You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) Read online

  “I will always love Dead Donkey,

  The jewel of desert sand,

  But if you get me out of here,

  I’ll give you thirty grand.”

  However, the mayor and the other sorts of scum that involve themselves in local government have long endeavored to change Dead Donkey’s overwhelmingly negative image. There were so many good points to the city that were underrepresented in the media - for example, Dead Donkey had provided some of America’s most brilliant arsonists, and had long been a leading manufacturer of the legendary xylophone fence, prior to the mysterious series of fires that had permanently shuttered the xylophone fence factory. They insisted that the levels of poisonous selenium in the water supply were best described as “superior,” and reports of radioactivity in the air all came down to the active exuberance of Dead Donkey’s local radio stations. Suggestions that residents had started using shoeboxes as a crude form of currency were totally ungrounded; the Burmese kyat continued to serve the city’s needs just fine. Moreover, the mayor’s office insisted, Dead Donkey was at the center of Nevada’s ‘smart’ innovation economy. Aside from the famous electric fork and xylophone fence, innovations like the reverse liposuction, the pineapple hardener, the air de-purifier, and the steam-powered trash can lid were conceived of and developed wholly in the city of Dead Donkey. Where else in the state of Nevada, the city council asked, could you get your tissues cleaned, or your carpet waxed, or your hammer sharpened? All these wonderful businesses and services could be found on Technology Lane, right between the catapult factory and the plague mask fitter’s, and just across from the Witch Hunting Association.

  Moreover, the city was full of high-paying tech and social impact jobs and workers, like senior tissue engineers, xylophone fence tuners, anti-diplomats, and professional squash players. Why, in the opinion of the city council, people should be flocking to Dead Donkey - by air, land, or sea (not that Dead Donkey was a coastal city) - by road, rail, or even hot air balloon - provided they could navigate their way past the deadly flak batteries that ringed the city.

  With all this in mind, some of the more pioneering members of the city council decided they wanted to prove that the Town Hall was more than just a place to get drunk in and put forward legislation to totally renew the entire city of Dead Donkey. The plan hit something of a snag almost immediately due to an unfortunate misunderstanding involving a local Marine unit and the Mayor’s bulk purchase of second-hand vehicles, flags, and buildings from pre-war Iraq. The misunderstanding ended with the Marines shelling and destroying the centers of government, which in one fell stroke both greatly improved property prices in the vicinity and proved that you can, in fact, beat city hall if you’re willing to put your mind to it.

  Setting aside this minor snafu, one of the surviving local legislators put forward a bill suggesting that the city allocate a massive amount of money for the purpose of improving the city’s image. Outside observers suspected there was something a little bit fishy about this plan as it was put up for consideration. Maybe it was the way the legislator giggled uncontrollably while he urged people to vote for it, or maybe it was the suspicious-looking map of the Bahamas he put up on his wall following the passage of the bill. Indeed, at the first chance he got, the man jumped on a plane to the Caribbean, but, as with virtually all flights out of Dead Donkey, the plane crashed long before it got clear of the city and the legislator therefore received a karmic comeuppance (or more accurately, comedownance, given the direction he ultimately fell).

  Instances of corruption in the local government such as this are all too common in Dead Donkey. The city’s public accounts have never been audited, but if they were examined the auditor would have discovered to his amazement that Dead Donkey’s books were in fact the nutritional information from the back of a bottle of vinegar, and the five-year budget projection was a child’s doodle of a fairy. What these items cunningly concealed was a truly epic amount of embezzlement on the part of the city council, which was enabled and frequently abetted by Dead Donkey’s deeply unpopular mayor. Unlike the bureaucratic afterlife, there was no Complaints Department in the city of Dead Donkey. This was by deliberate design on the part of the city council. Many of the city’s residents made a fortune as professional frustration outlets, with other residents paying them to complain at them, shout at them about their problems, and give them a good whack or two in the face just to make the days more bearable. The city council explained that opening a Complaints Department would, therefore, be a job-destroying intrusion of government on the domain of private enterprise, which was absolutely unthinkable. However, since the professional grief bearers had absolutely no power to improve anything, the city never got any better, which meant that Dead Donkey remained the same smoldering hellhole that its residents have come to know and hate.

  Anyone else would have long since given in to - or perhaps even embraced - bureaucratic pressure to remain in the afterlife, but Nathan quite liked it in Dead Donkey, which is why he tried so hard to come back whenever he died. There is no accounting for taste.

  Chapter 5

  Nathan was pleased to find himself back in his living room, which is pretty extraordinary unto and of itself because, as has been explained, almost no one else would be. Nevertheless, this was home to Nathan, even if his window was broken and there was yet another one of his own corpses on the floor. It was a very bright afternoon, and sunlight was streaming in through the newly formed hole in his windowsill. A gentle breeze was also drafting through, laced with the sweet smell of burning garbage from the city beyond. From inside, Nathan could hear the familiar sounds of fighting and gleeful gunfire as his next-door neighbor, Mr. Fletcher, fired round after round in his ongoing battle against the salesmen who were intruding on his lawn. As far as Nathan was concerned, it was a perfect day in Dead Donkey and there was no finer place in the world to be.

