heaven exists in nildimensional space, without depth or breadth or width. so in response to the inquires of late medievalists concerning dancing angels on heads of pins, the answer is: all of them. all of them and then some. but angels don’t sing in choirs. they don’t throw down fiery swords. they don’t deliver messages on behalf of god almighty. the angels are uncertain as to god’s existence. god is to them as remote as they are to us, existing somewhere beyond the point in which they live their entire lives. 

angels, you see, are the bureaucrats of a divine order. they process the transient souls who flow in and out of the multiverse, receiving us for but moment at our life’s end before flinging us back into the cosmic stew. when a human or duck or quartack or molban dies, they return to heaven, a large city at the edge of a vast ocean, riven through with ancient canals and spotted with foot bridges of stone. should you arrive midday, you will find bustling crowds in open air markets, enjoying sodas along the pier, eating desserts at the street-level cafés, browsing books in antiquated little shops. and among these crowds, the angels conduct interviews with the recently deceased, little tape recorders between them and their subjects, pads of scrap paper nearby on which they dash notes and record fleeting impressions. 

for the recently deceased, the life they left is little more than a fleeting dream, and if the angels are to capture its contours, its meanings, its shapes, they must get it down quickly. the recently deceased will not stay long. a day or two is all it takes. long enough to partake in the dancing of heaven’s never-ending carnivale, to fall in love with a masked stranger, grow drunk on the endless corvina, lament the sleep that comes at sunrise. by then the life they knew will have faded from memory, and then off they go again. the cycle of birth and rebirth never breaks. the deceased simply move on, as all things move on, assuming new forms one after the other, until something—the angels know not what—happens.

the angels themselves know nothing of what lies beyond their city. none have ever ventured. none ever will. what they know of life in the multiverse is stitched together as a massive compendium of dictionaries, encyclopedias, almanacs, atlases, bibliographies, catalogs, concordances, directories, glossaries, handbooks, indices, manuals, research guides, thesauruses, reference works, and multi-relational databases. the knowledge they have accumulated since beginningless time is a cloudy, incomplete mirror, one which is always expanding, always struggling to keep up with the ebbs and flows of quasars, quarks and galaxies. planets are destroyed. solar systems go dark. entire universes grind to a halt. elsewhere in the multiverse, stars collide, moons descend into orbit, life is born anew. the dead are to angels as the antennae of an insect, the feelers and sensory mechanism of their blind stumbling. we bring them answers to questions they don’t know how to pose. they are desperate to know.

and at night, when the angels have conducted their interviews for the day and sent us back to our rooms to sleep, they tour their city, arm in arm, trading the stories and ideas they’ve gleaned. some come together in clubs and bars and cabarets, where they put on costumes of the living and turn on stage lights and perform the crude rituals that make life elsewhere possible. they tell one another stories of unrequited love, of unsolicited heroism, of tender maternal affection. and they sit silently in the audience, in the dark, unsure of what they’re watching, unsure of what it means, sipping their gin and tonics, laughing at jokes they heard others tell, debating questions they’d not considered, reaching desperately out over that vast ocean.