Knowing

May twirled a daisy between her thumb and forefinger and finally planted it behind her left ear.  She stared up at the shadows of passing traffic cast on the forest where the creek disappeared from view.  “You mean you don’t get lonely?”  She asked the question not so much for his benefit but for her own.  May was lonely.  It seemed her entire life had been lonely.  She couldn’t imagine what it was like for him.

“Not really,” said David.  “I do my own thing.  I don’t think about it really.”

May shook her head.  “I can’t believe that. Don’t you miss your parents?”

He shrugged.  “There isn’t much to miss.  My parents thought I was a loser.”

“Why?”

David was quiet for a moment; introspective.  He said, “They had their reasons.”  The words came out jumbled, though.  His voice was nearly inaudible.  May was used to that, though.  Her very first friend- Anna- had talked in such a hushed voice that sometimes, in May’s mind, it was reminiscent of white noise or snow on the radio.

“Is that why?” asked May.

“Why what?”

May blushed.  She picked another flower from the ones growing near her feet.  She craned her head down to smell it.  When the questioning look on David’s face didn’t disappear, May became even more bashful and poked him in the ribs.  “Don’t look at me like that, you goober.  You know what I’m talking about.”  May huffed a sigh and buried her face in the little flower again, thinking.  “It’s terrible they thought you were a loser.  Did they tell you that?”

David nodded.  “But it’s not important,” he muttered.  “I don’t have to deal with them anymore.”

She smiled at him fondly and handed him the flower.  “That’s okay,” she said.  “I’ll come visit you.  That way you’ll never be lonely.  Tomorrow I’ll even bring Haley.  That’s my dog.  She’d like you.”

David sniffed the flower and threw it away.

“That was a gift, by the way,” said May, smirking.  “Thanks a lot.”

David laughed.  “I’m sorry.”

“I gave it to you and then you just threw it away.”  May shook her head.

“It’s a beautiful flower.”

“Not anymore.  I’m surprised you didn’t just smash it into the ground.”  She rolled her eyes but smiled, nonetheless.

“Well, what about you?” asked David.  “Why are you here?  You should have all sorts of friends.”  He thought about things from his past; faces that he hadn’t thought about in a long time.  In his mind he associated them with his own sense of inadequacy.  His sister Jules was one of the most popular girls at his school.  David hadn’t been popular at all.  In a way, May reminded him of his sister.  She had the same personality- sarcastic.  The difference was that Jules was mean about it.  May was sarcastic, but it was sweet.  Warm.

May made a face.  “People think I’m weird,” she said.  “Maybe I am.”

“What’s the weirdest thing about you?” asked David.

“You know the weirdest thing about me,” said May.  “We’ve talked about that.”

“Fine.  The next weirdest thing.”

May thought.  “The next weirdest thing… Well, my grandma told me I was born in the caul.  I didn’t find out what it meant until, like, two years ago.”

“What’s it mean?”

“I was born with a covering over my face,” said May.  “Whatever that sac is that babies come from.  I mean, come on.  That’s pretty weird.”

David laughed.  “Yeah,” he said.  “That’s weird.”

May descended into thought again.  She lay back on the ground, staring up at the blue sky.  She heard a voice then- an accent that she was not familiar with.  There’s enough blue in the sky to make a Dutchman’s coat.  She had become accustomed to the seemingly random statements that floated across her mind, particularly when she was relaxed or happy.  The phrase itself she had heard once or twice.  She would have never used it herself.  Her eyes became blurred with a presence and she closed her eyes, willed it away.  I don’t feel like talking to you right now, she thought.

The aberration in front of her eyes faded; the voice did not reassert itself.

She turned her head to look at David.  She didn’t believe him, no matter what he said.  He was slouched over, turned in on himself.  He didn’t smile often, though she adored it when he did.

He wasn’t happy.

“You’re sure you don’t get lonely?” asked May again.

David turned to look at her.  “I told you, I’m not lonely,” he said in his typical smartass way.  “I can have as much company as I want whenever I want.”

“Prove it,” said May. 

She stuck her tongue out at him.

David looked at May, surprised.  “Prove it?”

“Yeah,” said May.  “I don’t believe you.”

David shook his head.  “You don’t want me to do that,” he said.

“I do or I wouldn’t have said it.”  May smiled.

“It’s a rotten thing to ask me to do,” said David.

“Why?”

“It just is.”

There was silence.  David thought for a moment.  May watched him, patiently.  Finally, she said, “If you don’t want to, that’s fine.  I mean, you just act like you’re lonely, that’s all.  I already told you, I would be too if I were in your situation.”  She turned back and stared up at the sky, at the tufts of cloud puffing across the blue.  “I mean, if you’re chicken, it’s okay.”

David shook his head and turned to look at May again.  “You’re being a bitch,” he said.  “You know that, right?  You don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”

May shrugged.  “I told you, don’t worry about it.”

David sighed.  “Fine,” he said.

“Fine what?”

“I’ll do it.”  He stood up and dusted off his jeans.  “But don’t move.  Don’t go anywhere.  Just wait til I get back.”

He leapt up the embankment with gazelle-like ease and disappeared at the top of the hill.  May watched with sudden concern.  This part of the interstate, the one that stretched above the creek bed where she had first met him, was some of the most notoriously dangerous highway in the state.  More people had died along the one-mile trek of road that the Murphy Overpass was apart of than almost any other stretch of road.  On the rare occasions she had ever traveled over it herself, May had been struck with the same heady mindfog that she had learned to isolate and work with over the years.

