You Are A Ghost.
(Sign Here Please)
by Andrew Stanek
This is the second book in the You Are Dead series. If you haven’t already read it, you might want to start with You Are Dead. (Sign Here Please). On the other hand, there’s also now a sequel to this book. Check out You Are Doomed. (Sign Here Please) if you want to read the next installment in the series, or You Are Undead. (Sign Here Please) for the fourth part. They are all available on Amazon and other online retail outlets.
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--Andrew Stanek
Prologue
Mankind’s most cherished pastime is contemplating the great questions of existence. If asked (and they live for the moments that they are asked), most philosophers would probably say “Do our lives have purpose?” is the great question of existence. This is, of course, self-serving claptrap. The great question of existence is “Why are there so many forms for everything?” We, the human species, have forms for everything - forms for cars and airplanes, forms for buying and selling, forms for making and losing money, forms for getting sick and healthy again, even forms for being born and dying. In the modern world, one cannot so much as walk out the door without being thwacked in the head with a passing form, and previously simple acts - like getting a job, or losing a job, or buying a gun with which to wage war against your neighbor - now involve so much paperwork they’re hardly worth the time at all.
Everyone who has spent any time contemplating this demanding intrusion into the previously paperless human condition has arrived at the same question. Why do we have so many forms? Forms are of course created by humans, but what was the point of creating all of these purchase orders and tax returns when, quite plainly, no one wants to fill them out? What is the point of filing a form with the DMV informing the state and federal government that I have just purchased a perfectly serviceable front half of a 1998 Ford Focus? Will filing this notice with the appropriate department bring me any closer to actually possessing the Ford Focus? Will the subsequent letter from the DMV that it is not actually legal to drive only the front half of the car stop me from trying? The system demands that we fill in bubbles and check boxes as if doing so, that is, pushing paper around, gives us the power to actually change reality.
And therein lies the secret. Forms are not, as a casual and deeply mistaken observer might believe, merely an instrument of government designed to gather information to reflect reality. Rather, forms have the power to change reality. Merely the act of filling out a form alters the world to bring it in conformation with what is shown on the paper.
This is because reality is run by bureaucrats.
Everyone knows that reality is run by bureaucrats, but they tend not to have figured it in exactly this way. The truth is that behind the entirety of existence, managing every event in the world - from the crawling of ants to the eruptions of volcanoes - is a vast and inscrutable cosmic bureaucracy, which causes these events to happen by filing large numbers of increasingly complicated forms. For every universal law - every gravitational influence and photon of light and burst of radiation - there are bureaucrats sworn to uphold that law, who have created and manage a whole battery of forms related to their execution. However, over time all the filing of the Form 1157765s (Authorization for Two Insignificant Particles To Bump Into Each Other) and Form 387664s (Notice That Minuscule Speck of Dust Has Improperly Received A Driver’s License) grew to be too much even for the cosmic bureaucrats. Therefore, they picked a rocky planet around a suitable main-line yellow star far away from the devastation and colossal galactic explosions that ravage much of existence, and on that planet assembled some primordial lipids and amino acids into a pile of self-replicating goop. Over time this goop went from microscopic bacteria to fish to vertebrate to mammal to ape to human, and the humans went from unwashed and barbaric to hygienic and barbaric, developing society, culture, politics, government - and ultimately, inevitably - bureaucracy. Now, when humans die, the bureaucrats recruit them into the infinitely unfolding ranks of the cosmic bureaucracy, so there will always be enough bureaucrats to properly manage the affairs of the universe. This is the reason there are so many forms. It is also the meaning of life. Don’t tell any philosophers. They won’t like it.
Only a very, very small number of people (like Travis Erwin Habsworth of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany) know that bureaucrats run reality, and they aren’t very happy about it so they tend to keep quiet. However, the only person in the entire world in a position to fully appreciate this last and most terrible secret behind human existence was a singular and truly unique man: Nathan Haynes of Dead Donkey, Nevada. Nathan never wanted to be tangled up with bureaucrats or death or the meaning of existence, and simply wanted to kick back in his green chairs and live the quiet life that he was absolutely, positively not destined to have.
