. “This is the end of time. This is Heaven.”

I looked around but the only thing that I could see clearly was still my daughter. Everything else was still cloudy, the way Heaven was always portrayed in old movies.

“You have a million questions,” she said. “There’s a million answers waiting for you. But you’re not going to get them standing here. Come on.”

She took me by the hand and we started walking. I let her guide me.

“Why are you a little girl again?” I asked.

“Because that’s the way you’ve always seen me,” Felony said. “Everything you see when you first get here is subjective, dreamlike.”

“I’m not seeing what you really look like?”

“Well, you’re not seeing me the way everyone else does yet.”

“If you’re still alive back on earth, how did you get here before I did?”

“Do you really want a lecture on resolving the paradox equations in temporal mechanics five minutes after you get to Heaven? Or is it enough if I tell you that I gave you grandchildren and great-grandchildren before I died?”

I laughed. “Did you make any movies?”

She smiled. “I dedicated my first directing Oscar to you.”

“I’m sorry I missed it, sweetheart.”

“Who said you’re going to miss it?”

“I’ll take that lecture now,” I said, grinning.

Felony looked at me seriously. “Do you have any idea why you were brought here?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

She shook her head. “All I know is that I got a message telling me that you were arriving today and asking me to guide you until you’re reborn.”

I frowned. “You mean I have to go through puberty again?”

She laughed. “No, Daddy. Unless you want to stay a ghost, just using your second body, you need to get new flesh. Which, considering your love for all-you-can-eat restaurants, I don’t think you’d like very much. Come on.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“Just because you’re being reborn is no excuse to act like a baby,” my teenage daughter the grandmother said.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter IV.

That’s about as close as I can come in describing how I felt at that moment.

It’s not that anything around me changed physically at the moment of revelation. I was still sitting at a table in Jerry’s Famous Deli. My sandwich was still in front of me. So was my glass of Dr. Brown’s celery tonic and a dish of pickles.

What was different is that I wasn’t Duj Pepperman anymore.

I looked around the restaurant, at the other people. I saw them for a moment on the surface; then it was as if my vision went around a corner and I was seeing them from another angle, not just on the outside, but from the inside out, and with perspective both on their past and future.

I looked at a waiter and I knew that his fondest wish at the moment was to get the part he was up for on General Hospital.

A young woman sitting at the next table had just been told by her doctor that she was pregnant … but not by her husband, who was sitting at the table next to her, and had no idea. She wanted to keep the baby. So would he … but only if he thought it was his.

I looked over to a trim middle-aged man with a shaved head, sitting a few tables away, an ex-army colonel who had served with distinction in the Gulf War. He had been forcibly retired due to a sexual harassment scandal involving men under his command, but that he, personally, had nothing to do with. Now he was middle management of a small computer software company and was about to be laid off, although he didn’t know it yet. His greatest wish was just one more mission where he could make a difference.

Across from me, at another table, was a short curly-haired man who had been a successful writer of science-fiction paperbacks—mostly media tie-ins. The book contracts had dried up and he was now working as a technical writer. He had completed an original, science-fiction novel with an epic theme that he hoped would be his break into hardcover publication and serious reviews, but so far no one would touch it and it was breaking his heart.

The TV over the bar had CNN on. A prominent U.S. senator was being interviewed about a bill she had introduced for a comprehensive national health plan. She should have been focusing instead on her own health; she was addicted to both amphetamines and barbiturates that she used to mask the pain of her husband’s serial adultery. She had shut down sexually, converted her libido into power lust, and covered it all with a smile that was permanently glued onto her face.

I looked in the bar mirror, at myself.

I saw that my life until that moment had been preparation for this one, that “Duj Pepperman” was a fictitious identity, that his life until that moment had been a series of training exercises waiting for my arrival. I felt that I’d just arrived after a long journey but registered surprise at how overweight this body was.

I laughed silently. Until that moment, Duj Pepperman had been an atheist.

There were two staggeringly beautiful women with elfin ears, both of them blond, almost albino, sitting a few tables away from me, looking at me intently. I recognized them as angels named Estella and Sophia. They recognized me as well. I nodded to them; they nodded back.

I paid my check and walked out to the parking lot. They were waiting for me in front of Sebrings hair stylists, where I had parked.

“I can’t commit suicide,” I told them. “I’m bound by the rules.”

Estella nodded. “Don’t worry, we understand our orders.” She pulled a Glock 9-millimeter pistol from her jacket pocket and pointed it at me.

Sophia said, “Give me your keys.”

