You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please)

by Andrew Stanek

  “What happens if a bureaucrat is fired?” Nathan asked.

  Brian did not immediately answer.

  Owing to the quizillion civil-servant-job-protection regulations put in place for exactly this purpose, it is almost impossible to fire a civil servant. Firing a civil servant requires the signatures of thousands if not millions of his superiors of various grades, at least half of whom are likely to be unreachable or uncooperative or dead or never existed at all, which renders the process very difficult. Additionally, there is a review and appellate period of up to 6 billion years during which time the bureaucrat is put on paid leave to compile his case against being fired and dismissed from his position. After this review period, the matter must then be put before an executive tribunal, which never happens because the tribunal executives all hate each other, and will subsequently bend over backwards not to see each other, and if they’re forced to do so will all inevitably disagree and fail to reach the necessary unanimous verdict for the dismissal. If, by some miraculous happenstance, they do all reach a unanimous verdict, then the case is forwarded to Inhuman Resources, who check to make sure that the bureaucrat in question was not in any way discriminated against or had his feelings hurt during the proceedings. After IHR approves, the legal department typically tears up the case on statutory grounds or for fear of a wrongful termination lawsuit, generally centered around how they acquired all those signatures of managers who didn’t exist. Finally, with the legal department’s approval, the matter is sent to a Job Executioner, who signs the final Form 789041E - Order of Involuntary Termination of Employment. Then one million badgers all have to ring tiny bells at the same time. It’s very important that the badgers do this, because if they don’t then none of this counted and they have to start over again. This is all very tedious and time-consuming and is likely the reason that Overdirector Powell walked around threatening to turn people into skulls for her canes rather than threatening to fire them, because a threat to fire them simply is not credible.

  However, in the astronomically unlikely event that a bureaucrat is fired, they do not leave the bureaucratic domain or the cosmic afterlife. Instead, their pens are all snapped and their desks burned. Then, they are simply led to an otherwise empty locked room, which they are placed inside, alone. They remain there for the rest of eternity. Forms are then slowly pushed under the door, one by one, but the bureaucrat cannot fill them out, because he does not have anything to fill them out with. He remains in that locked room for the rest of all time to come, watching the forms pile up ever higher in the room, one by one, but is totally unable to process any of them.

  Generally speaking, this is why bureaucrats quit before they are fired, so they can instead draw a pension and buy a vacation home in the south of France. Failing that, it turns out it is quite easy to escape locked rooms in the afterlife, so fired bureaucrats tend to simply leave. Even so, it is the thought that counts.

  Brian did not tell Nathan any of this.

  “Mind your own business,” he snapped instead. “If we’re going to go to the park then let’s get a move on.”

  “Okay,” Nathan said cheerily, and phased through the door. Brian followed him, leaving the door unlocked as he did so. Nathan started to float towards his neighbor’s car. Nathan’s neighbor was a blind man named Mr. Chamness who Nathan said let him use his car. Brian had always been very suspicious of Nathan’s story, because every time he had seen Nathan ‘borrow’ this vehicle, Nathan had stuck a slim jim down the window, then hotwired the ignition. However, they did not get as far as the car before Nathan stopped dead (literally and metaphorically) on his front step. Sitting there on the pavement was a small package addressed to Nathan.

  “It’s for me,” Nathan observed and bent down and tried to pick it up. It slid through his hands.

  Brian rolled his eyes and picked up the package himself, then tore it open.

  “Hey,” Nathan said. “It’s illegal to open someone else’s mail.”

  Brian stiffened up. This remark had wounded him more than he thought possible - he wasn’t going to sit around being accused of violations of statute by a ghost with half its brain missing.

  “I think you will find that the addressee in this instance is deceased and the applicable statute therefore no longer applies,” he said.

  He reached inside the envelope and pulled out the contents: a single large print-out picture of a man of middling height with dark hair and very heavy eyebrows. The words ‘haunt him’ were scrawled across the picture. There was no further explanation of who this man might be.

  “I think someone might want you to haunt him,” Brian observed. “Who is this?”

  Nathan cocked his head at the picture.

  “I have no idea.”

  Brian studied the picture and the words scrawled across it.

  “But who would know that you’re a ghost?” he asked aloud.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” Nathan said. “It’s my cereal, er, serial killer. He’s the one that killed me so he must know I’m a ghost.”

  “No, but the only people who know you’re a ghost would be bureaucrats,” Brian said, frowning. “Only bureaucrats would know that Director Fulcher planned to refuse to resurrect you again. Anyone else would have just assumed you would come back to life again, as you usually do. There shouldn’t be anyone at all in the world of the living who would realize you would turn into a ghost.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen that man before so maybe they got the wrong ghost,” Nathan said cheerily. “It must be coincidence.”

  He turned back to Mr. Chamness’ car and floated through the side door to sit in the driver’s seat. Brian, remembering he was supposed to be following Nathan, tucked the package into his jacket and then approached the car. Nathan was trying to hotwire the car, very unsuccessfully, because his hands couldn’t grasp the wires. Meanwhile, Brian was examining the car with disapproval. The license plate number was a picture of a volcano followed by an interrobang and a crying emoticon.

