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" Heaven&amp;#039;s no place for the dead.  Why he wrote the last line: I am an atheist. You think I&amp;#039;d be happy all those books about the folly of religion -- The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, God Is Not Great -- are shooting up the bestseller charts. But I&amp;#039;m not: I always wanted to believe in heaven. When I was nine, I moved from Boston to Salt Lake City. First day at school, a classmate asked: &amp;quot;Are you or aren&amp;#039;t you?&amp;quot; He meant a Mormon. The kid thought my family had to be. Our last name is Smith, just like Joseph Smith, the big cheese of Mormonism who saw Jesus in a grove of trees. I wimped out. I couldn&amp;#039;t admit my parents were atheists. (My mother claimed that in her experience, any man who had visions in a forest was under the influence of Johnnie Walker rather than Jesus Christ.) So I said I was Canadian. I suddenly surpassed the Jehovah&amp;#039;s Witness as most exotic boy in class.  I liked the Mormons. They were right out of a book by my favorite author, L. Frank Baum. I could see them living in a corner of Oz between the Land of the Skeezers and the County of the Flatheads. They were mesmerizing, these Mormons. No Coke or even Ice Tea! Basements like bomb shelters filled with cases of canned soups and toilet paper! A fixation for hopscotch even among boys! A leader, Joseph Smith, who had worked as a treasure hunter and ended up tarred and feathered for his beliefs!  Plus, Mormons had an afterlife. I wanted an afterlife. When I asked my parents what happens after we die, there was no mention of oblivion. Instead they told me to use my imagination. So I pictured heaven as a place where people lounged around in sweatsuits on beanbag chairs. They played a little tennis. Maybe practiced the guitar. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t just make up your own rules about heaven,&amp;quot; the Mormon kids would insist. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not Christian!&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s when I knew I really was an atheist. To me, being atheist meant having an imagination. Nowadays I&amp;#039;m again inventing my own version of the sweet hereafter for my second book of fiction, a novel titled Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens. As the novel opens, sixteen-year-old Johnny Henzel finds himself in a ramshackle airport holding a suitcase he&amp;#039;s never seen before. Soon he&amp;#039;s put on a rickety 727. All the passengers onboard, Johnny included, are dead. The causes are varied: heart attack, car crash, anaphylactic shock caused by a nut allergy. The in-flight movie is called A Whole New World in reference to the heaven everybody is being shipped to.  That heaven turns out to be as odd as the Land of the Skeezers. It&amp;#039;s a mix of urban, suburban and rural. A subway system called the Boa slinks beneath the ground. Bike paths crisscross sprawling parks. The temperature always hovers in the low eighties. High-rise residences resembling college dorms house the dearly departed. Special residences are reserved for the murdered, and that&amp;#039;s where Johnny ends up (a lunatic at his high school shot him in the head). Johnny spends his first week attending orientation classes, where he mostly learns what heaven does not have. No cars, no compact disks, no cellphones. Typewriters instead of computers. You&amp;#039;d think the place was run by Luddites.  Also, heaven has no animals other than sheep and goats. It has no meat or leather because meat and leather are dead animals and, as one character says, &amp;quot;Heaven&amp;#039;s no place for the dead.&amp;quot;  People don&amp;#039;t age here, but they do die. Throw yourself in front of the subway and your mangled body will simply -- poof! -- disappear. Otherwise life expectancy is about seventy or eighty years. After that many years in heaven, you go to bed one night and vanish in your sleep. Where you go next is anybody&amp;#039;s guess. As an author, I play God. I can kill off one character, bring another to life. In my novel, I must decide everything: from the money people use to pay for their typewriter ribbons to the fate, in the hereafter, of people with Alzheimer&amp;#039;s and Down&amp;#039;s syndrome. (God wrapped up his work in seven days; I take a week to decide whether the fire hydrants in heaven are yellow or red.) And I am facing tough questions like: What happens to someone who commits a murder in the afterlife? Is there jail here? Is there a death penalty?  I&amp;#039;m building the type of heaven I can believe in. A place more real to me than the Christian heaven. In mine, toilets back up, the subway breaks down, and shoplifting is rampant. People here are sometimes callous and vindictive. But sometimes kind and courageous, too.  When I was a kid back in Salt Lake City, I first thought Mormons were called Ladder Day Saints. I pictured them, on the day of their death, climbing giant, wobbly ladders to heaven. Writing my novel is like climbing such a scary ladder. I&amp;#039;m moving up rung by rung. Swaying in the wind. Trying not to look down. The top seems so far off. Sometimes, I admit, I despair of ever reaching it. Maybe all this atheist needs is a little faith. About the author: Neil Smith is the author of Bang Crunch, a story collection that recently became a national bestseller in Canada and will soon be released in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Three of the stories in the book were nominated for the Journey Prize.  As told to Anya Yurchyshyn "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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