You Are Doomed. (Sign Here Please): You Are Dead., #3

Prologue

Our greatest moral and spiritual leaders have long sought a transcendental experience, something that overcomes our petty cultural, racial, national, and class divides, bridges the vast gulf of understanding that separates us, and unites us all as human. This turns out not to be terribly easy, since anyone who’s ever met a human (and most of us have) knows that we’re an unruly bunch. If you manage to stuff a dozen people into the same room, a process that is itself fraught with hazard and danger, chances are that they won’t even agree on what kind of ice cream flavor they find delicious, much less bigger questions like politics, religion, and economics. Worse still, they’ll start to argue over these ideas, and if enough people are involved, the argument will inevitably devolve into a fight. Yes, mankind loves to fight over land, or resources, or people, or ideas, or ideas about people, or people’s ideas, or just fighting over the last time we fought, or because we used to fight before and we’ve developed a keen sense of nostalgia for the whole process.

This frustrates our greatest moral and spiritual leaders terribly because, if anyone stopped fighting for long enough to think about it, they’d recall that the whole thing started with the leaders trying to come up with an idea to unite people and it all ended up in a great big war. At the point they realize this, our greatest moral and spiritual leaders are usually tempted to go home and just cry into their Nobel Peace Prizes for a few hours. Despite centuries of looking, they have yet to find that transcendental, unifying experience they were looking for, and even if they did, everyone’s too busy fighting over the last time they fought to listen.

But fortunately, as luck would have it, there do exist exactly two transcendental, uniquely human experiences that have the capacity to overcome our petty differences and unify us. Our leaders haven’t found them yet, but if they ever do, it would immediately mean peace on Earth.

The first is that everyone in the entire world likes pie. One of the most fundamental principles of the universe is that everyone likes pie, and all 7.5 billion humans in the world will all individually agree that they like pie and consent to put down their arms and sit down at a table together with their former enemies and share a pie if asked. No one ever seems to ask, though.

The second is that everyone in the entire world has experienced bureaucracy. Everyone, from pizza delivery men in New York City to tractor manufacturers in Minsk to occupants of remote Indonesian fishing villages has to deal with red tape. Even deep in the Amazon, uncontacted tribes of primitive peoples subsisting entirely on wild animals that they hunt with spears are, at this very moment, devising new and ever-more-complicated paperwork to approve requisitions of ever-pointier spears. Bureaucracy is indeed the great unifying experience of human existence.

This is because bureaucrats run reality.

While everyone has already figured out that bureaucrats run reality, they have generally failed to appreciate the scope of the problem. When I say that bureaucrats run reality, I am not talking about a political or a governmental bureaucracy. Rather, I am alluding to the existence of a cosmic bureaucracy: an administration for the universe itself, run from the great governmental offices in the sky, because, beyond the pale of death, there is a vast and well-organized hierarchy of suit-and-tie-wearing professionals who are tasked with operating reality. They do this by signing forms. Every single event in the whole of creation, from the explosions of distant stars to the births of tiny insects, must have its forms filled out properly. Otherwise, it does not happen. Thus, bureaucracy is everywhere.

In fact, the cosmic bureaucracy is responsible for life on Earth. After a few billion years of universal administration, the cosmic bureaucrats found that they couldn’t cope with all the paperwork. So they found a warm, watery, hospitable planet circling a suitable, bright yellow mainline star, and on this planet created a primordial stew of ancient amino acids, lipids, and complex hydrocarbons. It not only won the subsequent primordial cook-off competition but also became the cradle of life, developing into a self-replicating sludge that then became bacteria, eukarya, algae, fish, reptiles, mammals, apes - and finally, humans. The humans then proceeded to foolishly develop politics and government and all the bureaucracy that came along with it. Now, when humans die, they are recruited into the infinitely unfolding ranks of the cosmic bureaucracy, which allows the cosmic bureaucrats to keep the universe running smoothly and confines the paperwork backlog to a meager two, or maybe two and a half, billion years tops, unless there are unforeseen delays, which there almost never are, because nearly all the delays are foreseen.

