You Are Dead. [Sign Here Please]

by Andrew Stanek

  “It’s just that I think my social security number is terribly important for something. I think I have to use it to-”

  “To fill out forms?” Director Fulcher asked, one eyebrow raised.

  “Oh yes, I guess so.”

  “I happened across your 19247-O,” Fulcher continued. As he spoke, a particular form zoomed out of the pile and onto his desk. The heading read, “Form 19247-O: Notice of Behaviors That Represent A Viable Threat To Oneself And Others.”

  “It says here that you failed to regard an armed serial killer as a threat to either yourself or Mr. Dithershoes.”

  “Well, it wasn’t as if he was a stranger. He was a serial killer I knew.”

  “It says you let him kill you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Twice.”

  “He asked very politely, so I didn’t really see why I shouldn’t.”

  Fulcher bridged his knobby fingers and regarded Nathan imperiously.

  “You are completely insane.”

  “Oh good,” Nathan said cheerily. “I was beginning to worry that reality was insane, but if it’s just me then that’s alright.”

  “You are completely insane,” Fulcher repeated, “and I have instructed my subordinates to add a note to that effect in your file.”

  “Isn’t that what this is?” Nathan said looking confusedly at the 19247-O.

  “No. This merely says that you are dangerous. The process to have you flagged as insane involves somewhat more paperwork.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry about that.”

  “Once you are flagged as insane, I will not need you to sign your 21B anymore. It will be signed without you.”

  “What?” Nathan yelled, jumping out of his chair.

  “Yes. I shall be able to sign on your behalf,” Director Fulcher said with a grim smile. “And that will be the end of this little game of ours.”

  “Are we playing a game?” Nathan asked confusedly. “Do you have Monopoly?”

  “I have the monopoly on your future,” Fulcher said.

  “Is that a variant? What are the rules?”

  “Never mind. I still cannot have you here until the paperwork is prepared, so I will send you back in the meantime.”

  Fulcher reached into his desk and produced a new form.

  “Mr. Dithershoes, you will go back with him to keep an eye on him.”

  Brian sat up very straight.

  “Yes, Director Fulcher.”

  Fulcher signed the form before him, and the world winked out of existence again.

  Chapter 11

  Misdirection is a handy tool for anyone who wants to direct attention away from his mistakes. It has been used to great effect by certain Presidential administrations, which have cleverly used the war to distract from the abysmal state of the economy, and simultaneously cleverly used the economy to distract from the abysmal state of the war. Misdirection is also commonly employed by petty shoplifters in convenience stores, who shrewdly attempt to direct attention away from the things they are haphazardly shoving into their bags by waving a gun around in the air and declaring that they are robbing the store. The trick, you see, is to keep attention on the gun and no one will notice the theft. (This is, by coincidence, exactly the same technique as used by the Presidential administrations, only on a smaller scale.)

  Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian General, employed misdirection against the Roman Consul Sempronius Longus at the Battle of Trebia by approaching his enemies while looking up on horseback and then loudly engaging them in conversation about the weather, commenting about the unseasonable warmth for this time of year and how he hoped it didn’t turn into rain some other time because he had this big battle he was hoping to fight. The Romans looked up and were subsequently so preoccupied by the weather that they didn’t notice Hannibal killing them. For this outstanding victory, Hannibal is remembered as the father of strategy, but in truth, he is not its first practitioner.

  The bureaucrats who run reality are masters of misdirection. They would like us to believe they are infallible, and will go to great lengths to maintain the illusion, but the truth is that they aren’t. Take, for example, the case of the Great Superbath of Latifia.

  The Great Superbath of Latifia was one of the most incredible wonders of the ancient world. It was larger than the mightiest of the legendary Pyramids at Giza, involved more inspired ancient engineering than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and provided much more comfort and entertainment to the masses than the Coliseum at Rome.

