Dead Men Scare Me Stupid (10 page)

The problem was,
I didn’t know how to move it. My hands just went right through it when I tried
to pick it up. I knew it was possible to move it, because I had seen Ed and
Fred move solid objects around with relative ease. But darned if I could figure
out how they did it.

I tried sliding
into my body and operating it from the inside. That didn’t work. I didn’t think
it would, but it was worth a try. I wouldn’t recommend other people trying it
though. It’s pretty nasty in there. Dark, claustrophobic, damp and smelly. And
I think I heard rats in there. I got back out of there pretty quick.

After
experimenting for awhile, I found that by clenching every muscle in my ghostly
body - sort of gritting myself - I could materialize enough to be able to move
things around. The more I practiced, the better I got at this.

Finally I decided
I was ready. I picked up my corpse’s legs and began dragging it slowly out of
the room. I hit the head on a few things, but I decided that that probably
didn’t matter at this point. I didn’t know whether I would ever be using that
head again or not, but I certainly wasn’t using it now.

I dragged my body
down the two flights of stairs to the living room, my head thumping on each
step, then dragged it out of the house, across the yard, and onto the sidewalk,
as the few remaining ghosts in the house watched me from the window,
occasionally rubbing the knots on their heads. They didn’t try to stop me or
get me to come back. They’d had enough of me. They probably wished I had left sooner.

Now that the
battle was over, and I had successfully retrieved my personal property, I took
a moment to review my situation. It didn’t look good. I was in a pretty tough
spot. Not only was I never born, now I was dead too. Things hadn’t been going too
well for me lately. I decided the first thing I should do was seek medical
help. My body was looking worse by the minute. One of my ears was about to fall
off. It had never been this loose. I needed to see a doctor right away.

I spent the next
three hours laboriously dragging my corpse down the street towards the hospital
– with people screaming and running away, policemen anxiously blowing their
whistles at me, and dogs trying their damnedest to pull my corpse in the
opposite direction from where I wanted it to go. It was a pain in the butt. And
I mean that in both the literal and the philosophical sense.

After awhile I
noticed I was scraping my body’s eyebrows off on the pavement. I didn’t care. I
never knew what eyebrows were for anyway. Artists have since told me that you
need them so you can move them around to express your feelings. Surprise, or
anger, or mounting fear. Useful expressions like that. I’ve always kept them in
the same place on my face. Maybe that’s been my problem all along. Maybe that’s
why I got passed over for promotion so many times, and why I never made it in
Society, and why I got arrested and ambushed so often. Maybe I should have been
using my eyebrows more. Anyway, I scraped ‘em off.

By late that
afternoon I was sitting in the hospital waiting room, reading a magazine, with
my body in the chair next to me, surrounded by every fly that had ever lived.

A terrified nurse
finally ushered me in to the doctor’s office. I dragged my body in and got it
up on the examination table, while the doctor watched from the top of a filing
cabinet. When I finally convinced him that I wouldn’t be leaving until he had
examined the body, and if he didn’t hurry up, I would start bringing it up to
where he was, he reluctantly climbed down and began to check it over.

It was a
difficult examination for a number of reasons. There was no pulse to check, no
breathing to listen to, no reflexes to measure, no eyebrows to indicate my
current mood, nothing. But probably the biggest problem was communication.

“Cough.”

I coughed.

“Not you. Your
body.”

“Look,” I said,
“this is getting confusing. For the past hour…”

“Just cough… not
you.”

When he had
finished the examination, he told me I could get dressed. I told him I was
already dressed. He said he meant my body. There was that communication problem
again. I suggested that the next time we do this he should point to which one
of me he’s talking to. The dead one or the other dead one. He said there
wouldn’t be a next time. I said never mind then.

He wrote the
results of my tests down on my chart. I watched him do this, worriedly.

“How long do I
have, Doc?”

“Until what?”

“Just answer the
question.”

“You don’t have
any time. You’re dead.”

