Michael stirred from his long slumber. The intense light made him squint. A beautiful young chimpanzee, dressed in a gold lamé drum major tunic and gilded trousers, gazed beatifically upon him.

“Bubbles, is that you?”

“Bubbles is enjoying retirement and old age in Florida. I’m Bob, his cousin. I never made it out of the vivisection lab.”

Michael pulled himself up. Groggily, he came to. He found he’d been sleeping on a cloud.

The chimpanzee’s words were soft and deep. “Welcome to the land of the dead, noble Michael. You have suffered long in the cruel world of the living, where you were so well known yet so poorly understood. Come with us and know paradise.”

Michael’s father-in-law waved from a nearby cumulus formation of pink cotton candy. “Welcome home, son,” he said, offering a peanut butter and quaalude sandwich. Curling his lip with a Memphis drawl, he added, “from one King to another.”

“Wait,” cried Michael. “Do you mean I’m dead? I can’t die yet. I was getting ready for my best stage show ever. My work is not done.”

Bob the Chimp frowned. “I’m afraid it is, Michael. You were on some supremely fucked up prescription drugs toward the end there. Your body at this point is pretty much a chemical-surgical experiment gone wrong. No can do.”

Michael spotted the Lord Buddha overhead, jet-skiing merrily by with a couple of supermodels riding on his back. Michael, gathering his wits about him, knew a thing or two about the Buddhist conception of the afterlife. “There’s got to be something we can do. I wish to return to Earth as a bodhisattva, a spiritual guide to others, to heal the world with my music.”

Bob considered Michael’s request. “Well, if you’re serious, there is one option. We have a friend among the land of the living named Ariel. He’s a musician of sorts, but he’s kind of been dicking around for the past ten years, wasting his potential. He’s been asking us for help with his new album. I think you guys might get along. He even wrote a song about how he wants to be raped, castrated and turned gay. Figuratively speaking, I think.”

Michael nodded. “Tell me more.”

“You can return to Earth to share Ariel’s body. I don’t think he would object.”

It was then that Hall & Oates and Keyboard Cat rollerskated up to Michael and Bob the Chimp.

“Hey, you guys aren’t dead yet,” cried Bob. “What are you doing here?”

“Technically we’re not dead, but our careers are,” Hall said. “Despite an appearance on American Idol and the best efforts of Keyboard Cat here to resurrect digital sales of ‘You Make My Dreams Come True’.”

“I really am dead, actually,” Keyboard Cat piped up. “That YouTube footage was taken years ago.”

“We couldn’t help but overhear what you guys were talking about,” Hall continued. “We think we could help this kid Ariel out in the studio too. What do you think, Michael?”

Michael, who always loved collaboration, beamed. “Sounds great. We’ll make a great team. We’ll sell billions. We’ll make history. We’ll conquer the world together. We’ll change the way humanity thinks about its own possibilities as a culture, as a species. Ariel’s statue—our statue—will float down the Thames in triumph.”

“Jesus Christ,” cried Bob.

Jesus suddenly poked his head up from a game of Pictionary with Mohammed, Zoroaster and Socrates. “Yes?”

“Never mind, just an expression.”

“Look, guys, don’t get your hopes up,” Bob said to the musicians now busily plotting rebirth. “Times have changed. There’s never going to be another Michael Jackson, or even another Hall & Oates. Pop music isn’t as communal as it used to be, it’s all niche marketing now, millions of individuals looking at millions of individual screens. Ariel will get pretty good blog buzz, ride the top of the Hype Machine for a few weeks, and score a 9.0 rating from Pitchfork. Almost no one will actually buy the record. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to license a track or two to an alternative ad campaign. That’s about the best a performer can do these days. He’ll probably have to get a real job at some point. Maybe get into brand marketing, fashion, or meme design. But the album will still be pretty great, all the same: a cracked and ghostly soup of light funk, late ‘70s AM radio, and tender-hearted Venus envy. Little Ariel will do us all proud.”

And so it came to pass: In the summer of 2009, Michael Jackson, Keyboard Cat, and Hall & Oates left their previous planes of existence and crowded into Ariel Pink’s body. They got down to work in the studio. And verily, one year later, their work was done and released to a measure of indie enthusiasm, as Bob the Heavenly Chimpanzee had foretold. But was the land of the living really ready for poor Ariel and his ghosts? Would trendsetting tweens with iTunes gift cards to burn make YouTube videos of themselves dancing to him, Neon Indian, or Vampire Weekend?

Bob couldn’t know. But he liked the result nonetheless. Serenely, he chomped on a banana. He scratched his chest.