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 Chapter 1: Lenny​​

   I ​was on my way to my girlfriend, Karen, busy with my trivial and insignificant matters at that moment on that wet night, immersed in my screen in the back seat, my whole fucking life ahead of me, when the Mercedes taxi entered the intersection. I didn’t notice the world outside at all until I heard the horns and the screeches and the driver’s scream and was blinded by the lights of the small refrigerated truck that sped toward us like a cruise missile from the depths of hell. Everything happened within seconds: the windshield shattered, and a piece of glass from the Mercedes lodged in my head.

THE END.

And when I say, “the end,” I mean it. When I opened my eyes again, I suspected I was dead.

I further suspected it wasn’t the absolute end, that something just finished and something else was beginning. Something totally different.

I found myself in a long, dark corridor, dressed in a white polyester suit that felt like a wafer-thin windbreaker. I was barefoot, and beside me walked a tall guy in a black uniform. He was athletic, black-haired, his face chiseled, his expression turned off. He had a face of a real shitty bastard.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked anxiously.

“You’ll soon see,” answered the shit.

“I’m dead, right?”

“Unfortunately.”

“I’m scared …,” I said.

He shrugged. “I have my own problems,” he said grimly. “You’ll be fine.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t feel like talking,” he grumbled. “I had a long day.”

We continued walking, in complete silence, until a bright light emerged from the end of the corridor. And since the world is full of stories about all kinds of weirdos who got stuck in a corridor with a light at the end and managed to return from it, I hoped that maybe I was just clinically dead—that I would soon open my eyes and see doctors and nurses and orderlies above me under the fluorescent light of an operating room. That did not happen. The light at the end emanated from an open door, which led to a narrow, windowless room. Two men and a woman were sitting behind a table, looking at me. They were dressed in white suits and on the wall behind them hung a large poster that read, “In God We Trust.”

My escort closed the door and stood by its side. An almost robotic voice cut through the small space: “Committee members: Ilan Cohen, male, six foot, one hundred and sixty-five pounds, twenty-five years and eighty-two days old, transferred from the state of Israel. Section 178, specials.”

The table was covered with endless paperwork, and a bespectacled middle-aged man, sitting in the center, was examining a document seriously. The head of the committee, I assumed.

“Good evening, Mr. Cohen,” he approached me dryly.

“I’m not so sure,” I said.

He lowered his glasses to the tip of his nose, examined me, and blinked. “It’s hard, yes,” he said. “At first, it’s hard for everyone.”

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Where do you think you are, Cohen?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

He looked at the documents again, glanced at the shithead in the black uniform standing by the door, and then looked back at me. “Look, I’ll be honest with you. We had a little glitch.”

“A glitch?”

He glanced at the lady to his right, an older woman wearing glasses and a short bob, who looked a bit like a toad. She was also looking at the documents. “The truck that crashed into the vehicle you were in wasn’t meant for you,” she said.

“Meant for?”

“It was supposed to bring someone else here,” she said, her eyes still focused on the document. “A man called Motty Moris.”

“Motty Moris?” I repeated. “I’ve never heard that name before.”

“Forty-four, a taxi driver,” she added. “Unfortunately, there was a mistake, and you arrived here instead. But don’t worry, we’ll check what happened exactly.”

“A mistake?” I asked.

“A mistake,” confirmed the man in the center.

“You are completely dead by mistake,” added the third one, not adding much actually.

“But I feel alive …,” I mumbled. “I talk, I think, I breathe, I feel …”

“You’ll find it hard to comprehend at this stage,” said the middle one. “Even impossible. But trust us, Cohen. You’re dead.”

When you are young, you think you’ll live forever. I had heard about certain people dying, murdered, killed, or just dropping dead, people burning, crashing, squashed, drowning, getting sick, being run over, committing suicide, exploding, being shot, stabbed, disappearing, people who die in their sleep—but me? I could never have imagined it. How did this happen to me, of all people?

“Are you telling me you have lists, and you know exactly who’s gonna die, and when?” I asked.

“Not exactly. Death is quite random, really,” replied the middle man. “We won’t get into all the transition between worlds business now.”

“Transition between worlds?”

“Yes, Cohen. You were transited to another world.”

“The afterlife?”

“It would be more accurate to say that this is your current life now, and what you had up to now was your previous life. Or your previous world. It’s just a different world. New opportunities.”

