That roar you will be hearing intermittently forever is called Euphoria. You’ll learn to tamp it back a bit should it ever interfere with The Conversation. Nothing must ever obscure one glorious word of that, our communal enterprise:

The Conversation, our highest form of folk art. Cerebral, circular, sexual, musical, celestial—you have just arrived midsentence at the longest dormitory bull session on record. Heaven is pure communion with your own source in others, with theirs in you.

The scale of Heavenly talk is not symphonic … that was merely poignant human overreaching. Heaven is Chamber Music, a give-take chat and revelation, confusion finally fully harmonized, a gossip where history, picnic sensation, philosophy, mathematical verity, and especially the earthly acts of eating, eliminating, plus all deeds sexual, have been conjoined to form a single round-the-clock state, a forward beating rolling motion we call Joy. —There, I heard a giggle over there. Good. Go with that.

Some mortals do their weekly Meals-on-Wheels gig just to appease a superstitious prospect of heavenly reward. They missed The Boat. Such climbers and overachievers are not, alas, for us. Not one of them stands among you. Fact is, 39 percent of you are atheists. Were …

All of you got here the hard way, via the back stairs’ long spiral climb. —Among us, find not a single glad-hander from the Business Community of Atlanta. We’ve included only two “career” Manhattanites, and no Parisians. Our ranks … our

Uhum, excuse me. I see you three whispering, on the two hundred and ninety-fifth queue back? Yes, you. Look, I’m sure you’re keyed up. I don’t doubt you have scads to chat about. But I ain’t exactly your average flight attendant up here delivering the same old crash-lore, my dears.

There’ll be mucho time for your little personal exchanges later, thank you … (—I swear, in every group, we get a few …) Where was I? Oh yes, Paradise, etc. Our ranks are comprised solely of seeming nonbelievers who somehow found ways to live believingly.

Having devoted yourselves to the chance of finding meaning—you each came, if-half-by-accident, to actually believe.

In something.

What is the rarest commodity left down there on your self-tainting, self-pitying planet? Belief.

And you bottled your homebrew of it. Belief is a vintage that can only be created a bathtubful at a time. Micro-breweries predominate. You fermented your own, for home use only. And now your joy is just commencing. Believe God. Believe me.

How you suffered. We saw. I know.

What’s coming is such sweet payback, my fellow survivors. Oh, but we tried hard, didn’t we? The wasteful cruelty of that rigged game.

You know my own last conscious thoughts? An awareness of my teeth!