This is his story, though I’m not quite sure he sees it that way.
Chapter 1
Nathan was sitting in one of the less green of his several green chairs and watching the news when there was a knock on his door, followed by a shout from his doorstep, succeeded by a most insistent brick through his window. With a weary sigh, Nathan muted his television and stood to answer his door. He hadn’t even done his laundry yet today, and already he had a window to replace.
When he answered his door, Nathan found standing behind it a shortish and balding middle-aged man in coveralls with a sort of squashed and unpleasant face, which was curled into a frown. His shoulders were hunched and he was himself stooped, and when Nathan opened the door he drew closer with a stuttering, stumbling sort of a walk that told Nathan the last thing he wanted in the world was to be here. All in all, he had the look of a man who hated his job and utterly lacked the necessary motivation to do it.
“You know,” the man said, before Nathan could say a word, “I’m not really being paid enough to kill you.”
Nathan blinked as he processed this statement. Finally, something clicked into place and he understood.
“Oh, are you my new serial killer?” Nathan asked politely.
“Yes, but they don’t pay me nearly enough.”
The man continued to hunch and stoop unpleasantly. Nathan peered at him - Nathan wasn’t sure he liked this new serial killer. Still, he guessed he might as well be civil.
“I suppose I should invite you in,” Nathan said at length. He ushered the man into his living room, and the serial killer sank into the greenest of Nathan’s several green chairs.
“Can I get you anything?” Nathan asked him. “Coffee? Tea?”
“I am not really paid enough to drink tea,” the man replied.
Nathan took this as an indication that he should get some coffee. He quickly started to make a new pot, though he wasn’t entirely happy about it. This new fellow’s mopey attitude was starting to get on his nerves a bit.
“My old serial killer always used to call ahead,” Nathan said.
“I’m not paid enough to call ahead,” the new serial killer said.
Nathan frowned as he retrieved some snack cakes from his various cupboards to serve with the coffee.
“My old serial killer also used to smile a bit more. He was always very friendly and kept a positive attitude. That’s what made him such a pleasure to talk to. You should learn from him.”
The new serial killer made a muffled groaning noise and slouched further down in the green chair.
“I heard you have some kind of brain thingie,” the new serial killer said.
“Yes,” Nathan agreed. “When I was very little, I had a
n accident that left me with a brain lesion. Unfortunately, as a result of the brain damage, I have no self-preservation instinct at all.”
The new serial killer made another overworked groaning noise. Nathan frowned. When he’d brought this point up, his old serial killer had engaged him in a very prolonged and interesting chat about the matter before getting down to business. This new man was just sitting in the chair and complaining. That was no way to go about a job. Was this what serial killing had come to in this city? Serial killing used to be a matter of civic pride in Dead Donkey, a dynamic field of criminal activity that the residents could really point to as something great that the city had. It must have gone downhill very fast if this was the kind of serial killer they had going around now, complaining about compensation and barely mustering the energy to get his fat butt out of his chair and murder someone.
Yes, Nathan had dramatically preferred his old serial killer, a man with a smile on his face, a silenced pistol in his pocket, and a dream in his heart. Thanks to his brain lesion, which left Nathan with absolutely no motivation to stay alive, Nathan had been visited by that same serial killer a good three times, and every time it had been an absolute pleasure to be murdered by him. There was the little matter of cutting the phone cables that had proved to be a right nuisance, but Nathan could see now that was a minor inconvenience. Unfortunately, on the occasion of his last visit, Nathan’s old serial killer had been shot by atheists, leaving Nathan without visits from the friendly neighborhood murderer to look forward to on his lonely days. This new man just wasn’t up to the task. It was a crying shame, if you asked Nathan.