One of the very few people who knows about all this is Nathan Haynes, formerly resident of Dead Donkey, Nevada. He isn’t one of our great moral and spiritual leaders, though. As you’ll come to appreciate over the course of this book, this is probably for the best.

Chapter 1

Two men were trudging their way down a lonely road in the middle of the Nevada desert, sand crunching beneath their feet as they went.

One of these men was a very tall, middle-aged man with a sharp gaze. He had a certain spark in his bright eyes, and a quiet, determined, dignified presence that marked him as a person to be reckoned with. He was not wearing a tie. His name was Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany. Keep him in mind. We’ll come back to him.

The other was a good-natured, unassuming man who was trying to whistle a cereal jingle except he had forgotten he didn’t know how to whistle. This was Nathan Haynes, formerly lifelong resident of the city of Dead Donkey, Nevada. He was positive and friendly, mostly owing to the large brain lesion he had that left him with no fear of death whatsoever. If it hadn’t been for this brain lesion, he probably wouldn’t have been nearly so good-natured because he had a funny tendency to die frequently. Another man might have been embittered by this, but not Nathan. Part of his personal doctrine was maintaining a sunny outlook on everything. For example, it had been approximately twelve hours since they had left the city of Dead Donkey and in that short time period, Nathan had gotten lost in the desert, was nearly run over by a renegade horde of wild beavers, had been shot at from a helicopter, and was almost crushed by a bathtub for the third time. This kind of thing happens very frequently to Nathan, but he didn’t mind it. He is very accident-prone.

After trudging another few hundred feet, Travis and Nathan came to a small bus stop sitting by the side of the road. Travis and Nathan sat down. There was a brief silence.

The funny thing is, I didn’t think there were beavers in the Nevada desert, Nathan said cheerily, as he inspected a sleeve of his jacket where a rabid beaver had gnawed a hole in the material.

I do not believe in beavers, Travis said with a shrug. Travis Erwin Habsworth was a man of very strong not-beliefs. May I ask why you felt it was necessary to go back to Dead Donkey?

I had forgotten my wallet, Nathan said happily. Also, I had to get this.

He held up a small, unmarked cardboard box.

And what is in there? Travis asked politely.

Nothing much, replied Nathan with continued cheeriness.

Travis bridged his fingers and examined the object shrewdly, but shrugged. There was nothing more to do but wait for the bus to take them to Las Vegas, and from there flee to New York.

For those not familiar with Nathan, some explanation is probably required.

Nathan Haynes has the dubious distinction of having died more times than any other person now alive, largely owing to his stubborn refusal to sign any forms and also his brain lesion, which strips him of any fear of death. Thanks to this lesion, he once happily invited a serial killer into his house. The serial killer promptly shot him. Thereafter, Nathan had been speedily conveyed to the afterlife, where he refused to sign his Form 21B - an essential form for the dying that would have waived any liability to the cosmic bureaucrats and held them harmless for any damages, mental, physical, spiritual, or otherwise, that he might sustain while there. Nathan had continued to refuse to sign despite the pleadings of several managers. Because he might sue them if he were in the afterlife without a waiver, the powerful Director Fulcher - who ran the bureaucrats’ Decedent Receiving and Processing Unit - had sent Nathan back to life. Nathan had died a lot since then and Director Fulcher’s superiors had gotten madder and madder at both Nathan and Fulcher, especially after Nathan had tricked Fulcher into signing a contract that prevented Nathan from signing any more forms. This had only redoubled Fulcher’s determination to put Nathan’s papers in order, though, and Nathan had subsequently been forced to flee his home city of Dead Donkey to put some distance between himself and the agents of bureaucracy that were hunting him in that city. Somewhere along the way, Nathan had met Travis Erwin Habsworth, another powerful anti-bureaucratic figure, and together (largely at Travis’ insistence), Nathan had fled Dead Donkey.