She called up the embankment to him.  “David!”  She stood up and tried to catch a glimpse of him, but he was gone.  The ridge that dropped off into the creek bed obscured her view.  “David!  Come back!”

But it was too late.

Suddenly there was the sound of screeching tires, an impact, breaking glass…

Tears filled her eyes and she looked around for him.  She felt stupid.  Of course, she had heard the stories.  It was one of the reasons none of her friends- those who knew about David- actually believed that May knew him, that she spent time with him.  The stories of a frantic young man standing in the middle of the Murphy Overpass, just as he had the day that he took his own life, were the stuff of local legend.  Numerous people had died or been injured while trying to avoid “the ghost of David Newton”.  She should have known better…

She heard a groan, mechanical, metallic.  In the next moment a shadow appeared on the other side of the overpass.  The shadow eased slowly over the guardrails and tumbled through the air.  It crashed into the shallow creek bed, a heap of metal, deflated tires, and broken glass.  May sucked in her breath and stared at the pulverized vehicle only thirty feet- at most- from where she stood.  She looked at David horrified as he returned.

“What?” he asked.

May gazed at him in disbelief.

“You wanted me to prove it,” said David.  He peered at the car.  It had landed on its roof and was a sardine can now.  There was no way anyone could survive a crash like that. “I’ll be right back,” he said, standing up.

He didn’t ask if she was okay, didn’t ask what she thought of what she had just witnessed.  He didn’t inquire as to May’s state of mind at that moment- not at all.  He walked over the rocky incline, beneath the concrete supports that extended up to the now silent highway.  In a few short moments, May imagined she would hear the wail of police cars, fire trucks, an ambulance.  They would come racing to the scene of the crash and they would do so with the best of intentions.  But the damage had been done.

And May blamed herself.

If it wasn’t so horrible she would have laughed.  It was like the punchline to a bad joke.  How do ghosts make friends?

They make more ghosts.

May watched David walk to the car and, still in shock, followed with caution.  He said someday she would be able to watch them separate too, but for now it was an element of all of this that she had to experience vicariously through him.  She wanted to be able to see it.  For as long as she could remember she had been able to see spirits; she had never been able to see spirits separate from their bodies.  She thought it must have been one of the most beautiful things.  To see a spirit newly experiencing its own freedom… It seemed one of those experiences that words would only cheapen.

David, on the other hand, said it was a simple process and that it wasn’t anything really special to watch.  Still, May wanted to witness it.  She watched him approach the car, grasping at what- to May- was nothing but air.  “Come on,” he said, as if helping someone out of the wreckage.  “You’re okay.  Everything’s okay.”

She tried to see something, anything.  She looked at the wreckage with more discernment; her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed.  Then the shadows began to play tricks with her.  They moved and distorted themselves in ways that she intuitively knew were not reflective of an otherworldly presence but rather of eyes connected to a brain intently concentrating in order to witness something that May, at long last, admitted to herself she was not truly ready to see.  She gave up and leaned back against the abutment wall, staring up at the girders so high above her.  A bird fluttered across the expanse, playing with that same light and shadow. 

She recalled when she first met David.  She found him sitting alone under the bridge.  As May had approached him, he looked up and without even thinking, he said, “I found a bird.  It’s dying.”  There were no hellos, no introductions.  It was as if he knew- at least suspected- that May was different than everyone else.  Once, after they had known one another for awhile, he told her: “I stopped with pleasantries awhile ago and, not long after that, I stopped talking to people altogether.  Never could tell if they could hear me, and if they didn’t respond it just made me sad, so I decided to stop.  Still, every now and then I have to try.  I just don’t waste my time, on those occasions, with hellos.”

That first day they sat and watched the dying bird.  As it struggled against death before finally succumbing to it, David reached down and put his hands very close to the bird’s face.  As if he were grasping at kite string, David began to move his hands, pulling something from the poor creature without ever touching it.  The bird twitched once or twice and then- and she could see this- something just went out of its eyes.  Its essence.

He lifted his hands above his head.  He seemed to watch something.  His eyes moved with what May believed must have been the bird; they darted back and forth.

“They just get up out of their old bodies and start walking around.  That’s what humans do,” he said, letting his hands fall to his lap.  “Sometimes humans fly.  Not always.  Birds, though- they always fly away.  Sometimes it just looks like a puff of smoke with a sense of direction.”  He looked at her and smiled.

May gazed up at the girders and heard the traffic above them- hundreds, even thousands of cars heading to places that the two of them could only guess at.  She looked for the bird.  She didn’t see it then.

After a moment, May followed the intuitive knowing that had led her to him in the first place.  “Is that what happened to you?” she asked.  She looked at him.  Knowing was sketched on her face.  “Did you fly?”

Almost automatically, the sense of knowing was transferred between them.  It bloomed on David’s face and he looked at her with a new clarity.  Then, despite himself, he smiled.  He was such a brooding soul.  He had been so miserable until that moment.  No one spoke to him; no one saw him; no one was brave enough or gifted enough to understand.  He thought about her questions.  “I guess you could say I flew.  I separated out of my body as it was falling to the creek bed and then I kind of floated down to where it landed.  It was kind of… beautiful.”

“Like a leaf falling from a tree,” said May.

David nodded.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Almost exactly like that.”