by Cliff Hicks
Gilbert smiled a bit at her as he motioned to the stack of magazines on the table, a portion of the table’s surface having been forcibly cleared of the greenish-white paper empire to make room for the magazines to rest on and be noticed. (Gone, but not forgotten.) “You see those?” It was hard to miss the magazines. They were a multitude of colors and images amidst oceans of paper stacks. They also bore titles in fonts far too large and gaudy to be the kind of thing someone would write in Heaven.
Randall moved over and looked at them, trying to figure out why Gilbert was so impressed with them. “It’s just a bunch of magazines. So?”
Gilbert’s smile broadened until he was practically beaming at them. “Sure, but look closer at them.”
Randall picked one up and looked at the cover, trying to figure out what he was missing for a good few seconds before he looked at the date on the cover. “Is this date right?” He tossed it over to Shelly, who stared at it then tossed it to James, for him to do the same before tossing it back to Randall.
“You bet your holy backside it is,” Gilbert cackled. “When I was working on Altford’s paperwork, he suggested I talk to a couple of the Cherubim who bring people up. I was apologizing to him about the magazine selection – they were so ridiculously out of date, it was like being in a dentist’s office. So his idea was to talk to the Cherubim and see if I could get a mailman or two routed my way. Everything that people have on them gets confiscated along the way, so rather than letting all of that stuff go into cold storage, why not have those magazines here to help people pass the time in my office while I’m sorting out their paperwork for them? Like I said, it was a good idea so I followed through on it.” He nodded a bit as he talked, sitting back down at his desk. “Gave him a little leg up, too. Cleared up some of the paperwork for him to get him through the line a bit faster. Probably skipped him past three or four of the landing circle lines. Figured it was the very least I could do.”
Gilbert looked around conspiratorially then brought his hand up to the side of his mouth, whispering loudly at them. “Sometimes when I have time between souls, I read them myself.”
Shelly shook her head a little bit, trying to figure out how this related to anything. “Did he seem like he was unhappy here? Like the idea of being in Heaven wasn’t what he was expecting?”
Gilbert shrugged his bony shoulders. “I couldn’t tell you, miss. He seemed happy enough, interested to see what Heaven had to offer him. He was a bit tired, having been in the lines for so long, but they all are these days, so that’s not too unusual. The lines just keep getting longer and longer, and we don’t have enough people to process them.” He sighed softly as he leaned his chair back some, lifting his hands to run through his wiry black hair, sweeping it back against his head. “Oh well, not my problem, really, so I suppose I don’t have to worry about it. Let the Seraphim worry about it. They’ll let us all know when they get it worked out.”
“And you haven’t seen him since then?” Randall asked, as he tossed the magazine back onto the stack. The neighboring paper shifted, pondering a tactical strike before settling back where it was, reluctantly. The magazines, it seemed, were the alpha dogs in the Great Paper Wars. (The subscription cards were the nuclear deterrents of the paper culture, and nobody wanted an IOBSC – InterOffice Ballistic Subscription Card – launched their way. That way, madness lay.) “He hasn’t come through here since?”
“Why would he?” Gilbert replied. “Unless…” He lifted a fingertip up to waggle it at them, a toothy grin crossing his face. “You lost him, huh? Someone took him out for a walk and you turned your back for a second and then he was gone?” He shook his head, tsking them. “You know you really have to keep an eye on them otherwi…”
“Look,” James said, banging his fist on the desk to make Gilbert stop babbling. The papers on Gilbert’s desk shuffled and blended, leaving the top of his desk buried in splattered mess of various colors of off-white paper, an avalanche of reddish-white, greenish-white, orangish-white, purplish-white, bluish-white and yellowish-white, all scrambled together. (Randall thought to himself that most vomit was less colorful, and certainly less garish.) The papers, it seemed, would have to form a treaty before returning to their own nations, otherwise no paper would escape alive. “He’s not where he’s supposed to be, that’s all that’s important right now. So we’re looking to find him, figure out where he’s gone, and get him back to where he ought to be. Has he been here?”
