You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please)

by Andrew Stanek

  Dead Donkey park had been built as a people trap. The designers of the city had, as Nathan had done with the office plants, noticed that people had an unnatural and unhealthy obsession with green grass and foliage, and planned the municipal park as a way to attract people to the center of the city for downright evil events, like mass muggings and/or Muleball tournaments. However, the Dead Donkey park had recently gained an even more sinister purpose following the ground-shaking, heroic shelling of city hall by the US Marines. Following the destruction of that building, the mayor had relocated his office to the public park urinals, essentially transforming the park into a center of political activity. Now local politicians and their cronies, surrogates, and cultist-like believers patrolled the park in greater force than the police ever would have done, even if the police had been competent, and accosted random joggers, duck-feeders, and children and demanded support from them. They were constantly annoying the civilians and creating rings of political pamphlets in the grass to stake out their territory and defend it from encroachment by any rival activists. Worse still, Dead Donkey’s politicians themselves had on occasion been known to visit the park.

  Of course, you should never relax in any part of Dead Donkey, but you should especially never relax around the politicians, lest they trick you into voting for them.

  Brian, who did not know this, made the near-fatal mistake of wandering off towards the pond to start demanding tax returns from local geese. He was almost immediately spotted by a pamphlet-bearer, who rushed up to him with arms full of reading material. The political surrogate ran straight through Nathan (which Nathan thought was quite impolite; just because he was a ghost didn’t mean it was fair to ignore him) and tapped Brian on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, sir, are you planning to vote this month? And if so can we count on your support for The Smiley Face Painted On A Bus for mayor?”

  “No.”

  The activist’s face darkened considerably.

  “Well then, would you care to spare a moment of your time to listen to Mr. Smiley’s platform?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  Brian frowned in annoyance.

  “I am not a resident or a voter in this city. I am only here because I am a bureaucrat escorting a ghost for vocational and revenge-related purposes.”

  “Look pal, we’re all escorting ghosts that we’re trying to take revenge on,” she said dismissively. “That just comes with the territory, but you have to take an interest in what happens around the city! The mayor has failed the city, and it’s time for a change. Mr. Smiley is the only candidate who offers us a real choice. If you don’t vote for Mr. Smiley, think of what could happen to you personally. You could end up like the haberdashers.”

  A haberdasher is someone who sells men’s clothing. They represented a very powerful political block who had, nevertheless, failed to realize that the mayor was about to stab them in the back. The mayor was re-elected in part with the support of the haberdashers at the last election and subsequently banned haberdashery within the city limits of Dead Donkey, on the grounds that he didn’t like men who were better dressed than him walking around and making him feel inadequate. Now there are only women’s clothing stores in Dead Donkey, although shrewd buyers can find a tie or a nice men’s jacket and trousers from the more unscrupulous black market dealers. The best illegal haberdashery dealer in Dead Donkey is in the back alley off of Fourth Street, between Jermaine’s bank and the muggers’ union offices. Ask for Stylish Steve.

  Brian, who still did not know any of this, brushed off the suggestion.

  “I am not registered to vote.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to register to vote in this city,” the Smiley campaigner replied.

  Brian looked quizzically at her.

  “Then how do you know if someone has voted twice? Do you take down their names and details as they vote?”

  “No,” the woman said cheerily. “The polling worker will just sprain one of your ankles for you so you don’t want to vote again.”

  With a tsking, ‘I might have known’ kind of a noise, Brian shrugged his shoulders and turned away from her.

  “Regardless, I’m not likely to vote. Please leave me alone. I’m looking after a ghost right now, and he’s a particularly stupid ghost, so I don’t have time to waste on local politics.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t giving you a choice,” the campaign worker said cheerily, and pulled a knife on him.

  Fortunately for Brian, he noticed Nathan over by the edge of the pond and started to walk towards him at just the same time that the campaigner lunged at him. She subsequently missed and fell face-first into the water, where she was immediately attacked by savage ducks.

  Two men walked past the pool on their way from the basketball court to the bathrooms.

  “I lost another game,” one man said with dejection. (This was actually the same man named Vincent who had lost a game of basketball earlier.)

  “That’s okay,” the other said.

  With a start, both men noticed the political activist struggling with the ducks. They did not move to help her.

  From some distance away, Nathan watched the campaigner try to fight off the waterfowl. He briefly remembered how Travis Erwin Habsworth (a man of very strong not-beliefs who Nathan had met previously) had once warned him that Dead Donkey was a very violent city. Nathan had disagreed with him at first, but ever since Travis had told him that, he’d started to see violence everywhere. He supposed it was like the arrow in the Fedex logo; you could go years without noticing it, but once you did see it you could never stop seeing it.

  The psychological illusion wherein something you have just noticed suddenly appears everywhere is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion or frequency bias. This is not what was afflicting Nathan; violence actually was everywhere in Dead Donkey.

  Brian walked over to Nathan and straightened his off-brown collar.

  “What was that about?” Nathan asked.