“What …”

“Death is only a word. A concept,” he mused philosophically. “Do you know how many dimensions the world is composed of?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t even understand the question.”

“Being dead is like being alive, only different,” said the toad.

“How different?”

“Different,” she croaked. “You can’t define how different—it’s subjective.”

“But … can’t you fix the mistake? Transfer me back to my previous world?”

“No,” announced the head of committee, quite categorically. “It will do more harm than good.”

“Harm to whom?”

“To the system.”

“What about the harm done to me?”

“Marginal.” He shrugged, half apologizing. “After all, you weren’t that essential to the future of humanity.”

“You were just an insignificant detail,” elaborated the lady on the already understood thesis. “An average person.”

I wanted to throw up on all three of them, and also on the black-uniformed shithead. As if there are so many people who are that essential to the future of humanity. What a terrible crime! And since you are all here, I thought to myself, you were probably not particularly essential for the future of humanity either.

“So, it’s possible,” I said angrily, “but you just won’t do it.”

“It’s a very complicated matter,” said the toad didactically. “Such intervention would jeopardize the whole cosmic sequence of the parallel universes.”

“What?”

“We do understand it’s difficult for you to accept the fact you’re dead, and by mistake,” observed the head of the committee—some people just see everything!—“but it’s not so bad to die young. You were spared a lot of suffering that was waiting for you in the future. You didn’t experience the big tragedies life had to offer you. Not only that, but there will always be someone who’d claim you could have done great things but just didn’t have enough time on earth. So, it’s not that bad.”

Aha! I thought. Really not that bad. Good even. I feel so good right now.

“Consider the fact you wouldn’t have lived forever anyway,” the third one entered the conversation. “Every birth is actually a death verdict. And you get to fulfill the dream of so many people—to stay twenty-five forever.”

“Forever?”

“Forever is too strong a word,” said the middle one. “Let’s say, for now. In any case, Cohen, I can offer you my apologies again, but they will hardly console you. Totally natural. You are an average human being as we said, and there’s no reason why you should react differently than the average human being. Wrongdoing floods us with feelings of fury and frustration. I can only promise you we’ll learn our lessons.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“We will form a committee. A thorough one. Not one to cut corners and sweep things under the rug. And when we find out what exactly went wrong, what caused the glitch, and when the glitch is officially declared a glitch, we will take care of it and see what we can do about your case. What’s important at this moment is your full cooperation.”

“Is there any chance to fix the mistake?” I pressed.

“To be truthful, that’s highly unlikely, Cohen,” said the main guy.

“Why?” I asked.

“We already explained. Because of the cosmic sequence,” he said, then asked the lady toad, “What are we going to do with him, considering the circumstances?”

“We can assign him to operations in the sixth circle,” she said.

“The sixth circle?” I showed an interest.

“You know,” he said matter-of-factly, “Circles of Hell.”

“Hell?!” I was mortified.

“Everybody starts there,” he said. “But hell is not what you probably imagine. Hell is just a term, and a vague one at that. Everyone has their own private hell they must go through. And as we established, you don’t know how many dimensions the world is composed of. You cannot fathom that right now, but, as I said, hell is not such a terrible place at all.”

“It’s probably almost as good as dying young,” I noted.

I closed my eyes and imagined the organized transports to hell. The platform is dirty, full of security personnel, teenagers shoving flyers into your hands, people pushing onto the bus because the journey is long and no one wants to stand. I never get a seat. And even if I did, there would be some old lady standing over me, playing on my conscience with a look of “Shame on you, I could be your grandmother.” I thought about giant skewers and heat of four thousand degrees, bodies piling up, handcuffs, Ferris wheels, and too much nudity.

“What will I do there exactly? In that hell?” I asked.

“There will be a period of apprenticeship, and then we’ll see,” said the toad. “We’ll find you something that suits your qualifications.”

I wondered whether it would be wise to mention I don’t have many qualifications.

“But you can’t do that to me!” I protested. “With all due respect! You can’t send me to hell! I’m not even supposed to be here!”

“Where did you expect us to send you to?” wondered the third one. “Heaven?”

“That’s all we got right now,” said the chief. “If you insist, we can send your file to the appeals committee.”

“The appeals committee? And then what?”

