You Are Dead.

by Andrew Stanek

  Nathan went back out and waited in the lobby (which looked exactly the same except it did not have the picture of an almond). The first person to come out and join him was not a nurse but Brian. He looked extremely unhappy.

  “What’s wrong?” Nathan asked him.

  “They told me I have obsessive compulsive disorder,” he said with a huff. “As if.” He straightened his tie. “What about you?”

  “Oh, they told me I’m sane,” Nathan said.

  Brian’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair.

  “If you’re sane, what do insane people look like?” he asked.

  Nathan was about to reply when a form materialized in his hands. He stared at it, then handed it to Brian.

  “It’s for you. It says you’re about to receive a notice regarding a memorandum.”

  Brian looked and frowned at it. “Why would they go to all the trouble to send me one of these?” he asked.

  No sooner had he spoken the words than another form appeared in his hands.

  “It’s a notice that I’m about to receive a memorandum,” he said, his frown deepening.

  A third form appeared in his hands.

  “What does it say,” Nathan asked, craning his head to look at it.

  “It says I’m about to get a phone call,” Brian said.

  His pocket began to ring with a slow, functional tune. He fished out an old-looking flip phone.

  “Hello?” he said. There was a pause. “Here? But why? How?”

  He was now looking very upset and somewhat afraid. He wandered out of the room still speaking into the phone, his hand groping at the little satchel he wore that contained a large stack of forms.

  Nathan watched him go with interest, then went back to waiting.

  After a few minutes, a dark-haired male nurse emerged from a side door. From just outside the room, Brian - though he was still on the phone - turned and frowned at the nurse.

  “Here you go,” the nurse said. “Here is the paperwork declaring you sane, and here is your cream. I should explain that this is a topical cream. Apply directly to your brain to get best results.”

  “Thank you,” Nathan said, pocketing the cream.

  The nurse held out a clipboard.

  “Let me explain that this is the paperwork declaring you to be sane,” the nurse said and flipped through several pages to the last page. “Dr. April has already signed, but I’m afraid you need to sign right there.”

  He handed Nathan a pen. Nathan signed.

  As he did this, he simultaneously became aware of several things he hadn’t previously noticed. First, Brian was frowning at the male nurse with a look of recognition in his eyes. Second, the male nurse had a familiar aura of authority and hopelessness about him. And third, he was wearing a tie - a tie done up with the immensely complicated triple Windsor knot.

  “You!” Nathan gasped, springing up. “You’re Ian!”

  Ian was momentarily taken aback, but snatched up the form and grinned broadly. “Yes, Mr. Haynes. Very good. You recognized me. This was a deception. Let me explain that a deception is a trick-”

  “I know what a deception is. What are you doing here?”

  “Ah. I should explain that I was given a temporary body to enter this world for the purpose of deceiving you into thinking I was a nurse and getting you to sign paperwork that you thought would declare you sane, but was actually a 21B. It was Director Fulcher’s plan. I feel I should explain that a plan-”

  “I know what a plan is! That was a dirty trick.”

  “It was,” Ian agreed. “But it doesn’t matter now that you’ve signed the form! Your 21B is all signed and filled out,” he said, patting it appreciatively. “This is the end for you, Mr. Haynes. Now the next time you die your paperwork will be in order.”

  “Noooooo,” Nathan said. “Not that! Anything but that.”

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. Haynes. We have won this round. I should explain winning is the attainment of victory, which is what we have done! You should have known better than to go up against the forces of bureaucracy.”

  No sooner had he said this than the side door opened. Through it walked a middle aged man who Nathan had never seen before. He had dark, somewhat graying hair, and he was tall, very tall, thin and fit. His eyes were determined and powerful, and he had a kind of quiet presence that filled the room. He was not wearing a tie. With unflappable deliberation he walked up to Ian. Ian did not notice him.

  “Now that I have this form my mission here is complete,” Ian continued. “I should explain complete means finished, terminated satisfactorily. Your 21B will be filed and-”

  The newcomer grabbed the form from Ian’s hands and neatly tore it into tiny shreds.

  Ian whipped around.

  “You can’t just do that!” he said to the newcomer, aghast. “Who do you think you are?”

  The new man looked him straight in the eyes.

  “I am Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany.”

  Chapter 19

  Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany, is one of the most singularly extraordinary people to walk the earth, because of one completely unique quality that he possesses. His parents died when he was little, and he was subsequently brought up in foster care. During that upbringing, due to an accident involving an arson, a sociologist, and a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, he does not believe in money.

