“We are very embarrassed by the matter of the fly,” the manager apologized profusely. “I should explain that this has never happened before and unfortunately a fly happened to find its way into the boot after it was simmered and subsequently being chilled. Our restaurant, let me say, has the highest standards of health and safety in the city and has been given an A-rating by the government inspector, who is a man sent by city hall to periodically check the public health qualifications of our establishments. The chef - he is the man who prepares the food - is particularly apologetic and wishes to say he is sorry in person, which is his way of asking for forgiveness.”
“That’s okay,” Nathan said. “I forgive you.”
“I think he would like to hear that from you in person,” the manager said. “Right this way, sayidi.”
He pushed open the door to the kitchen. It was very dark inside the kitchen, and Nathan peered into the blackness to try to see the chef, but there was no chef anywhere. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything at all in the kitchen - just infinite, unending blackness. And a very familiar infinite, unending blackness at that.
“Go on,” the manager said. “He’s waiting for you.”
“Wait a minute,” Nathan said. Several things clicked into his brain all at once - this infinite, unending blackness wasn’t a kitchen at all. Rather, it was part of the veil that separates bureaucracy from the world of the living. Additionally, the manager was a tall excitable man who looked very familiar to Nathan, and his tie was done up in the immensely complicated triple windsor knot. He had an aura of combined authority and hopelessness about him which was commonly found not in managers, but rather in the managers of managers. Finally Nathan recognized him behind his silly fake mustache and realized who he must be.
“You’re Ian,” Nathan exclaimed.
Ian nervously adjusted his mustache.
“I don’t know who you mean, signore. I am the manager. My name is - uh - Not Ian. Why don’t you step into the kitchen so the cook can apologize to you? Let me explain that this is a ruse - oh, whoops, I shouldn’t have said that - I mean this is a French restaurant.”
Nathan was not very impressed with this fumbling.
“You’re not going to trick me into going back into the afterlife by accident again, Ian. I know who you are. And, while you’re here, I have a complaint to make. The third time I died - three deaths ago - I was attacked by a badger on the premises of Director Fulcher’s department. It wouldn’t have happened if Jeanne at the badger-attack, stroke, and bathtub desk had just sent me to Director Fulcher’s office immediately like she was supposed to. That’s my complaint.”
Ian, who was the head of the Complaints Department, winced and tried to stuff his fingers in his ears so he couldn’t hear Nathan’s words, but it was too late.
“Oh dear,” he said finally. “Director Fulcher won’t like this. He won’t like this at all. I will have to go inform him.” Ian grimaced. “I should explain that I don’t at all like informing Director Fulcher of complaints.”
“I know. You already told me that.”
Ian did not respond, but instead produced his little 8-ball and grasped it. He shook it until the words, “Director Fulcher’s Office” appeared, then stepped through the doorway, which subsequently disappeared. Nathan watched him go happily, then returned to his table.
“The manager was actually Ian,” he said.
“I noticed,” Travis remarked. He moved a fork across his plate - the Saxons were regrouping. “I had the utmost confidence that you could handle the situation.”
“You did?” Brian asked. “Why?”
Travis shrugged.
“I complained to Ian about the badger attack, since he’s the head of the complaints department,” Nathan explained.
“Brilliant,” Brian remarked. “Good, good. Yes, under section 109140, subsection b, paragraph 1, of general complaints code 686, a complaint filed verbally and directly with the head of the Complaints Department should be valid, unless anyone complains about it. Now all we have to do now is wait for Ian to fail to respond.”
Brian rubbed his hands together menacingly.
“I don’t know what you’re up to, but it is extremely important that we get out of Dead Donkey,” Travis said. “Nathan, with the bureaucrats once again pursuing you, the most prudent move is to leave the city for safety - somewhere where the bureaucrats will not think to look. At some point we can get rid of Brian as well.”
Brian bristled.
“You won’t get rid of me. I’ve been instructed to follow Nathan in accordance with Personal Instruction 236220 from Director Fulcher and a good bureaucrat always follows protocol. And you can’t leave the city - it’s imperative to my plan that you stay here!”
“It is imperative to my plan that we leave,” Travis answered calmly. “I suggest you once again try to leave the city before the bureaucrats can make another attempt to force you back into the afterlife, Nathan.”
Nathan thought about this, then started to nod his head.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s go. I know just how we can leave.”
Chapter 16
About twenty minutes later, Nathan parked Mr. Big’s car outside of the Dead Donkey airport. Brian stared at it in horror.
“This is your plan?” he demanded. “To come back to this place? Don’t you remember what happened the last time we got on a plane here?”
“We crashed,” Nathan said cheerily. “But it’s like they say, the second time’s the charm.”
“They say that the third time’s the charm,” Brian snapped.
“Well, do they say the second time isn’t the charm?” Nathan asked. To this Brian had no answer, so Nathan happily began to saunter into the airport.