“God knows,” he said, looking upward. “But the bureaucracy is heavy. It will take time. The matter will go through the investigative committee first. Until there are conclusions, the appeals committee’s hands are tied, so to speak. In the meantime, we won’t be able to assign you, because these are the regulations regarding appeal cases, and you might be sent to a different sort of hell. You’ll come back here for another tribunal and get a random assignment.”

“You should take what we offer you,” the toad jumped in. “As we said, we considered your circumstances. Such mistakes happen, and the appeal option might be dangerous for you.”

“Anyway,” said the third one, “take thirty seconds and give us an answer. We haven’t got all day.”

Wow, I’m really sorry you brought me here, morons. Thirty seconds. Like a psychometric test. I was so under pressure that I figured it would indeed be better to take what they give me. Why should I wait for yet another committee to put all the fucking blame on some retarded one-handed angel of death? What will they do to him? Make a note in his file? On the other hand, I didn’t want to give up the chance to rectify the mistake, as slim as it was.

“Any decision?” asked the chief.

“Look …,” I said. “I think the least you can do is give me what you offered, and in the meantime, send my file to appeals.”

They leaned together and whispered secretly.

“This is highly unusual,” said the chief after a few moments, “but OK. Considering the special circumstances, this is what we’ll do.”

“OK,” I said, “I agree, but I have lots of questions.”

“For example?” he asked.

Understandably, I didn’t know where to start. “How do I file the appeal?” I asked.

“We’ll file it for you,” said the chief.

“Ah, OK. But other than that, there are plenty of other things I need to understand, because—”

“Cohen,” he cut me off, “I’m sure you have many questions, but this is neither the time nor the place. We’re already way behind schedule with your case.”

“Reuben,” he signaled to the morbid shit in the black uniform. Reuben took something out of his pocket and pressed it to my head. That something turned off my body, making it collapse to the floor like a sack of potatoes. I collapsed right after.

• • •​​​

​

The first thought that crossed my mind was that I had hallucinated everything, that I had smoked a bit too much, and this was just an especially detailed nightmare I would be very happy to wake up from. But almost immediately, other thoughts began passing through my head.

I woke up in a teeny-tiny cell, maybe four meters by four, devoid of any furniture. Apparently, I had spent the night, or whatever period of time it was, on the floor. I was naked, though I didn’t remember undressing, and when I ran my hand over my hair, I realized I had none, though I didn’t remember shaving it off.

The cell had a door without a handle, and the wall opposite it was made entirely of glass, from floor to ceiling. Through the glass, from what seemed like hundreds of meters above the ground, a desert was visible under a clear, blue, cloudless sky. An orange sun bathed the sands in a golden-white glow, and far away in the depths of the desert stood a shimmering skyscraper. It looked several kilometers away, but when I placed my thumb against the glass, it didn’t even reach half the height of the building.

I sat on the floor, facing the tower, and realized that this was the first time I was completely alone in the world, whatever world it was, hopelessly lost. Imagine that you die but remain awake, still remember your entire life, and now you have time to look back at it all. What are the chances you would feel satisfied? That you would be at peace with who you were? I, in any case, was far from being at peace with myself and felt as if I was about to come down with the flu. I was struck by a headache, existential fatigue, and a sense of nausea, and I thought it was very strange that you could suffer even after you die because that’s what they say about everyone who dies—“At least now they are no longer suffering.” A shiver ran through me, my thoughts racing like Bambi on speed, and when I closed my eyes, I suddenly heard a woman’s voice, whispering, almost caressing:

“Good morning, Lenny … everything OK with you? Slept well?”

When I was a kid, my younger sister had trouble saying “Ilan,” so she called me “Lenny,” and it’s stuck ever since.

I looked up toward the ceiling.

“Did you ask if everything is OK with me?” I shouted, searching for hidden speakers in the corners. “Is that what you just asked me?”

“Why are you shouting?” whispered the voice.

“Where are my clothes?” I asked a bit more quietly, covering my crotch with my hands. “And what happened to my hair?”

“They shave all the newcomers. And there’s really no reason for you to feel uncomfortable with your nudity—you have a very nice body …”

I said nothing. I let my hands down and stopped searching for speakers in the corners. After a few seconds, I asked if there were any cameras in the room.

