At the moment he was leveling his rather deadly looking shotgun at a group of salesmen who he suspected were up to no good, on the excellent grounds that they were salesmen, and young whippersnappers, and that they were wearing clothes that he did not recognize. Several loud shots rang out as he fired at them. A group of a half dozen or so had taken cover behind a large sturdy fence on the edge of Mr. Fletcher’s property.
“Perhaps,” one of the salesmen shouted out, “you would like to consider an installment plan.”
The load of buckshot that Mr. Fletcher sent towards him by way of response pinged musically off of the xylophone fence.
“Zero down payment,” shouted another, before Mr. Fletcher sent a second spread of shot flying over his head.
“Get off of my property,” Fletcher spat at them.
Brian stared.
“Hello, Mr. Fletcher,” Nathan called out genially as he sauntered towards the mailbox.
“Oh, hello Nathan,” Fletcher croaked, his eyes only briefly leaving the sights of his shotgun to observe his neighbor.
“What’s the count for today?” Nathan asked genially.
“I’ve fired forty-six shells and hit three whippersnappers, six salesmen, a cyclist, and the mailman,” Fletcher said. “A few teenagers also came by, but I let them get away.”
“Mmm...” Nathan hummed, as if this were completely normal. He opened his mailbox to discover it was empty. “Still no delivery? It’s getting late.”
“The mail service is getting worse and worse around here,” Fletcher agreed, amid a cacophony of shots aimed at the salesman.
Brian was too stunned and terrified to say anything, but his eyes fell on the abandoned mailtruck on the opposite side of the street. It was on fire, peppered with bullet holes.
One of the salesman apparently thought the discussion of mail service constituted an opening for his sales pitch, as he shouted, “subscribe now for free shipping and handling!” He ducked back behind the fence to avoid Mr. Fletcher’s reply.
“Who’s your friend?” Mr. Fletcher asked, glancing at Brian.
“Didn’t you see him come in?”
“I saw a policeman come in,” Mr. Fletcher replied, “but you know I don’t like to bother your guests.”
“He is not a policeman,” Nathan explained. “He is a bureaucrat trying to get me to sign a form.”
“Terrible nuisance, paperwork,” Mr. Fletcher said.
“Satisfaction guaranteed or your money-”
There was a loud bang, and the salesman finished his pitch with a sound like “urgle burgle.”
“It’s absolutely necessary,” Brian said mechanically.
Fletcher held up a cautioning hand. “Excuse me for one moment.” He reached into the pocket of his night gown and pulled out what looked to be a grenade, and threw it - with surprising accuracy for a man of his age - behind the fence. The salesmen scampered out from behind the fence and then dropped as Fletcher picked them off.
“I am very unhappy about the mail service though,” he said as he did this. “I had a letter for pick up.”
“Did you?” Nathan asked.
“Oh yes. It was a donation for the local chapter of the International Committee of the Red Cross. I make a sizable contribution every year.”
“Why?”
“I suppose,” said Fletcher, as he sighted another salesman, “I am just a pacifist at heart.”
There was a loud bang as he brought down the final salesman.
“Are you aware that you are creating rather a lot of paperwork for other people?” Brian asked him, eyeing the bodies of the salesmen. “By killing them, I mean.”
“Oh, don’t worry sonny. They’re not dead. They’re just stunned.”
Brian did not think that stunned people tended to produce quite so much blood.
“Stunned are they?”
“Yes. I fire rubber bullets.” Fletcher broke into a wicked grin. “Sometimes.”
Nathan, meanwhile, had picked up the newspaper from his driveway that he had apparently neglected to fetch earlier in the day. It was mostly drawn in crayon, though the illustrations were done in magic marker.
Fletcher, apparently satisfied that the salesmen were adequately stunned, ducked back inside to reload. Nathan, whistling, tucked his paper under one arm and returned to his home. Brian turned to follow him, but as he turned, he saw another salesman sneaking out from behind a nearby hedge and maneuvering back towards Fletcher’s house.
Brian caught the man by the arm.
“Did you see what just happened? You don’t seriously mean to go back, do you?”
“No, no, it’s alright,” the salesman said excitedly. “I sell shotgun shells.”
Brian looked after him in disbelief for a moment, then ducked back into Nathan’s house.
“Does that happen every day?” he asked Nathan.
“More or less,” Nathan affirmed.
Brian slumped down into one of Nathan’s green chairs in disbelief.
“And you live here?”
“I’ve lived here all my life.”
“How do you stand it?”
“Stand what?” Nathan asked, turning to the next page of his paper, which was just one constant waxy crayon squiggle.
“Well, the threat of death, for one thing.”
“I have a brain lesion-”
“Let me rephrase the question. How does your family put up with it?”
“All of my family died, I’m afraid,” Nathan said.
“That doesn’t surprise me in the slightest - but I meant, why did they come to Dead Donkey in the first place?”
“Oh, I don’t know. But my family has lived here for generations.”
Brian goggled at him.
