You Are Dead. [Sign Here Please]

by Andrew Stanek

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

  Nathan was barely listening; the jingle had started up in his head again.

  “I had just gotten a phone call saying that Ian was going to - induce - Nathan to sign his forms, but that you were on the way to stop him.”

  “Ah. Why didn’t you stop me?”

  “I did not receive the proper forms. I needed a 937832 - Authorization To Intervene In An Incident Involving Travis Erwin Habsworth.”

  “I see,” Travis said with a nod. “Let this be a lesson to you, Nathan. The principal weakness of the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.”

  Nathan still wasn’t listening. The jingle had just gotten to the best part.

  “We have to get you out of here,” Travis said to Nathan. “Due to the circumstances surrounding your repeated deaths, you have the capacity to become an even more revolutionary figure than me.”

  Nathan’s jingle ended.

  “Oh. That sounds important,” he said brightly. “What should I do?”

  Travis checked his watch, which was in such bad shape that it looked like he’d stolen it from a hobo.

  “I stole it from a hobo,” Travis explained as he checked it. “I suggest we go get some afternoon coffee. There is a coffee shop I like downtown. Let’s go.”

  He led them out of the laboratory. They exited the building, interrupted only briefly by Dr. Vegatillius, who was trying to lug Nathan’s previous dead body into a room labelled “Musical Studies.”

  “I have my eye on you,” Brian warned Travis as they walked off the university campus. “You won’t get away with this. Director Fulcher won’t stand for it.”

  “He will have to stand for it,” Travis said calmly. “The bureaucrats,” he confided in Nathan, “have vast power. I would go so far as to say that they have infinite power. However, they can only use it in conformity with the universal laws, of which they are the executors. Therefore, they - at the same time - have virtually no power whatsoever. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Not at all,” Nathan said cheerily.

  “Take gravity, for instance. Gravity causes objects to fall to Earth. Every such instance of an object falling to Earth requires paperwork. The bureaucrats who control reality could refuse to file this paperwork and then objects would not fall, but the law instructs that they must file the gravity forms. In a sense their whole purpose for existing is to fill out the gravity forms. Thus they have vast power and at the same time none at all. Now do you understand?”

  Nathan wasn’t listening again. They had just rounded a corner to find a half dozen men beating a single man on the ground with hefty sticks.

  “Are you playing Muleball?” Nathan asked, remembering the last time they had seen this.

  “Oh no, I’m just being mugged,” the man on the ground said. “Don’t mind me.”

  One of the muggers approached Travis.

  “Give us your money,” he demanded.

  “I’m sorry. Money doesn’t exist,” Travis said apologetically. He gave the mugger a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and walked on.

  “We shouldn’t be with this man,” Brian hissed to Nathan. “You don’t know him. He’s an anarchist. A dissident. A madman. He put the entire legal department into complete disarray. I heard that he once exited the country without a passport or a visa.”

  “The critical thing to understand is that all paperwork is simply a manifestation of bureaucracy,” Travis said calmly. “That is what I have come to realize.”

  “I parked somewhere around here,” Nathan said suddenly.

  He wandered around until he found the car he’d borrowed from his neighbor, quickly broke into it, and drove off. Travis gave him directions on where to go. Though the directions were very strange like, “go a block forward, then a block back,” and “close your eyes and turn left,” Nathan suddenly found that he was sitting in front of a small coffee shop in downtown Dead Donkey that he had never seen before.

  Brian’s expression darkened, but he said nothing. He had a strange gleam in his eye.

  The three men got out of the car and went into the coffee shop.

  It was unlike any of the coffee shops Nathan had been in before. There were several small, trendy tables, and Nathan sat down at one. A blonde waitress walked up to them.

  “Hello and welcome,” she said brightly. “Can I get you something?”

  “Nothing for me,” Brian said stiffly.

  Nathan squinted at the menu of coffee and pastries. He had expected the prices to be highway robbery, but instead they were figures he associated with the prices of Burmese penny stocks.

