Escaping Heaven

by Cliff Hicks

  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.

  * * * * *

  In 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 withou
t 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?”

  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.

  * * * * *

  Hours 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. Nightmare. 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.