I had this dream about a boy I’d met a number of times but didn’t know too well. We walked on opposite sides of a road for a long time, looking at each other in acknowledgement but never saying hello. We waited for the other to speak. I think we were in Frenchtown. We walked past a lot of blue and white houses.

When I left Baltimore for the summer and saw him in the grocery store in town, I told him about the dream.

“The funny thing is, if that happened in real life, it would have been just like that,” he told me. I laughed in agreement and wheeled my shopping cart into the next aisle. 

Two days later, at one in the morning, I was driving him to the hospital because he called me and said he wanted to kill himself. I drove to his apartment, apprehensive because I thought he could have really cracked, but determined to help him.

He was smoking a cigarette in the parking lot and holding a case of beer. He was belligerently drunk but oddly competent. He’d finished a handle of vodka and was emptying every can of remaining beer onto his neighbor’s lawn and told me I should do the same. He said it was liberating. He said he’d never drink again after the beer was drained. So I picked up a couple, shook them up, and poured them onto the pavement by the driver’s side of my car.

“Not like that.”

“Should we go to the hospital? Are you sure you want to go?”

“Not now. We have four cans left. Yes. I want to go back.”

I sighed and took two, gave them a shake and sprayed them on the sidewalk. The place was deserted. An orange light smothered in moths glared behind him. He looked empty and dark. I looked around for a garbage can. I wanted to clean the empty cans from the lawn, or line them up on the sidewalk, to stuff the cardboard case into the mailbox slot a few yards away and wash the beer from my hands. I’d wash my hands of this.

“People come in the morning and clean up. It’s like the projects over here,” he reassured me.

I drove him to the hospital. When I pulled into the parking lot of the emergency ward he gave me  his crushed pack of Mavericks. We had a few. A few minutes would pass and he’d say, “Okay, okay. I just need another cigarette before I go.”

He explained that he wanted to stay at the hospital to take a break from everything. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and delusional hallucinations. I think he said he had schizophrenia, but he also said he had a fourteen-year old girlfriend which he later told me, sober, was a joke.

“Kurt Cobain told me to do things. He’d always talk to me.” Some things he must’ve exaggerated. Or it was all true. I’m not even sure if he knows.

He said something I didn’t catch.

“I don’t listen to them.”

“Allison? You’re name?”

“That’s not my name and I thought you said Alice in Chains.”

“You know if it weren’t for these circumstances, we wouldn’t be hanging out right now.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because you’re very attractive and I’m all sorts of fucked up.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” he said.

“You don’t know that because you don’t really know me.”

He told me about the last time he was there. He talked about a man who was in for alcoholism, who understood the Bible and read verses to people like a psychic. He tried to hang himself. He talked about a woman named Shirley who called herself ‘Baroness’.

“She knew people in Afghanistan and Pakistan who wanted her to build a church here. She told me I’d be the best man in every wedding. Every meal she ordered she’d say she didn’t, so the nurses started photocopying her signature on the menus to prove it to her when she complained."

He told me about the time he tried to kill himself in Philadelphia. He cut his Achilles tendon and was bleeding out in the bathroom until his friend walked in and bandaged him up with toilet paper.

We listened to Duran Duran on the radio and he handed over all of his belongings to me: two jackets, two lighters, a pocket knife (“I think I tried to kill someone with this.”), two ipods, a paycheck stub, and his wallet. He said the hospital would confiscate them anyway.

The desk people seemed annoyed. I didn’t have to say anything besides my name and yes, I would like a ginger ale while I sit in the waiting room, but he told me to tell them he was saying crazy things and had a knife. Both of which were true, but not in the way the nurses would have thought.

“What should she do? Can she stay? My bride?” He gestured towards me as he walked through the double doors with a nurse. The desk lady looked at me. “I’ll wait,” I said.

I visited him a couple days later when he was settled into the behavioral clinic to bring him a book because he told me on the phone that he was bored. We talked for the visitor’s hour in the kitchen and watched bitter old people work on a jigsaw puzzle.