Herbert hadn’t meant to do it, was his argument. There was no way to know that out of all the things that could have mattered, “not returning a library book” would have been the snag that kept him out of the afterlife. Surely everybody forgot those things sometimes. It wasn’t like he hadn’t returned it on purpose, or at least, not at first. OK, yes, when the library told him he was banned from the premises until he either returned the library book or paid to replace it, it’s true, he didn’t handle it all that well. Did he say “I have no recollection of even checking it out” on the phone while looking directly at the unopened book that was sitting on his coffee table—sure. And did Herbert, after that call, take some steps that were, in retrospect, more extreme than the situation really called for? Maybe.
But Herbert had been provoked. He’d reacted the way anybody would. It wasn’t like he couldn’t afford to pay, he explained to the angel. It was just the principle of the thing.
“What principle?” asked the angel.
Herbert declined to elaborate. Instead he glanced around what seemed to be the lobby of Heaven looking for someone with whom he could make the kind of eye contact that said—this guy. There was nobody else in the lobby, however; not even another angel, not that another angel could have been counted on to take his side. Instead the lobby was full of golden light falling through its glass doors and windows, through which Herbert could see an unclear lawn stretching out past the equally indistinct drive. In the lobby itself, the furniture was a plush white so pure that it seemed to attack anything that could stain its surface in advance. Behind a marble desk sat the angel, looking exactly how you’d expect an angel to look, except that it was dressed in a red-and-gold uniform. Before the angel sat a ledger of names and one cup of coffee. Piped throughout the lobby was the scent of roses and the music of Bach.
Herbert didn’t care for Bach. (He could take or leave the roses.)
Also, you should know now, before we get too far: things don’t end well for Herbert in this story.
“Well,” said the angel. “You can’t move on until your obligation has been settled.”
“In practical terms,” said Herbert. “That means…?”
“Well,” said the angel. “You can return the book. Or you can wait until the library ceases to exist, but probably you’ll have to wait until the concept of libraries ceases to exist. In the most extreme case, you’ll be stuck in as a ghost until the heat death of the universe.”
“I don’t know where it is,” said Herbert, who was lying.
“Untrue,” said the angel. “You put the book in a waterproof box and then buried it and planted a bush over it. As a ghost it would be trivially easy for you to fetch the book and return it.”
“If I went away and then came back,” said Herbert, “you’d never know I didn’t return the book.”
“Incorrect,” said the angel. “First of all, there is no ‘away.’ I exist in eternity. As long as you are bound to this life, you cannot understand what that means, but suffice it to say that this interaction, in this hotel lobby, corresponds to no ‘place.’ It is simply how you interpret the aspect of eternity being revealed to you at this time as you are unable to perceive things from the standpoint of eternity.” It took a sip of coffee. “You’d understand this if you’d actually read that book, by the way.”
“It was really boring,” said Herbert. “All about heaven, and everybody’s Italian.”
“That is an inaccurate characterization of your reasons,” said the angel. “You did not open it. However, I have access to the library’s internal card catalog system. So I will know if your obligation has been settled or not.”
“What’s that,” asked Herbert, gesturing at the coffee cup, “in eternity, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s still coffee,” said the angel. “We’re very fond of coffee. And naturally, in Heaven, the coffee is always perfect and precisely how you want it. There is no issue with incorporating coffee into one’s life from the standpoint of eternity.”
“If you live in eternity,” said Herbert, sensing a promising line of inquiry, “don’t you know what I’m going to do?”
“Yes,” said the angel.
“So,” said Herbert, “can’t we treat it as done?”
“No,” said the angel. “You have free will and for you nothing is as yet determined.”
“This makes no sense,” said Herbert.
“It makes sense,” corrected the angel, “from the standpoint of eternity.” Before Herbert could interject that this was the angel’s answer to everything, it added: “Mr. Wells, before you go, I should tell you that many things exist in eternity. All have an interest in balancing the scale. For temporal beings such as yourself, the balancing of the scale is a matter of the individual. That is our interest also. Eternal beings, however, do not all take the same view. You may find others less friendly.”
“Who said I was leaving?” demanded Herbert.
“I did,” said the angel, and was gone.
Suddenly Herbert was back in the funeral home, looking down at his made-up corpse. He did not think the mortician had done a very good job and he hoped his heirs, his niece and nephew, were going to complain to get a discount. But the younger generation, he knew, didn’t have the same spine as Herbert’s when it came to these things. They never sent a plate back or haggled at the grocery checkout. They would never have survived the Great Depression. Granted, Herbert hadn’t lived through it either. But he would have.
Herbert knew he should just return the book. But why did it matter so much? It was, Herbert asserted to himself once more, the principle of the thing. Why should the rest of his life—the days he shoveled his sidewalk, paid his taxes, put recyclables in the correct container, sat next to a crying baby without complaining too much—all count for nothing against this one library book? Herbert supposed the angel would say that all those things were already counted against something else and so the library book, unmatched by an equivalently good deed, remained outstanding. What a stupid system! When he got to heaven, he’d fix that. Surely the public funding of a public library should mean that if a book seemed to have been checked out by somebody and never returned, the library could eat the cost. After all, it might be a mistake. True, in his case, it wasn’t a mistake, but they didn’t know that.
In fact, that wasn’t what the angel would have said at all. You should understand that, because Herbert won’t. If Herbert could have grasped what the angel would have said, he would not have been in this situation. His situation in the afterlife was not made up of a tally of good deed to bad deed. The angel had told Herbert to return the book because Herbert was incapable of doing so. All Herbert had to do was give up his favorite vices: pettiness, stubbornness, and spite. If he had become capable of doing so, he would have gotten into Heaven quite easily.