Nathan was not thinking about any of this. He was still thinking about the cereal jingle and all the laundry he had to do. An abrupt wave of homesickness broke over him and he sighed.

I miss Dead Donkey, he said longingly.

Dead Donkey was a city founded when an idiot’s mule keeled over dead above an arsenic mine, Travis informed him.

But I still miss it, Nathan said fervently. The lights-

Those were fires set by arsonists.

The sounds-

Largely gunfire as I remember it.

Life in general-

As I recall, you died eight times in the city in the last few days, including twice yesterday alone, Travis remarked.

But what about love? Nathan asked longingly. I’m leaving the love of my life behind.

You do not, Travis said firmly, have a girlfriend.

Oh, that’s right, Nathan said. I forgot.

Quite alright, Travis replied indifferently. He was a difficult man to upset; he’d once single-handedly brought down the government of Ethiopia and nothing thereafter ever bothered him in the least.

But I had Mr. Quacks, Nathan exclaimed suddenly.

Mr. Quacks was a pelican that Nathan had mistaken for a duck and named Mr. Quacks. Of course, Mr. Quacks was not the pelican’s real name. His real name was Lord Wesley Benediktas the Third, Viscount of Ovadyah.

Mr. Quacks flew away, Travis reminded Nathan.

Right, Nathan said. I forgot about that too. I’m sorry. You see, I have a brain lesion-

Yes, I know, Travis said. You have mentioned it several times.

They lapsed back into silence. The desert wind battered their ankles and ruffled their hair. Nathan started to whistle his cereal jingle, having again forgotten that he couldn’t whistle. Nathan had never been outside the city of Dead Donkey before, so everything was very new and exciting for him, so he was in a particularly good mood. He stared out at a vast strip of sandy nothing and smiled pleasantly. They sure didn’t have nothing like that back in Dead Donkey. In Dead Donkey, the most abundant source of nothing in the city was the schedule in the mayor’s office. The mayor endeavored to do nothing so aggressively he could keep the entire city supplied by himself.

Suddenly, the wind picked up. The sand whirled around them, blowing into their faces like a petulant child. Then, abruptly, a sharp, shiny knife, apparently caught by the gust, zoomed forward straight at Nathan. Fortunately, at just that moment, Nathan spotted a particularly attractive patch of nothing on the ground and leaned forward to inspect it further. He bent down, smiling cheerily at it, and the knife thudded into the bus stop’s glass window behind him.

Travis grabbed the knife and inspected it curiously.

You almost died again, he said. By my count, that’s the fifth time this morning, not counting the time you went back to Dead Donkey, which I am told legally constitutes attempted suicide.

That was very strange, Nathan said, smiling at the knife. I wonder why that keeps happening.

It’s almost as if someone is trying to kill you, Travis remarked.

Travis Erwin Habsworth has a remarkable talent for being both right and wrong at the same time.

It was not true that someone was trying to kill Nathan.

Rather, a lot of someones were trying to kill Nathan.

Chapter 2

The incidents in which Nathan had nearly gotten lost, been shot, stabbed, crushed, and then trampled by a horde of rampaging beavers, were not random. Instead, they were the product of a malevolent intelligence. As was the case with Travis, we will talk more about this later. For now, it’s enough to know that a lot of people were trying to kill Nathan and Nathan, oblivious to the many quite angry people who were trying to kill him, was sitting at the bus stop and whistling benignly. He continued to do this until a bus came by, as tends to happen if you sit at a bus stop for long enough.

This doesn’t happen everywhere. In the city of Dead Donkey, buses will not come regardless of how long you wait at the bus stop owing to the fact that Dead Donkey does not have a public transit system as such. There are a lot of good reasons for this: budgetary constraints, massive corruption at city hall, the huge terms-of-trade crisis owing to the city’s adoption of the Burmese kyat that prevents the import of things like buses, the Great Dead Donkey Traffic Jam, which is in its sixth decade, the fact that all bus drivers in Dead Donkey have gone on strike pre-emptively in case the city ever develops a bus service so they have more bargaining power for better wages, etc.

