Authors: Cliff Hicks
Finally, Jake thought, all the paperwork and waiting was about to pay off. He was about to see the big prize that was Heaven. Or, he supposed, his Heaven. He’d been in Heaven since he’d arrived here, but it hadn’t really felt like Heaven. More like a dentist’s waiting room. But now, his time had come. It was time to see what he thought Heaven should be.
He raised a hand to wave to the old man with a smile as he walked around the desk, placing his hand on the doorknob. He left it there for a few seconds, as if the idea of opening the door made him nervous. Then, suddenly, he turned the door handle and pushed it forward. Beyond the other side of the door, Jake could only see blinding white light flooding over him. He raised the back of his hand up to shield his eyes and then cautiously stepped through the door, it closing automatically behind him.
So, Jake thought to himself, as he looked around, this is Heaven. Let’s have a look about the place.
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T
ime passed…
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L
ots of time…
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H
e had no real way of knowing how long he’d been there, but based on the way they structured activities, Jake Altford figured he had been in his “personal place” in Heaven for about six weeks before he started to lose his mind. Six weeks that had seemed like an eternity. Of course, it could’ve been only days, or it could’ve been a hundred years. He had no way of knowing. One thing, however, was certain. He couldn’t stay, he realized. Heaven was not for him, no matter what the brochure said. Not if this was Heaven. This certainly couldn’t be his idea of Heaven. He didn’t hate himself that much, surely he didn’t.
Everyone has an idea of what their personal Heaven will be like, even if they aren’t a religious person. But no matter when and where Jake had been thinking of Heaven, this was certainly not what he had had in mind. He wasn’t sure whose idea of Heaven this was. Maybe Bob Ross’s.
Today, at the insistence of the activity group’s project leader, Jake had been making a painting from macaroni. Yesterday, it had been basketweaving. Tomorrow, they were planned to do pottery. The activity group was led by a puttering angel named Byron, who didn’t seem to be capable of listening to anyone, but had a way of forcing people into doing what everyone else was without being blatant about it. He reminded Jake of one of his grandmothers, and he idly wondered if she was up here doing the same thing for some other group of people.
In his six weeks (or whatever) in Heaven, Jake had come to realize that they had placed him in what could only be compared to a retirement community. There were ‘guest speakers’ who would come by every so often and talk about improving one’s status in the afterlife, and not once did any of the speakers ever seem to have a clue as to what they were talking about. Still, his fellow afterlifers would clap mindlessly and nod their heads, only to regurgitate the information later, as if it was perfect.
What Jake found funniest about this was that on one day, they had had a speaker talking about positive thinking, and how it kept men and women afloat. The audience agreed and nodded, reciting their lines after the angel was gone. The next day, however, another angel showed up and lectured about how positive thinking could easily get out of hand. Sure enough, as soon as the second angel was gone, they were spouting the propaganda as if they had never heard the first angel speak.
Orwell, Jake figured, would be proud. Or depressed. Perhaps both. At once. It was hard to say. Doublespeak, meet triplespeak. Maybe, Jake thought to himself, Orwell would come and speak and then he could ask him what he thought of Heaven.
And it had been like this relentlessly. Things to keep people busy. Things to keep people complacent. Things to keep people consumed and occupied and not thinking. But Jake had never been the kind of person who would let his relentless mind stop, even if he rarely acted on it. It wasn’t as though he particularly had a choice – his mind just never paused here, constantly searching for something, anything, trying to construct a higher meaning. Instead of being busy, he was simply bored.
Worse than that, he was beginning to get frustrated. He’d tried telling an angel the other day that he wasn’t interested in free form sculpture. The angel had gone out of his way to try and guilt trip Jake into participating. He’d gotten the rest of the people in his “activity group” to try and apply as much peer pressure as possible to him in an effort to get him to “enjoy himself.” After it became clear that Jake wasn’t going to participate, the angel had started a second project and done the second project “for” Jake. When it was finished, the angel claimed that Jake had done the sculpture and the people all applauded Jake’s effort.
He could see it in their eyes – the angel had told them that Jake had done it and they had believed him. Despite the fact that each and every one of them had seen Jake sitting around doing nothing, everyone was talking for days about what a wonderful sculptor Jake was, despite his constant reassurance that he hadn’t actually done it. The people, who Jake were beginning to think were brainwashed, simply seemed to take it as false modesty. It was not sitting well with him.
It was downright creepy.
Days seemed to continue by like this, lost in a mess of activities that were designed to put them to sleep, and all the while, Jake kept studying, kept thinking. He would push the system a little bit here and there, and the angels would get upset and push him back into line one way or another. They would always stress that they knew best, and that this was what Jake “really wanted.”
(Ha.)
After the pottery incident, Jake did his best to play along with whatever thing they were doing without putting much effort into it. The almost controlling smiles the angels had shot him the day after the pottery incident had put him on edge, and he wanted to give the angels a sense of complacency.