Nathan’s family had in fact lived in Dead Donkey for generations. Nathan had been raised by his father; his mother left before he was born. Nathan’s father worked in the xylophone factory, and earned an honest and musical living until the factory burned down, and he had subsequently choked on a hard candy that he mistook for a soft candy. His aunt had been a zookeeper at the Dead Donkey zoo, until it transpired that there was no Dead Donkey zoo, as the animals that the zookeepers had hitherto thought were being kept in transparent animal enclosures were in fact just being polite. The Dead Donkey Zoo’s board of trustees insists it has now rectified this small oversight by constructing transparent animal enclosures. If so no one is entirely sure where these enclosures might be, because they are certainly not enclosing the animals.
The better liked of Nathan’s two grandfathers had been a very well respected local magician. His immensely popular signature act consisted of walking through a solid wall, and although his technique for doing so involved a sledge and a chainsaw, it still drew crowds so tremendous that he had once been responsible for the Great Dead Donkey Theater Floor Collapse. Unfortunately, his wizard-grandfather had eventually been killed by a faulty bathtub. His death so outraged the public that they formed a lynch mob to hunt down and string up the perpetrator.
While Nathan’s grandfather had been the best known member of the family, his other relatives were also quite distinguished. Nathan’s grandmother had been a treasure hunter. She maintained throughout her life that she had discovered ancient documents proving that there was hidden gold in the city and insisted Captain Kidd buried his treasure in Dead Donkey. Why Captain Kidd would have buried his treasure in Dead Donkey, which was three hundred miles inland from entirely the wrong ocean, remained a mystery. Nathan’s other grandmother had been a social engineer, and had managed to dramatically reduce poverty and wealth inequality in the city of Dead Donkey by introducing the concept of armed robbery to the masses. She was later crushed to death by a life support machine.
Nathan’s other grandfather had been a faulty bathtub manufacturer, and had been lynched by an angry mob when he was found out.
Nathan’s third grandfather had been a firefighterfighter, which is to say he worked closely with the arsonists. He’d gone ou
t in a blaze of glory. He remains a legend in the city’s firefighterfighter community, and the arsonists continue to light eternal flames in tribute to him (or so they claim).
Brian listened to Nathan tell him all this. The latter concluded his story by saying:
“I am very proud of my family.”
Brian was speechless.
“What about your family?” Nathan asked Brian.
“I don’t like to talk about my family.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like to talk about talking about my family either.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
Nathan considered.
“Perhaps you could do some kind of interpretive dance.” He looked dead serious.
Brian was about to deliver some sort of biting remark about dancing on Nathan’s little toe when the phone rang. Nathan picked it up.
“Hello,” he said.
There was a pause.
“Oh, yes. You can come right over.” He put down the phone. “Excuse me,” he said to Brian. “I am expecting company and I have to get ready.”
Nathan stood and walked out of the room, then returned with a plate of little snack cakes and pitcher of coffee. No sooner had he done this than the doorbell rang. Nathan went over and answered it.
A man with a very broad smile was standing on the doorstep. He shook Nathan’s hand in a jaunty handshake.
“So good to see you again!” he said cheerily.
“And you,” Nathan said with equal cheeriness. “Come in, come in. What can I do for you?”
“I wouldn’t have believed it myself but it looks like you’re back again. We’ll just have to do something about that, won’t we? Oh, and you have company! How silly of me. I didn’t mean to intrude.”
“You’re not intruding. He was just leaving.”
“I was not,” Brian said insistently.
The grinning man took another one of Nathan’s several green chairs and sat down in it. He stretched his legs in a leisurely manner.
“Can I offer you some coffee?” Nathan asked.
“I would but I really shouldn’t drink anything while I’m working. It could lead to... some unnecessary complications,” the grinning man finished.
Nathan poured him a cup anyway and seized one of the snack cakes.
The smiling man ignored this, but hung his head apologetically.
“I am terribly sorry for my tardiness. I would have come earlier but there is a very strange old man who lives next door to you-”
“Don’t mind Mr. Fletcher. He won’t hurt you unless you try to sell him something or walk on his grass. What brings you back here?”
“I heard the funniest rumor that you had come back, and I wouldn’t have believed it. One does encounter the funniest problems in this business... but you know, if word got out that I had come to visit you, but you were still... around, so to speak, that could be very bad for my reputation. Very bad indeed. So we’ll just have to take care of it. Nothing personal, of course, Mr. Haynes. Just part of my work.”
Brian was getting the impression that there was something very strange going on here. He straightened his tie.
“What do you do exactly?”
“I am a serial killer,” the grinning man said quietly. And before Brian could react, he drew a silenced pistol out of his pocket and shot Brian dead.
Nathan sipped his coffee and looked bemusedly at Brian for a second or so, until the serial killer shot him too, and then the world went black.
A mechanical woman’s voice sounded out.
“Station number four, please.”
Suddenly, Nathan was standing in line behind rather a lot of salesman who had not, in fact, been stunned. The frumpy woman at the desk looked up and spotted him.
“You again?” she demanded irritably.
