"1949," Ishmael said. "A Tailorcraft. They don't build them now. You okay there?"
Grijpstra was too big maybe but he didn't say so. He watched Ishmael turn the wooden propeller and listened to the little engine ahead, sputtering before catching. Ishmael hoisted himselfup, patted the dashboard, took out a portable radio, and called the control tower. The Tailorcraft began to spin as it reached the runway.
"Hello?" Ishmael asked the plane. "Would you mind? Oh, I see."
It was Grijpstra's right foot, depressing the plane's right wheel brake. The plane had double everything.
"Don't touch nothing," Ishmael said. The plane finished its full turn and tried again. Ishmael was wearing little headphones connected to his portable radio. Control must have told him to go, for the plane took off, suddenly and bravely, into an empty sky that connected, Grijpstra reflected, to the rest of the universe, which was nothing really, a void, without coordinates except the lines that man had come up with.
"Nothing," Grijpstra shouted over the engine's puny roar.
"What?" Ishmael shouted.
"Even less than your heaven," Grijpstra said, pointing ahead and to the sides, even to the rear, where, turning his head with some difficulty, he could see only the plane's toy tail, sticking up comically between two little white clouds suspended in an infinity of blues, in assorted shades, all transparent.
"Heaven?"
"Your restroom heaven."
Ishmael shouted that he'd been dreaming about heaven before meeting Grijpstra. The Tailorcraft, flying horizontally now above the Massachusetts coast line, replaced its tiny roar with a quiet putt-putt. "Maybe you're the angel," Ish-mael said. "There should be angels in heaven, but in my dream, there was only the restroom and a uniformed guy shining shoes, a black, white-haired guy, he was Saint Peter, his nameplate said so, he wanted to know what I'd been doing."
"In charge of thresholds," Grijpstra said.
"That's him." Ishmael rolled a cigarette with one hand, out ofa can from the glove compartment. There was a soldier on the can blowing a trumpet. "You want one?"
Grijpstra didn't.
"They still smoke in Holland?"
"Oh yes," Grijpstra said, reassured by the Boston suburbs below, crawling up along the coast in repetitive patterns. There were sailboats too, and ferries, busily connecting clearly visible points A and 6. He'd probably be fine, sitting on the plane's sailcloth wings, waving and screaming. Social suburbanites, sunning their worked-out bodies on their balconies, would pick up a phone, or old salts, ferry captains, weathered pleasure sailors, would turn a wheel. Not to worry.
"They don't smoke here no more," Ishmael said. "Just me and Hairy Harry occasionally. Looks funny, puffy rosy cheeks and then that fat cigar. Where was I, Krip?"
Grijpstra thought they were flying out of Where, if there were a Where anywhere now that they were out of coordinates below-no houses, no boats.
"The dream." Ishmael blew thick smoke at the plane's cracked windscreen. "Saint Peter wanted to know who-what-where and I said I had been this Maine Pentecostal person. You know? Pentecost? Whitsunday? Holy Ghost coming down? You don't cut your hair much and the women wear long dresses and you go to chapel most of the time?"
"Right," Grijpstra said happily. The shoreline had showed up again: some houses, a sizable boat.
"You got the Holy Ghost coming down Whitsunday at your end too?"
"Yes," Grijpstra said. There was an Uncle Joe who lived in the country, Holland's religious part, where kids weren't vaccinated against polio and everybody put out the flag on the queen's birthday. Uncle Joe was a healer.
"Ever heal anybody?"
Not to Grijpstra's knowledge but Uncle Joe did speak in tongues.
"Like you," Ishmael said, "in the restroom. Okay. So I told Saint Peter I had been doing that, and more, praying extra hours, going to chapel before breakfast, preaching, hollering and whatnot, guiding the congregation, rolling about the floor speaking in tongues, and he said, 'Very well, sir, that'll be the second door on the right then.'"
The houses below were getting further apart and there was only one ship, a huge tanker, the size of some of the bigger islands they had passed earlier, that appeared to move just a little slower, it seemed to Grijpstra, than the Tailor-craft. Grijpstra remembered a yachtsman in Holland who washed up on the beach after his craft got torn up by a gale. The yachtsman told a TV interviewer he'd been floating on top of big waves and there were tankers everywhere and when the yachtsman looked into the tankers' portholes he kept seeing sailors enjoying their dinners, or watching TV, or un-centerfolding Playboys, and nobody saw him outside, begging and sobbing.
"Second door on the right," Ishmael repeated, "and we're in the airport restroom, so that door would lead into one of the shifters. But that's where he said I had to go and he was Saint Peter-he had a label on his chest that said so."
Grijpstra groaned.
"Bad," Ishmael said, "but I'm from Maine so I don't believe nothing unless my parents tell me to and my parents are dead. So I just stand about for a bit and there's other people having their shoes shined and they never did the Pentecost and you know where Saint Peter sent them?"
"No," Grijpstra said. He thought he shouldn't worry because this Tailorcraft had been around since 1949, with good people like Ishmael at the controls. Nothing to fear but fear itself. And say, just for argument's sake, that the plane did go down. This was not a good planet anyway. This might even be hell. To leave could only be pleasant. Nellie was okay perhaps but no more memory of the significant person in one's life means no more regret at being without that significant person. What else would death wipe out? Amsterdam traffic? Old age? Traveling in old unreliable mini-airplanes? More and more red tide in the sea and a lot of people being kept alive with terminal painful diseases? He should be grateful. Here he was having the last bad time ofhis bad life.
"Second door on the right," Ishmael said. "All ofthem. All of them got sent through the second door on the right. One total asshole I knew, he'd lived in a commune-Zen, you know Zen?"
"My friend does," Grijpstra said, looking straight ahead. "My friend Rinus, on Squid Island. Back in Amsterdam he'd go sometimes, Sunday mornings. Said he would sit on thin cushions, his legs all twisted, quietly, never mind if it hurt."
"On Squid Island?"
"No, in a loft, in Amsterdam. Lange Leidse Dwarsstraat honderd drie en veertig drie hoog."
"You're okay?" Ishmael asked.
"I'm sorry," Grijpstra said. "I thought you wanted to know where Rinus did Zen. That was the address."
"In tongues?"
"In Dutch."
"What happens to Rinus when he does Zen?"
"When he stops sitting his legs stop hurting. So where did your Zen man get sent by Saint Peter?
"Second door on the right," Ishmael said. "Like everybody else. Never mind what he'd done. Maybe played golf and fished for trout all his life. Maybe nine to fived for IBM or Ford. Watched daytime TV. Same difference-all us suckers. But there were all the other doors too-those are big restrooms at Logan, fifty doors maybe-so I wondered where they led to. And there were all these folks getting their shoes shined by Peter, keeping the old boy busy so that he couldn't see what was going on behind him. So I sneaked around, tried all the other doors, and you know what?"
"Duds," Grijpstra said. "Dud doors. Part of the wall between Now and Hereafter. Only the second door worked."
"You had the same dream?"
"Makes sense," Grijpstra said. "Doesn't it? You tried the second door?"
"Sure," Ishmael said. "Led to Bliss. More of the same with the pain blocked out. Whatever you wanted to do you could do. All the shoe-shined people were there, looking for something to do. But I wanted to make music and there were these black guys who said they would let me play with them so I was going to do that for a while but they said it wouldn't satisfy me forever."