Authors: Cliff Hicks
“
But, it doesn’t actually
do
anything. It’s still just decorative. Ornamentation. Why have something that isn’t for any purpose other than show?”
“
It’s a mark of rank,” she stated matter-of-factly, as if the whole conversation was starting to annoy her. Jake found he seemed to have that effect on people around here. First Bob, now Joy. It was almost as if they were unaccustomed to people having an opinion that didn't immediately fall in line with what they expected. Joy looked particularly irked. “That’s more than enough.” The woman looked back at her paperwork, a bit less, well, joyously, focusing on finding the forms as quickly as possible. It seemed obvious to Jake she didn’t care for having something she was so proud of questioned.
“
But isn’t that vanity? And isn’t vanity a sin?” Jake was starting to enjoy himself just a little bit. It seemed even Heaven wasn’t without its flaws, which Jake found rather funny. This was Heaven, after all.
The pamphlet had said so.
“
Look, here are your forms, just take them and shut up, will you?” She pushed the large stack of forms his way and then moved forward to talk to the person in front of Jake in a language Jake didn’t even recognize. Then again, the man in front of Jake also had a bone tied off in his beard, so Jake had been fairly sure he wouldn’t have known a word of whatever it was they were speaking.
Within twenty minutes, the pretty little redhead was gone, leaving Jake only with his forms and the distinct impression that Heaven was not all it was cracked up to be.
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W
hen he dug into the forms, Jake found that he was going to have a long, uncomfortable experience filling them out. The large phonebook, which he’d assumed would be an instruction manual on how to fill out the forms,
was
in fact the main form. There were instructions sprinkled through it, but in glancing at it, he wasn’t sure they were going to help much. It almost felt like doing his taxes all over again, if his tax forms had been written by the Marquis De Sade with literary diarrhea.
On the very first page, of course, the questions were easy enough and Jake began flying through them. They were mostly hereditary questions – parents’ names, grandparents’ names, things like that. The second page was mostly vital stats, which Jake had to confess finding a little amusement in. Date of birth and date of death were both fairly easy, but Jake couldn’t help but wonder if people who had trouble remembering the date began panicking around this point. Thankfully, Jake was not one of those people, and he jotted down the day he had died helpfully.
The forms were on almost blindingly white paper, and the pencils they’d been given didn’t use lead, but some form of gold dust. They never seemed to need sharpening, nor did they ever get any shorter. They had an eraser-like end, which simply wiped the gold dust away. The experience was somewhat disquieting and Jake found himself eager to avoid mistakes, simply to not have to witness the Miracle of the Gold Pencil Dust Eraser any more.
As he moved onward along the form, the questionnaire began to feel more and more like a test. Jake wondered how much of his own life he was going to be expected to remember. The questions ranged from the simplistic to the absurd. He wondered how they expected anyone to remember their first sin. Didn’t most people forget these kinds of things by now? It certainly wasn’t something he could place his finger on, so he pondered the line for a long time and then simply wrote down the first thing he could remember. He was sure there was something before playing “doctor” in the back yard with Angela Sandoz when he was 5, but he hadn’t the foggiest what it was. He wondered, idly, what would happen if got something wrong.
The questions about his youth seemed simpler the further he moved on, and gave him a brief surge of hope until the test (form? He wasn’t sure what to call it) took a turn for the bizarre. They began to get into social questions that made absolutely no sense to him. “If Jeff and Nancy, who have been a couple for eight months, meet up with their friends Arthur and Jennifer, who have been a couple for two months, and Jennifer has brought a cheese fondu, not knowing Nancy is allergic to cheese, when Jeff is serving duck, not knowing that Jennifer is a vegetarian, what is the best way to diffuse the issue that Nancy and Arthur once dated and did not realize it until the moment they all sit down for dinner?” Jake could only ponder the surrealism of the question before shaking his head and scrawling down some random answer. After a while, Jake found himself doing that a lot. It was almost as if the questions had moved into the realm of the absurd and then just kept on going, never once looking back at rationality.
Time still continued to pass, or not, depending on his point of view at any given moment. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on with this test, but after a while he was sure they were simply screwing with his head or randomly pulling words from a hat. Still, on the top of every page, the words “Please take this questionnaire seriously, as it will determine your placement within Heaven.” Jake was starting to feel like he was taking his SATs again. If Salvador Dali had written SATs. On acid. While drunk. As a bar bet.
He scrawled more and more information onto these massive pages and every so often, the line would shift up a few feet and Jake would simply slide down the bench, keeping moving. He found himself doing whatever he could to stay on task, waggling his foot up and down. He was bored out of his skull, but he was starting to get into a groove with the questionnaire and was moving through the pages at a good clip. He’d stopped fighting the weirdness and instead embraced it full bore.
Jake eventually realized that what he was taking was a personality test rolled in with a morality test and just general cognitive questions. There were also screwball questions thrown in all over the place just to slow people down, and he was starting to wonder if those questions meant anything at all. It was like a family history, an automated dating survey and an IQ test all balled up into one. From there, Jake was able to pull out individual questions, categorize them and solve them. The pages flipped repeatedly, and Jake started to notice the line was moving a little faster now. He’d moved a ways from where he had started, although it was hard to tell that, as almost all of the places looked exactly alike. However, the line behind Jake sprawled out in epic fashion, so much so that if it wasn’t for the wall and the bench, he might have gotten confused about where the line started and where it ended, not that he could see either point.
