“I see.” Director Fulcher said, drawing himself up to his full height. “I see,” he repeated. “Well, there’s only one thing to do then.”
“You’re going to send me to see your supervisor?” Nathan asked, remembering that “I see, I see,” was exactly what Ian had said before doing just that.
Fulcher gave him a grim smile. “I’m afraid that you are not allowed to see my supervisor unless you have been canonized. Although she has very recently started meeting Nobel Peace Prize winners. Have you won a nobel peace prize, Mr. Haynes?”
“Not as far as I remember,” Nathan said uncertainly. “In fact, now that you mention it, I don’t think I’ve won a Nobel Prize of any kind.” He felt a bit embarrassed.
“Not even economics?” Fulcher inquired.
“Not even economics,” Nathan confirmed.
“Well, then I am afraid you cannot see my supervisor, Mr. Haynes.”
“Should we keep him here, sir?” Donna asked, speaking up for the first time. She was glaring at Nathan with a mixture of anger and malice. “Can’t we just plop him back in station four until he agrees to sign his 21B?”
“No, of course not,” Fulcher said, straightening his collar. “If he hasn’t signed his liability waiver, we can’t have him here. He might sue us. No, we will have to send him back.”
“Back?” Nathan asked.
“Yes, back,” Fulcher said. “To life.”
“Oh, that sounds like a very good idea,” Nathan said, nodding. “I have to finish doing my laundry.”
Fulcher fixed him with a rather wolfish smile. Nathan had a nasty feeling he was about to find out why Director Fulcher didn’t wear a tie.
“Dear me, Mr. Haynes, you didn’t think that we would send you back to life as yourself, did you? No, no, no. I was thinking of sending you back as a worm.”
“A worm!” exclaimed Nathan. “But I don’t think I would enjoy being a worm.”
“No, I don’t think you would either,” Fulcher said, smiling. “That is the point. But I think we could find something you would enjoy even less. Maybe, for example, we could send you back as an eel.”
“An eel?” Nathan gasped with horror. In truth, his mind had not yet processed what it would be like to be an eel, and his mouth - while resentfully expressing the opinion that it was always picking up the slack and doing all the work around here - was simply repeating everything that Fulcher said. Fulcher, perhaps sensing this, began to elaborate.
“Yes, an eel. A filthy, slimy, self-conscious eel that no one wants to touch. An electric eel, I should think, so one day, when you are particularly yearning for human contact, a curious little girl will pick you up out of the water as she swims, but you will shock her without meaning to, and she will run away crying.”
“Oh no!”
“Yes!” Fulcher said, his eyes flashing triumphantly. “And then you will be speared by an Indonesian eel fisherman, who will sell your meat at a fish market to a young woman who will cook you, decide you taste bad, and throw you away.”
“That sounds very unpleasant,” Nathan said.
“Or maybe,” Fulcher continued, with a manic glint in his eye, “we should bring you back as a tapeworm.”
“Not a tapeworm!”
“Yes, a tapeworm! A tapeworm that prefers to eat meat, but it lives in the gut of a cow, and the cow only eats grass, and you shall have to spend the whole of your life wishing just once you could have a bite of bacon rather than filthy, tasteless, grass.”
“That does sound unpleasant,” Nathan said.
“Or maybe we shall bring you back-” Fulcher paused dramatically, and Nathan knew that he had saved the very worst for last “-as a fat man!”
“Not a fat man!”
“Yes, a fat man! A fat man who has a genuine gland problem - the only fat man alive who actually has a gland problem! A gland problem that is totally incurable by modern medical science. And no matter what you do, you will gain more and more weight, and never be able to convince anyone that it is actually not your fault!”
“Nooooooo!” protested Nathan.
“Yes!” countered Fulcher dramatically.
“Noooooooooo,” shot back Nathan.
“Yesss!” replied Fulcher.
“Nooooooooooooooo,” argued Nathan.
