Visiting Stan in the Afterlife
Title pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Hope you enjoy.
Toward the end of high school Stan recorded all these songs, about two hours' worth, clever little things he had written. We had a great time sitting around listening to them, and he loved to play for me on the guitar, too. He had a killer voice. It wouldn't have been out of place in some grungy garage band. Since I was one of his better friends, he gave me both his CDs. Those songs were really special to me. Then, about a year later, he hung himself in his room, facing out the window toward where a giant willow had grown. I put his music in a cardboard box along with a lot of insignificant things, and that went in the basement unlabeled.
The day he died was December 15, a very overcast and snowy day, and around October most years I start to feel nostalgic. It's been a decade now, and it wasn't until November of this year that I felt ready to take out the CDs out and give them a listen. I put on the first disc in the living room and sat down on the couch with a beer. Then I shut my eyes and just let the music and memories wash over me.
It had been a hard week, especially for Kyle. He and I spend a lot of time talking now, and it's funny how our moods seem to correspond. But Kyle was far closer to Stan than he could ever be to me. Probably closer than I ever was to anybody. This time of year we both feel it: a cold, stiffening wind comes between us and the rest of the world.
Listening to the music both lifted my spirits and brought me down. I had never been able to figure out what changed in Stan, and when. There was so little I knew about him during those darks days, so little he shared. But his music was loud and fast, his voice unselfconscious. The lyrics were self-pitying at times, but they were also often humorous. With my eyes closed it was almost like Stan was sitting across the table from me, strumming on his guitar and singing. Every sound coming from the speakers was familiar, having steeped for years in memories. It was a very tranquil experience.
Sitting there, I let my mind wander. I started to wonder what Stan was up to these days. There were a lot of things I wanted to ask him, and it had been so many years since we had a good, long talk. It was crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. True, I had just brought myself to listen to the music he had made, but the feeling his songs gave me was like nothing I'd felt for a long, long time. The memories shot up out of me like oil. Maybe I was rushing things, but I decided to look him up. Finding him wasn't hard. I just checked a special phonebook.
On the phone Stan sounded content. We tried to have a normal conversation before deciding it just wasn't working. How do you catch up, I mean really catch up, with an old friend over the phone? He suggested I come visit him. "It's a pretty easy thing to do," he said, "although it wouldn't occur to most people." He explained the process to me. Like he said, it didn't sound complicated at all, though it was definitely something no living person could ever think of. That much was absolutely clear.
Before long, I was standing in Stan's living room. He was stuck at nineteen. He looked exactly the same as he had in the last picture I'd seen of him-he even wore the same smile as he showed me around. It was a nice place, one that seemed oddly familiar. In the corner of the living room was a very old upright piano with a dusty doily on top, and sheet music for John Lennon's "Imagine." There were nice big oak speakers, a lot like the ones I had at home, on either side of an entertainment center with a TV, a phonograph, and a massive record collection. The place was a mess, but undeniably comfortable-it had a sort of Sunday morning feel about it.
Stan led me into the kitchen, where he showed me his collection of tea bags. Like the record collection, it was so big I had no idea how he could ever use all of it. Then he had me sit down at a small dining table, just big enough for two people. Next to the table was a window, and I peeked through the blinds to see what was outside. It was an overcast day, though not snowy like in Colorado, and the backyard was overgrown with some type of ivy. The kitchen, like the living room, was lit only by a vague natural light. An overhead light fixture had a glow-in-the-dark skull hanging down, which you would pull to turn on the light. It was glowing a little now in the semi-darkness. Stan brought over a bowl with granola bars and Cheeze-Its, along with two glasses of water filled at the sink. Then he disappeared through a door and came back with a small, shiny guitar.
"If you're really hungry, there might be some leftover pizza," he said. "Sometimes the journey here makes people a little hungry." I said I was fine, but I did feel like something to munch on, so I opened one of the small bags of Cheeze-Its.
"I don't know how long you have to talk," I said. "Are you very busy?"
"No, no, it's cool. We can talk." Putting his guitar down, Stan lifted his right foot up onto his left knee and pulled his shoe off, then did the same for the left foot. They were plain, white sneakers, but very old; they looked like they could fall apart at any time. He tossed them over by the sink. "It's not like I do a lot here," he said. "Actually, it's surprising how domestic and comfortable I've gotten. No bills to pay or anything."