Gilbert peered up at him with confusion. “Here? Why on Heaven would he have been here? You think he would come back here and try to get me to reassign him? Oh no, buddy, I don’t have that kind of clout around here, and even if I did, I certainly wouldn’t go using it without good cause. I can’t even imagine why you’d think he’d come back here in the first place.”
“So where do you think he would’ve gone? You have a full personality make up on him, and you obviously remember the guy.”
Gilbert had begun to try and restore some semblance of order to his desk, moving all the papers into their own stack, based on color. (The papers pushed back into stacks easily, as if thankful that someone was saving them from having to mingle with foreigners.) He seemed a little more annoyed, now that his delicate balance had been disturbed. “Well, it was a couple of celestial years ago, but yeah, I’ve got a pretty good memory for people who’ve helped me out.”
“So what do you think?”
Gilbert paused in his work and looked up as he thought the matter over, scratching his head, pondering what he knew about Jake Altford and what he’d learned in talking with the man. “You’re sure this was Jake Altford who you lost?” he asked them. “I mean, no offense, I’m sure you think you’re sure, but are you really sure it’s him?”
Randall frowned at him. “Why wouldn’t it be him?”
Gilbert tilted his head side to side a couple of times. “Well… I mean, it just doesn’t sound like him. If you read this kid’s file, you’d understand. He… well, he was a good kid, but he was kind of a doormat. He took the path of least resistance in pretty much every aspect of his life possible. He took the first job that paid decently out of college and stayed at it, despite the fact that he couldn’t stand it. He proposed to his first real girlfriend, and he rarely asked girls out, because he was afraid they wouldn’t like him if they said no. He got into debt with his parents’ funeral because he assumed it was just what people did when the funeral home director sold him the deluxe package. Don’t get me wrong, he was a nice guy, and the kind of person you wouldn’t mind killing a few hours with… but a jailbreak? That’s so not what I imagine him doing with his afterlife.” He laughed a little bit. “Unless you were making the guy’s afterlife a complete disaster.” He stopped for a moment and the humor faded from his face, wondering what exactly they might have done to drive a man into running. “You… you, ah… you didn’t, did you?”
Randall shook his head at him. “No, of course not, we were just putting him through the standard course we’re told to for everyone in our section. It turns out he wasn’t eating the sweets, though, so that may have figured into it.”
Gilbert raised his hands palm up and waggled them back and forth. “If you say so. I dunno, it just doesn’t seem very much in character with the guy. Of course, it’s possible there’s other stuff about him that’s not in our files. I mean, you gotta remember we don’t get the most up to date ones out here.”
Shelly picked up the sheet off the desk, reading it. “I don’t understand. What do you mean you don’t get the most up to date files? What’s missing from the files you get?”
“Well, the last two weeks of their life, really. It’s been a bone of contention for a long time between us in processing and those in dispatch for a long time. Dispatch tells us they can’t give us all the information we want, because it would slow the system down too much. The Cherubim who pick them up sort of get a detailed itinerary of the about-to-be-deceased’s last six hours or so, to let them get to the right tim
e and place to pick up their souls. You’d think the Cherubim could just give that to the soul who could bring it to us, but oh no, that’d make too much sense, so that idea’s right out. The Cherubim claim letting people who’ve just died know that there’s a log of it all would take away the feeling of free will, and cause all sorts of metapsychological problems like we can’t even begin to imagine here behind our desks, and I guess they’re right. What happens in the field can stay out in the field, I suppose. But by the time we see the souls, they’ve been in line for weeks or months of celestial time, and have had plenty of chance to adjust to being dead. We have to trust what answers they give to the paperwork to fill any discrepancies.”
“What do the Cherubim do with those files?”
