“I’m next, John!” John had fallen asleep leaning against a golden pole with red velvet ropes. His new found friend grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him awake.
With a startle, John popped to attention, “What? Where, what, are we there, uh—”
The man interrupted John’s disjunctive questioning, “You dozed off again. You know you don’t have to sleep anymore.”
John locked eyes with his friend and began to remember. He grunted his answer and twisted his head to confirm that the situation was unchanged. The white marble floor, the counters seamlessly rising from the pure white plane, even the chairs were made from marble, and it all appeared to be one piece. He spanned the front of the room – that had no walls – and watched the counters of clerks extended in both directions. It seemed infinite, but his friend had told him it wasn’t.
“How long was I out, Bob?”
Before Bob could answer, he was called to a counter by an angel, “Next in line, please.” John inhaled slowly as he watched Bob strut towards the gorgeous woman. Her hair was cropped in a pixie cut, amber eyes broke through her porcelain skin tone, and her face’s softness.
John hoped he would be called soon. Without a sun, it was impossible to tell how long the two makeshift friends had been in line. John and Bob put it at about three days. Bob consistently tried to explain things to John, but it was too much information to wrap his nonexistent brain around. John began to stretch as Bob stood up and walked around the counter.
Soon after Bob began to walk away from the amber eyed beauty, John’s angel called, “Next in line, please.”
John walked towards her and couldn’t break eye contact. Without seeing where he was going, he ran into the marble chair but didn’t feel it. It wasn’t until she blinked that he snapped from her gaze. She motioned to the chair and John automatically followed her hand’s command. The cold marble didn’t feel frigid or hard like marble; John felt like he was floating on a cloud.
“John Smith”—she laughed—“Well, you had a very unique name this time.”
John took advantage of her pause, “This is my first time.”
Glasses had appeared on her face. John didn’t know if they had been there the entire time, or she had put them on. She sighed, “Yes, I know. You did really well for your first time. Let me get your file and we will go through it. I was especially surprised that you were able to keep its temper under control, and it never killed anyone. The bunny situation was a little weird, but he did end up eating it.”
John smiled, “Thank you.” It was his first time being praised by an angel.
She reciprocated when a slight smile broke her business like demeanor, “Here it is.” She pulled out a manila folder which contained a large leather bound book and a single page that was dotted with numbers and words. Her silken voice continued, “Now, we don’t go through your human’s life story. No real need to in this day and age. Nowadays, we aggregate all of your information into this simple page.” She dangled the piece of paper between her pointer finger and thumb. Eventually, she set it down on the marble, “Makes the whole process go by much quicker. The people downstairs already came to your judgment, but seeing as this is your first time, we can go through it step by step so you can improve for next time.” She looked at John and he nodded. Another smile as she continued, “Excellent let’s get—”
Before she could continue, a man at the table besides them was screaming, “Rehabilitation! Rehabilitation! I don’t want to be damned to rehabilitation! This is bullshit, you gave me a human that was genetically predisposed to kill. You can’t put that shit on my shoulders!” The man grabbed his angel by her robe, “Listen, pull that damn book out and look at the data again.” He was shaking her by the cuff of her shirt when the angel being assaulted looked into his eyes. His voice began to drop in amplitude as her eyes pierced through his body. Eventually, he gave into the second option, “I just… I don’t want to… I guess… yea, I guess I will try again.”
John overheard the angel speak on the protocol, “If you fail this time, and your human kills another human, you will not get a choice.” Suddenly the chair disappeared through the ground. Golden sunlight erupted from the opening and the sedated man disappeared.
John’s angel was staring at her coworker that was smoothing the gown with the palms of her hands. With her attention on the other angel, she spoke, “Poor Betsy, her charges have been doing poorly recently. I think she needs a vacation. She just sent two to rehabilitation this morning.”
John was new and made a grave mistake, “You mean Hell?” Anyone in ear shot, that wasn’t new, scowled in his direction. Without realizing it, John tried to get his head into his body like a turtle.
Another quick smile from his angel, “Don’t worry, you won’t make that mistake again. Alright, where was I? Ah yes, let’s go through the process.” She touched the single document and created a copy on the spot. She handed one to John and licked her lips before beginning, “So the first thing we check is your human’s ethical score. Looks like yours ended up in the top five percentile. That is impressive for a first timer!”
As she was gloating over her charge’s score, John spoke in a whisper, “Do you know if I made it in?”
“Yea, I’m sorry.”
“So I passed!” John was exuberant
She crushed his dreams, “No, sorry. I meant I knew the answer. And I am sorry for not telling you when you came in.” A quick excuse, “You threw me off with this being your first time and everything. Yes, you didn’t pass and will have to go back to Earth.”
“What!? I was faithful.”
“Firstly, it was your human that was”—she made air quotes—“faithful. Come on, you don’t think we know what is going on in your human’s heart?” John made an audible gulp. She laughed, “Oh come on. Those are guidelines. It all breaks down into the ethical score. It’s all about your human’s actions and underlying motivations. Remember that! The key to passing ethics and avoiding rehabilitation all together is ethics. So just do what you did here and point your human down the right path. Is that clear?” She leaned forward to get his answer. Her cleavage distracted John. She asked again, “Is that clear?”
