At first I thought I was schizophrenic, or seriously hallucinating, when John appeared suddenly on the third anniversary of his death. But as I quickly discovered, I was not the only one who saw him. John, true to his personality I knew when he was alive, carried on detailed conversations with almost everyone I encountered. He even became somewhat of an obstacle to any romance I undertook at the time. But as time wore on, he quickly engendered himself to any girlfriend. Some never knew that he was actually dead. One of the more interesting episodes during this time period involved John falling asleep while driving his car after we watched a Yankees game at the bar. John had a lot to drink that night, and the officer thought that he was intoxicated. But John passed the breathalyzer in flying colors. The fact that he had no alcohol in his breath should not have been surprising because he didn't actually breathe.
Of course, when he had to, John could also be very convincing that he was alive. Once, on what would have been his fiftieth birthday, he was hit by a car. He was taken by ambulance to the hospital (I was at work at the time and was not present). The doctor who pronounced him dead in the ER was surprised when John opened his eyes, sat up on the gurney and proceeded to walk out of the hospital. To this day, the doctor believes that there must have been a power surge which disabled all the medical monitoring equipment.
During the last two years of his life, John voraciously read David Foster Wallace. So I guess it really did not come as much of a surprise that one evening when I came home from work, I saw John and David Foster Wallace chatting amiably at the kitchen table. It appeared that they had reached a consensus that my life could be improved if I took up tennis again and discarded my red wine consumption in favor of smoking pot. We invited Foster Wallace for dinner, and later he became a regular house guest. I considered myself fortunate to live with two dead people.
John and David Foster Wallace had a lot in common. They were the same age, their parents were teachers, and they both grew up in the Midwest. They both liked sports, TV, sarcasm and writing. They both took the same anti-depression medication. Of course, even though John was a former Leisure and Arts Editor at the Wall Street Journal he should have kept his editorial criticisms of Foster Wallace's novels to himself. John was always given Foster Wallace "helpful" suggestions on cutting some of the length of his novels and making some of his ideas clearer. Foster Wallace would inevitably retort that at least he had attempted the "great American" novel, while John was just a critic at a business journal. I usually exited the conversation at that point as things invariably got nasty.
Eventually John and Foster Wallace asked a favor of me. It seems they both were stuck on this planet because of the way they had attempted to exit this planet, namely by taking their own life. For reasons that they could never explain to me, suicide victims are stuck on earth after their death because of the heavy energy states released during death. If you die by other means, the human energy potential is released skyward, and accounts for the lights of the aurora borealis. They were eager to exit this planet once and for all. But to do that, I had to take them to the north pole by air, where, on a clear night, they could jump out of the plane and their energy could assimilate into the aurora borealis.
I readily agreed to help them out, but it did take some advance planning on my part. First, I had to learn how to fly a plane, then purchase a plane, and finally plan our mission. This took me all of several weeks to accomplish. Then, on a bright clear night in October, I opened the hatch door at 20,000 feet, and watched my two friends leap into oblivion. Of course, I captured the entire event on my new Iphone 6, which they both appreciated:-).
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