I went away to college because I wanted to meet new people. Lots of people go away to college for that. I wanted to meet beautiful girls, fall in love and hang out with exciting new friends that played music and ate out together and drank beers in their dorm room while talking about all the girls and music. I sent an application to a college upstate and when I got accepted, I was excited. The college was far enough away to stretch my umbilical chord, so to speak, and close enough that I could come home for the weekends. It was big enough that it had a competitive football team, a nice student center with a new cafeteria, roomy dorms, and an art gallery and a performing arts center. It was small enough that it had ivy covered little cottages for classrooms and just outside its parameters were the mountains.

I can't help thinking now, that all these little things that influenced my decision of where to go to school led me to meet Ed, someone from somewhere else who I would never have dreamed of meeting.

I had no idea what I really wanted to study, but I was sure about the part of wanting to meet new people. As a boy, I grew up in a family that revolved around itself in many ways; birthdays and holidays shared with cousins across town, going to school and going to church. I was baptized and confirmed and took communion in the same old church that my parents had always gone to for years and years. It's not that I wasn't happy with that life. I loved my sister and my cousins, and I enjoyed going to church. Especially at Christmas and Easter, when that message of hope and redemption seemed to resound in the hymns and the light in the stained glass windows. I had always believed in Jesus and His story of hope for the downtrodden, His message of forgiveness and rebirth. But as I got older, the excitement of the outside world, with its rock concerts and movies, it's promise of exploration, was also enticing. I was tired of singing the same old songs, tired of playing the same old melodies on my acoustic guitar. I had known all the girls in Sunday school for years; none of them seemed to hold out a hope for me. My cousins were planning on going away to all kinds of schools and my friends were going away for various reasons.

So at the end of the summer of my eighteenth year, I packed up my little pinto with suitcases and boxes, my guitar case and my notebooks, my camera and my cassettes, and said goodbye to my parents and sister on the front porch of our house. My mother cried, and I promised I would call every week. My father shook my hand and wished me luck. My sister said she would keep me informed of all the goings on of our cousins and friends. She would even play me chess by letter. On the one hand I was trembling with the excitement of heading off into something new, but with one foot firmly standing still on that porch, knowing there were people who loved me waiting for me when I got back. I could always go back to that old church next summer.

When I arrived at the dorm, and got my room assignment, the lady gave me the key and told me I had a roommate. The dorm was on the second floor so I had to carry all my things up there and it took a couple of trips. I fumbled with the keys, I remember, at the door; half tired of all that carrying the past up there, and half wondering what I would find on the other side. When I opened the door, I saw a young man in a bat man t-shirt sitting on a couch in front of a video camera in the living room. The camera was hooked up to a computer on a desk in the corner. He was obviously doing some kind of video feed, in the middle of saying something to some kind of audience out there on Youtube or Facebook, and he stopped abruptly when I came in, as though he were doing something exclusive. He looked at me as if I had just walked in on a movie set in Hollywood. He turned off the camera.

"Hi," I said, putting down my suitcase and my guitar case. "I'm Bill. I guess you're my roommate. They said I had a roommate."

I couldn't help thinking how much he looked like an average kid who wanted to be a movie star. He had a fashionable hair cut. He was wearing designer jeans. He had a little goatie like you see on those movie directors sometimes. He didn't say anything right away. He just looked at me, and I got the feeling that he felt I was crowding his space. He got up, and turned off the computer. Then, he sat down on the couch again, crossed his legs like a movie director, and said: "Do me a favor. Knock before you come in."

"Knock?" I said.

"Yea. I was in the middle of this webcast. I do this webcast."

"No kidding?" I said. "Well, that's cool, I guess." I asked him what his name was, and he said his name was Ed. And that was how I met Ed.

Ed was from Pittsburgh. That's about all he ever told me of his background. He never mentioned his family, his friends, or a girlfriend. He watched a lot of TV. He had a TV in the living room, a small TV that he kept on the windowsill in the kitchen, and another one next to his bed. We got into an argument about it one night because I couldn't go to sleep while he watched and watched into the morning hours. In the end, I moved my bed into the living room.
He told me he couldn't sleep without it.

Mostly he watched family sitcoms, like Roseanne, Family Ties, Reba, or The Dick Van Dyke show or Father Knows Best. In the morning he watched I Love Lucy reruns. In the afternoon, he watched soap operas. At first I didn't think too much of it, and then I noticed that he was watching reruns of the reruns. The same things, over and over.

"Dude," I asked him once, after dinner, in the middle of another rerun of George Lopez, "Why do keep watching the same things over and over? Don't you ever get tired of it?"

He didn't say anything right away. Then he said something like, "It's like watching home movies," or something.

It was funny sometimes, I got that. But the guy really didn't do much else, other than shoot this webcast. I had to leave the room when he did that. For some reason, he couldn't do it while I was there, and I got tired of arguing with him. So I made a habit of going down to the library and then getting something to eat in the cafeteria. It was down there that I met Christine. She was a literature major from Vermont, into poetry and music, and we hit it off right away. I got to bringing down my guitar and we'd go outside and I'd play her something romantic, and she'd sit on a bench and laugh. She was also close to her family, and called her mom every night. She went to church and we started going to this little Lutheran chapel in the town. We'd listen to the gospel and the sermon, bask in the light of the stained glass windows, and sing all the old hymns we knew together. For some reason, I never thought of asking Ed to come with us. I don't know why. I guess because he seemed so creepy.

One night while we were in the cafeteria, I saw Ed sitting at a table in a corner of the room, by himself. He must have been done eating, but he just sat there, with his hands folded, looking around at the other students eating their dinners and the girls and guys fooling around together at their tables. I was sure he had seen us. I thought of going over there with Christine, and introducing her, and then, I thought better of it. I don't know why.

