What other indignities must I suffer flagrantly before I find the Just City, the garden I left before I was even born? Pull up the policies, quote the terms of agreement, provide me with tables of the precise point-value breakdown before I break down or out or up or through to the other side of grievance because it’s not so much the indignities themselves as the uncertainties regarding their relative scoring: when I mispronounce peony to rhyme with pony, stressing the long O— like crony, phony, stony— how many points do I earn? When I ask the woman in the none-too-slimming black dress when she’s going to have her baby, and she tells me four months ago, how much is that worth? How much closer am I to the long-promised prospect of healing leaves and unimaginable flowers? I picture heaven as a Customer Service desk where polo-shirted personnel with name badges brocaded with the swoops and lags of a strange language laugh and chat without ever answering the bright red phones that ring without ceasing, and I can take to them all the unfulfilling moments of my unfulfilling life—like some defective pair of clunky VR goggles weighting a white plastic bag twist-knotted at the top— for a refund or exchange. They don’t ask for a receipt. They only want to know if I am ready and when I tell them I’ve been ready my whole life, the phones stop ringing, the chatter snaps off, they stare at me with something between sadness and bewildered ardor and wish me a good day and send me back into the world, which is just what it has always been: one big, beautiful garden.
