You Are a Ghost. (Sign Here Please)

by Andrew Stanek

  The stewardess approached them with a box of weapons and handed Brian a knife, Nathan a heavy mace, and Travis some nunchucks.

  “In case of a hijacking by terrorists, use these weapons to fight off the hijackers and maintain control of the plane,” the stewardess instructed. “Please do not use them to fight one another unless absolutely necessary. If you do not know how to use the weapon you have been assigned, inform your stewardess now and she will assign you another one.”

  No one said anything, but Nathan took a few experimental swings with his mace.

  “Please comply with all crewmember instructions and do not unbuckle your seatbelt while the seatbelt sign is lit, unless the captain asks everyone to move to one side of the plane to aid in maneuvering. This is still a mandatory smoking flight; if you do not have a cigarette inform your flight attendant and she will provide you with one, though cigars and marijuana are now acceptable aboard as well. Please turn on all of your electronic devices at this time, as without them the airplane will not be able to fly. Put your seats back and your tray tables in full and upright position for takeoff; you will have to return them to reclined and down positions respectively for landing. In the event of a catastrophic failure of the Flying Trashcan 2’s integrity, please grab a repair kit from the overhead bins and assist the crew in patching up the aircraft before it breaks up in midair. This concludes the in-flight safety briefing.”

  She paused.

  “We realize that you have a choice in airlines, and we would like to thank you for choosing to fly with us again, and we do apologize for your previous inconveniences along this route when we crashed the plane and killed everybody.”

  Brian clicked his tongue bureaucratically. It wasn’t true that they had killed everybody; in fact, only the bare majority of them had died on that occasion, though he didn’t bother to correct the flight attendant.

  From inside the cockpit, the pilot was prodding buttons at random. Rex slapped his hand away from the controls and pushed a large button near the artificial horizon, and the plane’s engine rumbled to life. Through his window, Nathan could see the Flying Trashcan 2 thunder along the runway, with other hangers and terminals quickly whizzing by. They tilted from side to side, dodging other planes on the runway - then, finally, hit the slanty-uppy bit at the end of the underground runway and leapt into the sky.

  “I have a good feeling about this,” Nathan confided in Brian.

  Chapter 17

  Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Aviation is one of the absolutely most complex fields of human endeavor, ahead of architecture, chemical engineering, and medicine, and not far behind nuclear physics, rocket science, and attempting to convince denialists that global warming is real. In fact, it is so complicated that Igor Sikorsky was once heard to say, “Aeronautics was neither an industry nor a science. It was a miracle.”

  It is a fundamental law of the universe that the more complicated a field becomes, the more and more bureaucracy there is associated with it. Chemical engineering requires Department of Transportation hazard labels, statutory safety courses, degrees, and laboratory authorizations to handle volatile materials. Medicine demands malpractice insurance, medical training at the undergraduate, graduate, and residency levels, followed by additional training for specialization, then board certification, then huge stacks of paperwork from charts to forms to letters of notification for each patient. Architecture, for bizarre and as-yet unexplained reasons, can only be performed by architects, and they need to draft blueprints and apply for approvals from the city council, and even then they usually end up building something nobody wants. These are just the less complicated fields. If you even attempt to perform nuclear physics without the appropriate authorizations, the government will make the most terrible fuss about it and a bunch of nice men in space suits will show up at your door, asking intrusive questions. Unauthorized rocket launches are similarly frowned upon, and it requires so much ridiculous paperwork and form-filing to get authorization that you simply can’t get approval if you’re anything less than a billionaire. Attempting to convince climate change denialists that global warming is real is so immensely complicated and involved that, to date, no one has even discovered what forms need to be filled out to do so, which is why there are so many climate change denialists running around.

  Naturally, there is also a tremendous amount of paperwork associated with aviation - and the more complicated aviation got, the more paperwork there was. Gone are the days when you could simply cobble a wooden airplane together in the back of the Wrights’ bike shop and launch it off a sand dune at Kitty Hawk. Now if you want to fly an aircraft, the pilot needs to be licensed, and to get the license he must have gone through hundreds, if not thousands of hours of flight training and preparation. The aircraft itself must be certified, and re-certified, and re-re-certified, usually in a logbook that is kept exclusively for that vehicle and registers at least four different types of maintenance checks and inspections. The baggage must be searched and cleared, the passengers scanned and equipped with proper documentation, and all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed, and all this only gets you off the ground. There is even more bureaucracy when you get in the air. There are places where you can’t fly, like military bases or government centers or over the President’s head, and maneuvers you can’t perform while flying, like the super-double-triple barrel roll, and you’re not allowed to go too high or too low or jostle around too much. An entire infrastructure of control towers and radio networks has been built, just so government bureaucrats (“air traffic controllers”) can tell you what to do while you’re still in the air. Then, just to add insult to injury, you’re only allowed to land on a runway, of all things, even though the ground is littered with perfectly serviceable roads, strips of farmland, and buildings to land on instead.

  And all this is just to fly yourself around. If you want to actually fly passengers or cargo, there’s a whole host of new regulations and bureaucracy to deal with.

  The cargo cultists of Melanesia didn’t know any of this.