Once I asked him if he liked music. He said he didn't know. Can you imagine someone telling you that they didn't know if they liked music? He watched me once playing my guitar, like one of the judges on American Idol.

"So that's how you're going to become famous?" he asked me.

"Well," I said, "I don't really play guitar because I plan on becoming famous doing it. I just like music."

"It's easier to get famous playing music," he said, matter of fact like. "Lots of people get famous that way."

I shook my head. "Ed, is that why you're on the web, so that you can get famous?"

He shrugged.

"So how many people actually follow your show?" I asked him.

"I have to study," he said, and got up and went into the bedroom.

I asked him once what kinds of things he talked about on his webcast, but he wouldn't tell me. I thought of going online and watching it once, but I never did. Maybe I was afraid of what I would see. I don't know. After all, I lived with the guy.

I never knew what kind of classes he was supposed to be taking either. Sometimes he went out, and he would stay out for a while. It seemed like he was going to class. But I never saw him doing any homework. Once one of his teachers called, and asked me if I knew why Ed hadn't been to his class for the last three weeks.

"Is he sick or something?" the guy asked me.

"No," I answered.

"Tell him that I called, will you?" the guy said, "Tell him I want to talk to him."

So when Ed came back, I told him.

He just shrugged.

I followed him once, after that. I was getting curious about what he was really doing. He ate his Wheaties, in his Superman t-shirt, put on his jacket, grabbed his knapsack, and opened the door and went out like anybody would do on their way to a morning class. I grabbed my jacket and slipped out after him. He had taken the stairs down to the first floor, and when I got down there, I could see him walking across the parking lot towards the campus. But instead of continuing on the path out to one of the colleges, he got into his car, a little grey Honda. So I cut over to my car, got in, and kept following him, out of the parking lot, and onto the main road that led into town.

He drove through the town, to the shopping mall, and pulled into the parking garage. I followed him all the way to the top floor, and watched him park up there in one of the corners. He got out of the car with the knapsack. He set it carefully on the ground. He opened it up and took out his video camera and tripod. He set up the camera on the edge of the parking garage, overlooking the entrance to the mall. Then he started filming the shoppers as they walked into the mall.

I was getting worried about Ed. There were times I felt sorry for him, and times I was scared of him. I didn't know what to do. So I went to talk to one of the guidance counselors at the college.

"So what seems to be the problem with your roommate?" she asked me, picking up her cup of coffee.

"He's strange," I told her. "He does weird things. He watches TV all the time."

"Has he threatened you?" she asked me, putting down her cup of coffee. "Has he damaged any of your things?"

"No," I said, carefully. "He hasn't threatened me. But one of his professors called once, and asked why he hasn't been going to class."

"That sounds like an issue between him and his professor. It doesn't really involve you."

"You mean I should mind my own business?"

"If it doesn't concern you."

"I followed him once, to see what he's doing. He went to the mall. He just stood there, filming people going into the mall from the parking garage."

The counselor shook her head. "That kind of behavior can be described as stalking. Maybe there was an explanation for his actions. Maybe he is working on a class project. Maybe he needs to just get off campus for a while. I don't think you should feel the need to follow him around and see what he is up to. People need their space, sometimes."

"I don't know. He once told me he didn't know if he liked music."

The counselor shrugged. "Maybe he just doesn't like music."

I looked out of the window. It was a grey, cloudy day, I remember. "I guess you're right," I said.

The counselor smiled and picked up her cup of coffee again. "I'm sure there is some innocent explanation to all this. Don't start jumping to conclusions. But if you really feel that uncomfortable, maybe I can get you a new dorm assignment.

I stood up. "I'll think about it," I told her.

I left the counselor's office and started back for the dorm room. It was getting windy, and cold. The brown leaves of last summer were rattling as they blew along the sidewalks, and people hurried passed me bundled in their coats, heads down, silent.

As I got nearer to the dorm, I noticed a crowd of kids and security guards standing around the front door. Some of the girls were crying, and people were calling their parents on their cell phones. There were police cars in the parking lot, with their lights popping on and off. I asked one of the guys what was going on.

"Some kid hanged himself in a closet in his dorm, while he was doing this webcast," the guy told me.

"That's my roommate!" I shouted.

One of the security guards approached me and told me I had better go up and talk to the police. Everyone was looking at me as I went through the door; the girls crying, the guys staring, whispering. The security guard told the police I was Ed's roommate, and they took me up to the room. The detectives and the officers were all crowded around the computer, watching this horrible image of Ed, swinging from a rope in the dorm closet. They had already taken down his body, but they were watching it over and over.

"You were the roommate?" they asked me. I told them I was.

"Did you know anything about this webcast he was doing?" they asked me.

Then they showed me the video, the last video Ed had made. He started by sitting in the chair, the way I had seen him the first day I met him. He talked about how he had always wanted to be somebody. How he had wanted to be famous. An actor, a movie director. He had started this webcast, but hardly anyone watched it. He felt nobody was noticing him. His father had left. His mother was dating someone and hardly talked to him. He had no friends. He wanted everyone to know what they had done to him. This was how he could tell the world how he felt, and get famous doing it.

Then, he got up from the chair and opened the closet door. There was a rope hanging from the bar where we hung our clothes, tied into a noose, with a chair under it. He climbed onto the chair, put the noose around his neck, and said: "Goodbye, everybody,". Then he kicked the chair out from underneath him. I looked away.

"What did you know about him?" the detective asked me.

"Nothing," I said.