"Either you're crazy or you think I am." I said. This conversation had gone so far off the rails from what I had rehearsed, I really wanted nothing more than for one of us to just give up and for us to go our separate ways.
"I've waited for so long man, even if you can't help me, please talk to me." Mike implored.
I just kind of stood there a moment, I could see my reflection in Mike's sunglasses and wished I could at least look him in the eyes when we spoke. He doesn't have eyes, I reminded myself.
"I'll listen to more of what you have to say, but I seriously doubt I can help you." I said, finally. We both sat down and I extended my hand to Mike. "I'm Jason, by the way." Mike shook my hand firmly with his pale, clammy hand.
"You have no idea what this means to me man." He said.
"Yeah, I probably don't. But don't take this to mean that I believe anything you've told me so far." I replied.
"Man, are you really that self centered? Do you really think that me and all these people would spend this much time and effort punking you? Are you some kind of celebrity and think we got hidden cameras here man?"
"No, it's just-"
"No, man I get it." He interrupted. "I, I don't believe it myself sometimes either. You would think in the years that I've been here, waiting for this exact moment I could've at least come up with a way to convince someone I am who I say I am.
I guess I was never really prepared for this to happen, I kind of gave up hope a long time ago. At first I had hoped that someone like the kid from that movie, who see's ghosts everywhere, would eventually come along and see me, but man, I guess that's just Hollywood."
"Ghosts are just Hollywood." I pointed out.
"I know man, there are times I don't think I'm a ghost either. I mean, this could be a dream. I remember dying but still... I could be lying in a hospital somewhere, in a coma. But this is all just too real, and too long to be a dream. If this is a dream and I'm in a coma somewhere I really wish someone would just pull the plug on me, this is worse than death."
"It really doesn't sound that bad. Who wouldn't mind being an invisible spectator at a nude beach..."
"Don't go there man. I used to think like you. I was a loner, a drifter. There was a time when I might have traded my old existence for this one." He interjected. "Be careful what you wish for man."
"I'm glad we at least agree that this all a little hard to swallow." I said. "I'm definitely not like the kid from that movie, I don't see ghosts everywhere, so I think seeing one now is a little unlikely."
"Are you sure about that man? Are you sure you're not surrounded by ghosts everyday? I get the feeling me and you have a lot in common. I can see you spend a lot of time alone, avoiding others. You don't want to know people and you don't want people to know you. You miss a lot when you go through life like that, man."
I was a little taken back. The possibility that I had some affinity for seeing ghosts and was just discovering it this late in life was definitely not a possibility I could have imagined on my own nor was it a possibility I was willing to try and wrap my head around. I was starting to regret allowing this conversation to continue.
"Even if I was surrounded by ghosts everyday and didn't realize it, my point still stands, I have no experience with this sort of stuff, so I don't see how I can possibly help you."
"I don't know how you can help me either man. I really don't know much at all. All I know is that I'm dead, and it seems like I'm doomed to walk this beach forever. Can this really be all there is for me, man?"
"I suppose this isn't exactly an ideal afterlife." I said, not convinced it wouldn't actually be an ideal afterlife for myself. "Why don't we go to the spot where you died and see if there's a portal or door or something that might take you away from here?"
"Believe me man, I've spent years looking for such a thing. But if you really are going to try and help me that's as good a place as any to start."
Mike and I walked down to the waters edge. It was still fairly early in the morning but it was already getting pretty hot out. I stripped down, anticipating a swim. Mike pointed out towards the middle of the lake.
"I was pretty far out there man, I was trying to swim across the lake. I was maybe a quarter of the way across and then I got a cramp in my leg. My leg became dead weight that was dragging me down. My other leg and my arms couldn't compensate. I began to panic, I tried coming back this way to get to shore before my arms and other leg gave out. Suddenly, I was swallowing a lot of water, choking on it. I couldn't get my head above the surface. At some point my gag reflex went off and I puked, but because my head was still underwater the puke just floated and swirled around in front of my face. My body and brain began demanding oxygen, I needed a breath so bad but I had to resist. Soon it was all beyond my control. I breathed water in through my nose and mouth and it burned so bad. It was excruciating for a moment and then it was over. I remember a foggy haze filling my mind and then everything went dark."
"Well so much for going swimming Mike, I think you've kind of talked me out of that." I said.
"It doesn't matter man, there's nothing to find in that lake, believe me I've looked." He replied. "But there is something here I can show you, I had forgotten about this. Watch."
Mike stepped forward into the water and I found myself having yet another "what the fuck" moment. The water didn't react to Mike, there was no splashing, no rippling, nothing.
"Ghosts don't, what's the word, displace? Ghosts don't displace water." He said and began to bounce around and kick at the water to emphasize his point.
"So how do you swim?" I asked while my brain tried desperately to make sense of what it was seeing. It was like trying to make sense of one of those impossible optical illusions.
