Richmond, 500 Miles

I would say it started happening right around the time that Fiona left me. She could have left me for any number of reasons throughout the years. The flicking of the light switches three times before we go to bed. The washing of my hands until they were raw. Maybe it was getting out of bed three or four times throughout the night to make sure the stove was off. Now that I think of it, she was really pissed when we were late to her sister’s wedding. I turned around halfway through the three-hour drive because I thought I left the front door unlocked. It wasn’t. But that didn’t stop me from unlocking it and locking it three times before we left. 

Fiona tried to help me as much as she could, but eventually she had enough. When I got home from work one day, her stuff was already gone. She was there in the mostly empty living room and told me she was leaving. She didn’t flick the switches or unlock the door three times before she left, she just walked out. I may be odd, but I’m not crazy. I know I’m not easy to live with. 

The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back was an innocuous ride to the grocery store. We sat in silence, and Fiona flipped on the radio to break the silence. Never in all my years did I think that a song on the radio would change my life. It was that song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers. We strolled through the produce aisle while I hummed just to be the man who rolls a thousand miles to fall down at your door. In the frozen food section I continued the chorus, da da da, da da da, da da da dun diddle un diddle un diddle uh da da. While looking at soup cans in aisle six, and I was on my hundredth diddle uh da, Fiona glared at me and said, 

“Can you not?”

We shopped in silence the rest of the way. At the checkout, the off-rhythm beeps of the scanners were enough to keep the song at bay. But it felt like putting a band-aid on cancer. At twenty-seven years old, I have spent a good portion of my life worrying. That feeling of impending fear was creeping in already, the feeling that makes me research symptoms of diseases I don’t have. The feeling that keeps me up until four in the morning straightening out the fringes of my living room carpet with a comb. Somehow this feeling felt worse already, and I kept repeating a singular line in my head. This song is stuck in your head, this song is stuck in your head. Then the line transitioned into something else, something even more sinister. What if it never leaves? I began to sweat and dropped a bag of onions. The beeping was deafening, but it was keeping the song out of my head for the moment. 

“Paper or plastic?” asked the elderly gentleman who sauntered over to the checkout lane.

“Paper is fine,” Fiona answered. 

The beeping of the checkout area and the clickity-clack of the keyboards as she punched in the code for yellow onions regulated my breathing. You can’t even remember the words, you’re doing fine, just breathe, remember what Dr. Friedman taught you. 

In some sort of cosmic punishment, the elderly bagger sang under his breath,

“When I wake up, well I know I’m gonna be…”

“Sir. That song, what made you start singing that song just now?” I stuttered.

“Well geez, son,” he responded while rubbing his white mustache. “I suppose I heard a young feller like yourself humming it when he walked in.” He squinted, pushed his glasses up with his index finger, and continued to hum away.

That’s when I knew my fears were justified and rational. Screw what Dr. Friedman says, this is real and it’s happening. Like some sort of poisonous bite from a spider, the entry wound was barely noticeable. But its fatal venom was already seeping through my bloodstream, into my central nervous system, and spreading a deadly infection into my brain.

Has this ever happened to anyone before? What happens if the song never leaves my brain? The infectious lyrics have been nonstop in my head. Will I be studied like a lab rat in some clinic in Geneva by a team of doctors?

These were the questions controlling my thoughts on the way home. I found out later that Fiona was talking to me, but her questions hit an impenetrable wall. That night was the final time we ever made love. All through dinner, and the movie we watched on the couch later, the song continued to be a parasite in my body. It attached itself to my vital organs, turning them into mush. I don’t remember doing it, but in our throes of passion, I yelled something. It wasn’t her name, which would have been acceptable. I yelled diddle uh da da. She wrapped herself in a bedsheet and spent the rest of the night downstairs. A few more weeks of singing that I was “gonna be the man that wakes up next to you,” and she was gone. Now I was waking up to no one.

Like I said earlier, that’s when it started happening. First were the emails automatically forwarded to my spam folder. Then I noticed pamphlets coming in the mail that matched the emails flooding my inbox. After the first voicemail, I dug one of the pamphlets from the trash. 

Welcome to the Portia Alfredo Center for Strange and Unusual Disorders (PAC-SUD), learn to be happy in your own skin! Since 1975, we have been helping people from all over the country overcome various afflictions. Is your condition not covered by insurance?  We got you covered! Are your feelings invalidated by your friends and family? We got you covered! Here at PAC-SUD, we’ve been helping people for decades. Our founder, Portia Alfredo, once suffered from sciophobia, literally afraid of her own shadow. She hiccuped every thirty seconds for 25 years. She thought she was a vampire and refused to be exposed to sunlight, resulting in dangerously low levels of Vitamin D. At some point she decided to no longer live that way. What started as a small group meeting on Tuesday nights in the basement of a local church has morphed into a beautiful residential facility located in the rolling hills of Virginia. Stop living in the dark, and come into the light! We can’t wait to see you!