  There are many people who say that they do not believe in money, by which they usually mean that they think humanity either should use gold as money because gold is very shiny and therefore valuable or else mean humanity shouldn’t use any sort of money at all and should instead work for some utopian notion of a common good. (Funnily, these tend to be the exact opposite sorts of people in all other respects.) This is not what Mr. Habsworth believes. Unlike these other people who say they do not believe in money but actually simply disagree with it, Mr. Habsworth actually does not believe in money. That is, he does not believe money exists. He does not think that people in fact and on a day to day basis exchange pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents on them in return for goods and services. He thinks that people do all the things they do - grow food and cut hedges and build smartphones and whatnot for some as-yet-unidentified and inscrutable reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with pictures of dead Presidents. In his opinion, to the extent that people have to settle debts between themselves, they do so with little pieces of string and pictures of cats on the internet. He decided that this is the only rational reason that there could possibly be so many pictures of cats on the internet. While he is right that this is the only rational reason that there could be so many pictures of cats on the internet, it is not the actual reason that there are so many pictures of cats on the internet, making Mr. Habsworth both right and wrong at the same time. This is something of a trend with him.

  Mr. Habsworth is of course wrong that money does not exist. In fact, owing to his belief that money does not exist, Mr. Habsworth is the second wrongest man alive. The wrongest man alive is Professor Stephen Hawking, formerly Lucasian Professor of Mathematics and now researcher of the Center For Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, periodic contributing lecturer at the California Institute of Technology, etc. He believes that within the universe there are peculiar gravitationally bound singularities called black holes, formed by the collapse of massive bodies, which store and can release information. Professor Hawking believes this so strongly that he has staked money on it (something that Mr. Habsworth refuses to believe he has done). In fact, black holes are not caused by any sort of collapse except for a collapse in the bureaucratic filing system. In short, black holes are where the cosmic bureaucrats who manage reality hide their completed and historical forms. Since they have a quizillion of these, they quickly ran out of space in their storage rooms and needed to invent a new kind of storage system that would allow them to put a substantial fraction of a quizillion forms into an infinitely small
area. So they invented black holes, and to make sure that no one would ever be able to remove forms from the storage areas without the proper authorization forms filled out in triplicate, they made them impossible to leave. Since the forms to remove other forms from black holes are extremely complicated and involve such circuitous relationships as “Form 973970 - Form to Receive a Form 885134,” and “Form 885134 - Form to Receive a Form 973970,” and “Form 617525 - Destroy At Least Two Other Form 617525s To Receive This Form,” it is exceedingly unlikely anyone will ever be able to retrieve information from them. If Prof. Hawking had known this, he would probably have given up on the field of cosmology entirely and started playing badminton. In many ways it’s a pity he didn’t, because he would have won what would have generally been regarded as the greatest upset victory in the history of Olympic badminton and finally furnished the world with ultimate proof that things really are mind over matter.

  But I digress.

  The point is that Mr. Habsworth was wrong. Money does exist even though he believes otherwise, but as will become clear, this completely wrong belief allowed Mr. Habsworth to become very, very right about something else. He has a tremendous predilection for being both right and wrong at the same time.

  Since he did not believe in money, the world confused Mr. Habsworth. Ever since he was a young child he wondered why he could see people doing things that, as far as he was concerned, they had absolutely no reason to do: working jobs, carrying wallets, creating complex financial instruments that gave the recipient regular payments linked to a bundle of home mortgages which were then insured as AAA-backed securities, etc. While people tried to assure him the reasons for these were to make money, to carry money, and because they were idiots respectively, since Mr. Habsworth did not believe in money, he did not believe these explanations. He therefore reasoned that there must be some vast and unseen force that compelled people to do the things they did, one that he as yet could not fathom. He resolved to travel the world to discover this secret reason. This proved to be fairly difficult without believing in money, and turned out to involve a lot of swimming, hitchhiking, and stowing away, but he managed it nevertheless.

  First he went to Ethiopia, which at the time was ruled by a group of deeply unpleasant people called the Derg. The Derg had previously ousted the Emperor of Ethiopia (Haile Selassie I) and now ran the country, and although they weren’t quite sure what they believed, they were very suspicious of this whole “money” thing that people seemed to keep going on about. From the Derg, Mr. Habsworth learned that governments had tremendous capacity to use force at their disposal, but did not necessarily have to use force to make people do as they pleased. Mr. Habsworth then managed to convince the Derg that there was no such thing as money, which was such an important revelation that the Derg collapsed just a few years later, and were in turn replaced by a wholly different group of deeply unpleasant people, who called themselves something else entirely.

  He next travelled to East Asia (that is Travis Habsworth did, not the Derg - they probably would have liked to travel to East Asia if they could but were too busy being shot). There, in East Asia, Mr. Habsworth travelled to the Buddhist monastery on the top of Mt. Falafu, where he stayed for some time. He learned to knife-fight from the Buddhist monks there, but since the Buddhist monks didn’t know how to knife-fight he ultimately didn’t learn much. He also picked up many of their peculiar habits, with his own alterations. For example, he slept on a bed of one giant spike rather than the many the Buddhists preferred. He also learned much about their spiritual beliefs, about eschewing worldly possessions and achieving enlightenment and so on, but he proved not to be very good at either and left.

