God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (18 page)

she replied with shrugs and in three different romance languages.

o o

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"Asi es la vida," she said. la vita," she said.

And then: "Go fly a kite!" SO

during

my

experiences, I've met Sir Isaac Newton, who died back in 1727, as often as I've met Saint Peter. They both hang out at the Heaven end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife. Saint Peter is there because that's his job. Sir Isaac is there because of his insatiable curiosity about what the blue tunnel is, Low the blue tunnel works. It isn't enough for Newton that during his eightyfive years on Earth he invented codified and

quantified the laws of gravity, motion, and optics, and designed the first reflecting telescope. He can't forgive himself for having left it to Darwin to come up with the theory of evolution, to Pasteur to come

up with the germ theory, and to Albert Einstein to come up with relativity.

"I must have been

dumb, and blind not to have

come up with those myself," he said to me. "What could have been more obvious?"

My job is to interview dead people for WNYC, but the late Sir Isaac Newton interviewed me instead. He got to make only a single one-way trip down the tunnel. He wants to know what it seems to be made of, fabric or metal or wood or what. I tell him that it's made of whatever dreams are made of, which leaves him monumentally

Saint Peter quoted Shakespeare to him: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

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