“Yessss,” insisted Fulcher. “But of course, all of this could be avoided, and you should never have to be an eel or a tapeworm or a fat man, if only you will sign your Form 21B. Then you would be able to stay here, and never be any of those things.”
But Nathan was having none of that.
“I won’t sign the form,” he said. “Even if I have to be an eel and a tape worm and a fat man.”
Fulcher considered him briefly, and in a flash of realization, Nathan knew the Director had one last trump card to play.
“What if the fat man was also big boned? Genuinely big-boned! The only fat man alive who really has big bones!”
Nathan reeled in horror at the merciless sadism of his opponent, but he still refused to yield. If only out of sheer stubbornness, he would not sign the form. After all, he had said he wouldn’t sign it before, so he couldn’t very well switch positions at this point.
“I won’t sign the form even if you bring me back as a big-boned fat man with glandular problems. Not even if you bring me back with twelve aunts.”
Fulcher regarded him shrewdly.
“Your resolve is stronger than I thought. I respect that. We will send you back to life!” He reached into his desk and pulled out a form.
“You are sending him back as the eel?” Donna asked breathlessly.
“Or the tapeworm?” Ian asked.
“Or the fat man?” Nathan inquired.
“No,” Fulcher said. “I was bluffing. There’s a terrible lot of paperwork involved in bringing someone back to life as something he’s not supposed to be, so I will have to bring you back as yourself. To bring you back as an eel or a tapeworm or a fat man I would need -” his expression darkened “-to ask for a favor from another department. And you aren’t worth that. So I’m sending you back as-is.”
Nathan practically choked with relief.
“But Director,” Ian began nervously. “He was shot in the head. If you send him back as is he’ll just immediately die again and come back here.”
Fulcher waved the problem aside.
“I will give him one of the replica bodies we use when we have to enter the living world or visit the New York office,” he said. “He won’t die immediately.” He began to fill out the immensely complex resurrection form with astonishing speed. After a few seconds he said, “As soon as I sign this form you will be sent back to the world of the living. But mark my words, Mr. Haynes, I run a very smooth operation. Every form in my department is filed. Every ‘e’ is dotted and ‘t’ crossed!”
“You mean every ‘i’ is dotted?” Nathan inquired.
“That too! And I will have your form appropriately signed and filed, sir, even if it takes me all of my directorial cunning. You have not heard the last of me, Mr. Haynes.”
Nathan was not listening. His brain had started playing the cereal jingle again.
Fulcher signed the form. Nathan disappeared.
The last thing he heard before reappearing in the world of the living (after the ending of the jingle) was Fulcher’s voice.
“Ian, find Brian and bring him to my office immediately. I have a job for him.”
And then Nathan crossed over the pale barrier of souls that separates worlds and found himself unexpectedly, and against the odds, alive.
Chapter 5
Nathan Haynes was a lifelong resident of the very sorry city of Dead Donkey, Nevada. It was one of the very worst places to live in the whole of the United States, and indeed much of Nevada.
The city had been founded in the mid-1860s by a certain Efrain Smith, a settler from back East who decided to go West to seek his fortune in the great California gold rush. Smith was a particularly extraordinary man for
two reasons: first, because he preferred the company of his donkey, Arnie, to humans, and second, because he failed to hear that the California gold rush had ended some ten years before he set out (and that the American Civil War was pretty much over). He also got spectacularly lost while trying to make his way to California and ended up trudging around in a series of vast, nightmarish circles, despite the fact that Arnie the donkey kept reorienting towards San Francisco and straining to lead him in that direction, and that passing settlers kept telling him he was going the wrong way. He refused to believe either the settlers or his donkey (what, he asked, did a donkey know?) and ended up spending more than two years walking but getting nowhere. Smith also had a compass, but he refused to believe it because it co-opted the donkey’s story, which led him to believe that they must be conspiring against him somehow.
Eventually, poor Arnie’s health gave out and the donkey had keeled over right in the middle of a vast, desolate plain. Since Arnie had been carrying all of his stuff, Efrain Smith had decided to end his journey right on the spot and thereby founded the city of Dead Donkey.
