"Hey Barry, you ever see a ghost?"
Barry put his mug of coffee on the table. Yeah, he'd seen one. Him, a man of science and pragmatism, could now definitively say he had seen someone's spirit escape their body with their own two eyes.
"Once," he said.
Ronnie sipped his own drink, a special lager unique to the diner where they went every Friday after work. Barry couldn't drink tonight. He'd be going back to work tomorrow. Understaffed, they'd told him. The lab needed more help as it was getting up and running. Quarril Labs, they were going to call it, named after the man who'd discovered the way to slow down the degradation of cellular material and prolong death. Or was it the man who had unraveled the limbic system of the brain, successfully mutating the cerebellum and allowing better memory retention? He didn't remember. And right now, he didn't care.
"I saw one today," he said.
Barry picked up his coffee and swirled it around, watching it form a tiny whirlpool in his mug.
"First time?"
"Yeah."
They sat in silence for a moment.
"It was surreal. I saw him die. And I – I saw him looking at me, man. After he died. He didn't talk. He couldn't talk. But he just looked at me, and I just knew, I knew, he was asking me, 'why? Why did I have to die? Why didn't you do anything?'"
"How'd he die?" Barry asked, bluntly.
"Killed by a native. We didn't see them coming. We were supposed to be in a safe zone. No previous reports of attacks, you know? But he came at us out nowhere. Normal looking guy, dressed in normal clothes. His eyes, though, they were on fire, blazing with madness. Came at us, screaming about his family and his wife. I don't even know what he was trying to say. Just kept screaming something about 'my wife,' over and over again, asking us where she was, where is she, where is she. Took my buddy in a chokehold and slit his throat."
"Sorry to hear that."
Ronnie's eyes were sunken, his expression almost vacant. He was normally so bright, always smiling. Today, there was no brightness in his sky blue eyes. No joy in his voice.
"I wanted to kill him. I wanted to, but I didn't. I had my finger on the trigger, my eye down the barrel, looking right at his face. In the fire of his eyes, for a split second, I saw a bit more than madness. I saw rage. Hatred. And, maybe it was because he kept screaming about his family, but I knew he felt something, something very painful. I shot him in the leg instead. I restrained him and sent him away to be taken prisoner. But then I saw it. About three minutes after, like they tell you. My buddy rose, but his body stayed on the ground."
Ronnie shook his head, his eyes becoming wider as he spoke.
"Transparent. Ethereal blue. He looked at me, right at me. I wanted to be afraid. You feel something in the air when it happens, something so real and so striking that it feels realer than real. But when I looked at him, I could see that he was afraid. Way more than I could be. Afraid and confused. I tried to tell him I'm sorry, I didn't see him, I couldn't stop him from coming, but all he could do was look at me and ask me, in that way he did without saying anything, 'why? Why am I dead?' And a couple of minutes later, he vanished into the air like mist in the wind."
He took a long drink of his favorite lager, leaning back in the soft tan cushions of the booth.
"Was your experience anything like that?" He asked.
Barry looked into his coffee whirlpool. The memory was coming back to him. He hadn't talked to anyone about it in a while, because he wanted to forget.
"No," he answered.
"It was… my mom."
Ronnie's eyes instantly perked up, and a look of regret formed on his face.
"Oh. Shit, man. Sorry for asking."
Barry shook his head.
"No… no, it's ok. We had just gotten out of our escape pods, after the crash. My mom sent me ahead. You remember what it was like, back then. Everyone scrambling to make sense of what had happened. Everyone struggling to pull themselves back together."
"Yeah," Ronnie said, taking another sip.
"It was a few days before we found her pod. Something went wrong when it ejected from the ship. I don't know what it was. The door didn't close right or got damaged on impact, something like that. Either way, the insulation systems didn't work like they were supposed to, and the impact was fatal. The only thing keeping her alive were the pod's emergency medical systems. So when we opened the door, she… she didn't make it very far before she died."
"Whew," Ronnie said. "I never knew you had to go through that."
"I held her in my arms as she died. I remember, I was seventeen. I looked her in the eyes and she held her hand up to my face, stroking me, so happy to see me. She was so happy to see me alive, so happy to see that I made it. But me? I was afraid. I finally found her, only to feel her hand fall as her spirit left her body. I found her only to lose her, for good this time."
He stopped swirling his drink and put it down on the table.
"Back then, we didn't know. We couldn't have known. So I sat there, holding her body, crying for about three minutes, like you said. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. I saw her standing over me. I saw her looking at me with that same loving expression, that same relief that I was safe. For a moment, I felt comforted. I felt like she was still with me. I would have gotten up to hug her if I wasn't still holding her increasingly colder body in my hands. I've never felt such a strange cocktail of emotions, Ronnie. Not ever in my life before or since. I was the one who was confused back then. All I could do was look at her, and listen to her, in that way you listen to ghosts who don't talk to you but feel at you, and listen to her tell me that everything was ok. It was when her ghost vanished into the air, it was at that moment that I felt afraid."
He gripped the mug of his drink, feeling its warmth, watching the steam rise from its surface.
"She's the one who pressured me to pursue genetics. To be just like my father. She's the reason I am who I am. I wonder what she'd think of this crazy world we found. I wonder what she'd think of ghosts."
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