  “She was asking me to vote for the smiley face painted on the side of a bus,” Brian informed him.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t do that,” Nathan answered. “There are a lot of horrible rumors going around about Smiley Face. They say he has a drug problem, and he’s being unfaithful to his wife, Mrs. Smiley Face. He’s in third place in the polls right now. I guess you never really know if these nasty rumors about candidates are true or not because they can be made up by opponents, but I never trusted that Smiley. He looked shifty to me.”

  “And you support the corpse, who is trailing the incumbent mayor?”

  “Yes,” Nathan agreed exuberantly. “The corpse has slumped in the polls recently because they say he has ties to organized crime, but I’m confident he’ll get back on his feet. Corpses always do.”

  Brian sighed and did not bother to correct Nathan, whose experiences being dead were very different from those of other people.

  At this point, politically-minded readers are no doubt wondering why someone more suitable does not run for office. You might ask, given that the city’s Contingencies Office is currently planning an emergency street party in case of the sudden death of the deeply unpopular mayor, why someone better than a philandering smiley face and the corpse of a suspected mafioso can’t be found to oppose him.

  The answer is in two parts. First, there really isn’t anyone better in the city to begin with. Second, even if there was, an innovation from Dead Donkey university’s finest mad scientists has barred all but the thickest-skinned and strongest-willed candidates from standing for office.

  Permit me to explain. Some years ago, around the time that the current mayor was first being elected to public office, there were dozens of candidates for mayor, and each was more sleazy and inscrutable than the last. Each represented a very specific slice of Dead Donkey society: the arsonists, the blind, the muggers, the Muleball Players, the xylophone fence manufacturers, the drinkers, the gamblers, the Pluto Libe
ration Front, and so on. However, in order to get the edge on all the others in the election, each candidate sought to broaden his base of support. Each in his turn therefore started to insist that he deeply empathized with the other groups outside his base, and that he cared about their stupid problems and worthless lives on a core emotional level - in other words, that he felt their pain. The voters of Dead Donkey are a canny bunch, what with the high level of constant paranoia they maintain at all times, and suspected that this was all a bunch of insincere claptrap. However, with all the candidates insisting that they felt their pain, the people didn’t know who to vote for.

  The election was tipped by a breakthrough at Dead Donkey University when Prof. Jasper Panderwell of the Political Science Department (political science being the branch of science where you stuff elected officials into test tubes and centrifuge them to separate out their policy views) came up with a brilliant idea. Since all these candidates were saying they felt the pain of their constituents, the University would construct a machine that actually made the candidates feel the pain of their constituents.

  After much consultation with the machine shop, the Physics Department (who had taken over from the Engineering Department after a recent coup), and the History Department, the political scientists finally assembled their machine. They proudly unveiled it to the public in the very park where Brian was standing. It looked something like one of those amusement park rides that goes straight up and then down again, except smaller: that is, it had a long, tall antenna-like protrusion shooting up into the air, and around it there were a number of seats with metal bars that came down over the politician’s chest to restrain him in place. The seats did not go up and down the antenna. The purpose of the antenna was to detect and monitor the level of pain of all people in the city of Dead Donkey in real time. Then, a series of instruments like electric stun guns, cattle prods, pummeling arms, heavy weights, and sharp knives would administer corresponding levels of pain to the politicians who were strapped into the chairs.

  When it was tested on the mayoral candidates, it transpired that most of them had not, up to that point, been feeling the pain of their constituents and in fact generally passed out when they did. By the time most had regained consciousness, the people of Dead Donkey had voted that politicians had to receive periodic sessions with the Empathy Machine, to ensure that no politicians would ever get so disconnected from their constituents’ pain again. In the stampede that followed, most of the mayoral candidates quit the race. The only one who remained was the mayor, who was much too drunk and stubborn to be bothered by the pain of his constituents. He became the mayor by default and has remained the mayor ever since.

  The only people who are able to oppose him in running for office are, therefore, the ones who can prove they have real empathy with the voters. In subsequent tests with the Empathy Machine, it turned out that inanimate objects were the most empathetic of all, since they could bear the highest level of constituent pain. However, none has yet to defeat the incumbent mayor.

  But that’s democracy for you.

  Nathan was not thinking about this. He had just noticed a group of ducks near the edge of the pond and decided he wanted to catch one. Without their noticing, he approached them stealthily.

  One of the principle advantages of being a ghost - some would go so far as to say the single greatest advantage - is that it makes it much easier to catch ducks. Before he was a ghost, Nathan had tried to catch ducks many times, but they had always run away from him. Now that he was intangible, the ducks could no longer see, smell, hear, feel, taste, or use their duck telepathy to detect Nathan and subsequently run away from him.

  Nathan sneaked up to the flock, reached down, and then, by applying great concentration, managed to grab one of the ducks. He held it tightly in his arms and then jogged over to Brian.

  “I’m going to name him Mr. Quacks,” Nathan said happily.

  “That’s a pelican, not a duck,” Brian pointed out.

  Indeed, Nathan had grabbed a pelican by mistake. Pelicans are not native to Dead Donkey, but then again neither are ducks.

  “You bureaucrats and your technicalities,” Nathan scoffed. “He’s Mr. Quacks to me.”

