You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please)

by Andrew Stanek

  Harry Goldbug was a famous financier and stock trader on the Dead Donkey stock exchange. Though he made a considerable fortune by defying conventional market wisdom and shorting xylophone fences shortly before the factory burned down, this was never enough for Harry Goldbug. He became a legend in the stock trading world for his subsequent development of new trading techniques. The premise he started with was this: on the floor of the Dead Donkey stock exchange, people made money by shouting ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ and waving little pieces of paper in the air, which somehow ended up changing the amount of money they had. However, in Goldbug’s opinion, this was such a ridiculously trivial task that even a brain-dead sheep could have done it. He devoted much of his time to working tirelessly to invent something between ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ to shout at a broker. Over the course of his thirty year career, Goldbug invented ‘laipep,’ which meant to punch the adjacent broker in the face and steal all his stocks, and ‘blell’ which meant to get extremely drunk and declare yourself to be richer than you were before. Thanks to these marvelous new words he shouted on the floor of the exchange, he very quickly became the richest man in Dead Donkey. A financial collapse that forced the closure of the stock exchange would eventually ensue once people realized that all this blelling and laipep didn’t really mean anything and hadn’t actually created any wealth in any meaningful sense, but Goldbug could not be held accountable because he had died the previous year - crushed to death by all the gold he had collected. His fortune was left to the Dead Donkey University to start an Economics Department on the sole condition they made a solid gold statue of him and put it outside. The design was chosen by his wife, and the finished statue was made of white marble, which the university’s chemistry department certified as being the same as gold.

  “How did you know where this place was?” Brian asked Travis while observing the statue. “I thought you didn’t believe in money.”

  “I don’t,” Travis said quietly. “However, I believe in university economics departments. Who doesn’t?”

  Brian did not appear immediately able to muster a response to this and instead stood quietly as Travis walked into the building first. Nathan floated through the doors, not far behind.

  Almost as soon as they pushed aside the glass double-doors that led into the lobby, a middle-aged man in glasses and a dark jacket immediately ran up to them, waving a piece of paper.

  “I’ve done it!” he said excitedly.

  “What have you done, exactly?” Brian asked. He looked curiously at the waving piece of paper. Bureaucrats like waving pieces of paper.

  “A theoretical basis for downward nominal wage rigidity in terms of economic microfoundations,” the man said excitedly. “The reason that wages don’t go down when unemployment is high - I have been working on it for fifteen years, and I have finally proved it. Here, take it, take it. The whole world will know soon enough! Don’t worry, I have other copies. The math is a little involved but you have to appreciate its elegance, its magnificence, its objective beauty. The proof is perfect, sublime in its perfection, beautiful in its simplicity, the greatest scientific revelation of our lifetimes, no, the greatest since Einstein imagined he sat upon a beam of light and saw the whole universe stand still. This will make me the greatest economist alive! I have to go call Stockholm and claim my Nobel Prize. Excuse me.”

  He hurried off after stuffing the copy of the proof into Brian’s hands. Brian unfolded the paper. It said:

  “People don’t like paycuts.”

  That was all.

  With a sigh, Brian shoved it into a nearby trashcan. He doubted that the researcher would be getting his Nobel Prize any time soon.

  While it was highly probable that Stockholm would reject this proof, Brian was wrong to think that the researcher would not get a Nobel Prize. Tired of what they see as exceptional scientific discrimination against themselves, the scientists of Dead Donkey have created their own Nobel Prize. They have retained the name, “Nobel Prize,” much to the annoyance of the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee and the estate of Alfred Nobel. Dead Donkey also exclusively uses authentic, gold, stolen Nobel Prizes for its awards, further annoying the Swedish Nobel Prize Committee.