Bureaucrats normally like airports because of all the legalistic inspections, waiting, bureaucratic transfers of luggage, forms, identification, and passes necessary to go from one area of the airport to the other. This is all very legally orderly and appeals to their love of paperwork. However, Dead Donkey Airport was not like other airports. Normal airports consist of, at the bare minimum, a runway and a terminal building. People check into their flights in the terminal building and then board the plane on the runway, which then takes off. When they’d commissioned the construction of the airport, the Dead Donkey City Council decided that the runway part was an awful waste of space given how big the airport was likely to be and, considering how cramped the city was already, decided to build the runway underground. This was very inconvenient for planes trying to land on the runway because, due to a hideous design oversight on the part of companies like Boeing and Airbus, planes cannot fly through ground. Funnily, they can only travel through air. Difficult to understand, but there you have it.
To cater to this odd quirk of aviation, the City Council designed the airport to have an opening and a slanty-uppy bit on one end of the airport, which led to the underground runway. However, all commercial airlines refused to fly down the slanty-uppy bit and onto the runway. Subsequently, the only people who agreed to fly into and out of Dead Donkey airport were residents of Dead Donkey. That is to say, the only aviators here were the fearless, the desperate, the blind, the insane - in other words, the people who didn’t care that their odds of surviving a flight out of Dead Donkey were considerably less than being struck by lightning while winning the lottery. There was no bureaucracy, no boarding passes or TSA security checkpoints, as Dead Donkey didn’t put up with such things. Instead, there was a wall of grizzled, terrifying daredevil pilots who formed a grim line near the back of the terminal and held up signs indicating where they would next crash towards. If you, as a traveller in Dead Donkey, insisted on exiting the city (and probably the mortal coil) by this particular method, all you had to do was approach one of these individuals and haggle over a trip with him. Nathan was just about to do precisely this.
This was, all things considered, a very stupid thing to do because there was a perfectly serviceable helipad next door,
but no one ever seemed to use that.
They strutted into the terminal, and Nathan was shocked to see a familiar face in the line of people. This familiar person was a pilot smoking a cigar large enough to hide a desk fan in. He had an eyepatch over his left nostril and a pistol holster with a large stuffed weasel in it. The words “NEW YORK” were written on his cardboard placard.
“Hello,” Nathan said in his usual, chirpy tones. “It’s good to see you again. Can you take us to New York?”
The man blew rancid smoke in Nathan’s face.
“Can get you there or die trying. Price is a hundred dollars a seat.”
“I brought you this instead,” Nathan said, and handed the pilot his bottle of Chateau d’Malodorant. The pilot took a swig of it, swished it around in his mouth, and spat it out.
“Yeah, that’ll do,” he said. “I’ll drink half of it and pour the other half in the engine. Come on. Let’s go to the plane.”
He tossed his cardboard placard aside for later and began to strut towards the hangar. Nathan followed him briskly.
Brian lagged not far behind, staring at the man in confusion.
“Didn’t you die during the last plane crash?” he asked the pilot.
“Sure did,” the pilot responded. “But it’s like I always say, if you can’t stand dyin’ then you shouldn’t be flyin’.”
“But how did you come back to life?”
Without stopping, the pilot pointed back at Nathan.
“He told us not to sign the form 21B after we died. We didn’t, so they sent us back here.”
“That’s right, I did,” Nathan exclaimed, remembering the incident.
Brian recalled this too and bristled.
“Not content to put your own file out of order, you disrupt the files of others. You are an anarchist and a force for evil, Mr. Haynes, even more so than Travis. At least he -” Brian jerked his thumb at Travis “-has the good sense to stay locked up in Albany and spend his time arranging sticks rather than bothering other people. You, Nathan, spread chaos everywhere you go. It’s because of people like you that I can’t get the authorization form to get my name changed.”
Nathan did not answer and the four men walked the rest of the way in relative silence. The pilot led them through the metal dungeon that was the Dead Donkey airport, down, down, into the bowels of the earth and through unforgiving steel corridors and ominous stone walls splattered with the blood and debris of flights past until they finally reached the hanger. Sitting proudly in the hangar was an airplane. It looked much like the last airplane that the pilot had taken them up on, and Nathan still was not entirely confident in its airworthiness. It now had several unpaired wings jutting up at odd angles and one engine was strapped to the roof of the cabin. The wheels had been fixed to the plane’s nose with a hefty rubber band, and there was a propeller on the highest tip of the tail. A weathervane was further affixed to the underside of the craft. Previously, the plane had dead passengers stamped on the side like Luftwaffe fighters. This part appeared to have been painted over and replaced with the words “successful flights:” just above the tail. No icons followed the colon. What did follow it was a heavy chain which appeared to connect the aircraft to a battleship anchor. Worse still, the entire thing seemed to have been built out of parts from the last airplane, which everyone present could vividly remember crashing.
“There she is,” the pilot said proudly. “The Flying Trashcan 2. Isn’t she a beauty?”
“You rebuilt this thing?” Brian asked, goggling at it.
“Yeah. It wasn’t that hard. It only has two moving parts and one of them’s the motorized cupholder.” The pilot took an unconcerned sip from the Chateau, then popped a fuel cap and began to pour the drink directly into the engine.
“I’m not getting on that thing,” Brian declared. “We should stay in Dead Donkey and not die. Nathan, just because I have accounted for you dying in my master plan doesn’t mean there’s any need for you to accelerate the process. This plane is a deathtrap.”
