At luncheon, Elizabeth bit into a ripe raspberry. What she did not swallow, popped forth, speckling her white neck ruff, four spots of glistening crimson. This became the Proof she sought. Cousin Mary’s beheading was ordered, loud, at once. (The farmer who grew the luscious berries that inspired assassination was one Ezekiel Booth, the latent great-great-greatgrandfather of a bad actor who’d shoot Lincoln.) After Elizabeth’s own death, molecules retained from the portentous berry departed her remains, entered a nearby elder bush whose wood became marquetry in the captain’s quarters of a fourmaster that in 1771 sailed to America, where the great ship was finally scrapped in 1804, its better interior surfaces purchased by a clock maker whose elaborate gonging mantel timepiece rode a Conestoga wagon West where, honored as an heirloom in Sacramento, it burned during a housefire, the splinters rendered into mulch taken up by the very strawberries then served to Bette Davis, on camera, as she played Elizabeth I with such psychic skill.

I could go on. It being Paradise, you can … Rest assured, You will.

The promised show is coming. Nine thousand new colors. You will be essential in God’s promised show.

Eating here and sleeping here and the nuisance of elimination are optional. But many of our ranks still choose to exercise these functions in memory (and therefore deed). Old habits die hard. Habits seem, in fact, less willing to stop living than does any single human life!

Sneezes have lately proved popular. Sneezing is a hobby as arbitrary as taking snuff. But sneeze these silly angels do, remembering.

I find such fads endearing. They’re unpredictable as our former species itself, and just as lavishly perverse. Certain rituals of the bathroom recall our lower starter-life as little else here can. “Voiding” is catching on in certain circles—you see them seated, knee to knee, salamander-smooth backsides exposed. Quaint, loggy, primitive, hopeless, soporific, yet engaging as human life itself.

Sex? You think we’re superior to that on high? With all this time on our hands? Rethink, my new beauties. You’ll find no virgins in Paradise—at least not for long. (0, sure, they’re a few holdouts. Emily Dickinson, Winslow Homer, Joseph Cornell, and Vincent van Gogh, actually. And I mean everybody’s after them.)

But, on this plane, there is, as the hit song tried saying, “a whole lot of fuckin’ going on.” You need only consider trying the act with someone, need only find a pooled majority vote, and instantly—indeed almost involuntarily—you two are at it. Oftentimes midair. Others, materialized nearby, get to watch. All in the family. No need for your partner to even announce his/her name or former occupation or death date—you know that already. (You know everything, my dear ones. And instead of being phone-book boring, Omniscience—one now realizes—is such a turn-on.)

Before, you had to sneak off somewhere fugitive to “do it.” But, here, anytime-anywhere, you ARE it.