"I know what you mean," I said. "What do you do around here during the day?"
"Well, just a few minutes ago I was in the garage fooling around with this old amp. It's pretty burned out, but it sounds cool. Maybe in a bit we can check it out. If we've got time, of course. But I don't know what I would play you with an electric..."
"If we've got time?"
"I've been playing mostly acoustic lately."
"Is there a time constraint here?"
"Yeah. I mean, I don't have anywhere to be, but unfortunately you can't stay here for very long. Maybe an hour. It's a shitty rule."
I nodded. "And visitors? Do you get many? I can't be the first to come."
"No. But right now it's too close to when I died. Whenever that was. About ten years ago, right?"
"December 15, 2009."
"Something like that. See, you're the first person who's come and remembered the exact date. Most people who have come, I was never all that close to. Most people who loved me, and who I loved, they're not ready to see me yet. To be honest, though, I don't think I'd be ready to see a lot of them. It'd be a weird thing. But I'm glad you're here."
He ran a hand through his hair and sniffed. I ate a couple of Cheeze-Its and took a drink of water. It seemed strange to be sitting in this house with this person ten years younger than me. But he was definitely Stanley. He picked up his guitar. "Do you remember what we were listening to the last time we saw each other?" he asked.
"Amazingly, yeah," I said. I hummed a few bars from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Stan smiled. "Sgt. Pepper," he said.
"You know, you really changed that album for me."
"Good or bad?"
I thought for a moment. "Good, I think, but not entirely. I listened to your CDs the other day."
He nodded and started to strum a few chords absentmindedly. I took a look around the kitchen while I listened to his playing. The room had everything an ordinary kitchen would have: fridge, stove, sink. Hung above one counter was a small print with a prayer on it. The tiles were linoleum. Stan's wandering song had turned into "Julia" from The White Album, and he softly hummed the melody.
"I just started listening to The Beatles again recently," he said.
"What do you usually say to people who visit you here?" I asked.
It was a moment before he answered me. "Oh, you know." He paused, strumming one chord. "They all want to know... you know, why I did it. But it's like an intellectual curiosity for them. That's all it is. They're pretty much detached. That's why they can ask in the first place."
"So what do you tell them?"
"They all get a different story. It's not like they can fact-check or anything, 'cause who's gonna talk about visiting a dead guy? I don't even know why they bother coming, really. Somedays I wish they would all just leave me alone. Which isn't to say I don't enjoy the company. It depends on the day. Things are pretty slow-moving."
"Do you like it here, though?"
Stan shrugged. "One day I sat down and tried to play The Replacements' entire discography, just play it the whole way through. It didn't work, but that gives you an idea of what I do here. And I've been listening to a lot of Howlin' Wolf. You may have noticed that big record collection over there. You can get pretty much whatever you want, but only on vinyl. It's better that way. Something about playing a record as opposed to a CD just makes you feel good. So I listen to all those records a lot. Do you remember when you and me and Kyle used to sit around all day listening to records?"
I smiled. "Of course," I said.
"That's one thing I really miss. Just hanging out with you and Kyle. Everybody thinks the dead can revisit, but they're wrong."
"You can't come back? Not even to, like, watch someone you love or something? No guardian angel stuff?"
"Nope. I'm here. But that's not so bad. Here there's no chatter, for one thing. And that's what I liked about you and Kyle: you weren't afraid of silence. That's part of what I liked, I mean. Silence in conversation is like the silence between songs on an album. Like, don't you hate it when a bunch of songs go into each other? It's bewildering! You need those moments of silence between the songs. And that's me. That's where we are. It's necessary."
He started strumming on his guitar. I recognized the chords he was playing: it was the intro figure to one of his songs. I told him I recognized it. He nodded.
"For years I've just been rewriting different songs," he said. "Like this one. You remember the name?"
It took me a moment.
"Yeah, well, I've turned it into about a million different things now. I can't even really remember what it was like originally."
"What did you turn it into?"
He played and hummed a verse before answering me, staring off into the kitchen. Then he said, "One version was about doing laundry, and another about making waffles. So I don't know, just anything. A song can be about any subject. I mean, nobody ever wrote a song about tuning their guitar, and that's a shame. That'd be more interesting than just another love song. So I just try to figure out how many different ways I can fill up a song with words. I've started playing drums, too, but I don't own any."