I gave the keys to Sophia, who unlocked the doors with the remote. Estella opened the rear passenger door, motioning me in with the gun. I got into the back seat of my car, Estella following, with the gun still pointed at me. She reached across and pulled down the shoulder strap, buckling me in.

Sophia got behind the wheel of my car, started the ignition, and drove off, while Estella pulled a roll of duct tape out of her handbag.

“Give me your hands,” Estella said.

Holding the gun on me with one hand, she bound my hands to the seat belt, ripping the tape off with her teeth, then bound my feet. I tested the strength of the tape. She’d done a good job.

Sophia turned on the radio and tuned it to KLSX FM. The Beach Boys were singing “Good Vibrations.”

Both angels started singing along, “I’m pickin’ up good vibrations, she’s giving me excitations …”

Still singing, Sophia drove onto Admiralty Way. I started singing along with the angels, “Good, good, good, good vibrations!”

Sophia turned left on Via Marina, then onto a pier leading out to the harbor. Sophia accelerated the car while opening all four windows. The car leapt the pier and splashed. The Mercedes floated a few seconds then began sinking. Water began rushing in through the open windows.

“Na na na na na … na na na!” sang Sophia, Estella, the Beach Boys, and me.

All of a sudden, the angels vanished and their voices cut off. Just as suddenly, I was no longer God.

The radio shorted out and went silent. I stopped singing, mid-vibration.

I was Duj Pepperman again, bound with duct tape into the back seat of a Mercedes that was sinking into cold salt water, water that was quickly rising up my chest.

“God, where did you go?” I shouted, panicked. “Why did you leave me?”

There was no answer.

I took a deep breath as the water rose toward my chin. Used all my strength to try to break the duct tape, but it was no use.

“Oh, shit!” I said, took one more breath, my last, then sunk beneath the water and drowned.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter III.

There’s an old saying that everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die.

That’s how it was for me, anyway.

I drove a Mercedes because I was told it was the safest car in a crash. And it was a smart choice. I died of something else.

I owned a handgun so I wouldn’t die at the hands of a burglar. I was right about that, too. The burglar who broke into my bedroom ran like hell when he saw the .45 Government Model I was pointing at him … and I died of something else.

I quit smoking, did my best to keep my weight down and eat a low cholesterol diet, and practiced safe sex, because I didn’t want to die of cancer, heart disease, emphysema or AIDS, and it paid off: I died of something else.

You see, that’s the part they forget to mention. No matter what nasty ways of dying you avoid, there’s always another one waiting for you. If one thing doesn’t get you, another thing will. Everybody could have saved a lot of thought that went into bumper stickers and public service messages. All they would have had to say is, “Don’t do that. Die of something else.”

It would have saved me a lot of trouble, too. I was a coward most of my life because I was afraid of dying.

My story begins the day I died and went to Heaven.

It was a slow news day. Here in Los Angeles, no riots, no brushfires, no mudslides, no earthquakes, no celebrities being accused of child molesting, hit and run, wife-beating, trafficking in drugs, or murder. On the national and international scene, no terrorist attacks, no school yard shootings, no one holed up in a church surrounded by the Feds, no movie idol or politico getting caught with a prostitute, no husband looking for his johnson in the traffic island, no custody battles with a communist dictator acting in loco parentis.

The sort of day that strikes fear into the hearts of talk radio hosts like me.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. A little. Some of the best shows have been on slow days. I once heard Tom Leykis when he was on KFI, do a spellbinding three-hour monologue — no calls, only commercial breaks — just telling how he got into this business. Phil Hendrie is the radio equivalent of fantasy mud wrestling. But if you don’t have that sort of talent for improv — and I don’t — then you succeed or fail by the quality of calls you get.

Talk radio topics get divided between the social issues and the personal issues — the macro and the micro, as my old friend Dennis Prager calls it. As a general rule, people are more willing to talk about the personal issues with women hosts who put the word “doctor” before their first name. There have been exceptions — David Viscott, for example — but that usually requires diplomas I didn’t have.

Other talk show hosts had no problem getting the phones filled with wives calling about their husband’s cheating or gay men talking about their lovers dying of AIDS, but that wasn’t the sort of listenership I tended to attract. My listeners wanted politics, current events, controversy. I wasn’t pushing the outside of the outrageousness envelope, like Imus or Howard Stern. I was a pundit, a loudmouth. In other words, a Rush Limbaugh/Larry King wannabee, like almost everyone else in talk radio.

