On the Death of My Son 3

Jasper in his heart felt that Mike had beaten him to the solution of the enigma he called lie. He had found happiness in the hereafter: not in the pig latin of organised bigotry, damnation in Hell.

Indeed, Jasper took a very long time to absorb all that Mike had been telling him.

"Mike," said Jasper, during a session with Nina, "I think I am getting a much clearer picture of the laws that operate in your world. But can you tell me a bit more about yourself?"

"Well, Dad, there's quite a difference between the me that lives in this world and the me that lived in your world! My body doesn't need food or drink to keep it going; nor does it need sleep to restore it.

"When you first arrive here, however, the routines of eating and drinking and sleeping are too firmly established to be eliminated at one fell swoop. So if you think you need to sleep, well, you lie down on a couch in one of the houses, and you sleep for as long as you want. If you think you need to eat, then you eat your fill. There are no excetory organs in our bodies. For example, when I drink a glass of water, it just diffuses itself throughout my system, and that's that! In other words, it's converted into energy. If I see a beautiful apple tree with bright red apples on it, I can reach up and pick one off and swallow it - all it does is to give me a tingling sense of satisfaction!

"We have hundreds of trees which bear fruit, and the fruit never drops off or rots. It stays crisp and fresh. When we occasionally feel depressed - and we do Dad; when the people we left behind are sorrowing for us too intensely, it depresses us up here! The best way to cheer up is to wander out and pick an apple or pear, or any other fruit we happen to fancy. It has the effect of recharging our batteries."

"What sort of clothes do you wear, Mike?"

"Any old thing we choose. It's simply a matter of concentrating on a particular cut of cloth and, hey presto! we're wearing it!

"There is one robe that we could never try to alter; our spirit robe. When we have public gatherings here, or when we call on one of the higher brethren in the halls of wisdom and learning, we simply discard our personal fashion of the moment, and our spirit robes appear at once. They hang in classical folds and come in an entire spectrum of glowing colours. We can never change the colour or alter the shape of a robe, because its function is to reflect the true condition of our spirit.

"Suppose, on earth, I had been a man with a violent temper. My robe here would have splotches of dark, muddy grey; or dirty red shot through with grey. This proclaims to all and sundry that it's high time the wearer began ridding himself of these blemishes.

"Most of us here wear our spirit clothing most of the time; when we combine this with our gift of telepathy, it's well nigh impossible for anyone to maintain a phoney front and hope to get away with it! No sooner have I thought a thing, than the person I'm talking to hears it. He knows exactly what's making me tick!

"As no dust or grime exists up here, we have no reason to wash our clothes. Nor do we need dry-cleaners. When we feel that our clothes don't have the shine we'd like them to have, we exercise our minds, and the clothes shine as brightly as we deserve.

"We have a lot of fun with the teenagers who have just arrived here. Especially the girls, when they think they're still the cat's whiskers. Oh Dad, you'd laugh to see them pimping around as if they were in a department store, changing out of one set of glad rags to put on another, and then starting again from scratch and dreaming up something even more weird and wonderful! Which promptly appears, as large as life and twice as natural! They have the time of their lives for hours!"