“I don’t need cameras to see you …,” whispered the voice. “And there’s no need for cameras to see that you are confused … all your existential assumptions are collapsing, and you don’t understand how this could happen …”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A lot of thoughts, too many thoughts, far too many thoughts … they are flooding you, soon you will drown in thoughts …”

“What is this place?” I mumbled. “Where am I?”

“I believe you are in the cell of introspection now … Soon, you will be busy with summaries, taking stock of yourself, of the world, of the universe, of fate. What you have accomplished, what you will no longer be able to achieve, what you have gained, what you have lost, what was your fault and what was just the result of circumstances, what you could have done more of and why you didn’t do it, plus and minus, good and bad, black and white … Today, everything can be put into an Excel sheet, even a person’s life balance. Would you like to know what they said about you after you passed away … Ugh, so boring.

“After that, you will feel the urge to do something … It will burn in your bones, to do something! Anything … You will be interested in what is happening below, it will drive you crazy, it will crawl up your nervous system … You will have to know what you are missing. I know it, because everyone has been there. So, you can be calm—although everything seems gray to you, you’re missing out on a lot! People are doing stuff, working, coming, going, creating, progressing, falling, getting up, getting excited, getting enthusiastic, falling in love, the world is bustling, waves are breaking, glaciers are melting, volcanoes are erupting … Only you are stuck behind.

“The thoughts wander … many fragmented, unclear images? They come to everyone, each with their own thing … What are you imagining, through those glazed pupils? Childhood memories, trips to faraway lands, tanned girls on bicycles … golden beaches? A journey into the forest? Cotton fields? Children playing in the sand? Do you hear them? The children?

“Or maybe you’re in a more material mood? Small things? Cigarette and coffee? Hamburger and fries? Grapefruit arak? A joint in the bathtub? A good blowjob? Yes … you’re thinking about her, about Karen. She’s not bad, your girl … And maybe not everything is gray after all … the sky, it’s blue! And outside the city, everything is green … You think about the look in her eyes and all that emotional crap, about how nice it is to fall asleep in a soft tangle of curls, to cling to her body after making it burn? Do you imagine her on the bed, naked, stretching back? You think about lips tasting like wet strawberry, erect nipples, and moonlight filtering through the window, about your fingers wandering on her pale white skin and hers caressing the hair on your chest …

“The anger builds in you, fueling you. Someone else was supposed to die instead of you, and now he’s living at your expense.

“It really sucks, doesn’t it?”

The voice fell silent, and the joy of a legless South Sudanese orphan took over me. I felt exposed like a thorn in the desert. Motty Moris … Motty Moris … Motty Moris … What a stupid name. I imagined him lying in the orthopedic ward with a few shards of glass in his hand, surrounded by friends and family and heart-shaped helium balloons and plastic boxes filled with home-cooked food laden with oil and sugar and cheap bonbons that no one ever managed to finish. Tomorrow, he would already be home, thinking how good it is to be alive, and everyone would tell him how lucky he was, and how unlucky the young guy who died was, and then they would go through their entire lives without giving me another fucking thought. And then, in the terrible silence and for the first time in about a hundred thousand years, out of self-pity, I started crying like a madman, like someone who hadn’t cried in years, and I felt so terrible as I realized I had to die in order to feel alive again.

​

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  Chapter 2: Duce​​​

    After a while, the door opened, and a man of average height, bald and thickset, almost neckless, dressed in a suit like the one I wore at the committee, entered the cell of introspection. A black eyepatch covered his right eye, giving him an air of heroic disability.

“Welcome to hell,” he said, fixing me with a cyclopean stare. “I guess you’re the new guy.”

He looked like a suspicious middleweight boxer around forty-five, who had lost his joy for life and one eye. His appearance mesmerized me; I couldn’t utter a word. His greeting also shocked me. I thought I really needed a cigarette and that this wasn’t shaping up to be a particularly good week to start quitting.

“Are you mute?” he asked in a mocking tone.

“No,” I said. “I’m just the new guy.”

He gave me a look that suggested I stop staring at the thing covering half his head, and tossed me a gray polyester suit.

“So …,” I mumbled as I slipped it on, “this really is hell?”

“It sure ain’t heaven.”

I zipped up the top. “I also need shoes,” I said.

He shrugged. “You’ll be eligible for shoes only tomorrow,” he said, looked me in the eyes, and extended a businesslike hand that turned into a viselike grip.

“Duce,” he said, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was his name, and a few more to conclude that it was a pretty strange name. I thought about how I had no energy to meet new people right now.