Dead Donkey, as previously mentioned, is not a very nice place to live. Its skyline consists of some of the ugliest, bleakest, most twisted buildings in the world, many of which are either painted dull gray or the exact shade (and smell) of vomit. It has one of the highest rates of crime in the world. Efrain Smith technically founded it in California, but California refused to take it, invoking the secret clause in the US constitution that allows any state to transfer any territory to Nevada for any reason. (This is the same reason that Reno is in Nevada.)
Dead Donkey has a population of some tens of thousands and would be one of the larger cities in Nevada, except it is not really a city. It is technically classified as a garbage dump. Dead Donkey’s mayor (or to give him his legally proper title, Garbage Dump Supervisor), insists this is because of a meaningless technicality in the law, and is in no way because the statutory salary of a garbage dump supervisor is greater than that of a mayor.
The mayor of Dead Donkey is not very popular.
Along with many other crimes, like murder, fraud, and Muleball (which we will get to shortly), arson is rampant in Dead Donkey. In fact, the arson rate in Dead Donkey is the highest in the world. The city’s public policy analysts have come up with various reasons to explain why this might be - the high rate of unemployment, alcoholism and smoking, economic stagnation, a culture of gang violence among the youths, the very high average temperature of Dead Donkey exacerbated by global warming, the proliferation of dry brush and whatnot around the city, the generally inadequate amount of rain the city receives, lack of smoke detectors, poor enforcement, bad building codes, etc.
None of these reasons are correct. The actual cause of Dead Donkey’s arson problem is the extremely high number of arsons committed by public policy analysts, who have long since worked out that as long as there’s an arson problem for them to explain, they’ll all be able to keep their extremely cushy and high-paying think-tank jobs. While some have protested this to the mayor, he insists that the public policy analysts are all friends of his and they wouldn’t possibly be doing anything so insidious, and the arsons must all be down to the confluence of sunspots, just as the latest public policy analysis said.
The mayor of Dead Donkey is not very popular.
Dead Donkey’s curious predilection for arson was best summed up by ‘Sandy’ Drexler, the most famous of Dead Donkey University’s poet laureates who had neither gone insane or tried to escape by mailing themselves to Baltimore, which is an increasingly common problem among Dead Donkey’s poets. (Fortunately, packages containing members of the latter category are easily spotted because their postal labels are written in rhyming verse.) Drexler’s poem went like this:
“My true home is Dead Donkey,
My city bright and fair,
The girls, they set my heart alight,
The boys, they torched my hair.”
Over the years, arson had actually become vital to the local economy, with arsons both keeping the local building industry employed, as they tried to rebuild the local skyline almost as fast as it burned down, and bringing firefighters from as far as three counties over to spend money, which represented a vital infusion of capital into Dead Donkey’s businesses. While Dead Donkey was required by law to maintain its own fire department (Nevada’s “Statutes Pertaining to High Population Garbage Dumps”), one of the cornerstones of maintaining an arson-based economy was having a terrible local fire department so firefighters from further afield would have to be called in. Dead Donkey’s firefighters had no idea how to fight fires. While they often managed to get to the fire itself, that was about the limit of their expertise, and they could often be seen standing outside burning buildings staring at their hoses in puzzlement and despondency. They used their firetruck’s sirens exclusively to cut through traffic on their way to the supermarket which was itself rarely, if ever, on fire. Their dog was a dachshund.
In fact, the Dead Donkey Fire Department is so bad that when one of the city’s few domestic industries, Dead Donkey’s much famed xylophone fence factory was put to light, the factory proprietors did not even bother calling the fire department. Instead, they commissioned the construction of the world’s largest air conditioner to attempt to cool the factory faster than the fire could heat it. This worked extremely well until the arsonists set fire to the air conditioner, which at last precipitated the xylophone fence factory’s closure, and forced the factory’s many customers to look elsewhere for their supply of musical barriers.
