Harold and Patty were high school sweethearts. They rushed from their senior prom to a damp log cabin lit with a few candles and lost their virginity. And they stayed a couple throughout college with only one minor spat, which, though conducted in public at a local tavern, was also nauseatingly romantic (something about growing pains), then they got married and had three kids: a sharp-witted boy and two beautiful girls. They prospered across forty years of passion and tenderness, raising their family and their enviously adorable grandchildren, thereby solidifying their claim as quintessential soulmates. Everything carried out perfectly—almost too perfect. So it was no surprise to their friends that not some fifty years after Patty reunited with Harold in Heaven they opted to file jointly for divorce, listing irreconcilable differences.
They had become different people during the years they spent separated by The Great Divide and Harold had started to need his space. He’d look at his wife and think: who is this person? she’s like a stranger. They’d always liked different things but there were fewer distractions now. When they were alive it was hard to keep things fresh, but at least they had the physicality. Physicality is a good thing. It limits you and confines you in the moment. There’s nothing worse than making love to your wife and being caught drifting off to marvel the battle of Gettysburg. “Yes! Yes... Honey?” she’d say and cringe, “Are you in Gettysburg, again. Goddamnit!” And he knew she was pissed, taking His name in vain with Him so close by.
And there were other things, of course. Like the argument over the house, that’s when it really came to a head. Harold said, “Why do we have to spend all our time in the Third Street House. Why do you always resist my attempts to conjure the house from Georgia? Now that was a house.”
“You like this house,” Patty said, rifling through junk mail with her back to him and eating a perfect peach. “It’s your favorite.”
“Yah, but it can’t be my favorite forever.”
She stopped eating and lowered the mail. “Harold, I’m cheating on you.” She turned to face him.
“What?” Harold walked to her; he felt his heartbeat, again, and that old sensation of blood rushing to his face as he looked deep into those pretty green eyes that held perfectly still. “That doesn’t make any sense. This is Heaven. There’s no cheating in Heaven.”
Patty sneered, flinging the mail across the black granite island and turning away. “That’s what you always do. You always tell me the rules. Use doorknobs. Don’t walk through doors at dinner parties. Haunt the granddaughter in her dreams, not when she’s screwing that wannabe musician and it would do her the most good.”
“There’s no cheating in Heaven!”
She turned back to him, “Harold, I want a divorce.”
“Fine.” Harold stormed out of the kitchen and conjured the siege of Constantinople. His shout echoed across the abyss, “FINE-FINE-fine-fin...”
Harold kicked sand, walking through the dark and musty limestone stables. Black stallions plodded and whinnied—nervous from battle. Blood dripped near the hoof of a brave one that wouldn’t stop eyeing him and Harold was tempted to ride her bareback into the dusty night and forget the effects of rippling the timeline. He sighed and looked down at straw and dirt.
He wondered why he hadn’t immediately demanded to know who she had been sleeping with. He couldn’t think of anyone it could be. Back on Earth the act of sex could only potentially create a unique soul of infinite will and duration. When you had sex in Heaven the stakes were a bit higher than that. Nothing to trifle with. Still he was somehow more troubled by the idea of divorce itself. Divorce was prevalent in Heaven since a lot of the marriages grandfathered into Heaven were done in a spurious manner, sometimes just a few years before The Great Divide was crossed. But he’d never heard of soulmates getting a divorce in Heaven. And that’s what they were, right? soulmates. Their case would be tried by one of the primary emanations of God and that in itself seemed risky. When he had his first brush with God (the Nineteenth Emanation) during Extra Terrestrial and Pre-Hominid Orientation, he thought for an instant he had been dissolved—dissolved down to what seemed his atoms, into a sea of peace.
The idea of divorce didn’t make complete sense to him. And she could afford a much better lawyer. She was a surgeon in her past life and she had taken most of it with her. He had a lot of his money tied-up in his internet business and it wasn’t panning out yet. You see, a lot of old people choose to stay old after they die because they grow to hate the young so much and he was going to teach those old people to make Webpages and file their taxes online. So now he could only afford a decently good lawyer. Someone like Sammy. Sammy the ATM Machine, oh, it was going to be embarrassing.