"I can't. I can only traverse the bottom and believe me, traverse it, I have." He replied. "That's where I woke up after I died, the bottom of the lake. It was so dark; I had no idea where I was. I just stumbled around down there, hardly able to see anything man. I probably walked in circles for hours before I saw light. Pray that you never know fear like that man."
"But if there's something down there that might help you, you could have been too scared and confused at the time to notice it."
"I know, I've thought of that. That's why I went back in there. I've been down there a few times man, and believe me if there is a way off this beach down there, I can't find it." Mike started walking back to me out of the water. Once he was back on the shore next to me I noticed that his feet and legs were completely dry. "Come with me I got something else to show you."
I followed Mike down the shore to a small, shallow inlet filled with reeds and lily pads. Mosquitoes swarmed me, unsurprisingly, none landed on Mike.
"This is where they found me. I was just down the beach when I heard the commotion and seen a bunch of people running this way. I was so confused at the time, I had been trying to talk to people for hours and everyone had been ignoring me. I followed the crowd and got here just in time to see them pulling a body out of the water. There was yelling and people crying and when I got closer I could see someone was performing cpr on the body. Then it hit me like a freight train, the body I was looking at was my own. I didn't know what to do man. I didn't think, I just ran. I started running as far away from this place as I could. It was like "fight or flight" was gonna take me as far away from this crazy scene as possible, then something else hit me. The invisible wall that surrounds this place and keeps me trapped here. I ran straight into it and got knocked back like 15 feet or so. It didn't hurt, I don't seem to feel pain anymore, at least not physically."
"Show me this wall please." I asked, and despite the warm sun beating down on me I was covered in goosebumps.
"Yeah, I was going to show you that next." Mike motioned for me to follow and we walked inland away from beach. We stopped about a quarter mile away from the shore, almost all the way back at the parking lot. "Here, the wall is a few feet in front of me. This is farthest point from the water, the wall arcs back toward the beach in both directions."
"So the wall makes a circle? Does that mean the middle of the circle is where you died?"
"There's no way to know for certain, but it makes sense."
"I think it must be and that's probably significant." I said. "Show me what happens when you try to go any further."
Mike took two steps forward and was suddenly repelled backwards. It was comic and almost cartoonish, like he had been blasted backwards by an intense wind. He landed on his ass but promptly jumped back up to his feet.
"I've done that so many times, man, you don't even know."
"That looks...unnerving."
"Yeah and I think it's meant to be. Now you try."
I walked forward, not sure what either of us could possibly be expecting. I walked past the place where Mike had been repelled and nothing happened.
"Did you feel anything at all man? A slight change in temperature maybe, the hairs on your neck standing up, I don't know, anything out of the ordinary?"
I walked back and forth over the spot a few times. If there was something there, I couldn't feel it.
"Sorry Mike, there's nothing."
"It's okay man, I just thought since you were able to see me, you might be able to sense the wall too. But I guess this wall was meant for me and only me."
Mike led me down his invisible wall back toward the water. He told me how he had traversed this wall, hundreds if not thousands of times, looking for some kind of way out. We got back to the beach and started making our way back up the shore along the water. It was getting later in the day and more people had arrived. I started to wonder if any of them would see me talking to Mike and think I was a crazy person talking to myself. I have a solution for that and I''ll bring it with me tomorrow. I thought.
As we walked Mike did most of the talking anyway, he talked about his fear of the water and how dark and oppressing it was at the lake bottom. With no frame of reference it was impossible to do anything but walk in circles down there. He said every time he went in, he never knew how long it would be before he found his way back out. We followed the beach for a mile or so. I couldn't help but feel a shiver as we passed the inlet where we had started. Just a little further down the beach Mike stopped us again.
"We are at the wall again, it arcs back toward the parking lot from here."
"So not including the area underwater, you have about a mile of beach and wooded area to walk around in."
"Yeah, this is my prison, this my hell."
"Mike.." I said trying to think of something comforting to say.
"I haven't even told you the worst part yet man. I think I may have manifested this. This may have been what I've always wanted, and now I can't handle it. I wanted the wrong thing and now it's too late to change my mind."
"What if this is just the way it works Mike? What if this is what's in store for all of us, we just get a small piece of real estate to haunt near the place where we die." As I said this, I realized it was not a comforting sentiment in the least, it was actually quite horrifying.
"I may have been able to accept that man, and I probably would have eventually, if hadn't been for what happened with Amanda." he said.
"Who is Amanda?" I asked.
"Amanda died here two years ago. I don't know her last name but she was here with some friends a couple summers ago, they were all young, like in their late teens or early twenties. They were drinking and partying and skinny dipping here one night. I don't know how it happened but all of a sudden I hear all these people screaming and crying. It was just like the day they found me, man. People kept shouting and crying her name over and over again. She was lying on her back down by the beach and they were performing cpr on her. And as I watched, as horrible as it sounds, I wanted nothing more than for her to die. I wanted there to be someone else on this beach like me. It was selfish I know, but I was desperate for any kind of companionship man.
