A Man Named Ezra Davis

It’s called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Or, in simple terms, the Recency Bias or Frequency Illusion. It’s the circumstance that you start noticing the same object or phrase wherever you go. Most people experience this when they play “punch buggie” and suddenly a surge of Volkswagen Beetles emerge from seemingly nowhere, or when they run across a new word in something they’ve read and now they don’t understand how they’ve never seen the word before. For me it was a man.

He first appeared in the parking lot of my workplace. We had just locked up and only the cleaning crew lingered in the building. A chill whistled in the night air, initiating the late summer dying down and being replaced by discolored flora and sepia décor.

A man stood by my car. He wasn’t touching it, just standing by the rear driver’s side door. Despite parking my car under a lamp, shadows enshrouded his face. I stopped about twenty feet away and yelled at him.

“Hey,” I said, “Who are you? Get away from my car.”

He made no effort to move. Instead, his body flickered under the lamp. I didn’t blink.

My fingers fumbled around my keychain, seeking the pepper spray. Something smelled harsh, like composting soil. I kept my hand from my nose. “Get away from my car. I’m going to call the police.”

Behind me, car lights scattered the darkness around us. A car door opened. My co-worker Janina called out, “Hey, are you okay?”

I turned. Their head poked out from atop their door as they stood half out of their car. I turned back. He vanished. My fingers tightened around the pepper spray as I scanned the nearby lot. Without turning back, I called out to Janina, “Yeah, I’m okay. Just wait until I get in my car?”

I stepped towards it cautiously. As I got within a few feet of the door, I jumped, pulled the handle, slid into the driver’s seat, locked the door, and started the engine. The tires squealed as I pulled out of the parking lot with Janina following behind me. I drove home, but while I drove, my eyes flitted to the rear-view mirror. He was not in my car. I checked. Double-checked. It was okay. It was going to be okay.

He surfaced more and more after that. I called him stranger man. I’d see him on my way to work, admittedly in better light, standing on the sidewalks. He looked normal in the sun. Like a tall, brown-haired man with tan skin. Not unattractive. He appeared on my way home, during lunch rushes at the nearby sushi place, and during quick grocery store stops. We live in the same town, so generally I wouldn’t be surprised. But what got me was that he always stood still. Standing still and staring at me. He never arrived or left. He never followed me—physically, at least; he never chased after me or walked. I never saw him walk. He just stood, and I walked until he was outside of my line of sight, and when I came back around, he was gone. When I first started seeing him around town, I screamed. But after a few months, he became a normalcy. Compost scent and all.

I tried not to look at him too closely, for every time I did, he seemed to get closer to me without moving. Like my eyes dragged him closer. Maybe that wasn’t true. It certainly felt like it. Yet, he also seemed to hover. Not off the ground, but his presence was looming. Energy pulsed through him, shifting parts of him. I looked away. He disappeared.

Months later, I saw him on the news. His photo popped up next to the anchor’s. Car accident. One dead. His vehicle had rolled over off the highway, down into the ditch. It rolled five times before finally landing upside down in a local soybean field, the one right off the highway exit. His vehicle was the only one involved. No one who saw the accident reported it, if anyone had seen it at all. Some passerby called it in. The news said the police were still investigating. The autopsy reported clean—no traces of alcohol or drugs in his system at the time of death. Maybe it was suicide. Or maybe there was a bee—he's probably allergic to bees. Either way, he lost control of the vehicle and rolled. Hit his head and died.

After the car accident, I called him the burning man. He continued to follow me, stagnant and stoic. Yet, instead of compost, he smelled like fire. Well, no. More like burning, fire burning wood. Like charcoal. Like a grill being prepped for Fourth-of-July burgers by one of your neighbors. You could only see the smoke above the tree line, but couldn’t tell which neighbor you had to curse for not inviting you to a cookout with people you never knew and never cared to know. The scent was inviting, but then it turned vile. Still burning, but melting. Rubber. Melting rubber like a trash fire, you could feel the heat pulse from the flames of tires and cured furniture broken and slashed. The scent that rolled off of the burning formaldehyde stung your eyes and dried your throat, catching your breath deep down into your lungs. You couldn't breathe that stuff in. It was poisonous, it could kill you.

Since the accident, I had only saw him once. That one time to take in the reek of rubber and burnt leather. I told him off. I yelled at him, “Go away!” While retching. He left. The smell still lingered, but he took the hint. I only saw him once more after that.

I now call him the melting man. I thought he was gone for good. But there he stood, right in front of me. He just stared. My knuckles tightened on the steering wheel as I faced him again, headlights spotlighting him like I played a technician and he played a showman.

First started a low moaning then slap... slap... slap. He moved towards me. From the center of the street he walked towards me, or I should say trudged, for each step forward appeared to take great effort, slow and painful as he pulled one leg from behind him and slapped it on the paved road ahead. Slap. He was quite literally melting, the skin of him sagging in rolls like sap down a trunk, like river sludge in massive folds. His skin bubbled and popped like hot tar, pouring from him and sticking to the pavement as he moved forward, pulling his legs from the ground. Slap... slap. I inhaled, long and deep. He was coming for me. My stranger man. His bulging eyes reflected revenge, and in them I saw the pile of burning metal. A little red Beetle in a soybean field.