I could always get the phones lit up by talking about abortion, or gun control, or political correctness, or illegal immigration. But you don’t want to hit on those too often. You just keep hearing the same arguments over and over, usually from the same callers. (And yes, I know it’s you, even if you give my call screener a phony name and pretend you’re on the other side so we put you on for the third time that month.)

There are certain subjects that will light up the board with callers you just don’t want to go near. People who say they’ve been abducted by UFO’s. Callers reincarnated from Marilyn Monroe — and not just women, either. People who say they’ve figured out the doughnut assassination, or claim they know where Bill Gates is. Mysterious deaths of pets owned by powerful politicians. Waco, 9/11 revisionists, the International Space Station explosion, militias, endless conspiracy theories. Any of these calls you take, no matter how good your call screener, is walking through a minefield. And most of them are just unoriginal — bad radio. You really have to have the bizarre talents of an Art Bell to succeed in that sort of market.

I guess I was desperate. I was coming back from my first commercial break after the news, evening drive time and my second of four hours, Monday through Friday — and if you called me right now, you were not going to get a busy signal. A bad situation.

My engineer, Terry, had a cruel sense of humor. For the musical bump leading back into the show, I was hearing on my phones Frank Sinatra singing, “It’s quarter to three, there’s no one in the place …except you and me…” I gave Terry the finger and he grinned from the other side of a plate-glass window.

I hit the cough button to clear my throat and came in a half beat too late: “You’re listening to 680 K-TALK, and I’m Duj ‘Rhymes-with-Judge’ Pepperman. The time is exactly 5:19. That little musical interlude is my engineer’s not-so-subtle way of telling me I’m dying. So for the rest of the hour let’s talk about death. The big D. Specifically, do you believe in life after death? Our number again is 1-888-55-K-TALK.”

My producer, Jules, rolled her eyes heavenward. She was the one who was going to have to talk to all the assorted loose nuts who were about to call in. But it didn’t take long for the video screen in front of me to start filling up with descriptions of new callers — and some of them were bound to be airworthy.

Okay, it was a cheap trick. You don’t keep evening drive time in a top-rated market unless you do sheer entertainment once in a while.

My video screen said that line two had a 38-year-old woman who was having an affair with a ghost. I hit the private intercom to Jules, behind the glass. When the intercom button is pressed, my broadcast mike is cut off, allowing private conversations with my engineer or producer. “Line two,” I said to Jules. “Calling from the Twilight Zone?”

Jules shook her head and gave me a hand signal that I interpreted as meaning “sex”; Jules didn’t speak to me because she was screening another call.

I released the intercom and punched up line two. “Marie in Torrance,” I said, “you’re on K-TALK with Duj Pepperman.”

“Duj? I can’t believe I got through! I’ve been trying to call for weeks!”

I hit my intercom again and blew Terry a razzberry.

Releasing the intercom button again, I went back to my caller.

Marie’s “ghost” sounded suspiciously to me like Patrick Swayze in the movie of that title, but I didn’t say it. As long as she didn’t get hotter than PG-13 in her description of her romantic relations with him, I could let her go on about him a bit. Nobody was going to be punching up KRLA.

Listening with one ear, I went back to reading through my fan mail (okay, hate mail, too) and wondered why anyone in my job ever wanted to move over to TV. Sure, the money was better, but with the camera on you all the time you had to work for it. And wear a suit. And get recognized in restaurants, too. I had a monthly audience averaging a few million, yet nobody ever asked me for an autograph while I was standing at a urinal. What celebrity can ask for more than that?

I thanked Marie for her call, went to a traffic report, told Terry to cart the new Purple Web commercial, then read it live while he recorded it for posterity, and returned to the live phones. My call monitor said line seven had “God” calling from “Paradise,” and the subject was “Personal proof that life-after-death exists.” I guessed that “God” was Jules’ abbreviating Godfrey, and while Paradise, California is a few hundred miles north of our usual daytime broadcast area, we get calls from all over from satellite radio and our web cast. “Godfrey from Paradise,” I said, “this is Duj Pepper­man and you’re on 680 K-TALK.”

“Duj,” said a rich baritone voice. A good radio voice. My voice. “This is God, calling from Heaven. I can’t believe I got through. I’m one of your biggest fans!”

I immediately hit the “dump” button, but it didn’t work and the call continued, “Listen, Duj, would you mind dying tonight and meeting tomorrow morning at my palace in Heaven? We need to talk privately.”

I punched the intercom to Terry. “Kill line seven!” I hoped he could wipe the call before the four-second delay finished and the call went on the air.