He jumped back but the marble chair didn’t budge. His head bobbed as he spoke, “Yes, sorry.” With his bearings found he continued, “Then why did I fail?”
She leaned farther, and he averted his eyes as she spoke, “Right here, the time segment. That’s where you failed.” Her knuckle turned white as she poked the piece of paper.
“What!? Come on, I was great with his time.”
“Really? Are you going to contest that line item? You passed all the other ones, you are welcome to challenge the calculations.”
“Yes, if it means I can pass, then I will challenge.”
“You learn quickly.” She smiled at her charge’s intelligence.
His back was straight now and his posture displayed a different person. He nodded, “Thank you.”
“First let’s cut out all of the years your human was in school. That doesn’t count because outside forces conspired to put him in school. Which means its time wasn’t yours to manage. You did make it study a lot, and that is excellent. You were building a strong foundation for the rest of its life.”
“Again, thank you.”
Her smile never appeared, “That’s the only time you managed its time well.”
“When?”
She rolled her eyes, “When it was in school.” She paused and waited for him to interrupt. When he didn’t she continued, “Other than that, you kept pushing the human to sell time. In fact one of its favorite phrases was, ‘time is money’. That is despicable.”
“Yea, but he needed money to go on vacation and take care of his family.”
“How much did it die with?” She was not leaning anymore but sitting back with her arms crossed across her chest. Her demeanor had changed from soft and teacher-like to strong and judge-like.
“How much what?”
“Money.”
“He only had fifty dollars on him.” She didn’t ask him a question but scowled. His tongue nervously dotted his lips with saliva. With no response from the angel, he tried to clarify, “He had half a million in a couple of trusts.”
Her head shook from side to side, “Full net worth.”
“I don’t know, I didn’t always pay attention to his books.” She pointed at a line item on the stats sheet. John’s eyes lit up, “Twenty four million? That can’t be right.”
“It’s right. That is a simple thing to quantify for the back room.”
John went from defensive to offensive, “Yea, but being rich isn’t sinful.”
“Correct, it used a lot of that money for philanthropy. But remember, you didn’t fail because of ethics. You failed because of time. Acquiring such fortune comes at the cost of what?”
John was defeated, “Time.”
“Exactly, time is money. Well looks like it spent a lot of time for a lot of money.”
John was wracking his brain for another way to contest the item, “But vacations! He took vacations with his family. There were people in the office that never took vacations.”
“It only took forty-five vacations during its work life.”
“Yea, that is good.”
“Over the course of thirty five years, the average worker took seventy vacations.”
John shook his head with a smug smile on his face, “No way.”
“They are small vacations when they were younger. When your human was young in its career it chose to not take vacation for the first five years and collect the money. Then it took them sparingly for the next ten years. It wasn’t until fifteen years after it started working that it used all of his allotted vacation. That comes to a failing grade.”
John was aghast, “How do you know those numbers are accurate.”
This time the angel laughed and smuggled motioned to the room they were in, “Really? You think we make mistakes?”
An audible gulp was heard from John, “So it was the vacation. That is what made me fail.”
The angel frowned, “Nope, that was but a fraction of its time alive. You failed for another reason.”
“What was that?”
“You knew when it was going to cease to exist. You had the exact time it would go. Yet, you continued to let it workout, even though its death had nothing to do with its body and health. That workout took up four percent of its after school life. Then there is the driving. All the driving. Just the commute every week to work was nine percent of its life. You wanted it to have so much money that you sacrificed time for a job in that massive city. The poor thing was over worked and tired from driving; so it napped on the weekends. That is why you failed: its commute. The rest is acceptable, it had to live within a system, but the commute, God, that is nine percent of its life, just, just gone.” John looked down at the paper. The only line item that was in a different color was the commute time. His angel didn’t stop berating him, “You know how many books that is? It loved to read, and you took that one thing away from it by giving it a two hour commute.” Before John could interject, the angel countered his talking point, “Books on tape aren’t the same thing. The total time you flushed away, assuming it was only two hours during the week, was eighteen thousand two hundred hours. If it takes eight hours to read a book that would have been two thousand two hundred seventy five books you took away from your human.”
John attempted a hail Mary, “So, he would have still had a commute.”
The angel smiled, “It could have retired after ten years and lived the exact same life it ended up living. The only difference”—she rubbed her thumb, pointer, and middle finger together—“its ending net worth.” She put her hands down on the table and changed her demeanor to be more sensitive, “I am sorry, it was your first time. Don’t be too hard on yourself, just learn to balance it all. Once your human is successful, we know you will be able to handle Heaven. Otherwise, God is afraid you will waste his precious gift. Any other questions?”
John was swimming in his own thoughts and automatically answered, “No.” Before he could change it, golden light erupted around his body, and he was in a sterile room. A brand new human was in its mother’s hands. John sat down with the rest of the souls, gave a head nod, and watched as they manipulated their humans.