"As I was watching, something happened that I will never forget. A band of light, pure white light enveloped her body and then shot straight up into the sky. It was almost like a perfectly straight bolt of lightning shooting straight upwards from where she was laying. At the time I didn't know what that meant, so I spent the next few days looking for her ghost. I even searched the murky lake bottom for any sign of her, thinking she might be lost down there like I was. Eventually I had to give up and accept the fact that the white light I saw was her ghost or spirit or whatever moving on from this world. Probably to her own version of an afterlife.
"To this day I still feel guilty about wishing death on that poor girl, man. I can only hope whatever afterlife she finds herself in, it's better than this one."
"Mike, her death wasn't your fault, and maybe you're looking at it all wrong. Maybe it's a good thing she isn't stuck here too. If she doesn't have to be here than maybe neither do you."
"I can't tell you how good that is to hear someone say man."
"I still don't know if I can help you. But I'm going to try." I said. "How could I not at this point?"
"Thank you man, I know how impossible this all seems."
"Yeah, well even if we cant get you off this beach I can at least keep you company." I said, then realizing how awkward and defeatist that sounded, I added. "I mean, we will talk more tomorrow. We'll figure this out."
With that Mike and I parted ways for the day. At home my wife, again, found me preoccupied and kept insisting on knowing what was wrong. I brushed her off and went to my home office. I went online and tried to research whatever I could about ghosts and the supernatural as it pertained to Mike and his predicament. Not surprisingly, there was very little helpful information. I read up on various theories about life after death, and though things like Limbo and Purgatory sounded similar to Mike's situation, they really offered no insight as to what Mike or I should do.
It was fair to say I was a little overwhelmed with the task at hand and starting to think maybe Mike was right. He was living in the afterlife that he would have considered ideal while still alive. It was possible he was now doomed to that existence.
Don't they say, one man's heaven is another man's hell? Well, maybe your own heaven becomes hell after you've experienced it for so long. In life Mike was a man who, like me, had avoided others like they were lepers. Now he would practically sit on people's laps and stare at them for hours just to get some kind of response. It was like feeding a chocolate lover so much chocolate that he would rather eat poop than eat one more bite of chocolate.
I also printed out a map of the lake, and by retracing our steps from memory I penciled in where Mike's wall was. By extending the wall out into the water I created a rough sketch of the area Mike had available to him. The exact center was about a quarter of the way across the lake from the beach. That being said, the amount of space underwater was several times larger than the amount of space he had on land. I remember thinking how unfair that was but then again life isn't fair, why would the after life be any different?
The next day I arrived at the beach but didn't see Mike standing there waiting for me. I wandered around a bit until I found him down by the inlet with the reeds and lily pads. He greeted me with a nod and a smile and it occurred to me that before now I had yet to see Mike smile.
"I brought you something, I don't know if it means anything but I thought I would show you." I opened the map of the lake and showed him. "It's your wall, as accurate as I could make it from memory."
Mike just nodded and smiled. "I think my days of traversing that wall are coming to an end man."
"I don't know if you should get your hopes up that much. I didn't have much luck coming up with anything to help you last night." I replied.
"That's okay man, because I did," he said. "I don't need sleep, so I spent the night pondering things."
"Alright, I can't wait to hear what you've come up with." I said, then pulled my cell phone from my pocket and switched it to vibrate mode. "I brought this just in case there are people around, I can put it up to my ear and no one will think I'm a lunatic talking to myself."
Mike clapped his hands and laughed. Then he shook his head and smiled again. "Man, you really are it, I knew it."
"I really am what?"
"The missing piece, man," he said. "Yesterday, you thought we should be looking for a door or portal or something to help me get out of here, but you were wrong man. We don't need to find anything, what I need has already been found."
"I'm not sure I'm following you."
"For the longest time I kept coming back here to this spot, hoping that someone in my family, my dad or my brother might come along and visit, maybe put up a memorial or something. But no such luck. Maybe there's a memorial out there for me somewhere and maybe my dad and brother visit it, but I doubt it. The truth is, there isn't anyone out there that remembers me."
"I'm sure your dad and brother remember you well."
"No man, not the real me. No one knew the real me. That's no ones fault but mine. I never let anyone know the real me. But it's not too late, now. You can get to know the real me, and not only that, I think you will understand the real me better than most. You and I are so much alike man."
"If you think it will help, I'm willing to listen." I said and we sat down on a nearby log. No one was around so I let my phone sit on my lap for the time being.
"You really care what people think about you, don't you man?"
"I don't know if that's fair to say, I get naked in front of strangers every day."