“Ilan Cohen. But my friends call me Lenny.”

“I know, Cohen,” he muttered. “I’m responsible for you for the time being, so we better get along.”

What could possibly go wrong? I thought.

“Anything else?” he asked.

I pondered the question. “A lot of things, I guess,” I said. “For example, I really need a cigarette.”

“Smoking is prohibited inside the building.”

“So let’s step outside for a moment,” I suggested.

He looked at me and smiled. “You think you’re really clever, huh?” he asked.

“Not really. I almost don’t know anything.”

“Almost? What do you know?”

“I know I ended up here by mistake,” I muttered. “Someone made a mistake. But I submitted an appeal.”

“An appeal, huh?” he chuckled and walked toward the door. “Come on, you don’t want to be late for the assembly.”

“What assembly?”

“Recruit orientation.”

I followed him out of the cell of introspection into the unknown. The floor was cold. My eyes didn’t know what to look for, and what they found was a short hallway leading to a bright, white, clean space surrounded by ramps, offices, and glass walls—larger than any enclosed space I had ever seen. A giant banner reading “In God We Trust” hung from the ceiling. It seemed as though God himself had hung it there, with some inside help. Thousands of people scurried from side to side, loudspeakers and the hum of voices and the general tumult filling my ears, and I felt trapped in a futuristic terminal inhabited by passengers from various lands and planets. It felt cold, gloomy, but perhaps not as bad as you might imagine hell to feel.

I asked him how all these people communicate with each other, what language we are actually speaking.

“Death is a universal language,” Duce explained, pointing toward a hundred thousand people. “By the way—do you see them all?”

“What about them?” I asked.

“They’re all here by mistake.”

He kept walking, and I followed, my eyes darting around this bizarre existence. I asked him where exactly I was.

“In the sixth circle, you’re attached to us now,” he said. “You’ve been accepted. You’re going to be an operations guy. We don’t take just anyone.”

“And this is hell?” I mumbled. “A building?”

“What did you expect? A tent? And now you want to get clever and ask how everyone fits into one building.”

“Honestly, I hadn’t thought about it yet … How does everyone fit into one building?”

“There are many buildings like this,” he said, turning right into a wide, well-lit corridor. “This world is full of buildings.”

“I only saw a desert,” I said. “And one other tower.”

“P City,” Duce answered briefly. “Paradise.”

Things were getting stranger by the moment. “That tower is paradise?” I repeated.

“You catch on quickly,” he said. “I like that.”

We descended some metal stairs into another space, which was slightly less crowded.

“What do people do here?” I asked. “In hell?”

“Work …,” he said, clarifying the point. “Hell is routine.”

We kept walking until we stopped at the entrance to an auditorium. Another banner hung at the entrance: “Welcome to the Rookie Orientation, In God We Trust.”

“We made it, and right on time,” he said, asking me to wait for him at the exit after the event, before disappearing into the terminal.

I looked around. No one was interested in me, not even with a passing glance. I felt transparent, and the mush left in my head suggested that I take my legs and leave—turn around, escape this hell … I’ve always felt the need to escape. I imagined successfully sneaking out of the building, walking through the desert toward paradise, and stopping by a diner with red leather seats and a jukebox, sitting at the bar and ordering toast and sunny-side-up eggs, sneaking a glance at the newspaper and smoking like a chimney. An aging waitress would pour me filter coffee from a glass pot and wink at me, and when I hit on her, she’d say, “Honey, I have jeans more worn out than you.”

I thought they might agree to give me a job, and I’d even be willing to scrub pots or stand by the only gas pump outside in overalls and a cap, offering random customers oil checks and windshield fluid.

A moment later, I realized I was a crazy bald guy with no shoes, dressed in a straitjacket.

“Hello there!” smiled a dark-skinned usher sitting behind a table by the door of the auditorium. I stared at her for a moment and decided to postpone my escape to hear what they had to say at this assembly. She gave me my seat allocation, and I went in, deep into the hall.

A few more people had a crappy week—the place was packed. The lights were already off, and on a wide stage stood a large man with silver hair behind a lecturer’s stand, his big and weird head adorned with a partial beard that suited the insane. His fingers drummed on the surface of the stand. He was dressed in a white suit and tie, and next to him on the stage sat another man and a woman, both also in white suits.

