There was a ghost in my room. I was in a grand old home over by Rhodes, a beautiful place of gray stone and carefully wrought iron. I was headed home to Mississippi from St. Louis. The ghost was you.
Memphis, Tennessee, Polaroid 600 (2015)
Perhaps it is wrong to say ghost; it was at night, and I was asleep, and I suppose the truth is, who I saw that night was alive. I wouldn’t have called it a dream; it seemed closer to a vision, or at least, a visitation.
It was your wife. You had been gone a few weeks. In the dream—in the visitation—she told me “he’s feeling like an appearance tonight.”
I said, delicately, “how?” Because you could no longer appear in this world; your body had stopped working. “On the internet,” she replied.
My hopes began to rise. If you were going to make an appearance, then she was talking to you, so maybe—so maybe you weren’t really gone.
“How are you . . . how are you talking to him?” Hope began to rise in my belly, a strange looseness, like hearing your own voice after sipping helium from a balloon, and she said:
Memphis, looking North over the River, Polaroid SX-70 (October 2021)
I had never been on a farm before. I was eighteen. Even though you knew about Schubert and Mozart and could make a computer from scratch, this is where you grew up. We were almost dead center in the middle of Mississippi, at midnight, in a field of corn. “Look up,” you said.
I had never looked at the night sky before. I was eighteen. I still remember the star that streaked across the immensity of the roaring darkness. I remember thinking, is this up there all the time? All of this? It was so beautiful, even if I didn’t know what that meant yet.
Overton Square, Memphis, Polaroid SX-70 (October 2021)
I still don’t know how a classically trained musician ends up loving Nine Inch Nails, but your entire day is devoted to listening to them at our residence hall. It’s hard to explain to people now and even I manage to forget it, but compact discs were rare. I don’t mean you couldn’t buy them, but what you bought was up to the whims of where you lived, and what the stores you could find there had in stock. Plus it was so expensive; a whole album crept up towards twenty dollars, and the imported cd-singles by the Cure and NiN could be even more.
It’s been almost 30 years but I can still see you at a keyboard, mouse clicking steadily, as you dragged pixels one way to harvest spice and another to deploy sonic tanks in Dune II, all while the Broken EP pounded in the background, Reznor screaming you’re too physicaaaaaaaaaal through his teeth, over and over.
Memphis, Polaroid SX-70 (October 2021)
The sun has reached the branches on the oaks in the back yard. I absentmindedly pick a twig off my heel, stuck when I walked out to get the Sunday paper. Normally I whistle “Blue Moon” to myself when I feel like this, when the world is quiet, when the world is beautiful, but today I start singing
Once there was a way
to get back homeward
Once there was a way
to get back home.
I wonder if I could find your family farm, which is no longer your family’s farm, realize there’s very little chance of that, all these years later. But I bet I could find the bakery run by the Mennonite family where we went the next day for doughnuts, remember what you called it growing up.
I was too little to be able to say it, you laughed. So I would ask my parents if we could go get doughnuts from the Meteorites.
Crittenden County, Arkansas (near Cloar), Polaroid 600 (October 2021)
Here are some stories that, in a different world, we would tell in lawn chairs in my backyard, as the sun crept down towards the Mississippi:
Once we helped a friend move an upright piano. We loaded it in the back of my golden El Camino. You sat on a stool in the back and played Bach, the most beautiful and solemn of music, as I drove slowly through downtown Starkville.
Once I had put the El Camino in a ditch and my face was bandaged. You flew me to Florida, where you had moved, and we spent the week walking through Little Havana, fútbol matches blaring on FM radios in open shops, as you ordered drinks I had never heard of in a language I couldn’t understand.
Once in the Ozarks you put me in a sleeper hold and said I will hug him and squeeze him and call him George and I was pretttttty sure I was going to die, but it just knocked me out.
Once Mississippi State was playing a Florida directional school in the Liberty Bowl and you had VIP passes. God, you loved Mississippi State so much. My girlfriend bought me a cashmere scarf with a maroon and gray check pattern to wear to the game. I can see the photo of us in the stands now, grinning widely, almost brought to tears with some of the most boring football of all time, but we look dazed with happiness.
Arkansas, Polaroid SX-70 (October 2021)
I was holding your hand in a white room in downtown Memphis. Your nails were long, and when you breathed it sounded like a piece of cotton cloth tearing. Your eyes would go out of focus and then dart around, and then you would be back in the white room again. You were already a ghost.
You had told your wife a few weeks before you thought you had the flu, that the way you just ached, it had to be the flu. It was not the flu. It was something in your bones.
It was something in your bones, and it kept growing.
So you were in that white room, and we all came. All of us. From Jackson, from Athens, from New Orleans, from Hattiesburg. We all looked so different then we had before, all those years ago. But I remember thinking we looked pretty good, I remember thinking this is what we should look like, I remember thinking we did it, we are all here, just how you are supposed to be for each other. We all made it.
We took turns sitting beside you and holding your hand in the white room. Then we went across the street and I sat underneath the painting of the Old Man, the Bear, at his last game in the Liberty Bowl. We were all together.
Email from my college roommate, received March 9, 2015 at 7:24 p.m.:
The MRI showed cancer spread to brain, meninges, and spine. No real successful options left.
Photo by Katie Steed and David McCarty, Memphis, Tennessee, Polaroid 600 (October 2021)
So I’m in a bedroom in a grand old home in Memphis and your wife is there, even though I know she’s really back in Florida with the boys, so she is not there, and she tells me “he’s feeling like an appearance tonight,” and I ask her “how are you talking to him?” because I want to be able to talk to you again, and hear your big booming bark of a laugh again, and the thought of that causes hope to rise in my belly, a strange looseness, like hearing your voice after you sip in helium from a balloon, a bright blue balloon at a baby’s birthday party, and she looks me in the eyes, and says:
Memphis, Tennessee, Polaroid SX-70 (October 2021)
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby
We are standing in a field in Mississippi, at midnight, and across the velvet-black bowl above there is a star, and the star is
Golden slumbers fill your eyes
You are in the back of my dad’s El Camino, back straight as a cornstalk, eyes closed, playing piano
Smiles await you when you rise
You are in a white room in Memphis and I am holding your hand
Once there was a way
To get back homeward
We are standing in a field in Mississippi, and it is dark, so dark, but across the sky there is a star, and the star is
Once there was a way
Your wife is talking to me, I swear she is in the room with me, in the bedroom of a house in Memphis and she tells me “he’s feeling like an appearance tonight,” and Jesus Christ, Jonathan, she has already scattered your ashes, and I know that, but still I ask her, in this dream, or whatever it is that this is, I ask “how are you talking to him?” because I want to be able to talk to you again, and she says:
This is the second photo I took after the morning I didn’t see your ghost, in that grand house over by Rhodes, in that city by the River:
Memphis, Tennessee, Polaroid 600 (2015)
We were all there at the end.
And what she said to me, was:
I’m not crying but I’m almost crying. That is some piece of writing. The mixed up looping of time and memory and feelings is something I recognise. I’m sorry about your friend.
Magic. That’s a pretty good song to tie together all those feelings. I think I will make a BAMF playlist for myself and that will be the last song on it. Thanks for writing that.