  “I’d like some kind of coffee and a bagel, I suppose,” he said.

  “Of course, hun,” the waitress said, scratching it down. “And for you?” she asked Travis.

  “I’d like a coffee as black as-” (what he uttered next reached a level of racism so shocking it would have made even the whitest veterans of the Rhodesian Bush War blush.)

  “One black coffee, coming up,” the waitress said awkwardly, and turned and walked away.

  Brian and Nathan were staring at Travis, stunned.

  “Have I mentioned that I’ve been to Ethiopia?” Travis said calmly.

  The waitress quickly returned.

  “Coffee for you two and a bagel for you dear,” she said to Nathan, smiling at him.

  Nathan thanked her and started to nibble on his bagel.

  “Now, down to business,” Travis said as he sipped his black coffee. “We need to get you out of the city, Nathan.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for a start, it’s not a very nice city.”

  “I disagree,” Nathan said, looking out the cafe window at the scenic arson across the street.

  “Yes, well, it also has someone in it who is trying to kill you. Somehow, the serial killer who murdered you twice has learned that you are still alive, and he is determined to finish you.”

  “Oh good,” Nathan said cheerily. “I think he’d be very disappointed if he told everyone he’d killed me, then found out later that he was wrong. It would be very embarrassing for him. He was such a nice serial killer.”

  “I believe the man you have just described as ‘such a nice serial killer,’ has a million-dollar reward associated with him, pooled by the various members of his victims’ families and several police departments,” Brian piped in.

  “Does he get the reward if he kills enough people?” Nathan asked.

  Travis held his head in his hands.

  Nathan started to sip the coffee. It was coffee in approximately the same sense that asbestos is a food, or bongo player is a job. On the plus side, Nathan felt it would serve very well as a laundry detergent. Remembering that he still hadn’t done his laundry, he asked for his coffee to go.

  “There you go, dear,” the waitress said sympathetically as she handed the coffee to Nathan in a little cardboard cup and tray. He thanked her.

  Meanwhile, Travis had recovered and went back to sipping his coffee as if it were a liquid, which it decidedly wasn’t. In fact, it was a previously unobserved form of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate, but since there’s never a physicist around when you need one, it would remain unobserved for another fifty-three years, at which time the Dead Donkey physics department head would wander (very drunk) into this cafe one night and order something to drink.

  Brian was silently playing a game that bureaucrats like to play when they’re out, wherein he mentally documented the number of reportable zoning, labor, and health code violations that he could see from where he was sitting. So far he’d spotted three hundred and thirty four. While he would have liked to get some forms out of his satchel and start writing them all down, the point of the game was to fill out as much paperwork in one’s own mind as possible without resorting to pen and paper. If he’d gotten out some forms it would have ruined the fun.

  Nathan had forgott
en why they’d come here and for some few minutes quite happily thought about his laundry. He had the colored load and the white load, but he suspected he would have to put the white load in with some bleach because of how bloodstained it had all gotten, owing to today’s events. Still, he was sure he’d read something about how you get blood out with white vinegar, so it would probably be alright.

  Travis coughed to get his attention.

  “The point is that since you have died and come back to life so many times, you are an entirely unique person in the whole history of bureaucracy, Nathan. In that respect you are much like myself. But unlike me, the bureaucrats can utterly destroy you by tricking you into signing your missing form, so it is critically important that we get you to some safe place away from the city. Otherwise your life will be in grave danger.”

  “Good, I’ll stay here,” Nathan said.

  “Your life will be in grave danger!” Travis repeated. “The bureaucrats will eventually induce you to sign the form and then the serial killer will track you down and murder you. Don’t you see?”

  “Take care of this when you’re ready,” the waitress said suddenly. She’d sneaked up on them from behind with her painted nails clutching the bill, which she handed to Travis. “It’ll be $6.80.”

  “I’m sorry, money doesn’t exist,” Travis informed her. He handed her three little pieces of string and a picture of a cat.