  Unbeknownst to Nathan, the pelican’s real name was Lord Wesley Benediktas the Third, Viscount of Ovadyah. He was aware that he had just been picked up and called Mr. Quacks by a ghost because, as it happened, he was a pelican bureaucrat. (Pelicans have bureaucrats even though they don’t have souls; neither do the best bureaucrats.) Lord Wesley Benediktas was a very dignified pelican and felt he deserved to be treated with greater respect than this, but sadly, because he was a pelican and not a duck, he did not possess duck telepathy and therefore had no way of telling Nathan. His attempts to produce the same effect by pecking at Nathan’s arm proved equally fruitless, because Nathan was a ghost.

  To the flock of nearby ducks, it appeared that Lord Wesley was floating without flying. It looked very silly and they all laughed at him and made fun of him telepathically. This did nothing to improve Lord Wesley’s mood.

  “I may regret asking, but why have you caught a pelican?” Brian asked with a sigh.

  “I have always wanted a pet duck,” Nathan said happily as he looked down at Lord Wesley.

  “You still do not have one because that is a pelican.”

  “Oh, they can’t be that different. You’re basically a duck, aren’t you Mr. Quacks?”

  Lord Wesley tried to peck Nathan in the face, which didn’t work either.

  “Aw, he’s trying to kiss me,” Nathan remarked. He had a huge smile on his face. “I’m going to take you home and let you live in the bath with lots of rubber duckies to keep you company and a big, big bag of duck food for you to eat...”

  “Why do you want a pet duck to begin with?” Brian demanded.

  “I am lonely sometimes,” Nathan answered. “But now I don’t have to be lonely any more, do I Mr. Quacks? Because you’ll come live with me.”

  Just then, Nathan was distracted because the two men from the basketball court walked by them again.

  “I lost another game,” Vincent said dejectedly. “I think it’s my fault we keep losing.”

  “In fairness, you are supposed to shoot on the other team’s basket, not your own,” the second man said.

  This distracted Nathan sufficiently that he failed to concentrate on keeping a hold on Lord Wesley, who then phased through his spectral arms. Wesley, realizing that he was free at last, then spread his wings and very quickly sped away into the sky.

  “Wait, no!” Nathan cried, but it was too late. Wesley was already soaring away.

  “Aw, Mr. Quacks,” said Nathan. He looked very unhappy. To assuage his grief, he went over to sit on a park bench, which he fell straight through.

  With a sigh, Nathan turned to Brian.

  “I’m starting to think that being a ghost is a nuisance after all.”

  “Then maybe you should stop wandering around a park, trying to catch a pet duck, and do something about it,” Brian suggested.

  “Can I do something about it? To stop being a ghost?”

  Brian had been waiting for Nathan to ask something exactly like this, as it was all part of his growing plan to get revenge on both Nathan and Director Fulcher.

  “Yes, there is. You need to get a new body to inhabit, but before you can do that, you need to find people among the living who can communicate with you and advise you further. You are a ghost,” he reminded Nathan, who was looking a little bewildered.

  “I would need someone like a psychic to communicate with me then,” Nathan said slowly.

  “A psychic would do nicely,” Brian agreed.

  Nathan shook his head.

  “But there are no psychics in Dead Donkey.”

  There had previously been one psychic in Dead Donkey, a be-turbaned woman with a diadem of false crystal named Madam Mystic. Madam Mystic told fortunes, or more accurately, she told one fortune, because she gave everyone who came to s
ee her the same fortune. Her one fortune went like this: “You will have good fortune so long as you don’t go outside.”

  Since it was impossible not to go outside, particularly since Madam Mystic told fortunes on the street, this was a very safe fortune to tell. However, the mystically inclined people of Dead Donkey eventually caught on that she had given them all the same fortune, and a large crowd of disappointed customers thereafter went to confront her. They were not very impressed when she told them that they’d all made the mistake of going outside, and were therefore going to have bad luck.

  When they demanded to know why she’d given them all the same fortune, Madam Mystic told them that they would have their answer when they could solve the following riddle:

  “I am tall as a tree,

  And short as a bush,

  I will go very far,

  If you give me a push,

  I am known for my height,

  But not for my length,

  And doing my job,

  Requires no great strength.

  What am I?”

  The mob’s members put their heads together and discussed this riddle. When they finally were ready to submit their answer (“a giraffe on roller skates”), they found that Madam Mystic had stolen all their stuff while they were distracted and skipped town a good forty minutes ago. This made her prophecy that they would all have bad luck if they went outside somewhat self-fulfilling. As for the riddle, a giraffe on roller skates is a perfectly valid answer. A cherrypicker with its parking brake off is also a fair response. There are many right answers.

  After that, psychics were banned from the city of Dead Donkey and went the way of the haberdashers. The city now has zero tolerance for psychics and haberdashers, or psychic haberdashers, so there aren’t any to be found within city limits.

  Nathan sat down (once again sinking through the bench) and put on his thinking cap. There weren’t any psychics anywhere in Dead Donkey, so he needed someone like a psychic - in essence, someone who was given everyday problems and returned a lot of intricate mumbo-jumbo and vague, unreliable predictions that they would claim until their dying day were right.