For a brief period of time, Jake actually wondered if he’d filled something out incorrectly on the forms. Did he, perhaps, answer some small key series of questions in the wrong way, and was that what had led him here? Had the occasional thing he had intentionally flubbed led him to this? Then he realized that with all the redundancy, all of the triplicate upon triplicate, such a mistake was unlikely, if not impossible. Which left only three options, none of which Jake cared for.
The first option was that someone had put him here intentionally, perhaps as punishment or in an attempt to try and mold him into something. The second option was that he really wasn’t in Heaven – he was in Hell – and that they were lying to him to install a false sense of ease. Still, he couldn’t put much weight in this option as the place he was in wasn’t bad, per se, so much as dull to the point of madness. The last option was the scariest – perhaps this was all there was to Heaven. Arts and crafts. Positive thinking. Motivational speakers. Trust exercises. Self-help lectures.
More arts and crafts.
God help us, Jake thought to himself, how can Hell be
any
worse?
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B
ob had taken to wandering the stacks, and was starting to feel a bit like Cain, or maybe the Jews during their years of wandering in the desert. The libraries in Heaven were, much like the hallways of Heaven, absolute mazes, except even worse. There might have been some arcane system that would have told him where he was, where he was going, what he was looking for, and where the exits were, but all the signs were in numbers, and those numbers weren’t following the Dewey Decimal System. Some of them had elaborate formulas, or complex integers. A few of them even defied rational thinking. (He was fairly certain at least a few of them were imaginary numbers, a concept Bob had never really been able to wrap his head around.) Bob started to wonder if he understood Calculus if he would have a better sense of direction here. He needed an astrophysicist more than a tour guide. (The Hell with Livingston. “Dr. Hawking, I presume?”)
He trekked from one row to another, climbing stairs, descending stairs, turning corners, climbing ladders only to find a doorway to go through which lead to another series of bookshelves in cryptic stacks, and he wandered for ages before he finally just stopped, let out a deep sigh and picked up a book at random. “Appendix 362, series 4. Alright, well, Heaven, let’s just see if series four has what I’m looking for…” Bob placed the book back on the shelf and started to move down along the row, scanning over the numbers on the spines before he found “A: 459, S:4, V:1” Next to it he saw books marked “V:2” through “V:8” and he picked all of them up, carting them over to a table behind him, tossing them down with a heavy thud. “Where are you, you annoying little rule?”
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J
ake’s estimates on time had gotten even more skewed as he attempted to keep his sanity through studying and examining the angels. It was all one big jumble now, and he was using the angels as markers. He was looking around, paying attention to the number of them, who each one was. There were only five of them keeping tabs on his “activity group,” and they operated in rotating shifts of three, and seemed to move with a precision that was slightly eerie. (It was something to use as a placeholder for time concepts, he supposed, except that they didn’t seem to have an actual schedule to when they came and went. Still it was something.) And that wasn’t the only disconcerting thing about the angels, either. No matter what was going on, if one knew about it, all three knew about it. He almost wondered if they were linked telepathically or something.
He also began to learn the limitations of the “space” they “resided” in. While the area itself looked massive, it was, in fact, really quite tiny. There were landscapes that seemed to go on forever, but Jake had begun testing the boundaries. He’d asked to go on field trips to the mountains he could see in the distance, but the angels would simply smile and say it wasn’t on the agenda for the near future. They seemed to be on a huge island, surrounded by mountains and ocean. The group spent most of its time on a deck out on a beach facing the water. Jake asked to go swimming twice. Both days the angel had told him that swimming was on “tomorrow’s agenda.” A tomorrow that never came.
He asked about seeing old friends from his previous life, something the pamphlet he’d gotten when Bob left him suggested he could do. He was told it would be looked into. Jake didn’t believe it for a moment. Jake would let pebbles fly from his hands, and somewhere, not too far off the distance, he could hear a tiny thud, which was what he had expected. Much of the landscapes were faked, something akin to walls painted with decorative scenes to imply much more space than was actually there. They were boxed in. It wasn’t a huge island at all. In fact, the area they were in was rather small, and Jake now knew it.
The angels would change shifts through a small door off in one part of the nondescript abode they all shared. Each of them had their own room, and the angels all “shared” a room, but Jake could tell it was much more than that. Unlike the doors to all of their rooms, there was a tiny series of scrawlings that surrounded the door the angels came and went from. He recognized that kind of thing before – he had seen it on most of the doors during the process of filling out the forms. That meant the door didn’t attach itself to the small room that should lay behind it, but to something else entirely. It must be the Heavenly equivalent of a wormhole – two points completely unrelated that were somehow connected by a gateway. Or so he was guessing. It seemed the only way to explain the architecture that would have given a mapmaker vertigo.
As time progressed, Jake continued to study the room. Two out, two in, one missing. Two out, two in, one missing. That seemed to be the standard pattern. They would move in shifts. They would always follow this pattern, only when people were supposed to be resting. Despite the fact that they didn’t have to sleep, the angels seemed to encourage them to take several hours of silent meditation. Jake, instead, used this time to study the angels and their movements, sneaking out of his room every so often to spy on them.