“I know, but, now
what? I mean, what pills should I take? And how often? What’s your professional
advice?”

He advised me to
put my body under six feet of dirt and leave it there until Christ came back.
He said that was the best thing I could do for it now. If I insisted on giving
it something, he suggested flowers.

It
wasn’t the advice I’d hoped for, and I wished he had given me some pills to
take, but he was the doctor. I nodded glumly and started dragging my body back
towards the elevators. Flowers. I would remember that.

I’m not the kind
of guy who gives up easily. I don’t do anything easily. I’ve always done things
the hard way. It’s my style, darnit.

So I didn’t take
the doctor’s advice right away. Six feet under ground might be the best place
for my body, but I could always put it there. There was no rush. The ground
wasn’t going anyplace. And the longer I kept my body above ground, the better
chance there was of a better option coming along. Maybe some new medicine. Or
maybe I’d develop a style that wasn’t so pointless.

I dragged my body
back to my house and tried to get on with my life, such as it was. I tried to
make the best of a bad situation. I’m like that. Upbeat, that’s me.

I wasn’t sure
where I should keep my body at first. It didn’t seem right to just stuff it in
a closet - it didn’t seem respectful. And besides, the closet was pretty full
already. With better stuff. There was no way I was going to take my tool box
out of there. That tool box was brand new.

By bending it a
little, I found I could get my body into the closet without taking anything
else out, but every time I tried to close the door there would be a neck
sticking out. That wasn’t acceptable to me. It didn’t look tidy enough.
Besides, there was no way to lock it now, and I had that new tool box in there.

Finally I gave up
on the idea of trying to store it somewhere out of sight, and just started
treating it more or less like a house guest.

I propped it up
in a chair, put slippers on its feet, and turned on a reading lamp, in case it
suddenly was able to read. I tried to feed it – it looked kind of hungry to me
- but the food just stayed in its mouth, or nose, wherever I put it. It didn’t
go anyplace after that, which is what you want.

After a few days
I was putting on TV shows I thought my corpse would like, taking it to boxing
matches, and trying to play tennis with it. That whole game was a farce. I
couldn’t hit the ball and my body couldn’t hit it back. We just stood there.

My ghostly body
wasn’t much more use to me than my regular body was. Due to my lack of
substance, it was hard for me to do even the simplest of domestic tasks.
Cooking was difficult, cleaning and dusting were more trouble than they were
worth, and trying to rotate the tires on my car was a complete waste of time. I
managed to get one tire off, but not the others. And then I couldn’t get the
first tire back on again. Same thing happened when I tried to re-shingle my
roof, and rotate the paint on my house. I’ve got to remember not to start
projects I can’t finish. That’s a good lesson for all of us to remember.

As if I didn’t
have enough problems, I started getting complaints from my neighbors. They said
strange noises were coming out of my house at night. Hey, can I help it if I
fall over things? And talk to myself through a bullhorn? Is that my fault? They
said there seemed to be a spirit haunting the place, which apparently violated
some kind of neighborhood covenant. They were worried I might owe them some
money.

Finally a
neighborhood committee showed up at my house to discuss these issues with me. I
was happy to have this discussion with them, because I was getting a little
bored with my own company. It would be nice, I felt, to talk to someone new.
Someone whose mouth moved.

Unfortunately,
the meeting didn’t go very well. My neighbors seemed extremely uncomfortable
all the time they were in my home. For one thing, there seemed to be two of me
there. One transparent and the other dead. I said there was actually only one
of us - I was a ventriloquist. They asked which one of me was the
ventriloquist. I wasn’t ready for that question, didn’t know what to say, so
after awhile I just chased them around with a poker until they left. After
that, there were no more complaints. But no more visitors either.

Then one evening
while I was playing checkers with my body (three hours and no moves yet!) I
decided I couldn’t continue to live this way. Something had to be done. I had
to try to find a way to bring my body back to life, or this checker game would
never end.