That said, there are buses in Dead Donkey, but they are never on time and do not stop at bus stops. Instead, they only ever take you to one of two places: the bar or the hospital. This is because after going to the only bar in Dead Donkey, the Lucky Loser, and drinking the battery acid mixed with alka-seltzer they serve there and call ale, you will have to go to the hospital quite a lot of the time. The hospital no longer takes patients since its medical arm was shut down, but you may still have to go there, because that’s where the morgue is.

A short-lived public transport initiative to run the buses to the Mayor’s office proved unprofitable. While the mayor rode the bus to go to the bar enough to justify the route, he fare-hopped and therefore never paid. On the other hand, the bus service initially sold a lot of tickets to concerned/angry/homicidal citizens who needed a quick way to get to the Mayor’s office while they sharpened their knives and loaded their pistols and sharpened their loaded pistol-knives. However, this traffic was brought to an abrupt and sticky end after the city made the extremely poor decision to buy its flags, emblems, and public vehicles from a shady Ba’athist second hand car and political standard dealer. The resulting, famous bombardment of City Hall by the US Marines destroyed the Mayor’s office, an event immortalized by Dead Donkey poet laureate ‘Sandy’ Drexler in this verse:

"The guns have shattered everything,

How is our town to thrive?

But at least the mayor’s dead,

No, crap, he’s still alive."

The Mayor’s office was subsequently relocated to the men’s urinals in the municipal park, a hotspot for criminal and, worse, political activity in Dead Donkey. The hordes of Muleball players and telepathic ducks inspired Drexler to write yet another famous poem about the park:

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

So, feeling adventure’s tug,

I took the one less traveled by,

And that’s how I got mugged."

Drexler was later sued to death by the estate of Robert Frost.

As for the bus stops, the city put them in primarily so the city’s many homeless (like the mayor) would have somewhere to sleep. Highly optimistic city residents still wait at them until the aforementioned muggers helpfully relieve them of their valuables, at which point the residents go home, since they can no longer afford the bus fare that any bus might charge if the city had bus service to its bus stops, which it doesn’t.

Nathan, a life-long resident of Dead Donkey, had therefore never seen a bus before and felt a pang of terrific excitement when it rolled up to the bus stop and braked with a mechanical puff. It was quite a nice bus, Nathan thought, all white and lime green, with blues in some places, with a peeling advertisement on the side all covered with highly creative graffiti. It did not have any back doors, only front doors, which lurched open with a sigh. Nathan climbed the steps excitedly. This must be the adventure that Director Fulcher had told him about. Travis followed him quietly.

At the top of the steps, a surly, beefy bus driver sat behind the wheel. He was wearing one of those old-fashioned caps that they make some bus drivers wear for some reason, which was probably why he looked so angry.

Fare, he demanded as they got on.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in money, Travis said quietly.

And I don’t believe in passengers who don’t pay their fares, the driver said.

Travis shrugged his shoulders.

Then I suppose we will just have to agree to disagree.

The bus driver glared at him.

Nathan, who was enjoying his first time on a bus, interposed himself between the two men.

Now, let’s all be friends, he said cheerily. How much is the fare?

This, if anything, put the bus driver into a worse mood than before. He had a very dull, boring job and he was just starting to look forward to getting to kick someone off of his bus, a practice he enjoyed immensely, when this idiot suddenly had to up and ruin it. The driver adjusted his stupid cap and frowned, but jabbed wordlessly at a fare-paying machine installed at the front of the bus. Nathan paid.

Next stop is in a few miles, the driver said vaguely. After that, there will be no further stops until we reach Las Vegas.

And with that, he pulled the lever to shut the door, undid the brake, and put the bus into gear. It lurched forward.

Travis and Nathan made their way back. Nathan grabbed at one of the hand-holds and looked around at everyone smiling, searching for a seat. No one smiled back.