  Only a handful of people in the Dead Donkey research communities and intelligentsia have yet to win the singular honor of a Dead Donkey Nobel Prize. So far, one in physics has been awarded to the Dead Donkey space program, even though the rocketeers in question routinely point their rockets in the wrong direction and thus have never reached the height of the commercial jetliners they secretly hope they will hit whenever they launch. However, they have succeeded in making a fairly large and ever-widening crater around the launch site, and their Nobel Prize citation says, “for excellence in the field of failure.” A further prize in chemistry was awarded to a team from the university’s material science department, who pioneered a marvelous new kind of manufacturing process wherein you shout at a lump of iron until it becomes the thing you wanted it to be. It hasn’t worked yet, but the researchers insist it is an emergent technology whose applications are potentially world-changing once commercialization works out the kinks. Therefore, it was only right and proper that the second-ever Dead Donkey Nobel Prize in economics should go to the university economics department for its establishment of the theoretical basis of downward nominal wage rigidity. The first ever Dead Donkey Nobel Prize in economics had, of course, gone to the mayor for his astonishing ability to balance the city’s books. Many have argued that he doesn’t deserve the prize, since his feat required the use of about fifteen lead weights and a shim.

  Brian, who didn’t particularly care about Nobel Prizes, followed a chain of signs that led him to the spacious office of the head of the Economics Department. The sign on his door said, “Professor Berthold Milburn.” Brian pushed open the door and found an office space filled with books - books on the desk, books on the chair, books filling several huge bookcases that blocked the walls and windows from view. Behind the desk and under the various piles of books sat a small man, entirely bald, with a large tome in his hands.

  “Who are you?” he squeaked. “Don’t you know that this is the Economics Department? You can’t just come barging in here. We’re very important and our predictions are correct practically half the time, some of the time, and our science isn’t dismal at all and it is science, and we’re scientists, and who says we’re not?”

  “My name is Brian and I’m a bureaucrat. Although I don’t think you can see him, I’ve come here with a ghost who wants to be returned to his body. We reasoned that the Economics Department was the best place to find someone to do that because all the psychics have been run out of town so we needed to find some other kind of charlatan.”

  “Boy, have you ever come to the right place!” Milburn squeaked, and stood up from behind his desk. “Is the spirit with you now?”

  Nathan had drifted into the room and started innocuously humming another cereal jingle to himself.

  “Yes,” Brian confirmed.

  “Excellent.”

  Milburn walked over to one of his bookcases and pulled out one particular volume: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. He did not read a passage, but instead started to brandish it wildly around the room.

  “I calculate that there is a spirit among us,” he called. “Show yourself, spirit! The power of Smith compels you!”

  He continued to brandish The Wealth of Nations. Travis deftly dodged one of his more wild waves; it was due to an incident involving this very book that Travis did not believe in money.

  Nathan, for his part, smiled benignly at the economist, but this apparently wasn’t the reaction that Milburn was hoping for.

  “Ghosts cannot exist in this world, spirit!” Milburn cried. “It violates the laws of economics. If ghosts existed, they would enter the labor market and compete with the living. We do not observe this so, ipso facto, ghosts do not exist! I demand you show yourself, spirit!”

  “I think this ghost is actually on we
lfare,” Brian advised Milburn.

  “Good point,” Milburn said. “Ghosts would be a drain on our welfare funds, so they do not belong in the world of the living! Show yourself, spirit! Be bound by the laws of economics!”

  Nathan had gone back to actively humming one of the tunes to his cereal jingle. Apparently, Milburn still could not see him because he continued to wave and shout economic postulates at Nathan.

  “Ghosts are without theoretical basis derived from economic microfoundations!” he called. “All the ghost money they inject into the economy would cause inflation due to expansion in the monetary base! Appear before us, spirit. I command you!”

  “I wonder what happened to Mr. Quacks,” Nathan said suddenly. He did not appear to be appearing.

  “If ghosts were to exist in the world of the living, they would impact both aggregate demand and aggregate supply and cause macroeconomic ripples felt across the globe!” Milburn insisted. “You do not belong here, spirit! Show yourself that we may return you to your rightful home!”

