"We finally found a spot to kick it Where we can drink liquor and no one bickers over trick shit And in my mind's eye, I see this place the players go and pass it I got a spot for us all, so we can ball, at thug's mansion."

--Tupac Shakur, Thugz Mansion

Today, while crossing a busy Tokyo street, I was hit by a bus. Don't worry, I'm fine. Japanese medicine is incredible and I have already effected a miraculous full recovery.

Anyway, I was on the cross walk by the Morinda building when the Friendly Airport Limousine bus came from my blind spot at terrific speed, its low-emission hybrid engine almost silent. It struck me with catastrophic force, breaking most of the bones in my body before I even hit the ground.

My impact with the ground broke the remaining bones, and the subsequent impact of all 18 of the articulated bus' wheels left me in very poor condition indeed. It was all quite painless. Over in just a split second. The only regret I was conscious of having was that I never quite finished Breaking Bad.

There was a bright flash of light and I stood before God, who peered at me over a clipboard, gave me a cursory but not-unfriendly wave, and sentenced me to lawyer purgatory.

Bang, went the gavel.

I was in a wood-paneled hallway, very stately and Edwardian. A series of doors opened off either side. Down the hall, a well-dressed man in a sharp suit was walking toward me, extending a hand of greeting.

    "Welcome to lawyer purgatory," he said. "I'm Virgil."

    "Whoah," I reverently intoned. "I'm a big fan. Arma Virumque Cano, etc."

    "Close, but no cigar. Eric Virgil, Esq, Top-Rated Estate & Trust Litigation Attorney in Coral Gables, FL."

    "Cool. Cool cool. That's good too. So you're dead?"

    "Nope, I just work here. We're in Coral Gables now. Lawyer purgatory is actually just Florida."

I didn't know what to say, so I changed the subject. "Why am I in lawyer purgatory anyway? I'm a pretty good person, for starters, and I haven't even started law school yet, let alone passed the bar."

    "If you had, you'd be in either lawyer heaven or hell. Personal righteousness has nothing to do with it. Did you try to negotiate anything with God?"

    "No."

    "Well, there you go. You were an average person with an average LSAT score and no T14 alumni in your entire family. You were always going to end up in lawyer purgatory." I had no reply, so after a brief pause he courteously directed me down the hallway. "Let me show you around."

We walked for awhile. As we passed the doors, I noticed that each one had a name on it.

Louis Brandeis.

William Blackstone.

John Marshall.

Sandra Day O'Connor.

    "Wait a minute," I said to Virgil. "These are legendary lawyers. What are they doing in purgatory?"

    "They're great alright," he said, "just not quite great enough. They didn't leave enough of an impact on the American legal system to justify heaven. These are their offices. They litigate with each other through the millennia, with the winners eventually moving into heaven. Robert Kardashian moved up there last week."

We reached a room with an open door. "Mine?" I asked.

    "Good one. No, this is Richard Nixon. You're going to be clerking for him. Watch out, he's tricky."

He ushered me in, closed the door behind me. I was alone in a stuffy office. On a hunch, I lifted the potted plant on the desk, turned off the tape recorder that I found underneath it, then sat down and waited.

And waited.

After an interminable amount of time, bored out of my skull, I stood back up and tried the door. It was open. A quick peek outside confirmed that the hallway was abandoned. I shut the door quietly behind me and accelerated down the endless hallway until I found an elevator.

Stepping inside, I pressed the "up" button.

A lurch, a chime, and the doors opened onto a brilliant celestial cloudscape. Blissfully happy people milled around gigantic Ozymandian statues that towered hundreds of feet into the sky. Somewhere a choir of bailiffs was singing oyez.

I floated out of the elevator to get a closer look at the statues. The nearest one depicted a thin, reedy man, heroically nude, holding a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. The statue's head was almost too high to be visible, but at its feet, I found a plaque that read very much like this:

The next statue, also nude, depicted a massively powerful man grimacing with what appeared to be a shiv protruding from his ribs. His soulful eyes were turned up to heaven, a sort of legal St. Sebastian.

Odd, I thought, that lawyer heaven was reserved primarily for rapists, thieves and kidnappers, but the more I thought about it, the more rational it began to seem.

There were many statues. Some I recognized, most I did not. Clarence Brandenburg was depicted in his full KKK regalia. I was heading toward the statue of Gregory Lee Johnson, which was in the act of burning a US flag, when I was interrupted by a sharp but warm voice at my elbow.

    "I see you're dead too," said Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

And then the doctors fired the defibrillator and I was whisked back to real world Tokyo, with another two months left before classes start at Texas A&M.