“Don’t worry!” the pilot called from near the gas cap. “I’ve never crashed twice in a row before.”
Brian did not look very reassured. Nathan started to climb the spidery metal staircase towards the main door of the airplane, which was closed. Travis moved to follow him, but Brian crossed his arms and did not move.
“What are you, chicken?” Travis asked mockingly. “You didn’t even die last time.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in airplanes,” Brian shot back.
“No, but I do believe in cowardice.”
Brian continued to stand still with his arms crossed.
Travis raised his arms to his sides in imitation of a chicken and began to flap his wings.
“Bock bock bock,” Travis mocked Brian.
A vein began to throb in Brian’s temple.
“Fine,” Brian said at last, “but don’t blame me when we all get splattered.” He furiously took a Form 672032 - Angry Acceptance Of A Suicide Mission out of his form satchel and began to fill it out. Meanwhile, the pilot had finished gassing up the plane with the Chateau and climbed the ladder, passing both Nathan and Travis, before reaching the door of the plane. He stubbed out his cigar and banged on the hatch. It promptly opened to reveal a female flight attendant with impeccable makeup.
“Hello,” she said brightly. “Thank you for choosing to fly with us again. Step right aboard.”
She courteously ushered them into the plane and showed Brian, Nathan, and Travis to their seats, which were very familiar because they were the same seats that they had occupied the last time. Nathan thought he could even still see the bloodstain he’d left on the fabric of one of the seats.
Meanwhile, the pilot was pulling on his leather flying helmet and goggles and ducked into the cockpit.
“Now,” he began promptly. “You folks are probably all edgy and worried because last time we didn’t quite make it to New York.”
“We crashed so close to Dead Donkey that the city fire department gave us a lift back,” Travis said.
“Right, well, I have made two significant changes since then that make this a completely different airplane. First, I have the motorized cupholder.” The pilot tapped on the cupholder with his knuckles, and it extended with a mechanical hum. He put the Chateau in it and it whizzed back. Brian stared at it.
“As long as this baby is in place, things will be alright,” the pilot said with a big thumbs up. “Second, I have a co-pilot with me this time.”
As soon as the captain said this, there was a loud bark from inside the cockpit. Brian froze.
“Would your co-pilot happen to be a dog?” he asked.
“Yes, but he thinks he’s people, and that’s the important part,” the captain replied. “This job is almost all mental.”
From inside the cockpit, a jet black dog with an angular head peaked around the door and out at the passengers. Though he was strapped into his co-pilot’s chair, he looked thrilled to be there and was panting with his tongue out while his front legs rested on the co-pilot’s yoke.
“Taxi, Rex,” the pilot said, stamping his hands on his legs and using that weird tone that you only use when speaking to a dog. “Come on, boy. Taxi us onto the runway.”
Rex barked and began to fiddle with the yoke and the controls. The aircraft rumbled tenuously forward.
The pilot buckled his own harness and gave another big thumbs up to the flight attendant, who commenced her pre-flight spiel.
“Hello and welcome to our nonstop flight from Dead Donkey to New York. I’ll be your flight attendant this afternoon. The expected flight duration is about four hours if we have a tailwind and twelve years with a headwind. Please stow your luggage and small children in the overhead compartments above your seats; please give any oversize baggage or children to your stewardess and she will be more than happy to check them for you. Do any of the passengers today have medical conditions that the crew ought to be made aware of?”
“I ha
ve a brain lesion and up until about an hour ago, I was a ghost,” Nathan said cheerily. The stewardess did not respond and continued her lecture mechanically.
“Passengers with life-threatening medical conditions should be advised that in the event you have an episode or emergency related to your condition, none of the crew have received medical training, and you’re on your own. If you have any pills with you, please pass them up to the front so the captain can sample them before takeoff.
I will now commence the in-flight safety briefing. Please follow along on the placards in the pockets of the seats in front of you.”
Brian automatically reached into the pocket and retrieved the plastic placard. It had a picture of Mount Everest on it and the text was a copy of the inscription of the plaque that Apollo 11 carried to the moon. There was no mention of aircraft safety.
“The Flying Trashcan has three and a half emergency exits,” the stewardess began to explain. “If you are seated in an emergency exit row, please move immediately because we will likely need to use those rows during the flight to escape the aircraft, and we can’t really have you getting in the way during the mad scramble for the exit. You should only use the middle emergency exit if the number two engine has failed. If the number two engine has not failed then using this exit will result in your dying. Underneath your seats, you have futons in the event of a water landing. Inflate your futon by blowing into it until it has gone from a reclined position to a sitting position. Fasten your seatbelts securely around your necks like so and pull tightly until you can no longer breathe comfortably.
In the event of cabin depressurization at altitude, yellow masks will drop from the ceiling. Place them around your nose and mouth and breathe normally. Affix your own mask before helping any animals or children that you might have with you. However, take care not to mistake the yellow masks for blue masks, as the blue masks will inflate with death gas and should not be fastened around your face for any reason. Due to security considerations, you will now all be assigned a weapon.”
You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please) Page 14