  In point of fact, if one could be bothered to count, there were at least a quizillion finer places to be. Everyone else in the city of Dead Donkey knew this and many of them devoted their lives to trying to leave. There are really only three possible reasons for not leaving Dead Donkey, which we will discuss in greater detail at a later time. For now, it is sufficient to know that Nathan was at odds with pretty much everyone on this particular point, but then again he did have brain damage.

  He sighed and stretched and wondered what to do about his broken window and his dead body until he became acutely aware that the phone was ringing. Nathan, thinking it might be the police, walked over to the phone.

  It should be explained that in Dead Donkey, one rarely has to call the police, and indeed on the occasions one does call the police the effort proves to be almost entirely fruitless owing to their complete unwillingness to do anything that extends beyond the range of their defensive perimeter around the downtown q-tip factory. Rather, the police have adopted a “don’t call us, we’ll call you,” attitude towards crime-fighting. In accordance with that stance, the police frequently call the victims of crimes shortly after the crime has been committed. Since more often than not the police are the ones who committed the crime, this is generally for the purpose of taunting the victim rather than doing anything useful. In case you are actually mugged, burgled, or murdered in the city of Dead Donkey, it is generally much more productive to call the local grocery store, as they will be happy to sell you excess fruits and vegetables to throw at the perpetrators should you happen across them in the near future. The Dead Donkey police department still encourages you to report any crimes to them. They say they could do with a good laugh, but they never promise anything more than a routine investigation, which in the context of Dead Donkey means no investigation at all.

  Nathan knew all this but still thought it would be impolite not to answer the phone, especially if it was the police calling, so he made his way over to the device all the same. He moved to pick up the receiver. His hand passed right through it. Nathan stared at his hand.

  He tried several mor
e times, but on each occasion, his hand swiped clean through the telephone, which was very strange because it had almost never done that before. However, Nathan knew he had to pick up the phone just in case it was important. On the final attempt of his several furious swipes, Nathan saw the phone receiver jostle just a little bit as his hand phased through it. With great care and concentration, Nathan repositioned his hand and, moving very carefully, just managed to grasp the phone. It felt momentarily solid under his fingertips.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  There was a moment’s pause, after which he frowned into the phone receiver.

  “No, I do not wish to buy a dog riding an elephant,” he said with irritation. “Please stop calling me. Do you have any idea what I have been through today? I’ve been shot, gone to bureaucracy, and come back - my window is broken, there’s a body on my floor, my laundry isn’t done, and it absolutely does not help that I am being called every few minutes by someone wanting to know if I am willing to buy a dog riding an elephant. I do not want and will never want a dog riding an elephant, nor will anyone else. What would I possibly do with a dog riding an elephant after I bought them?”

  “Well,” came the voice on the other end of the phone, “if you’re anything like me, you’d spend the rest of your life dialing random numbers trying to find someone to buy the damn things off of you.”

  There was a click and the phone went dead. Nathan sighed and tried to hang it back up, but the receiver phased back through his hand and dangled uselessly. After a solid sixty seconds of trying and maybe another sixty for which he was distracted by a new cereal jingle he had just remembered, Nathan finally managed to grab hold of the receiver and push it back onto its stand.

  Something very strange was going on, Nathan decided, but he wasn’t going to let himself worry very much about it. Instead, he was going to sit down and finish watching the news before he worried about his broken window. The corpse on his floor would be even more troublesome. In Nathan’s experience the most cost effective way to deal with them was to either donate them to medical science or purchase a one-way bulk freight shipping label to Baltimore, and since donating things to medical science had a lot of tedious complications in Nathan’s experience, he would have to send it off to Baltimore. Still, the news took precedence.

  He sat down in the greenest of his several green chairs and immediately fell through it.

  Nathan stood back up and scratched his head. The whole point of having a chair was so you wouldn’t fall through it when you sat down on it. Maybe it had malfunctioned somehow.

  He tried again, then tried to sit in several other chairs, but in each instance he plummeted through the material. After a few more tries in which he couldn’t quite manage to sit down, even with considerable concentration, he decided that his chairs must be broken and he’d just have to watch the news standing up. The TV was on but the volume was muted, so Nathan couldn’t hear what was being said. This was a particular shame because the newscasters had something very exciting-looking on the screen with lots of flashing lights and whizzing cars and broken jars of grape jam in the background and Nathan would have loved to know what it was. To hear the story, he would have to unmute the television.

  Nathan reached over for his remote control on the coffee table (which was still laid out for the small bite to eat he’d shared with Ernie), but his hand whistled right through the remote control and the coffee table itself. With great care, Nathan tried to gently close his fingers around the remote control and momentarily felt that he’d made contact with it, but it slipped out of his grasp. Now he knew there was something strange going on.

  He experimentally grabbed at a coffee cup, and watched as his entire arm passed clean through the ceramic with ease. At last he realized what was happening.

  “I can’t touch anything,” Nathan exclaimed. He thought about this for a moment.

  “I must have forgotten to pay my gas bill again,” he decided at last. “That’s usually the problem.”

  From behind him, there was a very dark chuckle.

