Remember when I found you in that long, white hallway? There were no obvious lights anywhere, but somehow everything seemed brightly lit, without any shadows.

The majority of the crowd in the hall was drifting past us in small groups, linked arm-in-arm — probably families and friends, or communities, or economic associations, moving at a fairly steady clip. A few loners were running and bumping into people. Lots of “excuse me’s” and “hey, look out’s” could be heard.

I asked you to stand to the side, because that woman to the left just about ran you over, remember? Of course, I was joking.

I introduced myself as a janitor. Not really part of the crowd. But I’d been working in that complex for as long as I could remember.

Perhaps I’m a spirit, because nobody seemed to notice me. I pushed my invisible broom up and down the various corridors, without paying much attention to the hubbub or what this place was all about.

But after what seemed like several thousand years of sweeping floors, I got a little bored. And I got a little curious about the nature of this complex or whatever it is. You were the only ghost like me I’d ever met. You seemed familiar to me. I saw you on the margins of the page, not quite sure why you were here. I told you to join the club. I said, I think it’s time for me to lay down my broom and start exploring this place a little more. I asked you to join me.

So, we picked out somebody at random to see where he was going. Let’s not bother with describing him, other than to say, he walked alone (which was somewhat rare), early middle-aged, somewhat stooped and nervous, constantly checking his watch. Oh, and he was carrying a backpack that looked fairly heavy. That should suffice, we’re not building a character study. We only wanted to find out where everyone was heading.

Now and then we’d pass someone moving in the opposite direction, almost always mumbling feverishly to themselves. Everyone would try to get out of their way. They had bad hair, which seemed to make people nervous.

It was a non-descript hallway, as I said, except for signs that appeared at every turn, or T, or four corners. The first one we passed said, “just around the corner!” But usually, the signs were more specific.

For instance, sometimes the crowd would move slower. Especially if we came to a juncture. The first one I recall was a four corners – left, right or straight. Our man stopped to consider his options.

The sign to the left read, “This way to Profit”, and a portion of the crowd in business attire — using their briefcases as shields to push through the traffic jam — went scampering off in that direction, talking into their cell phones nonstop. 

But we couldn’t see anything different in that direction. It looked like the same white, featureless hall. And we saw another sign at the end of the corridor, but it wasn’t possible to make it out clearly.

To the right, the sign said, “This way to Life Everlasting!” And a portion of the crowd started heading in that direction, walking arm in arm with their children. And others walked alone with their heads bent in solemn procession. And yet that corridor also looked exactly the same as the others. And the man we were following went straight. We thought, maybe we should have picked somebody more interesting. But that wasn’t the point of the trip.

Being ghosts, you and I, we did this for several decades without noticing the passage of time. But let me summarize the previous few decades as best I can, in case there are any other ghosts that we can’t see, who are listening to us:

To this point in our journey, every corridor has looked the same. Only the signs changed a little with time. Now and then we passed shabbier corridors heading to the left or right, with signs that advertised anything and everything from “this way to all-you-can-eat lunch specials”, which drew a few older people pushing walkers; to “Take a right for the family of your dreams”, which seemed to draw off a good number of younger couples; and even to the occasional dimly lit corridors covered in filth and debris, advertising “Take an immediate left for suicide”, which inevitably attracted a few, but we won’t dwell on that.

And then there were the corridors advertising “Public service for the good of all!”, which drew even fewer than the previous. And “Fame! Fortune! Legacy!”, which was almost as big a corridor as the one we were taking, drawing huge, bustling, easily irritable throngs rushing out of sight around the next corner.

Sometimes you’d see people coming out of some of these corridors as well, looking miffed or indignant. Often they’d arrive linked arm-in-arm, probably afraid of losing themselves in the larger mass of people.

The point is, segments of the crowd were constantly peeling off or rejoining us. And I was pretty sure I recognized some of the same people now and again. As if they (or maybe we) were walking in circles. But I couldn’t be sure.

Oh, yes, there were deaths. They were quite common. Aged bodies would drop to their knees and crawl for a while, as people tried to step around them. The man we were following almost lost his life too. A sudden stampede nearly did him in, as a corridor opened, advertising a special one-day sale at a nick-nack store.

In fact, removing the dead had been part of my old job — gathering the corpses and the floor dust into large bags, which we’d deposit into a system of pneumatic tubes behind a closet door conveniently located half-way down each corridor.

Apart from death, I never saw any of them come to a complete standstill. At least as far as I could tell in all the traffic. Usually, they’d keep on chugging even if they were slower than snails.

And all along the way, we’d hear rumors about the great things waiting for us around the next bend. Periodically, these rumors would surge into mass hysterias and fervent movements of whole segments of the crowd, linked arm-in-arm, pushing other linked groups to the ground like dominos and trampling them. And then ever more factions would form, all trying to push past one another in a frantic effort to turn the next corner in the hall.

Many started to adopt similar shirts and hats to distinguish themselves from the others. Some clung to one lane and denied all passage from strangers wearing different hats. And progress would slow to a crawl, especially if we came to a T in the hallway.

Then everybody would wait to see where the majority of the others went, because everyone figured the majority opinion must be onto something. You’d rarely see anyone head off in a lonely direction, even if it promised something as humble as room and board for the evening. If there wasn’t a crowd they could join, they were mostly stumped.

