By far the largest spiritual association in the city now was a church called the Church of Particularly Cynical Atheism (or Particularly Cynical Atheists, if you prefer, they’re too cynical to care which way you put it). Despite its dominant status as the largest atheist church in the city, it was forever at war with smaller atheist churches, like the Association of Atheist Absolutists or the Church of Messianic Atheists, whose differing beliefs about how exactly there was no god were considered heretical in the eyes of the Particularly Cynical Atheists.
The first display booth belonged to the Church of Particularly Cynical Atheism. A large number of students flocked around it while a crew of young men and woman handed out fliers. One woman shoved one into Brian’s hands as he approached in pursuit of Nathan.
“Do you have a moment to talk about atheism?” she asked him brightly.
“No,” Brian said. “I am chasing a very dumb ghost who is probably getting himself lost at this very minute.”
“Particularly Cynical Atheism has the power to change your life,” the woman insisted. “Did you know that existence is a slow, absurd, and meaningless march from the cradle to the grave?”
“Of course I know that, I’m a bureaucrat,” Brian said, and shoved the flier back into the woman’s hands. He couldn’t see Nathan anywhere so he started to march off to the next booth.
“There is no god and accidents have more power over your life than your choices ever will,” the woman called as he retreated.
Brian snorted. The only accidents were bureaucratic mix-ups, and he knew how to file with the Complaints Department if an accident ever influenced his life.
The next of the three largest booths belonged to the followers of Cthulu. Much like the campus map from earlier, their display was written in an incomprehensible language, but unlike the campus map from before, the script curved and curled ominously as Brian looked at it and seemed to darken the bright daylight around it as it glowed with the hue of an impossible color. The only words written in English crowned the top of the booth. They recited the famous couplet from the Necronomicon:
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
The priests of Cthulu who had gathered around the display were wearing strangely heavy robes for such a bright, sunshiny day, and chanted in the same unknown language as their display. Their faces and limbs were shadowed underneath their cloaks, probably because they were Lovecraftian horrors from across the endless abyss that engulfs the stars who worship the timeless alien god of madness. Nearby, one of the priests was talking to a student.
“Plbyl’th yaanh rcadilr brrm’sil yyt ahlebri. Llrtt’wu R’lyeh orgboth hattylms syn’ci hyprot ehdirax beaxla abrx. Wsassss Yog’Sothoth, y qhlu Nog, rplabx rplabx rplabx Cthulu, ari bbm’nu.”
“Naturally,” the student was saying impatiently, “but I’m very concerned about the church’s stance on gay marriage.”
The priest continued to explain in the tongue that gave voice to the Voiceless One, but Brian did not see Nathan anywhere.
The last of the three largest booths belonged to the Cult of Dave. It was very large indeed, having its own stage and speakers, and on the stage a firebrand preacher was shouting to the masses who had gathered to hear him.
“Be righteous and follow Dave’s laws in this life and you will go to DAVE’S HOUSE,” the preacher roared. “Can I get a ‘Dave, heck yeah!’ brothers?”
‘Dave, heck yeah!’ thundered the crowd.
“But sinners against almighty DAVE will be cast down into DAVE’S BASEMENT, where they will be condemned to spend all eternity burning in the fires of DAVE’S WATER HEATER. Can I get a ‘Praise Dave,’ brothers and sisters?”
“Praise Dave,” they echoed.
“I am feelin’ the power today,” the preacher said. “Now let us join hands in prayer to DAVE, because DAVE is good, and DAVE is righteous, and DAVE is just, and DAVE’S HOUSE has an AC in the summer and gas heating in winter, and if we believe, brothers and sisters, I promise you we will see the gates of DAVE’S HOUSE one day, as soon as we can find a bus to take us there. Can I get another ‘Praise Dave’ brothers and sisters?”
As the enraptured congregation continued to hang on the preacher’s every word, a passing Particularly Cynical Atheist barked, “there is no god!” at the gathering.
“No, but there is Dave,” a cultist shouted back.
The Particularly Cynical Atheist rolled his eyes and continued to walk away.
Try as he might, Brian could not locate Nathan in the crowd of cultists either, which meant that he must have been floating somewhere towards one of the smaller booths. Unfortunately, there were so many small booths, representing all of the tiny splinter factions of atheism and wacko cults that the city hosted, that Brian could have searched all day and never found Nathan. Brian had to find Nathan, or he wouldn’t be able to execute his elaborate plan for revenge, but given Nathan’s power to phase through solid objects (such as crowds of people), he would be difficult to locate.
Meanwhile, Nathan had drifted happily over to the booth for the Church of Experimental Atheists while looking for the economics department. The Church of Experimental Atheists believed there couldn’t possibly be a god because they have performed a series of experiments that had disproven his existence. Their experiments mainly went something like this: half of a group of volunteers was given a placebo, while the other half of a group of volunteers were given a pill. If god existed, he probably would have stopped us from doing that, because the pills were poison, ergo there is no god.
Nathan surveyed their literature happily until someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see a smiling, blond woman with painted nails standing not far behind him.
“Hello,” she said chirpily. Her voice sounded artificially high by an octave or two, and Nathan noticed her smile was a little fixed. “Are you lost?”