Since doctors
hadn’t been able to help me, I tried taking my body to a repair shop. The sign
in the window of the shop said: ‘We fix anything” with a long string of
reassuring asterisks. I figured a shop with that much confidence in itself was
the place for me. I materialized myself as well as I could - and I was getting
better at this. You could still see through me, but not for as many miles – and
dragged my body down to the shop.

I told Sid, the
repairman, my problem. He looked my body over for awhile, then shook his head.
“I don’t like the look of that head.”

“You don’t? Wait
a minute. I’ll make it smile.”

He shook his head
again. “I’m pretty sure you’re going to need a new head.”

“No, I want to
keep the head, if I can.”

He looked at me
the way all repairmen look at me when I say something like that, then did some
figuring. “Cost you five hundred dollars,” he said finally. “Come back this
afternoon. I’ll have it fixed up as good as new.” Then he made some rapid tiny
sounds with his mouth that I later figured out were asterisks.

When I came back
that afternoon, Sid had gotten my body looking pretty good. I especially liked
the huge biceps (compressed air did the trick there, he revealed), and the nice
healthy color he had painted my face, but my body still didn’t work, which was
mainly what I was looking for. It just laid there on the hydraulic lift,
leaking oil.

I told Sid I
didn’t want my body to just look good, which it did, I wanted it to be able to
earn a living, with me inside it. He said if I wanted that I would have to pop
for a new head. I said I wouldn’t, that I thought the current head was good
enough, that it still had some wear left in it, and reminded him that the
customer was always right. He said that usually wasn’t the case in his
experience. He couldn’t remember the last time a customer was right. I said I was
thinking seriously of taking my valuable business somewhere else, and he said
he was glad to hear that. So that’s where we left it.

We argued about
the bill for awhile, an argument which I finally won by just disappearing. Sid
put my body in a storage area with a bunch of other crap that hadn’t been paid
for, but I just dragged it away that night. Score one for me.

Feeling I needed
help of a more supernatural nature than Sid, I took my body to Odd Town. I had
seen a number of occult-type characters hanging around there the last time I
was in the area - exorcists, sorcerers, you name it - all anxious to make a
quick Earthly buck. You’d think people with magical powers wouldn’t have to
work for a living in the crappiest part of town, but you would be wrong. I’ve
seen them there.

I went to the
first sorcerer I could find, and told him what I wanted. He looked at my body
doubtfully.

“I don’t…” he
began.

“I want to keep
the head,” I snapped.

He shrugged, said
the customer was always right (ha!), and went to work.

After fiddling
with my body for awhile, and chanting gibberish over it, including what sounded
like garbled lyrics to several popular songs such as Pennsylvania 6-5000, and
sprinkling what looked like, and turned out to be, barbeque sauce over it, he
announced grandly that my body had been successfully brought back to life. Then
he kicked it a little to make it move briefly. He didn’t get paid either. As I
dragged my body back out onto the street again, he shouted at me that he’d turn
me into a newt if I didn’t pay. I said I bet he wouldn’t.

I tried several
other sorcerers on the same block, but it turned out the first guy I had gone
to was the best one. They were surprised I had gotten in to see him.

As I said
earlier, I don’t give up easily. But I do give up eventually. And the time had
come to admit to myself that the doctors and the fix-it shop men were probably
right. I was dead. And I wasn’t coming back. I would have to continue to walk
the Earth as a ghost until a place opened up for me in Heaven.

That was one good
thing I had gotten out of all of this. At least I knew how the afterlife worked
now. I even knew how long I had to wait. One of the ghosts in The Very Haunted
House had tipped me off that I was due to check in to Heaven in 2018. He said
we were going to be sharing the same cloud – 46B Upper Level, Next To The Fire
Door – when it became available.

I don’t know
where he got all his information, but he said my death was supposed to occur in
Germany in the summer of 2018, when I was destined to blunder into the middle
of a nuclear standoff between the superpowers and fart. So until that year
rolled around, it looked like there was nothing else for me to do but wait.