  Finally, Nathan unlocked the door and slid over into the passenger-side seat.

  “You will have to drive,” he told Brian. “I can’t touch the steering wheel well enough to do it myself.”

  Since Brian had sworn off pointing out to Nathan that he was a ghost, he did not remark on Nathan’s attempts to do up his seat belt and not spectrally pass through his seat. Instead, he just shrugged his shoulders dejectedly and got into the driver side.

  “Is this vehicle properly insured?” he demanded as he did.

  Nathan stared at him blankly.

  Brian sighed again and, feeling there was no further point complaining, quickly filled out the necessary forms from his satchel, then took the wheel. Nathan had succeeded in hotwiring the car and the engine was running. Brian drove the car down the street. There were several loud, cacophonous gunshots from a nearby house as Brian neared the corner, but he did not let them bother him. He was already familiar with Nathan Haynes’ next door neighbor, Mr. Fletcher, whose civil war with the salespeople who steadily advanced on his house was entering its fifth year and had survived several international attempts to broker a ceasefire. However, he was thrown for a loop at the end of the street, where a large green road sign with the word “Go” was written on it. Brian stopped to stare at it.

  “You’d better get a move on,” Nathan advised him. “It’s illegal to stop at a go sign.”

  Brian drove through it.

  Nathan gave Brian directions, and despite signs that said things like, “unicycle lane,” and “boats only on this road,” and “no trucks under five tons allowed,” he generally managed to navigate until he reached his first traffic light.

  Drivers in Dead Donkey have developed a technique for avoiding stopping at traffic signals. It is called ‘running red lights.’ Virtually everyone in Dead Donkey has adopted this technique and the local police are too cowardly and incompetent to give out tickets (and even if they weren’t, they are all very busy guarding the q-tip factory), so driv
ers in Dead Donkey are not in the habit of stopping at red lights.

  Therefore, the Dead Donkey traffic system works on the principle of trying to scare people into stopping. The traffic signals in Dead Donkey are immensely complicated, consisting of at least seven lights at each intersection, with wild and original colors from violet to infrared emitting from each light, up to four of which can be lit up at any one given time. The point of having all these lights is not to instruct the driver to do anything in particular, because they do not have any specific meaning. Rather, the point is to blind, bewilder, and confuse the drivers of Dead Donkey into stopping when they wouldn’t otherwise be inclined to do so. This system worked more or less perfectly with Brian, who screeched to a halt in front of the light in considerable confusion.

  Nathan quickly explained about the red lights and their subsequent replacement, and how this system was a vast improvement over the previous one where people in monster costumes had been employed as traffic guards to jump out in front of moving cars to startle the drivers into stopping. The old system, he said, had caused a lot of unnecessary bumps and cracks and mess on and in the bumpers and front windshields of the cars.

  “But you can’t just start running red lights,” Brian said, blustering. “If you start running red lights, people might start running yellow lights, then green lights. Where would it end?”

  “You have the navy blue light,” Nathan advised him. “That probably means you can go.”

  Brian accelerated, but suddenly a car shot through a puce, yellow, ultraviolet, and white light right out in front of him.

  “Watch where you’re going, you maniac!” Brian yelled. “What are you, blind?”

  A man with very dark glasses poked his head out the driver’s side window of the other car.

  “Eh? Who said that?” he asked, staring around in confusion.

  Owing to extremely low property prices and the famously musical xylophone fences that put Dead Donkey on the map, the city had a fairly sizable blind community. Being blind was essentially a strategic advantage in Dead Donkey, as the malevolent color scheme of the local buildings couldn’t drive you insane if you couldn’t see them. However, the usual hazards - spontaneous games of Muleball, arsons, murders, and Marine raids still applied regardless of whether you were blind. With that in mind, a pretty large number of blind people had decided that as long as they were going to live in Dead Donkey, they might as well take their chances and try driving a car. A lot of them had always wondered what it was like.

  The blind man doubled his car back, swerved around Brian, and then started off. He clipped a lamppost as he went. From the seat next to him, his seeing eye dog barked.

  “Now don’t you start,” the blind man admonished the dog. He sped down a different street and disappeared.

  Brian took a very deep breath.

  “How many more traffic lights are there going to be before we reach this park?” he demanded.

  “Seven or eight,” Nathan answered.

  “Wonderful,” Brian muttered, and put the car into gear.

  Chapter 8

  Back in the past, when men were men and women were disenfranchised and children were racists, and when you went to school you walked uphill both ways, not that anyone ever left school back in those days, busy as they were being men and walking uphill, not like the lazy kids these days, playing their Facebooks and inviting all their friends to join their lolcats... Anyway, back in the past, people used to wonder, and indeed argue about, whether their whole lives had been pre-determined ahead of time. Particularly, a group called the Calvinists devised a theology wherein they decided that all actions were pre-determined, and therefore no one had any free will. A lot of other people disagreed with them and decided to prove the Calvinists wrong by using their free will to do something totally unexpected, like executing a whole lot of Calvinists. That’s how worked up people used to get over it.