  “The whole point of this was so I wouldn’t have to go back to the afterlife,” Nathan said with annoyance. “Unless he means he wants me to go back to my house, which is alright with me, although the window is still broken, and there’s a corpse on the floor, and I haven’t done the laundry yet.”

  Milburn wasn’t giving up.

  “Ectoplasm must have a market price! By the laws of the market, there must be some price I can pay to a bidder to force you to show yourself, spirit. Supply and demand bind you! Show yourself! By the power of the Smith, the Keynes, and the Holy Friedman! Become manifest and appear in the physical plane of existence! Economics controls even you, oh soul of the departed! Show yourself! Show yourself! The power of Smith compels you!”

  There was a bright flash.

  “Aha!” Milburn said, bouncing on the balls of his feet and pointing directly at Nathan. “You have appeared.”

  “Have I?” Nathan replied cheerily.

  “Yes, you have been bound by the laws of economics.”

  “Good,” Nathan said. “Does that mean I can pay my gas bill now? I think I need to pay my gas bill.”

  “Yes,” Milburn agreed.

  “Wonderful,” Nathan exclaimed. “Thanks a lot.” He then tried to sit down in a chair and phased through it. Nathan stared up with annoyance at Milburn.

  “I’m still a ghost,” he said with annoyance.

  “Of course you are,” Milburn agreed. “All I have done is tethered your soul to the physical plane by the powers of economics, thereby allowing others to see and hear you all the time. However, I cannot restore you to life. That is beyond the scope of this department’s budget.”

  “Wait, I thought you said ghosts didn’t exist,” Brian said.

  “That was just economic mumbo-jumbo,” Milburn said dismissively. “It’s not like any of it meant anything. What, did you think economics actually meant anything?” He chuckled.

  “But what should I do to get my body back?” Nathan asked. “I’m very eager to get my body back so I’ll be able to move around and touch things again.”

  “To do that, you need someone to provide you with a literal, physical body for you to inhabit,” Milburn answered. “I suggest you check with the biology department. They might have one or two spares that you could use for the time being.”

  “Might they?” Nathan exclaimed happily. “That’s great news. Thank you very much, Mr. Milburn. You’ve really turned my day around. Things have been so dreary since I was murdered this morning.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Milburn said. “This is what economics departments are for.”

  They thanked him and left.

  “Where are we going?” Brian asked as they exited the doors of the economics department, past the statue of Goldbug and his several girlfriends.

  “The biology department,” Nathan repeated. “That’s where my doctor is. He’ll know what to do. Maybe he even has a body for me. He works in the Milton Prodmany Center For Biological and Biomedical Sciences. ”

  “Not this place again,” Brian groaned, but since he was obliged by duty and vengeance to follow Nathan, he reluctantly moved to cross the grassy field with him, Travis following not far behind.

  Chapter 13

  Medical care in Dead Donkey was not very good, owing to the recent closure of the only hospital in the city. Dead Donkey remained under sanction from the American Medical Association for using last-line antibiotics as ketchup additives and cat litter and for their doctors’ continued insistence on squirting leprosy into the state water supply (often giggling as they did so). As a result, or possibly in retaliation, the Dead Donkey hospital had been compelled to shut down and residents were thereafter forced to get their healthcare from the clique of escaped war criminals and defrocked abattoir butchers that was Dead Donkey University’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences Department. The Department assured all its patients that they were in excellent hands and that they should pay no attention or mind to the long line of undertakers assembled outside the front door, who tried to eagerly push their cards into peoples’ hands as they walked inside.

  Despite the Department’s insistence that their facilities were perfectly able to safely provide healthcare to the masses, anyone actually entering the Milton Prodmany Center would find due cause to doubt this inside. Maybe it was the “Unclaimed” organs in a “Lost and Found” bin on display near the front of the center, or the poster of a man with a lolling tongue next to it with the question “Have you seen this man’s brain?” printed across it, or the fact that every laboratory was equipped with a flamethrower rather than a fire extinguisher.

