I imagined myself choking the little girl to death, beating her to death with her violin.
Then Stanley bent over and put a five dollar bill into her case like he was hoping that would stop her. But it didn’t. She just took her bow and started moving it across the strings until it squeaked—eeek. And then eeked squeak. And then squeaked eeek. And we covered our ears. But then she slowly moved the bow once more and suddenly she wasn’t the horrible little girl playing her horrible violin, but the greatest musician you’ve ever heard, playing the most beautiful song in the world.
Then I shut the book and looked at the dark mountains. It wasn’t my blood or face or nerves. It was dirt and rocks and the smells of skin. I looked out into the purple mountaintops and laughed because I stood on these mountaintops, but then I felt the meanness. I felt myself hating because I had been in the darkness of what was between the mountains. I saw the crazy ass god of the old book people who made his story. They made him the way they made him because they lived next to a crazy river. I saw the people of the desert smile because of the Nile. Then I saw these mountains and chunks of mountains smile and I knew one thing.
I felt darkness because I had been deep in the hollers, and I knew glory because I had stood on top of the beautiful mountaintops. More mountaintops please. More mountaintops.
This is a lie I was told as a child, but it’s still true. The New River is one of the only two rivers that flows directly north. The other one is a river called the Nile. Those rivers are inside of me. I have a river inside my heart. You have a river inside your heart. There are diamonds inside of both of us. We are all flowing north.
I understand that Nathan was gone now. And I knew that this was a different part of my life now. This is where the hero goes out into the world and encounters the people he meets along the way. This is the part that comes after the first part. This is a part called…
THE SECOND PART
So time passed. After Nathan died, Grandma went to live with my Uncle Stanley and I needed a place to stay nearby so I could keep going to the same school. My friend Little Bill agreed that I could stay with him at his mom’s apartment. He told me she was never around anyway. He told me not to call him Little Bill anymore though. He told me his name was just Bill now.
BILL
I soon learned one good thing about having a roommate with obsessive compulsive disorder is that they always keep the room clean.
I didn’t even know Bill had OCD until the day I moved in and he pulled out this container of Lysol and a rag and started spraying shit down. I guess having lice made him worry about things being clean. His head wasn’t shaved now. His hair was thick and red. He sprayed down the door and then he sprayed down the floor and then he sprayed down the place I was going to sleep—SSSSS. Then he took a rag and wiped it all down. He did this all over the walls. Then he sprayed the desk, the dresser, the closet door, the bed rails, and then the bed.
I told him I thought it was okay.
Bill just shook his head no. He wasn’t listening to me.
He walked over to the side of the room and pulled out this giant plastic bag.
“What’s that?” I said. Then he pulled out an orange pill bottle and sat it on the counter. Then he took out another orange pill bottle and sat it on the counter. Then he took out another orange pill bottle and put it up on the counter too. He took another and another and then he took out another five and put them one by one by one by one on the table until they were all lined up on the shelf like little soldiers. 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11.
“What is this stuff,” I asked again. Bill just smiled and told me that he was psycho.
Isn’t everyone?
That’s when “Dust in the Wind” started. He turned on his CD player and sat down on his bed and listened.
He said, “You like ‘Dust in the Wind’?”
I said sure and started putting away all of my stuff that I brought with me. I tried not to think about Nathan or Ruby or graveyards.
I listened to the song: I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.
Then Bill went over to the scale and weighed himself.
He weighed 225 pounds.
Then he got off and weighed himself again.
He weighed 225 pounds.
Then he told me the story of the Greenbrier Ghost.
THE STORY OF THE GREENBRIER GHOST
It was about this woman named Zona who suddenly died back in the 1890s. Her husband was so overcome with grief that he put a red ribbon around her neck and he buried her without letting the other women prepare the body. Weeks later her mother woke up and Zona’s ghost was at the foot of her bed. She told her mother that her husband murdered her. He killed me, Mommy. He strangled me and broke my neck.
Her mother went to the sheriff and they exhumed her body. They found her neck was broken. It was just like the ghost said.
Then Bill told me it was the only case in the history of the country where a man has been convicted of murder on the second-hand testimony of a ghost. This story didn’t cheer me up.
The song finally ended and he hit play again. I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.
Then he went and weighed himself again.
He weighed 225 pounds.
There were other things Bill did too. He washed his hands. He took a hell of a lot of showers. He washed his hands some more. He sprayed some more Lysol. He weighed himself again. He weighed 225 pounds. He told me about the Greenbrier Ghost again.
Then he played “Dust in the Wind.”
I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone.
I asked him if he had to listen to the song again. He said, “I thought you liked Kansas?”
I told him I was just being nice.
He turned it off. Then he started spraying the walls down with some more Lysol. “You’ll see one day,” he said. “You’ll see.” Then he played Kansas, I close my eyes…
So that night Bill told me what was wrong with him. He told me he had a condition called OCD.
A LIST OF OCD SYMPTOMS IN CASE YOU ARE A HYPOCHONDRIAC AND WONDERING IF YOU MIGHT BE SUFFERING FROM OCD:
1. Compulsive actions in order to alleviate anxiety.
2. Obsessive thoughts in order to alleviate anxiety.
3. A combination of compulsive actions and obsessive thoughts in order to alleviate anxiety.
4. Constant obsession with a particular repetition of actions/ and or thought patterns.
Then he told me how it happened.
He told me how he first knew something was wrong with him when he was ten years old. He was sitting up on the counter eating a giant bag of cheeseballs. He was covered in orange cheeseball dust. It was on his hands and it was on his fingers and it was on his face. He kept eating the cheeseballs and before long he started thinking that he was turning into a cheeseball too. All of a sudden his mother and brother came into the room and he started yelling at them: “Don’t eat me. I’m a cheeseball. I’m a cheeseball.”
So he jumped off the counter and before long he started running around because he thought they were trying to eat him. Of course, this freaked them out so they chased after him thinking that something was wrong. They chased him around the house. They chased him around again.