Everything got worse once Fiona left. She was the only thing keeping my afflictions somewhat hidden. Without her, I had no reason to sneak upstairs to wash my hands or to lock and unlock the door as quietly as I could. Now I washed my hands until the skin cracked and bled. I would get out of bed to re-lock my door, go back to bed, wash, rinse, repeat. I made a playlist that I listened to at earth-shattering volumes. Death metal, polka, Beethoven, anything I could think of that would be the polar opposite of the song stuck in my head. Nothing helped. There were moments during Beethoven’s “Symphony #5” when I couldn’t think of the song. Then I would turn the speaker off and the song would march right back into my cerebellum. I know I’m gonna be…

Right around the time I lost my job, I picked up the pamphlet again. I was waiting tables at an Italian restaurant when a customer collided with another waiter and landed face down in a scalding pile of linguini. I was the closest one to provide assistance, and I wanted to, but my disease wouldn’t let me. I jumped on a chair and belted out, “Just to be the man who rolls a thousand miles to fall down at your door!” 

I stood there in the dining room with my finger pointed at the man in linguini with a smile painted on my face, but my joke was not met with a warm reception. The man, who ended up being a lawyer, suffered burns on his face and neck. He agreed to not sue me or the restaurant after my manager offered him free meatballs for life. That didn’t save my job though, and I marched out of the dining room singing, 

“Well I know I’m gonna dream, I’m gonna dream about the time when I’m with you.”

With no job and no girlfriend, I was on the next bus to Virginia. I was tapped on the shoulder by the person next to me for singing too loud. My headphones were blasting my death metal/polka playlist, but it did nothing to drown out my disease. I was not singing along to my playlist, and I’ll let you guess what song I was singing. I sighed, and started to sweat again, fearing that my condition was inoperable. The bus ride was a never ending stretch of flat farmland. I awoke at one point, hoping that we were close. The diesel fumes and lack of legroom made me restless. We passed a sign on a desolate highway that read Richmond, 500 Miles. I pressed a hand to my face to suppress my quivering lips. 

I spent the night in a dingy motel, considering if I should take the bus all the way back to Peoria, Illinois in the morning to win her back. The room smelled like moth balls and cigarettes and the bathroom looked like a warzone. With no chance of me using that breeding ground of bacteria, I was forced to do my business behind a dumpster. I spotted a hardware store during one of these trips, so I decided to walk over there and buy a roll of plastic sheeting. When the white van rolled up at 7:00, just like they said they would,they found me in a room where every last surface was covered in plastic. One of the PAC-SUD employees put a hand on my shoulder and said,

“You’re making the right decision.” 

The van stopped at a few more seedy motels, and even under a few bridges until it was full with passengers. The drivers, who introduced themselves as Big Steve and Little Steve, placed a cassette into the van’s tape deck. The tape sputtered, and Big Steve slammed his rock-sized fist on the dashboard until the tape started playing. It was a soft spoken woman who introduced herself as Portia Alfredo. She welcomed all new attendees of PAC-SUD, and spoke in hushed tones which I supposed was meant to calm us. Her silky voice was accompanied by music that I assume is played in Asian spas. It was having the opposite effect on me, I was getting irritated at how “calming” her voice was supposed to be. Maybe it was in my mind, or maybe it wasn’t, but the beat of her voice reminded me of a certain song. Without even noticing it, I sang under my breath,

“Well I know I’m gonna dream, I’m gonna dream about the time when I’m with you.” I barely choked out the last line, thoughts of countless mornings waking up to my beautiful Fiona were too painful to bear. While I was singing, Little Steve checked a clipboard and then peered over his shoulder.

“You Peter?” 

“Peters is my last name. Riley Peters.” I responded.

“Okie dokie,” Little Steve replied as he unbuckled from his seat. He reached into his pocket and fired a taser into my chest. I saw the two thin wires flutter at me in slow motion, then all I remember is thrashing on the floor like a fish on the deck of a boat, trying to flop my way back into the sea. 

When I came to, Little Steve was buckled back in and he flashed me a smug look from the passenger seat. He wore thick, black-rimmed glasses and had a pencil-thin mustache that wriggled when he spoke.

“Have no fear, Mr. Peters. We’re just retraining your brain, that’s all. That song will be out of your head in no time.”