"Letting people see you naked is one thing, letting people see what's beneath the skin, what's inside is completely different. You would never want these people to know the real you. You have nothing to hide but you just cant stand the thought of someone seeing you for who you are."
"My wife knows who I am, I think that's enough."
"Yeah, does she even know you come here? Does she know about this place? Does she know about me?"
"Look, why are we talking about me, I thought this was going to be about you, the real you?"
"We are talking about me, man. I was the same way. I've never opened up to anyone not even the people that thought they knew me and those were few and far between. I don't know if it was from a lifetime of being misunderstood by dad and brothers but I eventually put up a wall between me and the rest of the world. Today with your help man, we will tear down that wall."
I sat back and listened to what Mike had to say. He told my about his youth, being bullied and tormented by his brothers. He told me about his overbearing and overworked father who had to raise him and his brothers on his own after their mom died giving birth to him. He told me about his teen years, getting high and ditching school. He told me about losing his virginity to a girl he had only known for an hour. He told me how his dad and brothers had abandoned him and forgotten about him. He told me about his oldest brother dying of an overdose and only finding out about it years after it happened. He told me about his dreams of being a professional musician and all the failures that plagued him while trying to fulfill that dream. He told me about drug fueled orgies and waking up in strange homes in strange towns with no memory of how he got there. He told me about years of drifting from one place to the next, never concerned with where he would end up or what he would do when he got there.
I can tell you Mike's life was very different from mine. I doubt we would have ever met and been friends in life. But there was something about his story that resonated with me, and that was Mike's outlook on things and his reasoning for some of the choices that he made. His outlook on life and his reasonings were almost identical to mine. It made me wonder if I had to live in his shoes, would I have walked the same path? I think the only answer had to be yes. I think that was the connection; why I could see Mike and no one else could. We were like twins in that regard. You could swap my soul for his and no one would know the difference; nothing would change.
Mike talked for hours and like most life stories some of it was interesting and some of it was boring but all of it was insightful. By the end I knew more about Mike than I knew about anyone, including my own wife.
Mike recounted his death and the confusing months that followed. He recounted his years of an impossibly mundane existence after that, and his discovery of making people feel his presence, ever so slightly, by concentrating on them. He told of the day he confronted me and the long, agonizing night he spent wondering if I would ever return.
"I know it wasn't a life to be proud of and I wasn't always the best person I could be, but surely I deserve better than this, man?" Mike said glancing around.
"I don't know if people ever get what they deserve Mike" I said. "I don't know if I would've done anything differently if I were you."
"Exactly!" He exclaimed "That's my point, don't be like me, don't make those same choices. I regret it all. I need people to see me! You need people to see you! Don't end up like this!"
"Mike, it's not that simple."
"No, it's not simple. Do you think walking this beach for six years was simple man? Do you think sitting here and spilling my guts to you was simple man?"
"No but-"
"Jason!"
"What?"
"I can't see." He gasped. "It's too bright. I can't see."
Mike stood up off the log and stumbled around, disoriented.
"Something's happening," he said. "Hold these."
"Mike no. Don't!" I cried as he pulled off his sunglasses and held them out to me. The glasses vanished before I could reach out and take them. His eyes were beams of light and this time I forced myself to look. I watched as his eye sockets grew bigger and produced more light. As I watched, his face began to break up and peel away and the light grew brighter. Soon his whole head was just a blinding, beam of light. His neck and shoulders peeled away, replaced by light. Then his torso, waist and legs just peeled away and before me there was a pillar of blinding, radiant white light.
"Mike, what..." Before I could say anymore, the pillar of light began to stretch upwards. The longer it got, the thinner it got, and in the blink of an eye it shot straight upwards. It was like a white laser beam shot straight up into space. An instant later there was nothing more than a small white dot in the pale blue sky and an instant after that there was nothing.
I sat back down for a moment trying to make sense of what I just saw. I remembered Mike's story about Amanda, and how white light had shot up out of her body. Did that mean Mike was really gone? It didn't make much sense, it really didn't feel like I had helped him at all, or if I did I didn't know what I had done.
I've spent so many long sleepless nights thinking about my encounter with Mike and what it all meant. I went back to that beach everyday for the rest of the summer and looked for him, but I knew all along he was finally free.
I've never told anyone about Mike before now and now that I have I feel like I can finally get some closure. I still don't know if I helped Mike, but I can tell you he sure helped me. In the months since this happened I think I've come to realize that he was right. Living a life in which no one ever knows the real you, really is like living in a prison. A prison I plan to break free of. I think I'm going to start by telling my wife about the nude beach and about Mike.
To Mike, where ever you are. I don't know if I helped you, I think you did the hard part. I think letting people get to know the real you is the hardest thing any person can do. But you taught me that it's never too late to tear down that wall. Rest in peace, man.