There Is No Heaven Behind the Moon

It was back in ‘69. My dad had me down at a bar and I was only five or six at that time. It was common back then, for kids to be in bars. The bar culture was different back then. It was just a place for people to get together, drink, shoot some pool, throw some darts, and watch sports. It wasn’t what it is today.

There was a lot of cigarette smoke. It was back when you could still smoke indoors, so everybody had a smoke in their hand or their in between their lips. My dad had me in the stool in front of him pointing up to the television, black and white up in the corner behind the bar. The bartender was pulling drink after drink for the guys, and there were a few girls there too, and I remember she was giving all the guys this smile with a look in her eye as she handed the drinks to them. Everybody had their attention focused on the televisions that sat in different corners in the small room. My dad had one of those cigarettes in between his lips with his hands holding onto my shoulders looking and pointing at the one we were looking at behind the bar.

Nobody was too loud, just a regular murmur of voices. Like a room full of ten drunk conversations happening at once. I still wasn’t sure what was happening on the television my dad was pointing at, and what everybody was so focused on. I just smiled because I was happy to be there. Sometimes that girl would give me a soda or a glass of juice when my dad asked for it. I was nearly a regular at that bar before I was ten.

It was about an hour after we had been there, and my dad had played a couple games of pool with a few guys I didn’t know. It was different back then. It was a small town, too. You could leave your kids at the bar and they’d be as safe as anywhere else, if not safer. Bars in that town were safer than seatbelts because everybody knew everybody and things like kidnapping didn’t happen.

Everybody was really gathered around the television or the bar, all with a cigarette in between their fingers, their lips, or smoking in a nearby ashtray. They all had a beer in their hand, my dad included. It was as sudden as a crack of thunder, the way everybody cheered. Like it was in the middle of a rainstorm and you weren’t expecting the thunder to be that loud. It made me jump in my seat a little bit, not that anybody noticed. Everybody cheered and held their hands up and then I heard some guy on the television say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but everybody in that bar cheered their heads off and they all held a beer, some in cans some in glass bottles, high in the air. A lot of it spilled around them and they drank after the guy on the television said that line. I felt the way one of my dad’s hands left my shoulder and the way he put a little more pressure on my other one. It was too loud to ask what was going on, so I just cheered along with them, and I held my cola up in the air with them.

When we left, my dad pointed up to the moon up in the night sky and he said, “Neil is up there right now.”

“On the moon?” I asked. He nodded and I said, “Who’s Neil?”

He laughed a lot when I asked who Neil was. He held my hand as we walked back to the car and he opened the door for me. Then he walked over to the driver’s side and got in. I looked up at the moon and noticed how small it was, and I asked, “How does somebody fit on something so small?”

He said, “The moon is almost the size of the earth. It isn’t as small as it looks.”

I watched the moon the entire drive home, as if it were following me. It was normal back then, for people to drive drunk the way they did. I pulled my fingers up to my eye and I closed my left eye really tight as I placed the moon between my thumb and index finger like I could pop it. I looked through the car window to see if I could see Neil, whoever that was, walking around up there, but I couldn’t see anything. I asked him, “How is the moon so small but as big as earth? It fits between my fingers!”

And he laughed. And if he could have, he probably would have told me something like, “It’s just so far away that it looks small. It’s thousands of miles away.” But he couldn’t tell me that because before he finished laughing a car slammed into the driver’s side of the car. I don’t remember anything about it, and it’s probably best that I don’t remember the way the metal sounded smashing in, or glass shattering, or horns honking. What I do remember is the way my dad’s laugh sounded. He always laughed the same way, like it was with his whole face. He tilted his head back a little and he showed every tooth in his mouth. He wasn’t fat but he had a beer gut and it was like that’s where his laughs always came from.