  For those who are not familiar with the cargo cultists of Melanesia, they were a group of native people living on a series of remote islands in the Pacific. They quietly minded their own business until, one day and totally without warning (as far as they were concerned anyway), World War II broke out. Subsequently, soldiers - mainly sent by the Allies and Japan - began to arrive in Melanesia and built runways, complete with hangars, air traffic controllers, and the full smattering of military bureaucracy, though the bureaucracy was somewhat tempered by the fact that there was a war on and was therefore joined by a whole lot of shooting. Thereafter, aircraft landed on the runways in Melanesia and brought with them supplies, food, clothing, and manufactured goods - ie: cargo - as part of the war effort. Many of the native Melanesian islanders had never seen outsiders or cargo before, and were astonished to watch the airplanes land and deliver it. Much of the cargo was shared with them, so the Melanesians regarded the actual arrival of the cargo as a highly positive experience (as opposed to the fighting, which was less positive).

  Then the war ended, and the airplanes and soldiers all left, and took their cargo with them.

  Some Melanesians wished the cargo would come back, so they began to form cargo cults, spiritual organizations devoted to enticing the airplanes to return. They chopped down trees and built new runways, hangars, and control towers, in which fake air traffic controllers sat wearing a wooden facsimile of a headset while fiddling with a carving of a radio, hoping that the aircraft would return and once again bring cargo.

  While this endeavor succeeded in summoning record numbers of sociologists and anthropologists to study the cargo cults in the name of science, it did not entice the airplanes to return. The cargo cultists did not abandon their faith in the return of the airplanes, and spent their days and nights making small adjustments to the fake air stations they had constructed, refining the wooden headse
ts and patching holes in the hangars, and watching the skies in hopes of seeing an airplane land once again. This never worked, and never will.

  What the cargo cults were lacking was, of course, bureaucracy. The fault of their phony airstrips wasn’t that the controller’s tower was less than perfect or that the roof of the hangar had too many leaks in it. Rather, the problem was and is that their runways are not registered with international aviation authorities. Had they only filled in the proper forms and gotten their runways logged on aircraft navigation charts, then airplanes would probably be more than happy to land on the runways from time to time. In fact, it’s entirely possible that Melanesia would have become a popular tourist destination, what with all these accessible runways springing up all over the place, and major airlines might have started flying people and cargo over to Melanesia by the boatload (or planeload, if you prefer). While the Melanesians might have subsequently learned that they didn’t actually want cargo badly enough to put up with tourists, they were willing to put up with World War II happening in their backyards, so anything is possible.

  Sadly, the Melanesian cargo cults had no conception of bureaucracy, so the planes never came. Their hard efforts have produced only farcical copies of real runways, made of rickety, creaking wood and clay, but still they dream of airplanes.

  Dead Donkey aviators had no conception of bureaucracy either, which might explain why their airplanes were made of wood and clay too, and inevitably failed to make it out of Dead Donkey to deliver cargo.

  Chapter 18

  “What the hell is that?” the pilot shouted from the cockpit of the plane, as he pointed and gesticulated wildly at something in the sky.

  The dog barked at him.

  “Oh, right, the sun,” he said. “I forgot that was there. Do I fly towards it or away from it?”

  Rex barked again.

  “Like you’re so smart,” the pilot snapped at the dog, and huffily returned to smoking his cigar.

  The plane shook with turbulence. Or Brian hoped it was turbulence.

  Meanwhile, Travis (who did not believe planes could fly so had already resigned himself to the crash) was reading through the literature on the back of a seat in front of him. He tossed aside a magazine entitled, “So You’re Trapped On An Airplane And Have No Choice But To Buy Things To Pass The Time,” and pulled out a new one that said, “How to operate a parachute: a quick guide.” He began to thumb through it with interest. Brian had started to read a similar article entitled, “Five things to do with your electronic devices now that you’re not allowed to use them.” The advice therein was not very useful because they were being forced to use their electronic devices aboard the aircraft, not that they had many, simply to keep it in the air. Nathan was still swinging his mace around with interest.

  The flight attendant had started her usual rounds up and down the aisles.

  “Would you like anything to drink?” she asked them brightly.

  “I’ll have some water,” Nathan said cheerily.

  Travis motioned that he didn’t want anything, and Brian did the same.

  After returning with Nathan’s water, the stewardess began to pass out menus.

  “We will be serving a meal on this flight,” she said. “We have quite a selection of menu items this afternoon, which I hope you find are to your liking.”

  Nathan opened the menu.

  “Oh, you have coups de pied francaise,” Nathan said appreciatively. “I’ve already had that today, but I don’t think I liked the shoe leather so much. It had an aftertaste.”

  “Why is there so much dog food on the menu?” Travis asked with interest.

  “The co-pilot insisted, I’m afraid.”

  Rex barked from inside the cabin.

  “Yes, but they’re not going to eat the dog food, you idiot,” the pilot shot back. “Honestly, some days I don’t know why I ever made you my co-pilot.”

  Brian was not feeling hungry, given that he’d just eaten lunch, and set his menu aside. Travis did the same.