  The waitress stared at them, then turned to Nathan expectantly. He was fairly sure that he’d left his wallet in his trouser pocket three corpses ago, but he patted himself down and surprisingly found it exactly where it was supposed to be. Nathan fished it out, slapped down his credit card, and waited.

  “You have a credit card?” Brian said to Nathan with surprise.

  “Oh, it’s not mine,” Nathan said cheerily. “I take them off the dead salesman that Mr. Fletcher guns down back on my street. Then I use them until they stop working.”

  “We have to get you out of the city and away from the bureaucrats,” Travis insisted. “They will be flooding the place by now, and their administrative cunning knows no bounds except those defined by statute.”

  The waitress brought the check and Nathan’s card back. Nathan picked up the pen and moved to sign it.

  “No!” Travis cried, and leapt across the table. “It’s a trick.”

  “What do you mean?” Nathan asked. “I’m just paying... for our...”

  He suddenly realized that the blonde waitress with the painted nails looked extremely familiar.

  “You!” he said suddenly. “Donna!”

  Her face contorted into a look of managerial fury. “How did you know?” she said.

  “Well, for a start, you haven’t changed your face or hair or nails,” Nathan said.

  Donna scowled. “I will see you again, Mr. Haynes. And next time I will get you.” She reached into her bib pocket and pulled out a form, which she hurriedly initialed. Then she dissolved into nothing.

  Nathan blinked and went back to sipping his coffee.

  “Do you see?” Travis said. “Their spies are everywhere.”

  “Brian is a bureaucratic spy,” Nathan said calmly. “He keeps following me.”

  Brian regarded them with a mercilessly bureaucratic stare. It was the kind of look that sent shivers up and down your spine.

  “Yes, but that’s not my point. They have to trick you into signing the form. They’ll try to catch you off your guard, and if you’re not careful they will succeed. Then it’ll be curtains for you! We have to get you out of here. I’ve set up a safe house in Albany.”

  “But that’s very far away,” Nathan protested. “Why can’t I just stay here and go to sleep? I’m very sleepy. This has been an extremely active day for me.”

  “We have to go,” Travis insisted.

  “Oh, very well,” Nathan said with a shrug. “I guess the fastest way to get to Albany would be to go to the airport.”

  For some reason, Travis looked very unhappy with this suggestion, but he shrugged his shoulders and sighed.

  “If that’s what it takes to get you out of the city, then fine, let’s go to the airport.”

  “I’ll drive home and get my things,” Nathan said.

  “No time. Let’s go.”

  Travis grabbed him by the arm and guided him back into the car.

  Nathan did drive to the airport, but he wasn’t particularly happy about it.

  “I don’t see why it would be such a bad thing if I died,” he complained. “I mean, it’s a bit of a nuisance and I don’t really like Director Fulcher shouting at me all the time, but I’ll just come back again.”

  “I’ve tried to explain. It’s not the dying that’s important. It’s that the bureaucrats will eventually get you to sign a form, then the serial killer will finish you off.” Travis frowned. “I have been following all these proceedings with my twigs.”

  “Hmm?”

  “My twigs - I can use them - nevermind, I’ll explain later. But there is something very odd about all this. Let’s just focus on getting to the airport.”

  In the back seat, Brian was smiling. Bureaucrats like airports. There is an immense amount of bureaucracy involved with flying, from the ticket to the boarding pass to the security checks to those signs that remind you how much liquid you can take on board. And No Smoking signs and seatbelts and instructions from flight attendants - and FAA aircraft standards and electronic device notices and glorious baggage weight restrictions! Everyone complies with all of them. Where else can you wait in line to present a piece of paper to get in the line that demands people remove aspects of their clothing to enter a waiting area to receive another piece of paper? An airport is, therefore, very, very close to a bureaucrats’ paradise, except that bureaucrats sometimes have to get places in a hurry too, in which case it’s just as much a nightmare for them. As Brian was not in much of a hurry right now, he was smiling.