Gilbert rolled his eyes. “Don’t get me started. They’re destroyed, if you can believe that. To preserve the sanctity of free will, we’re told, although where that directive came from, no one can ever give me a straight answer. Once a Cherubim is down on earth, they burn the paperwork before they get the soul. No chance that someone could get a look-see into their own past. I mean, considering the Cherubim are all culled from the souls they bring up, it’s entirely possible that if they kept it on paper stored somewhere, once someone became a Cherubim, they could go into the old records department and see their own file, but honestly, at that point, do you really care about your time on Earth? Heck, I know I’ve forgotten all about mine. Most of us eagerly move on to our new roles up here and enjoy our blessed afterlife.”
Randall brought a hand up to his eyes, rubbing them with his thumb and forefinger. “So what you’re telling us is you haven’t got a clue where he might have gone. None at all.”
He looked back at the trio sympathetically. “Not particularly. Although…” he trailed off, thinking for a moment. The three angels looked at him, waiting patiently for him to put his line of thinking in order. “You know, you could always go look at things in holding.”
Shelly peered back at him curiously. “What do you mean holding?”
“Well, everything that a person has on them when they come to Heaven is eventually taken from them and put into a box in holding.”
“What for?” James asked.
“Mostly to make sure people don’t have them here in Heaven, I suppose, although I get the impression some of it’s given to people in some parts of Heaven. People who love sorting, filing, cataloging. It’s all part of each person’s records, down in the archives. You might have to do a little bit of digging, but you could always see what he had on him when he came to Heaven,” Gilbert said. “That might give you an idea of where he went. It’s a longshot, but it’s the best I’ve got. If he committed suicide, there’d probably be a weapon or a length of rope or something in his stuff. Like I said, couldn’t tell you anything about the guy’s final days, so it’s entirely possible that something changed him significantly in those last few weeks.”
“Hmmm… it’s worth a look see I suppose,” Randall said, trying to reassert himself as leader. “But you say the Cherubim who picked him up should know about his last six hours?”
Gilbert shrugged his shoulders. “He or she did but that was some time ago, and some of those Cherubim are picking up a bunch of people every day. They may have done hundreds, even thousands, of people since then, so it’s hard to say whether or not they’d remember what any one person’s last day would be like.”
Randall leaned in and whispered to Shelly, “I knew that little bastard was lying to us. He knew more than he was letting on.”
Shelly whispered back, “You don’t know that, Randall. You heard what he said. Thousands of people.”
James looked over at the two whispering angels and cleared his throat. The two of them quickly fell silent. (Gilbert, of course, had been listening to them the whole time. It was a small office.) James turned back to Gilbert and smiled again. “Thanks, Gilbert. You’ve really helped us a bunch in our search. Good leads. Now, I’m sure I don’t have to say this, but…”
Gilbert smiled and waved his hand in their direction. “Don’t worry about it. No problem. No problem at all. I don’t even remember you being here.”
The three angels moved to the door out of the back of Gilbert’s office, stepping through it, with the exception of Randall, who hung back a moment to look at Gilbert for a long moment, trying to be intimidating. “That’s because we weren’t.”
After Randall stepped through the door and closed it behind himself, Gilbert stuck his tongue out at the door and made an obscene hand gesture that way. “Pompous ass,” he muttered before he continued to resort the mess of papers on his desk.
* * * * *
Jake had spent the morning deciding what to do next, considering his options over a cup of coffee, perhaps the most wonderful thing he’d had to drink in his entire lifetime. He found he was appreciating things more and more now than he ever had when he’d been alive. It was almost as if the empty whiteness of Heaven had taught him the value of all the things in life. He’d been wearing some of the clothes he’d gotten from Kelly and been interacting with people for a few hours now, and he was treasuring every second of it.