Chapter 9
Reality has an odd sense of humor. The evidence for this is everywhere, from the duck-billed platypus to the warning tags on mattresses to the as-yet-undiscovered Sinistra hagfish, a deep-sea fish that only has one eye and only believes in the existence of the world to the left of itself and not right, and therefore spends its whole life going in circles, much like a lot of people. But Sinistra hagfish aside, nowhere is this sense of humor so apparent as in the city of Dead Donkey.
For example, consider the case of Christopher Seidel, a lifelong Dead Donkey resident who has been hailed as the blindest man alive. Seidel earned this title not because he was totally blind (which a good many people are), but rather because he absolutely insisted that he could see, though he absolutely, definitely could not. He eschewed the usual aids of a cane, guide dog, and dark glasses and instead went around bumping into hydrants and fences and staging loud, one-sided conversations with nearby lamp posts about the weather, much to the bemusement of passersby. When people pointed out to him that he couldn’t see, Seidel would furiously deny the simple fact and attempt to describe his surroundings in great detail, which would inevitably come out as a description of Time Square in New York, since he couldn’t see them. Hence, he was not only blind but also blind to his own blindness, and therefore the blindest man alive.
One particular morning, after Seidel had quite happily put on his polka-dot-feather gown and pink women’s tennis shoes and shaved while monitoring his reflection in a bathroom Salvador Dali painting, he tripped over a diamond which - by complete coincidence - had been unearthed by a good-natured squirrel and deposited on his front steps. This diamond was so magnificently, incredibly, jawdroppingly large and beautiful that could they have but seen it, DeBeers’ top executives would have given up the diamond trade on the spot. The curator of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History would have thrown the Hope Diamond into the trash, cursing at it for the time and space it had wasted during its tenure, and Marilyn Monroe would have made a credible effort at time travel to get her hands on it.
Seidel would have wept for joy. As it happened, though, he couldn’t see it, but Seidel was convinced he had found a large and inconveniently placed rock. He took it inside and used it as a paperweight for his important papers (which were actually takeout menus that he believed to be tax returns). It will, consequently, never be seen by human eyes, although the squirrel will occasionally come back to visit it.
Another example is the case of little ten-year-old Jimmy Millican, a young schoolboy enrolled in Dead Donkey elementary school, who spent a few of his mornings in math class learning about prime numbers. (Some aspects of the Dead Donkey education system will be discussed in greater depth in later chapters.) In between doodles of space ships and what the school psychiatrist would later generously label “water gun fights,” Jimmy Millican would happen to devise and scribble down a perfectly general method of quickly and easily finding the prime factorization of any number, no matter how large. He assumed this to be totally unimportant, and quite frankly boring.
In fact this was so mind-bendingly important that if anyone had known about it, every intelligence officer, covert operative, secret service agent, codebreaker, code-unbreaker, spook, ghost, ghoul, and CIA janitor would have swooped down on Jimmy where he sat, only to be shoved out of the way by a horde of angry number theorists loudly proclaiming that it couldn’t possibly be right, only for the number theorists to be themselves trampled by the rampaging Fields Medal committee in their rush to give Jimmy this and several other distinguished awards.
As it happened though, the only person who ever saw this was Jimmy’s math teacher and subsequently the school psychiatrist, who decided that the most important thing on the page was in fact the doodling of the “water gun fights” with his fellow classmates. Jimmy would subsequently be transferred to a special class and go on to work as a professional speed bump.
But such is life.
Chapter 10
After a few minutes of waiting and a certain amount of shouting, Nathan found himself back in Director Fulcher’s office. Fulcher was stalking back and forth like a panther that had j
ust been fired from an accounting job. The look in his eye was murderous.
“So.” He said to Nathan. “So.”
Brian was in the seat next to Nathan. He shifted uncomfortably.
Nathan stared benignly back at Fulcher.
“So?” Nathan prompted querulously.
“I decided to have a look at your file,” Fulcher said, “to find out why you are such a troublesome man. Would you like to see your file, Mr. Haynes?”
“I suppose so,” Nathan said.
“Here is your file.”
Fulcher opened an impossibly deep drawer in his desk and out of this impossibly deep drawer he drew an impossibly large file, a file so large that the room had to dramatically expand to house it. Space wobbled nauseously and inconveniently around them, twisting and yawning as the room inflated. By the end of it, the file was about the size of a small house, and inside it were about a quizillion forms written in unreadably small print. Their tops all said things like, “Form 16573: Authorization to Have a Dream About Frogs,” “Form 87103: Certification That Subject Has Never Interacted With Mr. Travis Erwin Habsworth, of 2388 Shillington Road, Albany,” and “Form 000-0: This is not a Form.”
Nathan blinked at it a bit bashfully. He guessed he had never realized how much paperwork he caused for other people.
“Is my social security number somewhere in there?” he asked pleasantly. “It’s just that I’ve forgotten my social security number, so if you could tell me what it is-”
“Everything that you have ever done is in here,” Fulcher said dryly.
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