  In addition to having taken one-hundred-and-fifty million consecutive Sunday afternoons by one-hundred-and-fifty thousand eager Latifian bathers to build, as part of a laborious and (it must be said) immensely stupid building process that involved rolling the tiny pebbles that made up the bath one rock at a time from a quarry five hundred miles away when there was a much more convenient one just down the road, it required an immense amount of paperwork on the parts of the cosmic bureaucrats to maintain. There was the Form 8183982 - Notice of Continued Existence of A Giant Bath - to consider, not to mention the Form 260821 - Declaration of an Element of the Common Heritage of Mankind - but also - and this was the part that really left the cosmic bureaucrats gritting their teeth - the Form 6236091 - Co-Bathing Postulation, which was a form that had to be filled out for every person already in the bath whenever another person entered it. While this was all fine and dandy for a simple bath, or a mother bathing her daughter, or a man bathing his gazelle, it was a ridiculous amount of paperwork for the bureaucrats to file when the entirety of the Latifian civilization hopped into the Great Superbath together, then proceeded to get in and out all the time whenever they remembered they had something they needed to do to maintain the civilization.

  The number of forms that needed to be filled out, which started out at just a total of one for the second person and three for the third person and six for the fourth person soon ballooned to a quizillion, and was further complicated by the Latifian “Let’s all get into and out of the bath in sequence day.”

  Ultimately, despite their incredibly great and much-lauded efficiency, the cosmic bureaucrats were not able to keep their papers in order, and they misfiled a 6236091 as a 6236091A - Form to Enable Someone To Dig Out Their Earwax With A Twig. The result was that all of a sudden the Latifian bath simply ceased to be. All its vast, great pipes and the main aqueducts that it had taken to supply it, the super-water-heaters and the giant megafires, the towering walls and the ultrawaterslides, all vanished in a heartbeat.

  What was left after the screw-up was resolved was a whole lot of very confused bathers who were suddenly sitting on the hard ground.

  The bureaucrats were mortified and immediately began to conceal their mistake by erasing every single bit of the Great Superbaths of Latifia in the historical record, the geological record, the archaeological record, and from human understanding generally. The problem was that the Latifians were walking around telling everyone about how they’d used to have a nice, warm giant superbath that had suddenly disappeared and were generally believed, so after a while the bureaucrats decided they would simply have to do something about the Latifians too and made them all disappear as well. When all the people of classical Europe then began to wonder aloud what had ever happened to the Latifians - the strange but wholly pleasant and affable people who had always seemed to have bathing suits available and invented the rubber ducky before the iron sword, the cosmic bureaucrats decided there was simply nothing else for it and made the entire Latifian homeland disappear. This very effectively distracted everyone from the problem of where the baths had gone since the whole of Latifia had vanished, and is hence a masterstroke in misdirection.

  Over time, the Europeans came to assume that it had been some kind of crazy myth and mostly forgot about Latifia, which we now call Atlantis, though the cultural memories of their vast bath and rubber duckies live on in the stories of their great technological and moral superiority.

  The whole incident sparked an inter
nal review of the bath form filing procedures, the results of which are still pending on the bureaucratic side, and should become available in another 6-to-8 thousand years, though of course delays are possible as thoroughness cannot be sacrificed for the sake of expediency. Since the incident, the bureaucrat responsible has been placed on paid leave, although he has never been able to collect any of the pay he is due because he is still filling out the immensely complicated Form 6624605 - Assessment of the Results of Destroying a Giant Bath Due to Filing Error, and more recently a 1193035 - Explanation of Delay in Filing Bath-Related Assessment.

  Despite the pending review, the bureaucrats were left with a sense of animosity towards giant baths in all their forms after the Latifians disappeared, as the embarrassment of the incident lingers with them. They have subsequently worked to covertly sabotage all giant bath-related projects worldwide, which is the real reason the Roman Empire collapsed. It is also the reason that modern baths require something called grouting, which apparently no other fixture in the house even occasionally requires.

