This is for Karen

For he was speechless, ghastly, wan,Like him of whom the story ran,Who spoke the spectre hound in man.

—Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI, v. 26

The hounds of winter, they harry me down.

—Sting, “The Hounds of Winter”

FORTY-ONE years after I died, my friend Dale returned to the farm where I was murdered. It was a very bad winter.

I know what you’re thinking. There’s the old journalism anecdote of William Randolph Hearst needing someone to cover the Johnstown flood and sending a young cub reporter. It was the kid’s big break. The next day the novice cabled back this lead to Hearst’s paper: “GOD SAT ON A LONELY HILL ABOVE JOHNSTOWN TODAY, LOOKING DOWN IN SORROW AT NATURE’S FIERCE DESTRUCTION.” Old-timers swear that Hearst did not hesitate ten seconds before cabling back this response: “FORGET FLOOD STORY. INTERVIEW GOD.”

I say I died forty-one years ago and your response is, Forget the story about Dale. Who cares? Tell us what it’s like to be dead—what is the afterlife like? What is it like to be a ghost? Is there a God?

At least, these would be my questions. Unfortunately, I am not a ghost. Nor do I know anything about any afterlife. When I was alive, I did not believe in ghosts or heaven or God or spirits surviving the body or resurrection or reincarnation, and I still do not. If I had to describe my current state of existence, I would say that I am a cyst of memory. Dale’s sense of me is so strong, so cut off and cauterized from the rest of his consciousness by trauma, that I seem to exist as something more than memory, something less than life, almost literally a black hole of holistic recollection formed by the collapsing gravity of grief.