“Yes, I am,” he admitted. “I am trying to find the economics department. Do you know where it is?”
“I do,” the blond woman said. “I can show you the way. Here, follow me.”
Nathan obediently turned and followed her back to a small tent with a few rickety tables set up inside. The plaque over the door indicated that it was the tent for Existentialism.
“Before you move on to the Economics Department, why don’t you sit down and have a drink?” the woman suggested. “Would you like anything? Coffee? Tea?”
“I’ll have some coffee please,” Nathan said. In truth, he wasn’t thirsty but he didn’t want to seem rude given that this woman was kindly showing him the way to the economics department.
“Coffee it is,” the woman said brightly. She turned and happily made Nathan a cup of tea, not coffee, while humming to herself, then plopped it down onto the table.
“So how was it that you came to be lost?” the woman asked him. “Did you come here to find religion?”
“No,” Nathan said. “I came here looking for the economics department to begin with. I had a problem. Earlier today, I was killed, you see-”
“Oh, you poor dear!” The woman’s voice was heavy with what might have been sympathy.
“-by a serial killer, and he wasn’t very into his job-”
“Absolutely awful,” she continued, patting Nathan sympathetically on the shoulder. “And have you been having a hard time recently?”
“I suppose so. My window was broken and now there’s blood all over my carpet, and people keep calling me to sell me things I don’t want, and now I don’t have a body at all and have turned into a ghost.”
“How terrible,” the woman cooed. “If you’re a ghost you must feel like no one cares about you at all!”
“I guess you could say that,” Nathan agreed cautiously. “I do get the feeling that people are looking right through me. And my car got stuck in a traffic jam.”
“You died and lost your car as well! My goodness, what a bad day you’re having. Well, you don’t have to wor
ry anymore. The economics department is right around the corner. It’s just through that door.”
Nathan blinked. There was a door in the tent. He hadn’t noticed that before. He stood to go through it. With one hand on the door, he paused.
“Say, what is existentialism?” he asked as he opened it.
“Existentialism is a bit difficult to define,” the woman said, breaking into a large, toothy smile. “But loosely put, I’d say it’s the philosophy that living people should be in this world, while dead people should stay in the afterlife, where they belong.”
Then she pushed him. Nathan flailed wildly towards the door, behind which there was an infinite, unending blackness. Nathan was quite sure that this wasn’t the economics department.
In this instant, Nathan realized several things: 1) He was a ghost, so regular people shouldn’t be able to see him, but the woman he was talking to had been able to see him and indeed push him very easily. 2) He had the strangest feeling that he’d had a very similar conversation to the one he’d just had before. Casting his mind around, Nathan remembered that it was much like the first time he’d ever died, when the frumpy woman had sent for her manager. 3) Knowing this, he quickly recognized the woman who had just pushed him towards the portal to the afterlife as Donna, the frumpy woman’s superior and Ian’s subordinate, and therefore someone who reported indirectly to Director Fulcher. 4) Tents did not have doors, but the Bureaucratic Transit Device had the power to create a door that led to almost anywhere. 5) Donna had just assumed a very sharkish smile that reminded Nathan of Director Fulcher’s.
Nathan stumbled and careened, trying to regain his balance, but the trouble with trying to regain your balance when you’re a ghost is that there’s nothing you can grab onto to steady yourself. It is just part of the price you pay for the ability to easily catch ducks and pelicans. Nathan flailed and grabbed at the table but his hand passed right through it, because ghosts need great concentration to grasp something, as opposed to blind panic.
“Goodbye, Mr. Haynes,” Donna said brightly. “Your days of defying statute, putting files out of order, and ignoring your legal obligations are through. You will be imprisoned in the afterlife, and even if you can’t be made to fill out your forms, we will see them filled out one way or another.”
With one last stumbling step, Nathan lost his balance and fell towards the door, the infinite dark of the void, the horribly bureaucratic afterlife looming large over him... but somehow, he never quite fell through it. Just as he was about to hit the threshold of the portal, a strong, steady hand threw the door shut, and the door subsequently vanished. Nathan fell and found himself floating benignly several feet above the ground. He turned and looked up and saw a very tall middle aged man with graying hair, and sharp, bright eyes. This was the man who had thrown the door shut just in the nick of time to save Nathan. He was not wearing a tie.
“You!” Donna exclaimed, her voice rising to almost a shrieking pitch. “What are you doing here? You - you can’t - can’t possibly be-”
“But I am,” the man said calmly. “I am Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany.”