Well, as we continued to follow our man, we started noticing subtle changes I’d never seen, at least in the hallway where I used to work. Oh, you had to have a lifespan like ours to notice the difference at first. The corridors were the same, only gradually bigger. There were fewer hallways to the left and right. The crowds were getting even thicker, the air became heavy and damp. People started peeling off their clothing and were no longer inclined to walk arm-in-arm, because they had fallen so often in domino fashion that they no longer trusted their neighbors.

Rumors – ever louder rumors — were spreading as the heat and humidity increased. “The Promised Land Up Ahead!” the signs proclaimed with more daring and urgency. And the crowd had atomized by now, only forming defensive clumps here and there, which slowed everyone down even more. People were shouting prophecies over the noise of fighting, “The promised land awaits us just around the bend!” And people started sharing feverish rumors of what awaited them – apparently some huge banquet hall even larger than Maro-Lago.

“The Great Gate Is Nigh, Keep Going!” the signs and people proclaimed. The air and passions heated even more. And by now they had stripped themselves nearly naked, and had dropped their heavy burdens and surged forward, until they got stuck every few hundred yards in clumps of traffic, fighting their way past the other clumps. And from our vantage point near the ceiling (we were ghosts, after all), we could barely find our little man, as he got bounced and squeezed, like a single grain of sand in a giant, flowing sand dune.

What made matters worse, was the flood of naked people coming from the other direction all of a sudden. Apparently, they had already turned the corner and found a dead end – we’d never heard of such a thing! Of course, that was the rumor. Maybe it was just another long corridor, where they placed too much hope on finding the golden banquet hall, and had finally given up en masse.  

This was the first time we’d ever encountered a crowd surging back in our direction, and it was sheer bedlam. Word spread that the signs had all been facing in the wrong direction, and that the great gate was way back where we had started from. “Progress was a mistake!” half the crowd was screaming.

“Don’t listen to them, keep faith!” the other half was shouting.

And somehow in the midst of all this, our man and a few other stragglers with no strong desire to go forward or back, found themselves pushed into a modest little corridor to the left, with a sign reading, “Vacation!”

This was nothing new. Every once in a while, you’d see a corridor advertising a vacation, but they were always little circular corridors that brought you right back to the main one. And this was no different.

As he stumbled down the circular hall, a man in his early 30’s went running past him at full speed, smiling maniacally and shouting “get outta the way, old man, the future is Here!” He was wearing a tee-shirt that said, “Everlasting Transhuman Life!”

He pondered sadly how many times in his long life he’d heard that same giddy promise.

Then he did something quite out of he ordinary. He stopped to deeply ponder the long journey he had made, the decades of weary travel in endless chaos to reach yet another monotonous spot of blank, white wall somewhere along an obscure detour of an endless hallway.

He was only wearing his underwear now, and it was still too hot even for those, but he was both too modest and too tired to take off anything else. So, he looked back the way he came, hesitated, look forward the way he was going, hesitated, and then sat down on the floor and said, “fuckit.”

And when he leaned his back against the hot, dripping walls of the hallway, the wall gave way.

A small door opened no taller or wider than he himself. At first, he was blinded by the brilliant green light that poured through the opening. A few stragglers walked past him, and he turned to look at them, trying to get their attention by pointing excitedly, but they just grumbled grumpily and called him a weirdo, a slacker and a slouch.

This happened again and again, as he stood before the door in astonishment. Nobody noticed.

He was afraid to step into the green light, because he’d never seen anything like it before. But he couldn’t turn away. The green space was vast and filled his heart with inexplicable joy. He couldn’t make anything out very clearly. But what little he saw was overwhelmingly beautiful, especially after a lifetime spent cooped up between whitewashed walls.

And as he stood there, a beautiful young woman appeared in the doorway dressed in animals skins and flowers. “Welcome home, grandfather!” she said, as if it were a joyous reunion.

But he was too afraid to enter. “Who are you and where am I?” he asked timidly. She smiled gently and reached out and grabbed his hand, but he refused to budge.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re home at last.”

“But where or what is this home?” he asked, frightened and bewildered. “Is this heaven?” he asked.

“No,” she laughed. “Nothing like that. But I can’t tell you who I am or where we are,” she said. “You won’t know anything by name, you have to walk through.”

But he didn’t dare. And people continued to file past, grumbling to one another about “lazy stragglers.”

“Very few people open the door,” she said.

“Is this the golden gate?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s not like that. The walls are only made of illusion. If you stop at any time and lean against them, they simply fall away.”

“Are you saying that I could have stopped at any point along the way and leaned on the wall? Surely, people bumped into it, why didn’t they fall through?”

“Because they never stopped,” she said. “They believed in the dream too strongly.”

“Am I the first one to find out?” he asked, with a surge of pride.

She laughed again, “No, of course not. It’s happening all the time, somewhere. But most of you still don’t dare come in. Will you?”

He stood there shaking in his knees a little, and looked back down the long white corridor, from where he’d come. And then he looked down the corridor in the other direction, bending out of sight.

And then he took the woman’s hand and stepped through.

Now, we’d like to tell you what he found in there, but all we can say is this: it’s not anything on any of the signs, it’s not the golden gate, it’s not heaven, it’s not hell, and it’s not that endless purgatory of illusion.

All we can say is here the birds are singing, and the trees are swaying, the lions are roaring, and the clouds are floating beneath a sun that’s shining. What more do you need?