Authors: Cliff Hicks
He stood up and glanced at the walls of books with a scowl. He closed up the books he’d taken out and put them onto the cart marked “Filing” and then started to pace among the stacks again before waving at someone he saw wandering around as well. The woman looked particularly put out to have to stop and talk to someone, but Bob was not the kind of Cherubim who was easily dissuaded. “Excuse me, do you know where I can find the Appendixes?”
“
Which series?” the woman asked him, sighing exhaustedly, as if this was the most trying thing that had happened to her in months. The librarians didn’t see many people, so they tended to be annoyed by any contact at all. They’d much rather simply sit around and read their books again.
“
Series?” Bob asked, scratching his head.
“
Sure, you gotta know what series it is, otherwise you could be here all day!” the woman chided. “If you don’t know, you can file a request for series form. They’re over next to the archival retrieval forms near the door.”
“
Can’t you just show me where the Appendix series are?”
“
Nope,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Can’t do anything without the right form. You know how it is, buddy.”
Bob hated the bureaucracy of Heaven more than just about anything else.
And Bob hated a
lot
of things.
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H
ours passed. Jake would have even guessed that days passed, but of course days had no meaning here. Time was incredibly relative he was learning to realize. Not long ago, he would have been able to tell you exactly how long he had been in the lobby of Heaven for, but now, it was all sort of one big blur. Time sort of ran together like the shades of a freshly painted watercolor that was hung upright before drying. His notions of time were the streaks of color that had all dripped into one another. It wasn’t something particularly helpful, but then again, he couldn’t expect anyone had much use for time up here. However he did know that he had learned a lot about 1983 in the time that he had been waiting for Gilbert to read through all of his paperwork. Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Better Homes and Gardens… all dated April 1983.
“
Why do you only have magazines from 1983?” Jake finally asked. “I wasn’t going to ask, but now I’m curious, considering I’ve been staring at them for who knows how long…”
“
Oh, ah, that.” Gilbert had pushed many pages of Jake’s forms into odd corners of his desk, and when he’d run out of corners, he’d used sides, ends, drawers, and Jake was sure the man was trying to figure out some way to attach them to the legs. “Yeah, well, you see… they don’t exactly deliver magazines to the afterlife, so the only time we get new batches is when a postal carrier dies carrying some and brings them up to us.” He paused for a moment, glancing over at the magazines before looking back at the rat’s nest of papers. “You can tell it’s been a while since I’ve had one come through the office. You can imagine how much the processors cheer when they get them.”
“
Why don’t you have one of those guys who gets new dead people, the whaddayacall’em, Cherubim, bring some up for you?” Jake asked, simply finding the subject a little baffling and trying to keep his head above water. “Just have the Cherubim take it from the carrier before he gets to processing, you know?”
Gilbert’s head looked up at Jake as his hand slapped palm flat against the top of his desk. He stared Jake down for almost a minute (or so Jake guessed) before he broke out into a big toothy grin. “That’s brilliant! I should do that! I could even get some stuff for me to read, seeing how little I get out of this office these days. You know what? I’m gonna use a T-
38
form for you instead of the standard T-
36
. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a difference to you, but believe me, this sweet baby’s gonna cut down on your wait time more than you can believe. I can’t believe I never thought of that! I’ll bet Murray would be more than glad to snag me some magazines when he’s down there…” Gilbert kept talking, although Jake had stopped listening at that point.
It was a strange concept to him. Jake wasn’t used to helping people particularly, but he seemed to be good at it here in Heaven, dealing with a problem simply because no one else had thought to do so. He didn’t know exactly how he felt about that, but he knew the idea was a little odd to him. Hadn’t they been here a while? Shouldn’t they have had all the time in the world to think about it? Strange, it was all very strange and there was nothing else Jake could say to himself about the matter.
Gilbert was shifting paper around excitedly now. It was almost as though he was enlivened, excited by the prospect of something changing. The very concept of something different seemed to have invigorated him. “Yes sir, there’s gonna be
new
things in this office soon! Okay, Einstein, your paperwork is all processed. You’re set to go to tier thirty-seven. If, after a few decades, you find you’re getting a little bored, you can put in for a transfer to tier twenty-one, but just remember that tier transfers are irreversible, and you can’t go back to a tier you’ve already been to for at least one century. We try to make Heaven as great a place as we can for as many people as we can, but nobody’s perfect. It may take you a little while to get your groove. Don’t worry about that. That’s normal. Everybody goes through that. Don’t let it get to you. We’ve seen a relative spike lately in P.A.D.S. and we’re working to find solutions for it, but until we do, you just sort of have to ride it out.”
“
P.A.D.S.?”
“
Post-Ascension Depression Syndrome. One of the fancy headshrinkers up here came up with it a few decades ago. Catchy, isn’t it?” Gilbert said with a broad smile as he was pulling together seemingly random sheets of paper and stuffing them into a manila folder. “Anyhow, if you start to feel what you think might be the onset of P.A.D.S. then you should notify one of the regional caretakers, who’ll refer you to an eternity specialist, barring additional consultation. They’ll work diligently to help you solve your problem, or, barring that, help you forget about it.” Gilbert closed up the folder and put the single sheet of paper he’d been filling out on top of it, then handed the stack to Jake. “That’s it, you’re done here. See? Painless and quick. Only took you…” Gilbert said, looking down at his watch, “thirty four celestial days, which means not even a day and a half Earth time.”