The song as he had recorded it in high school was about skiing down from the top of a mountain. I hummed along with him, and soon he started playing a new version for me, this one all about some nasty shrimp stir fry he had made. I laughed.
Then I asked, "Do you hear much new music? What's the reception like here?"
"Well, you can pretty much hear anything you want to, as long as you've heard it before. If you can imagine it, you can get a copy of it on vinyl. Mostly mine is stuff I heard with friends. But you can visit other guys here every once in a while, and some of them have got big record collections. You don't think about it, but you've really got to be sure to listen to as much music as possible when you're alive, so you're not bored in the afterlife. Books, too. Read as much as you can, and talk to people about what you've read. I don't know why, but that seems to make a difference.
"But anyway, new stuff. As far as new music goes, I don't really know what to imagine. Sometimes I do pick up radio signals on my amp, the crappy one in the garage that I told you about, but that's only if I bring it into the bedroom. It doesn't really seem worth it. You might be surprised by the amount of good music that was released before 1980."
He started to play a song: "She's Leaving Home" from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was the last album we had ever listened to together. That day we had spent driving around Fairplay in my car, listening to music. Sgt. Pepper has a special significance for me, thanks to Stan.
"So how come you're thinking of The Beatles now?" I asked. "Has Sgt. Pepper been on your mind since I've come up?"
"Up?" he asked.
"Well, out. You know what I mean."
"Hm. I guess it has been on my mind lately. You could be right. That could be the sign!"
"Sign?"
"Yeah. I get those sometimes. Like, when a connection's going to be made with the living world. Here's an example. Do you remember those big ladies' sunglasses I used to wear?"
I laughed. God, what a memory! "Of course I remember them," I said. "You wore them for two years, right? Those goofy-ass sunglasses!"
He laughed too, leaning forward in his chair. "Yeah, well, one day not long after I got here, maybe a year or so, I accidentally crushed them. I mean, they were totally ruined. At the time I didn't think anything of it, but a few days later I got a call from Butters. He gave them to me, you know."
"Is that right? He gave you those women's sunglasses?
"Yeah, and so he gave me a call. Said he was reconciled. He wanted to come visit."
"Is that right," I said.
"So things like that. And yeah, I've been thinking a lot about Sgt. Pepper lately. And, you know, our last day together. That was a good one."
I nodded.
He started playing the song again. This time I let him get through it. I shut my eyes and nodded along in time, feeling pleasant. The room was just the right temperature, and it seemed to have a special smell. After a bit I opened my eyes to watch Stan play. He wore the same expression he had so many years ago when he played the guitar. You could tell he was content in his own world, wherever he was, and nothing could disturb him. Like someone right on the verge of sleep. The more I watched, though, the stranger I started feeling. Between each line he took a breath, just like a living person. It was almost like Stan was unaware of the fact that he was dead. Certainly he wasn't dead as I understood death. But I had been to his sad funeral, heard the nails driven into his coffin. And when he crossed over he took with him a little piece of Kyle and me and everyone else. Even The Beatles-they too were changed when Stan died. I was looking at a lingering memory.
When he had finished the song he asked if I wouldn't mind going out to the back porch with him. I said I'd like to see the back yard, and he led me through a dark hallway in which there was a shelf with more records, and out through a door with a foggy window. The back porch was really just a cement platform surrounded by ivy. It was very humid out.
We sat down in some iron chairs and Stan lit up a cigarette. "You want one?" I declined, explaining that I had quit two years ago.
"That's right," Stan said. "I guess I'd forgotten that people who smoke run into health problems. Hm." He nodded to himself, staring at a spot in the ivy. "Me, I never had health problems," he said. I spent a minute looking around. How had all this ivy gotten here? On the other side of the fence was a clump of giant trees, looking almost like baobabs. A weird bird swooped a perfect arc from one side of the yard to the other, then was gone. The air out here had the same kind of grayish tint that it did inside.
"Kenny," Stan said. "You're all old."
I thought about that. "I'll be turning thirty in a few months," I said.
He asked what had been going on around South Park. I didn't feel much like gossiping. But I spent a minute giving him the basics, to which he gave me appropriate responses: laughter, sympathy, etc.