But he hadn’t purified his soul by working against these things in life, and in death, the angel knew he wasn’t going to change.
That might not seem very fair. Why give Herbert a test he was doomed to fail? That’s angels for you. They don’t see things like we do. In any case, Herbert would be purified of these sins through the long, long wait until the heat death of the universe, a wait that would become, after the extinction of the human race, so boring that even Herbert would think to himself that he should have just returned the book and thus at last alter his own character. Angels always offer you an easy way and a hard way, they just don’t say which is which.
However, Herbert would not get to Heaven and he would not see the heat death of the universe. As the angel had told him, these were not the only options. Because we’ll tell you again—things don’t end well for Herbert in this story.
They really don’t end well at all.
Herbert thought about what to do.
He could return the book. He could.
But he’d never enjoy Heaven, he thought, if he did. It would always stick in his craw, that they’d cared so much about something so stupid. No, he just couldn’t do it. (Wouldn’t do it.) Hang around here, though? Watching his family squander their inheritance, watching hundreds of generations make stupid choices he had no ability to opine on in ways they could hear? No, that was out. He couldn’t stay on the Earth.
What he needed was a workaround.
What was it the angel had said? There was something.… Something.…
The card catalog system, that was it. As a person, Herbert couldn’t go into the library, he was banned. But as a ghost, he reasoned, he could go in easily and he could simply delete the record. Then he would not owe them a book. Then the angel would have to let him in. Heaven would be extra-sweet, knowing he’d gotten one over them. In fact, if coffee was always exactly the way you wanted it in Heaven, surely that also meant that Heaven was how you wanted it, and Heaven would never be perfect to Herbert unless he’d felt he’d struck a bargain by refusing the first offer.
So Herbert hung around the outside of the library, waiting for the right time. It couldn’t be too busy, because then he’d never get a shot at a computer. It couldn’t be too slow, because then he might not be able to count on the librarian’s being distracted. It had to be open, because while Herbert felt confident he could use a computer, he couldn’t turn one on. And after what felt like forever, but was in truth only a few days, his big chance finally came when somebody dropped off a large donation for a friends of the library sale. Herbert slipped inside and past the librarian, who was talking to the donor, toward the unattended computer. He searched for his name—there it was. He deleted the relevant records. And now he, Herbert Wells, had never been banned and had never failed to return a book.
And now, Heaven.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Herbert turned around. A librarian was looking at him. Looking at him. It wasn’t the same person who had been talking to the donor. She had been a nice-looking young woman, in a dress covered in pineapples, with her hair up in a bun to show off earrings that looked like palm trees. The librarian before him was a woman of unclear age, with sleek dark hair that hung down her shoulders. Her expression was hard to read. But it was definitely not nice.
“I…” he said.
It felt cold all of a sudden, and he didn’t know why. Until he felt cold he hadn’t realized that he had not, until that moment, felt anything at all—being a ghost. And the library was suddenly silent, but not the way libraries were usually silent, with the hum of electric lighting and the shuffling of feet. It was truly silent, like if Herbert looked behind him there would be nothing.
“You aren’t allowed in here,” said the librarian. “You were banned.” And she grinned.
“No, no,” said Herbert, gesturing toward the computer. “Look—see—”
“That?” said the librarian, with a contemptuous flick of the eyes. “You don’t think that’s the real card catalog system, do you? You don’t know the first thing about eternity.” She grinned wider. “Don’t you know that everything you do is written? Don’t you know what it means, not to balance the scale?”
“It was a mistake,” said Herbert, not sure what he himself even meant. “I didn’t mean to.”
“It was not a mistake,” said the librarian. “You did mean to.” She grinned even wider.
“I’ll leave,” said Herbert. “I’ll get the book. I’ll put the record back. I’ll—”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” said the librarian, and she grinned so hard her face split into two pieces, two pieces that became long and toothy as the librarian’s hands became scaled and clawed, as the librarian’s body thickened and grew, and—
Well, Herbert ran. But what was this place? It wasn’t the same library. Not at all. This was some sort of place he’d never been. The floor was wet and slimy. It was no longer cold, but hot and humid. He ran and he ran and he didn’t look back and he didn’t look to the side. He just ran.
“Stupid,” said the librarian, whose voice seemed to be coming from all directions.
“It isn’t fair,” said Herbert. “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to.”
“Things have to balance,” said the librarian. “If you’re too heavy, you can’t go up. You were told. You are all the same. You all think you’re special until you can’t go back. Don’t you know where you are?” And the floor tilted, but the floor also moved—writhed—Herbert fell backward, not onto the floor but into space, and he saw all the shelves he hadn’t looked at, and they weren’t shelves at all, they were shining and white—
Teeth, they were teeth.
Herbert is in eternity now, forever being digested in the gut of the goddess Ammit. We all get there one way or another. Eternity, I mean. Finitude ends, after all—by definition. There are no shortcuts to Heaven, but you’ll get somewhere.
Maybe you think it isn’t fair, what happened to Herbert. The angel, in Heaven, drinking its eternal cup of eternally perfect coffee, wants you to know a few things. The first is that if you were looking at this series of events from the standpoint of eternity, there wouldn’t be an issue. The second is that Herbert was warned and he went ahead and did what he wanted anyway. At that point, well.
It’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it?
My heart was POUNDING at the end!!! The imagery in this is astounding, and VERY inspirational!