There are words in life you never want to hear. A doctor pointing at an X-ray of your brain and saying “inoperable tumor.” Calling your business manager’s office and having a voice answer, “Frauds Detail, Detective Smith.” Any call from your child’s school that contains the word “accident.”

The words that I heard next fell into that category. It was my engineer saying, “Kill what? There was no one on seven.”

The primal part of me gasped. I looked at the display again. Now there was nothing on the monitor for line seven. The professional in me, trained never to allow long silences on the air, took over immediately, and before releasing the intercom I said, “Not funny, Terry!”

Terry looked innocent and shrugged.

Jules looked at me blankly, and shrugged, too. It was obvious that neither of them had any idea what I was talking about.

I didn’t have time to worry about it now; the studio ON AIR light was still glowing.

I shrugged back. No reason to let my colleagues think I was losing it. “Modern technology strikes again,” I said lamely, and punched up line eight. “Bob in Long Beach, you’re on 680 K-TALK with Duj Pepperman.”

It was only after the show was over that it crossed my mind that I might have been the first talk show host in human history to get a live call-in from God.

And I had hung up on Him.

There’s something about having a few hundred thousand people listening to you that makes you feel invulnerable. Or maybe it’s that the studio feels like a fortress — the fences and guard posts you have to pass to get in, the labyrinth-like corridors, the enforced quietude of the studio when the ON AIR light is lit.

Glitches happen all the time in radio. If it was a little strange to be hearing a voice my engineer couldn’t and having a call disappear from the board, each had happened before. The only strange thing about it was both happening at the same time.

When I had a minute to think about it after I was off the air, I decided it might be a high-tech prank of some sort — a computer virus maybe. I decided if it happened again, I’d let the station’s management look into it.

The human mind is wonderful at not seeing the things it doesn’t want to see. By the time I left the studio, I’d convinced myself everything was perfectly mundane. Usually you had to be that way, if you’re going to get through the day. Just for example, you turned on the morning news and spent two seconds seriously wondering whether even a fraction of the terrible things you heard about could happen to you, you’d never have left the house. Not in L.A., anyway.

All things considered — as they say on the competition’s show — it’s amazing any of us got out of bed in the morning. Or could manage to fall asleep at night.

It’s just a ten-minute drive from the K-TALK studios on Motor to my town home in Culver City. I drove into the complex through the main gate, past the empty guard shack. We used to spend a couple of thousand dollars per unit each year to keep a rotation of guards in that shack. It didn’t stop a series of burglaries — and one rape — so there was a discussion at the Home Owners Association meeting.
First, the board voted to demand the security firm to fire one guard, for sleeping on the job. Then a lot of ideas were batted around.

One of the HOA’s directors, an LAPD cop, came up with an idea that everybody laughed at until they realized he was serious. Then a few other people said, “What the hell, it couldn’t hurt.” The board passed a resolution, adopting it.

The next day, posted on the guard shack, was a paper target showing the outline of a man, courtesy of our cop-in-residence. The target is riddled with bullet holes — big ones. Nobody’s been broken into since and we voted to get rid of the guards entirely.

When I got in I checked my phone messages and private email. The only message was a call from my ex-wife, the rock star, reminding me that the semester’s USC tuition was due. Our daughter, Felony, wants to be the next Quentin Tarantino. Before you laugh at my daughter’s given name, I have it on reliable authority that, nearing the end of Felony’s freshman year, my 18-year-old daughter is still a virgin. I dialed my business manager’s voice mail and played my ex’s message into the cordless.

You might think that, being on radio, I never had to spend a night alone. You’d be wrong. The truth is, I just didn’t get all that many opportunities to meet women. I didn’t have a lot of guests on my show, so I was pretty well sitting alone in a glass-enclosed room four hours a day. Then I went home to an empty town home. I don’t like parties or bars, I’m terrible with pick-up lines, and I think I’d have had better luck dating the first dozen single women in the phone book than the women I’d met through classified ads, the Internet, and dating services. I’d have had better luck meeting women if I’d been “recovering,” but you had to be addicted to something, first. Take my word, it’s not as easy for a radio talk-show host to get dates as it looked on Frasier.

I knew my freezer was full but I wasn’t in the mood to defrost. I jumped back in my car and onto the Richard M. Nixon Freeway to Marina del Rey—all two miles of it. Fifteen minutes later I was chowing down on a tongue and Swiss cheese on rye at Jerry’s Famous Deli.

That’s where it happened. That’s where I remembered that I was God.

Next in Escape from Heaven is Chapter II.