There were already quite a lot of people on the bus, or so Nathan thought. On his immediate right, a snot-nosed brat and a little girl were sitting there playing video games. In the back, two elderly women were knitting furiously, and not far from there, two full-grown men were arguing in hushed tones. Most of the people around were closer to Nathan, though, and many of them were quite colorfully dressed. There was a single well-dressed man near the front, another man with a priest’s collar, a little, familiar-looking balding man with quick, darting eyes, a rugged fellow in plaid with a big beard, and a man in a poncho who was rapidly muttering to himself. There were no free double-seats, so Nathan and Travis wouldn’t be able to sit together. Nathan sat down next to the man with the poncho.

Hello, Nathan said warmly as he did this.

Did you know that the human body contains six liters of blood? the man said hysterically, staring at Nathan with wild, unblinking eyes.

No, Nathan replied cheerily. That’s very interesting. Six liters, did you say?

This was not, strictly speaking correct. The average human body only contains five liters of blood, but that just goes to show you that you can’t believe everything you hear, particularly not from strangers on a bus.

The wild-eyed man in the poncho reached into his pocket and produced a knife covered in a caked, dripping red substance.

Is that ketchup? Nathan asked cheerily.

Guess again, the poncho man said.

Nathan tried to guess, but he couldn’t imagine off the top of his head anything else dripping and red that would belong on a knife. His mind started to wander and he’d gone back to thinking quite happily about the sandwich he would make himself whenever he got the time and the ingredients he’d use when his new friend interrupted him.

It’s blood from a man I killed yesterday, the poncho man said in a gravelly voice.

What a coincidence! Nathan exclaimed. I died yesterday! What are the odds?

I literally shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, continued the poncho man.

Does that mean you’re a serial killer? Nathan asked with interest. Are you my new serial killer? I’m in the market for a new serial killer.

Nathan had previously had two serial killers, but the last one, Ern, had been very lazy and mopey, and Nathan was glad to find a new one. He couldn’t quite remember why he needed a serial killer, but he was sure it was terribly important somehow.

Yes, the poncho man said. I am a serial killer.

Great, Nathan replied.

Mass panic failed to break out around them at this declaration for the simple reason that no one was listening to them. This was very helpful for Travis because Travis was trying to find somewhere to sit down, and it is quite difficult to find a good seat on a bus while everyone panics. Travis sidled up next to one of the other wild-eyed looking men with a free window seat not far from Nathan. This particular wild-eyed man was small and wearing galoshes and a fisherman’s hat.

May I sit here? Travis asked.

Storm’s a comin’, the fisherman said.

Pardon me? Travis asked politely.

Storm’s a comin’, repeated the fisherman.

We are in the middle of a desert, Travis pointed out.

He says a storm’s coming, said Nathan, with his usual good cheer.

Yes, thank you, Travis said. I did grasp that, but I wanted to know if I could take the seat next to him.

Storm’s a comin’, the fisherman said again.

I think I will find somewhere else to sit, Travis said crisply and moved on. He paused briefly by the two children, who were deeply engrossed in the video games on those handheld video game consoles that all children have. These days, it seems like all parents are willing to buy their children expensive handheld video games systems, or smartphones, or other electronic gadgets that the children use to blot out the world around them. Giving these devices to children is an extremely foolish act on the part of the parents because, if they had any sense at all, the parents would realize that they could just keep the devices for themselves. If they did they would be much happier but, alas, they insist on handing them off to children, which is why adults always seem so down and depressed while children are active and upbeat.

Walking in a short loop around the bus, Travis passed the unaccountably well-dressed man near the front without saying a word, then passed the rugged man in plaid. The man in plaid had a long beard and was clutching a large, long, heavy package with a wooden handle sticking out of one end. This package was occupying an otherwise vacant seat.

May I ask you to move your package so I can sit? Travis asked.

The rugged man stroked his beard.

I don’t think that’s a very good idea, he said.