  “I recall you used to have an in-flight movie on this aircraft,” Travis remarked. “Do you have one today?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid that we couldn’t restore the aircraft’s entertainment systems to working status following the last crash. Instead we have provided some reading material for the duration of the flight. If you’re not satisfied with what you have in front of you, I have a few more magazines here.” She handed Travis and Brian one additional magazine each. The top story on Brian’s asked, “Whatever happened to flight MH370? First of two Malaysian airliners disappeared, just before flight MH17 was shot down, totally without warning.”

  The plane shuddered and Brian flinched. He whitened.

  “I’ll trade you,” he said to Travis, and swapped magazines with him. Brian’s new magazine’s cover story read: “Terrorists - Are they everywhere, or just right behind you?”

  The plane gave another loud lurch, and Brian emitted a mouse-like squeak.

  “Coward,” Travis muttered as he went back to studying a diagram of a parachute.

  Just then, from inside the cockpit, there was a loud blaring noise. Brian shrieked girlishly.

  “Calm down, it’s just an urgent message from the ground,” the pilot shot back. He picked up the radio transceiver and stared blankly at the control panel. “Now is this the button to answer the radio or self-destruct the airplane?”

  “Why does your airplane have a self-destruct button?” Brian demanded.

  “Why wouldn’t it?” the pilot snapped. He pressed the button, and Brian flinched. The radio crackled.

  “This is the Flying Trashcan 2,” the pilot said. “Radio callsign... er, what’s our radio callsign again, Rex?”

  The dog barked twice.

  “Callsign Ruff-ruff. What’s your message, ground?”

  There was a pause as the pilot put his headset to his ear. Then he swiveled around.

  “Which one of you is Nathan? There’s a person on the radio who wants to know if you want to buy a dog riding an elephant-”

  “No!” Nathan exclaimed angrily and leapt to his feet. “I do not want to buy a dog riding an elephant. I will never want to buy a dog riding an elephant. I am already flying in a plane co-piloted by a dog and that is enough for me. Tell the dog-riding-elephant people to stop calling me!”

  “I am afraid you have to remain seated while the fasten seatbelt sign is on, sir,” the stewardess said calmly. Nathan crossed his arms and sank back into his chair in a huff.

  The pilot thumbed the radio transceiver’s button.

  “Yeah? He says he doesn’t want any. No I don’t want one either. I’m flying a plane right now.”

  Rex barked.

  “My dog doesn’t want a dog riding an elephant either. No, no interest at all. Goodbye.”

  He put the radio back down.

  Nathan went back to reading the menu and tried to forget his anger and frustration at the dog-riding-elephant people, which was hard to do because there was so much dog food on the menu. At last he decided he ought to eat something a little more healthy than the boot he’d had for lunch and ordered the salad.

  “The salad,” the stewardess confirmed. “And would you like the secret sauce on the side as dressing?”

  “What’s in the secret sauce?” Nathan asked.

  “I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.”

  “It’s amphetamines,” the pilot called from the cockpit. “You should try some! I’m eating it right now! It’s how I stay awake throughout the whole plane journey.”

  “We’ve only been in the air for five minutes,” Brian shouted angrily. “How do you already need amphetamines to stay awake?”

  “This is a really boring job, okay,” the pilot answered, and went back to staring at the sky.

  “Special sauce on the side,” Nathan answered.

  “I would also like the salad, no sauce,” Travis said. “I’m feeling a little peckish after all.”

  Brian, meanwhile, was readi
ng his way through the magazine he had, which was called “Plane Crashes Monthly.” The article he was on was entitled, “Amelia Earhart probably died horribly.”

  Displaying a commendable level of efficiency given their dubious airworthiness, the flight attendant brought out the salads promptly, and Nathan started to munch on his. He dipped his finger in the secret sauce and licked it. His eyes suddenly got very wide. Travis munched on his quietly, while Brian had advanced to the next article in the magazine, “12 things you’d never expect to pierce your torso in a plane crash (but will)!”

  Suddenly, the pilot shouted, “Arghh, I can’t see!” from the cockpit.

  “You’ve slid your cap down over your eyes again,” the flight attendant calmly said from her chair.

  There was a pause.

  “Oh, so I have,” the captain replied. “That’s much better. Hey, I see a bird. It’s pretty close to us.”

  There was another pause.

  “It’s not often you see a bird with that many engines,” the captain continued. “Or words written on the side.”

  Brian strained in his seat enough to see out the cockpit window. There was a huge plane in front of them with the words “Bob’s Plumbing,” written on the side. It was getting bigger menacingly quickly.

  “That’s an airplane,” Brian cried.

  “That makes more sense,” the pilot said. “I’m supposed to hit it, right?”

  “No! Go around it! Dodge it!”

  “Right, dodge it. Now I remember. Sorry, I’m pretty baked right now. Is this the button that dodges another aircraft or self-destructs the plane?”

  “Why do you have a button that self-destructs the plane?” Brian shrieked.

  “We don’t have enough time to get into that now,” the pilot said. “Now, which one is it, the red one or the blue one?”

  “I think you dodge another plane using the yoke, Captain,” the stewardess advised.