He still had both the sword and the halo on him, but he’d taken the halo off his head and tucked it into the inner lining of his jacket. The sword hilt was just tucked into his belt, and was easily enough overlooked, hiding beneath the jacket as well. For now, he just wanted to look normal, be normal. Even just sitting in some franchise coffee shop had its own appeal, as twisted and bizarre as that might have seemed to him before his death. He had been people watching for about an hour while he mulled over his next move. There was nothing he needed to do, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a few things he wanted to do. And there was one thing he felt like he needed to do, just to keep himself grounded in reality.
He headed across town and spent a couple of hours at the library, doing a bit of research on the Internet to see what he could find out about his own death. It wasn’t something he was particularly fascinated by, but there was one detail he wanted to get. Before he found that, though, he found several other details. The trucker who had hit his car had escaped unscathed. The brakes on his truck had given out and he’d been careening out of control when his truck hit Jake’s car. In some ways, Jake felt bad for the guy. It hadn’t been his fault, and now he’d be carrying around the guilt of Jake’s death for his whole life. He almost wanted to go and ease the guy’s pain, but somehow that just didn’t seem an easy proposition. What, exactly, would he say? “Hi, I know you killed me, but I just want you to know I broke out of Heaven to tell you I forgive you.” He didn’t expect that would go over too well. Likely the man would think Jake was there to haunt him, although Jake wasn’t exactly sure why anyone would ever want to haunt someone. It did, he supposed, keep them from having to go to Heaven, which was a reward in and of itself.
After a little more research with the computer, Jake had the detail he wanted. The location of his grave. He’d been buried not too far from his apartment, one of his distant cousins having flown in to handle the ceremony. He didn’t have any close family left alive, and he certainly couldn’t imagine Kelly handling the funeral. There was a part of him that was sad he’d missed his own funeral, but the more he thought about it, the more pleased he was that he’d not been there. It might’ve been a rather unsettling reminder of how little people actually cared about him on Earth before his death. The obituary itself was chilling enough on its own. Still, he wanted to stand over his tombstone, to have the experience to know that death was merely something to be conquered. Or maybe he was just curious what kind of tombstone he had over his corpse. He laughed a little bit, staring at the computer terminal in the library, as he wondered whether or not it would be too morbid to pass through the earth and coffin and peek at his own body. Then he remembered glancing back at the wreck of his car just after his death, and that idea passed from him immediately.
It had probably been a closed casket funeral.
(I
f not a cremation.)
He called a cab to come pick him up and deliver him over to the graveyard. He’d been paying people with some cash Kelly had stuck into the backpack for him, but at some point, he was going to need to figure out a way to get money for himself regularly. Sure, he could always break into a bank and steal money that way, but it wasn’t something he was keen to do if he could find another option.
Fifteen minutes later, the cab dropped him off at Forest Lawn Cemetery. He stopped by the office to find the location of his final resting place, and then made his way into the cemetery proper, heading across the landscaped lawns to find his tombstone. It was a nice walk, and the weather was particularly pleasant for late autumn, and despite the cool wind that blew across the land, the warm sunshine kept it from being too abrupt. Winter would be upon the city soon, but for just a little while longer, the snow was keeping at bay.
As Jake walked through the cemetery, he was pleased to not see spirits of any kind, no matter where he looked. He had been slightly afraid of cemeteries when he was younger, but now he had knowledge that he didn’t have back then – of course the dead weren’t hanging around cemeteries. They’d be dragged off to Heaven or Hell if they tried to linger around, although he couldn’t even really understand why the dead would want to cling to their corpses regardless. Being dead granted a certain level of freedom, so if you were deadset (ha ha) against going to Heaven or Hell, why would you stand around a graveyard doing absolutely nothing?
He approached his grave marker without any apprehension. It wasn’t as though there was any part of him still there, just the physical body he’d left behind. The steps still felt long, regardless, as if it were a mile every inch. He finally reached the tombstone and stopped before it, pushing his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “So here we are,” he said to the tombstone. “Me… and me.”