  “A bit slow on the uptake, aren’t you?”

  Nathan whipped around to see, standing behind the greenest of his several green chairs, a young man wearing the unmistakable stiff off-brown suit and tie of a low level bureaucrat. This bureaucrat’s name was Brian Dithershoes, and he was currently wearing a smile so wide and malicious that he might have been related to Director Fulcher.

  Nathan didn’t immediately catch on.

  “Oh, hello again, Brian,” he said. He didn’t particularly like Brian and was secretly hoping that the bureaucrat would leave, but he knew he was supposed to provide at least a basic level of hospitality to guests. “So good to see you again. Would you like anything to eat? I have some er - old half-drunken coffee and cake. I would get you something else, but I can’t seem to-”

  “Touch anything?” Brian asked. “Yes. I noticed. That’s because you are a ghost.”

  Nathan blinked in confusion.

  “What do you mean, I’m a ghost?”

  “I don’t see how I could be much clearer, Nathan,” Brian said with a smirk as he sat down into one of Nathan’s less green chairs and helped himself to a relatively intact slice of cake. “You are a disembodied spirit condemned to wander the earth in eternal loneliness. I’m very pleased about that, because I haven’t forgotten how you stopped me from changing my wretched name the last time we met. Fortunately, I’ve been given a second chance, and I don’t intend to blow it this time. I’ve drafted up a list of possible names I could change my name to. Tell me how they catch your fancy: Mathis, Oswald, Sunny, Gerhardt, Burnside - oh, I like the sound of that one, Burnside Dithershoes, sounds good, don’t you think? - Hudde, Zachary, Nadir, Andrew - Andrew is the dream, of course, but I’m not sure they’ll let me have that one - Ludvig, Goran, Dag, Rover-”

  “Wait, back up,” Nathan said in bewilderment.

  “To which one? Dag? Dag Dithershoes? I’m not particularly fond of it myself. It has a kind of 80s exploitation action-cop-movie feel to it. ‘Dag Dithershoes and his partner Chad Manly are on the hunt for an escaped jaywalker and they’re running out of time and bullets-’”

  “No, not the names - about me. Why am I a ghost condemned to wander the Earth in eternal loneliness?”

  Brian smirked again.

  “That’s obvious. You’re a ghost because you’re dead.”

  “But I’ve died lots of times, and I’ve never been a ghost before!” exclaimed Nathan.

  With the patronizing air of someone explaining something very simple to a mental subordinate, like a child, a squirrel, or a congressman, Brian leaned back in the less green chair and started to explain. He made it clear that this activity did not require his full mental faculties as he spoke, as he simultaneously helped himself to more coffee cake while filling out a Form 449836 - Notice of Consumption of A Ghost’s Coffee Cake.

  “Every time that you have died in the past, Mr. Haynes, you have gone to see Director Fulcher and he has restored you to life. Each time he did, he also gave you a new body, which is why your corpses pile up when you die repeatedly.”

  The bureaucrat gestured to Nathan’s most recent corpse sprawled across his reddening carpet, which remained politely still and silent for the purposes of the demonstration.

  “Why?” Nathan asked.

  “It was necessary because if you were returned to life without a new body and your spirit instead returned to your old body, which was unfit for habitation due to gunshot wounds or plane crashes or badger knife fights or whatever trouble you’d recently gotten yourself into, you would have immediately died again and gone back to Station #4. At the time, this was exactly where Director Fulcher did not want you, so he provided you with a replica body of the type I am using right now. You have been through five of them, I think, counting this one here. However, this time when you died, instead of receiving a new body, you stole Ian’s Bureaucratic Transit Device -”

  “-I gave it back,” Nathan
protested.

  “It is still stealing even if you give it back,” Brian snapped. “Where was I? Oh yes, you stole the transit device, which Ian and Director Fulcher were very upset about, and created a temporary door to your house here, then walked through it without ever receiving a new body. That means you are not alive at all, but rather a spirit that has returned to walk the world. Because you don’t have physical form, you can only manipulate objects like your much beloved toaster, telephone, and remote control with great difficulty. Ghosts are not meant to interact with the living world, though there is considerable precedent for their being able to do so for short periods of time.”

  “Oh. But then, why am I condemned to walk the Earth in eternal loneliness?”

  “That’s because Director Fulcher has sent me to keep an eye on you, and I intend to make you as miserable as humanly or inhumanly possible, because I don’t like you,” Brian clarified. “By the way, I am explaining all this because Ian asked me to. He seemed concerned that you might not understand.”

  Nathan made a mental note to thank Ian the next time he saw him, since the explanation had been most helpful. However, he also panicked as the implications of being unable to touch anything sank in.

  “I won’t be able to do my laundry!” Nathan exclaimed.

  Brian looked at him with annoyance.

  “You are a ghost. You don’t need laundry.”

  “And I won’t be able to eat my coffee cake either!”

  “You are a ghost. You don’t need to eat!”

  “Or fix my window! How will I fix my window?”

  “You are a ghost!” Brian exclaimed for the third time. “A spirit mostly unable to interact with the physical world! You are invisible and cannot be seen or sensed except through great effort on your part!”