  Next, he departed for Antarctica. This would prove to be one of his toughest hitchhiking jobs to date but he managed to catch a ride from a friendly passing group of penguins and arrive on the floor of the world, where he saw the wild, unspoiled beauty of nature in all its majestic glory, plus a lot of things penguins did that aren’t shown in nature documentaries because they would offend regular people’s sensibilities. He travelled to the south pole and felt the sting of the rough, katabatic winds on his cheeks as snow whipped through the air. He stood on the spots where the aforementioned antarctic explorers had conspired to go and contemplated why in the name of any almighty there might be anyone who would ever want to come here (he didn’t know about the sled dogs.) He hiked along the Antarctic highway and stealthily observed the scientists of McMurdo station in their natural habitat. After much deliberation, Travis (as the penguins called him) decided that whatever was compelling people to do things must be able to force them to do things they would never think of doing on their own.

  Then Travis hitched a ride to San Francisco with the penguins (who were on a beer run) and sat in the DMV for a while. He had told someone in San Francisco that he was getting tired of hitchhiking and he wanted to get a car, so they’d given him a set of instructions that ended in going to the DMV, but all the preceding instructions involved money so he decided to skip right to the end and do the vehicle registration part even though he didn’t have a vehicle. So he found the nearest branch of the California Department of Motor Vehicles and was given some forms to fill out, and there, as he waited for hours upon hours in the endless lines and was stonewalled by the grim-faced bureaucrats, he sat down on a bench and had a religious experience. He thought about the Derg and the Buddhist monks and the Antarctic and realized he finally understood what was going on in the world. The entire universe was controlled by paperwork. Paperwork possessed not merely administrative function but in fact direct and vast, perhaps infinite power to affect the nature of the world. Behind all this paperwork there must be bureaucrats. People’s lives were being run by a bureaucracy, not a government bureaucracy, but a cosmic bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that instructed people to do all the things he had previously not understood for mysterious and inscrutable reasons of law. He told a clerk about this and he gave Travis more forms to fill out, which in Travis’ opinion pretty much confirmed his view of the whole thing. So, in a very roundabout way, Travis had become both right and wrong. He was totally wrong about the money thing, but he had grasped a truth that no one else ever had.

  And so he emerged from the DMV an enlightened man, and rolled his eyes upward towards the great government office in the sky and declared that at last he understood.

  People nearby ignored him. There are a lot of weirdos in San Francisco.

  So Travis Habsworth hatched a plan. He realized that if the world was controlled by paperwork, he could use this to his advantage. Owing to his extremely strange lifestyle, he had never really made any contracts. He would draft his first contract with himself. The contract said, “The undersigned (Party A) hereby agrees that the undersigned (Party B) will never enter into any other agreement or have any other forms, contracts, paperwork, or bureaucratic instruments of any kind apply to him, and in return Party B agrees to the same provisions.”

  He signed both dotted lines. And with that agreement with himself, Travis was free. From then on, no contract ever applied to him. None of the forms that ruled the lives of other people meant anything to him any longer. The cosmic bureaucrats, who made other peoples’ pens disappear and rocks fall on people’s windscreens, didn’t have any hold over him. He was immune to paperwork.

  The bureaucrats of the next world took note and feared and hated Travis Habsworth, because he was the one person who was beyond their power to influence. His paperwork would never be in order, his forms never in compliance with the required standards, his file never quite full. They would erect a special desk to deal with affairs relating to him and create unique forms revolving around him, but no matter how many forms they signed pertaining to badger attacks and falling bathtubs, nothing ever seemed to affect him. He was the bane of all bureaucracy everywhere, and he threatened the rule of law and good order in the entire universe.

  He used this vast power mainly to arrange small piles of twigs into funny shapes,
then try to arrange a larger pile of twigs into an even funnier shape, and continue much in the same way until he ran out of twigs. This was very cruel to the twigs, who didn’t like being made fun of, but otherwise was relatively benign. The bureaucrats hated him.

  And indeed, Travis Habsworth was the only man in the world who could have walked into that nuthouse on the first floor of the Dead Donkey Milton Prodmany Center, Psychology Department, and torn up a Form 21B duly signed and initialed, as Nathan’s was. And yet this was exactly what he did.

  Chapter 20

  Ian stared at the fragments of ripped paper and gibbered.

  “Y-you can’t do that,” he said. “This is most irregular. I will have to report it to my supervisor.”

  And with that he produced a form, filled it out in duplicate, and popped out of existence.

  Nathan watched him feeling that he’d missed something very important.

  “I have your form,” Travis told him. “Your real form. It says that you’re not insane, just very, very strange.”

  “Oh good,” Nathan said happily, and pocketed the form. “Thank you very much, Mr. Habsworth.”

  “Please, call me Travis. That’s what all penguins call me.”

  Nathan rubbed his feet together and tilted his head in confusion.

  “What do you mean penguins?”

  “Never mind. Ah, I see your friend has finished his phone conversation.”

  Brian walked back into the room and frowned at Travis.

  “You,” he said. His tone was accusatory.

  “Me,” Travis agreed. “I am Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany.”

  “Is this 2388 Shillington Road, Albany?” Brian demanded.

  “No.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I came here to disrupt your evil plans to trick this innocent man into signing a contract against his will.” He gestured to Nathan.