  In point of fact, nothing is pre-determined. To begin with, the cosmic bureaucrats neither have the time or the inclination to pre-determine your entire life, and generally speaking do not fill out forms about the things you do until you have actually done them. For evidence of this simple fact, look no further than the city of Dead Donkey. If people didn’t have free will, either because their actions were pre-determined by god or because they were merely predictable arrangements of chemicals tempered by untold aeons of evolutionary selective pressure (or both), certainly no one would live in the city. No kind and caring god would ever force his beloved creations to suffer through miserable existences in a city named after a dead mule, and evolutionary imperatives would have forced people to flee long ago - or else, never come in the first place. The fact that Dead Donkey exists is proof that free will exists, because the only possible reason that people would ever live in Dead Donkey is the exercise of free will - or, barring that, physical impediments to leaving. (Physical impediments to leaving, among other things, will be discussed in later chapters). The mere existence of Dead Donkey proves that free will exists.

  This means you and all other people do in fact have free will, and can do almost anything you like, for example, immediately punching everyone you meet in the face. That’s not to say that doing this is a good idea, and frankly, the rest of us really wish you would stop doing it. We don’t see why exercises of free will inevitably have to amount to violence. You could use your free will to paint a surrealist picture of a pink wallaby, or take an unexpected vacation to Vanuatu, or go to your local supermarket and buy every greeting card they have in stock and then send them to strangers at random. You don’t have to use your free will to do things that will cause other people to exercise their free will to put you in jail.

  However, if you do not enjoy having free will, recent radical leaps forward in bureaucratic efficiency enable you to elect to have your entire life determined ahead of time. This is done by filling out every form you are likely to use in your entire life. If you feel so inclined, you can request from the bureaucrats a complete set of forms to fill out (which you have to do on your own time). Once the forms arrive, all you have to do is complete them. Doing so will take you the rest of your life, thereby making it pre-determined and utterly devoid of free will or ambiguity amidst the infinite busywork. (The forms themselves are of virtually no consequence, and don’t have to be.)

  One might reasonably wonder why anyone would ever want to pre-determine the rest of their life to be consumed filling out an endless number of bureaucratic forms. Calvinists certainly don’t want to; they don’t believe in bureaucrats.

  The answer is that some people are very bad at dealing with free will, and use it to make fantastically stupid decisions, like engaging themselves in a series of destructive, abusive relationships, or gambling away all their money, or purchasing a timeshare in Florida. Compared to such monstrously bad decisions, the sacrifice of free will in the name of bureaucracy is satisfying and, in a way, almost peaceful.

  Some people might also reasonably wonder if this really constitutes a sacrifice of free will. After all, didn’t you exercise your free will to decide to give it up and pre-determine your entire existence, therefore determining yourself, therefore making the whole experience a manifestation of, rather than a renunciation of, free will? IE: Since you decided to spend your whole life filling out forms, isn’t that just free will too?

  To those people I say: mind your own business.

  Anyway, Nathan Haynes was supremely, masterfully incompetent at making use of his own free will. He had an unfortunate tendency to make a string of terrifically bad decisions that resulted in him ignoring extremely pressing problems like, for example, his ignoring the fact that he had become a ghost in favor of going to the park. If he had any sense at all, Nathan probably would have spent at least a little bit of time contemplating his new ethereal nature rather than, say, visiting his favorite tree. Preferably, he might also have slowed down long enough to think about the immense pressure that Overdirector Powell had put on Director Fulc
her to trap him in the afterlife, and speculate what Director Fulcher’s next move against him might be. However, if Nathan possessed that kind of foresight he would never have gotten himself into this kind of mess in the first place.

  Chapter 9

  When Brian finally reached the Dead Donkey municipal park, he was relieved to find that it looked relatively normal. It was a large, green, sparsely wooded area for people to stroll around in happily. Some portions had lines of very highly normal-looking trees, and other parts had highly normal-looking grass fields. Children played games of soccer and football in the fields and ran happily around the trees while exuberant dogs bounded across the landscape with their owners, sniffing out the good spots to do their business and/or meet other dogs. Kites were flying in the sky above and squirrels benignly harvested nuts on the ground below. Joggers jogged down the footpaths and waved to other joggers whilst periodically checking those things joggers wear on their arms to tell them how much better they are than the joggers they just waved to. On a nearby basketball court, a man named Vincent had just spectacularly lost a game of basketball to a much shorter but faster man. A very blue pond was visible not far away, and swarms of geese, ducks, pigeons, and other local birds flocked around it, drinking from the water and begging crumbs off of the elderly.

  The only things that Brian saw that were remotely out of the ordinary were the signs. They said things like “Littering Mandatory,” and “You must feed the ducks - they will starve if you don’t.” However, even this had a sort of regulatory familiarity about it, and Brian relaxed. By now he should have known better than to relax in the city of Dead Donkey. The only people who survive in Dead Donkey are the types of people who have wild, darting eyes and flinch jerkily and reach for one of the many powerful weapons they carry whenever someone comes within about five yards of them.