Jake was amazed the man had a watch, and though he considered himself an honest man, Jake had the almost inescapable urge to try and steal it from him. “What do you mean ‘celestial time’?” Jake pried. “Does time run differently up here?”
“
Of course! This is Heaven, after all,” Gilbert replied with a toothy smile. “Celestial time and Earth time run a relative scale. What seems, approximately, like a day here runs about an hour of Earth time. Therefore, you get to experience even more of Heaven’s greatness than you would if we adhered to Earth time.”
“
Is that why it’s that way?”
“
Well,” Gilbert said secretively, leaning forward to put his hand alongside of his mouth, “I’ve always suspected it’s just so we can handle all the large influx of people coming in these days. Seems like there’s more and more every day.”
“
Isn’t there some religion that believes only 144,000 people are going to get into Heaven?”
“
Yeah, so?”
Jake scratched his chin for a second then looked at Gilbert again. “How many of those guys do you have?”
“
Those guys alone?” Gilbert swayed his head back and forth, as if he was estimating. “Two point eight million, give or take.”
This brought a chuckle to Jake’s lips, the first honest laugh he’d had in a while. “So they were wrong?”
In response, Gilbert smirked. “Well, let’s just say the system doesn’t work the way anyone expects it to. You can imagine the fit the reincarnationists throw when they get up here.
Night
mare. Now
go on and get out of here, before those forms expire and I have to do them all over again.”
Jake’s arms wrapped around the paperwork and he scooped it up. Gilbert was holding open the back door, giving him room to move out, and Jake slipped out the door silently, nodding his thanks to Gilbert. As he was leaving, he heard Gilbert’s voice behind him, talking into an intercom or a phone, although Jake didn’t remember seeing anything like that in the office. (It was, he conceded, possibly concealed beneath a cleverly placed avalanche of paper.) “Doris, can you put in a request for Murray to stop by my office please? Thank you.”
From Gilbert’s office, Jake entered yet another long white hallway that was featureless in every way. The walls were white, the floor was white, the ceiling was white. Hell, Jake half expected to look down and see that all of his color was gone. The hallway seemed to go on endlessly, no turns, no entrances or exits, only the long white hallway seemingly stretched on for eternity. It occurred to Jake after a while, that he wasn’t sure how the rooms were lit. He had yet to see any lights in the place, but he noticed that the walls themselves seemed to give off a soft glow, and that was a little creepy on its own. In a clean way. If there was such a thing.
By the time he neared the end of the tunnel, Jake was afraid his legs were going to fall off. He’d been walking for what felt like a lifetime, and although he wasn’t physically exhausted at all, he was mentally just tired of walking down a long, featureless tunnel. Eventually, though, the hallway did open up into a large room. Jake had to push open a small golden gate that latched closed behind him when he was through it, so as to prevent him from turning back.
Before him laid another large open room, with another set of lines. There were at least a dozen walkup windows, and the one with the longest line had a sign over it that marked it with “START HERE.”
Jake sighed and went to go wait in yet another line. He was starting to think Heaven was, in fact, just a series of well-crafted lines that lead to one another. Perhaps, he thought, if he kept at it, he’d end up in the line he’d started in. Behind the guy with the bone tied in his beard.
Line after line after line.
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T
his process repeated itself in a variety of incarnations over what felt like the next few months. (Or years. Surely it couldn’t have been years, could it?) Jake would find himself directed to a line (almost always in the wrong direction as the line he was actually supposed to be in), stand in the line, fill out more paperwork, turn in the paperwork (most of which was promptly ignored), watch them process the paperwork, add stamps, initial, notarize, authorize, recognize, sign, date, fill in, annotate, abbreviate and alter. The dozens of pages he was required to fill out would get reduced to something the size of an index card, handed to him, which he’d take to the next line and exchange for a new stack of paperwork, eventually, after three or four tries at being in the wrong line.
It had become something like a dance, and Jake was tuned out for most of it. It was daily life all over again, simply on a smaller scale. The paperwork had gone from overzealous to just mindlessly repetitious. Now he was specifically screwing up little bits in an effort to have something new happen. No one seemed to notice. Even the conversations with the form processors were getting to be monotonous. Since Gilbert, they were all business, with no sense of humor and no attempt to be anything other than strict and formal.
In an effort to keep himself from going crazy, he’d starting paying attention to the comings and goings of the angels. There certainly were a lot of them, but after a while, Jake was starting to be able to notice the subtle differences in them – how they wore their toga, how high or low the halo rested on their head, were they carrying swords or not. Lots of little details were adding up. Despite how indistinguishable and uniform Heaven was trying to be, tiny bits of individuality kept sneaking through the cracks, like bad weeds.
He’d even begun learning how to distinguish the classes of angels, although he had yet to see any of the big Archangels people kept talking about as if they were the bogeymen. In fact, he’d mostly just seen generic angels, although the Cherubim were a fairly consistent presence. He did, however, see an Erelim a few times. He wasn’t sure what an Erelim was or what they did, but he looked a little like General Patton. The Erelim was practically marching through the hallway, with a small number of other angels, each looking butch and frightening, marching behind him. (In fact, he only knew that this particular class of angel was called Erelim because he’d heard a couple of the Cherubim gossiping about him after he’d left.)
It was also fairly easy to distinguish the Erelim, because they had wings, large feathery blades that looked both strong and agile at the same time. After he stared at his first Erelim, Jake saw one or two more Erelim, again, distinguishable only particularly by the wings, but never had the urge to talk to any of them, because they all looked incredibly serious and bore scowls in addition to their wings. The last thing Jake wanted to do was draw attention to himself.