  None of this was enough to faze Nathan. Nathan got his healthcare from the Department, and the Milton Prodmany Center was exactly where they were headed now. The three men crossed back over the green field together, again passing the religion festival, ducking their way past cultists and atheists as they did. An insistent firebrand preacher intercepted them offering them a pamphlet.

  “DAVE is not just your lord, DAVE is not just your friend, DAVE is your savior, my good people-”

  “Oh, go fill out this form to authorize yourself to boil your head,” Brian said irritably, and threw a piece of paper at the preacher, who looked very taken aback.

  As they passed the edge of the religious festival, they discovered social movements were loitering around the perimeter, trying to pick off stragglers to recruit to their cause.

  “Everyone deserves equal rights and basic human dignity,” one person shouted at them, and tried to hand them more literature. “Join the Sock Puppet Dignity Movement! Sock puppets are people too!”

  Travis politely refused the form.

  “I do not believe in sock puppets,” he said calmly.

  Nathan haphazardly floated through the armed guerrilla fighters of the Pluto Liberation Front and quickly reached the doors of the Milton Prodmany Center. He drifted into the lobby without opening the door.

  Inside, there was a gleaming bust of a confused-looking man with only two teeth and what appeared to be an iguana chewing on his hair. This was the exact same bust that all three men had seen on their last visit to this center, when Nathan was simultaneously killed by a badger, stroke, and falling bathtub.

  Dr. Milton Prodmany was one of Dead Donkey’s most famous scientists. He had won the Dead Donkey Nobel Prize in Biology. He discovered that children dislike being pinched with tweezers and, if given the choice, a lion prefers to eat a stout doused in chili sauce instead of a groundhog seasoned with cinnamon. Dr. Prodmany, now many years deceased, was particularly proud of this second discovery; he’d had to dip a lot of stouts in chili sauce to discover that. Unfortunately, it ultimately transpired that he got a lot of chili sauce on himself during these experiments, and thus accidentally made his final discovery: that Dr. Milton Prodmany covered in chili sauce looks the same as a stout covered in chili sauce to a lion.

  Travis caught up with Nathan while he stopped to admire
the bust.

  “Nathan,” he began. “I did have something I wanted to mention. While I understand you don’t want to spend the rest of time as a ghost, and therefore wish to gain a body, gaining a body will make you more vulnerable to the forces of bureaucracy. Right now, you have legally bound Director Fulcher so he can no longer hope to trick you into signing a form, so his only way to teleport you to the afterlife is by tricking you into stepping through a door. However, when you regain your body, if you die for any reason - which, you will forgive me for saying so, you are somewhat prone to doing - then you will return to Decedent Receiving, where you will again be in Fulcher’s power. Are you sure this is entirely wise?”

  “Yes,” Nathan said. “There’s not a whole lot of point in being here in the living world if I don’t have a body. I won’t be able to do any of the things I enjoy, like...”

  He trailed off.

  “Being killed,” Brian suggested tentatively, while filling out a Form 195441 - Notice of Spontaneous Use of Sarcasm behind his back.

  “Like that,” Nathan agreed.

  Travis shrugged his shoulders.

  “If you insist, Nathan, but note that it would be a lot safer on the whole if you remained a ghost. One of the big advantages of being a ghost is that you cannot die as long as you do not inhabit another body.”

  Nathan was not really listening and had already started to float down the corridor that he thought might be towards his doctor’s office. He was wrong, as it happened, and this corridor actually led to the Psychology Department. Due to a recent string of unfortunate budget increases, the Psychology Department was forced to share the Milton Prodmany center with the Biological and Biomedical Sciences Department. They weren’t very happy about this because it prevented them from doing their psychology on the street, where they felt it belonged, and many thought they had sold out and become less real by taking up in their fancy-pantsed offices. The psychologists subsequently became locked in a series of bloody turf wars with the neurobiologists until the janitors intervened to put a stop to the fighting and separated the departments, leaving the psychologists free to do their work in peace but with a vague, untraceable desire for revenge that they could never quite get rid of.