He sipped on his coffee then brought the tray over to the table in the living room, where the new killer was still slouching and groaning.
“So tell me about yourself,” Nathan said brightly, resolving to try to engage the man in conversation. There was nothing more important than a good working relationship with one’s serial killers.
“Ern,” the other man said.
“Excuse me?” Nathan asked.
“That’s my name,” the serial killer muttered. “Ernie. People call me Ern.”
“It’s good to meet you, Ern,” Nathan lied. In fact, this experience so far had all been very unpleasant. He was beginning to cool to the whole idea of being killed. “What got you into serial killing?”
“It’s a job,” Ern answered. “Shoot people. Get paid. Doesn’t pay too well. Thinking of quitting. Become an arsonist instead. Hear that pays better.”
“So you’re a sponsored serial killer? Someone tells you who to kill and then pays you for it?”
“Yeah. Contracts. That’s the way it goes in this business.”
Nathan’s frown deepened. His old serial killer had been a fine, upstanding criminal who had murdered people purely due to his love for the business. He’d never demanded any payment, but done it out of the goodness of his heart. That was what had made him such a pleasure to be murdered by.
It was just then that a phone started to ring. At first Nathan thought it was his own phone and was briefly very annoyed by this thought. His old serial killer had always cut the phone cables before a murder. That was just good practice. Ern didn’t seem to care enough to bother. However, Nathan soon realized it wasn’t his phone that was ringing (which came as something of a relief to him, since the only phone call he ever got was from people trying to sell him a dog riding an elephant, and as much as he insisted that neither he nor anyone else would ever want to buy a dog riding an elephant they kept calling him hoping he would buckle and pay them just to shut them up). Rather, it was Ern’s cell phone. Ern didn’t move to pick it up.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” Nathan asked.
“No,” Ern muttered. “I’m not really paid enough to answer the phone either.”
All Ern’s insistence that he wasn’t paid enough to do this or that was really getting on Nathan’s nerves. Nathan wasn’t very good with technology owing to his chronic and occasionally terminal luddite tendencies, but he at least knew how to operate a cell phone. He scooped up Ern’s cell phone himself and looked at the caller ID.
“It says that it’s from your wife,” Nathan informed Ern. The ‘it says’ was an extremely important qualification because caller ID in Dead Donkey could not strictly speaking be relied upon. The entire phone system was something of a mess, what with the telephone operators coming and going and accidentally connecting you to the garbage company when you wanted the fire department and the Governor of Nevada when you wanted to speak to your mother, etc, and it was all very confusing and annoying because the Governor of Nevada was almost never your mother and the garbage company only did a marginally better job of putting out fires than the fire department. But at the moment, the phone indicated it was receiving a call from Ern’s wife.
“I’m not really paid enough to answer phone calls from my wife,” Ern said.
Nathan gave Ern a very critical look. The phone eventually stopped ringing and a text message dinged its way onto the screen.
“She’s sent you a text message,” Nathan said. “It says she wants you to pick up your children from Muleball practice.”
“I’m not paid enough to pick up my children,” Ern replied.
“If you’re going to be so sour about everything, I think you’d better just kill me and leave,” Nathan said. “I have a lot of things to do today, like my laundry, and I also need to finish watching the news, and I don’t really want to have my time wasted by someone who can’t be bothered to answer his own cell phone. Come on. Go ahead and kill me.”
With a sigh, Ernie took a pistol out of his jacket and loaded it, but he held it loose in his hands and pointed it downwards, like he couldn’t muster the energy to kill Nathan.
“It’s just all so depressing,” Ern continued. “All I do is kill, kill, kill and I’m really not paid enough. If you chip in an extra twenty dollars, I’ll kill you.”
Now Nathan was getting very seriously annoyed. He sat back down heavily in one of his less green chairs and crossed his arms.
“I’m not going to pay you anything to kill me.”
Ern shrugged his shoulders and holstered his pistol.