  The point is that bureaucrats don’t like making mistakes, even though they sometimes do, and they don’t like to be made to feel foolish, even though they sometimes are. Nathan Haynes, with his brain damage and his stubborn refusal to put his papers in order, made Director Fulcher and his subordinates feel foolish and - in practical terms - represented a mistake on their part. That’s why they intended to try so very hard to get Nathan to sign his 21B even if he didn’t want to. Practically speaking, there is nothing more abhorrent to a bureaucrat than an unsigned form, except perhaps for a giant bath.

  Chapter 12

  Brian stumbled back and forth a little as he rematerialized in the living world.

  Nathan was looking at his living room with his arms crossed. Both of their previous bodies were laying dead on the floor. He stared at them for a few seconds, then announced, “I have just remembered that I have forgotten to do my laundry.”

  He walked off. Brian stared after him. A washing machine roared to life somewhere down the hall, then Nathan returned, his arms still crossed.

  “My living room is getting very messy,” he said unhappily. “I don’t suppose you know a good carpet cleaner?”

  “No,” Brian answered.

  “Oh dear,” Nathan said, and walked over to the phone. He picked it up off the receiver and dialed three numbers.

  “Hello?” started Nathan. “Yes, I would like to report that I have been murdered again. Just now. Yes- Hello? Hello?” He put the receiver back in its cradle.

  “They hung up,” he explained with disappointment.

  “I can’t imagine why,” Brian said sarcastically.

  “Hold that thought,” Nathan interrupted cheerily. “I’ve just thought of someone else I could call.” He picked the phone back up and dialed some more numbers. “Hello? Guinness Book? I would like to apply for the record of the most number of times anyone has ever been murdered. I have been murdered twice.”

  There was a pause.

  “What do you mean you don’t take that sort of record? No one has been murdered more, have they? And I wonder if you could recommend a good carpet cleaning service. The blood on my... hello? Hello?”

  He put down the receiver again.

  “They hung up as well,” Nathan said unhappily. He looked around the living room. “Well, help me put these bodies outside. You take yours.”

  They both dragged their bodies outside and piled them onto the wheelbarrow, on top of Nathan’s first body.

  As they did this, Brian could not help but ask a question.

  “Why did you let him murder us?”

  “I make it a point to support the city’s murderer community,” Nathan said airily. The murderers were by far the most dynamic criminals in the city ever since the muggers unionized.

  “You are insane,” Brian reported, on returning to Nathan’s living room.

  Nathan thought about this as he sat down in one of his green chairs and reflected on the events of the past few hours.

  “What did Director Fulcher mean about declaring me insane?”

  “Well, if he fills out the appropriate paperwork, he can have you declared insane, meaning you aren’t competent to decide things for yourself. Then he doesn’t need you to sign forms anymore. He can sign them himself.”

  “That doesn’t seem entirely fair,” Nathan said with a frown.

  “We can’t have a load of insane people running around doing... everything you’ve done so far today, basically.”

  “I haven’t really done anything today,” Nathan argued. “I haven’t even finished doing the laundry.”

  Brian emitted an exasperated sigh.

  “It doesn’t really matter, I guess. We can just wait for the Director to finish filling out the paperwork. Then it will all be over. The next time you die, you’ll have to stay dead.”

  “I can’t have that,” Nathan said with a frown. “What if I got a form from my doctor saying that I’m not insane?”

  “That would be strong evidence your doctor is insane as well.”

  Nathan considered this. “No, I think he’s alright. We should go see him.” He stood up, and before Brian realized what he was doing, Nathan had walked out the door.

  Brian followed him out into the yard only to see Nathan apparently stealing his neighbor’s car.

  “What-?” Brian started.

  “I’m just borrowing it,” Nathan assured him as he stuck what appeared to be a slim jim down the driver-side window. “My neighbor on this side is Mr. Chamness. He doesn’t drive very much.”

