Mexico City

Mexico City has never believed the dead should be left alone.

The Office has learned to live with this.

Every autumn the city feeds its dead, cleans their photographs, remembers their favorite drinks, apologizes for old arguments and issues several million invitations without realizing that a sufficiently sincere invitation can acquire legal force.

Then every telephone in the Office rings at once.

A woman reports that her husband is eating breakfast.

He died in 1989.

Soon the dead are returning through memories, murals, shrines, graffiti, family stories and neighborhoods that technically no longer exist.

The Office has procedures for dead people.

It has fewer procedures for a city remembering people the Office forgot to count.

Eventually the Return Desk requires three signs:

LIVING.
DEAD.
OTHER.

The line for OTHER is longest.

Central considers this disorder.

Mexico City considers it Tuesday.

Included free: a complete Reality Services story, featuring living people who have somehow managed to make their paperwork almost as complicated.