Contrary to Efrain Smith’s original gold mining and donkey ranching intentions, Dead Donkey neither has a mining nor an agriculture industry. There is no gold in Dead Donkey. Someone once discovered what he thought was a gold mine but the rocks within were later found to be entirely arsenic which in retrospect looked nothing like gold. This may also account for the lack of an agricultural industry, as the only animal that eats the grass around Dead Donkey is a single breed of depressed-looking cow that produces no milk, and whose meat is poisonous.
This was not to say that Dead Donkey’s economy was entirely dependent on arson. Tourism was a vital part of the Dead Donkey economy. Travel agencies did a roaring business luring people into the city with promises of free transportation and board, then charging them through the nose to leave as fast as possible.
Dead Donkey is also at the center of Nevada’s innovation economy. Many visionaries (a term they vastly prefer to ‘crazy kooks’) have made their way to the city of Dead Donkey over the years. The aforementioned xylophone fence factory, set up by eccentric billionaire Olivia Doles, who realized she could put an end to all the heavy lugging around of xylophones that people so inconveniently had to do, is but one example. Dead Donkey is also home to the inventors of the world’s only car rental agency accessible exclusively by helipad, which stays in business by catering to upscale and extremely stupid clients. Engineers from Dead Donkey university have also recently invented a motorized fork that destroys your food if you are too fat to safely eat it. The manufacturers are eager to point out that this does not technically violate the guarantee on the package that it will “reduce your eating habit.” Generally speaking, the economy of Dead Donkey has markedly improved since the 1970s, when the US federal government declared it a disaster area, owing to the dangerously high levels of radiation found in people’s air conditioners - later found to extend to the air, and not just the air conditioners. This radiation was subsequently linked to the use of weaponized cesium in the xylophone fence manufacturing process. Thereafter, the city enjoyed something of an economic revival as a center to train psychologists specializing in clinical depression and suicide hotline operators opened downtown, right next to the training center for professional gamblers.
Recent news wasn’t all good, though. The US Marine Corps destroyed Dead Donkey’s city hall several years ago, after the building’s uncanny resemblance to the Ba’athist Party Headquarters in Fa
llujah led a passing marine colonel to mistakenly believe that Saddam had escaped capture after all and set up shop in Dead Donkey. This misunderstanding was greatly exacerbated by the fact that the city flag of Dead Donkey, by coincidence, is exactly the same as the flag of pre-war Iraq, and the logo that is painted onto government buildings in the city is the exact same emblem as the battle standard of the Fedayeen militia. These coincidences culminated in the marines shelling the city hall with rather a lot of 155mm artillery, which demolished the building and sent the local xylophone fences a-singing with a musical cacophony as the shrapnel pinged off of them.
The mayor’s office is now located in Dead Donkey municipal park (one of the world’s many parks where a stabbing is the best you can hope for if you decide to visit). More precisely, it is located in the urinals, where a charming sign informs visitors they are standing in the “Urinals and Mayor’s Office.” Due to a number of unfortunate incidents, this sign was amended to read: “Please do not urinate on the mayor.” After complaints, it was further amended to read: “Please do not urinate on the mayor without due cause.”
The mayor of Dead Donkey is not very popular.
Genetic tests have revealed that Arnie the donkey was not in fact a donkey but a mule, which explains the lack of success behind Smith’s earlier attempts to breed the poor creature. However, the authorities of Dead Donkey have refused to contemplate a name change, arguing that a city named Dead Mule would just be silly. Arnie’s true identity is commemorated in the official and original sport of Dead Donkey, a game called Muleball. The rules of Muleball are not exactly well-defined, but it basically involves two teams of any numbers of players. Members of one team will then endeavor to search for members of the other team and then, when they find one, jump out and beat the everliving crap out of him until he falls unconscious, then haul him to the other side of town (traditionally relieving him of his valuables in the process), whereupon they score one point. The game continues until one team runs out of valuables, and members of one of the teams are usually very surprised to find out they are playing. Nevertheless, it is much beloved by the people. It involves neither mules nor balls.
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