  Mr. Chamness didn’t drive very much partially because he wasn’t a very good driver, but also because he was blind. He’d therefore told Nathan he could feel free to break into the car and use it whenever he liked, provided that Nathan did a few odd jobs for him, like watering his cat and changing his plants’ litter boxes.

  After a few seconds, Nathan had defeated the anti-theft mechanisms, silenced the car alarm, and slid into the driver’s seat. Brian got into the passenger side.

  “Are we going to the hospital?” Brian asked as Nathan hotwired the ignition.

  “No,” Nathan said cheerily. “My doctor is at the university. The hospital closed recently.”

  “Oh. Why is that?”

  “It turned out it was full of sick people.”

  Brian resolved to spend the rest of the journey in silence. His resolution was severely challenged at the first traffic intersection. While there were a number of peculiar things about this intersection, it wasn’t the fact that the lights were colored purple and pink rather than red or green that surprised him. Neither was it the twisted and rickety, and frankly dangerous-looking architectures that flanked the street. Rather, it was the young man surrounded by a group of thugs on the street corner, being beaten with unpleasant looking sticks.

  The thugs patted the young man down.

  “Is he being mugged?” Brian exclaimed as he watched through the window.

  “No, just playing Muleball,” the young man called back. “Not to worry.”

  Nathan drove on, and Brian returned to stunned silence.

  At the next traffic light, there was a man sitting on the street corner in what appeared to be a stolen child’s lemonade stand, with the colorful words “Lemonade” crossed out and replaced with “Bank” in equally colorful letters. A rather large and terrifying looking black man with several ear piercings was sitting behind the counter. His account register was, on closer inspection, a children’s coloring book. On occasion, as people walked in front of him, he would yell, “Give me your money!” in an extremely insistent way and usually, they did.

  “Who’s that?” Brian asked, looking apprehensively at the man.

  “That’s Jermaine,” Nathan replied cheerily. “He runs the bank.”

  Although it would have taken an extremely shrewd observer to realize it, Jermaine was not actually a banker. His shop was not a bank. In fact, the flimsy particleboard was a c
lever ruse to deceive the unwary into thinking he was a banker, leading them to surrender their money to him. Jermaine himself was a highly successful con artist.

  Most people in Dead Donkey had long since realized this, of course, but they continued to bank with him primarily because he was consistently able to deliver a higher rate of return than most commercial banks, and because of his excellent customer service.

  “I think banks are usually a bit more formal,” Brian said uncertainly. “I’m fairly sure they’re supposed to have offices and forms and things.”

  “We don’t put up with that kind of bureaucracy in Dead Donkey.” They drove for a little while longer. “He also offers insurance policies,” Nathan added as they went.

  “Does he - er - do much insurance business?”

  “No. Sadly, all the valuations for our properties here are negative.”

  This deeply unsettled Brian. He was a bureaucrat, and this chaos and informality that whipped around the city of Dead Donkey like a cold wind through the Eastern Front rattled him deeply. He looked around for something familiar, and his eyes came to rest on a man carrying a large set of books and binders in his arms as he walked down the street. Brian found it somehow calming to watch this man for a while, as he was able to assure himself that the binders contained paperwork, and therefore some semblance of the things Brian was accustomed to.

  In fact, this person was the only man alive who went into restaurants to ask to see the government-mandated health inspector’s reports. He did this because many restaurants - particularly in Dead Donkey - did not have these like they were supposed to and would occasionally offer him bribes or free food to keep him quiet. Brian probably would have been quite troubled if he’d known this, because one of the laws of the universe that he as a bureaucrat was sworn to enforce was that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and if you have ever received a free lunch, karma is bound to turn around and get you sooner or later. (Generally, ‘sooner or later,’ is when the karma desk clears its backlog and files the appropriate 68240A: Instrument of Lunch-Related Retribution.) By coincidence, in the case of this particular man, this karmic redress came exactly as Nathan turned the corner and plunged the man out of sight, at which point he was attacked by a migrating flock of angry geese, who subsequently seized his wallet and took it upon themselves to destroy his credit rating.