I sat at the end of the row, and when the noise in the aisles ceased, the bearded man approached the microphone:

“Good morning and welcome to hell!” he began, smiling and spreading his arms to the sides. A collective discomfort emanated from the audience.

“Scary, isn’t it?” continued the man. “Hell! What a dramatic word! So let’s not define it that way. Let’s call our world exactly what it is—our current world.”

I surveyed my current world and saw hundreds of shining bald heads staring at the suited man like moonstruck lunatics, a sea of lonely souls. I looked at the people sitting next to me, young and old, men and women, beautiful and ugly, thin and fat, average, black, white, blond, brown, Latino, Asian, disconnected and dejected, and I wondered how they got here, what happened to them, what killed them, how everything went wrong for them in one moment. I thought about how everything went wrong for me in one moment.

“Firstly, allow me to introduce myself,” said the man on stage. “My name is Mr. Seven, and I am the supreme manager of the current world. And yes, yes—of course, this is not the name I came to this world with. And if you’re wondering, I am just a human. I am not God, nor am I the devil, or any other figure you might have conjured in your confused minds. And I have no doubt you are confused. How could you not be? The transition between worlds is shocking and incomprehensible for any person.”

Mr. Seven? Of all the names you could have chosen for yourself, that’s what you went with? I wondered for a moment what the story was with this creature, then closed my eyes and sank into the seat. I tried to imagine the feel of Karen’s nails scratching my back, piercing through the skin … I thought about how alive it made me feel. I wanted to get up from the seat and scream.

“Are you actually still alive?” Mr. Seven asked. “What does it mean—to die? What happens to your body, your thoughts, your soul? How long will you stay here? What is time, anyway? What is the purpose of existence here? What awaits you in the future? Do we even have a future, past, or present? Will our previous lives always haunt us? These are complex questions, and most of the answers, which you’ll discover for yourselves, aren’t simple. Our existence is what we make of it, and nowhere do we suffer more than in our own thoughts …”

I was definitely suffering in my own thoughts. I thought about my parents, my brother, my sister, then tried to force myself to think about other times, distant vacations, one-off trips, hotel rooms, hostels, cabins and hammocks, Greek islands, and the wooden pier facing the turquoise waters of Atitlán … I closed my eyes again and dreamed of the sun’s touch on my skin, sex in daylight, a cold beer and a basket of cherries, of diving into a pool in the blazing summer heat …

“At any given moment, we’re bringing in new recruits,” Mr. Seven continued. “This is the way of the cycle of life. This mission is always challenging, both for the recruits and for the system. But with the excellent team of the sixth circle, led by Mr. Sebastian Apollo, who is here with us today—”

Seven paused and turned toward the man sitting on the stage, who raised his hand to the crowd—“We will help you transition through this chapter as smoothly as possible. You might be asking yourselves how you can let go of the memories, the regrets, the frustrations, the bitter sense of missed opportunities … We always want something, yearn for something, miss something, regret something, fear something … And it hurts us. Perhaps you’ll discover that this existence is not much different from the lives you had, that hell is nothing but being human …”

Someone sitting a few seats to my left began to sob and whimper softly. I glanced over. I couldn’t see who it was, and I wanted to cry myself.

“I can promise you one thing … no matter how lost you feel, you will all find yourselves eventually. In time, you will be able to leave your previous lives behind, and then, for the first time, you will be free. Free from the shackles of the previous world. Free from the need for things we don’t truly need. Free from yourselves. Always remember that your lives in the previous world—what you did, where you lived, what language you spoke, what god you believed in, how much money you earned—are irrelevant. From today, we offer you all a new beginning, a blank slate free of mistakes. I wish us all great success—and in God we trust.”

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to clap at this point, but then someone started, and many joined in. I sat with my hands folded as Mr. Seven stepped away from the stand and was replaced by the CEO of the sixth circle, Mr. Sebastian Apollo, a much younger man, also clad in a white suit and white tie. His blond hair was meticulously trimmed, and his height would be good for basketball, although he’d be relatively shorter than other players. From where I was sitting, it was hard to discern the color of his eyes, but I estimated they were likely blue, or perhaps green. If he had golden epaulettes, he’d look like a Concorde pilot around the age of thirty-five. He was so perfect that he reminded me a bit of my older brother, Ari.

