by Cliff Hicks
Lots of time…
* * * * *
He 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?
* * * * *
Bob 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?”
* * * * *
Jake’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.
It was tedious and boring work, however. The angels weren’t doing anything interesting. Mostly, they were like anyone working a dead-end job. They would walk back and forth, pace and gossip. Very little unusual ever happened. Sometimes they would lean against walls and stare out into nothing. Sometimes they would just bicker back and forth, friends having a discussion that got a little out of hand. They were, Jake decided, little different from convenience store clerks. Angels working a 7-11. It would’ve been a funny image on any other day, in any other place. But instead, it was just another surreal thing about this place in particular that didn’t make sense.
Then, just when he thought he couldn’t take much more of it, opportunity struck. Like most escape plans, Jake knew that a lot of his departure would depend on chance and luck. Luck, however, did intend to cut Jake a break, just this once.
It began as a standard shift change. Two of the angels would come out and they would talk with the other two angels for a few minutes, leaving one somewhere behind the door. The four had just begun their usual chat when the fifth angel, an excitable fellow named Terence, came rushing out. “News just broke!” he said, breathlessly. “One of the walkers spotted Lucifer on the planet!”
Suddenly, all four of the other angels stopped talking and looked over at Terence. “Where?” the stoic one, James, asked.
“Somewhere in the Midwestern United States,” Terence panted. “Most of the choir’s talking about it!” Terence was a little out of shape, and was bent over, his hands resting on his thighs.
Jake sneaked closer towards the door, trying to stay behind a bench. This was going to be his only opportunity. He knew this was going to take a lot of pure dumb luck on his part, but the idea of staying here much longer would drive him crazier than anything the angels could do to him. Whatever punishment they could dish out… well, it was worth the risk, Jake decided. How could it be any worse than macaroni paintings?
“Has someone told Michael?” the bookish one, Byron, asked.
“Of course not,” the leader, Randall, dismissed. “If Michael knew about it, he’d be sending half the host out to try and find Lucifer. And the last thing any of us want is another war. We all remember the last one.”
“And the body count,” Terence interjected.
“They won’t be able to keep the news from him forever,” Shelly, the only female angel working with Jake’s group, countered. “Sooner or later, he’s going to find out.”
“The later, the better. If he finds out long enough after it happens, Lucifer will have moved again, and sending angels to find him will be…”
While Jake really wanted to continue listening, he was at the threshold point. Another few steps and he would be through the door, and that meant that he would have to be visible to the angels when he sprinted the last dozen or so feet. Without uttering a prayer of any kind, Jake sprinted out from behind the benches he’d been using to sneak over and bolted through the door, pulling it shut behind him. Hurriedly, he glanced at the back of it and found several deadbolts, which he immediately began turning and latching.
In the staging room of Jake’s old place of confinement, the five angels turned to glance at the door as it slammed shut. Two of them darted over towards it, but it was already locked. They pulled and pushed on it, hoping to force it loose, before Randall put his hands on their shoulders, a silent indicator that they should stop.
The angels stood there in an awkward silence for a long moment, before Byron spoke. His voice was steady, yet annoyed. “Well, fuck.”
* * * * *
The room Jake found himself in was far more utilitarian than he’d expected it to be. He hadn’t really been sure what to expect, but the sparse command post looking thing he found himself in certainly wasn’t it. The room itself was fairly bare, with small visuals on the wall. Jake examined these closer and saw they were like television screens, but without any obvious source of projection. Each of them showed an aspect of the small quarters in which they were being held. The angels had been spying on them! And now Jake could see on one screen in particular the five angels arguing among themselves. There was no sound, but Jake could tell from the way the lead angel was pointing fingers at the others, that he and the others were not happy.
Other than the screens, there was not much else in the place. A few chairs and a table were all that was in the room. And opposite from the door Jake had escaped from, there was another, single, solitary door. Despite the fact that he had deadbolted the door a few times, he moved the table over in front of it, and then the chair.
He turned around to face the other direction, then inspected the other door without opening it, paranoid perhaps, checking to see if he could glean any information from it. He couldn’t. The door was just as blank as everything else. He leaned his ear up against it, hoping to be able to hear some sound beyond it, but no sound was forthcoming. In short, Jake determined the door would tell him nothing until opened. So he opened it.
On the other side of the room, there was simply another hallway with more white walls and another white door at the end of it. To Jake, it looked like the sort of hallway used to connect two larger rooms. He couldn’t recall being brought in this way, so he pondered for a mome
nt whether they were brought in the same way he was sneaking out, or whether he had found the back tunnels of Heaven, much like the utilitarian passages that lined the areas behind most malls. To be fair, the mall tunnels had more color. (Taupe, usually.) And a mall felt like it had life to it. There was something lived in about the rooms behind malls, maybe just a psychic residue of people coming and going. They had the sense that they saw use. This room felt cold and lifeless, as though no human had ever set foot in it. Perhaps no human had. He walked down the passageway to another door, opening it. He had lost a little of his caution, emboldened by his escape attempt thusfar.
Beyond the door… there was another hallway. He had opened a door into a hallway that ran in either direction, with doors lining both walls. It was an endless white corridor, as far as the eye could see in other direction. As he stepped into the hallway, he realized that the tunnel he had moved up to get here was slanted. He had been climbing, and the area where he’d been living was below the level of the tunnel. He looked to the left of him, stepping out into the main hallway, and opened the next door down the line. Sure enough, it had a slight incline, as he expected it would. The hallway served as a hub, each hallway going up or down, and Jake was pretty sure he knew what lay behind each hallway – another area filled with people, each completely unaware of what was going on.
It was, Jake realized, a prison of its own.
Heaven was a prison.
It was something of a daunting realization. But one that Jake realized he had no time to linger on. The longer he was exposed like this, the more likely someone was to catch him standing around, and that would make him stand out, and they would ask him what he was doing, and they would realize he was someplace he was not supposed to be. And Jake did not want to be captured again. Anything was better than the day in and day out monotony of being trapped. The captivity had nearly driven him mad. He would not let that happen to himself again. Not easily, at least.