“Fine,” he said. “Then I won’t do it. Stay alive. See if I care. Oh, but please do me a favor, and if anyone asks, say you’ve been killed. That will make things much easier for me in the future.”
Nathan decided that what this new serial killer needed was a darn good talking to. A sort of a pep talk.
“Look here,” he started. “What you have is an attitude problem. My old serial killer was always cheery, and friendly, and perfectly polite and positive. Do you know why? It’s because he loved serial killing, ever since he was a little serial killer. He was passionate about his work. He didn’t sort of mope around complaining about how much or how little he was being paid. He just killed me, and he did it with a smile on his face. Have you ever tried smiling?”
“I am not really paid enough-”
“-to smile, no of course not. People don’t smile because they’re paid to, Ernie. They smile because they’re happy, and they’ve learned to appreciate and enjoy the finer things in life. It’s an expression of joy! Come on now. Smile.”
Slowly, timorously, Ern broke into an awkward smile.
“That’s it,” Nathan said, smiling back. “Now take some pride in your work. You’re a serial killer, for goodness’ sake. One of the cornerstones of Dead Donkey. A pillar of society! Who will put us on the map if we don’t have serial killers to give us the highest murder rate in the country? It’s a labor of love. Now, whip out your pistol and kill me.”
Though he was smiling, Nathan had yet to uncross his arms. Ernie reached down and pulled his gun out of its holster and looked at it querulously. Nathan gave him an encouraging nod.
“There you go,” Nathan said. “Just put it to my head and shoot me.”
Ernie, still looking at the weapon skeptically, slowly put it to Nathan’s head. He pulled the trigger. It
clicked slightly, but nothing happened.
“Safety,” Nathan reminded him.
“Oh, thank you,” Ernie said bashfully, and flipped off the safety. He put the gun back against Nathan’s temple.
“Now do you feel better?” Nathan asked him.
“Yes, actually,” Ern said with a small grin. “I feel a lot better. Thanks! You know, you’re very different from all the other people I’ve murdered.”
“I hear that a lot,” Nathan said.
Then Ernie pulled the trigger and shot him. Nathan crumpled down onto the ground, dead, though before he died he felt happy and secure in the knowledge that he had done something good today.
Chapter 2
Nathan was standing in a sea of unending, whirling, absolute darkness. Yes, yes, the infinite, whirling, absolute darkness. He’d seen all this before. He had to get a move on - he had a schedule to keep, but if there was one thing about bureaucracy it never moved nearly as fast as you wanted it to. Finally, he heard the chime and the sound of a voice over an intercom.
“Station Number Four, please,” the voice said.
Then Nathan materialized (or did everything materialize around Nathan?) in a room that solely consisted of a large, square desk piled high with folders and forms, on the very tip-top of which rested a little snowglobe paperweight. Behind this desk sat a slightly unattractive frumpy-looking woman with a severe expression and an ugly orange sweater. She wore blocky glasses and her hair was wrapped into a tight bun. She was a very familiar sight to Nathan, but the frumpy woman did not even acknowledge him as he materialized.
“You are dead,” she said crisply, then passed a form towards him that Nathan knew to be a 21B. “Sign here please.”
Her voice was laced with disdain, if not outright hatred. Here was another person who had an attitude problem, as Nathan already knew. He had come to visit Station Number Four many times in the past. This was not Nathan’s first visit to the offices of the bureaucrats of the afterlife and the great office in the sky. Excluding his most recent death, he had to date died a grand total of five times. He had been shot three times (twice by his old serial killer and once by an atheist), once died in a plane crash, and once been crushed by a bathtub while simultaneously dying of stroke and badger attack. Including his most recent death, that made six times. With the exception of the simultaneous bathtub, stroke, and badger attack (for which there was a special desk), each time Nathan had been sent here, to Station Number Four. Over his many deaths he had gotten to know the frumpy woman quite well.
You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) Page 1