After an indeterminate time, it could have been a few hours or a few weeks, Jake could see a light at the end of the tunnel – a counter with a single person working behind it. They were moving towards it, and the person sitting at the counter, an older matronly looking woman with silver-blue hair and a halo that rested smartly atop her head, was taking forms from people, glancing through them quickly, then redirecting them to one of several doors off to the side. Considering the amount of information which he’d been forced to write down, he was starting to be worried that he’d done all of this for naught, and then he realized the woman was simply making precursory glances at the paperwork to make sure everything was filled in. She wasn’t actually processing them. That work, apparently, was being left for whatever people were behind the doors.
His heart fell slightly as he realized this wasn’t the end of the line to get into Heaven, it was just the end of the
first
line he’d have to go through to get to Heaven. His face twitched with annoyance. Still, he thought to try and cheer himself up forcibly, it’s progress.
Soon enough, his time had come and Jake stood before the woman behind the counter. She bore a nametag pinned on her toga, which read “Hello! My name is DORIS!” Doris’s handwriting was much more utilitarian than Joy’s had been. It was written in large block letters with no attempt to add style or personalization. (He suspected the exclamation point at the end, printed on before she got it, only annoyed her.) Doris looked up at Jake, who beamed as he placed his paperwork on top of the counter. The woman looked back down at it, her face inscrutable. It wasn’t as though she was deliberately hard to read; she simply had the face of anyone who’s been stuck doing the same job for much longer than they would like – filled with apathy and sadness. “You finished?” she asked, her voice a nasal whine that grated on Jake’s last nerve.
He forced a smile and then nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
She looked up at him for a second, as if she was not accustomed to being spoken to with respect, then looked back down at his forms with a satisfied grunt. She glanced over the collection of odd, disorganized one-sheets before opening up the massive book and checked three or four pages at random. She then nodded, pushing the massive collection of paperwork back in his direction. “Go to door #3.” From this point, Jake could see that each of the doors was numbered, although he noticed with a slight bit or irony that there was no six anywhere on any of the doors. Four, five, seven, eight…fourteen, fifteen, seventeen… it was odd and yet somehow humorous to Jake at the same time. Apparently Heaven was full of numerologists. (There was still a door thirteen, though, he noted with a smile, so they were clearly
picky
numerologists...)
He slowly pulled the paperwork back to him, scooping it up into his arms. He hadn’t realized quite how much of it there was until he was holding it again. The people behind him were tapping their feet impatiently as Jake worked to tuck the loose pages inside the front cover of the massive form and then picked it up with both arms, starting to walk over towards the door, apologizing to the Frenchman, the Eskimos, the bushman and the like. He had to pin the book between him and the wall so he could free a hand up to open the door, pulling it back and tucking his foot behind it to keep it propped open before he let the book fell back into his arms. He moved into the small room, backing into it, watching the door close and latch behind him before a voice called out from behind him.
“
Come on in, siddown,” a shrill male voice said from behind him. “I’ve got tons of people to see today and the last thing I need you doing is holding up my line.” Jake turned around to see a small, thin man sitting behind the desk with a beak of a nose. He turned his head for a second, and then decided that it was entirely acceptable to find it odd that there was a Jewish man, whose name was “Gilbert” based on his name plate, sitting behind the desk. “What, you’ve never seen a Jew in Heaven before? You some kinda racist?” There was thick annoyance in the nasally voice.
“
I just assumed that because of different religions…”
“
It’s a big shock for everyone,” Gilbert assured him, standing up, which didn’t make him much taller. The annoyance was gone as quickly as it had arrived. “Come, come, siddown. Lemme start looking through that form. We don’t have… well, I guess we do have all day, but still,” he said with a smile, which indicated he was trying to be funny. Jake didn’t see much humor in it. He started to say something, but Gilbert cut him off. “You should imagine the response we get from the reincarnationists. They’re positively livid, but whaddaya gonna do? Okay, let’s get started.” Jake put the stack of forms on the desk with a loud thud. “It always amazes me how big these things are, when they don’t have to be. It’s a lot of useless information that really just gets condensed into a sheet of tiny checkmarks. You bring me this,” he said, waving his left hand over the stack of paperwork, “and I give you this.” In his other hand was a single clipboard with a single sheet of paper. “Depressing, isn’t it?” Jake started to answer but Gilbert cut him off again. “Yes, well, it’s a rough deal for everyone. But we all learn to just move on about it. Sit, get comfortable, it’s still going to be a bit. But you’re welcome to read a magazine or something while you wait. They might be a little out of date, but you have no idea how hard it is to get new magazines down here.”
Jake moved to sit down at Gilbert’s desk and picked up one of the magazines. It was a copy of Time from 1983. Jake looked at it with a little sadness then nodded, opening it up and starting to read. It was something, and something was better than nothing, Jake figured.
Jake didn’t always figure right.
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I
n another section of Heaven, Bob the Cherubim was sitting in a library, one of Heaven’s many libraries. He had at least three different rulebooks open in front of him, pushed into various sections of the white wooden table before him. They were massive tomes and one of the books, one of the more massive ones, was simply an index to the other books.
Bob flipped through the pages with his chubby fingers, scanning the pages as quickly as he could. He had on a pair of reading glasses to make skimming through all of the fine print easier. And the print was fine indeed, small and in some cases, barely legible without the aid of a magnifying glass. “Section two-thousand four hundred and seven, four hundred and eight, four hundred and nine…. Here we go,” Bob said as he searched for the passage he was looking for. “Section two-thousand five hundred, subsection C, clause F. A Cherubim may not bring back to Heaven any alcohol, tobacco, firearm or any item listed on the contraband list found in Appendix 459. Great…. Where the Heaven is Appendix 459?”