Then he became pensive. He said, "You know, a lot of times when you and me would hang out, I would really feel like saying something to you. Like, to fill you in on what I was feeling. But I never did, I guess." He stopped speaking for a moment. He silently puffed on his cigarette. Just as I was about to say You know... he continued, "I would get really angry with myself. Like, whenever we got on the verge of one of those emotional conversations, I would just want to... I would want to do two things. The first was to open up. And the second was to just get the hell out of there. It was always a battle between those two things, and it's sad, but the second one always won when you were around. It killed me that I could be so... you know, so... that I could indulge that side of me so often. That quiet, calculated side. It was bull. I'll have to show you all the revisions of my so-called suicide note. I have 'em all."
"You know," I started to say. Then I had to stop and think.
We went back inside and Stan put on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. He looked at me with a smile as the needle fell. "For old times' sake," he said. We sat down on the couch. It was one of those couches that you seemed to sink into. For some reason it reminded me of a night Stan and I had spent together once. One of our few nights without Kyle. At the video store Stan had rented Das Boot for some unimaginable reason, and when I got to his house we got drunk and made pancakes, then watched the whole movie. We stayed up till dawn talking and listening to records, and we fell asleep together on the couch. That had been near the end.
I told Stan what I was remembering. He grinned and leaned back into the couch. "You recognize what you're sitting on?" he asked.
I looked down.
"That's this couch," he said. "It was in my living room for, like, ten years."
"No way."
"That's why it's here," he declared. "This whole place is constructed from my memories."
He had it figured out.
After a moment Stan said wistfully, "You, me, and Kyle. Those were the days."
"Those were the days," I repeated, but the words sounded weird to me before they even came out of my mouth. Those were the days? Suddenly I was reminded that I was talking to a kid. For him, those days might as well have been last week.
We sat in silence as he stared at a book lying on its side near the TV, or something in that general area. I looked around the room. After "A Little Help from My Friends" ended, Stan said, "I keep wondering what the sign will be when Kyle's coming, you know? I mean, it's getting to be that time. You're here, and who knows who else will be coming soon. Hopefully not my parents. But like, will Kyle's hat turn up somewhere? You know what I mean?"
He sounded hopeful. But the thought of Kyle visiting filled me with sadness. I said, "Kyle stopped wearing that ushanka years ago. He wears his hair short now."
Stan frowned. "That's not how I remember him."
We listened more to the music. I wanted to be angry at Stan, to tell him just how insensitive I thought he was. But I didn't want to pollute his afterlife. And anyway, all I felt about it now was a kind of resignation, an emptiness. I was like a gift box with nothing inside it. I hadn't felt that way for a few years.
"Stanley," I said. "Don't you know that you're doing the same thing here that you did on earth? You sit around, you listen to music. What's the point?"
He bit his lip, and I didn't go on. One thing I knew for certain: Kyle would never come. He and I were adults now; we had to find satisfaction in our relationships with the living. Stan was a memory, lingering in the air in South Park for his family and friends to mourn. Kyle would only ever feel a deep sadness associated with the month of December. He and Stan had been close, probably closer than I had ever been with anyone.
That sadness, that guilt, is something you've got to live with for the rest of your life. It never goes away; it can only change in quality. Really, Stan hadn't changed at all. It was the people around him who had been forced to.
"Well, it does get lonely here," Stan sighed finally. "But I'm glad you came."
We made eye contact for a second, and then he shut his eyes. I did the same, and we listened to Sgt. Pepper together for the last time. For several songs we just sat there quietly. The music made me think of the last time I'd seen him. After our night of driving around, I'd dropped him off at his house. Maybe it was in my head, looking back, but I thought there was something significant about the way he looked walking to his door. The back of his coat. There one moment, gone from my life the next.
Memories are a hard thing to figure. Sometimes it seems like the stuff that makes you saddest in life is the stuff you end up holding onto. I guess whatever's going to stay in your heart, stays. It's inevitable that sometimes that cold, stiffening wind will come between you and the rest of the world. But when you're feeling alone like that, you can't let yourself get stuck in the past.
It took me a minute before I could remember how to get home. Just as "She's Leaving Home" was reaching its conclusion, I got up to go. Then I turned to say one last thing to Stan. His eyes were closed, I saw; he was lost in the music. His world was one that I was no longer a part of. Keeping my mouth shut, I waved and was gone.
Wow, you made it to the end! Thanks for reading.
-nemo1934