It was a little while later, after the hospital and the funeral, when people started saying things like, “He’s in a better place now,” and, “He’s in a place far away from here.” And a little while later I asked my teacher just how far away the moon was and she told me, “It’s about two-hundred-forty-thousand miles away.” And then I asked her if she thought that was pretty far away from here and she laughed and said, “Yes, very far!” Then I asked her if she thought it was a better place than Earth and she said, “In its own way, I think.” And when I asked her if she thought that’s where my dad went she looked at me like I had just hurt her feelings and she knelt down and gave me a hug. I hugged her back because I thought I had hurt her feelings and I told her I was sorry and she said, “Honey, your dad isn’t on the moon. Your dad is in Heaven.”

Then I asked, “Well, what’s Heaven? Is it behind the moon?”

And she smiled again and she said, “No, there is no Heaven behind the moon. It’s much different than that.”

Indeed, Heaven was further away than the moon. I had come to find out it was much further, in fact. And when I was a little older and I really understood how far away the moon was from the Earth, it left me a little hopeless to ever reach Heaven. And one day I asked my mom, “How do we get to Heaven?” She explained it as being a good person and being nice to people and listening to our parents. I asked her if my dad did those things and she said he did. Then I said, “Do we all go to Heaven when we reach Dad’s age?”

She squeezed me into her stomach and she said, “That isn’t exactly how it works.” When I asked her how it worked then, she took a big breath in through her mouth and she said, “When somebody passes away,” and she paused and said, “or dies. Their body gets buried in the ground like your dad’s was. Do you remember that?” When I looked up at her and nodded my head that I remembered she smiled and she squeezed me again and she said, “You also have a soul inside of you. It’s like your body, but a little different. You can’t see it, not like you see your body.” This confused me a little bit, but she kept going. “Your soul can’t stay inside a body that doesn’t work, so it goes to Heaven.”

“Then what happens?” I asked.

She smiled down at me again and she said, “Well, if you were kind in your human body, and you made a good soul, then your soul goes to Heaven. Where it can live in happiness forever.” Then I asked what happened if you didn’t make a good soul. She said, “That isn’t something you’ll ever have to worry about.”

A few years later my mom grew tired of the faces I’d get when I asked questions in church. Things like, “Where is Heaven?” and, “So Jesus wasn’t even white?” and, “What’s a menstruation? Will I get one?” and, “Why can’t you touch people during it?” She got sick of the way people looked at us, so we stopped going. And I never thought it was my fault, but I suppose in a way it was.

People just left me even more confused, and the more questions I asked the more questions I could come up with. And it seemed like there were never as many answers as there were questions in the world. By the time I was in high school all I really knew was that the moon was two-hundred-forty-thousand miles away. And that there must be something pretty spectacular about it to travel such a long way to visit it. I would look at the moon in between my fingers and pretend to squish it. I would often lie awake at night staring out the window, just to look at it a little longer before I went to sleep. Eventually I learned about constellations, other planets, space, and galaxies, and the entire universe. I got some glow in the dark stars to stick to my ceiling and outlined the different constellations as best I could, though they were never perfect. But it was good enough trick me into believing that I was anywhere but in my room, that I was anywhere else other than Earth. Sometimes I went to the moon, or sometimes it was Jupiter. Other times it was Saturn. Sometimes it was a planet that had never been discovered yet.

It all caused a rush in my stomach when I read it. When I read things like how Pluto was over three billion miles away, or the way the Sun reaches ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Things like that made my stomach float up out of my throat. The truly incomprehensible fascinated me to no end. Death became more and more comprehendible and eventually I didn’t care about it as much, and it didn’t seem to be much of anything at all. It was nothing like the numbers of the universe or planets. Things like the number of grains of sand on the Earth or stars in the night sky, those things were incomprehensible. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon was more interesting than death.

I always remembered it, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon that night in the bar. And every time I thought about it I couldn’t help but hear the way my dad’s laugh sounded in the car just before we got hit. I hated it, but I loved the way thinking of Neil walking on the moon made me feel. The way it always made my stomach soar through my throat in a rush. It hurt to learn things because when I did I could always hear him laughing. The more I learned about magnificent things, incomprehensible things, and the more I lost interest in death, the more I realized everything people told me was bullshit. I slowly came to the realization that my dad was nothing but dead.