Furkan Korkmaz groggily opened his eyes, but the light was too bright, and he immediately closed them before he could get a good look at his surroundings. The last he could remember, him and his teammates had been en route to a nightclub to celebrate their win and his new career high in points…was this the result? Lying on some hard floor somewhere after partying way too hard, a rich, drunk athlete who had no idea where he was? His teammates had been joking that they were going to buy endless bottles of Turkish liquor for him and, well, he had always had a weakness for raki…
Furkan opened his eyes again, but was flabbergasted by what he saw. Instead of a dim, dank nightclub bathroom, he was in some kind of ornate temple or palace. A sturdy marble floor was below him. Above him was a ceiling of thick silver-white clouds which glowed with diffuse light. The walls to his left and right were made of grey stones. These walls extended seemingly forever into the distance, periodically interrupted by grand, cathedral-style windows, the tops of which almost touching the clouds.
A bench, also made of marble and set with a pair of comfortable-looking pillows, was nearby. Furkan got to his feet and walked over to it. He could sit there and contemplate this exceedingly strange situation, which seemed more like an afterlife than anything else, or he could keep walking and see if he encountered anybody. If this was the afterlife, God would have to be somewhere, right? This thought is what spurred Furkan to spurn the comfortable-looking bench in favor of a trek down that endless stone-walled hall.
As he walked, Furkan noticed that he was filled with supreme contentment. In contrast to the hectic, stressful hustle and bustle of his mortal life, this place was quiet, serene, and relaxing. Nobody was bothering him with anything, and all his anxieties seemed a million miles and a million years away.
“Welcome, friend,” said a voice from behind Furkan, which didn’t make sense, because Furkan would have seen anybody who could have been there as he walked past them. He turned and saw a smiling, Latin-complexioned man holding a white robe out to him. When Furkan saw what was being offered to him, he realized for the first time that he was completely naked. Donning the garment, Furkan asked, “Am I dead?”
“No, you’re very much alive,” the man answered. “The Hall is exclusively a reward for the living.”
“The Hall?”
The man chuckled. “I sometimes forget that newcomers are not as familiar with the Hall as I. You are in the Hall of the Thirty Point Scorers, and my name is Carlos Delfino, the appointed Guardian of the Hall.”
Furkan was confused, but his confusion was of the academic sort, not the alarming sort. “If I’m still alive, but I’m here, then what happened to my night of partying? Am I making a fool of myself in some club somewhere without realizing it?”
Carlos’ eyebrows wrinkled in thought. “That is a fair question, but not one I am equipped to answer. Time flows differently here, or, I should say, time does not flow here. That is all the information I can offer.”
“So this is all in my head is what you’re saying,” Furkan countered.
“No, this is all very real,” Carlos replied. “It is simply located beyond and outside the realms of man’s experience.”
Furkan felt like he was no closer to understanding his situation than he had been before he met Carlos. For some reason, the image of mobius strip was in his mind. “So, if everybody who ever scored thirty points gets to come here, where are they? I don’t think I’m the only one who’s ever scored that many.”
“The Hall is a place of solitary contemplation,” Carlos said. “Given its infinite nature, the likelihood of two visitors crossing paths is quite remote.”
A sudden memory came to Furkan. He remembered his friend Ersan Ilyasova talking about a place like this, but Ersan’s memory of the Hall had been extremely fragmented, and Furkan had dismissed his friend’s description of it as the ramblings of a man who placed too much stock in his dreams. Would he, too, lose the soothing memories of the Hall once he left it? And how exactly did one leave this place, anyway?
“I see you’re deep in thought,” Carlos said. “As it should be! I will leave you to it.”
“So you’re really not God?” Furkan asked as Carlos started to walk away.
Carlos chuckled and answered over his shoulder, “Nope. If anybody’s God here, it’s the Overseers.”
That answer introduced more mysteries than it resolved, but Furkan was nevertheless happy with the answer. He didn’t want to be in heaven. He didn’t want to be dead. He wanted to keep living.
But first, he would get in some well-deserved relaxation in a place where time stood still.