  However, when they finally got to their destination, Brian was wholly unprepared for - and subsequently horrified by - the state of Dead Donkey’s airport. First, there were no glorious lines, no security checks, no removal of shoes and jackets to receive a statutory scan or uncomfortable poke with a metal stick. The Transportation Security Administration did not administer security checks on Dead Donkey flights, reasoning that any terrorist would have blown himself up simply from passing through Dead Donkey, long before he got to the airport.

  Second, there were no impersonal arrival and departure boards filled with friendly little red LEDs that winked at you and told you whether your flight had been cancelled or merely delayed. This was because Dead Donkey airport was not, strictly speaking, capable of landing large jet liners. Officially, this was because Dead Donkey’s runway was not long enough - but this allegation was not entirely accurate. Dead Donkey’s runway was more than long enough to accommodate any jetliner that the handful of companies that built such things had yet to design or even conceive of.

  The problem dated back to construction. The city of Dead Donkey had always wanted an airport, as the city council had dreamed of luring passenger flights to the city so they could charge them to leave again. But there wasn’t enough room in the city of Dead Donkey itself to build the runway, so they had decided to build it underground. Dead Donkey’s incredibly massive runway therefore ran underneath the city, with a little slanty-uppy bit at the end for airplanes to leave. Consequently, takeoffs and landings could be a bit tricky in Dead Donkey.

  For some reason, commercial airlines refused to service the city of Dead Donkey, even when Dead Donkey had launched its well-publicized campaign to subsidize hijackings to Dead Donkey Intranational Airport. The only people who ever flew out of Dead Donkey were people who had been certified as completely sane by the University Psychology Department, a group of grizzled, bearded, weather-beaten daredevils in leather flying jackets with prosthetic ears and glasses so heavily mirrored they couldn’t see what they were doing. They stood in the lobby of the airport and held up signs w
ith the names of places they wanted to go on them, waiting for passengers to come join them to help subsidize the fuel costs for their elaborately staged suicides.

  Nathan walked up to a man who was smoking a cigar the approximate size of Fidel Castro’s arm. He had an eyepatch over his left nostril and he was wearing a pistol holster with a large stuffed weasel in it, but what had drawn Nathan to him were the words “NEW YORK,” written on his cardboard placard.

  “Can you take us to Albany?” Nathan asked cheerily.

  The man chewed on the end of his cigarette, then puffed some rancid smoke in their faces.

  “I can,” he said with a little cough. “The price is a hundred dollars a seat.”

  Nathan checked his pockets. Then he realized he was still holding the cup of coffee from the cafe and decided to do some savvy haggling.

  “I can give you this cup of coffee instead.”

  The cigar-smoking pilot peered into the murky liquid and took a sip of it. He nodded.

  “This’ll make good fuel,” he said. “I can already taste the lead additive. You’ve got yourself a deal, stranger. Is it just these three people?”

  “I guess so,” Nathan said. “I don’t really want this one to come.” He pointed at Brian.

  “Well that’s okay,” the pilot said. “We’ll kick him off somewhere in the middle. Come on, I’ll show you out to my plane.”

  He guided them through the steel maze of the airport into the underground bunker-hanger where Dead Donkey’s planes were kept before taxi-ing out onto the runway.

  “Here it is,” the pilot said, patting it proudly. “My plane. The Flying Trashcan.”

  Though Nathan was no expert in airplanes, he was not entirely confident of the Flying Trashcan’s airworthiness. Maybe it was because it had an odd number of wings, or the fact that its propellers were clearly made out of floppy rubber rather than wood or metal, or that it had little icons of dead passengers stamped on the side like Luftwaffe fighters, but Nathan didn’t entirely trust the aircraft. Still, he wasn’t a pilot, and he supposed the pilot knew better than he did. It was a lot larger than he expected too. Maybe it could have held thirty people, and surely they wouldn’t have let the pilot have such a big airplane if he didn’t know what he was doing.