Chapter 12
Travis Erwin Habsworth of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany, is the most feared man in the entire cosmic bureaucracy, principally because of his very strong not-beliefs. He does not believe in many things: airplanes, for example, or Australia, or, as he sometimes demonstrates through off-putting and uncomfortable statements, political correctness. Travis also does not believe in money: that is to say, he literally does not believe that people exchange mass produced portraits of usually-dead people for goods and services. This belief in particular led down a curious intellectual path. Most people believe that money exists and therefore have a very simple explanation for the existence of bureaucracy: bureaucrats exist and create more bureaucracy because they are paid to do so by the government, and otherwise no one in his right mind would ever think of being a bureaucrat. Because Travis did not believe in money, he did not accept this explanation, and subsequently went on a magical globe-trotting journey of discovery to find the cause of bureaucracy. Although this journey was on the whole boring and very disappointing and involved a lot of knife-fighting Buddhist monks and getting drunk with Antarctic penguins and collapsing the government of Ethiopia, and the magical parts frankly weren’t all they were cracked up to be since the sorcerers in question proved to be incompetent, Travis Erwin Habsworth eventually found his answer. He had a spiritual revelation while sitting in the California DMV and realized that the reason bureaucracy exists is because pushing around pieces of paper actually does have the power to change the universe as we know it, and therefore became the first living human - through the application of pure logic - to discover the cosmic bureaucracy.
In the aftermath of this powerful epiphany, Travis decided he didn’t actually like the bureaucrats interfering in his affairs all the time and exercised his free will to sign a far-reaching contract with himself that exempted him from all further bureaucratic regulations, stipulations, rules, forms, statutes, protocols, and so on. This essentially exempts him from many of the laws of the universe, which the bureaucrats aren’t happy about. They gritted and gnashed their teeth, created more forms than ever before, and even instituted a special desk solely to process affairs relating to Mr. Habsworth, but they could not bring him back into line with universal codes. The bureaucrats are forced to unhappily tolerate his existence, unable to influence him in any way, and secretly hope that he falls down and stubs his toe or something.
Travis had previously intervened in Nathan’s affairs and prevented Nathan from being tricked and ensnared by the bureaucrats’ contracts after his second, third, and fourth deaths some time ago, saying as he did that Nathan had the potential to be an even more revolutionary figure than himself. To date Nathan had mainly stayed in his house and watched TV, which isn’t typically how revolutionary figures behave, but then there’s a first time for everything. It seemed he had now returned to save Nathan once again, which is exactly what he did by slamming the door back to the afterlife shut, and subsequently causing it to disappear.
Donna was beside herself with fury. Her eyes had turned cold and hate-filled, and her hands clenched tightly.
“How dare you?” she demanded of Habsworth. “You are interfering with the law and good order of the universe. This man is a ghost! Ghosts do not belong in the world of the living. He must return to the legally designated planes of existence for departed souls.”
“No he must not,” Habsworth said. “The law is an illusion.”
Donna stared furiously at him for a moment, then produced her Bureaucratic Transit Device. The writing on the bottom whirred and spun until it came up, “Decedent Receiving, Manager’s Office.” A door appeared, and Nathan glimpsed the highly familiar infinite blackness beyond before Donna stepped into it and subsequently dissolved into nothing.
Just as she did, Brian burst into the tent, panting. He was just in time to see Donna vanish. His eyes flickered from Habsworth to Nathan.
“You,” he spat at Habsworth.
“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Travis asked, frowning. “Of course I’m me. Who else would I be?”
“Never mind that,” Brian said. “We will deal with your unacceptable anarchism at some later time. It’s as I feared. Director Fulcher has moved up his timetable and decided that he’s going to try to force you back to the afterlife without waiting for you to acquire a body, Nathan. Instead of conspiring to kill you after you regain physical form, which would statutorily send you to receiving and processing, Fulcher has modified the Bureaucratic Transit Devices to be able to open portals to the afterlife from the living world! You will have to be on your guard or you may accidentally walk through a door that’s really a portal, Nathan.”
Nathan was still trying to stand up. It turns out that it’s very difficult for ghosts to stand up once they’ve fallen down, not unlike a very old and enfeebled person. Eventually Nath
an managed to float upright.
“Travis,” he said brightly, at last. “Good to see you again. How did you know I was here?”
“I have been following events with my sticks,” Travis replied. That was all the explanation he gave.
“Oh, that makes sense,” Nathan said.
Travis Habsworth used most of his time and considerable powers to arrange piles of sticks, which occasionally gave him insight into happenings around the world. Nathan did not know this; he was just too confused to ask any further questions.
“I understand that you have become a ghost and are looking for the Economics Department so they can advise you further,” Travis said. “I know where their offices are. Follow me!”
The two men followed Travis out of the tent.
“I see you still have Brian with you,” Travis remarked as they crossed the field, carefully staying away from any further atheists or cultists.
“Yes, I do,” Nathan said. “He’s being much more pleasant this time.”
“Why is that?” Travis asked.
Brian squinted at Travis shrewdly.
“I’m not saying,” he finally answered. “I am not legally obliged to answer you.”
Travis made a disapproving noise. They crossed in front of the university spire, then the chapel (where a wedding that Nathan couldn’t quite see was in progress), then finally arrived in front of the University’s Economics Department building: the Harry Goldbug Department of Economics and Finance. Outside, there was a statue of an ugly, squat, balding man with a clean-shaven chin and upper lip and an array of badly sized gold teeth. He was grinning like an idiot, possibly because two attractive young women were hanging off his arms and kissing him on the cheeks, or possibly because his hands (which were wrapped around the young women) were stuffed with cash. A plaque identified this as Harry Goldbug.
You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) Page 9