“Good morning and welcome to the sixth circle,” the yellow clone opened with a smooth tone and a smiling glance at Mr. Seven. “Mr. Seven won’t be able to say this himself, but I can inform you—you’ve won! You’ve been assigned to the best floor in the building, and as proof—we’ve won the ‘Outstanding Circle’ title for three quarters in a row, and I’m sure with your help we’ll win this title for many more quarters to come. While working here, you’ll understand what we actually do here, in the operations department and in general. I’ll meet with you soon in a smaller setting, but in the meantime, each of you will be assigned a mentor, and we’ll move forward from there.”

Apollo added that besides the operatives, there are also the laborers, who have a different orientation when they arrive in hell. It gave the impression of an industrial organization. When he finished his short speech and received his share of applause, the lady—who looked to be at an age where hot flashes are a problem—took the stage, as cordial as a traffic cop signaling you to pull over. Mr. Seven introduced her as Mrs. Something, but the something was too long and too difficult for human teeth. She didn’t give a speech but instead gave us a presentation projected on a giant screen titled “The Afterlife.”

From Mrs. Something-Tongue-Twister’s words, it emerged that we were pretty much stuck in this building for an unknown period—it varies from case to case—and that food is no longer part of our lives, nor is going to the bathroom. She said this casually, as if these weren’t two of the greatest pleasures life had to offer me. Our existence, she explained, is made possible thanks to a cup of special water—holy water, she joked—given once a week.

Then she moved on to our employment terms. Would you believe it? There’s a salary at the end of the month. For each month of the first year you’re dead, you earn forty-two credits, which is the currency here, and after that, it all depends on your role, performance, efficiency, motivation, and I guess also on connections and how you manage to sell yourself to the employer. And it sounded a little low to me—forty-two credits a month, no matter the exchange rate of one credit—especially since eight to eleven credits are automatically deducted from that amount for the holy water, housing, welfare and administrative services, clothing, laundry services and leisure activities. But the thing is, there’s not really anywhere to spend money in this hell, and the credits have no real value in daily life. They simply accumulate for long-term retirement savings: The Garden of Eden Tower? Well, it’s intended for people with means. And when you accumulate enough means, Mrs. Something-Tongue-Twister explained, you can move there.

“But how many credits do you actually need to move there?” someone brave from the front rows shouted at her. I was sure he was also Israeli.

“A million credits, as of now,” she replied curtly.

I’m not a math whiz, but I understood that I needed a raise urgently.

Bitter resentment swept through the hall. The man to my left whimpered louder, sounding like he was about to burst into uncontrollable sobbing. There was no one to offer him a tissue. Hell, I became convinced, is loneliness.

Mrs. Something-Tongue-Twister also talked about sleeping arrangements, saying that during the rookie month, each rookie sleeps in a room with their mentor, and that you have to shave your head once a week, as well as your stubble, which continues to grow even though as dead people we don’t continue to experience biological progress, and we actually continue to exist in the body we arrived here with. After that, she read the schedule for the rest of the week, which included way too many things for one week. She added that Thursday is our day off, and noted that it’s absolutely forbidden to leave the residential wing at night without permission. There was already a feeling of finality in the air, but Mrs. Something-Tongue-Twister had one more addition:

“The following rookies,” she said, “are requested to proceed to room 507 on this floor upon conclusion of the orientation.”

And even if there was only one thing in this new world I was sure of, it was that I would be one of them. There wasn’t even time to build suspense—“Ilan Cohen” was the third name from the end and the first from the beginning thrown into the void.

On the way out, I saw Duce, who was surprised to hear about the room 507 instruction. We walked back the way we came, and suddenly he started telling me a little about himself, saying he’d been in this hell since 1938 when he caught a burst in the stomach, thigh and head during the Spanish Civil War. Surprise—he was on the fascist side. His real name, he said, is Manuel Raul Vásquez, and the nickname “Duce” was given to him by Sebastian Apollo, according to him, “an idiot who can’t tell the difference between Italian fascism and Spanish fascism.” I confessed that there were a few other idiots who didn’t quite grasp the subtleties, but he didn’t even respond, saying he only told me all this because he knew I would ask him—because newcomers have a tendency to talk about their past lives—and that he considered the matter closed and done with, warning me not to ask any more about the subject nor about his missing eye or how he lost it, and I reacted as if I had only just noticed.