Sammy was peripherally linked into their circle of friends. It was rumored he liked going by the name Sammy so much that he became Sammy the ATM Machine simply because everything else he could think of was taken. But Harold didn’t believe it. Harold made an appointment and tried not to get annoyed by the fact that his secretary made him wait fifteen minutes in the receiving alcove, just for show. His office was dark brown, somewhat Victorian with leather bound book collections and Sammy sitting attentively in a high-back leather chair between an open-curtained bay window and a handsome wood desk.
Harold smelled cigar smoke. “You look good, Sammy. Life-like.”
“Thanks,” the words issued from his black money slot and green text on his screen flashed with his syllables, “It took me a while to get the arms and legs to look natural and not too robotic. I’m very sorry to hear of this divorce, Harold. Are you sure about this?”
“We’re sure. We’ve talked it over and we think it’s for the best. She cheated on me, Sammy.”
Sammy tapped pale-blue plastic fingers pensively over the lacquered desktop.
“Walk me through the basics of this Sam—”
He raised a hand, “Sammy.”
“Sorry. Sammy. Walk me through the basics. If we both know and agree we want this divorce, why can’t we just conjure it and be done with it?”
“Harold, take a seat. Please.”
Harold pulled a crimson leather chair closer to the desk and sat.
Sammy’s screen seemed to lock with his gaze, “The essence of the truth of these matters is equal parts intention and manifestation.”
“What?” Harold asked.
“We gotta do this thing to prove our case.”
“Oh.”
“Now, you’ll be going up against the DEMM; it’s important you know that.”
“What?”
“The DEMM. The Deus ex Machina Machine.”
“Huh?”
“The Eighth Emanation of God. The Deus ex Machina Machine. That’s what the Emanation calls Himself. He creates impossible resolutions. A handy trick in divorce court.”
“Oh.” Harold cringed, “Wait... what do you mean, I’ll be up against?”
“Harold, I’m just your council. You and Patty are going to have to settle things yourselves with the DEMM.” Sammy leaned back into his high-back leather chair and spun a little. “You might have the mistaken idea that a Heavenly divorce is like a material one. It’s not. In material divorce we split up property and assets. In Heavenly divorce we divvy up ideas. She wouldn’t just get the house, for example, she’d get the idea of it, all the memories, textures, nuances and pleasures derived from its contemplation, images and emotions. That’s serious business, Harold. You’ve been together so long, we’re not talking about a legal matter, we’re talking about an amputation of a big part of yourself. When I’m dealing with some octogenarian billionaire looking to extricate himself from the floozy he married just to get one last taste-a-the-tang, I say go for it, but this, this is different, Harold.”
“Why do we have to split up all our ideas, anyway?”
“You earned those ideas together. After the divorce you can’t share them anymore and truly be separated in any meaningful way. We have to separate the spiritual currency.”
“What? You mean ideas are lik
e money? But we still use money.”
“Harold, what have you been doing all this time? Don’t tell me you have all your money in stocks and bonds. Money buys ideas. It’s all the same thing. Money equal ideas. So we have to split it up. You have to think this through.”
“I know. I’ve thought it through. It still just feels right. It feels like the right thing to do. We can’t go on like this, Sammy.”
“Harold,” Sammy leaned forward, green ‘Would you like a receipt?’ text flashing, “Harold, look at me. You’ve been here, what, fifty some years. Take it from me. This place can be overwhelming. You come here and it seems for the first time you’ve got infinite power, infinite choices. But then there are people still trying to tell you what to do and it can be frustrating—infuriating. You just want to show them a thing or two. But you still have to make sound decisions. Let me tell you, Harold, sometimes—sometimes those decisions can stick with you for a long time—” Crisp, green bills flitted out, stacking themselves onto his tray and he swatted at them, cramming them inside a desk drawer. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Harold?”
“Yes. Believe me; I really do. It’s just. It’s over. I have to finish this.”
“Okay,” Sammy said. “In that case, the first thing you do when you get into the court room is...”