We should grab a drink sometime, what’s your sched this week? And then, just like in our college days, Wade comes tumbling after: Rank! No way we all thought you were dead or something what’s the story??
That’s when I panicked and actually emailed a couple of kids I work with to find out what you’re supposed to do when all these unsolicited voices from the past start honking at you. The kids assured me I could just click ignore and all would be well, and if ignore didn’t work then I could block, no worries, no more voices — no more ghosts. So I blocked (Wade: Yo, slacker, friend up!) and ignored (Kyle: Rank in all seriousness I’ve thought about you a lot over the years . . . ). But then Tina came knocking. And Tina’s friend the championship highland dancer, the one who used to get shitfaced and then cross two hockey sticks on Wade and Kyle’s kitchen floor so she could perform a sword dance at four in the morning, and she’d make the bagpipe noises herself as she hopped up and down and it always had us in hysterics. Janine. Whose name, along with everything else, I’d forgotten until the moment she tried to friend me. And Scott, from the hockey team. And Mitch, also from the hockey team, who tells me he now lives next door to Scott and their families take vacations together, which is weird because I distinctly remember them throwing punches at each other at the student pub during a Tragically Hip show. Ignore, block, ignore, block. But it’s no good because with every friend request it’s like I have to go over these people again — I have to confirm their continuing existence beyond their existence in my memory. With every block and ignore, it’s like I’m doing the opposite — every time I click on a name it’s an acknowledgement.
And then sometimes you just get these total doozies out of left field:
You have a friend request from Colin Chaisson.
It was like, as long as all these people existed only in my memory, it was just a short step to the belief that in fact I’d mistaken memory for imagination and, in fact, these people were actually figments — just like the events that they participated in — part of a long, dark dream that only you and I shared, Adam. (And it was hard enough when I discovered you shared it, when I found it immortalized in your book — immortalized, but in such a freakily offhand sort of way. Somehow enshrined and chucked aside all at once.) Now I had to contemplate that my private, guilty dream was out there, scattered across the internet in fragments, embedded in other people’s memories like ancient chunks of pottery waiting for some archaeologist to come along and piece it together.
Then Kyle again: Hey Rank. I really hope you don’t think I’m being nosy — seriously that’s not what this is about . . .
But I didn’t want to shut down my account as long as yours was up there. I had no good reason for this really. It was just a kind of superstition. So that’s when I got the idea to deactivate my old account and change my identity.
And now I’m Rankenstein — no photo, no info. And nobody tries to friend me because nobody knows who I am.
But you’re not even out there anymore, my only friend, my reason for being.
You’re not anywhere — not even in the paper. I check the newspaper every weekend, and the web of course, but it looks like all your reviews and interviews have pretty much trickled off. How’s that feel, by the bye? And how come you don’t have a web page? Stephen King has a web page. Wouldn’t it be good for business? What’s it like to have disappeared so all-of-a-sudden? On this end, it’s a feeling like you’ve been absorbed back into my imagination where you should’ve stayed in the first place — you’ve reverted to being a ghost.
Well, whatever. I believe in you Adam, even if you’ve disappeared. I know you exist, like the fairies in Peter Pan — if I shout and clap my hands you live; if I shrug and turn away you die. But I won’t — I won’t let myself forget. I still carry around your book, and it still has your picture on the back, and you, old friend, are still looking pretty porked-out. My