I could still feel the electricity through my body, twitching my fingers and toes. One more person was tased before we got there when she asked a question in a Jamaican accent, which I found odd because she was whiter than me. The Steves answered her, and she followed up in an offensive sounding Asian accent. Apparently she suffers from FAS (Foreign Accent Syndrome). As she wriggled and writhed on the ground, I saw brief glimpses of big, beautiful brown eyes and pouty lips. 

We got off the highway ages ago, and the van weaved through the back roads of rural Virginia. The van overheated at one point climbing a hill. Big Steve attended to it while Little Steve just watched us with a smile. The van turned on to dirt roads that were barely roads until we were plenty deep into the hills. No amount of bread crumbs could have led my way back to civilization. 

The Steves donned gas masks when white smoke began oozing through the vents, putting us all to sleep. We woke up in a white room, sitting in a semi-circle of plastic chairs. Our heads were foggy, but we noticed that we wore matching one-piece blue jumpsuits. It reminded me of the Germaphobes Anonymous meetings I attended back in Illinois. The Steves stood in the doorway, almost guarding it. They saluted when a tall woman with a black, pinstriped pantsuit clacked along the tiles in her even taller heels. She had short brown hair that was swooped to one side, and spiky in the back. The “Karen” haircut, if you will. She introduced herself as Olivia Zubair.

She gave us a rundown of the schedule. Breakfast, chores, group therapy, free time, more therapy, lunch, outdoor time, silent reflection (whatever that was), dinner, rooms by nine, lights out by nine-thirty.

“Now just a moment there, miss,” the woman from the van interjected, this time in a deep Southern accent. “I ain’t tryin’ to sound like I’m too big for my britches, but a bedtime? A time we have to be in our rooms?”

“That is correct.”

“This is a locked facility?”

Ms. Zubair fiddled with papers, and one of the Steves coughed into his hand. 

“We find it beneficial to the healing and therapeutic process.” 

“I don’t go to bed at nine!” She responded still in the Southern accent. “So I’m supposed to just sit around like a bump on a log until bedtime? Now I say ma’am, you’re crookedr’ than a barrel o’ snakes!” 

The Steves approached her, reaching for their hips.

“Crikey, mate!” She said, switching to Australian. “I ain’t no drongo!” 

After the tasers, she was dragged from the room while she flopped about, muttering something in a vaguely eastern European sounding accent. 

The next few weeks went as advertised. More and more I found myself sitting next to Aubrey, the woman of many accents. Fiona’s face became a fleeting image. Those of us with sense learned to suppress our conditions just to avoid the tasers and tranquilizer darts. Little Steve was a regular sniper with the blow darts, and hit poor Marty Reed with one from fifty yards away when he attempted to run.

I came here hoping to better myself enough to win Fiona back. But life is a funny thing, and the more time I spent with Aubrey, the more I realized that someone could love me for me. All this time I’ve been trying to change who I am, or at least hide it. I don’t have to do that with Aubrey. She can speak to me like an old Russian lady while I wash my hands until the end of time for all I care. 

One day, about two months into our stay at PAC-SUD, I lifted my juice carton from the tray to find a folded note. Aubrey was on cafeteria duty that day, and she winked at me and continued to spoon peas and carrots onto trays. I excused myself to the bathroom, the note told me to be on the roof of C Wing at 8:30, just before we needed to be in our rooms. 

I made it up there undetected, but Aubrey was nowhere in sight. Dammit, where are you?  I hummed diddle un diddle un diddle uh da da over and over under my breath until the door slammed open. It was her, and her sense of urgency was palpable.

“Aye, Riley. We need to skedaddle. Yer lookin’ awfully peelie-wally,” she was Scottish at the moment, my favorite. It was also the hardest to understand. 

“Huh?”

“Nevermind. I tied some sheets together and me and you are getting out of here. Just shoogle yerself down and try not to fall on ye bahookie.”

“What?”

“Fer god sakes man! We’re getting out of here!”

So we descended, or shoogled our way down the line of bed sheets silently. The sun was just beginning to set and the sky was a fierce shade of pink. 

“When did you do this?” I asked.

“No hablo ingles,” she responded. She was back to her Mexican accent.

The C Wing was the highest point of campus, and the closest one to the treeline. We made it to the ground without issue. The makeshift rope swung like a pendulum. A singular beam of light shot down on us, followed by every light on campus. The alarms were soon after. 

Sprinting into the thick woods with fuzzy slippers, I grabbed her hands and looked her in the eyes.

“And when I grow old, well I know I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be the man who’s growing old with you.”