So You’re Dead

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

It’s a robbery gone wrong, and when it ends you’re standing over a bloody corpse. The police come and you realize hang on, that’s you. You’re the corpse. What a turn! You basically had a lot to live for — you had exotic fish, you had magazines, you were going to prove yourself someday — so you resent being dead. 

A white light appears and a soothing voice says, “Come hither, thee.” 

Screw that. You stick around.

When you ditch the light, you plan to head straight back to your hometown. Not the town where you went to high school, gross, the town before that. It had this startling old mansion. You always thought it should be haunted. With towers and an iron fence, it was so different from the surrounding ranch and split-level homes — and whenever you walked past as a child, to calm your fright, you had to sing to yourself. That house will be your jam! You will be a cold spot in there, you will flicker the lights. You will be sighted as a glow on the stairs, as a face in the attic window, in mirrors at night. You will make the walls bleed and laugh as you do. And if the cable show To Debunk a Ghost sends its psychics after you? You will turn their hair white.

Ohhh crap, there’s a catch. 

You can’t pick any location. You have to haunt where you died.

You will be haunting the Food Fox at the corner of Route 53 and Parakeet.  

The place where you spent your last minute waiting to have your 12 items or fewer rung up, annoyed that the lady in front of you had 16 items — this is your forever home? What a nightmare. No ghost ever had it so bad. You should have gone to the light when you had the chance. 

The whole first year is rough. You hate it so much. 

But it’s eternity. You come to terms. You decide to make an effort.

You start with the cold spot thing. It’s hard, though, because the AC is cranked. You feel unnoticed. 

So you knock items off shelves. The stock boy finds them and puts them back and hates it, which is close to the reaction you want as a ghost. But he figures some customer did it, which is maddening. 

Eventually, one night — after saving up for it, because it takes days to build the energy to knock over even a small item — you go bonkers and hurl every single can of tuna onto the floor. 

In the morning, the manager is steamed. He ducks into his tiny office to review the surveillance video. When he comes out, he looks like he’s seen a ghost. Aha! 

This is the beginning of you on a roll.

In fact you do all the rolls the next month.  

Then the pickles. You feel bad when the jars break, but you haven’t had any attention in so long. You are in this for the attention. 

You were very lonely in life. Nothing worked out the way you wanted it. Certainly not dating. But even friends drifted away, over the years. They got caught up in their own lives. They had kids, and rewarding careers, they didn’t even make time to meet you out for dinner anymore. Once a month was all you asked. Was dinner with you such a burden? Sometimes you felt like you were perpetually fifteen, incapable of doing anything right, essentially unlikable. You put a brave face on it, you acted happy. You went on vacations alone.

Now you’re a celebrity! Even though you’re mostly invisible and silent. The manager puts up a sign about the haunting. The store sells DVDs of surveillance footage in which cans go flying. It takes you months to build up the energy to manifest just as an orb, but even so, people from all over the tristate area shop here because of you. Girls with cobweb tattoos try to hold a séance in Cookies & Crackers. Teens much more romantically successful than you ever were come to make out in the aisles at midnight — because your presence is sexy to them. On Halloween, little kids trick-or-treat at the store. You make a game for them: each year, you pick one child, and you knock off her hat, or you toss a bag of marshmallows at him, or you deliver an ice-cold wet willy to the ear. You love Halloween. You could haunt this supermarket forever.

Actually, you haunt it for thirty-six years. The neighborhood goes downhill and the parent company of Food Fox sells off the location and it closes (you are so alone) and then reopens as a 99-cent store, called Cheap-O. 

Cheap-O is not as fun. It isn’t open all night, and the new manager doesn’t believe in you. Even when you roll out all the gift-wrapping ribbon into piles of ribbon spaghetti. Even when you build a three-foot pyramid by meticulously stacking every single tin of Luck-Y-um Potted Meat Food Product. (That was exhausting.) He denies the evidence. Annoyed at his obstinacy, one night at closing you shove the manager into a cardboard rack of affordable, mean-spirited greeting cards. He gets up and accuses an employee named Wendy of doing it, and has her arrested. There is no surveillance system in the Cheap-O, so she can’t prove her innocence. The police take her away and you never see her again. Wendy was cool.

Ultimately sweet revenge is yours because the neighborhood continues its downward spiral, so, after eight or nine years, Cheap-O closes. After that, spiraling, the location becomes a series of things. First a tobacco and bong shop, featuring a product line made mostly of glass. And evidently not well-insured; they close quickly. Then it becomes a flea market, with lots of odd booths, then mostly empty booths, then it’s Off-Track Betting, then a check-cashing racket, then a storage facility, then a crack den, then a pile of debris. Then a vacant lot. And then, a $50 parking lot for flying cars. 

You wonder what year it is. You’ve lost track. Some year where $50 is worth $1, by the looks of it.

“I wish I haunted a supermarket,” you moan. “That was the time of my life.”

You kick a can around, when there is a can. You sit in the cars, when people risk parking them.

After a long time, generations maybe, the neighborhood comes back up. 

From where you haunt, you can see tall buildings getting built, and vacant storefronts turning into restaurants, and the pedestrians stop looking like they all need medical attention. Your lot becomes a brand-new shopping mall. You don’t have full run of it, just the parts that are built over the original Food Fox, but that’s not bad. You get to throw things on the floor of what seem to be some new century’s equivalents to a Starbucks, a Gap, a GNC, and Sharper Image. It feels sort of great! You go full attention-whore for decades.

But then the crowds thin out, and get anxious, and you’re at a loss as to why. It’s not like the downward spiral last time. Puzzled, you show off less, eavesdrop more, read over peoples’ shoulders, until one day you grasp what is up — which is that scientists have perfected immortality. 

Basically it involves abandoning the physical world and existing as a cloud of intelligent electrons. And more and more people are “jacking in” to this new, eternal society called iHeaven. 

It does not take long before you find yourself once again haunting a disused building. In this grim era, you meet only stragglers. Demented vagrants, mostly, and some holdouts who have become urban explorers to document dramatic ruins for upload to iHeaven.

And then once again you’re haunting crumbled cinderblocks and weeds.

But this time it gets worse. 

The immense, burgeoning need for servers to store realities where human consciousness can roam comes to require new construction on your stomping ground. Of course, at first you’re excited! All these digging robots and welding robots building you a new place! But when it’s finished, no people come to it. The building is a vast, lightless bunker, silent but for the hum of aisle after aisle of iHeaven’s databanks and cooling fans, patrolled only by robots programmed for menial tasks. Not a single living soul ever enters. 

Finally, here, you know true loneliness. 

You sit and build up enough energy to throw cans of tuna, even to throw cars, but there is no tuna, there are no cars, and there never will be.

It’s not exactly your fault what happens next. You’re just so angry at the way it’s going! You act out, you seize the biggest computer-thing, like a mainframe or whatever, and throw it to the floor. And it lands at precisely the right angle that the network breakers don’t kick in, a freak chance — you have to assume it’s partly your weird electrical field affecting the system, too. Anyway, the shockwave jolts through server after server in a massive chain reaction, not only in here but (you sense) across thousands of similar buildings connected to this one, and the result is, well... you pretty much instantly wipe from existence all 19 billion human beings around the planet, and destroy all record of our civilization’s long struggle.

Nice one, asshat.

The end